That's called NAT-PT and I've just had a huge flamewar about it on the last IPv6 article. Basically, all the v6 geeks here hate NAT and think nobody should be allowed to have such a thing. Hence, the RFC has been deprecated and nobody is even trying to implement it.
Bloody hell. I'm an altruist, too, but that doesn't mean I don't want the option of flexibility when working with devices where the networking stack is a fixed entity.
Your comment reminds me of discussions I've seen and had, way back in the infancy of modern NAT: "You should have one IP address for every host, and if you can't, then you should use a proxy server for every protocol. NAT is a horrible idea that solves nothing, and it breaks more stuff than it fixes. Only a moron would use it."
And we all know who won that discussion: NAT is everywhere, because it's both simpler and does almost every job just fine, and I haven't used a proxy since I decommissioned the caching Squid I had about a decade ago, after I got off of dialup.
(I believe, deep in my soul, that H.323 was written by anti-NAT protagonists.)
But is it a certainty that ISPs won't charge for using them?
Remember, this is a business that exists to generate profit. There's no harm in that, of course... But they also thrive on artificial scarcity whenever it can be created, in order to boost profits.
To a soulless near-monopoly for-profit entity, such games are like printing money.
And besides, I don't necessarily want people gathering data on the number of machines, and their habits, that I have on my own personal/64. Such information does seem harmless enough to me at this time, but then perhaps I'm just not clever enough to abuse this data.
That's why we have DNS, remember? The common end user shouldn't have deal with IP addresses.
We've been pretty well reliant on DNS for ages, anyway, most prominently to handle HTTP/1.1 virtual hosts.
There is a certain level of retardation with other stuff. For example, I can't count the number of devices that I've installed that support NTP for automatic timekeeping but only allow the server to be specified by numeric IP address. Most folks never experience even this level of basic network configuration, however. And if they do, it will almost certainly be on their local LAN (which will still be talking IPV4 just fine anyway, if for no reason than to support these legacy apps.)
Yes, I've communicated with Google regarding map errors. The mechanism for doing so was obvious at the time, though I don't recall it now.
Generally speaking, they responded in a timely fashion, and applied my suggested changes in the next update.
I did basically the same as you: A basic reasoning as to how their maps/directions were wrong, and appropriate links to their own satellite/streetview imagery along with an explanation to illustrate how it really works.
From spelling errors to poorly-formed intersection routing, they've done OK. Not great, mind you, and in one case near my own house they've taken my own advice quite backwards, but Google has been far more responsive than a black hole.
I've not tried to correct other mapping companies, since regular updates to my Garmin Nuvi seem to forestall my complaints before they're worth complaining about, and between them and Google they are only two maps that I use frequently.
While all three are operator error, it is obvious (as you state) that it is a conspiracy to cause you emotional distress, feed Big Oil, and try to kill you. Oh, and to keep you from understanding the device that you intend to rely on, Really - it's obvious. [/sarcasm]
You seem to think these options shouldn't exist, but I, myself, use them quite a bit: Even once, a year ago, to get from the middle of Detroit to my house in NW Ohio, while avoiding highways and using the shortest (not fastest) route, just to see the decrepit remains of that city and do something other than the four-lane shuffle. It was a lovely drive, and far less tiring (though far more time-consuming) than the highway, and we really enjoyed it.
(And yes, it was dark. And yes, it was in a flashy car with out-of-state plates. And yes, my wife was with me. And yes, we were hungry, but we learned that the urban Detroit we drove through is nothing but local pizza parlors and liquor stores -- conspicuously absent were both national-brand fast food, chicken, or even a proper grocer, and we simply weren't in the mood for the available local cuisine. Scared? Feh. Grow a pair, you pansy -- even in the bad parts of town, people are still just people.)
I live in Ohio. It's not Oregon, and it sure isn't Alaska, but it's still easy for me to tell when I'm in an area that has received heavy snow (it's built up all around a well-plowed road), and thus similarly easy to tell when I encounter a snow-covered road that hasn't been so well maintained (it's simply looks too smooth and white to be passable).
