The cell companies aren't discounting hardware because they love you.

They're over charging non contract people because they want you on that contract. There are no new cell phone customers. A market where people can move freely from carrier to carrier at a whim is one where they lose.

An automated test is more important then a fix. People goof. Can't fix that but you can test for it.

I guess the years have accumulated and I'm now and old timer but I don't see how that's cracking by anyone's definition.

From what I know, wii kept old the old driver versions installed and games would request the one they knew worked when loading. So an older game would load a pre-sdhc support driver.

I'm not saying that doesn't suck, but that is why.

I'm sure most of the burglars live in residence that came with alarm stickers on the doors and windows. They don't fool anyone. The two places I've lived that were broken into had them.

Phones, tablets, etc lack Ethernet ports. It's pretty close to deprecated for consumer electronics and understandably so.

To take on debt is not to spend money, they are very different. When you take on debt you are, well, in someone elses debt.

People are giving away their power. No questions asked: If it's the control of your life you're about to sign away, even a tiny fraction of it, the answer is "no."

I used to hate javascript. I'd disable it in my browsers up until a few years ago and avoid it like the plague in all of my web development tasks. A year and a half ago I became a full time web developer.

I had to shut up and learn to love javascript, and I really do. There's nothing wrong with it.

A language like PHP3 lacks enough features to make many common patterns possible. Progressing to PHP4, and PHP5, more and more patterns became possible. PHP can now house proper code, though it frequently doesn't because people still hack away like it's PHP3 or PHP4

To me, javascript feels much the same way. I never come across a pattern I can not implement, though I see a lot of coding that ignores standard patterns to it's own demise. linq.js, underscore.js, jquery, and some in-house libraries make classes, objects, collections, DOM work, etc, amazingly simple. The standard library is very poor, but that's ok because the 3rd party libraries are fantastic. Outside of IE8 and under, the speed is FAST too.

A lot of times there's a function that will be implemented by a library but can optionally wrap to a native function if available, making support for everything universal.

I too find the pricing to be appalling, but I suspect it's mostly because store clerks are designed to sell people everything they can, not what they need. I believe by doing your homework and wanting adequate, not just 'top of the line,' you can get away relatively cheap.

I paid $225 for a good quality used Nexus One (I'm aware it's not compatible with this service, but it's a smart phone regardless) and I pay t-mobile $15/mo for unlimited text, 10c/minute voice, and $1.50/day data that I never use because in general wifi is available.

This is expensive in comparison to my old phone which cost $14 shipped off of ebay, but for something so modern (just not bleeding edge) I would say it's an affordable luxury if you play your cards right.

Dell really wants BIOS updates to involve them fronting the $40-$120 min shop charge or paying for an onsite call.

I suspect it may have more to do with emission/dumping laws/costs, etc, though it's only a guess.

Strange... I have no problems closing those tabs w/o this plugin!

I used to run a 200~400+ user IRC channel on DALnet over a decade ago and we would get spammers in there.

So I made a bot that would rejoin the channel at a set interval and ban anyone who messaged it.

Then they made them detect that it was an op's ip, even though the bot wasn't op. So I started using a different host name.

Then they made it so that the bot used 2 connections, one to send the message and wasn't in the channel, and one to sit in the channel to tell the other connection who to spam. So I made my bot detect the identical hosts.

Then they started using different hosts. So I made it log who has and hasn't talked in the channel and notify me. I'd whois those people and join the other channels they were in waiting to find a common channel getting spammed. I'm assuming if they realized the weak link in the chain was me detecting who has and hasn't talked, they'd of made it say hurf durf randomly.

Once you require the spam bots to have friends, they'll have friends. Your solution is a temporary one.

>> i remember the days when we had a dozen cell carriers in the US. expensive service, crappy reception almost everywhere you went. as the competition dried up we've had prices drop and better phones come out.

My first computer ran Doom like a slide show and cost $3,000. I bought an iPod Video for $40 recently, with hacked firmware it runs Doom smoothly. This is the result of technology progressing, not with removal of competition.

I had Comcast cable internet for around 5 years because there was nothing else but even worse DSL in my area. They gave me 50kbytes/s upload and 750kbyte/s download. 2 months before Verizon installed FiOS lines in my area the upload jumped to 200kbyte/s and the download to 1.5mbyte/s.

Hotmail gave you 10mb disk space for eons. Gmail came out then Yahoo and Microsoft had to change.

As long as there is competition, even if it's just 2 mega-corps battling it out, companies can not sit still and must continue to innovate/advance.

Ask the clerk to swipe a store card. At the self checkouts, the chain I goto has 'forgot your card?' as the first item in the 'no barcode?' list.

There ya go, now you can save 25cents on each roll of tinfoil