I didn't state that there was a serious crime.

Although, I did jump to potential conclusions that there may be more than one way to look at it. One might say that there is a fallacy of division on my part because I am assuming (which goes against the grain here) that the pilot is rational and therefore he may have made a rational decision as a whole. I then hypothesize that the decision being rational must have been made up of parts that are could be rational in whole or part, but in reality that may not be the case.

To the comment "I am sure you will find some wya to justify actions against the brown guy", I do not think this is a race issue. After what has happened in Milwaukee and Aurora, masked men, women, or children carrying, pellet guns, squirt guns, or weapons into crowded places of worship or entertainment warrants removal regardless if they are green, orange, blue, pink, white, brown, or black. Society has norms that underlie the fabric by which we conduct ourselves. Going against these customary norms then results in grief (physical or mental) for the parties involved. It may not lead to assault, battery, etc., but the expectation of hardship for going against the norm exists and should be expected.

I'm going to say that most people 45+ don't know what ZOMG means. Therefore, seeing something that says "Gonna Kill US All ZOMG" would be a bit unnerving. Even though it is security theater, society has norms that state when people deem to be right and wrong. Wearing a shirt that has that message is wrong because it breaks those societal courtesies. Putting someone's grandma in a state of unease for something that is already not exactly the most fun doesn't sit well in my book.

I applaud the pilot. It is his job to get the plane safely in the air and back to the ground. He probably saw it for what it was, but decided he didn't want one the passengers beating the shit out of this guy mid-air because they felt threatened. Bruce Schneier has pointed out numerous times that the acts against the World Trade Center have empowered the average citizen to stand up and fight if they closely felt threatened. That could have been the case and may have saved the student further grief.

I had this phone. It was called the LG enV3. It was awesome for everything you described, except the keyboard didn't slide out it folded out. The battery would readily last 3-4 days. It had good calendar features, chargeable by micro-USB, Bluetooth, etc. This thing was easily made 3 years ago.

Now, I have an iPhone and I am not looking back. Being able to VPN back into work and run SSH from my phone is like magic. It is called progress, brother!

Call the public services commission. I work for an ISP (Telco) we are regulated by the PSC and the FCC. Notifying them, the better business bureau, and the village/town/municipality where you operate would make enough noise. Hell, I might through in the FCC, but I don't think that would do anything.

A lot of our field techs/linemen know and work the the municipality and the linemen with the electric and water utilities. Make enough noise and you will get service or at least an answer. Likely, the backhaul from the Central Office to the their meet point for the Internet if full and oversubscribed from 5PM to 9PM. Someone suggested that the cross connect from the DSLAM to the the router in the C.O. might be full, but we have never seen that to be the case where I work because we have GigE and Ten-GigE fiber running through our distribution network. Even, the old ATM based distribution networks (late 90's tech) had OC-3's and OC-12's so having enough bandwidth between the C.O. and the DSLAM has never really been an issue.

Good Luck!

I can't mod because I commented above, but the post above is awesome! I also want to chime in that the food pyramid has been replaced by "my plate". This has been the case for a few years, now.

As for counting calories, it is the fundamental unit of measure for energy. I have shed a bit of weight and like to think of my body as a rational system. In the fact that the storage of fat and gains in girth are because I was eating too much energy than what I needed to survive so my body stored the weight. The Hacker's Diet gave me great insight as to how weight is 90% caloric intake, 5% genetics, and 5% exercise.

I have a problem with "muscle, which weighs a lot more that the fat you're losing". A pound or kg of muscle has the same weight as a pound or kg of fat because of the unit of measure. The truth is that muscle is denser than fat, i.e. when you account for volume, muscle has more weight per volume than fat.

That's funny!

Especially considering that in a modern CO the blade(s) that is serve as the DSLAM is also the point where the analog signal is split out from the network and is in some instances responsible for providing dial tone. So if the DSL goes down, often times your POTS will go down with it!

I have to disagree with this. Currently, the two biggest cellular providers are Verizon and AT&T

Verizon was created from GTE + Bell Atlantic. AT&T is from Ameritech + NYNEX + Bell South + Pacific Telesis + SBC(changed name to AT&T).

Likely, only one of these entities would exist if AT&T continued to operate as a monopoly because I don't know if GTE had the clout to be as big as Verizon currently is by itself because moving cellular traffic depends mainly on access to fiber (T1s in days of yore). Which would mean that we would all have one technology for cell phones, with one option for a carrier. The other thing that came from the breakup, the Baby Bells had two work with each other to ensure that their new broken up networks would switch traffic after moving forward with independent network upgrades, which gave way to for more open/non proprietary standards to be implemented in the telecom industry and working interconnected networks with multiple routes and diverse locations (TCP/IP networks/slow rise of the Internet, respectively).