Yes, it is required of every business. This is true in just about every town or city - to get a license to operate you must pay for a license. Often, there is a floor, below which you may not be required to get one, and a ceiling above which you pay a percentage of your gross receipts (or income). It means businesses pay a portion of the funds it requires to run the city (police, fire, cleanup, trash, etc.)
This is a "privilege tax," which is simply a way to extract a minimum fixed fee for the opportunity to conduct business in a city. You can think of it as an extortion or protection money, but it's more appropriately likened to a cover charge. this is most common for service/professional fields. Tennessee, for example, has a professional privilege tax ($400/yr) for anyone with an active professional license (engineers, architects, accountants, doctors, lawyers; there may be others). It's why I keep my license inactive in that state, and will only activate it if I have a job large enough to cover the cost (and the client will be indirectly billed for it in my fee).
Yeah, but that would be true of every single app on Facebook. Making gullible FB users jump though a pay-questionnaire like they were trying to find the unlock key for a movie on usenet is hardly nefarious. I see this as mostly non-news. *shrug*
Preservative in that it preserves you from dying. You NEED salt in your diet. The fact that many people have too much is a reflection of how strong the innate need for the substance is to keep you alive. Modern humans can have way more of anything than they need - and they do. Our primal instincts select that which was rare or hard to obtain, and that didn't just get shut off with the industrial revolution.
Salt happens to have particular culinary uses in flavoring and enhancing foods. The preservation you appear to be referring to is actually dehydration. Removing moisture (and, admittedly, raising salinity - though it can be done with sugar, too) prevents the growth of microorganisms which cause spoilage.
That's not to say cafeteria food isn't poor - it is. That's what you get when you allocate 50 cents meal for raw materials and preparation. But arguing that salt is the root of evil as a preservative (everything these days is either canned or frozen when it gets to the school) is the wrong place to go.
FWIW, some of the most sought after salt in the world is from France (naturally evaporated sea salts), and is used in French cuisine quite frequently.
It looks like a regular waste of time (which, by definition, is the point of all facebook activities, right?).
Now, there may indeed be a more nefarious info-gathering subtext to this, but otherwise it looks like it posts that you like this app (which many do), that you fill out a survey (which is what lots of people do on FB, based on many of my friends' status updates), and it sends you to a FF add-on.
This sounds like everything else on FaceBook...I'm waiting for the "then is steals your children and sells them into slavery" part that will make us care about it.
"Besides Wi-Fi signals, could there possibly be any other logical explanation for kids having more symptoms of illness on school days than at home on weekends or in the summer?"
For those who have forgotten, Google is trying to do location based analysis without the geotags - you send them a picture of a place, they tell you where it is (well, what it is for right now). No geotagging necessary.
Of course, Picasa is kind enough to mark each geotagged picture with a google map pin in the preview window - so you at least know which pics have the metadata in the tags.
Mathematics at grade school level is based on operators, and each operator does a specific thing. + adds, - subtracts, x divides, = evaluates. This is a function of the level of understanding AT THIS POINT in mathematics.
What is being presented here is algebra. Now, don't get me wrong - they do this kind of thing in grade school too (usually presented as 7 - ___ = 5, with the child filling in the 2). It depends on how the problem is posed, and what the current plan is. That sounds odd, but it is true.
Often children will be asked to evaluate a string of sums, giving the answer at each stage. It's that "showing your work" thing teachers (and engineers who check calculations) like since you can identify where an error is made.
When it takes you 5-6 seconds to write each character, and you only have 30 minutes for the whole lesson, the extra blanks and semicolons are omitted.
5 + 4 = _____
+ 3 = _____
+ 2 = _____
Or to save paper, 5 + 4 = + 3 = + 2 =
Since the lesson is only about evaluating from left to right, top to bottom, and in sequence, the point of the lesson is achieved with maximum efficiency. The string is to be operated, not to be evaluated algebraically.
Is it completely, mathematically correct in its final written form? No. Did the kids learn to serially evaluate a sum? Yes. Then again, as so many have pointed out, using () in place of a variable isn't exactly kosher.