FWIW. And sorry about your luck, James and family.
Android devices (as well as IOS devices, including the lowly first-gen iPod Touch) can also triangulate position based on available Wifi and/or cellular signals, as long as it has a data connection.
In my experience, this completely non-GPS location data is eerily accurate.
A few years ago when I first got my hands on an iPod Touch, I took it for a walk in the country. Ever-curious about mapping and Wifi, I pulled it out of my pocket with a couple of farmhouses in sight, found an open access point, and connected to it.
I then instructed the thing to find my location. It did. It wasn't spot-on, but it was within several hundred feet, which is quite good enough for most practical applications.
Some years later, I pulled my Droid out inside of a downtown Chicago highrise hotel, and it pegged my location within about 10 yards after just a few seconds, completely without a GPS fix. I moved to a different area of the building, and it did the same. It doesn't seem to update very quickly in this mode -- about every 15 seconds -- but that's probably more to limit database loading than anything else.
Later that same day, I walked downtown Chicago to see the stuff I wanted to see before I had to head home. I used Google Maps to get me from A to B. The GPS radio was off during most of this, and the phone stayed mostly in my pocket, but when I did refer back to it it would consistently get my location with definitely-useful accuracy in seconds...and, again, without a GPS fix (I wasn't about to go wasting battery power waiting for THAT, even if aGPS can make it somewhat faster, since my non-GPS location was perfectly sufficient).
It ain't just plain-old GPS on modern handsets, and simple aGPS is not the end of the rainbow.
I generally carry Google Maps with me in my pocket on my Droid, and I enjoy the occasionally challenging road (even in my low-slung 325i, damage be damned) -- driving for fun is fun, for me.
But anyway, it's not a matter of the directions being wrong (even if they are), but of people being idiots. I've had bad GPS directions before, and I simply ignore them and keep moving in the direction of sanity and let the GPS figure out my intentions.
The conversation goes something like this when it happens to me:
GPS: Turn right toward Rocky Creek Bridge. Me: You stupid bitch! There's no bridge here! *keeps driving down main road* GPS: Recalculating. GPS: *finally reveals sane route* Me: About time.
Usually, this just means that my calculated ETA gets pushed back by a few minutes, which isn't a problem. Worst case is that she (the GPS lady) is particularly insistent on giving bad advice, and then I just mute her before use her own maps to get where I'm going without her direct guidance.
Meanwhile: If someone with zero wits tries to cross a non-existent bridge over Rocky Creek just because their GPS told them to, then I guess that's just Darwin at work.
My Garmin Nuvi is switched on, right now, attached to the windshield of my BMW (which is just sitting in the driveway).
And when I drive it again, tomorrow or the next day, it will still be on.
Why? Sometimes it's useful. And in those times of potential usefulness, it takes *forever* for it to boot up and become usable if it has been switched off. It's simply a practical matter (and yes, I'm perfectly capable of wiring the thing turn on and off with the ignition, or with a delay, or whatever -- I just think it's better how it is).
Of course, it's configured to automatically adjust itself to the dimmest of dims, with the darkest of dark backgrounds, whenever the sun sets (wherever I am). It is consequently never blinding, and I also adjust the angle of the display to minimize nighttime brightness. And it's mounted up high, nearly behind the mirror, so as to neither not block important sight lines nor substantially ruin my view of the road when I do glance at the GPS.
But, yeah: I see these folks driving around with a white background on a GPS set to MAXIMUM DAYLIGHT-READABLE TORCH MODE all the time, too. Usually, these are the same clowns that keep their dashboard lighting turned all the way up at night (ostensibly so they can see the displays, but without regard for seeing their dark surroundings).
As puzzling as it all is, I don't let it bother me -- instead, I see it as a feature: A gleaming indication of an idiotic and inattentive driver, beckoning me to avoid them, like a lighthouse signalling the presence of a dangerous outcropping -- a message of imminent destruction.
