Completely sincere: thanks for correcting me on that. It's something I still routinely get wrong and/or simply forget to consider.

Oh, I'd agree. It had a nice, blunted metal spike on top and a metal shaft. To say the least, that umbrella quickly got relegated to non-thunderstorm rain duty.

Years ago when I was in junior high or early high school, my father was taking my younger brother and I to go shopping. I could hear a thunderstorm outside as we were shopping, but we lived in south Florida, so that was nothing out of the ordinary.

As we were heading out to the car after our shopping was done, something occurred that never happened to me before or since: I heard a crack at the exact same time that I saw a flash of light. I didn't see a source for the flash, just the light, seemingly all around. I had been standing next to my dad, who was holding my brother's hand while we were in the parking lot, but when I turned to see what their reactions were to what I assumed was a REALLY close strike, my dad was on the asphalt on his knees with his hands gripping the top of his head. The umbrella he had been holding had fallen to the ground, my brother and I were getting soaked, and my father wasn't responding to us when we asked him if he was all right.

After about a minute, my father was finally able to respond, and was actually rather embarrassed by the whole thing, since he could see and hear us, but was simply incapable of responding. We didn't know exactly what had happened, since none of us had actually seen the lightning strike, but we knew it had to have hit close, given that none of us had ever heard the crack of the strike happen at the exact same time that we saw the flash of light. My brother mentioned that his heart was racing oddly as well.

When we got home, sure enough, we found a little scorch mark on the top of my father's head that was hot to the touch, and over the course of the next week or so, he discovered that his sense of smell had been damaged, with things smelling differently than they should. It ended up being about a year before he could smell things correctly again. We figure that my brother may have also gotten some of it through him, given that he was holding my dad's hand at the time that it happened.

It was probably a good 5 years before the three of us stopped being skittish when outside in a lightning storm, and even to this day I treat them quite a bit differently than I used to, despite having grown up with them around all the time and generally having practiced good habits around them (even at the time of our strike, there were tall poles and trees (that we weren't under) all around us, so it always seemed odd to me that the strike landed where it did).

If a browser isn't properly sandboxing its plugins, it is the browser developer's fault. I get where you're coming from, and I agree with your premise, but you sure picked a lousy analogy to make your point.

He has altered the deal. Pray he does not alter it any further.

So, not only have you assembled a straw man to tear apart, you also fabricated a straw person to attack in the first place.

Companies are fallible. We get it. We agree. There's no need to create a fictional quote from a fictional person to make your point.

I'm well aware that blood clots are a common complication. Nonetheless, they usually manifest earlier than two months after the surgery (I misspoke when I said "a few weeks"), which is when she died, and there was no mention at the time of her death that a blood clot was the cause. As far as I'm aware, it was ruled to be simple heart failure. Besides which, I can think of plenty of other examples regarding people I once knew:

- There was the little old lady who used to do the gardening at a church I attended. Her daughter decided that even though nothing had changed, it was time for her mom to stop gardening, and so prevented her from leaving the house to do so. The little old lady died in her sleep within the month.

- There was the couple I knew who were adopted grandparents to my brother and I. The husband was a diabetic and eventually passed away in his 70s after numerous complications. His wife had been his primary caregiver for years. She died in her sleep shortly thereafter, despite having been in excellent health.

- There was a mother and son I knew who lived together. He was severely mentally handicapped, so she acted as his primary caregiver, despite being in her 80s (he was in his 50s). A car ran a red light and T-boned them as they were crossing an intersection one day. The son was killed instantly, while the mother was physically unharmed. She passed away in her sleep within the month.

Is this proof of anything? Absolutely not. But I've seen too many people stop doing whatever it is that gets them up in the morning, lose the spark in their eyes, and then take a nose-dive for me to consider it purely coincidental.

You pretty much nailed it. What the summary failed to take into account was the most obvious factor: that the culture surrounding smartphones has changed.

Two years ago when the Note launched, phablets looked ridiculous, the UIs weren't designed for screens that large, and reviewers who hadn't used them before didn't even know how to hold them properly. Those early ones really weren't that great, but the fact that the general population wasn't ready to accept them since they looked so out of place didn't help any either. Even so, enough people bought them that they stuck around and started to shift what people considered to be normal.

Fast forward two years, and Samsung's continued push into the phablet space has made some major inroads. At this point, a 4" screen on a high-end phone is seen as small, UIs have done some catching up to be more usable on screens that large, the general population is more educated on how to use a screen that large, and people have begun to recognize the benefits of larger screens. Suddenly, they no longer look quite so ridiculous.

I know as scientists and engineers we want to be able to say with certainty that "X is the best at Y", since things that are true should remain true. But the bigger truth here is that the world changes, and this is one of those instances. What made sense 2 years ago may not make sense today, simply because our perspectives and tastes have changed. Hell, if you can remember all the way back to 2007, you may even recall that the 3.5" screen on the original iPhone was thought to be pushing the limits of what was reasonable, given that it was practically twice the diagonal size of much of the competition it was going up against. The trend back then was to go as small and thin as possible, but the original iPhone forced us to shift our expectations and perceptions of what was normal.

