Sorry but that is a load of crap. Crowding a bank and then denying its customers access gets you arrested. Only one person there wanted to close his account, and he was accommodated, the rest of them were just rabble rousing. I hate the major banks as much as anybody (especially Wells Fargo,) but to say those people were arrested for closing their accounts is just absurd.
If you followed some of the links in your first source, you'd know this.
I'm personally not a supporter of Ron Paul. (My first choice for the Republican nomination was Herman Cain)
However none of the excepts you gave are true. He mainly says that domestic issues are not the business of the federal government, which would include abortion, gay rights, etc. Personally, I agree with that. These issues do not fall within the enumerated powers of congress as defined in the constitution, and therefore should be issues that the states decide for themselves. If he had his way (whether he wills it or not) gay marriage would be legal in more places.
And furthermore, he is one of few Republicans who support evolution. He doesn't believe in evolution himself, however he doesn't want that stupid intelligent design theory pushed, he wants the real science to come first.
Again no conflict of interest here, although I am registered as a Republican (the choices are somewhat limited, and I really do not like the Democratic party; tough choice because I myself am an Atheist) I am not a Ron Paul supporter. I think he is downright nutty on some issues, but I do want to clear the above mentioned items up.
They still do, or at least Discovery as a company still does. Only difference now is that there are different channels with different Discovery related topics (I think there are a total of 6 different "Discovery" channels.) The one you're looking for goes by the name Animal Planet, and yes it is owned and run by Discovery networks, and yes it is rich with plenty of animal porn (not to be confused with bestiality.)
I myself am an avid watcher of Investigation Discovery, aka ID channel.
I love google as a company. I love android, I love gmail, and I love google calendar. I use and heavily rely on all three.
However google's search engine as of recent is very disappointing, largely as a result of a few so called "fixes."
Google recently did away with the ability to add + before a word to prevent from using synonyms for that word, so when you want to do a literal search for anything, you MUST surround it in quotes. Very annoying.
I've been finding that as of late, google appears to be omitting some kewords from my search. The page summary doesn't include some of the words, and worse is that when you go to the page, and hit ctrl-f, you can't even find one of the omitted keyword! Frustrating as hell.
The most annoying, is when you type a search term with google instant, and sometimes when you arrow back to inline edit your search while instant is coming up, or if you accidentally move the mouse over one of the search suggestions, it removes your original search and replaces it with one of the search suggestions, causing you to have to re-type the whole thing! And turning off google instant isn't a reliable solution, because when you lose the cookie, or move to a computer that doesn't have one, you have to go and turn it off again.
I've been using bing lately and thankfully it doesn't suffer from these problems. I'd like to go back to google, but until they can solve these problems I'll be using bing for a while.
They can do whatever they want right up until the point they get caught. Which is what this article is about, had you RTFA.
And how exactly did they get caught? HTC made a phone that is locked down, and sold that to their customers, through Verizon. Verizon didn't get caught doing anything; they didn't even do anything wrong. TFA points the blame at Verizon, but in this case the blame for that phone being locked lies squarely with HTC.
Verizon can't tell an OEM what to do with their phone, however Verizon CAN tell an OEM what to do with their phone if they want Verizon to carry it. This means that if said OEM doesn't comply they loose a HUGE retail opportunity. Most OEMs would rather let the carrier dictate terms than loose the carrier as a sales channel.
Hmm....No, not exactly.
On the C block, they can force Verizon to activate the phone for subscribers who request it. But the question ends up being: Is this profitable for the OEM? When an OEM makes a phone available for a given carrier, usually the carrier handles a lot of the burden of advertising and promoting that phone. For example, on Verizons website, Verizon stores, or orders over the phone, Verizon can completely deny that phone even exists if they'd like.
If you as a customer bring them a phone to that spectrum (passing FCC checks, of course) Verizon must make services available to it on your request. But how successful an OEM would be at providing that model is another question. Google tried to sell the original Nexus that way (unlocked, available to any GSM carrier that would take it) and it didn't sell too well from their own channels. Instead it was through t-mobil's channels that sold it well.
In the US at leaset, carriers are the customer, not the end user. The carriers determine which features are required and how much money will be spent by the end user and how much support is required from the carrier.
The C block is an exception. Read the links provided in the summary. Verizon isn't allowed to dictate features or limits to devices that make use of the C block.
By putting phones on that spectrum, they MUST allow the OEMs to do whatever they want; Verizon merely serves as a dumb pipe. I don't know whether or not you have similar rules in Europe, but this rule certainly applies in the US.
