Something about seeing the phrases "pre-rooted" and "Google Wallet" in the same sentence scares me.
Really? I'm more worried about contradictions like this: "has ROM Manager installed, and absolutely no bloatware". Also, props to the CyanogenMod guys for including closed source adware.
Well that's easy: no version of Android is really open source.
Call me when the rest of the Open Handset Alliance releases source for their bits. Oh. Right. They don't. Qualcomm, Broadcom I'm looking at you and all of your infernal binary blobs. Is Android 4.0 open source? Kinda. I won't hold my breath for Google to release code for "older" ARM chips (v6 chips like the Qualcomm MSM7k series). Christ. Is Davlik still deliberately broken on OSX? Or maybe Google will ACCEPT SOME OF THE LONG STANDING FIXES for various ancient bugs in the core Android framework (which can't be fixed by developers without reimplementing the whole class... thanks for making such extensive use of private classes in your tab widget bits, Google).
Wrong. Most credit unions in the United States belong to the CO-OP Network. This means you can use pretty much any other credit union ATM as if it were one of yours. You can also walk into many credit union branches and make nearly full use of their banking services. Hell, even 7-11 is a member of the Co-Op network, and many of their ATMs allow you to make deposits... gratis.
When I left Bank of America years ago over their ridiculous fees, the manager told me to come back the next time I wanted the benefits of a larger bank. Well, she's still waiting.
With the CU I use, a domestic, outgoing wire transfer is free (if you qualify) or $20 otherwise. Chances are the recipient will have to fork over some cash too.
Cool. I just went through the process of importing a self-signed certificate. Annoying because you don't get any clue from the mail app what the problem was (nice touch, HP). More annoying because you can't save "inline" text files to disk from the browser. Comical because once you add the certificate, the first one in the list is inaccessible (it's hidden by the header). And just downright painful because it took about 45 seconds to actually import it after tapping "Done". It's kinda like they didn't even use it before releasing it.
Yup. I picked up a Touchpad during the fire sale too. I/just/ received it yesterday. First impression was "oh hey, it's got a nice gouge in it, it's probably a refurb." Second was "yup, this is beta quality software." And the third was "yup, it's really slow to respond." It's got a 1.2 gigahertz dual core Snapdragon. It should be more than fast enough for tablet use.
Yes, webOS 3.0.2 is beta quality software at best. It's pretty, but it's got lots of rough edges. For instance, DHCP is disabled by default. On first boot I connected to my WiFi access point, and then was prompted to enter in IP address and gateway manually. Uh? Really HP? Really? Once I got past that I started playing with the apps. Wouldn't you know it, built-in apps and apps you download are listed in separate areas. The "App Catalog" is listed with the downloads, not the built-in apps. Pivot looked really neat. I flipped through it quickly, downloaded a few apps. Installed a few updates. Now that initial (July) issue of Pivot has disappeared and was replaced by a "Coming Soon" notice. Nice. I started playing with the instant messaging app. Well, tried to. For each IM I send the tablet vibrates ones and makes two distinct noises. Upon receipt of an IM it does the same thing. If the IM app is in the background, same thing... when you bring the app into the foreground, it goes through the same rigamarole all over again. And, of course, on occasion the foreground app just stops responding, but the system otherwise seems to respond to touch input.
Oh... and the web browser. Why do they have to make it so difficult to scroll vertically? For pages that don't expand beyond the screen's horizontal borders it would be real nice to... you know... disable horizontal scrolling. There's a native YouTube app, but the browser will still open youtube videos using flash. C'mon guys, even Android got that one right (it prompts the user which app to use).
If Apotheker hadn't been so keen on starving Hurd's baby, HP could have turned out a really nice tablet. For $150, the TouchPad IS a really nice tablet (with buttons that feel cheaper than my $150 no-contract Android phone, however). For $500 it's a piece of crap. What I'd like to see HP do is this: resume production of the Touchpad and sell it at cost for the time being; put some effort into optimizing webOS and fixing some of the niggling problems.
