Does this mean that Alexander Graham Bell made the very long range call to his assistant in 1915, but that until 1927 it was just a bunch of garbled noises that no else but the assistant could understand?

Hopefully, AT&T will jump on that expired patent. It would be nice if AT&T allowed its cell phones to do the same thing by year 2027

Radio frequency jammers may be, in case the bomb is remotely detonated. I actually don't know.

I don't know if fighter jets are equipped with them, but I can tell you that some helicopters have them. That's what the secret services uses to block cell phone frequencies and other types of frequencies when the President is traveling around.

Does Skymall include the tax-free liquor? If so, yes, depending on the country I was going to.

Otherwise, no. At least not when I was flying into California. Even with the $3.30-$6.60 tax surcharge per wine gallon, I can still get my liquor much cheaper at Costco than I can get aboard the plane, or at the tax-free duty shop.

An acquaintance of mine took this concept of hospitality even further, since he usually ships packages every single day from his residential home (which is probably not even permitted because of zoning regulations).

He transformed his garage into his shipping station. He also put out a nice kitchen table and some chairs in the garage with fresh brewing coffee and visibly home-made muffins on the table itself, along with take out coffee cups in case the delivery person doesn't have time to sit down.

If you really want your delivery person to accept your cup of tea, he has to see that a fresh pot of tea has already been made, and he has to think he's not interrupting you, or putting you out (for actually saying "yes" to an offer, which sometimes are just made out of ingrained politeness instead of real intent).

Also, don't expect every delivery person to accept your cup of tea. Some people are just shy, or really too busy in that particular moment, to be able to accept anything.

That's a good catch. I stand corrected.

Yes, my previous post could have been written a little better.

That being said, semantic ambiguity happens all the time, even where I live.

As a French person living in the US who gets his news partly from American news broadcasts, I have actually been made fun of by other French people for referring to our former French prime minister as Edith Croissant (just like the crescent shaped pastry, instead of Edith Cresson, which was/is actually her real name).

I know you're joking, but the answer is a huge "No".

Take this sentence for instance which at first didn't make any sense to me:

Apparently here, the President is patting himself on the back for having increased the import tariff to such a high level, that it has become impossible for foreign manufacturers to compete on cost. Wow! This President must be some kind of genius or something.

Not only, this new bolder protectionist strategy (which is even bolder than the previous protectionist strategy) is bound to propel Nigeria to new financial heights, but the President has zeroed in the banking industry's own dirty little secret. In banking, it's not the loans/investments, interests, or fees, that make the money. It's actually the manufacturing of the little plastic cards with a little bit of silicon in them that is the real cash cow of the banking industry.

For the President's Goodluck sake (yes, Goodluck is actually his real name), I sure hope that the WTO never catches onto his bold and unfair protectionist strategy over those little plastic cards with a little bit of silicon in them. President Goodluck may actually kill himself, if he ever found out that the WTO was against him when it came down to those little plastic cards.

You're probably right. That being said, all my developer friends in China use VPNs to access things like Github.

I know there are alternatives to Github, but really this is becoming an annoyance for them. It's not like they're artists or political activists, they're just using paid VPN access to get their job done and/or viewing the occasional Hollywood movies.

That's an entire class of people that were already pacified. There was nothing for China to gain by doing that. Blocking the free VPNs should have been more than sufficient.

Actually, no. Most people use Crouton in developer mode. That means they run Chrome OS side-by-side with their preferred Linux variant.

It's less risky that way. Because if you replace Chrome OS completely with your own Linux distribution, you'll probably lose the small amount of free Verizon data that comes with it for three years, or the 10-fingers touch support, or the very high resolution support, that may come on some of those newer Chromebooks. Because don't believe what the Ubuntu guys say, they may claim to have designed Unity to be a touch interface, but Unity is actually just as awful for people with actual touch screens.

That being said, running in developer mode carries its own set of risks. If a Verizon repair person ever opens my Chromebook, or one of my nephews opens it, they'll probably just wipe everything by mistake (because in developer mode, the first instructions that pop up is that you should wipe the device to get out of developer mode by pressing the space bar. Yes, thanks a lot Google for having that feature, I'm glad I don't have kids thought. This means I only need to hide my Chromebook Pixel when my nephews are visiting).

And don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind wiping my Chromebook if I only had Chrome OS on there, but I've had to wipe my Chromebook so many times to get the linux environment on Crouton just right for Android development purposes, the next time I have to do it, I might have a complete melt down.

That's only because you don't have a fresh pot of coffee and a plate of freshly baked cookies waiting for your delivery person. If receiving/sending packages is even slightly important to you, you have to start treating your delivery person like Santa Claus once in a while.

After all, why do you think he doesn't take the extra twenty seconds it requires to actually deliver your package? It's probably because he has to make up for the lost twenty minutes he already spent drinking coffee and eating cookies at my place.