That setup only applies to HTC's new phones, not phones already on the market, such as the Thunderbolt. And believe it or not, that isn't a full unlock. I own an HTC Evo 3D which is unlockable by that system. It doesn't turn off the security flag in the android hboot.
This means that while you can load custom roms that way, you still don't have a full nand unlock, and thus can't even load a custom recovery image, or do a number of other things.
This came about largely as a result of a bunch of posts to facebook, so they added this system. This is their halfway approach that silences those who were making all of the noise yet keeps the phone semi-locked down. The Nexus S 4G on the other hand is a full unlock.
Granted, nowhere is Verizon mentioned explicitly in regards with the unlockable devices... but neither can be said that Verizon cannot ask HTC to unlock their phones.
Again, Verizon can't tell the OEM's what to do with their phones. If you buy a phone that is locked, that is your choice.
First of all, that's in Europe, not the US, and thus second of all, there is no FCC mandate as to what European carriers are allowed to do on the C block.
Just to further drive my point to home: HTC also locks phones that they sell to Sprint. Meanwhile, Sprint has the Nexus S 4G on their network, which features an unlocked bootloader.
Sprint never made any request for the bootloader to be locked down, and Samsung (the manufacturer) said they won't lock any of their phones unless either Sprint or Google asked them to. The end result? You have an unlocked phone on the Sprint network.
Keep in mind, that Sprint is under no mandate from the FCC to unlock anything.
HTC doesn't just lock phones that go to Verizon; they lock all of the phones they sell. You are buying a phone from HTC that HTC locks. Verizon can't tell you what you can or can't put on that phone, but by buying into HTC's walled garden, HTC can tell you what you will or won't put on that phone.
Verizon in fact can't even tell HTC to unlock their phone (not that they would want to) because they aren't allowed to tell the manufacturer how to make their phone.
Almost a year ago I bought an HP DV5-2134US from Staples. Tested the latest version of backtrack on it, and all of the hardware worked right out of the box, including the wifi adapter, which as luck turned out, also supported advanced features such as monitor mode and packet injection, neither of which are even usable in Windows.
So clearly some OEM's are thinking outside of the box, even though their product runs windows.
The specs are a 14" screen, 4GB of ram, 500GB HDD, AMD P340, and a bunch of nice things like a radeon 4250, an HDMI port, eSATA port, 802.11n, and a gigabit ethernet port. Not a speed demon, but I can't think of anything that it won't do at a comfortable speed.
The price? $350. Equivalent apple systems at the time were just over triple the price of this.
Shop at places like Staples, Office Max, or Wal-Mart where the laptop has a return policy that doesn't include a restock fee. Then you can try it yourself at home and if any major showstoppers arise, back to the store it goes.
I agree, the ramblings of slashdot lately remind me of those nuts who believe in the new world order conspiracy that there's some secret group out there that conspires to rule the world, and they rig elections, caused 9/11, etc.
All that's missing is a link to Alex Jones' prisonplanet.com website.
At what point in history was global power ever not controlled by the top 1%? Even in truly socialist systems, the highest power has always been in the hands of a small minority. Even in democracy, less than 1% ever get elected to any higher office.
Tariffs are bad mojo. Trade restrictions make it harder for us to compete in the global economy.
Suppose for example that we raise tariffs on steel to keep a steel mill in PA from going under. Now everybody in the US pays more for steel, and any goods that use steel cost more. Cars use steel. Now that our cars are more expensive, other countries won't import them because they can get cheaper cars elsewhere.
So, you see, now not only does the rest of the world not want our steel because it's too expensive, but they also don't want any products we produce that are made with steel because now they are too expensive.
Sure that tariff might save a thousand steel mill jobs, but it's going to cost many times that number of jobs in other areas of the economy.
Tariffs are only pushed for two reasons:
1) People have a very simplistic view of the economy and don't understand that domestic production and imports rise and fall with one another, and so wrongly believe that tariffs will reduce our net imports as a percentage of GDP. Tariffs never have this effect.
2) Corporations and labor unions who don't want to compete with the foreign market, so they lobby the government to labor trade in their favor, all at the expense of everybody else.
Tariffs are knee jerk reactions that ultimately have negative effects on the economy. In fact, if it weren't for tariffs, there wouldn't have been a great depression:
Businesses increasingly rely on advanced communications technologies to convey timely and important information to consumers. These calls notify consumers about threats such as data breaches and fraud alerts, provide timely notice of flight and service appointment cancellations and drug recalls, and protect consumers against the adverse consequences of failure to make timely payments on an account.
