My 1993 Ford Escort Wagon (yes, I still own it) has absolutely no trouble passing State of Washington emissions laws. It's not even close to the limits.

My vehicle currently gets roughly 35 mpg highway and 30 mpg city. I know it's simplistic to use gas mileage as a proxy for gasoline conversion efficiency, but - it is not obvious to me that there's been significant improvement in gas engines over the past 20 or 30 years. I don't see a lot of similarly-sized new cars that do better than - or even as good as - my old beater.

He may have done it for the wrong reasons, but in the end he still did a good thing with that money.

Good for you, George Lucas.

I have known very few people who really care about my choice of phone. But, then, I've never thought about starting the discussion with a drunk person.

Now I do see it here on Slashdot all the time; but in the real world, not so much. On the rare occasion it comes up, we usually end up talking about some feature on each other's phone that we like.

I'm not sure about the timeline with regard to the phone you mention; but T-Mobile no longer counts the traffic from most streaming music services against your data plan.

Which is why the National Association of Broadcasters is the entity mentioned in the summary. This isn't about emergency preparedness - this is an attempt to breathe a little more life into their dying business model.

Incidentally, as I understand it the FM receiver built into these phones is pretty useless since it's not really attached to any type of supporting circuitry.

That's silly. People don't hate Google+. They do, however, find it irrelevant - and got really annoyed at Google's repeated attempts to force-feed it to all of their users.

Now that Google has finally (mostly) stopped doing that, everyone's back to simply finding Google+ irrelevant.

I bet QUIC will make those DART-driven VP9 video services really SPDY.

If digital radio is supposedly better for the consumer, why not just let the market decide? One would think the broadcasters would naturally migrate over as their customers demanded it.

And if consumers don't really care about digital versus FM - why does the government? Have the Norwegians solved every more important issue facing their people?

FYI - you can always file an amended return after the fact, and claim that missed deduction (assuming you find that data).

I keep an "emergency $20" in my phone's wallet case - but that's generally the only cash I have on me most of the time.

On a side note - I wonder when I turned into that guy? I used to swear I would never, ever use a debit card. Now that's almost always how I buy stuff.

Every work day, when I get off the Sounder train at King Street and am walking over towards the bus tunnel, there's a guy hawking those "Real Change" tabloids. I've never seen anyone actually take one, though - and I didn't realize they weren't free!

Huh. So what flavor is that Koolaid?

"It's a shame, what's going to happen to Germany over the next few weeks."

Can you actually have a business rival for a product no one wants?

At least if the comp is other Comcast subscribers. I live in a semi-rural area that doesn't have all that many cable subscribers. We are on Comcast's lowest tier service, but when I measure the speed I consistently get 60MB+ down (only 6 up though).

For comparison - at my mom's house, in a residential area containing thousand of suburban houses, 6MB down is about the best you'll ever see - and a good bit of the time your queries are just hanging there.