Stupid question: does GPS on a smartphone use up network minutes? How do you pay for the GPS use, compared to a standalone?

at least in the US of A, as long as the "broadband" part remains at the mercy of "providers" like the cablecos and phonecos. But I'm very happy for those who live in the developed world. Life will be good there.

"Reliable" would be good enough for me.

One new approach from SolarNetOne strives to allow users in those developing areas to have access to an internet connection without having to depend on unreliable infrastructure.

Much as I hate to be greedy, any chance we could accomplish this in the US of A?

How would he get proof? Would he be allowed to photograph the event? No. Would the TSA confirm or deny? No. Would you believe them if they did? No. Not sayin' the story's true or not true, just that in a police state evidence is just another pr variable. That said, the article doesn't explain why he was detained in the first place. Obviously they didn't know he had an "incriminating" script at that point. Of course, again, Big Brother ain't talking.

Getting net energy production was right around the corner in the '70s and apparently still is, except now the corner is a century away. There were tokamaks, magnetic bottles, laser inertial confinement systems, and other efforts in the 70s. The primary commercial fusion power developer, General Atomic, said fusion would account for significant amounts of commercial energy production by the year 2000. The milestone everyone was waiting for then, as now, was net energy production. It may well get on your nerves, but so far there's no good reason to think that more research would have made any difference. There's no proof that the concept is workable now, any more than there was 40 years ago. Is it worth funding some research? Yeah. But is it a bigger longshot as the years go by? Yeah.

In the middle of the 70s, controlled fusion was just around the corner. Many times. 100 years is some corner. Far as I know there's been no progress, even in the lab, since then.

So maybe MS will soon be able to dispense with that troublesome outsourcing and hire true American programmers for chickenfeed.

Only massive metabolizing can save us now. Pass it on.

Just happened to scroll down some after reading this. Not only will the batteries keep our mechanical add-ons working, they can have a Repo Man. No more late payments to our poor "health care" enforcers.

My own private vampire.

No, s/he's asking if the fungicides used to treat yeast infections would also attack the "good" yeast. And while we're at it, what about reglar ol' antibiotics?

That's the part I don't get: the complainers don't seem to know that when you click a link in google, you go to the Guardian site (or whatever). They'd have a case if you could read the story on google, but you can't. So google is funneling readers to the content provider (which does not pay, AFAIK, for the service). It's kind of like wanting the Yellow Pages to pay for listing your business. And of course the complainers have a simple recourse: don't let any search engines link to their content. So easy, if that's really the issue. The question then becomes, can these lawyers really be this pig ignorant, or so they just like pathetic whining, or are they counting on some judge/pols being ignorant enough not to laugh them out of the room? By the Guardian's standard, I guess /. should be paying them for referring to this story. And of course the Guardian should be paying the subjects of every story they cover, since they generated the content. There's a nice recursion in there somewhere. Perhaps with geniuses like these running our media we can look forward to a new era of total silence. Not an entirely unpleasant outcome.

Well, Britain manages to have a much livelier, independent, and diverse news environment than we do in the US. Much of the reason is that high inheritance taxes inclined privately owned news chains to go to nonprofit status. Plus of course there's the BBC competing with the private journalism outlets. In the case of Britain, I'm pretty sure they get to make candidate endorsements -- not that anybody cares about such things anyway, except the candidates. I can't believe anybody in the US believes that the "free" corporate press system has led to journalism that's worth a damn.

There was/is a banner that reads: "No more due dates for Blockbuster Total Access exchanges". No hint that this might be a policy change that will be adverse for most customers, and that cancels a feature that the was part of the deal when the customer signed up. The notice fits somewhere between "sneaky" and "dishonest". It's still not a bad deal, but I'll be rechecking the comparison between Netflix and BB. It's kind of amazing that the only 2 US movie-by-mail services are both so much crappier than they need to be.