If this is true, and this is the intended purpose of this law, and if it still keeps the telemarketers out, then I wouldn't oppose this change. Then again, I've never been in debt (I am quite poor, but I never go into debt as a matter of principle) so I don't know about the collectors, but since it isn't a problem for me I am not concerned.
You don't need to respect the dead. But, to a certain point, you need to respect other peoples' respect for the dead.
There are many out there who respect the late Osama Bin Laden, and I'll be damned if I have to respect their respect for his death. In fact I'd take a shit on his grave if he was buried in one.
Good thing I don't live in the UK, otherwise I'd go to jail for that.
You don't really know much about the US. The first amendment of the US constitution states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
In other words, congress itself shall not set any rules abridging speech, but the individual states may. However we have judicial review and case law which has altered this a bit. In summary, it has been generally applied as a rule throughout the states, but with certain limitations. In Schenck v. United States, it was established that certain speech that has no conceivable useful purpose and is inherently dangerous is not protected, such as the famously cited example, shouting fire in a crowded theater.
Now we also recognize that chiseling away at free speech is a very slippery slope, so we make every effort to curb it. There is a very strong concept of the tyranny of the mob. This means that just because the majority want something there way out of a strong moral sentiment, doesn't mean that they are right. We also recognize that every time we give up any rights, we will probably never get them back.
And IMO that system works pretty well. Hell don't take my word for it, it has lasted for a good 223 years now, and we remain the worlds strongest nation in terms of culture, military, economy, and global influence.
On slashdot, we all pretend to run linux, and we all pretend we don't care about windows. Yet we still manage to complain about it every time a new version comes out.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry but that is a load of crap. Crowding a bank and then denying its customers access gets you arrested. Only one person there wanted to close his account, and he was accommodated, the rest of them were just rabble rousing. I hate the major banks as much as anybody (especially Wells Fargo,) but to say those people were arrested for closing their accounts is just absurd.
If you followed some of the links in your first source, you'd know this.
I'm personally not a supporter of Ron Paul. (My first choice for the Republican nomination was Herman Cain)
However none of the excepts you gave are true. He mainly says that domestic issues are not the business of the federal government, which would include abortion, gay rights, etc. Personally, I agree with that. These issues do not fall within the enumerated powers of congress as defined in the constitution, and therefore should be issues that the states decide for themselves. If he had his way (whether he wills it or not) gay marriage would be legal in more places.
And furthermore, he is one of few Republicans who support evolution. He doesn't believe in evolution himself, however he doesn't want that stupid intelligent design theory pushed, he wants the real science to come first.
Again no conflict of interest here, although I am registered as a Republican (the choices are somewhat limited, and I really do not like the Democratic party; tough choice because I myself am an Atheist) I am not a Ron Paul supporter. I think he is downright nutty on some issues, but I do want to clear the above mentioned items up.
They still do, or at least Discovery as a company still does. Only difference now is that there are different channels with different Discovery related topics (I think there are a total of 6 different "Discovery" channels.) The one you're looking for goes by the name Animal Planet, and yes it is owned and run by Discovery networks, and yes it is rich with plenty of animal porn (not to be confused with bestiality.)
I myself am an avid watcher of Investigation Discovery, aka ID channel.
That would make retina displays on phones count as tablets.
It's configured in the build.prop
Fox news has made hardly any mention of it.
I love google as a company. I love android, I love gmail, and I love google calendar. I use and heavily rely on all three.
However google's search engine as of recent is very disappointing, largely as a result of a few so called "fixes."
Google recently did away with the ability to add + before a word to prevent from using synonyms for that word, so when you want to do a literal search for anything, you MUST surround it in quotes. Very annoying.
I've been finding that as of late, google appears to be omitting some kewords from my search. The page summary doesn't include some of the words, and worse is that when you go to the page, and hit ctrl-f, you can't even find one of the omitted keyword! Frustrating as hell.
The most annoying, is when you type a search term with google instant, and sometimes when you arrow back to inline edit your search while instant is coming up, or if you accidentally move the mouse over one of the search suggestions, it removes your original search and replaces it with one of the search suggestions, causing you to have to re-type the whole thing! And turning off google instant isn't a reliable solution, because when you lose the cookie, or move to a computer that doesn't have one, you have to go and turn it off again.
