Can anyone here name three products which are legal in the USA and do _not_ "[compete] or is intended to compete with any product or service sold, offered, or otherwise provided by Amazon (or intended to be sold, offered, or otherwise provided by Amazon in the future)"?

I'm having the same situation. AT&T swears up and down that they can give me U-verse service . . . until the tech gets there and finds out that the nearest box is miles away. They then tell me that they can probably get me DSL. But when I talk to the call center folks, they say they can't process a DSL order while the system says U-Verse is available. Don't worry, they say, as soon as the maps are updated, we can order your DSL. Almost a year later, the maps aren't updated. It's almost like they vigorously don't want my business.

What do you mean by SMS clients? Do you mean SMS integration?

I have email and chat. Why would I want SMS to get crippled messages or limit myself to a phone platform?

Ok fine. The proportions are off. So let's do some guesstimates based on the total energy. According to this http://www.geologyinmotion.com... the 2011 Japan tsumani had somewhere between 31 and 3100 KILOTONS of energy. That's equivalent to the energy in 1 to 100 Hiroshima nuclear bombs. So I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out how to power a line of giant squirt guns that deliver the equivalent of between 1-100 Hiroshima nuclear bombs of energy as a directed stream of water.

While you're at it, I think the military might be interested in your nuclear water cannon.

Agreed. I work on the instructional tech side of the house, but our engineers are good and would not get caught like this. We aren't invulnurable, but we have contingencies.

That was my thinking. We routinely back up the important stuff in my district. This would have been a headache, but the data would have been reasonably safe.

Why don't you try a mythbusters style experiment? Scale everything down. To simulate the tsunami wave, you will go to the beach and find a nice 4 foot wave. To simulate your massive high pressure water pump you will use a squirt gun. Use one of those "monster cannon" squirt guns. Wait for wave. Aim squirt gun. Fire. Record how you totally dissipated the wave's evergy, or not. I'm sure Japan is eager to see your results.

Yea, if most people put a traffic shaping rule on their router that limited them to T1 speed they'd go insane these days. Websites have grown huge, PDFs are commonly gigantic, and images are enormous. Oh, and don't even try to do anything with video.

Google fiber is the equivalent of an OC-20 (which doesn't exist per se).

Google Hangouts does chat and video chat and snapchat image type stuff.

It is multiplatform, unlike Factime or SMS messaging. Not sure if Whatsapp has a PC/Mac client.

I have had messaged delayed for some unknown reason on occasion. But overall, it is very solid.

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it, and possibly graduate a year late.

That's okay. You can leave the shredded ashes of your Nerd Card in the bowl by the door.

Um... I hate to be the one to break this to you but... Perhaps there are a few things you don't know about Toronto. Or Canada in general.

Unless I have misread the paper, it seems that these folks have just found experimental proof that disk writes are buffered.

I'm guessing that this investigation started with someone making a bet while their thought processes were slightly impaired.

Sure, you say that now, but when someone takes you up on your offer, you complain about it.

I used to love X-Files until a friend spoiled it for me. He basically said that Mulder and Scully were basically witnesses to whatever mystery they were uncovering. Nothing would have changed if they weren't there. Sure, the random person would have lived or died, but it's not like they solved any big mysteries.

And after I while I just got tired of the whole X-Files mythology.

Besides, weren't the aliens supposed to have invaded by now?