How can you be so foolish as to think that students are the consumers? Let me introduce you to the concepts at work here. The CONSUMER is the one paying money for a service. Which means that the ultimate consumer are the taxpayers (not even the parents alone, arguably not them at all). The money flow is simple and straight forward. From my pocket, to your corrupt bureaucracy, to shady text book suppliers. If the text book suppliers can make more money by rewriting the books every couple of years, they will. If they could make more money having a really good book, they would. Can you guess which of those two options is reality?

Oh good, invent bezerkers. This is NOT the kind of thinking we need.

Did you just liken not owning a TV to suspicion of criminal activity? I don't own a TV. Am I to be investigated for nothing more than that? How absurd.

So you're argument is that a production which costs hundreds of millions to make, you are saying that production will have appeal to less than 1/3 the US population, and exactly NO appeal to anyone outside the US? That is your assertion? My counter is, then it wasn't worth making.

A husband and wife pair working out of a garage created Myst, which for a long time was the best selling game ever.

You are joking right? That's not even comparable, for starters I use my computer for a lot more than facebook. For continuance, MANY people I know use "facebook mobile" almost exclusively. And because you annoyed me, don't forget that the typical power draw of a modern desktop/laptop computer is around 600watts. Do you have any idea what the draw is for a 48u rack with storage? I've give you a hint, it's a lot closer to 1000watts PER U. Someone that actually builds out those machines can probably give us better details, but I think the point is salient already.

In other news, the gas it takes to put produce in the grocery store is nothing compared to all the gas used by the customers who bought that produce. :stare:

It's not all that often you can accuse someone of being MORE short sighted than a C level executive. Is "the spectrum" full? Oh hell no. Do you really want to see that day? I assure you, no. But more to the point, ATT is aware, as anyone with a brain and a few minutes would be, that in large cities the spectrum may not be full, but the land to build a cell site... that is. At the very lowest level, the problem with adding bandwidth to crowded cities is a matter of real estate. In several senses, actually. First, you have to find some. Then you have to plan around the neighbors. Oh, that 43 story building next door is made mostly out of glass, steel and carbon. It sucks up and refracts your signals all to hell and back.

In short, it's not quite so simple as you pretend it is. On the other hand, screw ATT and verizon too. Bunch of money grubbing assholes, and they have been for about 60 years now. I say that as a long time ATT customer. Unfortunately there are no better options. Sprint's coverage is a joke, Verizon has dollar signs where their brains should be, and T-mo is desperately trying to sell itself off, which doesn't make signing a contract all that appealing. I pray that google takes Motoral's handset department, and combines it with a big fat fuck you to the telcos and starts offering GoogleMobile (combined Wifi, Wimax(whatever), cellular).

If google gave you some free services, or a bit of money to turn your wifi router into a public backhaul, would you? Presuming of course you had some level of QOS control.

This seems to be the point everyone is missing in all this. The carrier doesn't need spyware to spy on you, THEY ALREADY SEE ALL YOUR STUFF IN PLAIN TEXT. It's not like ATT needs a warrant to open up their own network and take a look around. Nor does verizon need federal permission to log, through their data proxy, every address you ever visit, for how long and using what protocols. In point of fact, current federal law requires these companies to store this information, for a very long time.

What exactly do people think CIQ can tell the carrier that they don't already know? The pathetic answer is, real world network performance diagnostic data. Which is just about the ONLY thing the carrier doesn't already know about your handset.

Pardon me, but if you feel that way, why are you a customer of facebook? Why the hell would you post something on a website whose sole purpose is to SHARE what you post, if you don't want to share it? Seriously, I think it's a perfectly reasonable question.

And when I said 'customer' before, I meant product. Because you aren't the consumer of facebook, and you aren't the customer either. You are the product being sold. Are there people that don't know that?

I'm curious if you ever actually owned and used a console for multiple years. I've replaced 3 PS2's in the time span I've had the computer I'm typing this on, and the computer still plays every game I've tried (no, not crysis). The damn things are built to fall apart. I've had an original PS2, a slim and a second gen slim. All three failed at some point (right outside warranty). The way I hear it, xbox's aren't much better (or possibly worse). The wii is pretty solid, but then Nintendo doesn't lose money on each unit either.

Why are we laying the fault for nefarious tracking schemes at Apple or Google's doors? Aren't the carriers the ones behind this? I know debating Android vs iOS is a favorite pass time, but... FOCUS.

Yeah, see they weren't selling "parts lists" they were selling service guides. Service guides (albeit wrongly IMHO) are copy-writable. Just because they use the word "parts list" to describe detailed step by step deconstruction, rebuild, and reconstruction instructions, does not mean they were innocent.

Under existing law(USA), the mechanical steps necessary to repair any portion of your car are considered proprietary and you can't know them unless you pay extortionist fees for that information. NOTE: this is information that any person could reverse-engineer with a set of tools and a few weeks. (that is also illegal)

Actually, they can do that too. They used to do it a lot. Now they tend to only use that tactic on child porn websites and terrorist BBS's.

Never heard of this before. I hate you right now. My childhood is flooding back into my head.

Little hint... stop putting your steam folder on your c:\ drive. I've had literally the same steam folder since steam was in beta and only came with Counter Strike. It doesn't bitch much, it just spends a bit of time updating and it's happy as a panda. I have this 50gb folder with pretty much all the games from steam I want, and it transfers between any windows computer more or less without issue.

I really can't understand what the problem with steam is? I have a bookshelf full of game boxes with discs in them. And I have a folder on my computer with ISO copies and cracks for nearly all of them. Because the boxed version kinda sucks more often than not, and if it doesn't have a significant multiplayer section, there is no reason to subject my computer to the publishers DRM wimzy. Steam on the other hand, doesn't give me a pretty box, but it also makes taking my games with me easy. It's a trade off I'm willing to accept as long as Valve sticks to their word and keeps the service up, refunds my money, or releases drm free copies. They have so far.