Keep in mind how much overhead is associated in dealing with insurance companies. Each company typically has their own forms and procedures... and let's not forget the push from ICD9 to ICD11 that means lots of new training and other such nonsense. When you're dealing with insurance companies, the prices you get charged are essentially set in stone. There are iron clad, and generally fairly secretive, contracts between service providers and the insurance companies.
I went through the initial motions to find a GP at UCSF a few years back. Turns out there's a waiting list of at least three months. I decided to go the no-insurance "concierge" doctor route. If you go into a typical doctor's office (at least in my experience) you'll often see a lot of admin staff. Here, it's an office full of doctors with one office manager type. No need to employ a whole host of support staff to put up with ridiculous insurance requirements. As an added bonus I can typically make same-day appointments, or same-week if I'm looking for a specific doctor at the practice. Because there's no contractual obligation to charge a fixed price, yeah, some people will end up getting charged less.
In a similar vein, the pharmacist I patronize was showing me some receipts (names redacted, of course). One example was a month's supply of/something/ for over $900. The insurance company paid him cost + $3. Three whole dollars to cover all of his dealings with the insurance company. And, yeah, dealing with them is a pain. I've watched him call and haggle with the insurance company because they switched "fulfillment providers" for prescription coverage and wanted him to upgrade a bunch of proprietary software in order to authorize some scripts. Other times it's just a matter of the insurance company cocking up and demanded that the customer be charged an excessive amount. But, yeah, 0.3% "profit" for having to order and warehouse the drugs, deal with collecting payment from the customers, then collecting payment from the insurance companies, dealing with the occasional retroactive claim denial, deal with the not so occasional insurance company screwups, debuging their software(!!!)... yeah that's a great way to get rich. Most of the time if he's on the phone, it's because he's dealing with some insurance company bullshit. OTOH if I go in there and pay cash for something, the buck stops here. I fork over the cash, I get the drugs. No fuss, no muss, *far* less overhead. When I've had to pick up (expensive) meds for a friend who had no insurance, you bet your sweet bippy he was willing to negotiate with me (and I ended up with stuff below cost in some cases).
In addition to the hassle that the company would have likely had to go through to get a non-necessary device approved, I can only imagine the extra hoops a durable equipment company would have to go through to upon return of the pump. So yeah, when you're bound by contracts with companies that make you jump through lots of tedious hoops at minimal cost I can only imagine that you'd be less likely or able to offer any sort of discount.
'Cept Amazon has a business presence in California (and a number of other states). They also collect sales taxes for a number of other non-Washington states.
That sounds about right. Under Carol's reign they got rid of Delicious, made some awful UI tweaks to Flickr, ran some obnoxious ad campaigns. As a user, I didn't see any improvements. Quite frankly I'm at a loss to come up with anything positive Carol did... and that's just from a user's point of view.
Of course, the board got what the board wanted: someone who wasn't as stubborn as Yang. It's kinda like HP. They've found a string of incompetent CEOs to focus on dismantling the company. But Yahoo! was Yang's baby and he didn't want to see its portfolio handed over to Microsoft for slaughter. It's a shame, really, as the whole MSFT buyout would have been good only in terms of short-term stock value.
Of course, being downgraded by the ratings agency that famously whiffed on highly questionable real estate bonds might be considered a badge of honor in some circles.
That agency. Too bad they've got the entire financial industry by the balls, or their words might carry less weight.
Given the events of last night and how BART has historically been run, I suspect that much of BART's motivation was to make the protestors look as bad as possible. Towards the end of the evening, while BART was tweeting that all stations were open, they were actually keeping the stations closed. There were lots of commuters angry and frustrated that they had been walking back and forth between two stations trying to catch a train... but nobody seemed to bat an eye at the fact that BART was the one giving them this misinformation. Come to think of it, BART PD was directing folks to closed stations for most of the evening.
Among other things, their chief PR flunkie, Linton Johnson publicly called for violence against station agents and train operators during contract negotiations. Johnson was also the one who came up with the idea of shutting off cell phone service in the first place. What can you really expect from a transit agency that lets their moron PR flunkie dictate policy like it's his own little fiefdom?