I've been using bing lately and thankfully it doesn't suffer from these problems. I'd like to go back to google, but until they can solve these problems I'll be using bing for a while.
They can do whatever they want right up until the point they get caught. Which is what this article is about, had you RTFA.
And how exactly did they get caught? HTC made a phone that is locked down, and sold that to their customers, through Verizon. Verizon didn't get caught doing anything; they didn't even do anything wrong. TFA points the blame at Verizon, but in this case the blame for that phone being locked lies squarely with HTC.
Verizon can't tell an OEM what to do with their phone, however Verizon CAN tell an OEM what to do with their phone if they want Verizon to carry it. This means that if said OEM doesn't comply they loose a HUGE retail opportunity. Most OEMs would rather let the carrier dictate terms than loose the carrier as a sales channel.
Hmm....No, not exactly.
On the C block, they can force Verizon to activate the phone for subscribers who request it. But the question ends up being: Is this profitable for the OEM? When an OEM makes a phone available for a given carrier, usually the carrier handles a lot of the burden of advertising and promoting that phone. For example, on Verizons website, Verizon stores, or orders over the phone, Verizon can completely deny that phone even exists if they'd like.
If you as a customer bring them a phone to that spectrum (passing FCC checks, of course) Verizon must make services available to it on your request. But how successful an OEM would be at providing that model is another question. Google tried to sell the original Nexus that way (unlocked, available to any GSM carrier that would take it) and it didn't sell too well from their own channels. Instead it was through t-mobil's channels that sold it well.
In the US at leaset, carriers are the customer, not the end user. The carriers determine which features are required and how much money will be spent by the end user and how much support is required from the carrier.
The C block is an exception. Read the links provided in the summary. Verizon isn't allowed to dictate features or limits to devices that make use of the C block.
Dude did you even read the article? No wait, I'll answer that: You didn't.
This is talking about the C block in the US, mandated by the FCC that all devices licensed to use that spectrum will not be locked down.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/08/03/20/209206/google-a-happy-loser-in-spectrum-auction
By putting phones on that spectrum, they MUST allow the OEMs to do whatever they want; Verizon merely serves as a dumb pipe. I don't know whether or not you have similar rules in Europe, but this rule certainly applies in the US.
Learn to RTFA
Oh, is it so [htcdev.com]?
Yes, actually.
That setup only applies to HTC's new phones, not phones already on the market, such as the Thunderbolt. And believe it or not, that isn't a full unlock. I own an HTC Evo 3D which is unlockable by that system. It doesn't turn off the security flag in the android hboot.
This means that while you can load custom roms that way, you still don't have a full nand unlock, and thus can't even load a custom recovery image, or do a number of other things.
This came about largely as a result of a bunch of posts to facebook, so they added this system. This is their halfway approach that silences those who were making all of the noise yet keeps the phone semi-locked down. The Nexus S 4G on the other hand is a full unlock.
Granted, nowhere is Verizon mentioned explicitly in regards with the unlockable devices... but neither can be said that Verizon cannot ask HTC to unlock their phones.
Again, Verizon can't tell the OEM's what to do with their phones. If you buy a phone that is locked, that is your choice.
Bush never actually said that, by the way.
http://factcheck.org/2007/12/bush-the-constitution-a-goddamned-piece-of-paper/
First of all, that's in Europe, not the US, and thus second of all, there is no FCC mandate as to what European carriers are allowed to do on the C block.
Pretty fail for a troll attempt.
Just to further drive my point to home: HTC also locks phones that they sell to Sprint. Meanwhile, Sprint has the Nexus S 4G on their network, which features an unlocked bootloader.
Sprint never made any request for the bootloader to be locked down, and Samsung (the manufacturer) said they won't lock any of their phones unless either Sprint or Google asked them to. The end result? You have an unlocked phone on the Sprint network.
Keep in mind, that Sprint is under no mandate from the FCC to unlock anything.
HTC isn't a licensee.
HTC doesn't just lock phones that go to Verizon; they lock all of the phones they sell. You are buying a phone from HTC that HTC locks. Verizon can't tell you what you can or can't put on that phone, but by buying into HTC's walled garden, HTC can tell you what you will or won't put on that phone.
Verizon in fact can't even tell HTC to unlock their phone (not that they would want to) because they aren't allowed to tell the manufacturer how to make their phone.