(FWIW, I though the answer should be (4+3)+2, not 7+2, and I have an MS in a math-intensive major)
Since when is a set of parentheses a proper substitution for a variable? Seriously, part of the problem is that the standards for writing and evaluating mathematics in (especially) earlier grades is subject to what' I'll call "local interpretation".
As the father of a rising third grader, and a professional engineer with masters degree that included more math than I care to admit, I've puzzled over the way problems are written. At least one in ten homework assignments require that I look at the answer sheet to determine what the question is actually asking. Some of the answers appear to be wrong, except when interpreted in a very specific way which is counter to standard practice. Others are simply misleading.
I thought so too, at first. In optimal signal areas, it doesn't significantly reduce performance, but in anything but optimal signal areas (max bars, but not actually pegged) the signal will drop very significantly. The reaction time of the meter appears to be on the order of 40-60 seconds, buffered to prevent panic in the users. Just casually holding the phone in my let hand and surfing will cause a signal of 3 bars to become unusable,a nd will register little or "no service" in under a minute.
It's a pain, and the phone is pretty nasty looking with a case on it. Actually, cases on any phone are annoying because they no linger site properly in chargers, nor do they fit in snug cases. Sadly, the error causes me to hold the phone in a less than optimal position when surfing. It's a minor annoyance, but for 300 freaking dollars and two years of service required it's darned close to unacceptable. Unfortunately, there aren't any other phones which have fewer flaws, and there are lots with more flaws.
I propose a gross receipts tax on every entity in the US (or who trades in the US). I figure 2-3% would actually do the job. Whatever you receive, you pay 3% of. Deposit accounts for which no interest is earned is not a "receipt," as the money is not lost or gained. Any other transaction would be. You sell your car, you pay 2% to the feds, you sell your house, same thing; you sell stocks, bonds, etc, same thing. You get money from your retirement account, same thing.
FWIW, I'm in favor of a single exclusion (call it a deduction) from this tax for each individual equal to 2087 x Federal minimum wage. There are no family or head of household rates - everybody pays from the infant to the dead. Every corporate intermediate pays the taxes - i.e. if you shelter your liability through multiple corporations, you pay tax on every dime received, every time it passes from one entity to the other.
A 2% tax on receipts would make nearly all day trading unprofitable.
First, It most certainly may be used as an ID number, just not by the federal government. It's a number I can find out about you, given your name and address, for about $30 or less. They're about spend $30 on you at their call center to answer your stupid ass questions you could have figured out from their website. They're going to make sure that you actually have the credit necessary for them to give you an $800 handset for $200, and let you walk out the door having (effectively) financed the rest over two years.
Someday, you may grow up and own a company, and you'll understand this kind of thing. We don't give a shit if you're a billionaire wearing a T-shirt and ripped jeans. There's a 99.999% chance your a bum with nothing better to do than waste our time and money because you're bored, and your attitude shows it. Real billionaires don't usually have a chip on their shoulder, and those that do - well, let's just say you'd rather not do business with them anyway.
Well, that will get you no cred here. I suspect you're like me - it's not about confusing, its about wasting time. My Fuze worked great for a year without incident. I spent probably 50 hours and $80-$100 on apps and ROM customization, and it worked very well, given it's inherent limitations (I wanted a finger OS, and WM is stylus oriented). I never had a lick of problems with it rebooting or not being able to answer calls. Until I had problems pairing it with a Kenwood head unit. I tried reinstalling, using the latest ROM, only to find that the screen lock on the new OS made the phone unanswerable 85% of the time. I probably wasted 20 hours trying to fix it.
I have to fix all the computers and the server at work, the home theater system at home, my personal desktop, and my laptop. Quite honestly, I'm tired of applying hacks just to make machines passably useful. I just want my phone to fucking work, and I don't want to have to track and install patches and upgrades. I was ->- this close to sending my iP4 back to Steve with a letter bomb attached after 4.0.1 bricked my phone. It took 2 damned hours to fix. It has certainly clouded my view of iOS, but I'm screwed anywhere else I go, too.