Observe your surroundings -- don't expect your surroundings to observe you.
This is why I carry multiple portable GPS units (one Garmin with built-in maps that may not be current, one Droid with online maps that more likely are current), a laptop with GPS (again with built-in maps), a 12v battery pack/jump start kit with a cig plug outlet (redundancy), a knife (everyone should carry one), and some 3M electrical tape (insulate those splices!) with me whenever I travel by car: As long as the car lives, I don't get lost. And even after the car dies, it'll be a long, long time before I lose navigation for any unreasonable length of time.
(Caveat: I don't generally travel too far off of the beaten path, and most of Ohio is far too dense (even the "rural" areas) to even begin to get dangerously lost in.)
Meanwhile, as long as we're in the context of hotels and actual civilization: There's always the old-fashioned method, wherein you pop into a nearby convenience store or gas station and ask for directions and/or buy a paper map.
Before GPS I used this latter method, generally with great success. I haven't needed to use it for a few years, but I'm sure it still works as well as it used to.
Whyt he fuck does the new system, in your "Comments" section for your account, take you to the parent conversation when you click on it instead of your fucking post? It's very stupid, is this some new "default" functionality I need to turn off? Seriously, why would I want to dig through a conversation tree looking for _my_ post, instead of being taken right to it?
I guess I should start pirating Android apps, as well, then. I hear it's even easier than on IOS, but until your comment I've never had any reason to explore it.
Whyt he fuck does the new system, in your "Comments" section for your account, take you to the parent conversation when you click on it instead of your fucking post? It's very stupid, is this some new "default" functionality I need to turn off? Seriously, why would I want to dig through a conversation tree looking for _my_ post, instead of being taken right to it?
Whyt he fuck does the new system, in your "Comments" section for your account, take you to the parent conversation when you click on it instead of your fucking post? It's very stupid, is this some new "default" functionality I need to turn off? Seriously, why would I want to dig through a conversation tree looking for _my_ post, instead of being taken right to it?
The problem with most contracts is that a legal contract (as opposed to an illegitimate and unenforceable contract) must include several things including consideration. (And to anyone, not just gsgriffin, please go read up on consideration before my next paragraph if you don't yet understand the concept.)
The trouble is, in this context, that if the newly-lessened consideration is unconscionable, then the contract is void.
IANAL, but I do have an unlimited Verizon data plan on my Droid, and I think changing the terms on such a broad scope is unconscionable, especially with such vagary .
At least AT&T didn't fuck over existing contracts when they decided that their users' bandwidth needed to be reduced, and they were up-front with their limits on new contracts. Verizon, on the other hand (as far as I can tell) proposes to a unilateral and quiet fucking of various folks under unseen rules.
I, for one, would like to see what sort of expectations Verizon has of my bandwidth usage. I don't believe I'm anywhere near the top 5%, but if I am, then I'd at least like to be aware of this so that I can make adjustments to my usage before it becomes useless.
But De-soldering is a messy task unless they set up a custom jig for each board type.
Building new motherboards is a messy task unless they set up a custom assembly line for each board type, and you think a "custom jig" to rework these tainted boards is a showstopper? Hah.
Er, uh. I'm not much of a football fan -- at all -- but all I can think is this:
They're at the Superbowl. The fucking SUPERBOWL. Have they nothing more important to do than fuck with their iPhones, wait in huge lines for bad and expensive food, and then wait in huger lines to recycle the food, while wasting similarly huge amounts of time shuffling to and from their designated seat?
Couldn't they just eat and shit before they show up at the stadium, so they might actually be able to... you know... watch the game that they paid/traveled to see?
No?
Then I guess it's truly an American sport after all*.
*: Yep. And I'm an American, always have been, always will be.
Next time someone says "Why isn't [an iOS app] also available for my Android device?", ask them how many apps on their Android device they've paid for, how many they have which are app supported, and how many are pirated. Then tell them they've just answered their own question.
