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Unlocking the phone yourself was legal in the US until a few days ago. If you want a phone you can easily swap to another carrier, you can search for unlocked phones on Amazon, there's a pretty good selection, but obviously you're going to pay full price for the phone.
As I understand it, you can still unlock a phone *you own,* it's the subsidized phones that you cannot legally unlock.
Crony capitalism is not capitalism
Crony capitalism is what actually happens when you implement captialism in the real world. Capitalism is the theory, cronyism is the practice.
Can you think of one -ism where that is not so? I can't. Cronyism is a disease all forms of economics and government seem to be vulnerable to.
When will something be done about this legal mafia?
Nothing will ever be done because every major company is playing the game.
Google, Apple, Microsoft, IBM . . . . . every big company with deep pockets has been hit by patent trolls. So why don't they all get together and use their considerable lobbying power to demand that congress change the law? Why? Because they don't really want the law changed. They want to be able to whack somebody with a patent lawsuit when it suits them.
Bogus patents are the new nuclear weapons. Everyone knows they are bad and destructive, they serve no useful purpose and should be eliminated. But nobody is willing to actually do that because some day they might need a weapon to use against a competitor. That's the new business model. Litigation instead of competition.
Also, all these big companies have invested billions into their patent chests. If they urged patent reform, they could well wipe out the value of these chests, which could potentially wipe out the company, as these patents are a large part of their corporate worth. I'm sure it is true for others as well, but I remember it being mentioned on Slashdot a while ago that in the case of Apple they actually spend more per year on acquiring and protecting their patents than on R&D.
Looks like you've got your work cut out for you, because what most of my self-described Libertarian friends say would fit right into this stereotype. I.e., indistinguishable from pure anarchy.
Funny how both the fanatical adherents and fanatical opposition will take any -ism to an absurd level for the sake of argument. There are plenty of sources around for what Libertarianism is, but to cut to the chase Libertarianism is not about *no* taxes or *no* regulation, just a much more restricted view of what the government can tax and what it can regulate. Full disclosure: I'm not a Libertarian. But that doesn't mean I have to be willfully ignorant to argue the point.
Peter and the Wolf being a musical composition aside...
I've always felt the message of the boy who cried wolf should be; always respond to an alarm especially in instances where ignoring it can lead to death.
I think the message was supposed to be "Don't make up crap (especially plausible crap), or people will stop believing you even when it's true." In other words, you're hurting your own cause (and your own personal safety), by claiming something is happening when it isn't, even if it *could* be happening. And yeah, I think he meant The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
If they can't even handle the amount of traffic the robodialer is generating for them, they are obviously being very successful.
I don't think it works like that. Instead, the system is set up to dial far more numbers than they have humans to actually talk to people. The idea is that it keeps their employees constantly busy. It's worth the dropped calls to minimize employee downtime (and thus employee numbers and thus expenses), since after all the robodialer will just call you again later if it misses you this time.
Amazon has been licensing their http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click to various companies like Apple. I guess Bezos just wants to use other people's patents for free but expects everyone to pay to use their patents.
Not necessarily. He's playing the game the way it has to be played now, according to the law. He'd like the law changed. That doesn't make him a hypocrite unless he honestly doesn't think the new law would apply to him. For patient laws to be changed some of the big players are going to have to make the move to change them, and it's hard to see how that's going to happen since it would invalidate patient chests that have cost, in some cases, billions of dollars to acquire. So if Bezos is serious about this, I'm going to have to buy some books from him again.
What your comment made me think of is that his example has made me ask other people on the Tea Party side about their nutcases, and there's a strong tendency for those people to claim there aren't any people like that guy attending their rallys and speaking at their town halls. I know some of these people have met Nutcase A, and in a couple of cases, have heard him say at least something totally whackjob. I was there when those cases happened. Even if Nutcase A is 1 in 1,000 and there's a lot more reasonable people making up the bulk of the group, I'm finding it harder and harder to believe those other people are not in some weird state of denial, deliberately or delusionally pretending they don't have any Nutcase A's at all around. And, I'm wondering about what else they are in denial over. When somebody claiming affiliation with the American right says, for example, that they haven't seen any signs the dislike of president Obama is racially motivated, I wonder if they have just ignored hearing a dozen rants and a hundred racial slurs at their last meeting - wondering if they start out thinking in each incident that those people aren't really the core of their group, and five minutes later have turned it into "that didn't happen at all - we aren't like that, so I didn't hear what I heard.". When people appear to be standing right next to some ranting and raving 'crazy people', and swearing they didn't hear anything crazy, yes, you start figuring the whole group is part of the illness.
I may be misjudging you here, and for that I apologize, but I was nodding along with your post until it became a not so subtle attack on one side of the political spectrum. The thing is, I know "Nutcase A's" that are just as vehement in their support for Obama. Different alternate histories, but the same fervor and delusion. So my question to you is, did you not notice those guys the last rally that you were at?
Or, you could just not worry about this weird video because it had well under 10,000 views before it appeared on Slashdot and currently has only 22 likes. And half of those likes may come from people that enjoy watching crazy nutters. The only harm comes from people believing the video, and the Slashdot crowd won't.
Seriously. Since the OP posts on Slashdot, presumably he understands the Streisand effect. Practically no one was paying attention to the remake before you called attention to it here. Just roll with it and understand that more people are mocking this guy than believing him. If that just won't sit well with you, then you need to consult a lawyer versed in internet law -- though preferably not the one that tried to sue TheOatmeal....
How casual? If they seriously cannot apply a crack, I highly doubt they can figure out how to use Steam.
You would be wrong. Several of my highly intelligent but not computer savvy friends have no problem using Steam routinely, but applying a crack? Might as well be black magic to them. Even just moving a file from folder to folder fills them with dread. I think you are falling into the trap of thinking you are familiar with something that you are not. Since you don't use Steam, you have no idea how user friendly or not it is.
. Any way you look at it, the only reason to wish to post anonymously is to avoid some form of repercussion
Why do you say that like it was a bad thing? You might as well say I use the steering wheel while driving to avoid the "repercussion" of wrapping around a tree. Except in this case the repercussions brought on by an increasingly nosy government/private watchdog/church/employer whatever can be far, far worse than that.
Couldn't they, I dunno, just put it in a rat?
He was talking about the next phase Medusoid, which he plans to make with human heart tissue. You didn't RTFA, did you?
Except that Mercury's sun side is 150 degrees Centigrade warmer than Venus (630 versus 480).
Creditor, n.: A man who has a better memory than a debtor.