Precisely. Just think how much had to be memorized before the printing press was invented. It's something of an ongoing process, although these days it's rather different sorts of information we need to have.

They're not lying, they're marketing. There's a difference. /sarcasm

That was my thought too. "Leaks" are too easy a way to build hype. They aren't going to let Google play in the social space without them.

I had that exact situation with SBC once too. It was ridiculous.

It definitely does sometimes, but not so much that I'd get "inside wiring" personally, and I worked for the phone company for about a year more than 10 years ago. Got people calling to get that added to their bill often enough because they had just reported a problem that might involve their inside wiring. Some people would push it pretty hard. A few years after I left that job, had a case where my phone line was crossed with someone else's, and they tried to see me on inside wiring for that one. It was quite obviously an outside issue, so of course I had no interest in it.

I assume it's the same as when I worked for the phone company, more than 10 years ago, but the other hard part for a lot of customers was understanding that they had to call the company that put the charge on the bill to cancel it most times. Regular customer service phone company employees couldn't do it, although removing the charges wasn't a big deal so long as the dollar amount wasn't huge. It was amazing how long some of these charges could be put on before someone caught on, and then expected all of them to be removed, months later.

It really pays to review your bills every month. Very simple to do, and then you know what it should look like.

I like that way of handling it. I pay no attention to the ads that come with any statements I get, not that I get many since paperless makes so much more sense. ATM ads are just annoying. Give me my cash without insisting I view a commercial - that's not why I put my money in a bank.

I also shop at a grocery store that doesn't have any of those obnoxious club cards. Funny thing, they just give everyone the discount and it works. They have better prices than the other stores around. Rare time that I want something from a store with a club card, I mess with their data and use my sister's number, my inlaws' number, whichever I have for that location.

I'm pretty sure corruption is a major problem in most economic and political systems.

I think this may explain why, when I updated AddThis on some of my sites, it caused the white screen of death instead. So far the sites look ok, but now I need to go over them in more detail.

I'm thinking there's lots of prior art on this one. How else would there be terms such as "godly powers?"

Too true. Describes my inlaws precisely. They buy every upgrade Norton offers them, and don't trust me when I say there are free alternatives. Never mind that I fix every other problem they have with their computer, only the guy from Cox is right when it comes to saying Norton is the right protection, and IE the best browser. Kind of amuses me that they won't take free even from Microsoft, but whatever.

In my area, depending on where you live, it's Cox or Time Warner. No overlap that I know of, so it's still usually no choice between the two.

That's why when someone says to me "God made dirt and dirt don't hurt," I reply with "God also made arsenic." I could give a list of natural poisons, but the one is generally quite enough.

Going down the rapids.

I don't know if this is true for all manufactured homes, but when my husband and I looked at them about 10 years ago, interest rates to buy a manufactured home were higher than for regular homes because lenders treated them as though they would devalue over time.