Perhaps interestingly, I've pirated a shitload of apps for my iPod Touch, and almost never use the thing these days, though I have paid for the apps that I've found genuinely useful. On the Droid, I've pirated nothing, but I have spent a fair sum on buying things in the Market. (And please bear in mind that I generally carry both devices with me, and that the Droid handily provides an ad-hoc WiFi network which works just fine with the iPod -- it is at that point, in this context, an iPhone without a speaker and a microphone.)
Google's 24-hour refund policy, and Apple's lack of it, has a lot to do with my buying habits. I've returned a few things to Google's market, but with Apple it's impossible.
I don't use a traditional media player on my Droid, and I don't intentionally load music onto it. My SD card is a barren wasteland of PDFs and camera pics, and I have no desire to fill it up with media, simply because I find no advantage in doing so. (Managing one pile of music is hard enough. Two is harder.)
I do listen to my music all the time, though, especially when driving (I drive a lot).
subsonic is a self-hosted streaming sort of thing, and it seems to work well. I generally have no trouble at all keeping myself fed with 320kbps non-transcoded MP3s, from the many tens of gigabytes of carefully-sorted music that I keep at home. (It also supports transcoding, but why bother as long as bandwidth is both unlimited and adequately available?)
The interface is reasonable, the performance is good, the server-side is open-source and multiplatform, and the price is fine (free-ish). It pre-caches music, stores a few hundred megs of it on the SD card (configurable) so you can get to your frequently-listened-to tracks without using bandwidth, and pretty much works flawlessly on Verizon.
Best of all, since it's geared toward playing music from your system at home, it never, ever picks up a stray ringtone...which I must say is the stupidest and most retarded "feature" ever to curse a thing which purports to play music.
Lately, I've even been using it at home with Firefox instead of [pick a random, platform-native media player], since it also does a fine job of album art and lyrics, is simple, and it automatically agrees with my preferred directory layout.
And (shhhh!), you and your friends can share subsonic servers, which can greatly increase the amount of available music you all have, including per-user restrictions on access and bandwidth.
I shot the author a few bucks after playing with it for less than half an hour, and haven't looked back.
If you're that worried about the pain of swapping a motherboard, just drop a few bucks on an SATA card and be done. They're not particularly expensive. If it were me, however, I'd want the thing fixed -- not patched.
Meanwhile, I think the whole thing is just really rather very funny. Back in the dark ages of aftermarket 386 motherboards and early 486 VLB boards, it was common to find things that either never quite worked right or got worse over time, requiring various tweaks to work around them. You kids don't know how good you've got it with hardware these days, where stuff generally works fine.
For that matter: As recently as a few years ago, boards were being made by a whole bunch of manufacturers with bad capacitors that would fail in fairly short order. Only a handful of companies ever even admitted that the problem existed, and extremely few took the extraordinary step of repairing or replacing them for free.
It's nice to see a company doing the right thing, straight-away -- especially with raw PC components. Perhaps it will become a trend.
That's an issue with many (most? all?) capacitive touch screens.
My Motorola Droid acts the same way. In the summer, when it's hot out and I'm sweating like a pig, I keep it in a tightly-fit vinyl pouch to keep the touchscreen responsive. The rest of the year, it does just fine in my front pocket without any additional protection.
Under current drunk driving laws in some states, operating any motor vehicle while inebriated -- no matter the locale -- is an offense. Even if it is private land, and even if the vehicle in question is not registered for road use.
I've heard one two many news stories about folks being arrested for mowing their own lawn with their riding mower, while drinking a beer.
Do I think these things are OK? Sure: It sounds like you have one good example of OK. I've produced another (so what if a guy sips a bear as he cuts his grass on an August afternoon?) of OK behavior.
But just because it's right, doesn't mean it's legal.
So, as much as I'm opposed to automated law enforcement, I must say that if it is to rear its ugly head, then it must be indiscriminate.
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Bloody hell. I'm an altruist, too, but that doesn't mean I don't want the option of flexibility when working with devices where the networking stack is a fixed entity.
