Now, about the real problem. Why is everybody so concerned about their credit worthness?
Aside from the many considerations other posters already mentioned, did you know that with many companies, your car/home insurance rates are affected by your credit score?
In fact, the formula favor having access to lots of debt that isn't utilized.
Sorry, I sort of said this wrong. I didn't mean to imply that having more credit available will necessarily increase your credit score. One of the factors taken into account is your credit utilization. This is the outstanding balance divided by your total available credit. A lower utilization is better to some degree. A 1% utilization probably isn't going to score any better than a 2% utilization, but it most certainly will score better than a 80% utilization. So, having a $500 credit limit and using $400 of it looks bad. Having a $5000 credit limit and using $400 of it looks a LOT better.
Even if you don't carry a balance month to month, this can still be important. Credit reports don't track credit balances over time . They are simply a snapshot of your current situation. So having $5k that you carry from month to month and only make minimum payments looks exactly like charging $5k every month and then paying it all off when the due date arrives. In both cases, your credit report will always show a $5k balance, so if you have $100k in credit lines (across all accounts combined), that's going to show a lower utilization than if you've only got $10k available.
You don't have to be from Europe to see the lies behind the current system of credit in America. The whole thing is designed so that people must have debt in order to beg the banks for more debt. It's absolutely crazy.
Nope, the problem there is that you are uneducated about credit scores. You can build a fantastic credit score without going into debt 1 cent. Having credit cards and using them responsibly - not going over your limit, paying them off each month, never missing a payment - is more than enough to build yourself a fantastic credit score over time. The credit score formulas don't favor carrying debt. In fact, the formula favor having access to lots of debt that isn't utilized. It shows you can be trusted not to blow all of your money.
This shouldn't matter. If you're using your credit card as a source of credit (instead of as a debit card), you're doing it wrong.
Really? In 2008, I make nearly 4k by using my credit card as a source of credit. I had more than 100k credit borrowed from credit cards at 0% + no fee, and stashed it in savings accounts returning >3% interest. I never realized I was doing it wrong. Thanks for correcting my mistake.
Mythtv currently does not use (and as far as I know, never has used) volume as a consideration in its commercial detection. You can read about it here: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Commercial_Detection
OMG. Yep, our god Steve could never do anything wrong. He must have been trying to do something altruistic. Yep, never mind the fact that Apple outright sued several other companies over phone patents already. This time they must have been doing something good. I'm not sure why he would try to do this good deed secretly so as not to draw positive attention to the company, while at the same time doing the not-so-good deeds very publicly and drawing negative attention, but I'm sure he has his reasons. All hail Steve.
Let me get this straight. You don't think a "politician" would feel "threatened" by a Robodialer enough to put the person on a "Terrorist Watch List" or something?
No, not really. In fact, if YOU believe they'd kill someone over a phone call, then they'd probably feel more threatened by you. If you are unstable enough to believe in such craziness, there no predicting what sort of action you might take to protect yourself from those delusions.
Whoever modded the above Flamebait is sadly, no, make that tragically out of touch with what is going on in the US today. The OP's statement is feasible based on just 2 items that came out of the government this week. Worst part? It would be legal!
The Obama government (whom I supported in 2008) is turning out to be one scary piece of work.
LOL. Instead of just being very vague to try and sound insightful, please specifically lay out for me which policies or actions by the "Obama government" makes you believe it is feasible that someone would be killed by the government for reverse robocalling politicians.
But these are generally (renewable) overnight loans so wouldn't you have to multiply by 365 to get the yearly rate we normally think of?
No. It's called the overnight rate because it's used for overnight lending between banks, but it's still an APR just like other published interest rates. If you have any doubts about whether that's true, just look at the historical figures for this rate: http://www.moneycafe.com/library/fedfundsrate.htm
In 2001 the overnight rate was 6.5%. Do the math: ( (1.0 + 0.065) ^ 365) - 1.0 = (1.065^365) - 1.0 = 9,607,421,348 - 1.0 = 9,607,421,347
Do you REALLY believe the banks were borrowing at 900 billion percent interest?
