When my normal 2 year contract (with subsidized phone) ended with T-mobile, and I switched to their new (at the time) no-contract plan, my monthly service bill immediately (pro-rated) dropped by $20

It's Verizon and at&t that charge the same price regardless of where you got your phone from, not t-mobile

In defense of t-mobiles pricing (which isn't great, but better than the other options) the amount of service you receive for that money has increased.

Over the last year they have added free PC wifi-tethering on the 5gb and 10gb 4g plans, and actual unlimited 4g download on the non-tethering plan (which can still be used for tethering, if you know the tricks)

you can save around $10 if you go with the 450 minute voice plan instead of the unlimited minute plan they usually push, if you are the kind of person that doesn't talk on the phone much

I never said at&t bought the baby bells, just that the company currently known as at&t consists of all the baby bells that don't already belong to Verizon.

My point was that, despite the many changes in names over the years, both companies still posses the same "we own the network, we own the phones, we own you" mentality that people hated so much about the old AT&T.
The kind of mentality where changing your plan (to a plan with more or less minutes) automatically extended your contract to a minimum of one year from the date of the plan change, regardless of the number of months still remaining on the original 2 year contract; or intentionally locking the phone such that you couldn't buy ringtones from anywhere except through the official Verizon ringtone "app" .
This is the same kind of behavior that the old AT&T would do, except their particular twist was forcing you to lease your telephone direct from the company (which was hardwired into the wall so it couldn't even be unplugged), and refusing to let ANY 3rd party or customer owned telephones onto the phone network.

(We also know that AT&T invented the magnetic tape answering machine in 1934 and then immediately buried the research out of fear, what else has been buried that we don't yet know about?)

I have no problem keeping Ma Bell Part A (Verizon and every baby bell they bought) and Ma Bell Part B (at&t and every baby bell that verizon didn't already own) from cheating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act by running a duopoly instead of their original monopoly

There were no actual grammar problems, just punctuation mistakes. The word immediately preceding your two examples should have been followed by a comma instead of a period.

Punctuation, especially commas, is hard even for native english speakers.

You don't have to actually KNOW dutch to answer his question for him, and there are far more english-only geeks than dutch-speaking geek, so asking in english is THE best way to get the most high quality answers.

The craziest thing about stock trading as pseudo science is that it doesn't matter. On a system that is mostly human-driven, the simple fact that everyone is using the same pseudo science (same algorithms) creates self-fulfilling "prophesies", forming a feedback loop which confirms the pseudo science.

The system only works because everyone follows the same sets of rules, but the ACTUAL rules themselves don't really matter (much like language, it doesn't matter what the words actually sound like, as long as we all agree on the same set of rules).

You know you have screwed up on a truly grand scale when you not only end up in prison (which isn't particularly hard nowadays), but also manage to completely destroy the company you work for, all in the same step. (Impressive for a non-executive anyway, CEOs do this sort of thing on an almost daily basis)

If the program was such a quick "fix", it would indicate that the device-specific limitations were either intentionally added by the higher-ups, or Facebook Home was written by a complete idiot (considering how buggy it is reported to be, this might be the more likely possibility)

There is nothing wrong with "buy this buy this!", that is the legitimate basis of healthy capitalism, and not why corporations are dangerous.

When corporations got out of control in the past, we ended up with things like company towns (where you are paid in "company dollars" that are only valid at the company store and the company apartment buildings), and violent oppressions of labor movements and labor strikes.

You know what saved us from those things? the Government.

Both Government and Corporations can be evil when allowed to run out of control, but there is a crucial difference between the two. The government (at least in theory) is controlled directly by the people, whereas the people have almost no control at all over private corporations, except in instances where they were able to use the government as a tool to set limits on the behavior of corporations (OSHA, Minimum wage, EPA, FTC, etc).

Yes, I agree that corporations at their worst are nothing compared to a government at it's worst, but that doesn't mean you should fight the government (not while we still have the right to vote anyway).

You can fight the burglar AND the pit bull at the same time, or you can take control of the pit bull and use it against the burglar, which would you rather do?

Nothing in the antenna laws says that the antennas has to be on your property (just your market), so you and your neighbors could all put their own personal antenna on the top of the nearest tall building and individually run a few hundred feet of coax if they wanted. With Aereo each person gets thier own personal antenna that is exclusively theirs for as long as as they pay for it (the antenna sits idle when you aren't watching), so it's no different than using someone elses roof (except using the internet instead of hundreds of feet of coax). The personal antenna aspect was the legal technicality that made Aereo legal

So you are saying that the government "stole" a range of radio frequencies from someone when they formed the FCC?

Who did they steal it from? Marconi? Tesla?

All I can say is..... OMG Ponies!

Our healthcare system will change to become one where all health problems are treated by replacing the faulty biological "part" with a robotic implant, until we all eventually become the robots that replaced us.

Stuff like this makes me wonder if North Korea is so isolated and full of itself that their military actually thinks the rest of the world is dumb enough to fall for a trick like that.

Part of me hopes they are, because this could be a REALLY easy win for the US. Maybe we can just send in swarms of drones (in sky-darkening amounts) armed with fake plastic bombs and simply scare them into surrendering, without actually killing anyone.