A month before I made the switch to AT&T (from a local), I bought an AT&T prepaid and a Verizon prepaid, then tracked the signal strength in the 8-10 counties I frequent, including call quality. There was one county that had pretty much exclusive Verizon coverage, but it's rare I do business there; even then the coverage was less than 30% of the county, though AT&T could have claimed about 5-8% from spillover from neighboring counties. (Now, it's more like 30% V / 20% AT&T since AT&T has towers along the only main highway). Call quality was essentially identical.
As long as the antenna stack is competent, there's precious little difference in phones except in fringe areas. It's not like anyone with a Droid is going to find out how AT&T coverage is, either, since you can't get a Droid to work on any system but Verizon.
Around me, AT&T has nearly (I'd say 85-90%) of the coverage of Verizon, and probably 130-200% more coverage than the next best. When comparing my speed to those on Verizon about a year ago, my data was twice as fast. Then again, I'm not in a major metro area. I doubt we have a lot of iGoobers streaming youtube and pandora on every cell.
I will say that the iPhone appearance of speed in Safari is about twice that of any WinMobile phone I've had, though no faster or slower than the browser on the couple of Blackberries I've seen.
I suspect the satifaction, aside from the Apple factor, has more to do with the particular default setup of the OS than the actual OS efficiency. Android can do a hell of a lot more, but since most (80%? 90%?) of users never change the defaults, most of the people with Android phones are missing out a lot of the potential features. iPhones, otoh, are more of a WYSIWYG experience - if it doesn't exist in the default profile setup, it simply doesn't exist.
Since when did a corporate disaster become a federal crisis? BP scews up, BP cleans up. If we have a major earthquake or a large hurricane or massive flooding, there are federal agencies tasked specifically to address those.
I don't even know why the federal government is involved, except to monitor the leases and hold the responsible people to pay for the cleanup.
They sound like trolls. It appears as if they don't actually produce any of the content. They buy an exclusive license to redistribute on speculation that someone will intentionally or inadvertently infringe, then they sue for enough money to make them money, but not enough to make it worth fighting in court.
Getty, I'm convinced, makes a good living off of crawling the web looking for their images. They put a bunch of them on stock photo CDs years ago, and the licensing on the box covers implies that they are free to use when you buy the cd (royalty free, I believe, its the term). It turns out, though, that by royalty free, they mean you don't have to pay per impression, but you still have to buy a license for each image separately, per year. I got hit for two thumbnails a couple years ago, and had to cough up $2000 for the transgression.
Thing is, for $2k, you can't fight it. And even if you've got a 90% chance of winning (which I didn't, though the oversight was unintentional - or rather, I thought I actually did own a license), it's not worth $20,000-$100,000 legal bill to try and prove you're right.
It extortion, but legal.
Oh, and I'll never, ever license a Getty work, and I actively discourage it with everyone I know.
I would say the same thing about the 3gs. Head and shoulders above the Touch Pro.
It took me a while to realize that it WASN'T multitasking. If I "exited" a program, then went back in, it was like I'd left it running. I don't listen to streaming music - I have about 50GB of my own music. I found the limit when facebook couldn't upload a video - it kept timing out as the phone slept. Oops. It pains me to say it, but for the most part it just fucking worked. After fussing with custom ROMs to get the Touch Pro functional, it was a huge relief.
Oddly enough, the resolution on the 3gs isn't a big deal except in one or two conditions (PocketInformant month view with appts inline). It wasn't as bad as I'd feared, even though I came from a 640x480 screen. Now, with the 640x960 screen on the 4, well, I don't care. Yes, it's crisper. BFD. No, it's no more functional. Unfortunately, I don't want a bigger phone, so I'm not going to get a bigger screen. The camera on the 4 is nice - very nice. Since my 3gs was a "test" I got the 16gb version. My 4 has 32. I hate SJ for not offering it in 64, but I couldn't get more usable space on android this cycle (neither would hold my MP3 collection). The notification light seemed more important when I had a WM phone, and color coded notices seemed cool. *shrug* It turns out I really like the hard switch for vibrate (I fought forever to get my TP to map the PTT button to the vibrate function) - that would be hard to give up. Oh, and I hate the one on the 4 - the ergonomics are much worse for the new vibrate switch.
