As an American I needed to unlock one of my phone about 2 weeks ago and my ATT contract was not up yet. I called ATT, gave them IMEI and within a minute they gave me an unlock code. I had the same experience previously. Not once was I denied an unlock request. Perhaps if you have the phone by a specific manufacturer, they don't allow unlocking. But it's not ATT's fault.

Are you in Australia? Because on our side of the planet, June 22nd is not the onset of winter.

I was born in a poor country and came to the USA with little more than a bag of clothes.

My thankfulness goes only to my drive to work full time and study full time in a community college at the same time. That's the only reason I am not poor.
But don't let me keep you from fatalistic, lazy belief that poverty or prosperity are results of mere luck.

You have cause and effect confused.

It's possible that "the poor" have no choice but to try desperate means to get out of poverty.
More likely they are in poverty because their pattern of bad decisions such as falling for the get-rich-quick scams.

Perhaps those with "half a functioning brain" do in fact treat their assumptions as facts. Especially when the assumptions agree with their prejudices.

The rest of us, i.e. those with a fully functioning brain, allow for multiple possible scenarios - at least until there's some proof to narrow them down.

If you have to factor in parking tickets into cost/benefit analysis, you are doing it wrong.

So you did the smart thing, right?
-bought from BB
-ordered from amazon
-got it from amazon.
-returned the one from BB

"grunt" means soil in russian.

Nonsense. I've never heard of college dorm where they clean your room for free.

Library

is where you can browse and read on impulse. With the added benefit of not having to pay for it. I don't remember the last time I bought a book which was not a textbook or children book (for my children that is)

This one isn't:

You missed the part where AMD has devs working on the open driver as well.

As for the rest of your rant, everyone knows the fglrx driver sucks on Linux. What has changed is that ATI is now a subdivision of AMD, and the future of ATI graphics on Linux will be the open driver that is being (rapidly) developed as we speak, and in the end it'll be much better than anything NV is willing to provide.

Anyone brave enough to use that in-development version of AMD's open driver already knows what the future is going to look like. Give AMD another year or two to stabilize the open driver and bring it up to speed on chip support, performance tweaking, and handling corner-cases, and once that work makes it into the mainstream Linux releases, they will end up changing the world of Linux graphics support (as we've known it) forever.

After all, their driver will be entirely found within either the kernel (KMS) or Xorg itself (DRM/Mesa), so you'll no longer need a separate binary blob/package just to get hardware-accelerated 2D & 3D (anyone with AMD-ATI hardware will thus get all this goodness right out of the box, as soon as they install Linux). And thats just for starters...

#1. Some of the data was deleted (obviously, it has been mentioned many times).

#2. Some of the data was contractually banned from being shared (the Met is working on getting this fixed, sent requests to 180 counties).

Secret and deleted data is NOT a good basis for anything, and the Met agrees, and wants to redo it transparently over the next three years.

I hope the Met gets permission to do that, I would love some really transparent / open process work around this.

I was shocked when I found out that stuff based on "secret" or unpublishable data, or deleted data was allowed to be written up in a peer reviewed journal. How the hell do you review something you can't see the data to?

While this is a 'pressing' issue in the west, and they there is a strong bias for action, screwing it up and having bad science will have a huge impact on how it is viewed by India and China in the future... it is worth doing it all in a hyper-transparent and straightforward way.