Let's try another analogy: say you drive your U.S. car into Canada and the engine shuts off. You get a message on your car's HUD or on your registered cell number or whatever: for a greatly inflated monthly fee (which will be tacked onto your lease back in the U.S.), your car engine will be re-enabled and you can drive on Canadian roads. Or, you can just say "Acknowledge, Keep Driving" and pay a by-the-mile super-duper inflated fee (perhaps totaling $1000 for a road trip from the Bellingham-ish border to Vancouver). If, however, you owned your car outright and had unlocked it, you could pay tolls on Canadian roads as you go, not through some U.S. company, perhaps totaling as little as $10 in an entire month, but because you're leasing your car and have not road-unlocked its engine, you're forced to accept these absurdly high fees.

A lot of people want an unlocked phone and would be willing to finance it themselves, but you notice how the new iPhone comes out only as carrier locked versions, and then, when months later it comes out as a carrier-unlocked version, the price is still a couple hundred bucks more than it maybe ought to be? Other notes: your carriers now won't unlock your phone when you finish your contract, it is illegal for you to do so yourself, and note that they've only been so nice as to carrier unlock you for about two years now, anyways.

I've moved between countries many times, and having to deal with the carrier locking shit is infuriating, especially when, say, I want to update my version of something like iOS to get a security patch but don't want to lose my carrier unlock in the process. (Yes, I also use Android phone sometimes, but alas~.) Granted, carrier unlock is more meant to keep people domestically stuck to one carrier, so that everyone doesn't migrate to T-mobile (Science Bless!).

Russell the Love Muscle

Aside from the issue of exploitation of women who participate in pornography, we should ask ourselves what pornography does to all the men who consume it. And no, I'm not talking about how it warps men's perceptions of women, because I don't think it necessarily does, or, even if it does, I don't think that that is the most important thing at stake.

What are we doing to our teenagers if we tell them that sex is wrong and bad and dangerous, and therefore that they should abstain? Teenagers (particularly boys) will find a sexual outlet, and so is it better to let them engage in the real thing (albeit with better education than currently exists about pregnancy and disease and tumultuous emotions), or is it better to let those desires unfurl in evolutionarily novel ways, like via pornography use? What happens when men spend years fapping to unreal images of women in magazines, television, and the internet?

I think porn is highly addictive. Not in obvious ways like alcohol cravings to a long-sober man, but in more subtle ways, like the inability to stop drinking after the first sip. If porn should be blocked, I think it should be for the sake of men, not because of some babble about harming women. Of course, then you have to deal with all sorts of sexualized female imagery in media and adverts, and I think the genie may be permanently out of the bottle on that..... I guess I just don't think you can take away pornography without maybe having a real, serious talk about how much more actual sex teenagers may and ought to begin to have, and how society should deal with that. Granted, I think that may be the better discussion to have.


Yeah... we Americans think that the pursuit of pleasure is the meaning of life. Like, if it feels good, how can it be wrong? And I think we've taken the wrong attitude towards pornography: I feel like pornography was a natural thing to evolve, but then we came to justify it by saying, "Oh, it's a reaction against all the Puritanical bullshit, and it feels good so it _must_ be good!" And certainly that Puritanical mumbo-jumbo _was_ bullshit, but I think the real answer was just to have more sex and focus on real relationships, not to help a generation of young men waste their time with technology-enhanced masturbation.

I tried this six days ago, my phone still under contract, and was denied.

Also, this is relevant to me because I'm travelling to Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam in two weeks, where being able to buy a local SIM card would be awesome. Fortunately I have an older jailbroken and unlocked iPhone, as well as an unlocked Nexus S, but still.....

I think the point is that the fundamental service offered by Instagram is not so complex or revolutionary as to be irreplaceable. Like Google could probably in-house it in no time. (I mean, they've already got Picasa.) Do I speak correctly on your behalf, wile_e8?

Also, there's a breed of trolling in which a troll accuses a non-troll of trolling.

I entered college in 2003, and by 2004 all these girls had phone numbers with different area codes, so I had to pay long distance to call them from a landline. Thus, I got a cell phone to save money, hah!

Oops, that was my post. Didn't mean to be an Anonymous Coward. Those slippery cookies!

When people drive more gas-efficient cars, all things being equal they tend to drive more, offsetting the benefit of increased mpg ratio. Furthermore, many electric cars will still be powered by oil or (ack!) coal, although I feel like Portland would have some clean energy sources. So, yes, penalizing them for driving a more 'green' car (thus, in theory, conserving oil) seems silly, but effectively they may not be conserving oil at all.

I will agree with you and say the proposition sounds entirely bone-headed, all that said.

So, I pseudocode on paper, and probably go through a page of paper every week or two. But 10,000 pages per person? Given 52 weeks in a year, and assuming an employee takes three weeks off (52 -3 = 49), and five working days in a week, that equates to about ~41 pages per day per person. Ouch.

I'm glad someone else found the "Silmarillion" boring. I slogged through that in eighth grade, and have never quite forgiven myself.

And f*** those kids who [illegally] take them off so that their cars can be faster.

People say this about programmers being able to work wherever, but when you're developing something on a wide variety of devices (like trying to write Android software that works on Vanilla Google Nexus, Samsung, LG, Motorola, HTC, etc. devices), it's reasonable for a localized team of people to share those devices, but not so practical if people are distributed. This becomes even more of an issue with secret or not-yet-released devices, which come with HUGE liabilities if you lose or misplace them.

Furthermore, working as a team is _way_ more efficient if you can walk a few paces over and talk to people. I mean, this is the kind of thing that slows down business if people aren't even on the same floor, let alone in different buildings or different cities or land masses. And doing video chats or phone chats is never going to be as good as _being there_.

Lastly, it's hard to get a GOOD, salaried remote code-writing job if you've not worked for a given company in its local area first.

Take your paycheck, go home safely, and do not infringe upon civil liberties.

It's not getting laid by all the hot babes on mine Facebook that stresses me out, you insensitive clod!

While I misspoke about kickbacks, here's an example of what I was referring to, which is Amazon attempting to get out of paying taxes (in this case it should arguably be exempt from retroactively paying them) by creating jobs in the state and investing capital. Again, arguably a fair trade for the state, but this sucks if Amazon is your competition, because it doesn't undo the damage of Amazon cutting into your sales:

"The settlement resolves the online retailer's ongoing dispute with [Texas], which claimed that Amazon owed $269 million in back taxes. In addition to taking up collection, Amazon has agreed to create at least 2,500 jobs and invest a minimum of $200 million in capital investments, though it admits no fault, ..."