3. The United States Government were mighty white to share the technology embedded in their GPS system for commercial use...
I haven't heard that phrase used since the '80s. It seemed to me to have a dual meaning -- on the surface, a compliment, if you accept the underlying dynamic. But it's a backhanded compliment, implying that you've done something that is so obvious that you'd have to be pretty goofy *not* to do it. That's the disturbing part -- if you hadn't done it, you'd be "not white".
The opposite term, equally disturbing, would be "Indian Giver", a term for someone who promises something they have no intention of delivering.
Both terms are so historically backward that it hurts; it was the white establishment that systematically denied non-whites basic human rights, and it was the Native Americans who were promised things that the US Government consistently refused to give.
I sincerely hope that neither "that's mighty white of you" nor "Indian Giver" make any sense at all to anyone born after 1990.
The problem is simply finding them. The signal-to-noise ratio of the big places like Monster and Dice is terrible.
I groan whenever I see someone ranting about how Slashdot has "sold out", though the whining has gone down in the years since they went semi-corporate. Still, there's the occasional whimper, especially if an article in some way might be helpful to Slashdot's parents or advertisers.
So, will this rather backhanded mention of Dice.com, whose ads I see constantly on Slashdot, silence those critics?
The fact that this joke, despite never being funny to begin with and being repeated to death by nerds everywhere ad nauseum, is still being modded up (to 5 for christsake) has convinced me to never try to actually instill any kind of sense into any of the people who post comments here ever again. So as long as the humor here is always going to be mindlessly repeated garbage, I'm going to go back to post spamming goatse, poop, and butts, which I find to be much more consistently fulfilling, and frankly, hilarious.
Cool! I had no idea. I wonder if I'd have been interested if I'd known about it?
I think my problem is that I wasn't the buy-a-game kind of geek, but more of the write-a-game kind of geek. In 1985, I was doing hardware-level stuff, like breadboarding a Radio Shack voice modulator chip to work from the TRS-80 Model 100's parallel port. As a result, I probably missed out on a lot of what was out there.
Also, that was my senior year, so I was trying to spend more time at the drive-in (not watching movies) than keeping up with gaming.
As a teenager in the early '80s, I wasn't terribly aware of the people who were actually getting paid to do what I and my friends were figuring out how to do on the TRS-80 and Apple ][. But one name that percolated up was Bill Budge, the programmer behind the wildly popular Pinball Construction Set. It was probably the closest thing you could get to The Sims on a 6502.
Oddly enough, I don't think I ever played it myself. Or rather, I never built anything -- I probably played some of my friends' creations. His name stuck in my mind thanks to a list in some computer magazine about "Opcodes we'd like to see". (That's an assembler term, for you High-Level Language junkies.) The only one I still remember was "PBB -- Program like Bill Budge".
I'm sure the engineers behind the concept are thinking in terms of watts per sq meter, or whatever unit is used to express the actual amount of signal that will be available to the future colonists. And I guess "bars" is a nice, non-technical term, like "Size of Texas" and "Volume of the Library of Congress".
But at least I can look up the size of Texas and the volume of the LoC, and I can even take a guess as to the length of a Fortnight. "Bar" is an utterly meaningless and arbitrary measurement. Heck, my phone shows FIVE bars. Does that mean I have any better reception than someone who hacked together a DSP and a SIM card and gave it a red/green LED telltale?
AT&T and their ubiquitous advertising -- I'm sucked into it too, looking for rising bar metaphors like a teenager looking for the Bunny symbol on the dog-eared cover of his dad's Playboy. When NASA rolls out the system, they'll need to be more even-handed. In addition to the AT&T "bars of service", they should ask "Can you hear me now?" for Verizon, "Where you at?" for Boost, and "No, you may NOT tap our customers' phones" for Quest.
I have several CO2 tanks sitting in my garage for serving beer. These contain liquid CO2. I hardly consider them dangerous objects. If a CO2 storage tank got punctured during a crash, a lot of gas would vent rather quickly but the tank isn't going to just peel apart. I've seen tanks shot with high power rifles, and they don't explode. You get a jet of CO2 "snow flakes" like out of a fire extinguisher. Is it dangerous? Yeah. But so is a car crash.
If Slashdot allowed it, I'd take the mod points off of my posting and put them on yours. Thanks for refuting my (now-)glaring mistakes!
