Exactly. The balance due on the phone which you still own. That's not a fee. That's paying for something that you bought and get to keep. The only reason they cancel the phone installment plan immediately is because the terms of the loan are so generous in the first place that it's not viable to let people keep those terms when they aren't paying you otherwise anymore.

Direct evidence is easily found on Google. Look up how to activate a non-Verizon phone on Verizon's network. You can't is the answer because they won't do it. I know they used to in the past, but not in many years.

This is nonsense. Try doing exactly what you said with Verizon. They won't let arbitrary compatible devices on their network. Call them up to activate and they'll tell you to bring the device to a Verizon store so they can "assess it for compatibility" which just means figure out if you bought it from them or not. If not it magically becomes "incompatible".

There is NO TERMINATION FEE! That's what he meant by idiot. You have to pay back what you borrowed for the phone. That is NOT A FEE. Just because you pay it at termination doesn't make it a termination fee. A termination fee is a price you pay for nothing in return. This price you pay at termination is for the phone that you bought with borrowed money. It's not a fee. And it's not mandatory that you buy a phone with borrowed money or buy one from T-Mobile or buy one at all. You can put a Tmobile sim card into any device you want to. Borrowing money to pay for a device that you can't afford is your own decision. This is not a difficult concept to understand.

So what are people around here considering reading instead of Slashdot? This indecipherable summary is extremely common around here along with click bait, exaggerated headlines (click bait again), news that's days behind every other tech news site. I'd love to hear some fresh ideas for Slashdot replacements.

Someone was actually dumb enough to broadcast to the internet that they are an idiot and didn't even do it as AC?

Seriously. I hate April Fools day because a large portion of the internet seems to become a barf bag filled with lame, obvious, and painfully stupid "fooled you!" articles that don't fool anybody. And especially don't fool anybody when EVERY post is lame nonsense. Google does this properly, everybody else should quit trying and let us read actual news.

This has been done. The results are entirely predictable in that almost any fool can tell the difference between a low bitrate MP3 and a CD or vinyl. Very few people can tell the difference between a 350kbps MP3 and CD or vinyl, but some people can (doubtful that all audiophiles fall into this group but some surely do). Most interestingly is that younger people had a much higher chance of preferring the low bitrate mp3 to the CD or vinyl.

I definitely agree and also want to point out that stopping you installing it for family probably shouldn't be a priority in the first place. I think interfering with they very organic nature of sharing among people you care about is only ever going to be a hindrance or perceived as greedy. Stopping someone making 10,000 copies and handing them out to complete strangers is the much bigger issue financially and morally.

I've always noticed among people that it's extremely easy to convince oneself that they are "breaking the rules" for a "legitimate" reason when it means they'll get something for free. People don't like obtrusive DRM, sure I get it. But one guy on one forum has one problem with a games DRM and all of a sudden it's war on that DRM and thousands of people latch onto to piracy as the holy cause despite all the evidence suggesting that likely none of them would have found the DRM obtrusive. I'm not saying there haven't been abuses by game companies and people left out in the cold by ruthless, greedy corporations. But the ease and vigor with which people jump on this particular bandwagon at the slightest provocation can only be due to the rewards they'll get for finding this tenuous moral justification. Basically if all pirate sites charged you the same money for the cracked version as the original developer did for the legit version this anti-DRM crusade would be almost completely deflated with no real cause to speak of beyond the relatively few cases of real abuse (Ubisoft, EA, Stardock) and people with philosophical hangups or truly unique computing requirements, which is likely to be a MUCH smaller set of the current "anti-DRM in any form" group that we're stuck with.

VERY few console games actually run at 1080p whether or not your TV can accommodate that resolution. Among the titles that you'd compare with Crysis 3 for PC, ZERO of them run at 1080p.

This is all exactly relevant to what I said. Police departments finding a dead body and a person with a violent criminal record having shot them are subject to penalties under the stand your ground law because these guys were found to have "stood their ground". This is insanity. How many similar cases aren't even reported on because police feared being penalized and never even arrested the shooter such that he could even be legally deemed to have shot in self defense. The law grossly expands the definition of self defense and then penalizes police for responding reasonably in cases where someone has been shot under unknown circumstances. It's not enough to make almost anything that happens in your home self defense, we also have to make sure that police aren't even allowed to keep you from leaving town while they try to figure out what did happen. I'm willing to accept that some people do not consider this law to be overly broad in it's stated intention. But no rational person who actually understands it as written can think that about it's horrific and sloppy text and execution.

Reality must not have read the same law you did
http://www.tampabay.com/news/courts/criminal/many-killers-who-go-free-with-florida-stand-your-ground-law-have-history/1241378

It would also seem that only men are allowed to stand their ground:
http://www.care2.com/causes/stand-your-ground-fails-abused-wife.html

The previous self defense law in Florida was perfectly fine. If you felt threatened and had no way to escape you were justified in using lethal force. Stand your ground essentially took away the "and you have no way to escape" part of the law such that you can always use lethal force if you feel threatened. On top of that it added language so broad that it's comical. It also introduced punishments (yes punishments) for police departments which arrest somebody who is later found to have been within the new stand your ground law. That is not rational policy. If the police find someone dead and you say you shot them, you go to jail and your self defense or not is determined by state prosecutors and ultimately a judge and jury. Self defense is a determination made by the justice system, NOT by law enforcement. Punishing police departments for doing their lawful duty is absolutely stupid. It's a great way to make sure almost nobody ever gets arrested for murder as long as the dead guy was in their house.

I do love me some libre office in general. But I must admit that impress is straight up garbage. It does OK (and just ok) at opening ppt files. It sucks big time at building presentations. Google docs presentation builder is much better, but if you're mostly interested in presentations Office is really hard to avoid. Calc and writer put up an admirable showing for sure, but impress does not impress in the slightest.

You can disable this from the options menu. The command line is only needed to remove the functionality entirely such that nobody could enable it again.