Your comment reminds me of discussions I've seen and had, way back in the infancy of modern NAT: "You should have one IP address for every host, and if you can't, then you should use a proxy server for every protocol. NAT is a horrible idea that solves nothing, and it breaks more stuff than it fixes. Only a moron would use it."
And we all know who won that discussion: NAT is everywhere, because it's both simpler and does almost every job just fine, and I haven't used a proxy since I decommissioned the caching Squid I had about a decade ago, after I got off of dialup.
(I believe, deep in my soul, that H.323 was written by anti-NAT protagonists.)
But is it a certainty that ISPs won't charge for using them?
Remember, this is a business that exists to generate profit. There's no harm in that, of course... But they also thrive on artificial scarcity whenever it can be created, in order to boost profits.
To a soulless near-monopoly for-profit entity, such games are like printing money.
And besides, I don't necessarily want people gathering data on the number of machines, and their habits, that I have on my own personal /64. Such information does seem harmless enough to me at this time, but then perhaps I'm just not clever enough to abuse this data.
Feh.
That's why we have DNS, remember? The common end user shouldn't have deal with IP addresses.
We've been pretty well reliant on DNS for ages, anyway, most prominently to handle HTTP/1.1 virtual hosts.
There is a certain level of retardation with other stuff. For example, I can't count the number of devices that I've installed that support NTP for automatic timekeeping but only allow the server to be specified by numeric IP address. Most folks never experience even this level of basic network configuration, however. And if they do, it will almost certainly be on their local LAN (which will still be talking IPV4 just fine anyway, if for no reason than to support these legacy apps.)
*shrug*
Yes, I've communicated with Google regarding map errors. The mechanism for doing so was obvious at the time, though I don't recall it now.
Generally speaking, they responded in a timely fashion, and applied my suggested changes in the next update.
I did basically the same as you: A basic reasoning as to how their maps/directions were wrong, and appropriate links to their own satellite/streetview imagery along with an explanation to illustrate how it really works.
From spelling errors to poorly-formed intersection routing, they've done OK. Not great, mind you, and in one case near my own house they've taken my own advice quite backwards, but Google has been far more responsive than a black hole.
I've not tried to correct other mapping companies, since regular updates to my Garmin Nuvi seem to forestall my complaints before they're worth complaining about, and between them and Google they are only two maps that I use frequently.
While all three are operator error, it is obvious (as you state) that it is a conspiracy to cause you emotional distress, feed Big Oil, and try to kill you. Oh, and to keep you from understanding the device that you intend to rely on, Really - it's obvious. [/sarcasm]
You seem to think these options shouldn't exist, but I, myself, use them quite a bit: Even once, a year ago, to get from the middle of Detroit to my house in NW Ohio, while avoiding highways and using the shortest (not fastest) route, just to see the decrepit remains of that city and do something other than the four-lane shuffle. It was a lovely drive, and far less tiring (though far more time-consuming) than the highway, and we really enjoyed it.
(And yes, it was dark. And yes, it was in a flashy car with out-of-state plates. And yes, my wife was with me. And yes, we were hungry, but we learned that the urban Detroit we drove through is nothing but local pizza parlors and liquor stores -- conspicuously absent were both national-brand fast food, chicken, or even a proper grocer, and we simply weren't in the mood for the available local cuisine. Scared? Feh. Grow a pair, you pansy -- even in the bad parts of town, people are still just people.)
The iPad doesn't know about the MiFi's GPS, and has no mechanism for using it.
The MiFi is just a gateway to teh Intarwebs, not a gateway to the GPS constellation.
There is no "raw GPS feed" in the scenario which you describe.
FYI.
...and for a week after they got stuck.
I live in Ohio. It's not Oregon, and it sure isn't Alaska, but it's still easy for me to tell when I'm in an area that has received heavy snow (it's built up all around a well-plowed road), and thus similarly easy to tell when I encounter a snow-covered road that hasn't been so well maintained (it's simply looks too smooth and white to be passable).
