I made up the limitations to approximate the model that a district court judge would use to determine whether two musical phrases are "substantially similar". With which of the made-up limitations do you disagree, and for each, why?

$35 per month minus $7 per month is also $28 per month. My gripe is that some carriers charge what amounts to a convenience fee of $28 per month just for having your phone and PDA in one device.

I expect the conversation went more like this:

FB: "We are building new housing in a ghetto area and we plan to have 10% of it go to our employees, and 90% of it to be rented at below market rates do that people can have better housing; all of this will be worthless, however, if no one wants to live there due to the high crime rate in the area. We'd like to see periodic patrols by a police officer in the area"

MP: "Sorry, we don't have enough officers to guarantee periodic patrols in the area that you're requesting"

FB: "Have another officer, on us, then, so that you can periodically patrol the area"

MP: "Thanks!"

You wish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

"The 2010 United States Census[9] reported that Menlo Park had a population of 32,026." ... "The racial makeup of Menlo Park was 22,494 (70.2%) White, 1,551 (4.8%) African American, 156 (0.5%) Native American, 3,157 (9.9%) Asian, 454 (1.4%) Pacific Islander, 2,776 (8.7%) from other races, and 1,438 (4.5%) from two or more races."

You don't have to be a particular race to live in a slum, you just have to have bad neighbors who make things miserable for everyone else.

"If the service isn't good, fix it for everybody"

They did.

They earmarked the funds for a cop, instead of just giving the city money to spend on whatever stupid, politically motivated bullshit worth maybe $25,000 some city councilman's brother in law could get away with selling the city for that same $200,000.

I rather approve of earmarks like this.

If I could earmark donated funds for specific uses, like solar powered LED street lights that pretty much never need service for 20+ years, I'd probably buy several for my neighborhood, as they are ~$500 each, and labor to put them up couldn't be more than ~$200 each (and if it was, I'd hire the private contractors to do the work instead of city employees). I'd happily pay $3,500 out of pocket for 5 lights to get safer streets in my immediate neighborhood.

I totally disagree.

It's also really important to regulatory agencies like the FCC in the U.S., the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the Ministere de l'Econonie des Finances et des L'Industrie in France, the Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railway in Germany, the European Radiocommunication Office in all of Europe, the Commission for Communications Regulation, and other government agencies.

Because they will damn well not let a software defined radio with source code be legally imported into their jurisdiction, and they all require that the firmware load on SDRs be cryptographically protected from being replaced by the end user, and they certify radio units as bundles of software + hardware, and any attempt to sever the relationship between the two renders the equipment illegal to use.

It's a nice pipe dream, though.

Because everyone wants to compete in the booming low-margin Blackberry/Nokia feature phone market?

That might work for people who make and receive calls only at home. Am I the only one who needs voice but not data while riding transit?

But how easy is it for a citizen of Dice's home country to get a work visa in those countries?

That microscopic yet vocal minority with the power to verify the phone's operating system is probably the public's best hope against the snooping-as-usual practices currently popular among governments of certain industrialized countries.

There are also people who can afford the phone but not the plan. Virgin Mobile, for instance, charges $336 per year more for service on an Android phone than for service on a dumbphone. I can keep service on a dumbphone for $7 per month, but if I wanted to activate an Android phone, that'd cost no less than $35 per month. Wouldn't carriers lump Firefox OS with the smartphones that require a data plan even if the subscriber plans to use only Wi-Fi data?

Which isn't necessarily something to be ashamed of, especially as people who graduated from college in the 1970s hit retirement age.

True, but U.S. CDMA carriers still refuse to activate low-end Android phones of today on a feature phone plan. And among U.S. GSM carriers, the one with more coverage still has a habit of automatically adding a data plan to a SIM with voice-only service inserted into a smartphone. These behaviors are why I still carry a tablet and dumbphone. Will carriers perform the same sort of tying on Firefox OS devices, or will they let customers use cellular voice with only Wi-Fi data?

Read their Edgar 10-Q filings: it's not true; the stores are unprofitable when examined on their own, but it is the operational costs of the store vs. the operational profits which counts as ROI on the investment, whether it be operating capitol, inventory, relative cost of flooring, opportunity cost relative to putting the capital to use elsewhere, channel aging, which makes closing them desirable to corporate.

My argument is that if there is a difference between the stores being closed and those being kept open, then it's a correctable difference for the stores being closed, or they might as well just follow Blockbuster into closure of all their corporate stores.

They do not appear to have anything in mind, other than a short term write-off on the closure costs vs. their taxes, and a reduction in operating expenses, and whatever they get from sale of the real estate under the stores being closed. In other words, this is a short term pump for the stock prior to a dump before it goes in the crapper over the long term. Blockbuster did this a couple of times as a leadup to the closure of the rest of their corporate stores.

Ironically, it's pretty clear that Radio Shack is salvageable, just as Blockbuster was, at one point, salvageable.

The other company currently in this crapper is Staples, and I could see some fundamental process model changes that might save them as well, but I'd be a hell of a lot less confident of my own ability to do the necessary work than either the Blockbuster or Radio Shack cases. Staples is probably a long shot, even if they get someone competent at business process engineering in charge, and give her or him carte blanche to try and fix things.

I think it would probably be cheaper, economically, to assassinate the people taxing it up to $1000/gallon than it would be to not drive. Just saying, when a gallon of gas can hire a relatively competent hitman, and all subsequent gallons of gas would be cheaper as a result, someone's going to pull out their siphon hose and get themselves a cheap hitman.