I have a Samsung TV from around 2008.

It isn't smart.

On Black Friday last year I added a Chromecast to it for $23. The Chromecast came with a bunch of freebies (most notably $20 in Play Store credit, which is actually useful to me).

So, either for free (or for $23, depending on how one counts), my TV became "smart."

And the only place it has ads is...gosh, I don't know that I've ever seen an ad on it.

When the Chromecast becomes woefully outdated I'll plug a different widget into the TV.

On my keychain, I carry keys. Mind you, it's a big carabiner clip full of keyrings which in turn are full of keys, but the main purpose is keys.

I used to carry more keys, but I started wearing out my belt loops. Now most of the keys (shhh, don't tell anyone) live in the glovebox of my car, all mounted to a gigantic split ring.

More important to me than keys (of which the only critically important one is usually a singular car key), are tools.

In my left pocket, I carry (or used to: I want another one desperately) my favorite screwdriver. It's a small forged flat blade screwdriver, made from steel that is both very hard and very -- shall we say -- tough. It turned all manner of screws, both phillips and flat and torx and other, and also made a handy deburring tool and I lost it a few months ago: If anyone has seen a yellow-and-black handled screwdriver, small, sold in ~1996 under the Vermont American "The Claw" brand in a set of 4 tools (three of which were useless), I will reward you kindly.

The left pocket also carries a very small stubby Phillips screwdriver, and pocket change, and has a lock-back Buck pocketknife clipped into it that varies between scary-sharp and near-useless depending on what I've been doing with it lately: I'm not nice to my knife, but I do try to take care of it.

The right pocket gets the phone, and only the phone. Despite Gorilla Glass and a TPU case, the pocket computer ("phone") gets its own place. (Yes, it was "only $199," but I won't be spending $599 off-contract to replace it and repairability has nose-dived since the OG Droid, which was simple to tear down and reassemble.)

The other right pocket (the one on my thigh) has my wallet: I used to carry my wallet in my rear/hip pocket, but it was killing my back from sitting on it. In the wallet, amongst a million discount and membership cards and whatever cash I might have, along with the Paypal/Simple/Local-credit-union debit cards, is a credit-card sized toolkit. It has my Courthouse Knife (never go anywhere without a knife / they never check the wallet), which I use for working in courthouses (it is always scary-sharp because it is seldom used and therefore tends to get touched up between uses), and some tweezers, a toothpick/reset-button pushing tool, a can/bottle opener that barely works (but does work well enough that I don't also carry a P38), and a very mediocre red LED flashlight which is a Godsend when faced with complete darkness (and absolutely useless the rest of the time).

The other left (thigh) pocket has nothing, unless I'm using hand tools, and then it tends to fill up with wrenches and pliars.

This entails that I wear cargo pants/shorts exclusively. I'm OK with not ever wearing jeans again. My butt-pockets never carry anything, and in fact I'd like to find clothing that doesn't have them at all.

And that's about it, except for the shirt pocket, which carries my hand-made smokes in a metal case, and a Bic lighter (Bic because they make the most consistently-reliable lighter, not because they make the most-efficient lighter). (And I don't wear shirts without pockets. I badly gimped my knee once because of a shirt with no pocket and spent a consecutive spring and summer stumbling around like a cripple because of that shirt: Never again.)

If somebody else is copying without the copyright holder's permission, then by the very definition of "exclusive", the pirate is depriving the rights holder of some measure of what was legally recognized as their property

Which is covered by copyright laws.

Please understand that an exclusive right to copy a work ("copyright") is a relatively recent notion in the grand scheme of things, and that theft is probably humankind's second defined profession (after prostitution).

Two reasons why LEDs aren't on satellites:

1. Weight. (A few LEDs might add up to maybe even a whole gram, all said: And you can use that gram somewhere else.)
2. Power. (Which is not unlimited. And using more power requires larger solar panels, and more storage for dark hours.)

Given the complexity of most satellites, I would be deeply surprised if there weren't a few zero-cost test points...maybe with a provision for a POGO test rig to test things with if the thing is ever seen intact by humans again (which it won't be).

Remedy: Consumers should immediately stop using the product and contact L G Sourcing to receive free replacement burners and, depending on the model of the grill owned, a free replacement lid.

Consumer Contact: For additional information, contact the firm toll-free at (888) 840-9590 anytime

Just curious, but: If you liked the grill, and did the homework, why didn't you just -- you know -- fix it? For free, even?

"Other people" need to buy a cheap (and I mean less than $5 shipped from .cn) Faraday bag, and use it to maintain their freedom as is proper of a free person.

And if they overuse their Faraday bag, they'll be jobless.

Am I missing something?

I've got a few potential bosses to work for, and I know of zero qualified local replacements. The company I still work for (now as a contractor) has hired a few potentials, but always lost money on them, and none remain.

It doesn't seem to be a Californian race-to-the-bottom here in the technical fields. YMMV.

If I could find 50 people who know what I know and are capable of implementing their knowledge as effectively as I'm told that I do, I'd start a regional business tomorrow...and take my (awesome) boss with me as a partner.

Is that the "free world" as in actually free, or "freedom" as prescribed by the laws of the People's Republic of California?

Because here, I live and work in an at-will employment state: I can be fired because I looked at someone sideways, or for no reason at all. I can also quit because someone looked at me sideways, or for no reason at all.

