In the US, we need cheaper wireless, not faster. I've been passing thru some of Verizon's XLTE areas lately where my speeds have topped out at 69/19Mbps. That's pretty darn fast but completely useless for the vast majority of their customers with their piddly 1-10 gig caps.

Anyone? Really? You're gonna run down to Speedy Cash and get a loan for $200,000 just for the ability to place a bid? And, when you win at $500 per, they're going to give you another $1,300,000 to pay the balance? Let us know how that goes for you.

Not just because they picked the wrong standard. (I'm picturing Gil Gunderson making the pitch.) The real problem is that wireless charging doesn't transfer very much power. My new phone has a 2 amp charger but it gets less than half that thru a wireless charger. 2 amps can get me a good chunk of charge in 20 minutes. Wireless can't. If I'm low enough that I need to charge on the go, I need the maximum current that my device can handle.

A wireless charger is fine for keeping the phone topped off at my desk where the phone's sitting for hours with the display off. It's pretty much useless when I'm only going to be sitting for a few minutes.

Just put an outlet at each table and be done with it. You know they had to run power to the wireless systems so it would have been simple to install outlets.

That's the whole point. To cleverly trick the tester into believing something that isn't true. The test can't be beaten without clever tricking.

There are dozens phones, each with one minuscule feature that sets it apart from the rest. The market is saturated. Verizon's website shows 31 different smartphones and most of those will roll off and be replaced within a year. And, judging by the pricing, they apparently can't even give the Motorolas away.

Exactly. If they've got good precision, the information is still useful. You can tell that Car A uses significantly more fuel per mile (or whatever the heck a "kilometer" is) than Car B.

So rotate your monitor already. That's been an option for 20 years. Sure, only a few specialty products were available back then but now it's available with just about every video driver. I can do it on my laptops with AMD and Intel video and my desktop with Nvidia. If your monitor's stand doesn't allow rotating, get a VESA stand for $35.

Is are kids learnding?

That's like saying I should be at fault if I'm a passenger on a bus and it crashes. Sure, if I interfered with the driver or slashed a tire before getting on, I'd be responsible. But, if I get on without sabotaging the bus and sit quietly in my seat without distracting the driver, how can I be at fault if there's an accident?

As far as the auto-driving car goes, I didn't write the software or design the hardware. If it passed federal and state guidelines, it's not my fault if it fails. If I've maintained the vehicle properly and installed all of the required software updates, that should be the extent of my responsibility and liability. Also, this is what insurance is for. My insurance pays the aggrieved parties, then goes after the manufacturer if a cost/benefit analysis says they should.

No, it's actually nothing like that. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I can only assume you're imagining this happening in an Apple store. But it's not. Because Apple doesn't sell Android devices. It's happening at non-denominational cell phone stores and resellers.

To me, this whole thing seems silly. We had centralized computing "back in the day". The mainframe was The Cloud. The data was stored there, software lived there, we accessed it through dumb terminals that were basically a keyboard and monitor with really long cables. But that "ivory tower" setup was annoying for departments that wanted to have control over their computing resources. So each department got their own servers and smart terminals (computers). Now it's apparently too much work for departments (and entire companies) to maintain their computing resources so we're rolling it all back to the 70s. I guess in a couple decades, people will be complaining about how they're tired of The Cloud deciding what software they can use and there will be a push to bring computing power back to the departments and individual companies.

At my last job, I had a bunch of vents in my office ceiling. It was like a scene from Brazil. Two were AC. I could control one but not the other. Heat came out of other vents and I had no control over the heat. But I could turn on my AC while the heat was on. Another vent pumped out air all the time that was neither heated nor chilled. Because I had a thermostat on my wall, people assumed I had [ET]Ultimate Power[/ET] over the temperature. Didn't matter how many times I told them, "I can only make it colder." There used to be another thermostat in a nearby room but it was remodeled and the thermostat disappeared. I think that controlled the other AC vent.

But it's a very highly defined grey. Look at that fidelity.

Years and years ago, I worked for an environmental lab and some local law enforcement agency (Sheriff's department, I think) asked us to help determine whether they'd found the dump from a meth lab. Step one was to figure out how meth is made. So I found every recipe I could (using Steve's computer, of course) and ran them by the chemists. "Poison, poison, poison, death, that could work, poison, poison, that could work." Then they took the potentially valid recipes and worked out what the byproducts would be created at each phase and gave the cops a list of chemicals to test for.

Oh, and there are a lot of hoops to jump through to [legally] obtain a meth standard. Had to put in a lock box and access protocol to store an amount that was too small to give a rat a buzz.

The fact that I don't need what they're selling doesn't mean I don't understand what they're selling.