You'd be surprised. Most of the people trying to get home had no idea what was going on. Embarcadero Station is the northernmost San Francisco station in the BART line. It's also the most heavily used, and in the heart of downtown SF. Nobody freaking knew. Civic Center station is near Union Square, the heart of tourist country. Most of the tourists didn't know what was going on either.
Despite comments from the peanut gallery on sfgate.com indicating otherwise, my experience was that the people who knew what was going on were the ones that had taken to the streets. People were, and still are, angry over the seemingly trigger happy attitude of BART PD. I reiterated the timeline as objectively as possible (see grandparent) for a few people including a couple of Canadian tourists. The tourists' very first reaction was "couldn't they just have arrested the [drunk] guy instead of shooting him?"
What was interesting to me was that there didn't appear to be a lot of outside agitators. In Oakland, during the unrest surrounding the Oscar Grant trial, much, if not all, of the looting and vandalism was perpetrated by people coming in from outside of Oakland to raise hell. Hell, in Brixton, and likely a number of other towns where the recent rioting took place, many of the instigators drove in for the purpose of raising hell. Not only did San Francisco not burn, but many of the people I talked to were either tourists or people who had lived and/or worked in the city for decades.
Grr. I accidentally posted this as an AC. Here's your context:
Two years ago BART PD shot and killed an unarmed, handcuffed man on the platform[1] of the West Oakland BART Station. White cop, black detainee. It California, if not the rest of the US, it's extremely rare for on-duty police officers to be charged with felonies surrounding shooting deaths. The police officer was tried, and convicted of involuntary manslaughter with a "gun enhancement". The judge threw out the "gun enhancement" and sentenced the police officer to the minimum amount of jail time required by law.
Two months ago BART PD shot and killed a man on the platform of Civic Center BART Station[2]. This time the deceased was a white man. BART PD alleged that he was drunk, aggressive, had a knife, and had already thrown a bottle at one of the police officers. BART has released security video of the situation which, unfortunately, doesn't seem to clarify much[3]. Witnesses at the scene claim that the man was not acting aggressively[3,4], and that the man's actions did not warrant the use of lethal force. There is, apparently, some dispute as to whether the man had a knife in the first place.
Last week, there were rumours swirling around about protests scheduled for Thursday regarding this latest shooting. In response, BART preemptively shut down their cell phone repeaters in the San Francisco portion of the subway[5]. This raised the ire of Anonymous[6], who obtained and subsequently released user information (names, addresses, passwords, telephone numbers) from BART's myBART.org site[7,8].
That's about as succinct as I can make the current tensions surrounding BART PD.
Meanwhile on the streets of San Francisco:
In January, SFPD shot an aggressive, knife wielding, wheelchair equipped man in the leg[9]. He was shot with a beanbag gun and subsequently dropped his knife. Allegedly the act of dropping his knife was considered further aggression, so SFPD shot him with a gun. He survived and is now suing the city[10].
In July, SFPD shot a man running away from SF MUNI fare inspectors. Allegedly he shot at SFPD, and police officers returned fire[11]. He died. People protested[12]. The latest twist is that the deceased in this case accidentally inflicted the lethal wound upon himself[13].
So, yes, there's a lot of tension in the BART system and in San Francisco right about now.
Add to the mix that there's a general sense of BART dragging their feet in releasing footage and being less than transparent and, yeah, people get more pissed. Throw in a side of pimping a child and allegedly murdering a pregnant woman, and yeah, some people feel very strongly that the latest SFPD shooting was justified. And, yeah, there's there's a lot of tension both between the public and the police as well as within the general community at large.
Supposedly the Photon 4G comes with an unlocked bootloader, and I suppose it's well known that Motorola already promised that their future phones would be unlocked. So, yeah. It'll be interesting to wait and see.
I was going to mention something along the lines of "well MY ISP sent me an e-mail referring me to an EFF article about privacy," and then I read your post (who reads TFA anymore?). Yeah, Sonic's pretty damn not-evil (for now?) and their support is about the best of any company in any industry I've had to deal with. I don't even bother looking at the call wait because the longest I've ever been on hold has been about 10 minutes. Not that I've been in a position to call them terribly often.
BTW you don't need a shell account to prevent hijackings because you get free Cisco VPN access with Sonic too. And you don't need to ask for it either.