FWIW. And sorry about your luck, James and family.
Android devices (as well as IOS devices, including the lowly first-gen iPod Touch) can also triangulate position based on available Wifi and/or cellular signals, as long as it has a data connection.
In my experience, this completely non-GPS location data is eerily accurate.
A few years ago when I first got my hands on an iPod Touch, I took it for a walk in the country. Ever-curious about mapping and Wifi, I pulled it out of my pocket with a couple of farmhouses in sight, found an open access point, and connected to it.
I then instructed the thing to find my location. It did. It wasn't spot-on, but it was within several hundred feet, which is quite good enough for most practical applications.
Some years later, I pulled my Droid out inside of a downtown Chicago highrise hotel, and it pegged my location within about 10 yards after just a few seconds, completely without a GPS fix. I moved to a different area of the building, and it did the same. It doesn't seem to update very quickly in this mode -- about every 15 seconds -- but that's probably more to limit database loading than anything else.
Later that same day, I walked downtown Chicago to see the stuff I wanted to see before I had to head home. I used Google Maps to get me from A to B. The GPS radio was off during most of this, and the phone stayed mostly in my pocket, but when I did refer back to it it would consistently get my location with definitely-useful accuracy in seconds...and, again, without a GPS fix (I wasn't about to go wasting battery power waiting for THAT, even if aGPS can make it somewhat faster, since my non-GPS location was perfectly sufficient).
It ain't just plain-old GPS on modern handsets, and simple aGPS is not the end of the rainbow.
I generally carry Google Maps with me in my pocket on my Droid, and I enjoy the occasionally challenging road (even in my low-slung 325i, damage be damned) -- driving for fun is fun, for me.
But anyway, it's not a matter of the directions being wrong (even if they are), but of people being idiots. I've had bad GPS directions before, and I simply ignore them and keep moving in the direction of sanity and let the GPS figure out my intentions.
The conversation goes something like this when it happens to me:
GPS: Turn right toward Rocky Creek Bridge.
Me: You stupid bitch! There's no bridge here! *keeps driving down main road*
GPS: Recalculating.
GPS: *finally reveals sane route*
Me: About time.
Usually, this just means that my calculated ETA gets pushed back by a few minutes, which isn't a problem. Worst case is that she (the GPS lady) is particularly insistent on giving bad advice, and then I just mute her before use her own maps to get where I'm going without her direct guidance.
Meanwhile: If someone with zero wits tries to cross a non-existent bridge over Rocky Creek just because their GPS told them to, then I guess that's just Darwin at work.
I've seen it, too. However:
My Garmin Nuvi is switched on, right now, attached to the windshield of my BMW (which is just sitting in the driveway).
And when I drive it again, tomorrow or the next day, it will still be on.
Why? Sometimes it's useful. And in those times of potential usefulness, it takes *forever* for it to boot up and become usable if it has been switched off. It's simply a practical matter (and yes, I'm perfectly capable of wiring the thing turn on and off with the ignition, or with a delay, or whatever -- I just think it's better how it is).
Of course, it's configured to automatically adjust itself to the dimmest of dims, with the darkest of dark backgrounds, whenever the sun sets (wherever I am). It is consequently never blinding, and I also adjust the angle of the display to minimize nighttime brightness. And it's mounted up high, nearly behind the mirror, so as to neither not block important sight lines nor substantially ruin my view of the road when I do glance at the GPS.
But, yeah: I see these folks driving around with a white background on a GPS set to MAXIMUM DAYLIGHT-READABLE TORCH MODE all the time, too. Usually, these are the same clowns that keep their dashboard lighting turned all the way up at night (ostensibly so they can see the displays, but without regard for seeing their dark surroundings).
As puzzling as it all is, I don't let it bother me -- instead, I see it as a feature: A gleaming indication of an idiotic and inattentive driver, beckoning me to avoid them, like a lighthouse signalling the presence of a dangerous outcropping -- a message of imminent destruction.