First, we've seen a number of studies that show the more people download, the more they tend to spend on music, so the assumption that downloading hurts that particular industry or artists is in doubt.
Second, they say that downloading is complementary. In my case, this is true. I download music, but it's mostly just to listen to a song once or twice and then it just sits there. The music I listen too over and over are bands that I really appreciate and enjoy their music. For them, I don't even bother trying to download it. As soon as a new CD comes I buy it right away. If downloading went away, I can guarantee you I wouldn't spend a penny more on music. In fact, if all forms of "downloading" (including things like youtube) went away, I'd probably spend a little less as I wouldn't have discovered a couple of bands.
Everything you said is true. In addition there's also the fact that in the Thai case, everything the guy did that was against Thai law was done in the US. As far as I can tell, his visit to Thailand had nothing to do with the crime he was being charged with. However, in this case, the extortion didn't end it Hungary. When this guy set foot in the US, he was still the the act of extorting Marriott.
But whichever side the argument really originated from is irrelevant to my point, which is that he would not care to control either.
What do you mean, he would not care to control either? You always have to control zoom. There's no such thing as automatic zoom. You either have manual zoom, or you have power zoom. Neither is automatic...you have to do both of them yourself. The difference is, with power zoom you end up with a very slow and imprecise zooming mechanism. Your subject is too small in the frame, so you press the zoom in button/level...wait while it slowly starts to zoom, and then....oh it just went to far. Now the subject doesn't fit in the frame. Ok, so zoom out...it takes a slight delay before the zooming kicks in and...oh, it jumped too far out again. Repeat this a few times and it gets really annoying.
The recommendation of a DSLR may have certainly been overkill for what the guy wanted, but there's nothing inherent about the feature of manual zoom that the guy would have objected to. Of course, that may be purely academic, since (as far as I know, but I may be wrong) there's no P&S on the market that has a manual zoom feature, but you aren't taking issue with the DSLR suggestion in general. Even after I pointed out your error and you corrected yourself, you are still taking issue with the concept of manual zoom, and that just doesn't make sense to me.
Come on, you are advocating use of a camera for manual zoom to a person who said explicitly they do not want to photograph as part of a serious hobby or profession?
That makes NO SENSE. People who are not seriously into photography DO NOT WANT to manually focus a camera, DO NOT CARE about a critical point of focus. You guys are ill-serving this poor questioner with confusing responses like this, which will in the end deliver unto him a bag of frustrations.
Wow, you were so quick to post your outrage, you failed to even comprehend that manual zoom and manual focus are not the same thing.
The fault of GroupOn is an inability to set limits in the number of coupons issued....If GroupOn allowed a limit to the number of coupons, say 2,500 then she many not have needed the extra employees and not suffered the losses from it.
You are absolutely right....except for that fact that you are absolutely wrong. Groupon DOES allow limits. I know I've intended to buy a groupon before but waited before purchasing, and when I later came back, the deal was over BEFORE the expiration because it reached the max quantity. Don't believe me? How about from the Groupon CEO himself:
Also, to clarify one important point: it has always been Groupon policy to allow merchants to cap deals. If a merchant sells too many Groupons, they’ll have a bad experience, the customer will have a bad experience, and therefore, Groupon loses. We’re longer-term thinkers than that. In fact, we have the opposite problem more often – where merchants protest a cap we recommend, convinced they can handle more customers than we think they can.
If this were a problem, wouldn't it also affect nooks and other readers that use e-Ink? The displays are all made by the same company, after all.
Remember when Toyota was in the news for the unintended acceleration thing? Funny, because up until that point, all brands had similar numbers of sporadic cases of UA, but none of them made the news. Then suddenly Toyota makes the news, and out of nowhere, nearly all models of Toyota's began exhibiting the problem at the same time. And it didn't matter if it was a new car just off the lot or a vehicle that had been driven for several years. Suddenly they all started failing at once. Then just as quickly the problem disappeared. But surprisingly, none of the other non-Toyota brands made headlines for similar problems, even though they all experienced it.