The Georgia Tech team has already created a fuel processor, called CO2/H2 Active Membrane Piston (CHAMP) reactor, capable of efficiently producing hydrogen and separating and liquefying CO2 from a liquid hydrocarbon or synthetic fuel used by an internal combustion engine or fuel cell. After the carbon dioxide is separated from the hydrogen, it can then be stored in liquefied state on-board the vehicle. The liquid state provides a much more stable and dense form of carbon, which is easy to store and transport.
I don't know what planet they were planning to use these vehicles on, but on *this* one, CO2 is a GAS. You've got to have some serious refrigeration (requiring, uh oh, ENERGY) and some darned high pressure to store liquid CO2. Laws of thermodynamics aside, I'd rather not be sitting on a mobile dry ice bomb, thankyouverymuch.
A side note: the original tag for Roland articles was "pigpile", not "ohnoitsroland" (or any of the cruder variants). Piquepaille = Pigpile, get it? And it's usually an apt description of the science behind the "discovery".
In Christianity, in some parts of Europe there are a few people who are a bit too much in love with Mary (for my taste), that wouldn't have happened if there were no pictures of her around.
You think Europe's bad? I can't imagine it could be any more Mary-obsessed than Mexico, or at least that part of the Mexican culture on display in Texas. The image of La Virgen de Guadalupe, borne on a cloud by a little dark-skinned angel, graces everything from cathedrals to car windows to the Bandana of Catholicism I got from Woot.
(Of course, being Protestant, I never quite understood the whole thing of praying to someone other than the Big Guy himself...)
The NYTimes notes that prognosticators expect Congress not to act on a budget until the next President arrives, betting on it being a Democrat.
While the Democratically-controlled Congress may indeed delay approving a budget, I'm sure they know that the next election could just as easily put another Republican in the White House -- and that their razor-thin majority (especially in the Senate) could be lost as well, depending on the R-side coattails.
I think the goal is to not act on the budget until the next President arrives, betting on it not being an Idiot.
I'm thoroughly unlikely to use a system that ranks my search results based on the preferences of my friends. I know *I* never put anything but the most basic information about me online (name and website is all that's required by the Geneva Convention, right?). So anyone whose searches are based on *my* stated interests will find a bunch of Dixie Chicks stuff, and little else.
And what about my searches based on *their* interests? Do I even *want* to know what they're doing with their time online? Even if the results aren't personalized ("Jim would probably like this link"), I'd rather not do a search on sushi restaurants and learn to my dismay that one or more of my friends has interests that include tentacle porn. And I don't even want to *think* about what could happen on a search for a good plate of cabrito!
When I worked for a large American Airline, the expectation was that all competent IT staffers would eventually "progress" into management. My stepmom, who worked for the same company, had to actively resist being promoted -- because she *wanted* to keep solving problems with code, not with overhead-projector (pre-PowerPoint) presentations.
I figured it wouldn't be so bad, so I moved in that direction by being the "lead" on a project. I got good feedback from our (internal) customer, so there was no reason to think I couldn't continue to "progress". It was really only because of a boss with personal hangups (he thought I wasn't "manly" enough for the mechanics -- the mechanics didn't care, they just wanted the thing to work) that I'm not still there, "progressing".
But I'm extremely happy where I'm at now. There is no obvious path from technical expert to management, and it works just fine. The most senior programmers are free to -- get this -- program at a senior level. Our management consists almost entirely of folks with a deep understanding of the business, not the code. As a result, we have virtually none of the micromanagement of the coding process that sometimes gummed up the works at the major American Airline. There's one project in particular that was completely FUBARed because management had no understanding of the business needs of the customer. That's never happened in my 12 years at my current employer.
So I'd suggest you ask yourself: are you asking how to get into management because that's what you want to do? Would you really rather direct projects and people than program? Or is the "path to management" a false career path foisted on you by the culture of your current employer?
Three centimeters wingspan is life-size? What kind of flies are they referring to? That's a pretty big fly.
You should get out of the city more often. We swat 1-inch horseflies whenever we see them, because they bite the horses (and us, if we're slow enough) and spread Equine Infectious Anemia (aka "Swamp Fever", or frequently "Coggins" after the test used to detect it).
If someone saw an inch-and-a-half specimen, they'd just think it was a little overgrown. Of course, normally when you smash one they splatter blood (yours, or your horse's) all over the place. Not sure what an old-time horseman would do if it looked back at him with Terminator-style red eyes after a swattin'.
