Yeah, AT&T's a dickhead company.

But honestly, one of the reasons I haven't gotten a smartphone on AT&T is exactly this reason. It's in their documentation. I read it, decided they were dickheads, and chose a different option.

So it's good to have this cautionary tale, but the real parable is that, when you sign a contract with anybody, but particularly a known dickhead, read the fine print up front. The news that dickheads will be dickheads -- well, that's not really news, is it? The question "Are they allowed to do this?" is much better asked before you sign a contract, yet after you have examined all your other options, and have decided whether it is worth it to risk being found out.

Why do you think your scribbling on the agreement has the force of law? Did the representative of the contract authorize your changes to the legally binding (presumably) document?

What makes you think what he writes should have any less legal force than what the company wrote?

I do the same thing all the time. Mandatory arbitration clause in car purchase agreement? Strike through and initial.

The lady at the desk likely does not have power to authorize contract changes.

If she has the ability to countersign, then she effectively does. If she doesn't have the ability to countersign -- worst case is that the entire contract is null and void, because there was no "meeting of the minds." But you would be laughed out of court if you suggested that the person who penciled in a change to a contract should be held to the original version because the other party didn't agree to the change, when the marked-up contract is sitting in the other party's files, properly countersigned, and there are no signatures on any unchanged version. And you would be laughed out of court if you suggested that the nice lady who signed the contract; who signed all the contracts for all the customers; who sat there every day signing contracts -- shouldn't have signed that modified contract. That's the company's problem, not the customers.

They definitely could have refused you service and still could. Unless of course there is some sort of additional regulation specific to utilities that changes something as they do have additional regulation.

No, they couldn't. Electric utilities are regulated like the monopolies they are. Now what they might be able to do, probably even what they intended to do, is to regulate whether you can hook up a generator in such a fashion that it might inadvertently be connected to their system (which would be bad). But even that is a bit iffy -- you could probably force them to specify characteristics of the proper sort of switch over circuitry that you have to install rather than denying you the ability to connect a generator outright.

And in this day and age, the ability to connect solar to the grid and actually force power back is actually a right granted by the state to the customer in a lot of places.

I always slow way down when the guy up front is farting. Don't have to breathe as much of it that way.

AFAIK, google doesn't instigate lawsuits other than against someone suing it. The only counterexample I know of was suing the US Govt for choosing Microsoft in violation of applicable law.

So if you have examples of Google being as much of a dick as Apple, please do share.

But Apple's response to Motorola opening a negotiation was a lawsuit.

It's disingenuous for them to say that they will do something without the court ordering it, when the entire reason the court is involved is that they refused to even make an initial offer, choosing instead to pick what they thought would be the best venue to sue in. Obviously, that didn't work out so well for them after the judge figured out what was going on.

depending on who you are...

If it's not easy to do, then you should get the big bucks.

The trick is to stay around long enough to reap the benefits of all your good refactoring work. If the software gets better and better, that should show up in whatever metrics management uses (downtime, customer satisfaction, whatever), and then they should pay you even more.

So the trick isn't to look at the quality of the code at the potential job. The trick is to figure out if, at some point, that quality comes under your control, and if you will have a nice work environment and be rewarded commensurately.

The problem is that the logic inside the router switches at very high speed, creating its own noise.

This is the reason that some mixed signal chips have both analog and digital power supplies -- to allow the board designer a small chance of keeping the analog signals clean by filtering the digital switching noise before it gets to the analog input.

The problem is compounded when you have multiple switching chips.

Of course, as other posters have pointed out, the problem certainly could be in the power supply itself, in which case swapping the power supply certainly could be a fix.

No, silly, to provide stable power to the circuit trying to transmit or decode at 2.4GHz.

Noise (because of bad caps) from the power supply could easily cause jitter, which can reduce viable range considerably.

Sounds like an incentive to make computer security stronger.

But what do I know?

I don't even know what a Tango is, but I'm only six degrees of separation away from its creator, right?

Wait a minute...

You figured it out in the last paragraph.

Glad I kept reading.

Depends on the state whether lawyers are allowed in small claims court or not.

For example, in Texas they are definitely allowed, though not required.

depends on the state