Almost a year ago I bought an HP DV5-2134US from Staples. Tested the latest version of backtrack on it, and all of the hardware worked right out of the box, including the wifi adapter, which as luck turned out, also supported advanced features such as monitor mode and packet injection, neither of which are even usable in Windows.
So clearly some OEM's are thinking outside of the box, even though their product runs windows.
The specs are a 14" screen, 4GB of ram, 500GB HDD, AMD P340, and a bunch of nice things like a radeon 4250, an HDMI port, eSATA port, 802.11n, and a gigabit ethernet port. Not a speed demon, but I can't think of anything that it won't do at a comfortable speed.
The price? $350. Equivalent apple systems at the time were just over triple the price of this.
Shop at places like Staples, Office Max, or Wal-Mart where the laptop has a return policy that doesn't include a restock fee. Then you can try it yourself at home and if any major showstoppers arise, back to the store it goes.
I agree, the ramblings of slashdot lately remind me of those nuts who believe in the new world order conspiracy that there's some secret group out there that conspires to rule the world, and they rig elections, caused 9/11, etc.
All that's missing is a link to Alex Jones' prisonplanet.com website.
At what point in history was global power ever not controlled by the top 1%? Even in truly socialist systems, the highest power has always been in the hands of a small minority. Even in democracy, less than 1% ever get elected to any higher office.
Tariffs are bad mojo. Trade restrictions make it harder for us to compete in the global economy.
Suppose for example that we raise tariffs on steel to keep a steel mill in PA from going under. Now everybody in the US pays more for steel, and any goods that use steel cost more. Cars use steel. Now that our cars are more expensive, other countries won't import them because they can get cheaper cars elsewhere.
So, you see, now not only does the rest of the world not want our steel because it's too expensive, but they also don't want any products we produce that are made with steel because now they are too expensive.
Sure that tariff might save a thousand steel mill jobs, but it's going to cost many times that number of jobs in other areas of the economy.
Tariffs are only pushed for two reasons:
1) People have a very simplistic view of the economy and don't understand that domestic production and imports rise and fall with one another, and so wrongly believe that tariffs will reduce our net imports as a percentage of GDP. Tariffs never have this effect.
2) Corporations and labor unions who don't want to compete with the foreign market, so they lobby the government to labor trade in their favor, all at the expense of everybody else.
Tariffs are knee jerk reactions that ultimately have negative effects on the economy. In fact, if it weren't for tariffs, there wouldn't have been a great depression:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQQon4tjlSA
Businesses increasingly rely on advanced communications technologies to convey timely and important information to consumers. These calls notify consumers about threats such as data breaches and fraud alerts, provide timely notice of flight and service appointment cancellations and drug recalls, and protect consumers against the adverse consequences of failure to make timely payments on an account.
If this is true, and this is the intended purpose of this law, and if it still keeps the telemarketers out, then I wouldn't oppose this change. Then again, I've never been in debt (I am quite poor, but I never go into debt as a matter of principle) so I don't know about the collectors, but since it isn't a problem for me I am not concerned.
I think there's a pretty significant distinction between Libertarianism and Anarchism.
Reed Hastings is a co-founder of netflix.
You don't need to respect the dead. But, to a certain point, you need to respect other peoples' respect for the dead.
There are many out there who respect the late Osama Bin Laden, and I'll be damned if I have to respect their respect for his death. In fact I'd take a shit on his grave if he was buried in one.
Good thing I don't live in the UK, otherwise I'd go to jail for that.
You don't really know much about the US. The first amendment of the US constitution states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
In other words, congress itself shall not set any rules abridging speech, but the individual states may. However we have judicial review and case law which has altered this a bit. In summary, it has been generally applied as a rule throughout the states, but with certain limitations. In Schenck v. United States, it was established that certain speech that has no conceivable useful purpose and is inherently dangerous is not protected, such as the famously cited example, shouting fire in a crowded theater.
Now we also recognize that chiseling away at free speech is a very slippery slope, so we make every effort to curb it. There is a very strong concept of the tyranny of the mob. This means that just because the majority want something there way out of a strong moral sentiment, doesn't mean that they are right. We also recognize that every time we give up any rights, we will probably never get them back.
And IMO that system works pretty well. Hell don't take my word for it, it has lasted for a good 223 years now, and we remain the worlds strongest nation in terms of culture, military, economy, and global influence.
That's not quite right.
On slashdot, we all pretend to run linux, and we all pretend we don't care about windows. Yet we still manage to complain about it every time a new version comes out.