I took French in high school, but I've always been confused by the term "Sommelier". I remember that "Sommeil" means "sleep", as in J'ai sommeil, maman! ("I'm sleepy, mama!"). So a "sommelier", it would seem, would be an expert in helping you go to sleep.
Of course, in the US, there would be no difference. Any discussion of cellphone features would be so boring, thanks to our provider-mandated crippled (but free) hardware, that it would put the most tragic insomniac into a deep slumber. "CallerTunes lets you subject inbound callers to your poor musical tastes!" "ZZZZzzzzzzzz"
I hadn't realized it until this thread, but Star Trek was my first computer game. I was around 12, so it must have been 1979, when my stepmom took me to work with her at her mainframe consulting gig at Continental Airlines. She took me to an out-of-the-way workstation and typed a cryptic program name, which brought up Star Trek. It was awesome, and kept me occupied and out of her hair for hours.
We got the TRS-80 a couple of years later, I wrote a hybrid BASIC/Assembler target shooting game (POKEing my asm code into memory), and the rest is history.
I still remember asking why that original program wasn't simply called STARTREK. It wasn't supposed to be on the system, she told me... so they would change its name periodically to prevent discovery. Also, I shouldn't say anything about it while there, and just be quiet in general. That last instruction may not have been game-related, however...
This is great news for Congressman "Smoky Joe" Barton's friends at the smelter upwind of Dallas. Next time they get hauled before the clean air folks, they can just say "We're not generating air pollution! We're controlling Dallas' rodent population!"
Well, some people don't want to get shot in the knee and dragged to Guantanamo. Welcome the the police state that is the US. He acted perfectly reasonable. They just say "terrorism" and can do everything they want. So by consenting to everything they wanted he was able to stop them from doing worse or using force. "I swear I saw the gun in his hand, your honor." "Case dimissed."
I'm a Green Party member and I'm thoroughly disgusted by my country's actions in this so-called "War on Terror" that has killed far more US citizens than died on 9/11 while focusing on the wrong country altogether. I know that the authorities overreact in stupid ways that disrupt and destroy lives.
But to describe the US as a "police state" is ludicrous. I can write this post in the full knowledge that anyone interested can find out who I am and where I live, yet I am quite sure the FBI has better things to do than knock down my apartment door in the middle of the night (though if I'm not on some list by now, I'd be surprised).
Yes, our freedoms and rights are being eroded, and I salute you for holding our feet to the fire. But the rights enumerated and implied in our founding documents aren't dead yet. Saying that they are, that it's too late, borders on giving up and caving in... and *that's* the sort of mindset that *can* push us over the cliff.
So, we can create a link that has a simple php script to have the user check a random domain through them. That way it isn't all coming from one IP Address...
Who needs a script when you have the power of Slashdot?/me goes off to join the crowd at the whois watering hole...
Finally, while we can't draw any conclusions from this, an old comScore press release shows that before becoming VP in charge of Sears' tracking program, Rob [Harles] was the senior vice president for comScore - the creator of the Sears spyware and the registrants of the domains to which the Sears spyware data is sent.
CA's Benjamin Googins is being diplomatic, of course. If the guy in charge of the "community" was previously a senior VP at the spyware company, then he clearly has a vested interest in the continued success of comScore.
If this were happening in a government agency, there would rightly be cries of conflict of interest. So much for the "perfection" of the free market over the ebil gubbermint...
FWIW, I haven't stepped foot in a Sears in about 5 years, when I needed a spark plug socket, and I can't recall my last purchase before that. And I've rarely been in a K-Mart since they closed most of their Texas stores -- the ones in other states still suck just as hard as they did before the buyout, but it's hard to compare one strong vacuum against another.
You never know, though, when something might have actually happened ahead. Yesterday, I found one of my alternate routes through Dallas traffic blocked. Nothing unusual there, but the cause was as bizarre as it gets:
Irving activist Anthony Bond was driving his brother home from a day of cancer treatment Thursday afternoon when a pickup on the other side of the Dallas North Tollway slammed into the median, he said.
The collision sent a large chunk of concrete through the passenger side of the windshield of Mr. Bond's northbound PT Cruiser shortly before 4 p.m. The concrete struck William Mathew Bond, 57, in the face, killing him instantly, authorities said.
I've been following the "traffic waves" procedure for years now, but I guess when that chunk of concrete aims for your head, that's all she wrote!
I finally broke with Verizon and switched to T-Mobile, partly because the Verizon phones are impossible to hack without breaking through the wall of Get It Now. Verizon's entire business model would seem to be antithetical to Google's stated desire (with $billions behind it) to open up the wireless spectrum to any device, and to put the device owner in control.