So, the answer may very well be that publicity has drawn people's attention to it. Did my nook fail? Well then I guess it was just a piece of crap. Did my kindle fail? Yeah, well then I guess it too was just a....wait a minute...did someone say something about airport scanners? I was at the airport recently. The airport scanners killed my kindle.
the First Amendment does not protect stealing goods off trucks
Does anyone else think this was a poor analogy? I thought everyone knew by know that the internet isn't a big truck. It's a series of tubes. Maybe she can come back with an analogy that includes those tubes at the bank drive through or something.
That new gmail interface sucks. I'm convinced that the issues is that all of their graphics designers are on strike. I suck at graphic design, but even I can do better than that.
Individual messages in conversations just blend together. I can't compose more than 1 reply at a time in a thread anymore. In long mail list threads, I often like to start multiple replies, but continue reading the thread before I submit anything or compose further. No more. And WTF are those button icons? That's supposed to mean "archive"? And is that a trash can or a card being inserted into a slot. And why is there a folder button AND a tag button when they are the same thing? Yes, I know the folder means to move the message, but that's not intuitive from the graphic, and if I have to stop for a second to think about each and every icon, that's just crap.
Please stop trying to make a consistent interface across all device (aka dumbing down to the least common denominator),
So sad that your attitude appears to be to brag about how bad you were abused, and to dismiss others abuse because it wasn't as severe as yours. By that token, I suppose I should just call you a whiny little bitch, since your abuse only results in 30 minutes of crying. That's nothing...soldiers in war are captured and sometimes abused for months on end (and in ways certainly much worse than you experienced), resulting in YEARS of them crying about it. You getting slapped around a couple times is NOTHING compared to what they go through, so boo hoo to you.
Funny. A belt is child abuse these days. In my day, that was considered 'punishment' for fucking up.
I'll grant you that there definitely is a bit of debate and disagreement on whether punishment with a belt is considered discipline or abuse. In a way I think it kind of borders on abuse, but at the same time, I was whipped with a belt as a child and I don't really think of myself as having been abused.
However, that's beside the point. We aren't talking about hitting someone with a belt a couple of times. We are talking about a video of him whipping and degrading her for SEVEN MINUTES. After about the first 5 hits in about 20 seconds, she's cryiing and begging him to stop, but he continues on. She's hit with the belt a total of 18 times. At one point (about 4:20 in the video) he appears to hit, punch, or slam her (you can hear a pretty loud thump, and you can tell it's not the belt). He uses phrases like "I didn't get my licks in yet", "I'm going to BEAT you into submission" (emphasis his), and "I'll keep BEATIN you, and BEATIN you". Apparently his wife even claims she was abused, and she eventually left him for that reason.
I don't think the problem is exposure, as my understanding is that these are just sensors all controlled by the controller, so I'm fairly sure that's not the issue (as it would be if you had just jammed 36 off-the-shelf digi-cams in there. But even if that were the problem, it would be trivial to solve. Even if you can't force them all to use the same fixed exposure and white balance settings, that can be corrected after the fact by reading the settings out of the exif and compensating in software.
The bigger issue is that the lenses are aligned differently geometrically, so when you get things like glare from the sun or another bright source, each lens suffers a different level of glare, and rather than a gradual transition, you end up with drastic changes where the image switches from one lens to another. You can somewhat compensate for this by doing a gradual transition from lens to lens in the overlapping area, but even that's only going to partially fix the problem.
You also see a problem similar to this if you try to stitch together multiple images that were taken through a polarizing lens, as the polarizer's effect is dependent upon it's angle to the sun.