Thin is still a trend, but small isn't any more. Samsung successfully shifted that. It should come as no surprise then, that modern reviews would reflect that change in public perception, and would look more favorably on a large screen today than they did 2 years ago, regardless of who the manufacturer happens to be. And, in fact, that's exactly what's going on, given that Samsung's recent, large-screen phones have been stealing a lot of thunder from Apple, which is what necessitated this move on Apple's part in the first place.

My grandmother served as a volunteer at her local Salt Lake City hospital for about 30 years, starting around the age of 65. She also traveled the world, going on mystery vacations that took her everywhere from China to Peru to the France, and was doing that all the way into her 90s as well. She was able to live independently in her home the entire time, still was hosting get-togethers with her friends right up until the end, and still made it down into town a few days a week to get her hair done or do other errands. And since her house was paid for long ago, she could easily live off of my grandfather's Army pension, allowing her to be generous with her time and the money she got from her other retirement holdings.

She broke her leg when she was 101, and despite the doctors not thinking she'd manage to survive the surgery to repair it, she did so with flying colors and was doing well in recovery afterwards. It wasn't until a few weeks later that someone broke the news to her: she would never be able to walk unaided again, nor would she be able to live independently any longer. She passed away within two days. I firmly believe it was a case of losing the will to live.

All of which is to say, people can and do live active, fulfilling lives well past 75, and I see no reason to cut off life early if the life is still being lived well. Volunteering is a great suggestion. You get to be involved in improving other people's lives and can see them benefit from your efforts. But without something to motivate people or keep them moving, people tend to die quickly. I've seen it happen time and time again, as have most of us, I'd assume. And I'd hope that it's the case for me as well: when I stop being able to contribute, I don't want any extraordinary measures used to lengthen my life. I outright let my retirement advisor know that I didn't plan to be alive for long after I retired, since I plan to work late in life in one capacity or another, and when I can't work, I plan to keel over shortly thereafter.

Except that it already is shipping. Apple's A8 chip used in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus is manufactured using TSMC's 20nm process. And given Apple's proclivity for consuming entire manufacturing lines for their products, it's entirely possible that TSMC had to turn away other customers if they wanted to keep Apple, simply because they lacked the capacity to do otherwise. It also makes sense why they haven't been able to talk about the fact that they had a major customer lined up, given how religiously Apple likes to control their product announcements and the fact that they didn't even announce the devices until a week or two ago.

Your logic is all flipped. The question you should be asking is simply, "Am I getting $8 worth of entertainment?" Netflix has never had a great selection of the latest stuff (even back a few years ago it wasn't that great), so if you're analyzing the value proposition through that lens, you're ignoring the actual value that it provides. Rather than asking what they don't have, the type of question that should be asked is if what they do have is worth the paltry asking price.

The more I've used Netflix, the better it's gotten at making recommendations, and at this point my queue is mostly filled up with great movies I either missed the first time around or had never even heard of at all but which Netflix recommended to me. And while it definitely doesn't hit a home run with each and every one of them, it's better at providing good recommendations than most of my friends are, so I'm getting tremendous value out of the service since it's supplying me with an endless stream of films I'm enjoying, despite it lacking the latest and greatest. But for those times when I'm impatient and can't wait to watch something that was just released, only paying $8/mo. for Netflix means that it's easy to justify supplementing it with rentals from Amazon, iTunes, Redbox, or some other service.

I find that I'm much happier in life if I stop asking what I lack, and start focusing on what I have. Maybe Netflix really doesn't offer any value to you since you're only interested in watching new releases, and if that's the case, that's fine. But if you have any interest at all in watching stuff you may have missed the first time around, Netflix continues to be an absolutely incredible deal, and it'd be a shame if you missed out on it because you couldn't look past its lack in another area.

What I have to say doesn't really change what you've said, but for your own future reference and information, there isn't any way for North and South Dakota to split from each other without leaving the US. They're already separate states and have been for as long as they've been states.

The last time they were part of a common political entity that was itself also a part of the US was when they were collectively known as the Dakota Territory (1861-1889), back before they became states. And, at least if Wikipedia is anything to go by, it's sounds like their becoming separate states wasn't exactly a non-issue, since it was a power play being made by one of the political parties to increase the number of seats they held in the US Senate (each state gets two Senators, so splitting the territory instead of accepting it whole meant doubling the number of Senators).

I agree last-mile is the harder part. Even so, city-to-city is clearly a problem as well when the cities are so far apart and so numerous. Mine is well populated and yet is only just now getting some dark fiber laid that will hopefully be picked up and used by an ISP. Rich or poor, doesn't matter where I live. All 200K+ folks have crappy Internet. I wish we had a last-mile problem here.

My head hurts after reading your comment. Netflix has effectively done the digital equivalent of setting up a blockade around Australia to prevent their goods from entering the country, and yet they're the ones cheating the system because Australians are managing to smuggle the content through the blockade? What sort of sense does that make?

The PRISM PowerPoint slides leaked by Snowden.