Now the tethering thing would have value for me, if it would allow me to shut off the expensive DSL service to my home. Is that realistic? Who's your provider, and what kind of speed/reliability do you get?

If you're like me, it's the expense of your talk, text and data plan that you dislike, not the features of a smartphone.

I pay $20 every 90 days to Virgin Mobile (works out to $6.67 per month). I'll upgrade to a smart phone if and when the price of a plan that includes a reasonable amount of data drops to $15 per month. Until then, I'll make a mental note of what online content I'd like to consume, and wait until I get home to consume it.

Calculate the annual cost of your cell phone plan; do you find that having instant gratification of your online desires is worth that cost? Not judging; just curious.

There are a few people using their .gov email addresses for this, some of those can be verified by the IP address

No, you can't. Remember, several different court cases have stated, and people on here have wholeheartedly agreed, you can't tie an IP address to a person, even if there is only one person at a residence.

So either you can use an IP address to tie it to someone or you can't. Which is it?

Besides, if you can do it in 1/16th of the time, you might find your maintenance budget get slashed to 1/16th of previous year/quarter. From what you described, it seems you/they allocate about a day to upgrade each station (16 units at 0.5 hour each.) Beats driving around in traffic to 16 different stations a day, too.

Yes, kitchen counter space is limited. And toolbox space, and desks, and dressers, etc etc. Keurig has a functional niche (places where mess is intolerable or there's no one to clean it up, like medical lobby or a low-use office), but their marketing has convinced a broader market that it's too cool not to have one. It won't last. Already there's blowback about the amount of waste produced by this particular device, and popularity is waning... just like most other uber-popular single-use doohickeys.

In order to survive past initial novelty-driven sales, a single-purpose/non-flexible device had better be utterly awesome at what it does, and seriously durable in both function and regularity of need. That's why the regular pan stays while the egg-magic pan goes to Goodwill (not durable, don't want eggs every day), and virtually every Rolodex has been replaced by a free app on a general-purpose portable computing device (not flexible, need changed). The Keurig makes consistent mid-grade coffee (not awesome), and is moderately durable at best (and DRM is a form of intentional breakage), which means market survival will eventually come down to flexibility. Can JoeBob consumer make ramen with a Keurig? No? Then eventually he'll keep the kettle and throw out the Keurig.

'Jus sayin... as I sip decent coffee out of a mug, made with a 15yo Cuisinart kettle, an $0.80 sbux Via packet, and less waste/cleanup than Keurig. The packet will change, the kettle will stay.

The annual booster shots for dogs is greed. So is the leptospirosis vaccine, and heartworm treatments for anything bigger than a squirrel. The leptospirosis vaccine only protects against 6 of the more than 150 types, and it's transferred by wild infected animals pissing on your dog's food. For heartworm, just keep the mosquito population down, the same as you should be doing to prevent the transmission of West Nile disease in humans. It's not like dogs can catch it from each other.

California is a microcosm of the United States as a whole: liberal around the coasts, except for the south coast; and conservative inland, except near the large body of water on the border.

They also tend to run liberal in federal elections and conservative in state elections.

This split personality is behind a lot of California's budget problems, as one part of the populace with a majority vote has mandated spending on certain programs, and another part of the populace with a majority vote has prohibited raising certain taxes, leaving the legislature tightly bound between the rock of having to spend money and the hard place of not being able to raise it, requiring them to borrow it.

Which, come to think of it, is another microcosm of the United States as a whole, and the reason for the constant debt crises we keep having. Congress mandates spending, doesn't authorize the necessary taxes, and then blames the president for coming to the unavoidable necessity of borrowing to pay for what they've required him to spend and not allowed him to raise.

But the numbers you have come up with are not comparable to each other, as they are for different areas and data sets.

25% of calls are pranks, while 70% are dialled inadvertently - an inadvertent dial is not a prank, and a prank is not an inadvertent dial, so these figures are not comparable.

The expected total expenditures for a student at my university when I graduated back in 2003 were in the range of $19,000 per year in today's dollars. Estimated total costs for students at the same university in the upcoming school year are about $35,000.

There really is no comparison here. School is vastly more expensive today than it was even 15 years ago. And that is tremendously unfair to current students.

You trust the infrastructure between you and the second party, but only in the US (and some tourist areas) is it considered acceptable to hand over your card to a 3rd party who disappear with it for a while. The rest of the world, the third party never, or rarely even touches your card. So you don't have to trust a 3rd party with your card to use it. At most, you trust the infrastructure between you and the credit card company.

"A better question may be, why do "federally-guaranteed loans" need to exist in the first place..." Exactly. If the question is "Why is higher education so expensive," that is the answer.

That's a great point but it does seem like a company should have the right to enable GPS tracking for company assets. Perhaps a good compromise would be that you could indicate when you were off-work to avoid tracking, but if required the device could be signaled to turn back on tracking.

I personally would probably get one of those signal shielding bags and drop it in there when I wasn't to be on-call. Then you could carry it with you even. Then it also appears just as if it lost power for a while, so it would be hard to get in trouble over it...

Depends. Is it wrapped with #if __i386__ || __x86_64__ and followed by a #else clause that contains code without the insane optimization? If so, it is elegant. If not, it is ugly.

And if he was to prescribe a standard antibiotic, you can buy them yourself at a pet supply. The same antibiotics used for fish are the same that you are given. Exactly the same, just different labels and no prescription required.