I've seen a number of people making these, and some are pretty poorly done...you can very easily tell it's fake. The ones in the link above a extremely realistic. They have all of the imperfections in the skin, like birthmarks, veins, blotches, etc. About the only part that isn't quite perfect is the eyeballs (sort of a glassy marble material). And the way they move is just odd. If you tip them to the side, they don't just flop over...they slowly lean that way, making it look like a real baby moving. To add to the creepiness, their mouth opens and they've got a tongue inside, and they've got fully formed genitals.
13... and all my stuff is __GONE__ ! 14. Go to iTunes, explicitly tell it to sync applications, hit sync.. 15. Only a few apps have been restored 16. Back to iTunes, manually check all applications that you want to have restored (why are most of them unchecked and not synced by default!?) 17. Sync.. 18...wait..wait..wait...wait.... FINALLY. DONE.
Did you actually get everything back....settings, data, and all? I've had issues with itunes sync and restore features before, but I wasn't so lucky. I don't recall what I was doing at the time (upgrading ios, or just trying to add some music or something) but I too got a dialog telling me essentially it was going to wipe everything, with buttons to confirm or cancel. I choose cancel, and it begins deleting apps from my device. I quickly disconnect to abort. Try the process over. Get the same dialog. Read carefully, and again make sure I choose cancel. It starts deleting again. I abort and try again. This time, just out of curiosity, I choose confirm to see what it will do. It again starts deleting. WTF...no matter whether I say confirm or cancel, it deletes anyway?
OK...so I figure I'm hosed at this point. I check my backups, and indeed there is a backup from earlier that day, so I go ahead and let it wipe (hoping maybe it will wipe it and then reload it or something). Nope, it just wipes it. Fine. Restore my trusty backup and all is well....wait, no it's not....that backup dated for today restored my device to the state it was in 6 MONTHS AGO? WTF apple? Everything worked fine after that, and I was able to copy my apps back over, but any data I had created in the last 6 months was gone.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, about the real problem. Why is everybody so concerned about their credit worthness?
Aside from the many considerations other posters already mentioned, did you know that with many companies, your car/home insurance rates are affected by your credit score?
In fact, the formula favor having access to lots of debt that isn't utilized.
Sorry, I sort of said this wrong. I didn't mean to imply that having more credit available will necessarily increase your credit score. One of the factors taken into account is your credit utilization. This is the outstanding balance divided by your total available credit. A lower utilization is better to some degree. A 1% utilization probably isn't going to score any better than a 2% utilization, but it most certainly will score better than a 80% utilization. So, having a $500 credit limit and using $400 of it looks bad. Having a $5000 credit limit and using $400 of it looks a LOT better.
Even if you don't carry a balance month to month, this can still be important. Credit reports don't track credit balances over time . They are simply a snapshot of your current situation. So having $5k that you carry from month to month and only make minimum payments looks exactly like charging $5k every month and then paying it all off when the due date arrives. In both cases, your credit report will always show a $5k balance, so if you have $100k in credit lines (across all accounts combined), that's going to show a lower utilization than if you've only got $10k available.
You don't have to be from Europe to see the lies behind the current system of credit in America. The whole thing is designed so that people must have debt in order to beg the banks for more debt. It's absolutely crazy.
Nope, the problem there is that you are uneducated about credit scores. You can build a fantastic credit score without going into debt 1 cent. Having credit cards and using them responsibly - not going over your limit, paying them off each month, never missing a payment - is more than enough to build yourself a fantastic credit score over time. The credit score formulas don't favor carrying debt. In fact, the formula favor having access to lots of debt that isn't utilized. It shows you can be trusted not to blow all of your money.
This shouldn't matter. If you're using your credit card as a source of credit (instead of as a debit card), you're doing it wrong.
Really? In 2008, I make nearly 4k by using my credit card as a source of credit. I had more than 100k credit borrowed from credit cards at 0% + no fee, and stashed it in savings accounts returning >3% interest. I never realized I was doing it wrong. Thanks for correcting my mistake.
