This really isn't any different from the common practice of including satellite radio, usually bundled with other car options, and charging a monthly fee to keep it enabled.

It also makes sense in cases where the vast majority of consumers would opt to include a feature and it's cheaper to include it on all cars than manufacture different parts and add options to your assembly line just for a couple cars. Case in point: Tesla included 60KWh batteries on its 40KWh models and software limited them to 40KWh. (reference: http://www.dailytech.com/Tesla...). At a later time, consumers can pay to unlock the extra capacity.

It actually could be useful to enable features at a later time - you might move to a cold state and really wish your car had heated seats. If it really does increase costs so much, there will certainly be some car manufacturers who opt to save costs and we can buy from them instead.

Did you ask the IRS how easy it is to write off business expenses used only for personal reasons for a business that has no revenue?

How is it that they wrongly deactivated his account? He exploited a bug and used it to post on someone else's wall, just like any spammer would have. It's clearly fair to deactivate while investigating further to block him from using the exploit on anyone else.

There definitely are problems with the healthcare system, but the cause and effect implied by your post should be reversed. Healthcare costs won't do much to reduce chronic diseases - the ones you list will be more influenced by lifestyle choices and genetics. However, chronic disease rates will have a large impact on healthcare costs.

This means that you can't use high disease rates to support your argument that healthcare costs are higher in USA. It's likely that much of the higher costs are due to the higher disease rates and you need to normalize by disease rate before using per capita healthcare costs to implying that we're overspending.

This really just supports my main point: iPhone works better out of the box and Android needs work to get it right. IMO, iPhone is better for the non-technically inclined.

If you wanted bleeding edge updates, you should have chosen a Nexus device

The vast majority of Android devices sold are carrier branded. It's a fair criticism to say that Android devices have slow updates. Apple is definitely open to criticism over their closed model, but there are plenty of benefits that come from developing both SW and HW and forcing carriers to play by their rules.

I switched from an iPhone to GSIII also and my experience has been different. The bigger screen makes the drawbacks worth it to me, but I wouldn't be able to recommend the phone to everyone. IMO, the iPhone works good enough right out of the box. Android might have more potential, but it takes some work to get right.

Pros:
- Bigger screen size, screen size options
- External memory card support (kind of)
- Discounts
- Can carrier unlock

Cons:
- Google/Samsung/Carrier branded apps. My AT&T SIII came with a "Messages", "Messaging" and "Messenger" app. In addition to the "ChatON" and "Talk" apps. There's also a "Play Music" vs "Music Player" and "Email" vs "Gmail". I can imagine the support nightmares if I bought one for my parents.
- External memory card support depends on app (Ex: Spotify's current version has no support). Also, GSIII doesn't properly support ExFAT and it doesn't format an ExFAT card to FAT32 or let you know. In my case, files would disappear and there were a few 'card unreadable' errors before I did some research.
- Doesn't charge properly in computer or car USB ports. I assume this means the GSIII isn't requesting high-power (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus#Power)
- Difficult to sync media. I don't particularly like iTunes, but it seemed to get the job done.
- Slow updates.
- Doesn't work as well with my car's Bluetooth. This may not be a Samsung issue, but iPhone tends to get more third-party testing and support because of the volume.
- Doesn't support Bluetooth Smart sensors (Bluetooth Low Energy) even though it uses the same chip as the iPhone and advertises that support.

I just bought a 30# bag of dog food online. Free two day shipping and cheaper than my local pet store.

"Last quarter we wrote a compiler that ended up being a few hundred KB of source."

A few hundred KB of CUP/lex autogenerated source... c'mon, don't let people think we're reinventing the wheel over at UCSD. =P