For the record, the iPhone keyboard sucks donkey balls, but it's still better than the android one from the one or two times I've tried it. I miss my touch pro keyboard every day (though I don't miss the phone thickness). The touch screen input is the absolute, positive, most important thing. The best cell service is useless if you can't dial properly, find your contacts, enter data. The iPhone has the hw and sw advantage there, and the reception is good enough not to be a worry. If you like the input better on android, you sure as hell don't want an iP4. Short of the music player functionality and connectivity (iP has a dedicated port on many high end car stereos), it doesn't have anything else head-and-shoulders above a good android phone.
If the 4 keeps pissing me off through the fall, I'll probably look for something else. The good thing is that the drooling masses keep prices of iPhones up, so eBaying mine after 6 months or a year will net me more than I paid for it (subsidized).
Look, I was up for a new phone this summer (AT&T isn't going to cut me a break on my rates, so I'm going to get a new fucking phone every 18 months, even if that means I immediately flip it on eBay). WinMo is no longer viable - there are android and iphone apps for everything the WinMos had a lock on two years ago, and I wanted a finger interface. W7 will not be ready in time.
I considered both android and iPhone, and did a bunch of research on them. For all the limitations of the iPhone, none of them mattered to me that much. I would miss tethering, but I only used it 4-6 times per year. The Nexus One was intriguing, but - by Android users own admissions it fell short. The touchscreen was inferior to the iPhone (a big point of contention with my old WM, and one of the things I really liked on my wife's iPhone). A standout feature was the notification light...but it didn't work as planned, and Google appeared to have abandoned ever making work. And, honestly, I couldn't play with one before stroking a check for $600.
I got an iPhone 3, liked it, and upgraded to a 4 for the speed and camera (which is very good, btw). Sold the 3 for within $20 of what I paid. Now, I'm not very happy with the 4, or Apple in general, since the 4.0.1 update bricked my phone and Apple had no answer on how to fix it. Thank goodness for mac hackers or I'd be at an AT&T store asking them to replace my !@#$ @#$#% phone with something that worked. I shouldn't have to troll the mac equivalent of XDA to get my never-jailbroken, never-hacked iPhone to do a simple update.
I'm still in the market, but AT&T android handsets are crippled, the new Moto android handsets are hobbled and Verizon wants $30 more poer month for their service (which is no better than AT&T near me), and everyone else coverage makes AT&T's map look continuous. The Nexus was nice, but now it's gone, and there's no push to get a better android phone, just a fatter spec sheet. I was hoping a N-2 might be in the offing, and a real phone shootout would ensue in my house. Guess not.
Why isn't there a real spill response center? Because there is no spill!!
I knew it - just like the damned moon landings. This whole spill thing is a fraud, isn't it? Those shots of the oil coming out of the sea bed are probably computer generated! This proves it - BP is clearly just making all of this stuff up. And who is going to question them, huh? Can you go down 5000 feet to see it for your self? NO! You just have to take their word for it, that the "cameras" they have "placed" are really there.
Drop a few cans of Pennzoil on the surface, dip some wild life if a bucket of goop, and maybe dispose of some of that tar you can't find a landfill to take. Heck, I've heard the stories about how the private fisherman in LA have been fishing the whole time without any problems.
I call bullshit on the whole spill story. In fact, I think they did it just to make the Obama administration look bad. Yeah, that's it! Make a disaster they CAN'T fix, because it doesn't exist, then blame them for not fixing it fast enough. Bloody geniuses, I tell you!
Slashdot Mirror
So now that it takes no significant investment to distribute audio recordings, how come we're being asked to pay so much for them?
Yes, it is required of every business. This is true in just about every town or city - to get a license to operate you must pay for a license. Often, there is a floor, below which you may not be required to get one, and a ceiling above which you pay a percentage of your gross receipts (or income). It means businesses pay a portion of the funds it requires to run the city (police, fire, cleanup, trash, etc.)
This is a "privilege tax," which is simply a way to extract a minimum fixed fee for the opportunity to conduct business in a city. You can think of it as an extortion or protection money, but it's more appropriately likened to a cover charge. this is most common for service/professional fields. Tennessee, for example, has a professional privilege tax ($400/yr) for anyone with an active professional license (engineers, architects, accountants, doctors, lawyers; there may be others). It's why I keep my license inactive in that state, and will only activate it if I have a job large enough to cover the cost (and the client will be indirectly billed for it in my fee).
ip6tables -i eth0 -A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
I'm going to email that to my mom so she can get her new dsl modem set up right.
