There's some obscure reason I don't recall at the moment for Sprint and Verizon's phones not being able to do voice calls and LTE simultaneously, even though they could do it in theory.

Found it. The reason I can't do voice + LTE simultaneously is a limitation of the Nexus 5 (and a handful of other phones).

I just moved into a new house and haven't yet started Internet service because I have lots of construction going on and am not sure where the cable modem will eventually go (part of the construction is networking the house, and I haven't decided where the network cabinet will go). So in the meantime I'm using the hotspot feature on my Nexus 5 for LTE internet. I get about 5-10 Mbps down, 3-5 Mbps up at this location (500 feet further uphill at the sandwich shop it's 30/9 Mbps, sigh).

My service is with Sprint which typically has spotty LTE service, but fortunately my new home is well covered. Sprint also teamed up with Google so my Sprint number is also my Google Voice number. This means I can make Google Voice calls over LTE via the Hangouts app (Google moved Voice to Hangouts a couple months ago). The app still needs a lot of work (e.g. doesn't integrate with the contacts directory yet) but call quality has been stellar - nearly indistinguishable from when I'm on wifi. I'm actually surprised how well it works considering it's going over a cellular data connection. I mention all this because Sprint is the network most MVNOs use by a huge margin. Since their LTE network is certainly capable of VoIP, any problems you encounter with it are likely to be due to the MVNO blocking VoIP.

Latency has been pretty good too. Speedtest.net reports my ping times between 40-45 ms. I occasionally play GW2 over this connection, and generally I haven't noticed any more lag than on a wired connection. Occasionally there's a hiccup like you'll sometimes get over wifi, but its infrequent enough that it hasn't degraded the gaming experience. Overall it's been pretty indistinguishable from FIOS (what I had before the move), and better than the cable internet (I had Time Warner before FIOS, with 150-250 ms ping times).

I'm on an unlimited data plan, so conceivably I could go on doing this forever. The main issue I'm running into (one you shouldn't encounter with a dedicated hotspot) is that my LTE disconnects when there's an incoming call. There's some obscure reason I don't recall at the moment for Sprint and Verizon's phones not being able to do voice calls and LTE simultaneously, even though they could do it in theory. Voice calls go over the CDMA radio while LTE goes over the LTE radio. Unfortunately since my phone is designed to be, well, a phone, I haven't figured out a way to disable CDMA so I can receive the incoming calls over Google Voice. The regular phone dialier and Hangouts both ring when I get an incoming call, but the regular phone dialer locks out the phone preventing me from switching to answer the call via Hangouts (I'm not even sure that would work since it seems to disconnect LTE the moment the phone rings).

If you plan to do this with a hotspot, make sure you can cancel the contract if there's poor service at your house. A tenant at the building I manage opted for LTE Internet (because Verizon DSL there sucks). The building is within their LTE coverage area, and I get a good LTE signal from the roof. But at ground level his hotspot defaults back to 3G and he gets terrible Internet speeds. Unfortunately he got excited and ordered this a month before he moved in, so was outside the cancellation period by the time he moved in and discovered this problem. But I would check first to see if you can use your phone as a hotspot and just beef up the data on your plan.

Are you really that obtuse? Does it physically hurt?

For me, it's my Political Correctness Meter. You know how it works.

Headline: "Huge Comet To Smash Into Earth, Instantly Ending All Life On The Planet! Activists Say Women and Minorites Unfairly Impacted."

Both Apple and Microsoft have been using ripoffs of Helvetica for decades as their default font. That was what all the cool kids did back in the 1980s - if you didn't want to pay for a font, you paid some graphics artist to design one which looked a lot like it but was slightly different. Adobe bought licenses for the real fonts, and if you were in the printing industry and needed the real Helvetica you could buy Adobe Type Manager (originally for Mac, later for WIndows).

All this announcement means is that Apple has finally decided to pay whomever has the copyright on Helvetica for the rights to use it as their default system font. The bit about "tomorrow" is just marketing spin to make it sound like some awesome new thing, when the font itself was made in 1957.

