Both of those are better than what I got. My check from the eBay settlement was a whopping $0.02.

...firmware updates update firmware!

Do they "ask" about pre-installing crapware when you first buy the phone? This was an ota firmware update, and they changed some of the pre-loaded apps. I'm much happier about the carriers providing ota updates and working on a solution to let end users "remove" pre-loaded junk from their phones.

My family has 5 laptops and 2 desktops as primary computers, plus three smartphones. I have ways of storing my music centrally and making it accessible, but the simplicity of a cloud service to make it available at home, at work, at a friend's house, when I'm visiting my family, when I'm on vacation...

Plus, if this service turns in to something like Lala, they can provide cheap access to music you might like to listen via streaming to but don't want to bother paying full price for. I'll pay $10 to have 100 songs I can listen to on demand whenever I have internet access way before I spend $10 for a single CD.

Thank you, Google. Ever since Apple bought Lala just so they could shutter it, I've been waiting for someone else to fill the gap. Apple will have a hard time buying out the competition this time.

Do you know anyone with a one of these phones? Me either.

My wife was the first person I knew who had an Android phone, and it was when I bought her a Droid this past December. That was quite some time after the G1 came out, so I guess Android bombed too.

Oh, what?

But less so than you already are today. At least with this approach, it's a lot cheaper to later upgrade such a chip, because you don't have to buy an entirely new chip to get the features that were disabled on your old one. Given the two options, I'd choose this one.

Wouldn't say it's a hoax... This keyboard PC has been on the market for years. This company sells it as the ZPC (for Zero-footprint PC).

Frankly, I wondered why it took so long for someone to decide to rebadge one as a Commodore. It was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw it.

You can still purchase and operate your own vehicle without government "permission" - even without insurance! - on your own property. Just not on public (government-owned) roads.

So, I've been playing an account on EVE for a little more than a week. I have more than one ship, and have based myself where there is both high and low security systems around me. If I want to mine for a while but have other stuff to do, I send out my Wreathe into high security space and read my email as the mining laser chops away asteroids. Even if by chance I get attacked by some jerk who suicide bombs miners in 1.0 regions just for the joy of causing others grief, I have enough saved money to replace everything I have, and it only takes a couple mining trips to make it up again. (I'm upgrading away from the Wreathe tomorrow, though - I've been training skills for flying the mining barges, and will be able to do in 5 minutes what took 50 before. Training skills while you sleep is a nice feature.)

I have a destroyer as well that I've been using for running missions. I keep a salvager onboard and have made as much money salvaging the wrecks of NPC ships during missions as I have mining, so I haven't even sent the mining ship out in a couple days. Even last night when I lost my destroyer (was playing on a slow laptop for convenience, hard to warp out in time) I was still revenue positive for the mission after buying a complete replacement ship, finishing the job, and mopping up the wrecks.

Am I out there in massive fleet fights against player who have been playing for years longer than I have? Nope. Haven't ventured beyond 0.4 space yet (and that one taught me a lesson about using the in-game map before wandering around systems), haven't joined any of the big player corporations, and I'm having fun.

Then again, I liked Elite II: Frontier back in the '90s. At least the space combat isn't that tedious.

With IE8 on Win7, tabs show up individually under the pinned IE icon on the toolbar. If you want to get to a particular tab while the browser minimized, you can. Not sure if Firefox supports that feature yet, but Chrome doesn't, which is disappointing.

And, when you want to minimize it out of the way, all the tabs minimize at once, since it's only one window.

Sometimes, I'll have a chat going and the browser open at the same time. I can resize the windows to fit side-by-side, and no matter how many tabs I open and switch between in the browser, I don't have to keep moving the windows around to be where I want them.

So, yeah. I find tabs useful.

and with several lives lost, I'd imagine.

Can we cut this part of the argument out, please?

Several people loose their lives every hour of every day commuting from the suburbs to some office job in the big city. Let the astronauts worry about the risk of the job they've chosen and whether they feel it is worth it. And then ask me if I think my current job is worth the risk I take when I get into my Civic every day and venture out onto the roads filled with super-cab trucks and SUVs.

Well, I'd say my current insurance is "good." I work at a hospital, and it's the only hospital that's covered for labs, procedures, admissions, etc, so when a physician really really wanted us to go to another hospital we got a several thousand dollar bill in return for the inconvenience. We have to pay $100/mo each for two of my son's prescriptions, but that's better than the $1000+ they supposedly cost retail. It could be worse; I could be paying out of pocket the whole way. So yeah, it's "good."

However, the only insurance my family has ever had that I'd call "excellent" was when the wife (then fiance) and kids were on Medicaid while I worked minimum-wage and went to school. My son got timely medical care for his CF, his life-sustaining medications cost us nothing out of pocket, they paid for necessary medical equipment without any hassle, we never had to deal with prior-auth forms or claim denials, and so on.

Hm. I've got an Equity I and I+ (with HD!). Maybe we should start a group...

Much like you said, I've got collections of old systems myself, and while some are significant in a universal way - an Osborne portable, for example - most are only significant to me.

The Equity I+ has actually seen some use, along with a Tandy almost-PC-compatible that my kids used to play Wheel of Fortune on a couple years ago. While they're nothing special, they are the oldest PC systems I have in working order, and I never had much PC experience until Win95 days. The PC XT and Dell XT clone I have were both given to me already pulled for parts, and I haven't scrounged up the stuff to make them whole again, although they are the more "important" systems.

So far just about every generic 2/3/486 I've come across has gone off for scrap, though.

My employer (a hospital) has a clear policy: As long as you are not on the clock, and you do not violate any laws, you may use the computer, internet, telephone, etc for personal use. I am writing this during my lunch time, for example.

And yes, the policy also states any such use can be monitored and revoked.