not at all.

short of the fact that I work in sales (boo hiss, I know, I'm the devil around here) there is not a single thing that I do work related, that could be considered evil.

In fact, my long term success has been built around my local reputation of the guy who isn't the anti-christ, and who does right by the customer every single time.

a perfect example today, was a small change to a customers account, that is going to save him around $1300 per month. How is that evil?

You're confusing two totally different personality traits.

I'm as greedy as they come. My immediate goal on any given day, to make as much money as humanly possible, so that I can retire to a decent life style in 30 years.

This doesn't mean that I am evil, or even unethical for that matter. Just greedy.

Profit is not a dirty word, you know that, right?

Just because I'm greedy (I am, my short term goals are to make as much money as humanly possible so that I can enjoy a decent quality of life when I retire 30 years from now) doesn't mean that I am evil, or even unethical for that matter.

10 days out of warranty, and my HP Pavillion POS shut off randomly one night in the middle of typing something up.

It made that sickly hdd disk spinning down sound, and then wouldn't turn back on. I swapped the power brick with another one, and it still won't fire up. Different batter didn't help either.

Yanked the disk out and put it in an external enclosure, made a quick back up of all the data that was on it, and called HP tech support. Promptly informed that it was a known issue with that particular model after about 14 months of service, and they they could repair it for $550, as my warranty was up. This, for a cheap machine that was purchased for $700 brand new.

This message, typed on my shiny new MBP, and I will never buy HP shit again.

I was in Seattle recently, and walked into an ATT store to pick up a prepaid sim for my phone to avoid roaming charges with my Canadian carrier.

less than 5 minutes later, I walked out of the store with an assigned mobile number, $10 worth of minutes on the phone, and $10 lighter in the wallet. the dude didn't even ask me for my name of identification. when I quizzed him on that, he told me my name was homer simpson, and I was born 01/01/1980

My ex openly admitted that she pooped. What she was trying to convince us all, was that it smelled like roses....

roses growing on a compost pile, maybe, but roses none the less.

Example: Blackberry 9700.
We sell the phone for $150 on a three year contract (voice and data, $400ish voice only), or $650 with no contract. Our wholesale cost on the phone is close to $600. The network then comps us for the price of the hardware subsidy ($450) as well as $300 in GP (Gross Profit) for the new activation. In short, for every 3 year term (Blackberry) we sign on the phone, the network pays out the company about $750, which has to cover the cost of the hardware, plus all of our fixed causes. The store has to sell about 200 phones per month after all costs in order to be profitable. Higher volume stores need to do close to 400 phones per month.
As to why cases cost so much? I get paid on margin, the more you pay, the more I make. The best way to get discounted cases out of me is to bring me friends who want to sign new contracts. I get paid for a phone, you get a discount on the case for referring me a new customer.

I work for a national cellular retailer in Canada, and you're guess on our margins is way off...
My company makes close to $300 in margin on 3 year voice contract, and considerably more on voice and data, in additional to monthly residuals, as well as load bonuses when we meet our network targets.
Selling the phone, is WAY more important to my companies margin than an accessory is.

uin:56505020 There are about a dozen active users still on my list. I'm using Pidgin on xunbutu these days, so it all looks the same to me, I don't even know what protocol is being used unless I check. Of those that still use ICQ (I have them all on gtalk and msn as well), they do tend to use ICQ more often than others. Most of us the user (myself included) are Canadian, but there are few internationals as well.

I Am A Fucking Legally Enraged Officer? Best I got, sorry...

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4933703&CatId=333

I have a box similar to this one shown, with a pair of 1TB WD Scorpio drives running it, one disk gets used to system partitions and home directories, the other is mounted at /srv/media. The box provides NFS and SMB shares to 2 desktops, 2 laptops and a Myth TV Box that's hooked up to the 42".

The only thing I haven't been able to do with it so far (time has been a factor, and I haven't been able to research it properly) is DLNA streaming to work properly to the PS3. Time has been a factor and I haven't really looked that closely.

Mine.

I supply the hardware and pay the bill, which I then bill them for.

You can do all of this via Blackberry Enterprise Server.

My 'berry is so locked down by the guru's at head office that I have the same web browsing restrictions on it, that I do on our point of sale desktops, all courtesy of the BES and SonicWall routers.

And I might be out to lunch on this, but...

Bing users are more likely to be using the default solftware that comes with their computers, where as many google users tend to be a bit more tech savvy, and are more likely to have ad blocking software installed along side a different browser?