That's why you want the app on your smartphone to be always running in the background, noticing that it just heard an SSID from your home Wifi, and starting to poll for the front door-lock lowpan so it can unlock the door when you're walking toward it. OTOH, it also needs to do the right thing if you leave your phone in your purse or briefcase on the chair by the front door.

Luke???

I can tell you a lot about the events that shaped the Vietnam war, from French colonialism and the Dulles Brothers on, and about the motivations of the ^@^%%@s who wanted to send me there, but I still can't tell you why anybody in their right mind thought it was a good idea to have that war. And a lot of the homeless vets I meet these days remind me of an old guy I knew a few decades ago who was never quite right after coming back from WWII.

Manual typewriters are pretty safe, if you dispose of the typewriter ribbons securely (spook agencies used to be really good at reconstructing content from used typewriter ribbons.) But even electric typewriters have their security risks - they're not all that quiet electrically, and weren't designed for low RF emissions, which gives spies some possibilities of doing electronic eavesdropping instead of having to do audio. There was once a cheap Brother electronic typewriter that had about a 2-mile signal range; I'm assuming it was designed like a computer keyboard plus computer printer in one box rather than being a dumb electromechanical.

There's also the question of whether they'll be able to find carbon paper, or are going to use photocopies.

I went for the Spinal Tap album cover and general heavy metal first, but HHGTTG was the obvious next place to go.

I don't know if San Francisco itself wants that. The Bay Guardian was agitating for it for years, but that doesn't mean the city as a whole was in favor of it. Besides, they've got the Hetch Hetchy Dam providing much of their power supply, and it's been more reliable than much of the rest of the Bay Area's power.

Seems like it to me. But it doesn't sound like the NSA; they're usually better at it than that.

LMGTFY.COM/Anonymous+Coward+says+Jorge+Carrasco+sounds+like+a+real+moron

Dude! It says "The page you were looking for doesn't exist." Oh, noes, he was successful!

What's a publicly-owned utility doing trying to hide the negative reputation of its CEO? Leave aside the question of whether the folks they hired to do it could do the job at the price they were charging, they still should have the guts to admit that the CEO they hired is the CEO they hired, and if they don't have the guts to do that, they should have hired somebody who didn't need reputation-washing.

Reasonably priced LED light bulbs that put out enough light to be useful for room lighting are a pretty new thing. I haven't seen =$10 bulbs with lumens equivalent to 60-watt incandescents until last year, though it's possible they've been around slightly longer, and I'm still waiting to see cheap LED bulbs that are equivalent to 100 or 150-watt incandescents. And yes, CFLs have been around for a while, and have probably been cheap for 4-5 years, and most of the hard-to-reach light fixtures in my ceilings have them, and sometimes they burn out. These days, if they do, I replace them with LEDs.

That's efficiency. Energy saving really is the watts; whether the amount of light the choices put out is enough, not enough, or more than enough is a separate question. For night-lights, not much is still usually enough.

I haven't owned any of the current generation of cellphone-accessory smartwatches. The ones I have owned:

-- Casio GPS watch - It was a gift from my wife, back before GPSs had taken over the world. It was big and clunky, got me all kinds of geek cred at work, didn't work very well as a GPS but the fact that it worked at all was amazing.

-- TI EZ430-Chronos watch - programmable, using their MSP430 microprocessor set, had a reasonably flexible display. It didn't have a lot of sensors, and I didn't end up hacking it very much, but it was a lot of fun. It had a low-power radio link that let it connect to a heartbeat monitor band, so you could use it for things like watching your heart rate while jogging.

-- Watches with various other functions built in, like moon phase, tides tables for surfing, that kind of thing. One of them had a screen saver for entirely no good reason, just because it could.

In practice, I find that almost all of the time I'm either in front of a computer screen with a clock display in the corner, or in an environment with clocks around, or carrying a cellphone with a clock display on the main screen, or in an environment that's not very friendly to watches, or in a social environment where I don't really care what time the clock says it is, so I've stopped wearing watches most of the time.

When smart-watches get smart enough to be the phone instead of being a peripheral display for the phone, maybe. But is a smart-watch phone that needs a Bluetooth headset and needs reading glasses to use more convenient than a cellphone with big text that can use a wired headset? For me, it's really not.

And Iron Dome hasn't been doing anything to protect the Palestinians from missile attacks.

Mira Grant sleeps with a machete under her bed, and highly suggests you do the same.

It's not the cold that kills you - it's the cure for the common cold. And not everybody dies. Or stays dead.