The reason your cancellation failed was a bad UI design. The text box that you dutifully typed into is entirely optional. The not-really-obvious-it's-a-pulldown box above it is NOT optional. Just pull it down to select a reason, and join the exodus.

Mind you, I got "re-confirmed" a couple of days after I cancelled, but that was just pure scumminess.

I do think it's fascinating how every negative thing they do to their service instantly impacts all of us who pre-paid, but "improvements" are always in the future. How can you offer me an all-you-can-eat buffet, take my money, and then say "Just lima beans and rice today, and only 6 hours from now"? These negative changes should not start until the next billing cycle.

Anyway, I re-dumped them, and I'm moving on.

Boost mobile. They don't have great coverage or quality, and they seem to go completely dead in rural areas, but they're cheap and they don't throw in any surprising fees.

You need to rename yours to "ILikeItWhenYouListen"

The "Free Speech Zones", where they corralled protesters into fenced in cages blocks away from the event they were protesting, were, when challenged, generally found to be unconstitutional by the courts. The US itself is a free speech zone. (Yes, I'm neglecting to mention the "Time Place Manner" restrictions, which allows the government some leeway to regulate speech, as long as they apply it evenly, without regard to the content of the speech. I'm ignoring that, because "Free Speech Zones" have traditionally been used to silence protestors, by keeping them away from the events, while supporters are allowed nearby.) These were massively expanded under W, and, I'm sorry to say, encouraged, rather than removed, by Obama, from whom I had expected better.

The legal sleight of hand that occurred here is that most of them were "recommended" by the Secret Service, who generally inform the local police about matters of security when presidential folks are around, and the police generally follow their recommendations. In this case, the local police who herded the protesters up said "We were just following the orders of the Secret Service, don't blame us," and the Secret Service basically said "not our fault... we just recommended it, but that recommendation carries no legal weight."

In short, yes, the civil rights of the protesters were infringed, and no, no punishment was meted out for doing so.

Wikipedia's article, under the ACLU Litigation section, sums it up pretty well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I agree with this, wholeheartedly. I found myself regularly visiting the copious amounts of content pouring out of the Washington Post, more than other papers, and I sometimes see they have some "deal" for a month for $1, but, when I actually go to investigate it, it winds up being $10 a month. Sorry, but news that I'll soon find everywhere else isn't worth $10 a month, to me, whereas $1 a month would've been fine, given the amount of times I find myself landing on one of their articles. Apparently, Amazon Prime has a deal with them, to allow prime subscribers 6 months free, after which their digital subscription renews at $4, which is _almost_ okay, but it's not quite tempting enough for me to pull the trigger. I realize that this is somewhat irrational, on my part, given that that's the cost of an overpriced cup of coffee, but the fact is, there's nothing in the Washington Post that won't wind up extensively covered for free, soon after it appears on the Post.

I know this is common nowadays, including in large servers, but I am old enough to still see it as very distasteful for a company to acknowledge that they are intentionally selling a crippled product. If the only difference between "Product A at $100" and "Product A+++ at $900" is that you flipped a few bits, it's just a strategy for squeezing more $$$ out of your customers. I didn't like it when SGI did it, I don't like it that IBM does it, and I still question why competition is so dried up in some areas that they wouldn't take advantage of the fact that they can build a better product than their competitors at literally no extra cost. (Yes, I understand that writing the software cost them... once. That was a one time cost that they're milking as if it were an ongoing cost.)

"Gosh, the builders made us a mansion on our property, but we're only allowed to use 700 square feet of it, unless we pay the premium fees! Oh, and don't forget the bathroom surcharge, and the hot water contract!"

Or, for the annoying other end of the spectrum, Yahoo has cheerfully informed me that my account was one of those that was compromised, and had me change my password.... for what was apparently an intrusion that did not require the password.

My personal favorite that I heard was "Creamsicle Hitler".

You are absolutely right. Of course, we can only hope that they will actually have more than one incoming line, actually receive the faxes (oops, did another printing error occur,) and all that, and gosh, it's only an extra step from emailing them to email-to-fax-for-a-fee to get the info to them. If you are okay with the government adding even more meaningless hoops to jump through, as long as they are small hoops, let's discuss options.

I have a great idea to even further "improve" things along the same line: Let's have all FOIA requests hand delivered by the driver of a horse and buggy, to a small, unmarked door in a wall. The driver must shove the requests under the door, with his whip, of course, which is hardly any inconvenience, since he's already there.

While we're at it, why don't we improve things just a tad more, by making sure that we have a thriving horse-and-carriage-and-buggy-whip industry, by requiring that any hand-and-whip-delivered FOIA request must also come from a carriage that has driven from California (the only allowable place where FOIA requests can be physically handed to carriage drivers, in the new improved method,) all the way to DC. Naturally, this will eventually lead to an economy of scale, with thousands of requests being given to each carriage rider before they set off, so I'm sure the cost will fall to somewhere near the level of a postage stamp, and, well, really, the cost of a stamp or a fax is only INFINITELY larger than the $0.00 cost of sending an email, so introducing new costs to the public that you are ostensibly serving, is fine, right?