Observe your surroundings -- don't expect your surroundings to observe you.
This is why I carry multiple portable GPS units (one Garmin with built-in maps that may not be current, one Droid with online maps that more likely are current), a laptop with GPS (again with built-in maps), a 12v battery pack/jump start kit with a cig plug outlet (redundancy), a knife (everyone should carry one), and some 3M electrical tape (insulate those splices!) with me whenever I travel by car: As long as the car lives, I don't get lost. And even after the car dies, it'll be a long, long time before I lose navigation for any unreasonable length of time.
(Caveat: I don't generally travel too far off of the beaten path, and most of Ohio is far too dense (even the "rural" areas) to even begin to get dangerously lost in.)
Meanwhile, as long as we're in the context of hotels and actual civilization: There's always the old-fashioned method, wherein you pop into a nearby convenience store or gas station and ask for directions and/or buy a paper map.
Before GPS I used this latter method, generally with great success. I haven't needed to use it for a few years, but I'm sure it still works as well as it used to.
Whyt he fuck does the new system, in your "Comments" section for your account, take you to the parent conversation when you click on it instead of your fucking post? It's very stupid, is this some new "default" functionality I need to turn off? Seriously, why would I want to dig through a conversation tree looking for _my_ post, instead of being taken right to it?
15 minutes, eh?
I guess I should start pirating Android apps, as well, then. I hear it's even easier than on IOS, but until your comment I've never had any reason to explore it.
Thanks, I guess.
Whyt he fuck does the new system, in your "Comments" section for your account, take you to the parent conversation when you click on it instead of your fucking post? It's very stupid, is this some new "default" functionality I need to turn off? Seriously, why would I want to dig through a conversation tree looking for _my_ post, instead of being taken right to it?
Whyt he fuck does the new system, in your "Comments" section for your account, take you to the parent conversation when you click on it instead of your fucking post? It's very stupid, is this some new "default" functionality I need to turn off? Seriously, why would I want to dig through a conversation tree looking for _my_ post, instead of being taken right to it?
The problem with most contracts is that a legal contract (as opposed to an illegitimate and unenforceable contract) must include several things including consideration. (And to anyone, not just gsgriffin, please go read up on consideration before my next paragraph if you don't yet understand the concept.)
The trouble is, in this context, that if the newly-lessened consideration is unconscionable, then the contract is void.
IANAL, but I do have an unlimited Verizon data plan on my Droid, and I think changing the terms on such a broad scope is unconscionable, especially with such vagary .
At least AT&T didn't fuck over existing contracts when they decided that their users' bandwidth needed to be reduced, and they were up-front with their limits on new contracts. Verizon, on the other hand (as far as I can tell) proposes to a unilateral and quiet fucking of various folks under unseen rules.
I, for one, would like to see what sort of expectations Verizon has of my bandwidth usage. I don't believe I'm anywhere near the top 5%, but if I am, then I'd at least like to be aware of this so that I can make adjustments to my usage before it becomes useless.
Building new motherboards is a messy task unless they set up a custom assembly line for each board type, and you think a "custom jig" to rework these tainted boards is a showstopper? Hah.
Thanks for posting!
Er, uh. I'm not much of a football fan -- at all -- but all I can think is this:
They're at the Superbowl. The fucking SUPERBOWL. Have they nothing more important to do than fuck with their iPhones, wait in huge lines for bad and expensive food, and then wait in huger lines to recycle the food, while wasting similarly huge amounts of time shuffling to and from their designated seat?
Couldn't they just eat and shit before they show up at the stadium, so they might actually be able to ... you know ... watch the game that they paid/traveled to see?
No?
Then I guess it's truly an American sport after all*.
*: Yep. And I'm an American, always have been, always will be.
I'm not average, but on an average day, I see none.
root handset; install adfree; experience little or no advertising.
(I don't mind paying for things that I use, but I do not want to see advertising for things that I will never want.)
