That would have been my suggestion as well. A carefully placed old iPhone 3G hardwired into the electrical system (to ensure it stays charged) with Find My iPhone enabled would do the trick, and be quite slick at that - you could track it on anything from a desktop computer, another iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, or heck, basically anything with a web browser.

Yes, there's a recurring monthly fee associated with that for the underlying cellular service, but I don't think that there's many options for this sort of system that won't carry a fee of one sort or another.

Not to come across as a tree hugger or anything, but is this landfill safe, since, ya know, a lot of it will eventually end up there in areas where recycling programs are not on place.

That presents another question - will it play havoc with the recycling process itself?

Polymer note lifespan is widely accepted to be about 5 years.

Given I just found a coin in my jeans from 1957 which is still in regular circulation, I think your suggestion that the two even remote compare in overall longevity remains flawed. Plenty of original 1987 $1.00 "Loonies" are still in circulation - at at 23+ years old. To replace the $1.00 and $2.00 coins with polymer would still mean that they would have been replaced at least 4 times over that same span of time, and every 5 years after that you add another replacement cycle.

To equate it to my 1957 coin in my jeans, a polymer equivalent would have had to have been replaced more than 20 times already.

Coins can easily last decades under regular circulation, and centuries with light circulation. Polymer will never match that no matter how hard you try.

The longevity of coins still far surpasses even these new plastic bills...by many times over. Your logic is flawed.

Agreed. I was excited to find a BBS a few months ago that was still running the same software I used when I was a SysOp myself in the late 80's. After about 15 minutes online the nostalgia effect quickly gave way to the reality that, well...it just sucked. +++ATH0

I own a CurrentCost ENVI. The current cost units do have basic device-level drivers for OSX but the interface software required to upload the data to Google Powermeter is (sadly) Windows only. It's one of the biggest gripes in the CurrentCost message forums but the developers appear complacent on the subject.

As such I've been forced to run Windows 24/7 via Parallels with the sole task of running the Google Powermeter application in Windows instead of OSX. Frustrating.

Frustration aside, I do like the unit, but I discovered shortly after my purchase that it only partially supports tiered pricing - it does support two tiers (day and night) with selectable rates and times, but our local utility uses three tiers with each coming into effect at various times of day - off peak, mid peak, and full peak. The ENVI has no ability to be programmed to support this - what I did was program it for the "average" price between mid=peak and on-peak so that it is at least relatively close on the price display.

I'm hoping eventually GPM will also add more options - it supports only *one* tarrif rate, making it even less useful for calculating pricing. It does graph the information nicely though.

Here in Canada we pay a huge levy on blank CD media, MP3 players, and virtually any other media capable of holding music. This "goes into a fund to pay musicians and songwriters for revenues lost from consumers' personal copying. ", as per the Cnet article here http://news.cnet.com/2100-1025_3-5121479.html

Therefore, this shutdown is infringing on my legal right to download music.

Meh, there's always ISOhunt, or like everyone else has already said, plenty of other choices.

I'll admit to having one of the original (and second version) of the Sidekick (They were called the Hiptop everywhere else except the USA) and the idea of storing everything on the cloud seemed great at the time - through several device upgrades, warranty replacements, and other hardware changes everything just automagically restored to the new phone within 10-15 minutes of switching the SIM.

One should add that the devices themselves are designed to "Play dead" when the battery gets low and shut down while still maintaining enough power to ensure the volatile ram holding the devices local cache of data remains intact. It's only if the battery is fully exhausted to the point of not being able to accomplish this, or a critical error/OS crash (The dreaded "red X of death") is encountered is the volatile ram actually in danger of being erased.

Therefore all the warnings about not letting the phones go "dead" or turning them off are a bit misleading since, excluding one of the two above situations everything is actually safe, but it's not without warrant since I'm sure MS/Danger are going to try to "backwards restore" whatever is salvageable.

Furthermore, since the OS is locked down extremely tight there's no (to my understanding, admittedly a few years old now) method of locally backing up a Sidekicks data. Contacts stored on the device can be backed up to the SIM card one at a time (with only the basic name/phone data, all other extraneous data such as profile pics, etc will not be included) but it was tedious to accomplish (one contact at a time) and the average Sidekick user (read as teen/clueless) probably has no idea how to do it anyways.

If they're on the way to eventually eliminating Firewire I sure hope that Apple has plans to update USB support for more camcorders then.

I have a JVC hard drive camcorder that is USB and iMovie has absolutely no idea what to do with it when I plug it into any of my Macs. It seems thatt if I had chosen a camcorder with Firewire instead (which Apple themselves trumpeted as the thing to do) I'd have had no issues.

Nice.