I don't live in a big metropolitan area. You seem to expect metropolitan-area cell phone service and coverage in a rural area with metropolitan-area competition and pricing, and I don't see why you have a reasonable expectation to get that. Lots of things are cheaper in rural areas, but some are more expensive. It's tradeoffs you make. Even once everything has switched to interchangeable LTE service and phones can move freely between carriers, Verizon can and should still charge people like us more in rural areas than they do in metropolitan areas, simply because providing service to us actually is more expensive and there is no reason for people from metropolitan areas to subsidize us. And if you want more competition in your town, why not do something about it yourself? Here, a local ISP just covered the town with WiFi access points and offered competitive rates.
I understand what you're saying, but as someone who has actually been using unsubsidized phones for 15 years, I have to say that you're wrong: unsubsidized phones without a contract are already a better deal and they already give you lots more choices and flexibility than locking yourself into a contract.
Of course, you're right that the value of a phone is greatly diminished by being tied to a particular carrier. So, don't buy a Sprint iPhone, it's a simple as that. Sooner or later, Sprint will figure out that they sit on a mountain of iPhones they can't sell and they'll have to lower prices.
I think it's hardly surprising if the editorial page of a conservative business newspaper is outraged at this; that doesn't constitute "widespread outrage".
Well, if you don't like Verizon or their resellers, don't buy a Verizon phone. There are plenty of other carriers and phones you can move between them. I just don't get what all this bellyaching is about.
That is, these organizations are supposed to be engaging in NON-POLITICAL activities,
That's just not true. Nonprofits are perfectly within their rights to engage in political activities. What they may not do is support or oppose specific candidates or intervene in elections; that's a much more narrow restriction.
This "personal definition" weasel word shit is the problem. IMHO the above poster SuperKendoll is pretending that something is not a social issue when common usage of English says it is
Minimum wage is neither "fiscal" nor "social", it's an economic issue, and economics is quite clear about it: it's a bad idea if you care about the general welfare of society and want to help the working poor. Minimum wage only becomes a "social issue" in that passing it will prevent lots of people from getting a first job and for lots of businesses to substitute automation for labor, thereby leading to lots of social problems down the road.
The law forbids non-profits from having a political goal.
That's false. Nonprofits may not conduct political campaign activities, support or oppose political candidates, or intervene in elections. But they most certainly may have political goals, and many of them do.
Oh, please. The term "party" in "tea party" refers to the Boston Tea Party, not a political party. In addition, becoming a political party is a complicated process, not something you do by putting a word in your name.
The fact that the IRS has permitted the LDS and Catholics to get away with using tax exempt resources to campaign does not mean that the IRS should be required to let everybody do it. It means that the IRS needs to do a better job of enforcing the code.
It should. But it should not start doing so by selectively picking on political opponents of the current administration and ignoring supporters of the administration.
Or you can outright buy a phone that's prepaid and in return for less risk on the carriers part, you'll pay a higher price per minute.
The carrier has a higher risk when you buy your phone outright: the risk of you switching to another carrier when the other carrier offers you better conditions. That's why there are long-running contracts in the first place. So, in principle, you should be paying more if you pay month-to-month. In practice, you're actually wrong: month-to-month contracts tend to be cheaper, although largely because you tend to get a lower level of service (little/no phone support, no store support, etc.).
I posted the links in this discussion thread; just look for the post. I used the data from Wikipedia, which comes from pretty standard sources (Small Arms Survey, UNODC). You can plot it yourself if you don't believe me.
If you want to bring this to a point, just look at Mexico: only 15% of households own guns, half the rate of Germany, but its murder rate is more than 20 times that of Germany and nearly five times that of the US. The US murder rate is higher than Europe because the US is quite a bit more like Mexico than like Europe, and no amount of legislation is going to change that.
What does it say about a candidate if he thinks that one of the most important issues facing the nation is which selection of cable TV channels people can subscribe to. What's he going to do next? Highway speed limits for horse-and-buggy carts? Food safety regulations for roadkill? Video game ratings for Pong? Bad as Obama has turned out to be, McCain would have been even worse.
I haven't had a locked phone in the US in 15 years, and I have used every major carrier. If you buy a locked phone on the "overpriced plan for stupid people", that's really your own fault. On the whole, in my experience, US and European cell phone service end up being fairly comparable in price and performance.
I think there's a good chance this administration will sign it and take credit for it: it's popular, yet it's largely a meaningless gesture in the US markets (people are still locked into contracts, and most phones are still incompatible between carriers). That's the kind ot stuff the Obama administration loves to do.