Crap. Am I gushing? I guess I'm just that glad I don't have to deal with either AT&T or Comcast on any level for phone service or internet access. I do miss two things from AT&T though: 311 access and per-call outgoing caller ID blocking (*67/*82).
I think you forgot the quotes around "security". As long as they're decrypting stuff voluntarily for various governments, there's nothing secure about it.
Actually, you'd probably be better off complaining to the elected members of the BART Board of Directors. I don't know who Molly Burke is, but SF's three BART directors are: Lynette Sweet, James Fang, and Tom Radulovich. Of the three, the first two are jokes better left ignored. Sweet is trying to use BART as a stepping stone to higher public office. Fang is, what? The only republican left in San Francisco? He's the guy who sees BART as a way to bring pork to SF. That leaves us with Radulovich, whose district actually encompasses Civic Center station. He's also the only director to have the balls to call out BART for making atrocious decisions, and the only one with some sort of interest in transit (beyond BART as a political platform). You wanna write to someone and get some sympathy, write to him. You wanna write to someone who will pander to whatever they think the constituents wanna hear, write to the latter.
And that's the problem with BART. This wasn't one rogue employee making a bad call, this is a structural problem.
In any case time for some shameless self-promotion: Let's take this thing as seriously or not as is deserved. Cheap shots aimed at BART available in thongs, onesies, iPad cases, and, of course, t-shirts and hoodies. Someone (aside from the EFF) had to go there.
Slashdot Mirror
Something about seeing the phrases "pre-rooted" and "Google Wallet" in the same sentence scares me.
Really? I'm more worried about contradictions like this: "has ROM Manager installed, and absolutely no bloatware". Also, props to the CyanogenMod guys for including closed source adware.
Well that's easy: no version of Android is really open source.
Call me when the rest of the Open Handset Alliance releases source for their bits. Oh. Right. They don't. Qualcomm, Broadcom I'm looking at you and all of your infernal binary blobs. Is Android 4.0 open source? Kinda. I won't hold my breath for Google to release code for "older" ARM chips (v6 chips like the Qualcomm MSM7k series). Christ. Is Davlik still deliberately broken on OSX? Or maybe Google will ACCEPT SOME OF THE LONG STANDING FIXES for various ancient bugs in the core Android framework (which can't be fixed by developers without reimplementing the whole class... thanks for making such extensive use of private classes in your tab widget bits, Google).
Wrong. Most credit unions in the United States belong to the CO-OP Network. This means you can use pretty much any other credit union ATM as if it were one of yours. You can also walk into many credit union branches and make nearly full use of their banking services. Hell, even 7-11 is a member of the Co-Op network, and many of their ATMs allow you to make deposits... gratis.
When I left Bank of America years ago over their ridiculous fees, the manager told me to come back the next time I wanted the benefits of a larger bank. Well, she's still waiting.
With the CU I use, a domestic, outgoing wire transfer is free (if you qualify) or $20 otherwise. Chances are the recipient will have to fork over some cash too.
Cool. I just went through the process of importing a self-signed certificate. Annoying because you don't get any clue from the mail app what the problem was (nice touch, HP). More annoying because you can't save "inline" text files to disk from the browser. Comical because once you add the certificate, the first one in the list is inaccessible (it's hidden by the header). And just downright painful because it took about 45 seconds to actually import it after tapping "Done". It's kinda like they didn't even use it before releasing it.
Yup. I picked up a Touchpad during the fire sale too. I /just/ received it yesterday. First impression was "oh hey, it's got a nice gouge in it, it's probably a refurb." Second was "yup, this is beta quality software." And the third was "yup, it's really slow to respond." It's got a 1.2 gigahertz dual core Snapdragon. It should be more than fast enough for tablet use.
