I blogged about my top 10 questions to ask before taking an IT job, and some of 'em included:

8. What is the on-call rotation schedule?
7. In the last year, how many times has the on-call person been called?
4. Can I schedule vacations around the holidays?

if you had a treo running palm OS, you could get something like TreoButler or CallFilter (or, I'm sure, any number of other apps) to control incoming calls. I have CallFilter, which allows me to sort calls by caller ID. You can select straight-to-voicemail, ring-to-voicemail, pickup/hangup with or without alerting, etc. I have all incoming 1-800 numbers and unknown callers set to go straigt to voicemail, and when I encounter a pest like the autodialer you've described they get the pickup/hangup treatment.

Works great. I'm sure something similar will come out for the Pre soon, because people expect that functionality. I don't know if the iPhone has something like this, but if it doesn't, it should. This is a feature that should come standard on every smartfone.

The iPhone and Blackberries would bounce up to more normal $800+ pricing.

I call BS. You can buy an 8 gig ipod touch today for under $200. According to the iSupply teardown, the GSM chipset in the iphone costs $2.80.

$179.00 + $3.00 != $800

Umm, they obviously did know about Opera because they explicitly redirected it to a file called error.html. That's the key part of the story. We don't know if Opera would have ruled out the vendor simply because the administration interface didn't function properly in the Opera browser. It was that the vendor explicitly blocked the use of Opera, even though it might have worked just fine.

Lack of using standards is as much the fault of the IT people who choose products and technologies as the vendors who sell them. The number of times that IT staff either don't consider whether the product uses standards - or worse they intentionally choose proprietary solutions because they like the vendor - exceeds the imagination. It's as much a demand problem as a supply. In this instance, the potential customer was the vendor who was being locked out so it kind of bit the manufacturer on the ass.

Or had your drunk 6-year-old child change lanes with his eyes closed. Which, when you think about it, is actually a pretty apt description of the way the Bushies ran the country.

Bush didn't see himself as breaking any laws.

the fact that he was wrong doesn't make his conduct lawful. Ignorance of the law is no defense.

I don't think the intent is to make the promise binding on this case. I think the intent is to make Obama look like a hypocrite in front of the whole world. The problem isn't with this judge, it's with the Obama administration's approach to dealing with the wholesale criminality of their predecessors. People can try to change that policy by winning lawsuits, or they can try to change it by shaming Obama into actually sacking up and doing something about it. This case just presents a nice opportunity to do both at the same time.

Since I wrote the summary, the EFF has a new page up with some analysis and commentary.

the IG report does confirm that the warrantless surveillance involved "unprecedented collection activities," beyond the surveillance program of Al-Qaeda touted by President Bush. The report described the scope of the additional spying only as "Other Intelligence Activities." Collectively, the so-called terrorist surveillance program and the Other Intelligence Activities were referred to as the "President's Surveillance Program." The report does not use the program's code name, Stellar Wind, which remains classified. Given the scope of the Nixon Administration's illegal spying (which led to FISA in the first place), it is sobering to consider that the Other Intelligence Activities were unprecedented.
[...]

The report damns the effectiveness of the program with faint praise. [...]

The IG report provided a dramatic summary of the dispute in March 2004, when dozens of Bush Administration officials nearly resigned in protest over the Other Intelligence Activities. The Department of Justice could find no legal support for these activities, and found that the factual basis for prior legal opinions was substantially incorrect. [emphasis mine]

that last bit is referring to some of John Yoo's embarrassingly shoddy 'legal' work, which (now 9th Circuit Judge-for-life) Jay Bybee signed off on.

It does kinda seem like the people running the show picked the fall guy in advance. Emptywheel's thread does point out one interesting detail - After Comey refused to sign off, George W. Bush personally called Ashcroft at the hospital, to try to hide what was going on just one more time.

The man's entire presidency was an exercise in law breaking and ass-covering.

Everyone is already required to pay a sales tax on the items they buy out of state anyway.

Not true. I live in Oregon. We don't have sales tax. While you are free to question the wisdom of that approach (and our public school teachers and administrators would surely agree with any criticisms you have to offer), I don't pay sales tax to (e.g.) California when I buy something online there, and I am not legally required to pay use tax to Oregon for purchases made out of state.

mod parent up. The way urban growth boundaries in Oregon work is that subdivision of parcels of land below some arbitrarily large size (I think it's 80 acres) is simply not allowed outside of the UGB.* The reasoning was that the UGB would allow farmers in the Willamette valley to continue their modest agricultural lifestyles without fighting against property speculators hoping to turn all of I-5 between Portland and Eugene into a soul-destroying chain of strip malls and burbclaves. And so far it's worked pretty well to achieve that purpose- while Eugene/Springfield is reasonably dense, there is literally NOTHING but sheep farms and hops vines in the 60 miles or so between Salem and Eugene.

The land speculation game is confined to the outskirts of existing cities- speculators can buy a big, relatively cheap parcel just outside the current UGB and hope that in 20 years, the city grows enough that at least some of their property will be pulled in, so they can break it into smaller lots and sell it. What the UGB has done is make it practically impossible for a speculator to buy a farm out in the middle of nowhere, bulldoze it flat, and build 100 houses on it... and that's just fine with most of the folks who live here.

Anyone who cares can read more here (html thanks to google)

*Local jurisdictions are allowed to make exceptions for various reasons, but "multi-unit housing development" isn't one of the allowed reasons. And of course all of the existing lots and structures were grandfathered in - the statewide UGB law was passed only about 30 years ago- much of the privately-owned land in particularly desirable locations (e.g. along the banks of the McKenzie River) was subdivided and developed long before the UGB took effect.