I've had a similar bad experience with Comcast contractors. They came to my house in an unmarked pickup truck, wearing baggy jeans and Roc-A-Wear shirts (unprofessional, IMHO). They they proceeded to start drilling a hole through my living room floor to run the cable without checking what their drill was going to hit. I stopped them before they drilled a hole right into my heating duct.

When I tried to get cable at my new place, the cheapest option was $63 a month. I told them to screw off and I've lived without cable since. Honestly I don't miss it. Luckily I can borrow wireless from my neighbors (with their permission!) so I don't have to deal with Comcast at all.

Firstly, If you have representatives, its not a democracy, its a republic.

Representatives in a republic do face the difficult choice of doing what they think is right versus doing what the majority of their constituents want. It's a fine line to walk between doing what is right and doing what is popular.

However, simply voting based on your perception of the majority of your constituents desires is essentially reverting back to mob rule. Sometimes a representative must vote for what they personally think is right, even if it goes against the will of the majority. To blindly state "do what the majority wants or resign" is a bit simplistic, IMHO.

If all representatives did was parrot their majority of their constituents, then the US would never have passed women's suffrage, civil rights legislation, etc.

The check on this is that, ultimately, its up to the people to decide whether to re-elect a representative that votes contrary to the desires of the majority.

I'll second this. I use Bank of America and I can pay anyone that has a mailing address. I set up all my payments to go out automatically via their online banking system. The ones that have electronic delivery go that way, otherwise they print a check and mail it on my behalf. They also accept e-bills from many companies so I don't have to receive paper bills in the mail.

It's super convenient, and free. I can't believe people still spend time every month "paying the bills".

I'll second that; I'm also a T-Mobile customer (for 7 years now) and their customer service is excellent. I sometimes get slightly irritated on the phone with them because they are SO overly nice and friendly. It's almost sickeningly sweet.

Problem is that you need to inform the user of locked records and give them options on how to handle them, requiring you to inject some awareness and handling of locking into your application layer.

They'd better understand "Get off my lawn!" or there's going to be trouble.

I could be remembering incorrectly, but I'm pretty sure the baby Praun said "Fuel goes here" at one point.

>>It's still too large to fit comfortably in a not too big shoulder bag.

If it isn't big enough to hold a MacBook Air, you're don't have a "shoulder bag". You have a purse.

Ticket scalping isn't exactly a proper analogy either. There's a limited number of tickets to an event, so someone snapping them all up and then selling them for a profit means that some people aren't going to be able to go. The scarcity of tickets is the issue.

There's an unlimited amount of domain names, however, so there's no scarcity in that sense. It really is more like real estate...there's plenty to go around, but if you can snap up the "best" properties early, then you stand to make a profit. If someone doesn't want to pay, there's always other real estate to purchase, although it might not be as nice.

It's not even as serious as real estate squatting, since, as an earlier poster pointed out, a good domain name is becoming less and less important since most people are just going to type search terms into google and find your site that way. I rarely remember URLs anymore, but instead remember the search terms that I used to find a particular page.

The problem with Active Desktop wasn't the Javascript language, it was the mixing of the OS and the Browser and the security problems that came from that mixing. Javascript had nothing to do with it; in fact, many of the malware related to ActiveDesktop was written with VBScript, not JS.

The article is talking about using Javascript as a scripting language to help build GTK applications. This is no different than using any other scripting language, such as Perl or Python. Just because it's Javascript doesn't mean it has anything to do with a web browser or the DOM.