I suspect that someone with a brain reminded him that he, in fact, works for the people of his district and they could therefore demand HIS password.

EVERY computation in the history of mankind, both before and after the invention of mechanical and electrical computing devices, has been done for the sole purpose of arriving at a number. The computation NEVER has value. The value comes from what you are able to do with the resulting number.

Here's a thought. Maybe they don't want your business. If price is your main concern, you're either poor or cheap and neither of those is good for the T-Mobile bottom line. If their entire customer base is paying a minimum of $50 a month, the chances are good that a large percentage of them still aren't going to be using much more resources than you do with your $30 plan, so they increase profits while divesting themselves of cheapskate customers with no upsell potential.

Yeah, and that means the next time they have a megasale price reduction across the board to bump the numbers at the end of a problematic quarter, YOU don't get to take advantage of the new prices because your 2-year contract locks you into the HIGHER rate.

Private contracts can be good for both parties. A contract between a private individual and a public corporation ALWAYS results in the advantage going to the corporation because the individual has NO say in the contract language.

It's not necessary to buy a $600 phone. I just got a new (not refurb) HTC MyTouch 4G Slider (physical keyboard, 8 mpx camera) at Frye's for $200 outright. It's last year's model, but I was replacing my much older G-1, which is now about 50% phone and 50% dirt & pocket lint and was starting to get flakey.

I needed to update the hardware one of my video editing workstations to do 2k, 3k, & 4k renders in a reasonable amount of time. Built an i7 and decided to try Win8 because it was pretty cheap. (cheaper than the last OEM copy of XP I bought years ago) The machine has Vegas Pro 12, VLC, GOMplayer, Mplayer, and Gspot installed. That's pretty much it. I spent a few days trying to keep from driving over to Balmer's house and ripping his dick off for creating such a piece of shit interface, but with the help of the mighty Googles, I eventually figured out how to do REAL network sharing, turn off the bulk of the childish bullshit, and change all the settings to create something that resembled a functional work machine.

My workstations run for months at a time without restarts and the only time I see the Metro interface is on a rare reboot. The half dozen applications I use all got a desktop shortcut the way jebus intended. That's how I start them. Since I have a pair of 32" monitors on this box, bringing up the metro screen is like getting hit in the face with a sheet of plywood. Fortunately, I rarely need to access it.

My only real complaint so far is that the OS locked up tight a bunch of times when I was trying to mass copy about 100k files at once over the network (2 TB or thereabouts). No blue screen, no complaints or warnings. Complete pull-the-plug-to-restart style lock-up like I haven't seen since the 90s. I don't know if it was Win8 or a flakey chipset driver (Asus Z77 board) but I had to end up hand-copying top-level directories one at a time to finish the job. Robocopy blasted the whole drive to an outboard backup drive without any issues later that day, so I'm going to assume that whoever wrote the GUI file copy stuff is a graphics designer and completely unqualified to do real coding.

Outside of that, I've pretty much gotten used to the OS. The new highly-informational file transfer and Task Manager dialogs are completely worth the price of admission. (GUI copy is borked, but it looks nice) I completely ignore Metro and I never used the Start menu on 95 thru XP (desktop shortcuts all the way, bitches!) so its absence doesn't bother me in the slightest.

Not having a shutdown button on the taskbar is massive FAIL though. That really pisses me off. I still might drive over to Balmer's and set fire to his lawn gnomes or something.

I've been earning my living with Vegas/Vegas Pro since V3.0 (currently at V12.0) and it's the only thing keeping my workstations on Windows. If they ported it to Linux (an Enterprise distro, not bleeding edge) I'd run away from Windows like shit thru a goose. In fact I'd drive over to Balmer's house the same day it was released and punch him in the throat on camera, edit the video with Vegas on Linux, upload it to YouTube, drive BACK to Balmer's house, and force him to watch the video 42 times on a Nexus 7 while punching him in the throat again.

I'm calling possible bullshit. BOA does not charge anything for the first twenty 3-day direct deposits (it's about 80 cents each after that number) They also charge nothing at all for BillPay check services and when paying major corporations (and I suspect all government entities like tax authorities) they don't physically mail a check anyway. It's all done electronically thru ACH for free. If you are really paying $3 a pop for DD, you need to grab your "personal banker" by the throat and remind him that you can take your business right down the road to Chase or WF if they don't start treating you better.

They always have a booth at the NAB trade show in Vegas, which starts in a couple weeks. I'll be stopping by and loudly explaining how their actions have guaranteed that I'll never buy one of their shitty cameras, nor will any of the hundreds of friends, family, and business associates who often ask me for technical advice about things like cameras and gadgetry.

Being a huge dick casts a long shadow.

What pisses me off about the current crop of devices is that everyone is reinventing the wheel with a bunch of proprietary bullshit and unnecessary new protocols. The DMX512 lighting control protocol has been around for decades and is used by hundreds of existing stage and commercial lighting device manufacturers. I want RGB bulbs that talk to a bridge device that I can control with existing lighting control boards or any computerized system. I can already buy the devices for residential outdoor applications. Why the hell can't these indoor bulb idiots use what everyone else in the world is already using?

So you're saying ... plants crave electrolytes?

That's because you opted for the monthly payment. Buy the lifetime service plan for a couple hundred bucks and be done with it. My first Series 1 Tivo from 1999 (with lifetime service) is still being used at my vacation home. The cable provider there still has an analog tier. My service cost over that time period is about 75 cents per month. Not what I'd call "outrageously overpriced"?

re: the ads. What ads? The only ones I've ever seen on the digital boxes are lines of text at the bottom of the menu screen. Virtually invisible. I've had an HD box for about 3 years and I couldn't tell you what a single one of them was pimping. If you find them "annoying", maybe you need to work on your concentration skills.

You're 12, aren't you?

AEE changed the schedule in 2012. Also, instead of holding it at the gigantic Sands Expo like they did for years, they physically moved the show to several very small and wholly inadequate separate conference rooms at The Hard Rock Hotel. Apparently they didn't learn their lesson, because they are holding it there again this year.

Since there were buses to the LVCC from the Sands all day long, you could travel between the shows easily. I think AEE moved because their main crowd got tired of paying the "jacked-up-5-times-higher-than-normal" room rates during CES.

It was less than $1.00 under Clinton