Why is plugging in a charger difficult?

Because any of a million things can happen to render a microUSB port useless... And the failure of that tiny part makes your $1,000 smartphone similarly useless and worthless.

I'd go for something like a magnetic surface-mount charging cord, if I got to make all the R&D decisions. But since I don't, an induction coil with some power loss is better than having to fiddle with fragile microUSB jacks all the time.

The most terrifying moment in history was Nagasaki, because they already knew what happened in Hiroshima.

Early nuclear weapons aren't modern fusion bombs. More Japanese were killed by conventional bombs and napalm.

And more than that, they simply didn't know how many we had... Which is actually a GOOD THING, because we spent the only two that were available, and the threat of us dropping lots more of them (which we didn't have) ended the war.

I think there are enough examples in history to prove that appeasement does not work.

Seems to have worked pretty well for Mexico.

It is the tepid response given to atrocities elsewhere that has sent the message that Putin can do this with impunity.

As opposed to Bush's decisive action, which led to Russia invading Georgia with impunity...?

The proper response to this is to strengthen military forces in new NATO member states surrounding Russia,

Ukraine trying to get NATO and EU membership was a major issue causing this crisis in the first place. At the first sign of other neighboring countries expressing an interest in NATO membership, expect another invasion force, BEFORE US forces have a chance to ever get on the ground.

I think we're better off with the Afghanistan model... Give Ukraine a ton of man-portable anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, and pay them a few dollars for every multi-million dollar Russian tank they destroy. Just think of it as faster sanctions...

History says that if you just let them take one or two countries they will stop and all will be well.

There are a huge number of examples in history, where expansion does stop after one or two objectives.

The Spanish-American war, and the Mexican-American war are examples of expansion that didn't ever go any further.

A shooting war with Russia means the entire US East and West coasts are within range of sub-launched cruise missiles,

Which is why US attack subs are following the Russian boomers around...

While people may have been all pissy about Bush, unilateral wars, and Team America World Police, the fact of the matter is that it was better than the alternative.

Bush was the one who ruined the good relations with Russia, the one who destroyed the economy that made it possible to pay for his wars, and the one who made the US public extremely weary of more war, or giving the president power to make such decisions. Even now, it's the divided congress with intractable Republicans that makes it a questionable proposition if the president could even get authorization to go to war.

Obama never had any red lines for Ukraine. It's utterly ridiculous to pretend that Bush or any other American president in history would ever have been willing to risk going to war with Russia over Ukraine. Not Regan at the height of the Cold War... Nobody. Ukraine is not West Berlin.

If there is research to do regarding what service to choose, how does comcast have a monopoly?

Well... Comcast could be the only wired internet service provider in an area, BUT they might only offer service that is so expensive and slow, that someone has to choose between Comcast, cellular, and satellite.

If your mother just wants to check her e-mail and download a few pictures every once in a while, then the ever-increasing speed of Comcast's cheapest tier is wasted, and saving a few dollars by going with something like T-Mobile's $30/month 5GB cellular plan might be cheaper and just as good.

I do not believe that "bork" is a legal term with any validity.

Umm... It sounds funny, because it's Latin. Lawyers just *love* Latin words.

quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur

Those regulations were instituted because taxi drivers and taxi companies were doing incredibly unethical things that were causing damage to both people and to the economy.

But that doesn't stop them, or later politicians, from abusing the power they've given themselves, to start squeezing every dollar they can get out of it, and/or to raise huge barriers to entry to keep out competitors and give their buddies a practical monopoly in the industry.

For example, NYC strictly limiting the number of medallions they sell, until they're valued at over $1 million each, paid for by the hacks who might pull in a whopping $50k/year working long hours, in dangerous conditions, in the highest cost-of-living city in the US. Or mandating a single, specific model of vehicle for all cabs, with their own customizations that drive the prices into the stratosphere. etc.

If the drive is huge and making a backup takes forever, you might be less inclined to keep a backup and more inclined to hope it doesn't fail.

Long gone are the days when you had to sit back and not do anything on your system, waiting patiently while the data was backed up, so as make sure everything would keep up, and not to interrupt the tape/CD-R/etc.

When my system is being rsync'd to the backup drive, the only thing I notice is a small lag when I click on a file, and a HDD LED that's blinking like it's trying to signal me that the Russians are invading.

Just like before I can lose entire tv series when the disk fails.

Buy two.

If you're worried about the drive failing, a RAID-1 setup will take care of it, while doubling read speeds and halving seek times.

If you're worried about user error or other accidents, have one offline in an external caddy, and just periodically power it up and rsync all the new data to it.

I've been doing the later religiously for the past 10 years, upgrading my external drive every time I upgrade my internal drives. In all that time, not one hard drive has suddenly failed on me, instead bigger drives drop in price and become too tempting to ignore, so old drives go in the trash. But besides being insurance that my many years of acquiring content won't poof into smoke and leave me at square one, feeling like a crippled baby learning how to walk again, the external drive has been extremely useful in making my hard drive upgrades, and OS upgrades, a much simpler operation.

It's just so damn incredibly cheap and easy to keep a reasonably up-to-date backup of EVERYTHING you have, that I can't believe people would choose not to do so. The prices on "cloud" storage are astronomical by comparison.

Time-cube meets ancient Egypt...

It doesn't take super-geniuses or fancy technology, it just takes dedication and some manpower.

More technology can dramatically reduces the time and manpower needed. With the technology they had, it's hard to figure out how they made the huge structures they did, with the numbers of people they had, in the time-frame they had to do it.

The Egyptian pyramids are a much harder problem than something small like stone-henge. It's the difference between someone building a wagon in their garage, and an assembly line turning out automobiles. There are strict limits on how much time they had, how many people could possibly have been on-site, and with the limited technology they had, the numbers just don't seem to add-up to make what they did, possible.