Two bloated pieces of garbage. They deserve each other. I use neither.

Yes, because if theres a fire in the theater, or someone's having a heart attack, we wouldnt want anyone to be able to call 911.

How about this - about the theaters just kick any individuals that are disturbing other movies goers?

And as far as jails, I say the jail should have a special cell/tower that they can monitor. Prisoners should be physically denied possesion of cellphones. Those caught with them would be subject to appropriate penalties.

Take action against the INDIVIDUAL that is causing a problem, don't punish everyone for the transgressions of the few.

The problem is not a *technical* problem - its a motivation problem.

The biggest problem is the lack of competition in almost all markets.

Providers have no motivation to provide better service, if they know that their customers either have no choice, or very limited choices.

The LUCKY people can choose between crappy overpriced DSL from the local telco monopoly, or crappy overpriced cable from that local monopoly. (Sometimes with a monthly cap, sometimes not)

Wireless (fixed and cellular) and satellite are even worse in comparison. High upfront costs, crappy service, and monthly transfer caps in pretty much all cases.

They know they've got you over a barrel, so they just keep taking your money and shining you on.

I would drop $300 for free 5Mbps is a *heartbeat*. I would *seriously* consider their higher tier offerings.

So.. $10 for 10GB.. (or $1/GB).

Then its $5/GB after that?

So the second 10GB would cost $50??? 5 times as much? That seems.. insane..

Whats to stop me from getting two devices/accounts, and then paying 2X $10 for the same 20GB?
(could either load balance, or use one up until 10GB then switch to the other....)

I'd say you've got it exactly right.

They should do the same for health insurance - not dictate how much it costs, or what is or isn't covered, but rather regulate how the coverage is described. Perhaps define various "standard" levels of covered, give them names, and then allow insurance to use those names for their products so long as the products they meet the official description. But still allow other packages, so long as the covereages and costs are describe in compliance with the regs.

If you click to the next page of results, google corrects its estimate to read

" Page 2 of 13 results (0.13 seconds)"

Alhough it does admit

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 13 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

If you choose to show the omitted results, and click through the pages, you get to the 8th page, which indicates:

"Page 8 of 72 results (0.12 seconds)"

Still nowhere near 86,000

And while I'm sure the owners of those 72 printers might want to take some steps to secure them, its hardly the huge problem that "86000 results" would suggest.

"laziness and incompetence" = using Microsoft platforms for power plant engineering systems.

"security best practices" = never letting Microsoft platforms near anything mission critical at such an installation.

Replying to myself: if testing the UA or the IP in the httpd itself was too much load, you could have also just nullrouted the IP blocks the Bing spider was coming from, either in the kernel table, or in your router.

Seems like a better solution would have been to setup a test for the either the User-Agent, or the IP/blocks that Bing was attacking your site from, and dropping those requests in /dev/null - your site would still exist on 'real' search engines, and Bing doesn't pound on your bandwidth anymore.

windowsonly proprietary-garbage.

You left out the 'could have been' part. None of these were stated as being the reasons for certain.

Maybe your cheap Windows laptop can't play Disney movies, but my (non-Windows) laptop does just fine.

As long as the non-terrorists vastly outnumber the terrorists :P

Of course, they could always fill an entire plane with terrorists.. I suppose I shouldn't be giving them any ideas, but it probably wouldn't be cost-effective (both in terms of ticket prices and whatever you measure 'suicidal-martyrs-per-terror-induced' in)

with the AT&T reps manner of presenting this, trying to make it sound as if the problems is the caller/potential customer's fault.

Its not that "you (the caller, or New York residents) doesn't have enough towers", its that "We (AT&T) don't have enough towers (in New York)"

My suggestion to the caller, would be to make their next question something along the lines of "So when will AT&T be putting up more towers then?" I mean heck, its not like they even have to build actual *towers* - there are skyscrapers all over the place to stick cells on top of or out the windows at lower floors.

It was good enough 'then', and would still work the same way.

If he is put off by it, perhaps LOGO (Yes, the one with the little 'turtle' that you program to move around and draw lines.