Thanks!
I don't have to worry. I unfriended everyone who "Likes" the IBA page on Facebook!
Yeah, but that would be true of every single app on Facebook. Making gullible FB users jump though a pay-questionnaire like they were trying to find the unlock key for a movie on usenet is hardly nefarious. I see this as mostly non-news. *shrug*
Preservative in that it preserves you from dying. You NEED salt in your diet. The fact that many people have too much is a reflection of how strong the innate need for the substance is to keep you alive. Modern humans can have way more of anything than they need - and they do. Our primal instincts select that which was rare or hard to obtain, and that didn't just get shut off with the industrial revolution.
Salt happens to have particular culinary uses in flavoring and enhancing foods. The preservation you appear to be referring to is actually dehydration. Removing moisture (and, admittedly, raising salinity - though it can be done with sugar, too) prevents the growth of microorganisms which cause spoilage.
That's not to say cafeteria food isn't poor - it is. That's what you get when you allocate 50 cents meal for raw materials and preparation. But arguing that salt is the root of evil as a preservative (everything these days is either canned or frozen when it gets to the school) is the wrong place to go.
FWIW, some of the most sought after salt in the world is from France (naturally evaporated sea salts), and is used in French cuisine quite frequently.
It looks like a regular waste of time (which, by definition, is the point of all facebook activities, right?).
Now, there may indeed be a more nefarious info-gathering subtext to this, but otherwise it looks like it posts that you like this app (which many do), that you fill out a survey (which is what lots of people do on FB, based on many of my friends' status updates), and it sends you to a FF add-on.
This sounds like everything else on FaceBook...I'm waiting for the "then is steals your children and sells them into slavery" part that will make us care about it.
"Essunge-a elreedy vurks veet zee Noo Yurk Teemes, zee Gooerdeeun, und Der Speeegel. Boot he's nut yet vurked es a culoomneest fur uny poobleeceshun. Sterteeng noo thet veell chunge-a. Essunge-a met Efftunbledet's ideetur in cheeeff Jun Heleen yesterdey. Bork bork bork! 'It's nu cueencidence-a thet I'm gueeng tu be-a vreeting fur a Svedeesh peper. Hurty flurty schnipp schnipp! Zee Svedeesh poobleecist cooltoore-a und Svedeesh lev hefe-a sooppurted us frum zee begeenning', seeed Essunge-a."
(-chef, that is. What? You knew somebody had to do it!)
"Besides Wi-Fi signals, could there possibly be any other logical explanation for kids having more symptoms of illness on school days than at home on weekends or in the summer?"
Um, being in school doesn't count as a reason?
For those who have forgotten, Google is trying to do location based analysis without the geotags - you send them a picture of a place, they tell you where it is (well, what it is for right now). No geotagging necessary.
Of course, Picasa is kind enough to mark each geotagged picture with a google map pin in the preview window - so you at least know which pics have the metadata in the tags.
You don't have a young child in school, do you?
Mathematics at grade school level is based on operators, and each operator does a specific thing. + adds, - subtracts, x divides, = evaluates. This is a function of the level of understanding AT THIS POINT in mathematics.
What is being presented here is algebra. Now, don't get me wrong - they do this kind of thing in grade school too (usually presented as 7 - ___ = 5, with the child filling in the 2). It depends on how the problem is posed, and what the current plan is. That sounds odd, but it is true.
Often children will be asked to evaluate a string of sums, giving the answer at each stage. It's that "showing your work" thing teachers (and engineers who check calculations) like since you can identify where an error is made.
5 + 4 + 3 + 2 =
is broken down into:
5 + 4 = ____; ____ + 3 = _____ ; _____ + 2 = _____
When it takes you 5-6 seconds to write each character, and you only have 30 minutes for the whole lesson, the extra blanks and semicolons are omitted.
