Yep. The sonic screwdriver was initially introduced because it was deemed silly to have the Doctor confounded by simple locks. Essentially its job was to allow the real plot to proceed when the Doctor was confined to a locked room or was in some similar mundane situation.

As such, it was not unreasonable.

Now, though, it has evolved into an extremely annoying gadget that seems to short-circuit the plot rather than further it. Is there nothing that the current incarnation of this device can't do? Frankly, I wish he'd just lose it somewhere.

Of course, now we also have magical mobile phones. Those should all be destroyed by the sonic screwdriver before the Doctor loses it.

Good idea. It made me think, "Why do I ever browse anything that doesn't support https?" Then I realised that I was browsing slashdot on an insecure connection. So I typed "https://slashdot.org" in the address bar... I'lll let you try that for yourself.

Rather to my surprise, the last decade has seen a marked deterioration in the number and quality of professional designers and typographers used by most publishing houses (both large and small). I some time ago came to the conclusion that someone with skills in TeX (and, probably more importantly, an understanding of the minutiæ of typesetting) can do a much better job than most publishing houses these days.

That is not to say that publishers don't provide other useful services (principally editing and marketing).

I write novels. What could be better than that? Seriously.

I beg to differ. It requires thinking hard enough about solving the problem so that you don't spend long nights staring blankly at mind-muddling objective languages.

Nope. I don't use IMAP, and, as I say in a comment further down, it was hideously slow until I turned off indexing after several days.

Must be a YMMV thing. After four days of waiting for 30 seconds or more at a time just to do simple things [and even longer just to exit the program; the OS kept inviting me to kill the program since it didn't actually close sufficiently quickly -- every time I exited; that got real old real quickly], I turned off all the indexing. I kept hoping that it would finally finish indexing, but there was no indication here that it was ever going to do so. It seemed (here... again, YMMV) that simply receiving a new e-mail into a folder would cause the entire folder to be reindexed. When one has more than ten thousand e-mails in a folder, that brings even a powerful machine to its knees.

Actually, if you're sensible, you'll first read the contract that Amazon requires you to sign. You may or may not decide after doing that that giving up substantial rights is worth seeing the material appear on a particular company's platform. Different authors have reached different conclusions on the matter.

Anent Amazon and the Kindle in particular, you may want to read: http://www.sfwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Amazon_digital_publication_distribution_agreement_annotated_v3_080329.pdf.

FWIW I live in Colorado.

Most responders seem to assume some sort of VHF but, as a few people point out, that's not really a great idea because there are big gaps in repeater coverage in the mountains.

However, 5W (or less) on HF CW would be ample for emergency communications, and you wouldn't have to worry about whether there's a repeater nearby. There are lots of designs for lightweight QRP (i.e., low power) single-frequency (or limited-frequency) rigs that would be suitable. I'd probably go for one that transmitted on 40m, just because there's more CW activity there, so you're more likely to be heard quickly than on, say, 80m.

I don't hike in the mountains, but if I did I would definitely carry such a rig with me. It only needs to save your life once.

Or possibly they have read the contract that Amazon requires them to agree to in order to put content on their devices, and decided that giving all the rights to Amazon is not something that they want to do (I exaggerate, but not by a whole lot; basically the publisher gives up essentially all control of the presentation and distribution). Perhaps they are careful rather than daft.

There were plenty of amateur radio operators (myself included) using the KA9Q stack to implement e-mail over radio in the late 80s.

As is so frequently the case, though, I haven't been able (yet) to find the details of the patents at issue here. Although possibly they are the same as the ones at issue in the RIM case (the PR blurb from NTP seems to indicate that that's a possibility, but isn't explicit). In any case, without the actual patents (indeed, without the detailed claims from the complaint), it's hard to know whether the action is even, as the lawyers say, colorable.

What I find discouraging with these smaller outfits (maybe I've been unlucky in my choice of companies whose APIs I've used) is the attitude that once the API is announced, there is a disconcerting tendency not to bother to communicate changes to developers who've made use of the API. I generally discover that some change has been made purely by accident a week or more after the event, when I discover that something no longer works properly.

And, of course, there's always the issue that the actual API as implemented often is just-different-enough from the published description to cause one to experience an annoying period of trial-and-error as one figures out what actually works.

Radio transmitters do not go "offline". They go "off the air".

What's particularly interesting to me about this is that many people predicted the death of CW (i.e., the use of Morse code) when the requirement to learn it was taken away from the license exams in most countries... and yet in the long-distance amateur radio contests we are finding that the use of Morse Code is quite clearly and consistently rising.

There are technical reasons why CW is superior to voice transmissions for long-distance communications, but I think a lot of us thought that the relative difficulty of learning the code would naturally lead to people not ever putting in the effort and thereby being in a position to discover its technical superiority for at least some kinds of communications. It seems that we were wrong, for which I am heartily grateful since I find CW simply a more pleasurable mode and was wondering if I would have anyone left to talk to in my dotage.

As Einstein famously said: "Time is what a clock reads". I always thought that was rather a clever evasion: true but not particularly helpful.

For many years that quotation was on a poster that greeted one in the lobby of what was then the National Bureau of Standards in Boulder, CO.