Not anymore my friend. They got rid of the Grandfathering a few months ago. I had quite the e-mail exchange back and forth with them about it.

It's still a bargain at that price of course, but I still wasn't happy about it....

Another question: How can it be legal to transmit on licensed frequencies owned by someone else? Perhaps the Feds have an exemption to the Radio Act but State and Local Governments? Not bloody likely. Why aren't the cellular carriers screaming bloody murder about this? They paid billions of dollars to license their spectrum. Modern digital networks are laid out very precisely, with a need to carefully account for the location of each transmitter and to control their output power to avoid interference with neighboring cells. There is no way that a device like Stingray can be used without causing interference to other users.

You'll shoot your eye out kid.

My sister is a part time LEO and retired member of the Air Force; she's working one night at a convenience store when some would be robber pulls a "gun" on her. She's complying with him long enough to draw her own firearm when she realizes that it's a BB gun. At that point she tells him to leave, he says "I'm not screwing with you bitch." whereupon she takes the BB gun away from him and uses it as a club to beat the ever living shit out of him. The only reason that idiot went to the hospital rather than the morgue was the cool-headedness of his would be victim. Most other people (including many LEOs) would have just shot the son of a bitch.

The best part was when he tried to sue her after the fact, in Louisiana, a state with a civil immunity law for injuries resulting from justifiable self-defense. She got court costs on that one, paid by his ambulance chasing scumbag attorney.

The other problem is the potential for escalation; if I think you're threatening me with deadly force I'm allowed to respond in kind in all 50 States in the Union. Pulling that BB gun might not seem like the best idea when your would-be victim pulls a real firearm and puts two real bullets into your chest.

You do know Pandora has a very inexpensive ($3.99/mo) option that eliminates all advertisements and comes with a few fringe benefits, right?

I haven't heard an ad on Pandora in 6 years.

This whole concept of "drive by porning" is nothing more than fear, uncertainty, and doubt spread by the "think of the children" namby-pambies who want to block adult sites from anyone accessing them on the internet.

Really? I guess some people are too young to remember WhiteHouse.com.

The National Security Agency (NSA) is a United States intelligence agency responsible for global monitoring, collection, decoding, translation and analysis of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes - a discipline known as Signals intelligence (SIGINT). NSA is also charged with protection of U.S. government communications and information systems against penetration and network warfare. The agency is authorized to accomplish its mission through clandestine means, among which are bugging electronic systems and allegedly engaging in sabotage through subversive software.

Medicial Device Excise Tax: That's $0.345 per tax at the non-bulk rate into Uncle Sam's coffers. I wonder how much purchasing power $0.345 has in the regions hardest hit by Ebola?

That's one of the things I miss about Finland; the lion's share of the public wi-fi networks don't waste your time with a stupid disclaimer/logon webpage. You connect to them, get an IP address, and you're off and running. The only one out of the dozens that I used where I can recall a logon webpage was on OnniBus.

Add this to the list of things that our sue happy culture has ruined. You'll never see that duplicated here, because some jackass will sue if little orphan Annie uses your hotspot to look at porn, or his laptop picks up malware, or even just because Saul Goodman has nothing better to do today and needs a new suit jacket or bluetooth headset.

I had the Nokia flip phone that implemented it back in 2006-2007. The Wi-Fi calling worked great in my experience, seamless handoff back and forth with the macro cellular network; it would even roam between different APs (my employer needed four APs to cover our entire building) without dropping calls. The problem was that Nokia was prone to crashing for other reasons, even with the Wi-Fi turned off, it had very buggy software and I eventually tired of it shutting down for no reason. They had two other phones that supported it, one of them a Blackberry, but I never got around to experimenting with them.

My favorite T-Mobile phone was the Motorola v195s; that thing had a radio in it that could hold the weakest signal without dropping calls (always a consideration for T-Mobile customers in suburban/rural markets), as well as an eight hour talk time with the factory battery. It was just a phone, didn't even have a camera, but it was and in some ways still is my favorite cell phone out of the dozens that I've owned over the years.

