It may not cost you anything, but not everyone has the luxury of being on an unlimited or high limit plan. In fact, there's a good number of people that don't have a traditional cell phone contract and use the rechargeable/calling card/by the minute/pay as you go type phones.

Personally, I have an older contract that doesn't have a ton of minutes each month. I don't regularly use more than half of my minutes each month, but then again I hardly talk on the phone. I know a good sized chunk of people who have gone over their minutes pretty regularly.

Finally, even if you're only billed in 1-minute increments, that 15 seconds can still push an otherwise 1 minute call into the 2 minute range.

If they're "following too close", then they aren't "rule abiding." You can't have it both ways.

Damn. Those bastards. I wish they'd unlock my Pearl...

As another poster said, this means that your phone is triangulating your location based on cell tower signals and is not reading from the GPS.

I'll bet you have Verizon as your carrier. They won't allow you to use the device GPS with Google Maps. They want you to pay for their "VZ Navigator" application. I think you can use the GPS with Blackberry Maps, though.

I have a Blackberry Pearl and have the same problem on the Verizon network.

You might want to RTFA before typing out such a long post. If you did, you'd notice a few things.

1) He's specifically advocating this for login forms on the web
2) He specifically says that security trumps usability in some instances
3) He gives a very clear example of a way to enable/disable this feature

With the proliferation of mobile devices with tiny, sometimes virtual, keyboards, typos are very common. When you can't even see that you've made a typo because it is obscured by dots, then you have no chance of correcting it.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could uncheck a little box that says "Obsure my password"? If you're paranoid, you could just check the box before entering your password or leave it checked, depending on the default.

Stop complaining and buy yourself a hammer

This kind of attitude is why our rights are slowly crumbling away. The Ron Paul staffer was not legally obligated to answer these questions. The notion that simply caving in and answering the questions anyway would have sped his passage through airport security has no bearing on any of this. He was clearly in the right and the TSA drones were in the wrong. He did nothing illegal and therefore should not have been held, searched, or subjected to questioning.

By giving in to the seemingly small intrusions on our civil liberties that happen on a daily basis, we are willingly giving up our rights. Unless we stand up for ourselves, even at the cost of possible inconvenience, the rights that we enjoy will eventually disappear.

I'm sure they have a verification step just like many other services. Just a guess, but they probably place a call to the number you want to register and you have to key in a code that they have given to you to prove that you are in control of the phone number in question.

That's exactly what they're doing. They are trying to switch to PeopleSoft.

I don't really see what you're objecting to. Physics, Chemistry, and Engineering students aren't being taught programming for the sake of programming. It is being taught as a data crunching/modeling/analysis tool. This certainly is something that they should have in their proverbial toolbox if they want to do research that requires analyzing large quantities of data. I'd tweak your analogy to say that it could well be useful to teach a carpenter to use software that would assist them in the design/visualization/structural analysis of what they are going to build.

Maybe it is just me, but cutscenes are the worst part of a game. When the whole game is pretty much cutscenes, I'm turned off. When I'm playing a game, I want to play not watch a movie. Forcing you to participate in the cutscenes by pressing buttons at the right time makes this even worse.

A whole bunch of times in the video, the narrator is talking about "giving the player the idea that they are in control" when all they are really doing is hitting a button or making a joystick motion when the game asks for it. I remember some other games that were just like this. They came out over 20 years ago. The graphics look great, but honestly, what's the point? This is like watching a movie but having to keep pressing buttons on the remote to "make it" to the next scene.

Guo's laser unleashes as much power as the entire grid of North America onto a spot the size of a needle point.

So, by only using as much power as the entire grid of North America, we can make a "less than 60 watt" bulb as bright as a 100 watt bulb? Perhaps it operates more efficiently, but it doesn't sound like it is so efficient to produce. Unless I'm misunderstanding or misrepresenting the verbiage from the summary.

The way to deal with police mistakes is with sanctions and fines.

So, the police get a slap on the wrist and an innocent person goes to the electric chair? No. Absolutely no. We have to err on the side of caution and give the accused the benefit of the doubt. Innocent until proven guilty, and you can't be proven guilty with illegally obtained evidence.

This is the way it was before the 1960s.

I'd like to see a citation for this. Even if it is true, so what? Who cares what it was like before the 1960s. We didn't have high speed internet before the 1960s either. Should we also go back to computers that take up a whole room and aren't connected to one another?

Improper procedures should not cause a case to be overturned unless of course it could be shown that the person was guilty only because of the improper procedures.

You're essentially contradicting yourself. You say "sure, evidence collected using improper (that is, illegal) procedures is admissible in court!" and then contradict it with "but evidence collected using improper procedures can't be used to show guilt."

The police need to follow the law. If they don't, then they are the ones out of luck. If this is not the case, then there is no incentive for the police to follow the law. In fact, there is considerable incentive for them to break the law. If they are able to collect more compelling evidence by breaking the law, have it allowed in a court case, and then result in a guilty verdict that they may not have gotten by following the law, then what is the incentive for them to follow the law?