Mythtv currently does not use (and as far as I know, never has used) volume as a consideration in its commercial detection. You can read about it here:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Commercial_Detection
OMG. Yep, our god Steve could never do anything wrong. He must have been trying to do something altruistic. Yep, never mind the fact that Apple outright sued several other companies over phone patents already. This time they must have been doing something good. I'm not sure why he would try to do this good deed secretly so as not to draw positive attention to the company, while at the same time doing the not-so-good deeds very publicly and drawing negative attention, but I'm sure he has his reasons. All hail Steve.
Let me get this straight. You don't think a "politician" would feel "threatened" by a Robodialer enough to put the person on a "Terrorist Watch List" or something?
No, not really. In fact, if YOU believe they'd kill someone over a phone call, then they'd probably feel more threatened by you. If you are unstable enough to believe in such craziness, there no predicting what sort of action you might take to protect yourself from those delusions.
Whoever modded the above Flamebait is sadly, no, make that tragically out of touch with what is going on in the US today. The OP's statement is feasible based on just 2 items that came out of the government this week. Worst part? It would be legal!
The Obama government (whom I supported in 2008) is turning out to be one scary piece of work.
LOL. Instead of just being very vague to try and sound insightful, please specifically lay out for me which policies or actions by the "Obama government" makes you believe it is feasible that someone would be killed by the government for reverse robocalling politicians.
'photogs' (why can't they call themselves photographers? weird.)
Must be a regional thing or something, because I know of no photographers who refer to themselves as "photogs". Not even the youngins.
But these are generally (renewable) overnight loans so wouldn't you have to multiply by 365 to get the yearly rate we normally think of?
No. It's called the overnight rate because it's used for overnight lending between banks, but it's still an APR just like other published interest rates. If you have any doubts about whether that's true, just look at the historical figures for this rate:
http://www.moneycafe.com/library/fedfundsrate.htm
In 2001 the overnight rate was 6.5%. Do the math:
( (1.0 + 0.065) ^ 365) - 1.0 = (1.065^365) - 1.0 = 9,607,421,348 - 1.0 = 9,607,421,347
Do you REALLY believe the banks were borrowing at 900 billion percent interest?
The banks got 7.7 trillion at .001 interest rate
On The Daily Show, I could have swore I heard them say .01 percent, which would be .0001 interest rate.
lots of magazines (probably most) publish about a month before the issue date.
First, we've seen a number of studies that show the more people download, the more they tend to spend on music, so the assumption that downloading hurts that particular industry or artists is in doubt.
Second, they say that downloading is complementary. In my case, this is true. I download music, but it's mostly just to listen to a song once or twice and then it just sits there. The music I listen too over and over are bands that I really appreciate and enjoy their music. For them, I don't even bother trying to download it. As soon as a new CD comes I buy it right away. If downloading went away, I can guarantee you I wouldn't spend a penny more on music. In fact, if all forms of "downloading" (including things like youtube) went away, I'd probably spend a little less as I wouldn't have discovered a couple of bands.
Everything you said is true. In addition there's also the fact that in the Thai case, everything the guy did that was against Thai law was done in the US. As far as I can tell, his visit to Thailand had nothing to do with the crime he was being charged with. However, in this case, the extortion didn't end it Hungary. When this guy set foot in the US, he was still the the act of extorting Marriott.
But whichever side the argument really originated from is irrelevant to my point, which is that he would not care to control either.
What do you mean, he would not care to control either? You always have to control zoom. There's no such thing as automatic zoom. You either have manual zoom, or you have power zoom. Neither is automatic...you have to do both of them yourself. The difference is, with power zoom you end up with a very slow and imprecise zooming mechanism. Your subject is too small in the frame, so you press the zoom in button/level...wait while it slowly starts to zoom, and then....oh it just went to far. Now the subject doesn't fit in the frame. Ok, so zoom out...it takes a slight delay before the zooming kicks in and...oh, it jumped too far out again. Repeat this a few times and it gets really annoying.