This is actually nothing new. Most electronics locks have had this capability for a very long time already. I've given service people their own pins, that would only work on certain days during certain hours. I've given my friends, my former roommates, and my family their own pins so they could get in whenever they wanted. The system keeps a pretty comprehensive audit trail of who comes in, so if someone gives their pin to someone else, it's usually pretty easy to figure out.

The only difference between that system and the lock I use is that this system is internet-enabled and accessible through a phone app, but then again, I haven't upgraded that lock in the last fifteen years, so such a change is to be expected. Also, there is the cost issue. These systems are not cheap. And this one being advertised slyly on Slashdot isn't cheap either.

As to the postal worker or the UPS guy, I've never given them a pin. Would they even take it if I gave it to them? I doubt it (unless I was really on very good terms with them). Even accepting the pin to a garage can lead to potential problems. What happens if I start to claim that valuable things have started missing from my garage on the day of deliveries? What happens if there is a dog in a garage that comes out when they open it? Do they run after it to put it back in there? What happens if there is a dog that comes out to bite the uniformed intruder? My UPS guy can handle dogs. He gives them little treats (with my permission of course). So my dogs start to salivate when they hear the UPS truck pull in, or see someone in a brown uniform. But my postal delivery man is still completely clueless, with his little pepper spray bottle. My dogs don't like him, or anyone else wearing a blue uniform.

When I lived in the inner city in a small apartment building, I recall the postal worker having a master key to my outer gate, so that he could access the mailboxes, but that's about it. Being able to open an outer gate is not the same thing as being able to open a garage (whether that large garage door is automated, or manual). And last I checked, city services are only decreasing these days, not increasing. Before the garbage man was willing to open my gate, open the enclosure to my garbage bins, and carry the garbage all the way to his garbage truck. These days, I have to take the garbage out to the curb myself, and the garbage man just leaves the empty garbage can near the middle of the road potentially blocking traffic.

Don't get me wrong. It does suck to be cheated on (even if it's just online). But if the couple isn't formally married to begin with, I don't think society should interfere. Society has too much to deal with already.

Also, you say "fraud", but to me fraud usually involves a specific monetary value that was taken under false pretense. In that sense, financial fraud is much easier to deal with because it's much more quantifiable than just emotional fraud (and yes, my own definition of "fraud" could be wrong, you don't need to prove it by quoting a dictionary for me. It's just that my point remains. As a society, financial fraud is much easier to deal with than other kinds of fraud).

Also, does anyone else see the parallel with gamergate? With gamergate, the guy started his campaign of accusations against the woman after he claims she had started cheating on him. In this case, the woman started her campaign of accusations against the Professor after he lied to her about other women.

And then the Professor blocked her from seeing his friends on Facebook, bolstering her claim of online infidelity even more.

So what we have here is two people who can't take "no" for an answer. In the first case, it's called sexual harassment because it's a woman who is saying "no", and the guy just can't take it because of his feelings of attachment towards her. In the second case, it's a 80 years old guy saying "no" to online exclusivity, but it's the woman who can't take that "no" because of her feelings of attachment towards him.

And of course MIT sided with the sexual harasser in that second case. That's what companies and organizations do nowadays. They have no interest in protecting their employees against true sexual harassment, or against sexual retaliation. They have no interest in trying to understand a situation. Their only interest is in covering their asses and implementing zero tolerance policies across the board.

Well, it does sound like he lied to them (about exclusivity).

It's probably just me being cynical, but had the first degree women friends of the Professor on Facebook not replied to that first woman saying that they were also in an online sexual relationship with the Professor, then the first woman wouldn't have considered his behavior sexual harassment, and she would have never retroactively taken back her consent to the online relationship.

She also said she felt trap near the end, but really how trapped could she have been? She started all of this more than a year after the fact. Wasn't she finished with the course by that time? Shouldn't the power relationship be nullified once all the grades are in and the course finished? Also the Professor was already pushing 80 years old and had already retired? How much power did have from across the ocean as an 80 year old?

Did he try to blackmail her with the pictures he already had? From the detailed article, that doesn't seem to be the case. If the detail of him lying about other women is any indication, that seems to be the most relevant part of her grievance, and that's how he "psychologically compelled" her -- by lying to her. And by the time she found out about the online infidelity, she was already emotionally attached to him, that's why she felt trapped (at least, that would be my cynical interpretation of her statements, because I just don't buy the I-felt trapped-because-he-kept-on-contacted-me reason.).

You're right. The idea that roughly 65,000 new jobs each year can not be filled with US citizens is mostly rhetorical BS.

Just double the wage, and US applicants will come out of the woodwork. And if that doesn't work, double that wage again, and just see what happens.

That's essentially what happened with COBOL for Y2K. People came out of retirement for the money. Others quit their management jobs to come back as lowly COBOL developers (for a language and a job they had mostly forgotten). And others still just bit the bullet, and learned COBOL from scratch just to take advantage of the temporary money windfall.

Who knows? If the demand from employers becomes desperate enough without being mitigated by the H1B program, parents, school boards, and government officials may even be crazy enough to make math and sciences the number one priority once again for their own kids.