AT&T Wireless offers several data plans with their GPRS-capable (“mMode”) phones. Let’s look at the cheapest three:

Note that neither the Included Data nor the Mini plans include any data; with the Mini plan you pay $2.99 extra to pay a little less per kilobyte. So let’s compute the break-even point, where it’s better to pay for Mini. It turns out to be 299 kilobytes, for which both plans total $8.97 a month. But wait: for only $7.99, you can get the Mega plan, which includes over three times as much data for almost a dollar less.

Note that you don’t have to decide up front; AT&T lets you change your plan retroactively for the whole month, and your current data usage can be discovered either via the Web site or using the phone itself. So if you’re on the Included Data plan, all you have to do is check your usage near the end of the billing cycle, and if you’re at 267 kilobytes or more, call Customer Service and switch to the Mega plan.

So one has to ask: Does AT&T Wireless offer the Mini Plan for any other reason than to extract an additional fee from people who aren’t good at math?

I was just listening to the preview of Blake Shelton’s Playboys of the Southwestern World on iTunes, and it got me thinking. The preview starts at the chorus, and it fit exactly. The sound clip starts just after a verse would have ended, and stops just before another would have begun. You get to hear the entire chorus, but with no cut-off lyrics or sudden stops in the middle of a musical phrase.

This got me thinking: Does embracing modern music distribution mean composing your songs to have the perfect thirty second preview?

From a Walgreens‘ spot I just saw on TV:

If only all businesses were like Walgreens… they’d have your credit card on file, and you could buy things just by giving your name.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

That’s what it says on my sticker, anyway. My experience was pretty good, I have to say. This wasn’t a huge election, and I think I may have been the second person voting in my district this morning. I will say this: Security issues aside, I rather liked the touchscreen voting machines. I think Santa Clara County’s are made by Diebold, but I’m not sure. I thought the interface they presented was very straightforward and easy to use, and the machine made several efforts to ensure that I knew exactly what I was voting for. The initial vote screens showed basically the same format as the sample ballot, and when you touched the box next to a candidate or issue, it turned into a green check. After you finished with the ballot, it showed you a nice screen listing only your votes (not the other options), and had you review them. Then you had to press a large yellow button to cast your vote. It was not as satisfying as the designers probably hoped.

I do have my concerns over the security and reliability of these systems, and I strongly hope that future electronic voting systems correct these issues. Santa Clara County is going to experiment with voter-verifiable paper receipts in the November and March elections, and the Secretary of State is considering requiring them statewide. I think that would be a good first step. However, I’ve been having nightmares over how a bad user interface on a touch-screen voting machine could make the notorious Florida butterfly ballot seem simple and straightforward by comparison. So I was glad to see that in this respect, at least, they did okay.

Ever since I was a little kid, I remember criminals and their hangers-on on TV and in the movies discussing the statute of limitations. When the statute of limitations on their particular crime expired, they would be free to return to a life of ease. For those shows that featured the exploits of authority types, the statute of limitations provided a drama-inducing deadline; if the criminals were not put to justice by the time the statute of limitations expired, they would get off scott-free.

So can someone explain to me how “expired” is the right word here? As I understand it, a statute of limitations is a law (that’s what “statute” means, right?) that says that after 7 years, you can no longer be prosecuted for insurance fraud (or whatever). So isn’t “expired” exactly the wrong word? Isn’t the seven-year mark exactly when the statute takes effect?