The recommendation of a DSLR may have certainly been overkill for what the guy wanted, but there's nothing inherent about the feature of manual zoom that the guy would have objected to. Of course, that may be purely academic, since (as far as I know, but I may be wrong) there's no P&S on the market that has a manual zoom feature, but you aren't taking issue with the DSLR suggestion in general. Even after I pointed out your error and you corrected yourself, you are still taking issue with the concept of manual zoom, and that just doesn't make sense to me.
" manual zoom, which is much faster and accurate"
Come on, you are advocating use of a camera for manual zoom to a person who said explicitly they do not want to photograph as part of a serious hobby or profession?
That makes NO SENSE. People who are not seriously into photography DO NOT WANT to manually focus a camera, DO NOT CARE about a critical point of focus. You guys are ill-serving this poor questioner with confusing responses like this, which will in the end deliver unto him a bag of frustrations.
Wow, you were so quick to post your outrage, you failed to even comprehend that manual zoom and manual focus are not the same thing.
The fault of GroupOn is an inability to set limits in the number of coupons issued....If GroupOn allowed a limit to the number of coupons, say 2,500 then she many not have needed the extra employees and not suffered the losses from it.
You are absolutely right....except for that fact that you are absolutely wrong. Groupon DOES allow limits. I know I've intended to buy a groupon before but waited before purchasing, and when I later came back, the deal was over BEFORE the expiration because it reached the max quantity. Don't believe me? How about from the Groupon CEO himself:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/09/17/businessinsider-groupon-ceo-posies-2010-9.DTL#ixzz0zp2ktgaQ
If this were a problem, wouldn't it also affect nooks and other readers that use e-Ink? The displays are all made by the same company, after all.
Remember when Toyota was in the news for the unintended acceleration thing? Funny, because up until that point, all brands had similar numbers of sporadic cases of UA, but none of them made the news. Then suddenly Toyota makes the news, and out of nowhere, nearly all models of Toyota's began exhibiting the problem at the same time. And it didn't matter if it was a new car just off the lot or a vehicle that had been driven for several years. Suddenly they all started failing at once. Then just as quickly the problem disappeared. But surprisingly, none of the other non-Toyota brands made headlines for similar problems, even though they all experienced it.
So, the answer may very well be that publicity has drawn people's attention to it. Did my nook fail? Well then I guess it was just a piece of crap. Did my kindle fail? Yeah, well then I guess it too was just a....wait a minute...did someone say something about airport scanners? I was at the airport recently. The airport scanners killed my kindle.
Does anyone else think this was a poor analogy? I thought everyone knew by know that the internet isn't a big truck. It's a series of tubes. Maybe she can come back with an analogy that includes those tubes at the bank drive through or something.
That new gmail interface sucks. I'm convinced that the issues is that all of their graphics designers are on strike. I suck at graphic design, but even I can do better than that.
Individual messages in conversations just blend together. I can't compose more than 1 reply at a time in a thread anymore. In long mail list threads, I often like to start multiple replies, but continue reading the thread before I submit anything or compose further. No more. And WTF are those button icons? That's supposed to mean "archive"? And is that a trash can or a card being inserted into a slot. And why is there a folder button AND a tag button when they are the same thing? Yes, I know the folder means to move the message, but that's not intuitive from the graphic, and if I have to stop for a second to think about each and every icon, that's just crap.
Please stop trying to make a consistent interface across all device (aka dumbing down to the least common denominator),
So sad that your attitude appears to be to brag about how bad you were abused, and to dismiss others abuse because it wasn't as severe as yours. By that token, I suppose I should just call you a whiny little bitch, since your abuse only results in 30 minutes of crying. That's nothing...soldiers in war are captured and sometimes abused for months on end (and in ways certainly much worse than you experienced), resulting in YEARS of them crying about it. You getting slapped around a couple times is NOTHING compared to what they go through, so boo hoo to you.
Funny. A belt is child abuse these days. In my day, that was considered 'punishment' for fucking up.