Or is there no advantage whatsoever to the public for making the public jump through more arbitrary hoops than they already do? Do you see the (not even very thin) end of the wedge, yet, or do you still consider this to be a defensible action by a government that claims to be by the people, for the people?

Just no. A thousand times, no. Even a "one time thing" is a NO, because there are an unlimited number of "one time deals" that can be shown. If you're okay with a one time deal, are you okay with a brand new "One Time Thing" every 10 seconds? If not, you're just setting the goal posts to an acceptable level of crap, that your PAID FOR operating system is throwing in your face, while you are working/playing/browsing the web. Any level that is accepted will be pushed past, to an unacceptable level.

Zero is the ONLY acceptable level, preferably with millions of calls to M$ tech support every time it happens, to assign a cost to it... Or, let's go with the Kindle route... If M$ wants to advertise to me, they can pay me, in advance, for the privilege.

Randomly:

Off of the top of my head examples of movies to watch more than once:

Princess Bride

The Quest for the Holy Grail

Sixth Sense (the second viewing is great)

Star Wars: A New Hope

Invincible Obsessed Fighter (okay, I'll admit, that's a personal preference that is probably shared with no one else, ever)

Almost anything from Studio Ghibli, with a rare few "wow, what was that" exceptions.

Many different anime series.

ANY movie or TV series that I enjoyed enough to want to share it with my child, or with other people who haven't seen it, when looking for an at-home movie night. (Firefly, Babylon 5, ST:TOS, Seasons 1 and 2 of Land of the Lost, Breaking Bad.)

As my disclaimer: I do enjoy Netflix, and it has tremendously reduced my DVD viewing. However, "Watch it again" is a very valid category on Netflix, even if the only ones I watch multiple times are a small minority of the movies I have watched.

I understand that some people don't want to see any movie more than once, or read the same book more than once... I kind of feel that way about baseball. I've seen a few baseball games, and I cannot imagine actually wanting to see another, though it may happen as a social event, sometime.

That's pretty much what the TSA is doing. Give them a few more years, to get rid of the rest of the folks who didn't get the hint, when they insisted on either irradiating them, or groping their genitals, while throwing out their toothpaste.

Actually, they understood that, perfectly. Your good scammers need to be intelligent to actually convince people to part with their money, and they need to know that they are running a scam, not actually representing a governmental agency in another country.

After receiving 4 calls in one day from them, I started calling them back. They would ask for my name, and I would remind them that they called my number, and left messages insisting that I owed money to the IRS, so all they needed to do was look at my phone number, and tell me who I was and how much I owed. They would then hang up on me. After about a dozen attempts, they recognized my number, and once answered the phone with a "f*ck you" and immediately hung up. After the 20th time I called them back, in a row (yes, I was bored, and apparently there were 3 or 4 people answering calls on the number they were using at the time, so I started recognizing their voices,) I lied to them and told them that I had just called the IRS, who denied having anything to do with this, and who had directed me to the FBI, who would be calling them, shortly. In a rare moment of "fsck this" the scammer said "Yes sir, you are right, this is a scam. If you fell for it, we were going to get you to send us all of the money in your bank account." I was shocked by this, and also excited, because I was recording the call (I'm in Virginia, a 1 party consent state.) So I drew him out, and he explained to me that he wasn't worried about the law coming to get him, because "we have been doing this for years. They never catch us. They never going to catch us." He then asked me, politely, if I would please stop calling them. I told him to stop calling my number, if he didn't want to keep hearing from me, dozens of times for every call they made to me, and he agreed.

They did call me back the next day (darned scammers, not keeping a good Do Not Call List,) but, after that, it was over a month before they put me back into the regular rotation.

Yes, I still have the recording. I had plans to post it on youtube to shame the government into some kind of action, but, when I looked it up online, I found that this was so well known for so many years that it was clear that the scammer was essentially right... no one was coming for them.

This news article made me smile. I kind of hoped they got the "they never going to catch us" guy.

Soft targets are the first ones chosen. If you're building a botnet, are you going to go after the hardened VMS box behind a military firewall, or are you going to drag in 10,000 network-capable toasters with their default admin passwords and no firewall?

I'm not arguing that these devices shouldn't have more security, or less network access. I am saying that passing knee-jerk legislation that says that if your network capable device can be compromised, it has to be withdrawn from the market immediately, is absurd. Every single device on the planet that is capable of being networked would fail that test.

In the entire history of the internet, not a single (useful) device has been made that would fit this requirement. If you can make a device that performs useful functions on the net, but that cannot be hijacked while it is online, you will be a billionaire by this time next year. Good luck. In the meantime, legislation that requires every car to implement anti-gravity technology using only vacuum energy should be next on the list of recommendations, and just as likely to succeed.

Legislation that requires technology that hasn't been invented yet is not good legislation.