Yes, webOS 3.0.2 is beta quality software at best. It's pretty, but it's got lots of rough edges. For instance, DHCP is disabled by default. On first boot I connected to my WiFi access point, and then was prompted to enter in IP address and gateway manually. Uh? Really HP? Really? Once I got past that I started playing with the apps. Wouldn't you know it, built-in apps and apps you download are listed in separate areas. The "App Catalog" is listed with the downloads, not the built-in apps. Pivot looked really neat. I flipped through it quickly, downloaded a few apps. Installed a few updates. Now that initial (July) issue of Pivot has disappeared and was replaced by a "Coming Soon" notice. Nice. I started playing with the instant messaging app. Well, tried to. For each IM I send the tablet vibrates ones and makes two distinct noises. Upon receipt of an IM it does the same thing. If the IM app is in the background, same thing... when you bring the app into the foreground, it goes through the same rigamarole all over again. And, of course, on occasion the foreground app just stops responding, but the system otherwise seems to respond to touch input.
Oh... and the web browser. Why do they have to make it so difficult to scroll vertically? For pages that don't expand beyond the screen's horizontal borders it would be real nice to... you know... disable horizontal scrolling. There's a native YouTube app, but the browser will still open youtube videos using flash. C'mon guys, even Android got that one right (it prompts the user which app to use).
If Apotheker hadn't been so keen on starving Hurd's baby, HP could have turned out a really nice tablet. For $150, the TouchPad IS a really nice tablet (with buttons that feel cheaper than my $150 no-contract Android phone, however). For $500 it's a piece of crap. What I'd like to see HP do is this: resume production of the Touchpad and sell it at cost for the time being; put some effort into optimizing webOS and fixing some of the niggling problems.
Keep in mind how much overhead is associated in dealing with insurance companies. Each company typically has their own forms and procedures... and let's not forget the push from ICD9 to ICD11 that means lots of new training and other such nonsense. When you're dealing with insurance companies, the prices you get charged are essentially set in stone. There are iron clad, and generally fairly secretive, contracts between service providers and the insurance companies.
I went through the initial motions to find a GP at UCSF a few years back. Turns out there's a waiting list of at least three months. I decided to go the no-insurance "concierge" doctor route. If you go into a typical doctor's office (at least in my experience) you'll often see a lot of admin staff. Here, it's an office full of doctors with one office manager type. No need to employ a whole host of support staff to put up with ridiculous insurance requirements. As an added bonus I can typically make same-day appointments, or same-week if I'm looking for a specific doctor at the practice. Because there's no contractual obligation to charge a fixed price, yeah, some people will end up getting charged less.
In a similar vein, the pharmacist I patronize was showing me some receipts (names redacted, of course). One example was a month's supply of /something/ for over $900. The insurance company paid him cost + $3. Three whole dollars to cover all of his dealings with the insurance company. And, yeah, dealing with them is a pain. I've watched him call and haggle with the insurance company because they switched "fulfillment providers" for prescription coverage and wanted him to upgrade a bunch of proprietary software in order to authorize some scripts. Other times it's just a matter of the insurance company cocking up and demanded that the customer be charged an excessive amount. But, yeah, 0.3% "profit" for having to order and warehouse the drugs, deal with collecting payment from the customers, then collecting payment from the insurance companies, dealing with the occasional retroactive claim denial, deal with the not so occasional insurance company screwups, debuging their software(!!!)... yeah that's a great way to get rich. Most of the time if he's on the phone, it's because he's dealing with some insurance company bullshit. OTOH if I go in there and pay cash for something, the buck stops here. I fork over the cash, I get the drugs. No fuss, no muss, *far* less overhead. When I've had to pick up (expensive) meds for a friend who had no insurance, you bet your sweet bippy he was willing to negotiate with me (and I ended up with stuff below cost in some cases).
In addition to the hassle that the company would have likely had to go through to get a non-necessary device approved, I can only imagine the extra hoops a durable equipment company would have to go through to upon return of the pump. So yeah, when you're bound by contracts with companies that make you jump through lots of tedious hoops at minimal cost I can only imagine that you'd be less likely or able to offer any sort of discount.
'Cept Amazon has a business presence in California (and a number of other states). They also collect sales taxes for a number of other non-Washington states.
There are plenty of California based engineers working for Amazon.
That sounds about right. Under Carol's reign they got rid of Delicious, made some awful UI tweaks to Flickr, ran some obnoxious ad campaigns. As a user, I didn't see any improvements. Quite frankly I'm at a loss to come up with anything positive Carol did... and that's just from a user's point of view.