Perhaps interestingly, I've pirated a shitload of apps for my iPod Touch, and almost never use the thing these days, though I have paid for the apps that I've found genuinely useful. On the Droid, I've pirated nothing, but I have spent a fair sum on buying things in the Market. (And please bear in mind that I generally carry both devices with me, and that the Droid handily provides an ad-hoc WiFi network which works just fine with the iPod -- it is at that point, in this context, an iPhone without a speaker and a microphone.)
Google's 24-hour refund policy, and Apple's lack of it, has a lot to do with my buying habits. I've returned a few things to Google's market, but with Apple it's impossible.
FYI.
Root, install adfree, be done.
I haven't played Angry Birds on my Droid in awhile, but last I did, I didn't see any advertising.
This might not work for you but:
Try subsonic.
I don't use a traditional media player on my Droid, and I don't intentionally load music onto it. My SD card is a barren wasteland of PDFs and camera pics, and I have no desire to fill it up with media, simply because I find no advantage in doing so. (Managing one pile of music is hard enough. Two is harder.)
I do listen to my music all the time, though, especially when driving (I drive a lot).
subsonic is a self-hosted streaming sort of thing, and it seems to work well. I generally have no trouble at all keeping myself fed with 320kbps non-transcoded MP3s, from the many tens of gigabytes of carefully-sorted music that I keep at home. (It also supports transcoding, but why bother as long as bandwidth is both unlimited and adequately available?)
The interface is reasonable, the performance is good, the server-side is open-source and multiplatform, and the price is fine (free-ish). It pre-caches music, stores a few hundred megs of it on the SD card (configurable) so you can get to your frequently-listened-to tracks without using bandwidth, and pretty much works flawlessly on Verizon.
Best of all, since it's geared toward playing music from your system at home, it never, ever picks up a stray ringtone...which I must say is the stupidest and most retarded "feature" ever to curse a thing which purports to play music.
Lately, I've even been using it at home with Firefox instead of [pick a random, platform-native media player], since it also does a fine job of album art and lyrics, is simple, and it automatically agrees with my preferred directory layout.
And (shhhh!), you and your friends can share subsonic servers, which can greatly increase the amount of available music you all have, including per-user restrictions on access and bandwidth.
I shot the author a few bucks after playing with it for less than half an hour, and haven't looked back.
If you're that worried about the pain of swapping a motherboard, just drop a few bucks on an SATA card and be done. They're not particularly expensive. If it were me, however, I'd want the thing fixed -- not patched.
Meanwhile, I think the whole thing is just really rather very funny. Back in the dark ages of aftermarket 386 motherboards and early 486 VLB boards, it was common to find things that either never quite worked right or got worse over time, requiring various tweaks to work around them. You kids don't know how good you've got it with hardware these days, where stuff generally works fine.
For that matter: As recently as a few years ago, boards were being made by a whole bunch of manufacturers with bad capacitors that would fail in fairly short order. Only a handful of companies ever even admitted that the problem existed, and extremely few took the extraordinary step of repairing or replacing them for free.
It's nice to see a company doing the right thing, straight-away -- especially with raw PC components. Perhaps it will become a trend.
That's an issue with many (most? all?) capacitive touch screens.
My Motorola Droid acts the same way. In the summer, when it's hot out and I'm sweating like a pig, I keep it in a tightly-fit vinyl pouch to keep the touchscreen responsive. The rest of the year, it does just fine in my front pocket without any additional protection.
Under current drunk driving laws in some states, operating any motor vehicle while inebriated -- no matter the locale -- is an offense. Even if it is private land, and even if the vehicle in question is not registered for road use.
I've heard one two many news stories about folks being arrested for mowing their own lawn with their riding mower, while drinking a beer.
Do I think these things are OK? Sure: It sounds like you have one good example of OK. I've produced another (so what if a guy sips a bear as he cuts his grass on an August afternoon?) of OK behavior.
But just because it's right, doesn't mean it's legal.
So, as much as I'm opposed to automated law enforcement, I must say that if it is to rear its ugly head, then it must be indiscriminate.