The average teen is ineligible for credit and does not earn enough money to buy an unsubsidized phone + monthly prepaid voice/data plan. Jobs for teens are scarce. In my town, half of them don't work at all. Maybe the problem is not what teens do with a smartphone, it's how they get to make the choice of owning one without the requirement to earn one. Mom and Dad hand over a $700 piece of hardware and spend another $500 annually on service plans, while the teenager's part of the bargain is little more than exclaiming "Hurray! Free stuff!". Then they turn 18, graduate from high school, and borrow other people's money to go to college. Student loans are not free, but to a person who has learned to expect handouts, it sure looks that way. Smartphones are the entry level of perpetual entitlement and dependence. If we have destroyed a generation, it's mostly because parents waited too long to introduce the concept of financial self sufficiency.

Before computers, there were typewriters (almost all of which used a Courier font). There was forensic analysis of typed documents, based mostly on matching tiny artifacts and inconsistencies to individual typewriters or possibly a brand/model of typewriter. Modern font forensics is a whole lot easier if all you care about is establishing the approximate year when a font became available. In the Killian documents case, nobody cared about matching the documents to the original typewriter or printer, they cared about whether or not the font existed when the documents were purportedly written. The ability to do this quickly and cheaply is relatively new, enabled by a proliferation of font types. If everyone still used Courier exclusively, it wouldn't be easy to prove anything by merely identifying a font.

Was the reprint of your short story presented as an original document by CBS news? I doubt it. Would you try to use your LaserWriter print to prove that you wrote the story as a kid with your TRS-80? Lotsa luck.

Quoted text from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

How incredibly convenient. If I didn't know better, I'd say someone didn't want the paper or toner to be analyzed, not realizing that the font was already a problem.

Either CBS producers knew it was a computer-generated print and thought nobody would notice, OR they saw what they wanted to see missed the obvious clues. Considering what a massive embarrassment this was for CBS (not to mention a career-ender for Dan Rather and 4 other people), I find it hard to believe this was simply a case of retyping a few memos. CBS has long since given up trying to convince anyone. After all, no matter what shape the originals were in, if they were legible enough to be retyped, they were legible enough to be photocopied. Unless, of course, the Word memos are partially or completely fabricated, in which case the known facts fit together without rationalization.

The first time I saw fonts at the center of an investigation was the CBS story about George W. Bush's military service. The CBS news story presented a document from the 1970s that was supposedly from an IBM Selectric typewriter when in fact it was from an Apple Macintosh using Microsoft Word default settings and a Palatino font. At the time, I was surprised to see how obvious the forgery was, and how easily it was exposed. Without this case, I wonder if anyone would have investigated the Calibri font in Pakistan.

Back in the late 1970's, I learned to type on a manual typewriter. As a result, I developed a heavy typing touch, which served me well with 1980's keyboards like the VT-100 terminal. A few years later, we had VT220 terminals with LK-201 keyboards. Every key was in the right place, but the key action was lighter and I wore out them out periodically. Today, my typing touch is considerably lighter. The LK-250 is the PC (ancient DIN connector) version of the LK-201, with the alt key replacing the compose key. IMHO, we reached the epitome of keyboard design back in the 1990's, with honorable mention to Apple for their keyboard designs of 2008-2015.

If and when the US has high-speed rail, TSA will be waiting for you at the train station. The only reason they don't do it now is that because AmTrak cannot afford to lose any passengers for a mode of transportation that costs more than flying and takes longer than driving.

Probably when the last Android phone on their network stops working. They can push as hard as they want to incentivize new customers to purchase iPhones, but they aren't going to give up the monthly revenue they get from their existing base, which is mostly Android.

In the past, VM has introduced new phone technology (like 4G) with corresponding new plans. Each time, they grandfathered the existing base. I had a $25/month plan with a 3G phone, which they honored until I wanted to buy a 4G phone, at which point I had to get the $35 plan. I expect to keep my $35 plan until I need a new phone, at which point I get an iPhone on their new $50 plan, or an Android phone on some other network.

Amazon has been selling VM phones for years, usually offering a better selection and better pricing than buying the exact same phone in the exact same box from VM. I predict that Amazon will continue to sell VM Android phones, and VM will continue to activate them, until the inventory is exhausted. If they follow past practices, even new customers should be able to get VM Android phones on Amazon and activate them on VM.

As you say, nobody is running online price checks at Whole Foods; they KNOW it will be cheaper elsewhere. I view the Whole Foods acquisition as Amazon's attempt to engage the least price-sensitive consumers they can find. Maybe Whole Foods customers will pay a premium (vs. local grocers) for Amazon's legendary online shopping experience. If Amazon ever found a way to deliver groceries to the customer without human cashiers or drivers, it would change the grocery industry forever.

Otherwise, YouTube becomes a cesspool of fake news and political correctness. I don't expect YouTube material to be vetted, confirmed, or "proven", and that's part of the appeal. There are a lot of hypersensitive snowflakes who would flag every opinion that doesn't agree with theirs. Hell, I expect a few downvotes for simply mentioning this possibility -- which will prove my point.

Owning a car means wasting a lot of money on insurance, depreciation, property tax, etc. When you can summon a robo-car with your phone, the incentive to own a car goes away. The auto makers will still sell cars, but the customers will be quantity buyers, and sales volume will be a lot less.

It seems that most of the online price checking takes place at OTHER stores, with customers checking the price of something on AMAZON. If Amazon thought to patent this method, maybe it's because they don't want competitors to block these online price checks.

Spare me the straw-man arguments. There is hardly any difference between Republicans paid by PAC money and Democrats paid by PAC money. Both parties have more in common than either would like to admit.

This is a bad idea that the airline lobby floats every few years. When the Democrats had control, they almost bought it until cooler heads prevailed. With Republicans in charge, it's time for another try. There really isn't much that the Federal government couldn't improve with privatization, but this is one of those things.

If this passes, the airlines will dominate the privatized company, transferring as much cost as they can to general aviation, while abusing their power for the purpose of limiting competition. They will dumb-down the controllers, resulting in chaos. It's hard to believe anyone could make the air travel industry any less accountable than it already is, but empowering an industry with a notoriously poor reputation of policing itself would be one way to do it.

Have we learned nothing from privatized airport security? Although I despise TSA, I have to admit that privatized airport security prior to 9/11 was absolutely useless. TSA, for all its well-documented flaws, ended the concept of minimum wage and constant turnover among security agents.

I had a Kindle Fire HD that went into brick mode a few years ago. Despite numerous attempts with Amazon tech support, Internet research, and all sorts of recovery procedures involving a "factory cable" to get into fast boot mode, it remains a brick to this day. It starts up OK, but when it gets to the unlock screen, it freezes after the swipe, leaving no keypad and thus no way to enter an unlock code. I have found others with the same problem, but not a single one seems to have a solution.

When Amazon elected to customize Android, they acquired the blame for any problems that vanilla Android does not have. IMHO, they have failed in this endeavor, on various devices in various ways. There are many reliable Android implementations out there, but I doubt any of them are from Amazon.

1. Auto delete any voice mail from numbers that are not in my address book.
2. Access code required to leave a voice mail message. Unauthenticated senders need not apply.
3. Voice recognition software screens each voice mail, comparing new messages to a centralized database of spam messages.

I will do whatever it takes to make sure these crap calls fail. At worst, I'll ditch voice mail altogether.

There is something to be said for putting the telephone out of its misery. With so many illegal telemarketers ignoring the do not call list, the days of voice telephone service are numbered anyway. A tsunami of crap voice mail would finish it off immediately.