That is probably not workable. One of my real life friends has discovered that some of their extended *family* express rather "unfortunate" opinions on Facebook. When they get together in real life, these opinions are muffled but on Facebook the filters come off.

I've seen a little of this from people I have known for my many years (long before Facebook) but have been out of frequent contact with for a decade or more. They post things that make me cringe a little.

I like Sonic. But 6Mbps is not fast anymore and that is all that Sonic will likely be able to offer you. (Yes, the service is technically "up to 20Mbps" but unless you share a parking lot with CO, you are not going to get that)

Comcast starts at 6Mbps and goes up to 105Mbps. AT&T is running VDSL up to 45Mbps. Unlike at the ADSL generation, they are not required to share and so they don't.

Any ISP that doesn't run their own wires is doomed to offer increasingly uncompetitive speeds. Sonic has run fiber in a couple of areas but it doesn't seem likely that they will be able to fiber everyone who has service with them now. Or even close.

Street protests were over compensation of executives. I never heard any suggestion that the lower level workers were overpaid.

Fusion reactors capable of producing net power are big, or seem to be being as we haven't actually built one yet.

However, if you just want to produce tritium for a boosted fission bomb, you don't need to generate net power. A farnsworth fusor will do and they are small and inconspicuous.

As for deuterium: Deuterium is produced for industrial, scientific and military purposes, by starting with ordinary water—a small fraction of which is naturally-occurring heavy water—and then separating out the heavy water by the Girdler sulfide process, distillation, or other methods.

So, no point in securing your fusion reactor because the bad guys don't have any real motivation to break in. At least, not to steal anything.

I can think of a few things that are worse, including:

1) Arriving at your destination needing to charge your phone and finding that, although you have the charger and the phone, you forgot the adapter.
2) Having to mate and secure two connections instead of just one.
3) Unplugging phone cable from adapter leaving converter behind. This already happens with car adapters where you can easily walk off with the cable and phone, leaving the 12V adapter behind.
4) Arriving at far off destination to find that you have a new style power adapter (for another device) but old style microusb on your phone with no converter and you may not even be able to get a converter at any price because everyone assumes that people migrate old to new and not the other way.

Nah. They've re-invented Ada.

Ada is when they re-invented PL/1.

Hmm. What comes after strike 2?

Even if you don't manage to make money at it, throwing a real ball around is a good way to stay in shape which is important for overall health. Throwing a virtual ball? Not so much and you are even more likely to need a day job which also will not give you the exercise that you need to stay healthy.

I think color representation would be like 3D: a fad that comes and goes but never quite sticks because it is so hard to do and because it can never be right.

Color paintings would be mostly highly abstract with a few rare and remarkable specimens painstaking created over many years. Most realistic art would gray scale.

Photography would be almost entirely black and white.

Computer monitors might well have color but, without effective mixing, could only display the actual color present in the phosphors. CGA would be state of the art color.

But the last I knew The Doctor preferred/will prefer to use cell phones. It probably isn't important the device use Skype. It may not even be important that the device be turned on.

Said the blind man.. What you describe is the end user description of a PAL. FPGA's are completely different and PALs are not actually designed that way either. It is just the end user description, much like knowing the x86 instruction set doesn't mean you know how to design a modern x86 processor.

An Altera or Xillinx FPGA is predominately a sea of small SRAM's but there are also many many muxes, complicated interconnects, configurable special function blocks (like multiply/accumulators, IO cells, and Ethernet interfaces). There is also a great deal of logic just to efficiently move configuration bitstreams into the chip. The complexity per unit area is less than a typical ASIC, which makes FPGA's good subjects for bringing up on new process flows but it is definitely not trivial work. Much is low level and structural rather than logical but that doesn't make it easy.

That said, an open FPGA design would be pretty useless. The hardest part is that low level process dependent optimization and that is just not repeatable without an army of engineers, expensive closed source tools, and access to bleeding edge foundries.

What people want, though, isn't to be able to make their own FPGA's. They just want an FPGA that is fully documented. Xilinx and Altera like to keep certain details secret. You have to use their tools because they won't tell you want you need to write your own and, even if you figure it out, they will sue you.

The Dumbarton (the closest route from PA) jams up. 237/880 (The route from further South on Peninsula and the South Bay) is a parking lot. It is simply not possible for a single location to be an easy drive from both Palo Alto and Fremont. If Tesla wants their employees meaningfully closer to the factory, they are going to have to put them on the factory's side of the Bay. I.e., Fremont or Union City.

True, but limited device intelligence and limited tape capacity made time shifting an exception rather than the rule. Most VCR owners, even those who used the time shifting feature, still watched most of their TV programs at the time that they aired.

With Tivo and other DVRs time-shifting becomes the norm and real-time an exception generally to be avoided.

Yes, but is it 1000 times bigger or 1024 times bigger? That's the important part!

Did you check to see if any of the these phones were still available?

I searched for sliders with displays of 960x540 and up, i.e., anything with more more pixels that my nearly 4 year old Mytouch 4G. There were four hits: all of them 960x540 and all of them discontinued.

On the contrary, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people who want keyboards. However, they will buy a new phone anyway, even if there is nothing available with a keyboard so the manufacturers have little incentive to cater to them. The same is true for small smart phones. Almost certainly more people want a small phone than want a slide out keyboard and they still get ignored. Manufacturers get more marketing buzz by pumping out giant keyboardless phones frequently than they would if they slowed down the upgrade cycle to spread their development efforts across niches.

When people stop buying new phones because manufacturers are not giving them what they want then maybe we will see some changes. My phone is 3.5 years old because I can't find a suitable (i.e., modern and not huge) replacement but I don't think there are enough people like me yet to catch the attention of the manufacturers.