I really liked T-Mobile, they introduced me to the awesomeness of GSM, amongst other things, and it was with a heavy heart that I switched back to Verizon when my job took me to a city where T-Mobile had no coverage. If Verizon ever yanks my unlimited data plan I'll be back on T-Mobile in a New York Minute; I've thought about doing it anyway but their coverage is grossly inferior around these parts, which would be worth putting up with if they could save me money, but with my grandfathered Verizon pricing + employee discount I'm paying less with Verizon than anything T-Mo can offer me. Hard to justify paying more for less, no matter how awesome they are or how much of an asshat Verizon can be.

That's been around forever. T-Mobile had this back in 2006 or 2007. It's called Generic Access Network. I played around with it back in the day when T-Mobile gave you unlimited calling if you subscribed to this, they even had a specially branded version of the WRT-54GL called the WRT-54TM, which I still have. It apparently did some power saving stuff that the standard WRT54GL didn't implement at the time,ich I'm just standard WMM; it makes for a nice dd-wrt router, since the T-Mobile model had more memory than the standard WRT-54GL, supposedly they requested that so they could add more features down the line. Ultimately they abandoned the concept of free wi-fi calling, there were only three phones that supported it back in the day, though it's my understanding that they still use the same technology so their customers can place calls while traveling aboard without paying roaming rates.

Anyway, I digress. This reeks of a press release that was issued to generate buzz and stock purchases. Is this what /. has come to? There's nothing new here. These ideas were discussed in the early 2000s and largely moved away from. Voice minutes aren't a significant expense for cellular carriers these days.

*shrug*, it's set on a space ship, in the future, where faster than light travel is a reality and most consumer goods can be created out of thin air. I think that makes it sci-fi; if you want to split hairs you could go with the downstream definition, though I think that's kind of silly.

I don't have that experience at all. A few of them are downright painful (The Dauphin, Manhunt, Up the Long Ladder) but those episodes were the ones that were downright painful when they originally aired. I can marathon the 3rd and 4th seasons over a long weekend and find those episodes just as compelling today as when they first aired.

Of those three I've only seen Sopranos, which I enjoyed a great deal (enough to own the DVD box sets) but I do not consider it to be as good as TNG. To each their own I suppose, but I think TNG harkens back to a day when TV dramas didn't have to be dark, depressing and have chaotic evil protagonists. I liked Breaking Bad too, more than the Sopranos, but still not as much as TNG.

Huh? I don't even need to quote DS9 (though it would so easy to do so) to shoot down this point. TNG Episodes: The Wounded, The First Duty, Ensign Ro, The Most Toys, Silicon Avatar, and The Pegasus. That's off the top of my head. There are plenty of TNG episodes that didn't present "consistent and perpetual moral high ground." Some of them raised tough questions (The Most Toys and Silicon Avatar, when is killing in self-defense justified?), some presented characters behaving like self-serving assholes (The First Duty, The Pegasus), others had moral ambiguity and unhappy endings (The Wounded).

And if it's a viewpoint character you're looking for, there's always Chief O'Brien. The rest of them weren't supposed to be viewpoint characters. The whole point to TNG was that these people are the best of the best, that was stated over and over in the show, they're supposed to be the people that you look up to, not people that you can see yourself as.

Incidentally, I really liked the BSG remake, but it came off the rails at the end with the religious/destiny nonsense that always made me reach for the fast forward button on my DVR. Not coincidentally, the Prophets subplot on DS9 was my least favorite part of that show.

One would assume that a snowstorm isn't going to destroy the on-site backup generations as a tsunami can. This seems like an overabundance of caution to, though IANANP, and if the grid can absorb the shutdown I suppose there's nothing wrong with excessive caution. There's a bit in TFA about them doing maintenance that required a shutdown during the last forced shutdown, so maybe they're planning to do the same here rather than do it over the summer months when energy prices and demand are higher.

Since you bought up Fukushima, I've long wondered how a modern first world nation-state could not manage to get generators on-site before the batteries went flat. I've read that the utility tried but could not get them there in time due to traffic jam and destroyed infrastructure on the ground. Did nobody think of picking up the phone and calling someone at the military to dispatch some bloody helicopters? I can't fathom that you need so much power to run cooling pumps as to render the required generators too heavy to fly in.