Neither citizenship verification, employment verification, or any of these other functions for which these databases have been proposed actually need centralized government databases. All that you really need is a reasonably secure way of identifying yourself and proving your citizenship. You should be able to store your credentials (physical or electronic) in some secure way if you like, but that should be your choosing. The traditional thing to do is to store your birth certificate, passport, and similar documents in safe or in a bank lock box.
Hey thanks, moron, for stalking me and my slashdot account information.
Reading your Slashdot profile is "stalking"? You're paranoid, which I suppose goes along with your paranoid fantasies about being able to regulate everybody else's lives just because you have an irrational fear of being harmed.
What I see is an article mixes up homicides, suicides, and gun-deaths, and misuses statistics in the most basic way.
Not only does the MJ article fail to show what it purports to show, the errors and deceptions it contains call into question MJ's competency and integrity.
Oh, I just noticed, you are not a software-only klutz, you are actually going for a medical degree. If you think, with a premed education, that these things can be regulated, you are really a complete moron. It is scary to think that people like you actually will practice medicine.
Do you own a 20 mm minigun? How about a room full of pressure cooker improvised explosives? Maybe a fertilizer bomb? There are clearly things that do not belong in the possession of the general public
You can write laws until the cows come home and it won't make any difference: each of these are so easy to construct that anybody who wants one can get one. They can either make them in their garage or outsource it to illegal manufacturers.
(other than properly licensed and checked entities)
I won't even start a discussion of how wrong that view is from a political point of view because your views on practicality are even more idiotic...
and it doesn't need to progress to pulling or pushing the trigger before saying "oops, he shouldn't have possession of that item!"
And how are you going to keep it from "progressing" to that point? Require licenses for pressure cookers? Make the purchase of metal working equipment reportable? Put anybody with college level knowledge of chemistry on a potential terrorist list? Have weekly home inspections of anybody with a metal workshop to make sure they haven't constructed something illegal? Or maybe just give federal prosecutors more leeway to create bogus charges: they can't prove that you illegally leaked classified information to the press, but they can get you for having that "illegal gun making equipment" (i.e., a metal lathe or a 3D printer) in the garage.
People complain about the loss of STEM, manufacturing, and engineering jobs. People getting good in these areas necessarily learn the techniques necessary for gun making and bomb making. Many hobbies necessarily involve the ability to make bombs and/or guns. Even just a serious cook would have reason to have large quantities of carbon, sulfur, nitrate, and a pressure cooker.
Just because you may be a software-only klutz without hobbies doesn't mean the entire world works that way.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't live in a big metropolitan area. You seem to expect metropolitan-area cell phone service and coverage in a rural area with metropolitan-area competition and pricing, and I don't see why you have a reasonable expectation to get that. Lots of things are cheaper in rural areas, but some are more expensive. It's tradeoffs you make. Even once everything has switched to interchangeable LTE service and phones can move freely between carriers, Verizon can and should still charge people like us more in rural areas than they do in metropolitan areas, simply because providing service to us actually is more expensive and there is no reason for people from metropolitan areas to subsidize us. And if you want more competition in your town, why not do something about it yourself? Here, a local ISP just covered the town with WiFi access points and offered competitive rates.
I understand what you're saying, but as someone who has actually been using unsubsidized phones for 15 years, I have to say that you're wrong: unsubsidized phones without a contract are already a better deal and they already give you lots more choices and flexibility than locking yourself into a contract.
Of course, you're right that the value of a phone is greatly diminished by being tied to a particular carrier. So, don't buy a Sprint iPhone, it's a simple as that. Sooner or later, Sprint will figure out that they sit on a mountain of iPhones they can't sell and they'll have to lower prices.
I think it's hardly surprising if the editorial page of a conservative business newspaper is outraged at this; that doesn't constitute "widespread outrage".
Well, if you don't like Verizon or their resellers, don't buy a Verizon phone. There are plenty of other carriers and phones you can move between them. I just don't get what all this bellyaching is about.
Perhaps you should use a dictionary some time yourself? Then perhaps you'd understand what I'm saying.
What an incredibly cynical and and anti-democratic view. We're a democracy, and politics is what makes a democracy work.
That's just not true. Nonprofits are perfectly within their rights to engage in political activities. What they may not do is support or oppose specific candidates or intervene in elections; that's a much more narrow restriction.
Minimum wage is neither "fiscal" nor "social", it's an economic issue, and economics is quite clear about it: it's a bad idea if you care about the general welfare of society and want to help the working poor. Minimum wage only becomes a "social issue" in that passing it will prevent lots of people from getting a first job and for lots of businesses to substitute automation for labor, thereby leading to lots of social problems down the road.
That's merely reporting. Show me widespread publications of opinion pieces and editorials showing outrage.