The end game is that they lose the help, and I lose the money. Both I and my employer have freedom to fire eachother at any instant, for any reason (or none at all), without retribution (excluding ADA, race, and etc. issues).

*shrug*

Meh; the type of signal does not matter. Until all of cell phone/GPS/Wifi-geolocation coverage is actually 100%, including inside of every building, down in every valley, and inside of every tunnel, there can be no expectation of continuous signal.

Meanwhile, being on call 24/7, 365.25 (this includes every fucking weekend, and every fucking holiday, and every fucking vacation -- no matter how remote) is a recipe for employees (me) finding ways to avoid it.

Realistically, I usually left the phone out of the Faraday bag: Mine had two compartments, one shielded and one not, and I used it as a continuous-duty cell-phone case. When I decided it was *my* time, I put the phone into the shielded side, and I'd periodically check for messages.

I really didn't care about what my boss thought of where I went, or how fast I got there on my own time (he got a speed alert on his own phone one day. His jovial SMS response: "134MPH. Niiiiice!").

It was more a matter of: If I want to take time off and go down in the holler in Kentucky, get drunk, eat lots of bacon and shoot guns, then I'm NOT going to be working, nor am I going to continuously cater to a cell phone. (And yes, I always let them know in advance when I'd be leaving for such a jaunt.)

A better solution is to have rotating on-call duty, with allowance for being absolutely-goddamn-away-from-work, and turning off tracking when one is absolutely-goddamn-away-from-work. Despite being a 9-5 shop supporting 24/7 systems, we had plenty of qualified techs to make things work, and it was an unreasonable expectation that all of them be absolutely on call at all times.

Especially for hourly employees with no stake in the company.

Meanwhile, leaving my phone on my desk would be such a slap in the face that I wouldn't have a job when I came back from Kentucky, and there would be no way for me to help during the time that I was gone if my counterparts really needed me.

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...

I used to have a phone with the problem described in TFA, along with me allegedly being "on-call" at all hours.

Such a shielding bag (really just a Faraday cage) generally worked just fine.

It is important to note, however, that putting the phone in the Faraday bag emulated loss of signal, instead of loss of power, since the program in the phone reported these conditions differently, and so also were the interpretations of these conditions by management.

No.

I'm suggesting that it route.

Nowhere did I suggest that Google not have their own (hard-wired, or otherwise out-of-band) connection to that router; indeed, I expect that they would. They've already got server farms; all they need are geographically-diverse mesh nodes.

And you're making the logical error that others seem to be making: That every purpose in having any network is to get free and fast access to the greater Internet, and anything that fails at this promise is utterly useless.

Following this misguided tangent, mesh is and must be a failure, because we don't (and can never) have enough unlicensed spectral bandwidth to make this happen.

I had a decent burr grinder. It died, I fixed it, it died, I fixed it, and then I roached the motor.

I replaced it with a whizzy-blade grinder, which seems to do almost as well with good technique.

Regarding espresso, I did have one of those machines. If it were the hard plumbed push a button and pull a shot type that the barista at my local coffee sanctuary uses, I'd still have one.

Instead, I donated it to the thrift store and someone else paid five bucks for it. Good for them for owning such a hated kit.

So I've got my thermal carafe drip brew machine, a big percolator, and a French press. I want an alcohol or butane fuelled vacuum brewer, but.....

And I'm totally not interested in spending my own dime on anything Kuereg.

In (most of?) Ohio, that's still the fix for a plugged catalytic converter. One can even be extra-sneaky, gut the cat, and trick an ODB-II computer into thinking that the catalyst is still there by putting an appropriate "spark plug anti-fouler" on the post-cat O2 sensor.

And then there's the other side of the coin. In my F-body days, I remember some of the net.folks in California with LT1 small block V8s that were so finely tuned that they sailed through the smog check even without catalytic converters: Their biggest issue, IIRC, was passing visual inspection.

My boss has a Keurig machine, and he keeps stock of my favorite coffee pods (he is a good boss).

So to me, it's not about waste (the dumpster empties itself every Monday, and costs him the same whether full or empty), and it's not about the expense (I offered to give him money once, and it insulted him so I stopped doing that).

There is a science to coffee brewing, and the first part of that is starting with fresh beans and much of the rest is consistent temperature and brewing time and good water.

The Keurig system does a pretty good job on freshness (they keep ambient oxygen out), and does an excellent job on temperature and brewing time, and the filter on the faucet in the shop kitchen does a decent job making tap water tasty.

This all conspires to mean that every cup of Newman's Own Medium Roast Breakfast Blend tastes just like the one I had earlier today. Or last week. Or last year. Or two years ago, when he had a completely different Keurig machine.

To me, the taste of the end result is the advantage of pre-filled, disposable pods: It always produces an excellent cup of coffee. Nevermind the convenience: I can walk in the back door of the shop, start a cup of coffee in about 20 seconds, say Hi to the boss and go get my to-go cup in a couple of minutes later.

Of course, my situation is unique since I have no material or waste expense with the boss's Keurig. At home, we go through a few 10-cup drip-brewed thermal carafes of coffee a day. Sometimes if we expect company during the day we fire up the antique 60-cup percolator. We seldom feel that we've wasted any coffee. But the stuff I make at home, though very tasty and much, much cheaper is never as consistent as the boss's Keurig.

When did knowing the law become a problem looking for a technical solution?

I just want tools. How I use the tools is my business, not the tools' business. If I run afoul of the law, I'm the one that goes to jail -- not the tool.