Of course, the board got what the board wanted: someone who wasn't as stubborn as Yang. It's kinda like HP. They've found a string of incompetent CEOs to focus on dismantling the company. But Yahoo! was Yang's baby and he didn't want to see its portfolio handed over to Microsoft for slaughter. It's a shame, really, as the whole MSFT buyout would have been good only in terms of short-term stock value.
Of course, being downgraded by the ratings agency that famously whiffed on highly questionable real estate bonds might be considered a badge of honor in some circles.
That agency. Too bad they've got the entire financial industry by the balls, or their words might carry less weight.
So how much weight does S&P really carry if multiple outlets are shrugging off the downgrade?
Given the events of last night and how BART has historically been run, I suspect that much of BART's motivation was to make the protestors look as bad as possible. Towards the end of the evening, while BART was tweeting that all stations were open, they were actually keeping the stations closed. There were lots of commuters angry and frustrated that they had been walking back and forth between two stations trying to catch a train... but nobody seemed to bat an eye at the fact that BART was the one giving them this misinformation. Come to think of it, BART PD was directing folks to closed stations for most of the evening.
Among other things, their chief PR flunkie, Linton Johnson publicly called for violence against station agents and train operators during contract negotiations. Johnson was also the one who came up with the idea of shutting off cell phone service in the first place. What can you really expect from a transit agency that lets their moron PR flunkie dictate policy like it's his own little fiefdom?
BART doesn't run buses (anymore), trams (ever), or heavy rail like Amtrak (ever).
You'd be surprised. Most of the people trying to get home had no idea what was going on. Embarcadero Station is the northernmost San Francisco station in the BART line. It's also the most heavily used, and in the heart of downtown SF. Nobody freaking knew. Civic Center station is near Union Square, the heart of tourist country. Most of the tourists didn't know what was going on either.
Despite comments from the peanut gallery on sfgate.com indicating otherwise, my experience was that the people who knew what was going on were the ones that had taken to the streets. People were, and still are, angry over the seemingly trigger happy attitude of BART PD. I reiterated the timeline as objectively as possible (see grandparent) for a few people including a couple of Canadian tourists. The tourists' very first reaction was "couldn't they just have arrested the [drunk] guy instead of shooting him?"
What was interesting to me was that there didn't appear to be a lot of outside agitators. In Oakland, during the unrest surrounding the Oscar Grant trial, much, if not all, of the looting and vandalism was perpetrated by people coming in from outside of Oakland to raise hell. Hell, in Brixton, and likely a number of other towns where the recent rioting took place, many of the instigators drove in for the purpose of raising hell. Not only did San Francisco not burn, but many of the people I talked to were either tourists or people who had lived and/or worked in the city for decades.
C'est la vie.
Grr. I accidentally posted this as an AC. Here's your context:
Two years ago BART PD shot and killed an unarmed, handcuffed man on the platform[1] of the West Oakland BART Station. White cop, black detainee. It California, if not the rest of the US, it's extremely rare for on-duty police officers to be charged with felonies surrounding shooting deaths. The police officer was tried, and convicted of involuntary manslaughter with a "gun enhancement". The judge threw out the "gun enhancement" and sentenced the police officer to the minimum amount of jail time required by law.
Two months ago BART PD shot and killed a man on the platform of Civic Center BART Station[2]. This time the deceased was a white man. BART PD alleged that he was drunk, aggressive, had a knife, and had already thrown a bottle at one of the police officers. BART has released security video of the situation which, unfortunately, doesn't seem to clarify much[3]. Witnesses at the scene claim that the man was not acting aggressively[3,4], and that the man's actions did not warrant the use of lethal force. There is, apparently, some dispute as to whether the man had a knife in the first place.
Last week, there were rumours swirling around about protests scheduled for Thursday regarding this latest shooting. In response, BART preemptively shut down their cell phone repeaters in the San Francisco portion of the subway[5]. This raised the ire of Anonymous[6], who obtained and subsequently released user information (names, addresses, passwords, telephone numbers) from BART's myBART.org site[7,8].
