It has DTMF, but there's a switch to make it pulse dial instead of using tones.

PS: Do you perhaps live in St. George Utah? I know for a fact they installed an exchange with stepper relays instead of DTMF decoders a while back, and since they amortize equipment over 20 years, the thing's still inservice.

My preferred method is "the heat death of the universe".

You really do *not* want the honest answer to this question, but I will give it to you anyway: So people who would otherwise be employed asking "Would you like fries with that?" can get non-performance critical programming jobs.

You *always* have to be closer to the hardware:

#1: Almost everything is a mobile device these days; people buy laptops instead of desktops, cell phones music players, etc.. The closer you are to the hardware, the better your battery life, the lower power your processor can be to do the same amount of work, the cheaper the unit price for the lower powered hardware and smaller battery, the lower the cooling system costs (mostly, you can go without them, or operate them on "low"), etc., etc..

#2: Being closer to the hardware lets you reduce the number of blades/servers/PaaS instances that you require in your data center or cloud. This reduces costs, again in terms of cooling, but also in rack space, and power requirements. Facebook rewrote their PHP code to be compiled to binary code, and it saved them over 50% in servers. When you are a startup, and have tons of VC money to throw hardware at a problem, you can get away with not having to worry about those things, but when it's time to get to scale, they start to become major issues.

You can *get away* with not being closer to the hardware... for a *short time*, when you are engaged in rapid churn (e.g. new web UI ever 2 hours), or doing a lot of rewrites or running on hardware that better than the hardware you intend to deploy on, but after that being closer to the hardware is *the overriding thing*.

Answer to the related question... "What smart phones out now are (or can be reasonably outfitted to be) closest to a dumb phone, considering reliability, simplicity, and battery life?".

That's easy: any of them that you don't install all of those crappy, battery-sucking Apps on, and turn off polling for push notifications from Facebook, email, and so on, so they they aren't constantly running the battery down because then they can actually get the application processor into sleep state once in a while without some stupid polling interval waking them up to use more battery every few picoseconds.

AT&T 210M Trimline; no battery needed, it gets it's power from your landline so it works in a power outage, never has reception issues.

Hey, if you are going to be retro-technology boy for no good reason, might as well plug your phone into the wall while you are at it.

Well, presumably it's because you happen to know when you've murdered someone, you aren't going to be beheaded for it, but the risk of lethal injection is actually real?

Isn't that site just an alias for the "pleasepownmeheresmyemailaddress.com"?

This is true, to an extent, for some definition of useful. The JVM is an environment where you can do some types of useful work, without having to be a great coder, and not do too much damage.

I suppose a good analogy would be Commodore 64 BASIC.

The absolute #1 contribution of Java: it has allowed colleges and universities to turn out a generation of coders who are incapable of dealing with pointers, explicit memory management, stack layout, static memory maps, etc., etc..

In other words: a crapload of people with "Computer Science" degrees who could not write an OS or even a trivial part, like the C library signal trampoline, to save their ass, because they are in this walled garden/protected environment where they are "safe" from having to actually deal with real hardware.

Ironically, all of their JVMs on which they are normally running this code are not written in Java, because it's not really practical to do that.

Don't worry; eventually they'll get it right, and then, like Mozilla, after it was finally able to be compiled and (limingly) run out side of company walls, it will be not dead again.

The Karman line is 100km. This thing is a suborbital. It's not going to space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kármán_line

Forcing the jackasses to go on the record as to whether or not they support the bill, rather than allowing them plausible deniability on whether or not they would have voted for it is actually a fantastic thing, particularly after the John Oliver interview of Edward Snowden, which basically makes it pretty obvious that the government gets to see you dick/boob picks if the bill is passed.

No fad is a long term winner. They are all short term winners. It's time for them to pick a new horse, if the old one is dead.

I notice she skipped addressing the questions dealing with the EV1.

Probably necessary, since there is not going to be much more she's likely to be able to add to the subject, but it would be worth hearing anything she did have to say.

Or just use a power of 2 chunk size?

What idiot configuration did someone have to have to trigger this bug?