5 + 4 = _____
+ 3 = _____
+ 2 = _____
Or to save paper, 5 + 4 = + 3 = + 2 =
Since the lesson is only about evaluating from left to right, top to bottom, and in sequence, the point of the lesson is achieved with maximum efficiency. The string is to be operated, not to be evaluated algebraically.
Is it completely, mathematically correct in its final written form? No. Did the kids learn to serially evaluate a sum? Yes. Then again, as so many have pointed out, using () in place of a variable isn't exactly kosher.
(FWIW, I though the answer should be (4+3)+2, not 7+2, and I have an MS in a math-intensive major)
Since when is a set of parentheses a proper substitution for a variable? Seriously, part of the problem is that the standards for writing and evaluating mathematics in (especially) earlier grades is subject to what' I'll call "local interpretation".
As the father of a rising third grader, and a professional engineer with masters degree that included more math than I care to admit, I've puzzled over the way problems are written. At least one in ten homework assignments require that I look at the answer sheet to determine what the question is actually asking. Some of the answers appear to be wrong, except when interpreted in a very specific way which is counter to standard practice. Others are simply misleading.
I thought so too, at first. In optimal signal areas, it doesn't significantly reduce performance, but in anything but optimal signal areas (max bars, but not actually pegged) the signal will drop very significantly. The reaction time of the meter appears to be on the order of 40-60 seconds, buffered to prevent panic in the users. Just casually holding the phone in my let hand and surfing will cause a signal of 3 bars to become unusable,a nd will register little or "no service" in under a minute.
It's a pain, and the phone is pretty nasty looking with a case on it. Actually, cases on any phone are annoying because they no linger site properly in chargers, nor do they fit in snug cases. Sadly, the error causes me to hold the phone in a less than optimal position when surfing. It's a minor annoyance, but for 300 freaking dollars and two years of service required it's darned close to unacceptable. Unfortunately, there aren't any other phones which have fewer flaws, and there are lots with more flaws.
Ah, you should subscribe to my newsletter... ;-)
I propose a gross receipts tax on every entity in the US (or who trades in the US). I figure 2-3% would actually do the job. Whatever you receive, you pay 3% of. Deposit accounts for which no interest is earned is not a "receipt," as the money is not lost or gained. Any other transaction would be. You sell your car, you pay 2% to the feds, you sell your house, same thing; you sell stocks, bonds, etc, same thing. You get money from your retirement account, same thing.
FWIW, I'm in favor of a single exclusion (call it a deduction) from this tax for each individual equal to 2087 x Federal minimum wage. There are no family or head of household rates - everybody pays from the infant to the dead. Every corporate intermediate pays the taxes - i.e. if you shelter your liability through multiple corporations, you pay tax on every dime received, every time it passes from one entity to the other.
A 2% tax on receipts would make nearly all day trading unprofitable.
First, It most certainly may be used as an ID number, just not by the federal government. It's a number I can find out about you, given your name and address, for about $30 or less. They're about spend $30 on you at their call center to answer your stupid ass questions you could have figured out from their website. They're going to make sure that you actually have the credit necessary for them to give you an $800 handset for $200, and let you walk out the door having (effectively) financed the rest over two years.
Someday, you may grow up and own a company, and you'll understand this kind of thing. We don't give a shit if you're a billionaire wearing a T-shirt and ripped jeans. There's a 99.999% chance your a bum with nothing better to do than waste our time and money because you're bored, and your attitude shows it. Real billionaires don't usually have a chip on their shoulder, and those that do - well, let's just say you'd rather not do business with them anyway.
Consider this troll well fed.
They just make things confusing.
Well, that will get you no cred here. I suspect you're like me - it's not about confusing, its about wasting time. My Fuze worked great for a year without incident. I spent probably 50 hours and $80-$100 on apps and ROM customization, and it worked very well, given it's inherent limitations (I wanted a finger OS, and WM is stylus oriented). I never had a lick of problems with it rebooting or not being able to answer calls. Until I had problems pairing it with a Kenwood head unit. I tried reinstalling, using the latest ROM, only to find that the screen lock on the new OS made the phone unanswerable 85% of the time. I probably wasted 20 hours trying to fix it.
