"There is NOTHING in the Constitution about freedom of speech that says that you have to assist demonstrators in shutting down your system."

Actually, it's the FCC that has full legal authority regarding cell phone service (and pretty much all wireless communication methods), and its intentional disruption or jamming, and how NO ONE is supposed to be legally allowed to do it. You know why movie theaters can't install cell phone jammers to keep phones in the audience from ringing? The FCC makes it illegal to do so. Remember when the vendors of paid WiFi services in Logan airport wanted to shut down a competing free WiFi service in the terminal, but weren't allowed to do so? That pesky FCC again.

Basically, only the FCC has the legal authority to suspend/disrupt/jam common carrier services. And in fact, the FCC is inviting users who had their services disrupted to register a complaint at http://www.fcc.gov/complaints or call 1-888-CALL-FCC.

So no, it's not the Constitution that protects the protesters' rights to use cell phones, but the FCC prohibits anyone else from interfering with the signals, regardless of the intention.

Already on the pre-order list, my friend. ;-)

Always glad to see another A2 user on slashdot.

As a die-hard Apple II user (still have my original //e and a spiffy Ethernet-equipped, Compact-Flash-card-as-a-hard-drive, maxed out IIGS), I've often pondered what might have been but for a few twists of computing fate.

With just between 16KB to 256KB or RAM, a pair of 140KB floppy drives, an 80-column green-screen or RGB color display, 5 card slots, and an 8-bit CPU bus with a CPU running at far less than 10 MHz, the IBM 5150 isn't that different than a contemporary Apple //e (typically with 128KB of RAM, a pair of 140KB floppies, a green screen or RGB display, 7 card slots, and a more efficient 1MHz CPU), and it wasn't obviously superior at the time. Both had similar expansion abilities (serial, parallel, game, modems, primitive hard drives in time), yet industry chose the PC to build upon because it was legally simpler.

What might have been if Apple allowed industry to clone and build upon the Apple II architecture, I wonder? Would we have had Compaq building luggable Apple II's with 16-bit CPUs and expanded memory early on? Might we have eventually had Apple IIs with 16-bit ISA slots, then VLB slots, then PCI slots, then AGP slots, and now PCI Express? Might we today have thoroughly modern computers with slick Windows-like GUIs, but if you did a Control-Reset or booted off of a USB-connected legacy Disk ][ you could still enter an AppleSoft BASIC program equivalent to booting off of an MSDOS boot floppy and doing a "dir?" Might our keyboards still have Open-Apple and Solid-Apple keys instead of Alt and Windows?

Now don't get me wrong, I love my PCs today and earn my livelihood with them, but as a former Beagle Bros employee, I sometimes can't help but wonder what might have been...

Surely not *everything* in your Dropbox folder is private and sensitive? Sure, your Excel spreadsheet with last years' taxes are, but your vacation photos?

For those few files I have that I consider sensitive, I just zip them up with a long/strong password and use encryption. There are a few Android apps that can deal with these zip files, and I know all my desktop OSes can.

I was born with ears that stuck out worse that Prince Charles. I was teased about them all through school.

In college I had my ears "tucked," which basically made them lay flat against my head. I had generous grandparents.

Anyway, the point is that to do this, (the following not for the queasy), they slice open your ear, take out the cartilage (which is what forms all the unique bumps and curves of your ear), manually reshape it, stick it back in, and then sew you up.

Not only did my ears finally not stick out, but they looked totally different than they did before: none of the curves matched, and even my earlobes are a different shape (the bottoms are trimmed a bit and then stitched back to your head.)

This is not terribly expensive surgery, and while a bit painful, if I were a criminal trying to beat a set of "earprints" somehow left at the scene of a crime, I'd have it done in a second.

Duh! If you wanna look at The Sun without risking your eyesight, just do it at night! Problem solved.

It took about 30 seconds with Google to establish that you are Timothy Lord. There's an MP3 I found of you giving a talk where you even identify your Slashdot ID. So we can get that right out of the way.

Now then.

I Googled Timothy Lord, Tim Lord, both with and without quotation marks. You know what?

There are roughly 7 billion (Timothy Lord) and 10 billion (Tim Lord) hits on that name without quotes. It goes down to close to 100,000 hits to 17,000 hits when you add quotes.

Timothy Lord isn't that uncommon a name. "Tim" and "Lord" by themselves are very common. I have a hard time imagining any employer going through all those search results when there's not really any way of knowing that the Tim Lord they're reading about doing something somewhere at a university computer some time in the past is the Tim Lord they're interviewing for a job. And even if they did, you could always deny it, unless you're under oath or something, but I guess that's a moral question you only have to think about if they went through the hassle of Googling you and getting this hit to begin with.

If your name were, oh, "Cornelius Mytzlplyk" I'd say you have a pretty valid concern here. But "Tim Lord?" I don't think so.

Remember the Thinkpad 701 with the folding, "Butterfly Keyboard?" Combine that screen with this keyboard and you'd have quite the portable "transformer." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj-5OI2tPlY

I have a small-but-nice vintage arcade game collection in my living room, and it occurred to me a few years back that these old upright cabinets would make for a pretty good coffin, especially my beloved Sinistar.

Then genius struck: remove the monitor (and I guess the boards too - let another collector use 'em), slap my lifeless remains in there so my face is right behind the glass, and BOOM, we have the makings of a great open-casket for what will surely be a somber wake.

Extra points for the nerdy friend who manages to get the game's synthesized voice to occasionally cry out BEWARE! I live!.

I love my old keyboards, and not just the Model M's.

I have 4 Model M's, and two of them have the EraserHead/Pointer Nipple dealie built-in like a Thinkpad. I have one classic Chicony AT with similar bucking springs inside. And I have 5 First-Generation Apple Extended Keyboards (model M0115) which I use with modern computers with an ADB-USB Converter from Griffin. As a professional writer, I've come to learn that a great-feeling keyboard actually adds the the writing experience, and makes the time pass by much more quickly.

That said, when I work in a cubicle farm (which happens from time to time as a tech writer), my Model M's are a problem. Their "clickety-clackety" machine-gun staccato usually irritates the hell out of everyone in earshot, and it doesn't take more than a hour or so for someone to ask me to use another keyboard. So do consider asking your office neighbors about it before shelling out big bucks for one.

On top of that, and this sounds like something right out of Office Space, but a Model M destroys the illusion of "constant productivity." Good managers know that you can't be typing for 8 hours straight, but Pointy Haired Bosses have no clue, and soon start to figure out when you're typing and when you're browsing Slashdot when you use a Model M. Quiet keyboards don't give your down-time away.

A good Apple M0115 (now nearly 20 years old) is a good combination between great key action and relative quiet, (it just goes "tappetty-tap") and as a bonus, it still works on your old Apple IIGS!

A new Muppet Show is obviously on the way...

I'm...going...to...see...it...again...and...again.

+1 if you get the reference.

(Hint: SNL)