In fact, it's not surprising that the article notes that "Google had already made significant progress in recent months with" T-Mobile. While not perfect (my daughter's phone won't let her use anything but $2 downloads for ringtones), T-Mobile is at least based on a more open technology (from what I understand). The surprise is that Verizon would even talk to Google at all. Maybe they aren't -- the article is based on "people familiar with the matter". Those "people" could be from Google, trying to kick-start talks with Verizon by putting the news on the CEO's front porch via the WSJ.
Slashdot Mirror
3. The United States Government were mighty white to share the technology embedded in their GPS system for commercial use...
I haven't heard that phrase used since the '80s. It seemed to me to have a dual meaning -- on the surface, a compliment, if you accept the underlying dynamic. But it's a backhanded compliment, implying that you've done something that is so obvious that you'd have to be pretty goofy *not* to do it. That's the disturbing part -- if you hadn't done it, you'd be "not white".
The opposite term, equally disturbing, would be "Indian Giver", a term for someone who promises something they have no intention of delivering.
Both terms are so historically backward that it hurts; it was the white establishment that systematically denied non-whites basic human rights, and it was the Native Americans who were promised things that the US Government consistently refused to give.
I sincerely hope that neither "that's mighty white of you" nor "Indian Giver" make any sense at all to anyone born after 1990.
The problem is simply finding them. The signal-to-noise ratio of the big places like Monster and Dice is terrible.
I groan whenever I see someone ranting about how Slashdot has "sold out", though the whining has gone down in the years since they went semi-corporate. Still, there's the occasional whimper, especially if an article in some way might be helpful to Slashdot's parents or advertisers.
So, will this rather backhanded mention of Dice.com, whose ads I see constantly on Slashdot, silence those critics?
Didn't think so. Carry on.
He is starting from the wrong position.
Indeed. He clearly needs to rotate 90 degrees counter-clockwise and move two units to the left.
The fact that this joke, despite never being funny to begin with and being repeated to death by nerds everywhere ad nauseum, is still being modded up (to 5 for christsake) has convinced me to never try to actually instill any kind of sense into any of the people who post comments here ever again. So as long as the humor here is always going to be mindlessly repeated garbage, I'm going to go back to post spamming goatse, poop, and butts, which I find to be much more consistently fulfilling, and frankly, hilarious.
You must be new here.
(oh, come on, you *knew* that was coming)
Someone has to say it.
In California, you play Tetris.
In Soviet Russia, Tetris play YOU!
(thank goodness for burnable Karma...)
Umm, isn't http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Computer_People "the closest thing you could get to The Sims on a 6502."?
Cool! I had no idea. I wonder if I'd have been interested if I'd known about it?
I think my problem is that I wasn't the buy-a-game kind of geek, but more of the write-a-game kind of geek. In 1985, I was doing hardware-level stuff, like breadboarding a Radio Shack voice modulator chip to work from the TRS-80 Model 100's parallel port. As a result, I probably missed out on a lot of what was out there.
Also, that was my senior year, so I was trying to spend more time at the drive-in (not watching movies) than keeping up with gaming.
Nah, I'm sure it's just me.
As a teenager in the early '80s, I wasn't terribly aware of the people who were actually getting paid to do what I and my friends were figuring out how to do on the TRS-80 and Apple ][. But one name that percolated up was Bill Budge, the programmer behind the wildly popular Pinball Construction Set. It was probably the closest thing you could get to The Sims on a 6502.
Oddly enough, I don't think I ever played it myself. Or rather, I never built anything -- I probably played some of my friends' creations. His name stuck in my mind thanks to a list in some computer magazine about "Opcodes we'd like to see". (That's an assembler term, for you High-Level Language junkies.) The only one I still remember was "PBB -- Program like Bill Budge".
I'm sure the engineers behind the concept are thinking in terms of watts per sq meter, or whatever unit is used to express the actual amount of signal that will be available to the future colonists. And I guess "bars" is a nice, non-technical term, like "Size of Texas" and "Volume of the Library of Congress".
But at least I can look up the size of Texas and the volume of the LoC, and I can even take a guess as to the length of a Fortnight. "Bar" is an utterly meaningless and arbitrary measurement. Heck, my phone shows FIVE bars. Does that mean I have any better reception than someone who hacked together a DSP and a SIM card and gave it a red/green LED telltale?
