mikecane

It's there for me too, in the order of: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, then others. Odd how G+ isn't first.

Depression is mentioned. As I'm sure everyone else here will say: There is no shame in getting help for that.

And yet with a modem and comm software, they could all connect to online services -- The Source, CompuServe, BBSes.

>>>Why should they change?

Because there's the example of the iPod. It wasn't the music player to have until Apple employees wore down Steve Jobs so they could let it connect with Windows.

>>>Yeah, Amazon is actually the worst at this because of their e-book DRM.

iBookstore, Nookbook store, and Kobo -- the other three big players also have eBook DRM (via Adobe). Kindle is no "worse" than them.

Still Mars. Unknown companies, unknown quality, unknown warranties (as in mostly non-existent). And sending it back to China to exchange a defective unit? Suddenly that $30 isn't.

>>>You can buy smart phones for 30$ in shenzhen electronic malls today.

1) That's in Shenzen. Might as well be Mars for most people. When Shenzen hardware is sourced by global brands, they usually have a generous markup where that "$30" quickly disappears.

2) How long do they last? "Oh, but they're cheap. If it breaks in 3 months, just buy another!" No. People just don't want to go through possibly losing data and having hardware just suddenly drop dead on them.

So, yeah. I'll go with the guy who said five years. That's for stuff that won't drop dead in three months.

Anyone interested in books published by former slaves, go search Google Books. 12 Years A Slave is there among others.

In the Kamalaya section, it doesn't seem to scroll down. Using the latest Firefox. Am I missing some sort of control that's too light to see on my bad-contrast screen?

"and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business" http://bnowire.com/inbox/?id=2158

And they reveal the hand they'll use to shut it all down.

Knew a guy in his his forties who wanted to work for an ad agency. Convinced them to use him for free for a while as a test and they wound up hiring him. YMMV.

I had a Canon CAT. The praise for it is overrated. It was never as simple as people claim nor really any joy to use. The hardware itself also tended to die suddenly. When mine died I went to repair place where I happened upon the Canon rep. He said the CAT's motherboard was prone to suddenly dying and the only solution was to buy a new CAT.

>>>Remove the DRM from your ebooks

You've missed the point. Something like a Scribd or Oyster subscription use an app and its own eBook format. The books are cached or streamed, not downloaded permanently. You are paying to read, not to own.

"industry" is the key word.

See Kobo's Reading Life: http://www.kobobooks.com/stats

It will breed sequelitis, a specialty of movies. And more grave-robbing of dead authors (see fourth Millennium series book recently announced while Stieg Larsson spins in his grave).

>>>despite the fact that inflation is running at the lowest level in decades.

Here is someone who does not do his own food shopping. Food prices have exploded since 2008, when the house of cards first collapsed. I used to be able to buy 5 cans of store-brand chunk tuna for $3.00. Now the store brand is gone, replaced by a national brand, and it's $1.29 per can (up from $1.00 per can at the start of this year). And that's just the most egregious example from my own experience. Food packaging has also shrunk dramatically, another way prices actually rise while the "store price" remains almost the same.

This article ties in with the recent Block change on Twitter. See all that vile material posted? Now imagine having that tweeted to you on a daily basis from multiple fake accounts. This is why the change to Block mattered. Because of vile driven sociopaths of the type displayed in that article.

Yes, they exist. I Follow people on Twitter who have made me aware of that issue. There's one prominent columnist in particular whose name I can't recall that seems to have it in for trans people and restrooms, for example.

>>>They could get that region-level information already from ISP routing info.

I think they want to know you are where you say you are. You'll find if you travel out of the area -- particularly out of the entire country -- you won't have access to entertainment you had while at home due to these regional restrictions. Just think of the times when you've gone to the BBC website to view a video only to be told you can't have it outside of the UK (the BBC license area). (Note that I'm assuming you're in the US although your use of "postal code" likely means you aren't.)

Oh please. This is still the champ: http://www.lingscars.com/

>>>Just recently I ran into problems with a TV station's app on iOS that refused to play video without Location Services Enabled.

When it comes to things such as entertainment, regional rights restrictions probably have more to do with that than the app wanting to spy on you. I'm not saying this is right. Just saying how the lawyers have sliced things into pieces like that.

It creates havoc with all the services that create metrics about Twitter. It's also bad for Twitter in terms of selling advertising based on user numbers. If advertisers, say, want to target people with N Followers, how can they be sure those numbers are actual people and not fake bot accounts?

Someone who was bombing my account saw my announcement that I was going to Protect my account and tried to bomb it before I did. I was faster and the fake Followers wound up in a request queue. Now that Twitter has restored Block, my account is again UnProtected and those 1,800+ are now automatically added to my Follower count. [typo edit]