That's false. Nonprofits may not conduct political campaign activities, support or oppose political candidates, or intervene in elections. But they most certainly may have political goals, and many of them do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)
Oh, please. The term "party" in "tea party" refers to the Boston Tea Party, not a political party. In addition, becoming a political party is a complicated process, not something you do by putting a word in your name.
It should. But it should not start doing so by selectively picking on political opponents of the current administration and ignoring supporters of the administration.
The problem is being resolved: all carriers are switching to LTE, and multi-frequency phones are becoming the norm.
In addition, for each major network, you have a choice of several companies offering plans on it, as the major carriers all resell bandwidth in bulk.
The carrier has a higher risk when you buy your phone outright: the risk of you switching to another carrier when the other carrier offers you better conditions. That's why there are long-running contracts in the first place. So, in principle, you should be paying more if you pay month-to-month. In practice, you're actually wrong: month-to-month contracts tend to be cheaper, although largely because you tend to get a lower level of service (little/no phone support, no store support, etc.).
I posted the links in this discussion thread; just look for the post. I used the data from Wikipedia, which comes from pretty standard sources (Small Arms Survey, UNODC). You can plot it yourself if you don't believe me.
If you want to bring this to a point, just look at Mexico: only 15% of households own guns, half the rate of Germany, but its murder rate is more than 20 times that of Germany and nearly five times that of the US. The US murder rate is higher than Europe because the US is quite a bit more like Mexico than like Europe, and no amount of legislation is going to change that.
What does it say about a candidate if he thinks that one of the most important issues facing the nation is which selection of cable TV channels people can subscribe to. What's he going to do next? Highway speed limits for horse-and-buggy carts? Food safety regulations for roadkill? Video game ratings for Pong? Bad as Obama has turned out to be, McCain would have been even worse.
I haven't had a locked phone in the US in 15 years, and I have used every major carrier. If you buy a locked phone on the "overpriced plan for stupid people", that's really your own fault. On the whole, in my experience, US and European cell phone service end up being fairly comparable in price and performance.
I think there's a good chance this administration will sign it and take credit for it: it's popular, yet it's largely a meaningless gesture in the US markets (people are still locked into contracts, and most phones are still incompatible between carriers). That's the kind ot stuff the Obama administration loves to do.
Neither citizenship verification, employment verification, or any of these other functions for which these databases have been proposed actually need centralized government databases. All that you really need is a reasonably secure way of identifying yourself and proving your citizenship. You should be able to store your credentials (physical or electronic) in some secure way if you like, but that should be your choosing. The traditional thing to do is to store your birth certificate, passport, and similar documents in safe or in a bank lock box.
No, there is no statistically meaningful correlation. I posted scatterplots, you can look at them yourself.
Reading your Slashdot profile is "stalking"? You're paranoid, which I suppose goes along with your paranoid fantasies about being able to regulate everybody else's lives just because you have an irrational fear of being harmed.
What I see is an article mixes up homicides, suicides, and gun-deaths, and misuses statistics in the most basic way.
Not only does the MJ article fail to show what it purports to show, the errors and deceptions it contains call into question MJ's competency and integrity.
To put this into perspective, Righthaven-style shakedowns are legal and common in Germany and probably other European nations.
Oh, I just noticed, you are not a software-only klutz, you are actually going for a medical degree. If you think, with a premed education, that these things can be regulated, you are really a complete moron. It is scary to think that people like you actually will practice medicine.
No, but you seem to be.
You can write laws until the cows come home and it won't make any difference: each of these are so easy to construct that anybody who wants one can get one. They can either make them in their garage or outsource it to illegal manufacturers.
I won't even start a discussion of how wrong that view is from a political point of view because your views on practicality are even more idiotic...
And how are you going to keep it from "progressing" to that point? Require licenses for pressure cookers? Make the purchase of metal working equipment reportable? Put anybody with college level knowledge of chemistry on a potential terrorist list? Have weekly home inspections of anybody with a metal workshop to make sure they haven't constructed something illegal? Or maybe just give federal prosecutors more leeway to create bogus charges: they can't prove that you illegally leaked classified information to the press, but they can get you for having that "illegal gun making equipment" (i.e., a metal lathe or a 3D printer) in the garage.
People complain about the loss of STEM, manufacturing, and engineering jobs. People getting good in these areas necessarily learn the techniques necessary for gun making and bomb making. Many hobbies necessarily involve the ability to make bombs and/or guns. Even just a serious cook would have reason to have large quantities of carbon, sulfur, nitrate, and a pressure cooker.
Just because you may be a software-only klutz without hobbies doesn't mean the entire world works that way.