And yes Apple abandons old tech and adopts new tech sooner than the rest of the industry meaning they're often at the forefront of tech which later becomes commonplace among PCs. You can cherry pick some of their successes (e.g. 3.5" floppy, abandoning optical drives) to make them seem brilliant. Or you could list some of their failures (e.g. firewire, lightning thus far, SCSI on the desktop, PowerPC which they abandoned for Intel) to make them seem like bumbling idiots. Apple isn't a prognosticator. They're making guesses about the future just like everyone else. For some reason people are less likely to remember their failures than with other companies.

These types of cases put Facebook between a rock and a hard place. You have to consider other possible scenarios under which such deletion requests might occur, not just the scenario in this case. What if the girl really had a Facebook page, and the culprits submitted a fake deletion request to Facebook? If FB took it down, then they'd be liable for wrongly disabling/deleting a legitimate account.

"But Facebook could do this only after receiving some sort of official notice!" What if the culprits were friends with an adult in the school administration or stole paper with the school's letterhead, and drafted an official-sounding letter requesting the deletion?

"But the court could have ordered Facebook to take it down!" Well, the court didn't.

Remember, if you create a method to delete/disable accounts, said method can and will be abused to send fake delete/disable requests. FB's policy probably just tries to keep things as simple as possible. Only the account creator can delete/disable it, unless they get a court order to do so. The only fault I can see on FB's part is that they need to make clear exactly what legal hoops you need to jump through to compel them to take down an account. I'm not sure the parents of the girl even knew that requesting the court to order FB to delete the account was even an option.

In case anyone doubts this: ratio of "normal" patients vs. infected healthworkers
third world: ~ 10:1
Texas: 1:2

These things are evolutionary. The initial rate of patients to infected healthcare workers is much higher. The current 10:1 ratio in Africa is after all the healthcare workers using poor infectious disease protocols have been killed off by ebola. It's purely survival of the fittest.

Same reason Cuba weathers hurricanes better than Louisiana did after Katrina. Cuba gets hit by several hurricanes every year, so any buildings which would been blown away, dams which would have failed, etc. have already done so long ago. The ones still standing remain because they are strong enough to survive a hurricane. Any government officials who were incompetent at post-hurricane recovery have long been filtered out. OTOH the previous major hurricane to hit Louisiana before Katrina was some 30 years ago. A lot of bad structures and incompetent officials can build up over 30 years.

No, it is not. They aren't keeping anyone else from competing, they've just made a reasonable business decision that it would not be profitable for one of them to compete with the other in an already built area, or to try building out at the same time.

There's no "business decision" involved in this. In most of the U.S., it's the municipal government (usually city, sometimes county) which awards exclusive cable TV service rights to a single company. Usually it was in exchange for a guarantee that lower income areas would get service (i.e. we'll give you a monopoly, but in exchange you have to provide service to 99.5% of the residences, including lower income areas). But in the last city I lived in it was a straight payola deal. The city let the cable companies bid on how much they'd pay the city per residence hooked up, and the highest bidder got the monopoly.

In the few areas with two or more cable companies, the second cable company usually had to butter up the local politicians ("donate" to their campaigns, aka pay bribes) or even file lawsuits to get rights to provide service. Some courts have ruled that the monopoly contracts the city entered are binding. Others have ruled that the city had no business granting a monopoly, and allowed other cable companies to provide service (that happened in the city I lived in prior to the one getting payola - the existing cable company dropped their prices $10/mo across the board the moment the second cable company announced they would begin providing service).

See, that's the dark side of Net Neutrality, and why free market types (conservatives, liberterians) generally oppose it. It's more government regulation to fix a problem caused by government regulation in the first place. If you're going to award monopolies to cable companies, then you need Net Neutrality. But if like most of the rest of the world you just let multiple cable companies compete freely with each other, you don't need Net Neutrality. Any ISP deliberately slowing down Netflix to try to get Netflix to pay them is shooting themselves in the foot - their customers will flee to other ISPs who don't slow down Netflix.

On a meta level, you initially want competition for cable service. Yes it's wasteful to have multiple hookups, but when the technology first rolls out, nobody is really which which implementation is the best (both in terms of cost and bandwidth). This is the sort of problem markets solve really well. So you want lots of cable companies competing to provide service, so that the ones with the best technology filter up to the top. Once the technology matures though, you want to treat it like a utility. One company is awarded a monopoly for rolling out the cables. But they're prohibited from providing service themselves - instead they must sell at a fixed rate to companies which provide the service.