I have to fix all the computers and the server at work, the home theater system at home, my personal desktop, and my laptop. Quite honestly, I'm tired of applying hacks just to make machines passably useful. I just want my phone to fucking work, and I don't want to have to track and install patches and upgrades. I was ->- this close to sending my iP4 back to Steve with a letter bomb attached after 4.0.1 bricked my phone. It took 2 damned hours to fix. It has certainly clouded my view of iOS, but I'm screwed anywhere else I go, too.
A month before I made the switch to AT&T (from a local), I bought an AT&T prepaid and a Verizon prepaid, then tracked the signal strength in the 8-10 counties I frequent, including call quality. There was one county that had pretty much exclusive Verizon coverage, but it's rare I do business there; even then the coverage was less than 30% of the county, though AT&T could have claimed about 5-8% from spillover from neighboring counties. (Now, it's more like 30% V / 20% AT&T since AT&T has towers along the only main highway). Call quality was essentially identical.
As long as the antenna stack is competent, there's precious little difference in phones except in fringe areas. It's not like anyone with a Droid is going to find out how AT&T coverage is, either, since you can't get a Droid to work on any system but Verizon.
Around me, AT&T has nearly (I'd say 85-90%) of the coverage of Verizon, and probably 130-200% more coverage than the next best. When comparing my speed to those on Verizon about a year ago, my data was twice as fast. Then again, I'm not in a major metro area. I doubt we have a lot of iGoobers streaming youtube and pandora on every cell.
I will say that the iPhone appearance of speed in Safari is about twice that of any WinMobile phone I've had, though no faster or slower than the browser on the couple of Blackberries I've seen.
I suspect the satifaction, aside from the Apple factor, has more to do with the particular default setup of the OS than the actual OS efficiency. Android can do a hell of a lot more, but since most (80%? 90%?) of users never change the defaults, most of the people with Android phones are missing out a lot of the potential features. iPhones, otoh, are more of a WYSIWYG experience - if it doesn't exist in the default profile setup, it simply doesn't exist.
Since when did a corporate disaster become a federal crisis? BP scews up, BP cleans up. If we have a major earthquake or a large hurricane or massive flooding, there are federal agencies tasked specifically to address those.
I don't even know why the federal government is involved, except to monitor the leases and hold the responsible people to pay for the cleanup.
They sound like trolls. It appears as if they don't actually produce any of the content. They buy an exclusive license to redistribute on speculation that someone will intentionally or inadvertently infringe, then they sue for enough money to make them money, but not enough to make it worth fighting in court.
Getty, I'm convinced, makes a good living off of crawling the web looking for their images. They put a bunch of them on stock photo CDs years ago, and the licensing on the box covers implies that they are free to use when you buy the cd (royalty free, I believe, its the term). It turns out, though, that by royalty free, they mean you don't have to pay per impression, but you still have to buy a license for each image separately, per year. I got hit for two thumbnails a couple years ago, and had to cough up $2000 for the transgression.
Thing is, for $2k, you can't fight it. And even if you've got a 90% chance of winning (which I didn't, though the oversight was unintentional - or rather, I thought I actually did own a license), it's not worth $20,000-$100,000 legal bill to try and prove you're right.
It extortion, but legal.
Oh, and I'll never, ever license a Getty work, and I actively discourage it with everyone I know.
I would say the same thing about the 3gs. Head and shoulders above the Touch Pro.
It took me a while to realize that it WASN'T multitasking. If I "exited" a program, then went back in, it was like I'd left it running. I don't listen to streaming music - I have about 50GB of my own music. I found the limit when facebook couldn't upload a video - it kept timing out as the phone slept. Oops. It pains me to say it, but for the most part it just fucking worked. After fussing with custom ROMs to get the Touch Pro functional, it was a huge relief.
