FiOS may be a mistake from Verizon's short-term bottom line, but that big pipe is a boon to those of us who have it. And that's the big problem with the FCC, AT&T et al who want to pull the plug on POTS. All they are thinking about is short-term bottom line. The real solution is to tell Big Telecom that after they run fiber to the home, and keep it running for 5 years, then they can apply to pull the plug on POTS.

I wish my cell phone made phone calls intelligible. Can you hear me? Can anybody hear me?

The data show two separate trends. For in-copyright books, the publisher's initial printing sells out and when sales drop off (for paper editions) the publisher stops printing more copies. Readers buy used copies, easily available from Amazon, Alibris, etc., which have taken over the market for older books, so eventually no new copies are available. If lots of copies were printed, the volume of used books is large and copies are cheap. If few were printed and more people want them, used copies are hard to find or expensive. Readers may have a problem, but it's not as bad as it looks. Authors and publishers have more problems because it's harder to make money selling new reprints. The large volume of new copies of out-of-copyright books probably comes from the ease of print-on-demand publishing. A simple recipe for do-it-yourself publishing is to set up a book template, skim the texts of public-domain books from Project Gutenberg or a similar source, and put the books into the system, without investing a penny in paper or ink until someone buys a copy on-line. Look up a public classic, like The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper, and you'll get dozens of different new editions on Amazon. Go a little ways down the list and you'll start finding publishers you've never heard of. They (probably) are POD editions that can be cheaply produced. Because the investment is so low (compared to actually printing copies and distributing copies the old-fashioned way), there are many more editions of these old books available than newer ones -- but you'll never find most of them in a bricks and mortar bookstore.

How long since your last crash or freeze? o Less than 10 minutes o Less than one hour o Less than one day o Less than one week

The Mac OS's successful commercialization of the GUI was a huge advance, and students really need to compare it to CP/M and the like to understand its importance. You don't need a detailed comparison, just test runs of the two side by side to show the difference in user experience. Late in 1983, I walked into a computer store fully intending to buy a CP/M machine, fiddled with the interface for about a half hour, and walked out without buying one. It simply was not worth it, even as a technology writer. I'm a fast typist, the three-finger command interface was too clumsy, and nobody wanted -- or even knew how to handle -- electronic submissions. The late Cary Lu introduced me to the Mac, in 1984, but what sold me was watching my six-year-old daughter play with one in the Boston Computer Museum. She picked up the interface in minutes for MacPaint. MacPaint and file management were similarly intuitive. I wanted a tool for writing, not to be a computer operator. I bought a Mac and got it up and running right out of the box.

Edison and Ford didn't do everything; they were charismatic innovators who became symbols of their generation in technology. Jobs is well on his way to being that type of historical figure, and dying relatively young didn't hurt. Look at how Alan Turing has emerged as a founding father of computing.

Amtrak is doing fine from Boston to New York and New York to Washington, account for more trips on both those routes than the airlines according to a recent report http://blogs.bostonmagazine.com/boston_daily/2012/08/20/amtrak-flying/ Amtrak is not just more comfortable than flying. It's also about as fast, if you account for the overhead time in getting to the transportation and waiting for it, especially if you are going downtown to downtown.

It depends on your typing speed and the legibility of your handwriting. I can type very fast and my handwriting is awful, so my notetaker of choice is a MacBook Pro running a simple word processor like Nisus Writer express, but any laptop with a physical keyboard (to orient my fingers) would work. Type fast, clean up the spelling mistakes later. Not only can I read my notes, but I have then in digital form for later reference. I'm a reporter and do the same for telephone interviews. One down side is that you can't do graphics and formulas are tough, but I rarely need them. If I did, I would go for a smartphone or compact digital camera with enough zoom and sensitivity to get the needed details -- if the conference allowed photography. Many don't.

And Scribd does not screen out material containing obvious copyright credit lines. Pick a book from your collection (paper or ebook) and find the copyright credit line. It usually starts "all rights reserved" and includes the name of the publisher. Search for the whole phrase. When I did that this morning, the top three hits were for content posted on Scribd.

Good point, but that's not all. Cell-phone connections are poor, as becomes painfully evident when you try to talk with people with thick accents. That poor quality effectively impairs your hearing, and can make it hard for people with mild hearing impairments to carry on conversations. I'm on the phone a lot, and do a lot of interviews on the phone, so I always use my land line and only call cell phones reluctantly. Often when I do call a cell., the voice quality is poor enough that we eventually switch to a landline. The bottom line is that cell connections are not good enough for many purposes, especially for many people who have mild hearing impairments but can use the PSTN. Can you say handicap access??