I'll grant you that there definitely is a bit of debate and disagreement on whether punishment with a belt is considered discipline or abuse. In a way I think it kind of borders on abuse, but at the same time, I was whipped with a belt as a child and I don't really think of myself as having been abused.
However, that's beside the point. We aren't talking about hitting someone with a belt a couple of times. We are talking about a video of him whipping and degrading her for SEVEN MINUTES. After about the first 5 hits in about 20 seconds, she's cryiing and begging him to stop, but he continues on. She's hit with the belt a total of 18 times. At one point (about 4:20 in the video) he appears to hit, punch, or slam her (you can hear a pretty loud thump, and you can tell it's not the belt). He uses phrases like "I didn't get my licks in yet", "I'm going to BEAT you into submission" (emphasis his), and "I'll keep BEATIN you, and BEATIN you". Apparently his wife even claims she was abused, and she eventually left him for that reason.
Here's the video of the whole thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEaqB4773MA
I don't think the problem is exposure, as my understanding is that these are just sensors all controlled by the controller, so I'm fairly sure that's not the issue (as it would be if you had just jammed 36 off-the-shelf digi-cams in there. But even if that were the problem, it would be trivial to solve. Even if you can't force them all to use the same fixed exposure and white balance settings, that can be corrected after the fact by reading the settings out of the exif and compensating in software.
The bigger issue is that the lenses are aligned differently geometrically, so when you get things like glare from the sun or another bright source, each lens suffers a different level of glare, and rather than a gradual transition, you end up with drastic changes where the image switches from one lens to another. You can somewhat compensate for this by doing a gradual transition from lens to lens in the overlapping area, but even that's only going to partially fix the problem.
You also see a problem similar to this if you try to stitch together multiple images that were taken through a polarizing lens, as the polarizer's effect is dependent upon it's angle to the sun.
You think these are creepy? Have you ever seen silicone babies? Now THAT is creepy:
http://www.juliemolloydolls.com/silicone_babies
I've seen a number of people making these, and some are pretty poorly done...you can very easily tell it's fake. The ones in the link above a extremely realistic. They have all of the imperfections in the skin, like birthmarks, veins, blotches, etc. About the only part that isn't quite perfect is the eyeballs (sort of a glassy marble material). And the way they move is just odd. If you tip them to the side, they don't just flop over...they slowly lean that way, making it look like a real baby moving. To add to the creepiness, their mouth opens and they've got a tongue inside, and they've got fully formed genitals.
13. .. and all my stuff is __GONE__ ! ..wait..wait..wait...wait.... FINALLY. DONE.
14. Go to iTunes, explicitly tell it to sync applications, hit sync..
15. Only a few apps have been restored
16. Back to iTunes, manually check all applications that you want to have restored (why are most of them unchecked and not synced by default!?)
17. Sync..
18.
Did you actually get everything back....settings, data, and all? I've had issues with itunes sync and restore features before, but I wasn't so lucky. I don't recall what I was doing at the time (upgrading ios, or just trying to add some music or something) but I too got a dialog telling me essentially it was going to wipe everything, with buttons to confirm or cancel. I choose cancel, and it begins deleting apps from my device. I quickly disconnect to abort. Try the process over. Get the same dialog. Read carefully, and again make sure I choose cancel. It starts deleting again. I abort and try again. This time, just out of curiosity, I choose confirm to see what it will do. It again starts deleting. WTF...no matter whether I say confirm or cancel, it deletes anyway?
OK...so I figure I'm hosed at this point. I check my backups, and indeed there is a backup from earlier that day, so I go ahead and let it wipe (hoping maybe it will wipe it and then reload it or something). Nope, it just wipes it. Fine. Restore my trusty backup and all is well....wait, no it's not....that backup dated for today restored my device to the state it was in 6 MONTHS AGO? WTF apple? Everything worked fine after that, and I was able to copy my apps back over, but any data I had created in the last 6 months was gone.