That's about as succinct as I can make the current tensions surrounding BART PD.
Meanwhile on the streets of San Francisco:
In January, SFPD shot an aggressive, knife wielding, wheelchair equipped man in the leg[9]. He was shot with a beanbag gun and subsequently dropped his knife. Allegedly the act of dropping his knife was considered further aggression, so SFPD shot him with a gun. He survived and is now suing the city[10].
In July, SFPD shot a man running away from SF MUNI fare inspectors. Allegedly he shot at SFPD, and police officers returned fire[11]. He died. People protested[12]. The latest twist is that the deceased in this case accidentally inflicted the lethal wound upon himself[13].
So, yes, there's a lot of tension in the BART system and in San Francisco right about now.
Add to the mix that there's a general sense of BART dragging their feet in releasing footage and being less than transparent and, yeah, people get more pissed. Throw in a side of pimping a child and allegedly murdering a pregnant woman, and yeah, some people feel very strongly that the latest SFPD shooting was justified. And, yeah, there's there's a lot of tension both between the public and the police as well as within the general community at large.
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BART_Police_shooting_of_Oscar_Grant
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BART_Police#Passengers_killed_by_the_department
3: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/07/charles_hill_bart_shooting_vid.php
4: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/07/charles_hill_identified_as_man.php
5: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/08/13/national/a110904D55.DTL
6: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/14/BAH71KN6CK.DTL
7: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011
Two words: installation error.
There already are Motorola Android phones on Sprint. The Photon 4G, XPRT, Titanium, and i1 on Sprint proper. The Triumph on Virgin Mobile.
--
The revolution will be mocked from the sidelines.
Supposedly the Photon 4G comes with an unlocked bootloader, and I suppose it's well known that Motorola already promised that their future phones would be unlocked. So, yeah. It'll be interesting to wait and see.
I searched for "LATA", but I don't know how up to date this is:
http://sonic.net/sales/maps/
I was going to mention something along the lines of "well MY ISP sent me an e-mail referring me to an EFF article about privacy," and then I read your post (who reads TFA anymore?). Yeah, Sonic's pretty damn not-evil (for now?) and their support is about the best of any company in any industry I've had to deal with. I don't even bother looking at the call wait because the longest I've ever been on hold has been about 10 minutes. Not that I've been in a position to call them terribly often.
BTW you don't need a shell account to prevent hijackings because you get free Cisco VPN access with Sonic too. And you don't need to ask for it either.
Crap. Am I gushing? I guess I'm just that glad I don't have to deal with either AT&T or Comcast on any level for phone service or internet access. I do miss two things from AT&T though: 311 access and per-call outgoing caller ID blocking (*67/*82).
I think you forgot the quotes around "security". As long as they're decrypting stuff voluntarily for various governments, there's nothing secure about it.
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the ass clowns"
Many people trying to get home meanwhile the ass clowns...being ass clowns...
What would Mubarak do?
Yeah. That's the thing about being an ass clown...
Actually, you'd probably be better off complaining to the elected members of the BART Board of Directors. I don't know who Molly Burke is, but SF's three BART directors are: Lynette Sweet, James Fang, and Tom Radulovich. Of the three, the first two are jokes better left ignored. Sweet is trying to use BART as a stepping stone to higher public office. Fang is, what? The only republican left in San Francisco? He's the guy who sees BART as a way to bring pork to SF. That leaves us with Radulovich, whose district actually encompasses Civic Center station. He's also the only director to have the balls to call out BART for making atrocious decisions, and the only one with some sort of interest in transit (beyond BART as a political platform). You wanna write to someone and get some sympathy, write to him. You wanna write to someone who will pander to whatever they think the constituents wanna hear, write to the latter.
And that's the problem with BART. This wasn't one rogue employee making a bad call, this is a structural problem.
In any case time for some shameless self-promotion: Let's take this thing as seriously or not as is deserved. Cheap shots aimed at BART available in thongs, onesies, iPad cases, and, of course, t-shirts and hoodies. Someone (aside from the EFF) had to go there.
Woosh.
Good thing you bought a Google Experience phone. I hear they're very open. :)