Oddly enough, the resolution on the 3gs isn't a big deal except in one or two conditions (PocketInformant month view with appts inline). It wasn't as bad as I'd feared, even though I came from a 640x480 screen. Now, with the 640x960 screen on the 4, well, I don't care. Yes, it's crisper. BFD. No, it's no more functional. Unfortunately, I don't want a bigger phone, so I'm not going to get a bigger screen. The camera on the 4 is nice - very nice. Since my 3gs was a "test" I got the 16gb version. My 4 has 32. I hate SJ for not offering it in 64, but I couldn't get more usable space on android this cycle (neither would hold my MP3 collection). The notification light seemed more important when I had a WM phone, and color coded notices seemed cool. *shrug* It turns out I really like the hard switch for vibrate (I fought forever to get my TP to map the PTT button to the vibrate function) - that would be hard to give up. Oh, and I hate the one on the 4 - the ergonomics are much worse for the new vibrate switch.
For the record, the iPhone keyboard sucks donkey balls, but it's still better than the android one from the one or two times I've tried it. I miss my touch pro keyboard every day (though I don't miss the phone thickness). The touch screen input is the absolute, positive, most important thing. The best cell service is useless if you can't dial properly, find your contacts, enter data. The iPhone has the hw and sw advantage there, and the reception is good enough not to be a worry. If you like the input better on android, you sure as hell don't want an iP4. Short of the music player functionality and connectivity (iP has a dedicated port on many high end car stereos), it doesn't have anything else head-and-shoulders above a good android phone.
If the 4 keeps pissing me off through the fall, I'll probably look for something else. The good thing is that the drooling masses keep prices of iPhones up, so eBaying mine after 6 months or a year will net me more than I paid for it (subsidized).
Around me, the coverage is about 85% for verizon, 75-80% for AT&T, and less than 50% for the rest. Sprint and T-Mobile aren't realistic options.
Look, I was up for a new phone this summer (AT&T isn't going to cut me a break on my rates, so I'm going to get a new fucking phone every 18 months, even if that means I immediately flip it on eBay). WinMo is no longer viable - there are android and iphone apps for everything the WinMos had a lock on two years ago, and I wanted a finger interface. W7 will not be ready in time.
I considered both android and iPhone, and did a bunch of research on them. For all the limitations of the iPhone, none of them mattered to me that much. I would miss tethering, but I only used it 4-6 times per year. The Nexus One was intriguing, but - by Android users own admissions it fell short. The touchscreen was inferior to the iPhone (a big point of contention with my old WM, and one of the things I really liked on my wife's iPhone). A standout feature was the notification light...but it didn't work as planned, and Google appeared to have abandoned ever making work. And, honestly, I couldn't play with one before stroking a check for $600.
I got an iPhone 3, liked it, and upgraded to a 4 for the speed and camera (which is very good, btw). Sold the 3 for within $20 of what I paid. Now, I'm not very happy with the 4, or Apple in general, since the 4.0.1 update bricked my phone and Apple had no answer on how to fix it. Thank goodness for mac hackers or I'd be at an AT&T store asking them to replace my !@#$ @#$#% phone with something that worked. I shouldn't have to troll the mac equivalent of XDA to get my never-jailbroken, never-hacked iPhone to do a simple update.
I'm still in the market, but AT&T android handsets are crippled, the new Moto android handsets are hobbled and Verizon wants $30 more poer month for their service (which is no better than AT&T near me), and everyone else coverage makes AT&T's map look continuous. The Nexus was nice, but now it's gone, and there's no push to get a better android phone, just a fatter spec sheet. I was hoping a N-2 might be in the offing, and a real phone shootout would ensue in my house. Guess not.
Why isn't there a real spill response center? Because there is no spill!!
I knew it - just like the damned moon landings. This whole spill thing is a fraud, isn't it? Those shots of the oil coming out of the sea bed are probably computer generated! This proves it - BP is clearly just making all of this stuff up. And who is going to question them, huh? Can you go down 5000 feet to see it for your self? NO! You just have to take their word for it, that the "cameras" they have "placed" are really there.
Drop a few cans of Pennzoil on the surface, dip some wild life if a bucket of goop, and maybe dispose of some of that tar you can't find a landfill to take. Heck, I've heard the stories about how the private fisherman in LA have been fishing the whole time without any problems.
I call bullshit on the whole spill story. In fact, I think they did it just to make the Obama administration look bad. Yeah, that's it! Make a disaster they CAN'T fix, because it doesn't exist, then blame them for not fixing it fast enough. Bloody geniuses, I tell you!