Take it from someone who had a WP7 phone for three years, and now has a WP8 phone: Skype never worked right on WP7 in the first place. It really shouldn't have been there to start with, but Microsoft couldn't have one of their most popular apps be a no-show on their mobile OS, so they put out a crippled mess that only served to piss off their users.

On WP8, Skype works just as it should, because WP8 is a completely different OS under the hood and can run the background processes necessary for it to function.

Aren't bugs impossible to avoid in programming, especially in complex projects? There's no such thing as a perfect programmer or perfect code; things can always be fixed, optimized, debugged, and improved. The brick wall analogy simply doesn't apply.

Can you cite references for this? I thought Dell in particular pawned off this type of work to their system builders in China. Dell still designs the look and feel of their machines and decides which parts go in, but the actual circuit board design is done further down the chain. At least, that's what I've always understood. Here's my source reference, btw:

http://www.xoticpc.com/laptop-...

I'm pretty sure Dell doesn't design the actual circuits on their boards, they just pick a chipset and ship off the parts list to their builder in Shenzhen or wherever. I'm willing to bet there was a mismatch between what the speaker could handle and what the audio chipset puts out. Some engineer somewhere cut a corner and didn't test it, and of course at build time all they check for is that sound is produced (this is Dell, not Apple; they don't care if it's great audio quality, just that it works long enough to make it into the shipping box).

That's all supposition on my part of course, but I'd put money on it being a mismatched speaker and chipset.

I was speaking strictly of species, specifically Homo sapiens vs Paranthropus boisei. You are being overly pedantic, and one-sided at that; why didn't you claim the same lineage for Paranthropus boisei? Oh yeah, because then you'd have no point to make.

They survived 1,000,000 years. We've been going at it for 200,000 years or so, and we're constantly at risk of killing ourselves off en masse. I'd say they did a lot better than we are doing on the species survival front.

I didn't see you being made fun of, I see a newcomer to a forum expressing a valid but ultimately unaccepted point, being told (yes, a bit harshly by one person who then apologized) that that's the way the developer wants it on his website, and in the end, there were no hard feelings expressed from anyone on the site.

If that's what you consider a beat-down, how have you survived the wild west of Slashdot??

The problem with what allegedly happened here is that once the "cat is out of the bag", i.e. the TSA has seen the documents, they cannot be unseen. The cops and prosecutors involved could get fired or even jailed, but in the meantime the TSA got what it wanted and can do whatever they wish with the information, which is most likely firing or demoting/transferring the whistleblowers while giving unrelated cause for those actions.

Sounds like the school administration had heard that you were a Zero, yet still kinda Cool.

It's not as difficult as you would think. My wife and I are on a five year budget plan to wipe out all of our existing debt. We have three vehicles; an old "work truck" that I paid cash for, her daily driver that she bought new before we started dating and still owes a few thousand on, and my daily driver that we paid cash for. Essentially, my debts will be satisfied within two years, her car and student loan (her only debts) within 18 months. We'll be snowballing all of the money we save from not making payments to finish paying off this house. A few years down the line we'll have enough saved up to pay at least half the note on a new house, maybe more if the market is right and we make back a lot on this one. Given that all three vehicles are in excellent mechanical condition and I'm meticulous about maintenance, barring an accident it will be at least ten years before we need to buy a new car and we plan to pay cash for it.

And we're not wealthy or upper middle class snobs; I work as an IT manager for a very small company and she works for local government. Our combined income is less than a lawyer just out of college. We've just learned how to manage money responsibly and not live beyond our means. We don't drive BMWs on a McDonald's salary like many people around here, and we don't have a six bedroom house with a 100 sq ft yard in an HOA neighborhood. We have a modest two bedroom cottage on half an acre of cheap land, a Chevy, a Toyota and a Nissan, and a whole heap of common sense.

Yeah, you know, where you actually said that it's apathy and not approval? Here, I'll quote you:

Hey, you were the one getting all pedantic up in here in the first place. I got your point from the start, don't be a dick just because you were proven wrong on semantics.

Practically speaking, you're quite dense. To be apathetic means to have no feelings towards something, or to have a lack of motivation. To be okay with something means to agree with and support it. One is neutral, bordering on negative in tone, the other is positive in tone.

No, because being okay with it implies that they understand it and don't see a problem with it. I'm saying they don't understand it and don't want to take the time to understand it. Apathy does not equal approval.

I don't think it's a matter of the general public being okay with it; rather they don't understand it and can't be bothered to find out why it's a bad thing. The vast majority of the voting public in this country range from the working poor to the middle class. These people are usually working two or more jobs per family (when it's not a broken family; even then the single parent often works two jobs) and simply don't have time to find out who is doing what in the government, much less do something about it. They vote along established party lines based on their upbringing, and probably hope that one asshole will screw the country over just a smidge less than the other one. Given that situation and attitude, it's no surprise that most Americans default to "I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care if they listen to my phone calls and read my email."

I think if the curtain was truly pulled back by someone with a public face (i.e. not just one whistleblower that no one heard of before June), people would begin to realize what is really going on and why it's so wrong. But panels like the one in the article exist to make sure that never happens. Someone above referenced the fox guarding the hen house, and that's a great analogy.