This is pretty much how it was done with electricity. At first nobody was sure if AC or DC transmission would win out. So private companies implemented both types of systems (Edison backing DC, Westinghouse/Tesla backing AC). Eventually it became clear that AC was better for transmitting over long distances. Most municipalities grant the local power company a monopoly over providing and maintaining the electrical wires, but you can usually buy the electricity transmitted over those wires to your house from dozens of different energy providers. Gas and long distance telephone service works the same way. By this point I think it's pretty clear cable TV/internet is going to all end up with fiber to the home, and we need to transition it over to a utility model.

These workers came into contact with the patient's bodily fluids.

While that's literally true, what's far more likely to have happened is that the patient's bodily fluids came in contact with something that you normally wouldn't associate with bodily fluids, and these nurses came in contact with that (or with something else which came in contact with that). So until we learn exactly what the "breach of protocol" was, I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that it was the nurses' own fault. For all we know some staffer may have accidentally used saline solution instead of bleach to fill a spray bottle used for disinfecting.

I don't see why cloud storage and local backups have to be mutually exclusive. You use cloud storage for devices and locations where you can't have a local backup. You also pick a site(s) where you can have a local backup, and use that to back up your cloud storage.

That's essentially what I do with the pics I take with my Android phone. New photos get backed up to Google+ automatically immediately after the photo is taken. Later I pull them off my phone (Google+ downsizes to 2048x2048 unless you pay) to my file server at home.

Rather than try to get people removed from the list, it'll probably be easier to fix this by getting ~15 million people added to the no-fly list. If 5% of the U.S. population were on the list, it'd be a significant enough impediment to free travel that they'd have to fix it or quit using it.

As a Netflix subscriber whose ISP does not charge them for peered access, it is simply Wrong that part of my subscription fee is being used to pay Comcast, Verizon, etc. when I have no business relationship with them.

Netflix should revamp their billing structure. In addition to their monthly fee, there should be a separate line item for an ISP surcharge. If your ISP does not charge Netflix, then that surcharge is $0. If your ISP does charge them, then the surcharge is how much Netflix pays them divided by the number of Netflix customers on that ISP. Let the people using those ISPs eat the costs their ISPs are adding, and make it damn obvious that the ISP is the one responsible for the surcharge. Don't hide it in Netflix's regular bill and make the rest of us pay for it.

Could someone explain why all of this is an issue, when Netflix seems to be giving away their OpenConnect CDN boxes for free,

Netflix is being a good netizen by giving away those boxes for free.

Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, TWC are being bad netizens by making Netfix pay them to accept the boxes, while simultaneously blaming Netflix for being a bandwidth hog and poor streaming service. How can you blame someone for a problem when they're giving away the solution for free, and you're just refusing to accept the solution unless they pay you.

Google doesn't want this either. They fought this tooth and nail up to the highest European Court, but the court decided to force them to remove requests under certain (but not clearly defined) circumstances.

That's the thing I find baffling about some of these EU court decisions.

EU: "Google is abusing its near-monopoly position in search. This needs to stop."
Google: "Ok, what exactly do you want us to stop doing?"
EU: "Um, we don't know. Why don't you come up with some suggestions and we'll tell you if it's agreeable?"
Google: "OK, how about this?"
EU: "Hmm, no, we want more."
Google: "How about this then?"
EU (to Google's competitors): "Do you think this is enough?"
Google's competitors (sensing an opportunity): "Hell no!"
EU: "No, something more."
Google: [exasperated sigh] "what about if we do this?"
etc.

EU: "You need to remove people from your search results if they have a legitimate reason."
Google: "Ok, just tell us what's a legitimate reason."
EU: "Um, we don't know. Why don't you decide and we'll tell you if you're doing it wrong."
Google: [exasperated sigh]

Methinks the EU court really, really badly needs to adopt the concept in the U.S. Constitution of the right of the defendant to know what crime they're being accused of.

The most destructive and demoralizing relationship I've had with the government was a health inspector who basically made up rules on the fly. Including one which the fire marshal later told us was a fire code violation. And another where the serving table manufacturer told us, "We sell this product to restaurants all over the country, and we have never had a health department request that modification." But there's nothing we could do about it because she had the power to shut down our restaurant that very day, leading to us being bankrupt within a couple months. We had to comply with her inane requests if we wanted to stay in business.