these type of comments are beginning to mystify me.

used, powerful android phones on swappa.com, ebay, or even you local pawn shop are plentiful.

in fact, i just bought a google nexus (verizon) for $80 at a local pawn shop...the same store was selling a almost new galaxy note 3 for $200...which i plan today to go buy and resell on swappa for a tidy profit.

life is too damn short to fuck around with a worthless handset.

really?

"Scientists overseeing temperature data collected by NASA satellite instruments compared real-world temperatures since 1979 to 73 climate prediction models produced by international government agencies, universities, and other climate groups, including 19 models produced by U.S. agencies, universities, and climate groups. All 73 models predicted substantially more warming than actually occurred, with the mean of the 73 models predicting three times as much warming as actually occurred."

this is a very significant finding. if by back-testing the models are mostly skewing towards over-warming predictions, how can anyone have any confidence these same models will be accurate moving forward?

isn't time we just ditch the fiction that privacy as we knew it in the 20th century is gone forever and accept that everything we do and say on any digital medium will be collected?

sheesh...yes I get it already...databases compromised, hacked, sold...NSA spying, collecting...

good lord how many times do we need to be wack-a-moled before we just stop caring?

For the sake of our privacy, let's all hope so!

Raw phone audio traffic/data, at least on cellular which makes up the vast majority of telephone traffic these days, is already heavily compressed at the air interface level to allow companies to maximize the voice traffic they can carry across a channel without increasing physical capacity. It would be hard to compress it much further and still be audible. Hell, on Verizon Wireless's network it is already practically inaudible due to the compression.
 
You'd basically just have to dump it to disk which wouldn't be processor intensive whatsoever nor would it take much disk. 8k EVRC is a common audio codec, which you could store roughly 30 years of phone calls on a 1TB disk at 8kbps. More reading on EVRC

You expect anyone in the media to actually be able to figure out how to reply to someone when it's more involved than just clicking the reply button at the top of the web page they check their email on?

 
Then you really, really haven't been paying attention for the last 15-odd years or so. Where are the apologies from all of the nay-saying bootlickers who branded those of us who have been pointing these things out since the early-90's "tinfoil hat nutters" or "right-wing conspiracy theorists" or just plain old "kooks"?
 
I'm not happy to be proven right (I was always hoping to be proven wrong), I'm just sad that we had to let it get to this point before people started paying attention.

Nondescript sedan with blackwall tires? Weren't those the days...

Howabouts a no-knock raid on your next door neighbor's house (since the jackboots can't be assed to get the house number right in most cases) where they shoot his dog and break his grandma's nose with the butt of the rifle for telling them to fuck off?

Ever heard of a Stingray? The police have been using them like hotcakes all over the country. The feds even went as far as to raid a police station who was going to release a FOIA request about their use. Long story short, they emulate a cell phone tower and trick the "target" handset into connecting to it. It's a hardware MITM over the cell network. Highly illegal, violates a number of laws and FCC regulations. Of course, those are perfectly fine since it's the power elite using them against YOU. You want a cell-phone free zone in your museum or church? PIRATERRORISM, of course.

the powerful of the world use their confiscated wealth (via taxes) to harness technology to spy on everyone else. really how surprising.

move along, there is nothing to see here...

Putting a cable box on the sequencer is a bad idea. Almost all STBs will lose all of their guide data, which can take hours to repopulate, in addition to taking forever to boot up. Occasionally they will even lose their subscription information if you are out of town/country for a few weeks. I wouldn't recommend it.

You can't read well. I just spelled out, in a post you replied to, exactly what the switched-AC passthrough port that is on the back of many STBs was originally designed for (which was for powering on an old-fashioned CRT television set). No, modern DVRs like TiVo probably DON'T have them (they also aren't rated for 500W), but many of your Motorola/GI/SA boxes DO in fact, have the switched power passthrough on the back. Stop trying to stir up bullshit.

Which is it? 500 watts or 35 watts? This summary and title are completely ridiculous, I can think of plenty of other things that are using more power in my home than a cable box. Refrigerator, freezer, washer, dryer, hair blow dryer, desktop computer, television, central heating/air conditioning, range (if it's electric), power tools/garage, home theatre system, the list goes on and on.
 
The reason the "500 Watts!!!" is disingenuous, is because many cable boxes have a switched outlet that allow you to plug in a television set to the back of it. Back in the good ol' days, you could click on the cable box and the TV would turn on as well, if it was plugged into the back. That CRT might draw as much as 500 watts, so that's what it's rated for. With the advent of universal remotes, electronic controls in sets that forget the last power setting and the need for constant power to keep settings and "quick-on" for many sets, this is now an antiquated port that's just a hold over from the olden days of cable TV.
 
The STB might be the 2nd biggest energy user in many homes, but I wouldn't bet on *most* homes.

and thus...the sell-off-slash-rebranding.

that's all this is, of course...when a brand as big as Time-Warner start being reviled by its customers, it's simply "time" to hit the ctrl-alt-delete and reboot things.