AT&T and their ubiquitous advertising -- I'm sucked into it too, looking for rising bar metaphors like a teenager looking for the Bunny symbol on the dog-eared cover of his dad's Playboy. When NASA rolls out the system, they'll need to be more even-handed. In addition to the AT&T "bars of service", they should ask "Can you hear me now?" for Verizon, "Where you at?" for Boost, and "No, you may NOT tap our customers' phones" for Quest.
I have several CO2 tanks sitting in my garage for serving beer. These contain liquid CO2. I hardly consider them dangerous objects. If a CO2 storage tank got punctured during a crash, a lot of gas would vent rather quickly but the tank isn't going to just peel apart. I've seen tanks shot with high power rifles, and they don't explode. You get a jet of CO2 "snow flakes" like out of a fire extinguisher. Is it dangerous? Yeah. But so is a car crash.
If Slashdot allowed it, I'd take the mod points off of my posting and put them on yours. Thanks for refuting my (now-)glaring mistakes!
I don't know what planet they were planning to use these vehicles on, but on *this* one, CO2 is a GAS. You've got to have some serious refrigeration (requiring, uh oh, ENERGY) and some darned high pressure to store liquid CO2. Laws of thermodynamics aside, I'd rather not be sitting on a mobile dry ice bomb, thankyouverymuch.
A side note: the original tag for Roland articles was "pigpile", not "ohnoitsroland" (or any of the cruder variants). Piquepaille = Pigpile, get it? And it's usually an apt description of the science behind the "discovery".
In Christianity, in some parts of Europe there are a few people who are a bit too much in love with Mary (for my taste), that wouldn't have happened if there were no pictures of her around.
You think Europe's bad? I can't imagine it could be any more Mary-obsessed than Mexico, or at least that part of the Mexican culture on display in Texas. The image of La Virgen de Guadalupe, borne on a cloud by a little dark-skinned angel, graces everything from cathedrals to car windows to the Bandana of Catholicism I got from Woot.
(Of course, being Protestant, I never quite understood the whole thing of praying to someone other than the Big Guy himself...)
The NYTimes notes that prognosticators expect Congress not to act on a budget until the next President arrives, betting on it being a Democrat.
While the Democratically-controlled Congress may indeed delay approving a budget, I'm sure they know that the next election could just as easily put another Republican in the White House -- and that their razor-thin majority (especially in the Senate) could be lost as well, depending on the R-side coattails.
I think the goal is to not act on the budget until the next President arrives, betting on it not being an Idiot.
I'm thoroughly unlikely to use a system that ranks my search results based on the preferences of my friends. I know *I* never put anything but the most basic information about me online (name and website is all that's required by the Geneva Convention, right?). So anyone whose searches are based on *my* stated interests will find a bunch of Dixie Chicks stuff, and little else.
And what about my searches based on *their* interests? Do I even *want* to know what they're doing with their time online? Even if the results aren't personalized ("Jim would probably like this link"), I'd rather not do a search on sushi restaurants and learn to my dismay that one or more of my friends has interests that include tentacle porn. And I don't even want to *think* about what could happen on a search for a good plate of cabrito!
When I worked for a large American Airline, the expectation was that all competent IT staffers would eventually "progress" into management. My stepmom, who worked for the same company, had to actively resist being promoted -- because she *wanted* to keep solving problems with code, not with overhead-projector (pre-PowerPoint) presentations.
I figured it wouldn't be so bad, so I moved in that direction by being the "lead" on a project. I got good feedback from our (internal) customer, so there was no reason to think I couldn't continue to "progress". It was really only because of a boss with personal hangups (he thought I wasn't "manly" enough for the mechanics -- the mechanics didn't care, they just wanted the thing to work) that I'm not still there, "progressing".
But I'm extremely happy where I'm at now. There is no obvious path from technical expert to management, and it works just fine. The most senior programmers are free to -- get this -- program at a senior level. Our management consists almost entirely of folks with a deep understanding of the business, not the code. As a result, we have virtually none of the micromanagement of the coding process that sometimes gummed up the works at the major American Airline. There's one project in particular that was completely FUBARed because management had no understanding of the business needs of the customer. That's never happened in my 12 years at my current employer.
So I'd suggest you ask yourself: are you asking how to get into management because that's what you want to do? Would you really rather direct projects and people than program? Or is the "path to management" a false career path foisted on you by the culture of your current employer?
Three centimeters wingspan is life-size? What kind of flies are they referring to? That's a pretty big fly.
