intelligence was rewarded. In fact, if anyone has too much education, they are labeled an elitist.

I was of course being sarcastic. I would like to point out that, as I heard in a physics class some place about 30 years ago, that while a pound is a unit of weight, a kilogram is a unit of mass and thus only have this relationship in earth gravity.

In the US we still don't do metric, either we are too good for it or too stupid to figure it out. Who can say? That said, what right do we have to join in this debate?

The citizens are the government and they have elected not to provide this service as a taxpayer funded service. The citizens of this county have CHOSEN to have this service only by subscription. This person was not in danger, nor were any members of his family, so this was not a public safety issue and the government is not under any obligation to protect a persons property from damage the person chooses to inflict on it. If the citizens of the county were to enact a tax to cover the expense of providing county wide fire protection, then they would not have to subscribe to a service. It's quite simple really.

I just can't understand how people can assume the government has unlimited resources. Tax and spend only works when you implement the tax side of the equation. Spend and spend is not viable long term.

It seems that there was a suit in process (or at least threatened) but HTC and MSFT came to a licensing agreement for the technology in question. The diagram seems to have been updated to reflect the current state.

I'm not surprised that Nokia is number one, but I never would have figured Kodak for number two. I never would have considered Kodak in this space at all.

Funny you should mention that, I was watching "House Hunters" on HGTV not too long ago, and they were searching for a home in Tennessee. They looked at homes both inside and outside the small city where they wanted to live and the agent pointed out that the taxes are much lower in the county than in the city. There are consequences for choices like that. This is a common practice in rural parts of the US. Having lived most of my life in Montana, I was actually surprised when I moved to Western Washington to see publicly owned fire houses in rural areas. Every couple years, the people in the counties opt to renew funding for rural fire protection through taxation.

When I was a kid (more than a few decades ago) in Montana, my family moved outside the city to get a bigger space (land and house). When we did, the only services the county provided were the county Sheriff and county road maintenance. I think they had a little equipment for fighting grass fires, but nothing to deal with structures (the costs for equipment and staffing are very different for the two). The county taxes were quite a bit lower than the city taxes and this was the result. For a lot of people who lived in the county lower taxes was a big part of their decision and they got what they paid for. My parents subscribed to a fire fighting service that served most of our county. (They also subscribed to a trash service because the city provided that only to tax payers as well.) We had stickers on every phone, and I think one on the window by the front door, with the number of the fire service, you called them directly back then. There were people in the county who decided they didn't want the protection and decided not to subscribe, but that was their choice and some of them lost their houses every year. Those that lost their homes one year had the reminder of those who lost their homes the year before, but they still chose not to subscribe.

Oh, and we had a burn barrel for burnable trash as well. The trash service charged by the number of cans you had and with 6 children, we produced a lot of trash. What would burn went into a 55 gal drum with no top on it and we threw in a couple of matches.

He made a choice to let his house burn if it caught fire when he decided not to subscribe to the service. The home owner made the call before any of this happened. It was a conscious decision on his part to not pay for the subscription because he had something else he wanted to spend the $75 on. Because he failed to pay the fee, it was too expensive to fully insure his house, so now he whines about that too. It's that simple. They were not mean, or thoughtless or any of those things. They simply followed the rules that everyone who lives in a rural area knows.

Let me say it again, the HOMEOWNER CHOSE TO LET HIS HOUSE BURN when HE FAILED TO SUBSCRIBE. Who are we to deny him his right to choose after all?

I for one am really quite OK with that, I don't think it is being used for much of anything right now. Somebody go grab the head and we'll find a rocket to juice up someplace. I'm pretty sure one of the pickle jars from a restaurant will work, I'll see if I can find one.

In all likelihood, the deodorization process will break their breeding process and they will disappear completely in a year or two.

Sadly, my Droid does not support this. The app is the only way to get it to work. I understand that some of the newer phones, Droid X and 2 do support it. I had hoped that 2.2 would fix this, but it did not. I had to go back to EasyTether.

Thanks, I installed that some time ago. It doesn't seem to matter, I can be sitting right next to the hotspot (it's behind my monitor) and it will still stop communicating and require that I restart the wifi. I've had the same problem in many locations, hotels, coffee shops, my living room, it will work for some random length of time, and then just stop. If I need a reliable connection for email or something like that, I switch to 3G.

Even then, they will tell the families that it was and IED instead of telling the truth.

This won't be a problem with the military until, instead of unsuspecting civilians being blown to hell, it turns out to be a squad of US military on patrol who actually called in the drone strike and just happen to be 13 meters away from the target.