Lately there has been a lot of flack going on over the Early Termination Fee (ETF) system that the major cellular carriers use to encourage consumers to abide by the length of the contract that they have signed.
Apparently a lot of people are upset that the various cellular carriers are wanting to charge a fee to get out of the contract they signed. Now I can understand that they don’t like paying some extra fee to switch carriers, however, they signed the contract in the beginning stating that they would pay the extra fee if terminating the contract early.
I can understand that there may be instances where the ETF seems onerous due to a dissatisfaction with the services or a case where the ETF is conceivably improperly levied. In fact, I had to pay an AllTel ETF when my wife died solely because the cellphone was actually in my name and not hers. If the phone contract had been in her name then AllTel would have waived the fee and just canceled the contract.
What I don’t quite grasp is why the very consumers that signed the contract are so loathe to abide by the terms. If you have ever signed a lease on an apartment, house or car, I imagine that you have agreed to pay extra fees in order to break the lease. This is a common practice and everyone seems to accept that it is worthwhile, so why is it so bad to have the same clause in the contract on cellular service?
So the USGS has almost completed the survey of the Bakken Formation. Estimates on the amount of oil contained in the shale formation range from 900 billion to 200 billion barrels.
A poster on Slashdot said that “Such a reserve would go a long way toward securing US energy independence.”
What exactly is energy independence? It seems to me that unless the United States starts taking alternatives to oil and coal more seriously that we are just trading dependence on foreign sources of petroleum for dependence on domestic ones. Is that really much better?
While watching Shark tonight I saw a commercial for the new Dyson root 6 handheld vacuum cleaner. The commercial was pretty cool. It showed the vacuum cleaner being built, in a Lego-like fashion.
Aside from the coolness of the commercial itself, it occurs to me that the design of the root 6 is quite similar to some of the designs I have seen for leaf blowers. Maybe Dyson needs to look into building a line of outdoor products next.
How heavy is your laptop bag? According to my passenger airbag sensors my latptop bag is at least as heavy as a small child.
The way I understand the system is that if the passenger is below a certain combination of height and weight, then the airbag is turned off and the seatbelt light is not triggered, but if you are a little heavier and/or taller then the seatbelt light is triggered.
The point of this is apparently to prevent injuries to small or under-weight passengers by a deploying airbag.
Awful nice of my truck to want my laptop to be secured by a seatbelt but not injured by the airbag. 