You should get out of the city more often. We swat 1-inch horseflies whenever we see them, because they bite the horses (and us, if we're slow enough) and spread Equine Infectious Anemia (aka "Swamp Fever", or frequently "Coggins" after the test used to detect it).
If someone saw an inch-and-a-half specimen, they'd just think it was a little overgrown. Of course, normally when you smash one they splatter blood (yours, or your horse's) all over the place. Not sure what an old-time horseman would do if it looked back at him with Terminator-style red eyes after a swattin'.
I took French in high school, but I've always been confused by the term "Sommelier". I remember that "Sommeil" means "sleep", as in J'ai sommeil, maman! ("I'm sleepy, mama!"). So a "sommelier", it would seem, would be an expert in helping you go to sleep.
Of course, in the US, there would be no difference. Any discussion of cellphone features would be so boring, thanks to our provider-mandated crippled (but free) hardware, that it would put the most tragic insomniac into a deep slumber. "CallerTunes lets you subject inbound callers to your poor musical tastes!" "ZZZZzzzzzzzz"
I hadn't realized it until this thread, but Star Trek was my first computer game. I was around 12, so it must have been 1979, when my stepmom took me to work with her at her mainframe consulting gig at Continental Airlines. She took me to an out-of-the-way workstation and typed a cryptic program name, which brought up Star Trek. It was awesome, and kept me occupied and out of her hair for hours.
We got the TRS-80 a couple of years later, I wrote a hybrid BASIC/Assembler target shooting game (POKEing my asm code into memory), and the rest is history.
I still remember asking why that original program wasn't simply called STARTREK. It wasn't supposed to be on the system, she told me... so they would change its name periodically to prevent discovery. Also, I shouldn't say anything about it while there, and just be quiet in general. That last instruction may not have been game-related, however...
...quite a complex orbit, with mercurial days...
Yeah, but the emo nights are the worst. Planets can be so bipolar!
This is great news for Congressman "Smoky Joe" Barton's friends at the smelter upwind of Dallas. Next time they get hauled before the clean air folks, they can just say "We're not generating air pollution! We're controlling Dallas' rodent population!"
I'm a Green Party member and I'm thoroughly disgusted by my country's actions in this so-called "War on Terror" that has killed far more US citizens than died on 9/11 while focusing on the wrong country altogether. I know that the authorities overreact in stupid ways that disrupt and destroy lives.
But to describe the US as a "police state" is ludicrous. I can write this post in the full knowledge that anyone interested can find out who I am and where I live, yet I am quite sure the FBI has better things to do than knock down my apartment door in the middle of the night (though if I'm not on some list by now, I'd be surprised).
Yes, our freedoms and rights are being eroded, and I salute you for holding our feet to the fire. But the rights enumerated and implied in our founding documents aren't dead yet. Saying that they are, that it's too late, borders on giving up and caving in... and *that's* the sort of mindset that *can* push us over the cliff.
Who needs a script when you have the power of Slashdot?
CA's Benjamin Googins is being diplomatic, of course. If the guy in charge of the "community" was previously a senior VP at the spyware company, then he clearly has a vested interest in the continued success of comScore.
If this were happening in a government agency, there would rightly be cries of conflict of interest. So much for the "perfection" of the free market over the ebil gubbermint...
FWIW, I haven't stepped foot in a Sears in about 5 years, when I needed a spark plug socket, and I can't recall my last purchase before that. And I've rarely been in a K-Mart since they closed most of their Texas stores -- the ones in other states still suck just as hard as they did before the buyout, but it's hard to compare one strong vacuum against another.
I've been following the "traffic waves" procedure for years now, but I guess when that chunk of concrete aims for your head, that's all she wrote!
I finally broke with Verizon and switched to T-Mobile, partly because the Verizon phones are impossible to hack without breaking through the wall of Get It Now. Verizon's entire business model would seem to be antithetical to Google's stated desire (with $billions behind it) to open up the wireless spectrum to any device, and to put the device owner in control.
In fact, it's not surprising that the article notes that "Google had already made significant progress in recent months with" T-Mobile. While not perfect (my daughter's phone won't let her use anything but $2 downloads for ringtones), T-Mobile is at least based on a more open technology (from what I understand). The surprise is that Verizon would even talk to Google at all. Maybe they aren't -- the article is based on "people familiar with the matter". Those "people" could be from Google, trying to kick-start talks with Verizon by putting the news on the CEO's front porch via the WSJ.