Put more memory in the device. Then you don't need a cell modem and data plan either. Or, if absolutely necessary (it's not in any of these devices) encrypt the data with a user-owned key so the company *can't* decrypt it.

Sending this stuff in the clear back to the company that makes the device only benefits the company, and comes with significant drawbacks.

He has no incoming outside of academia. He still has an excellent academic position and probably a good salary and benefits to go along with it. But strangely he didn't get rich sitting on corporate boards. Poor guy.

"Scoring high on intelligence tests only proves you know how to answer intelligence tests."

Intelligence tests aren't such a bad tool as you make them out to be, provided you use them correctly. Using them correctly involves taking into account differences in culture, upbringing, socioeconomic status, etc.

When you do that you find that IQ, along with adult income, highest education attained and pretty much every other indicator of success, is dominated by the socioeconomic status of the family in which you were raised.

And they almost killed it, except Roosevelt made a speech saying that the continued existence of football was critical to the future of the USA.

It's not quite that simple. POTS+modem sent your signal all the way to its destination as an acoustical signal carried on a POTS phone line. Those were limited to 3.4 kHz by the switching and other hardware. The speed with which you can transfer data in that bandwidth is limited by Shannon's theorems.

DSL uses a higher frequency (> 3.4 kHz) signal on the line from the local station to your house that also has more than 3 kHz of bandwidth, so can transfer data much more quickly. That signal doesn't go all the way to the destination, it's stripped off the line, re-encoded, and sent on via a packet switched digital network.

The DSL signal is using the same wire as the POTS service to your house, but it's purposely *not* POTS so that it can do so without interfering.

I'm not a physicist, so if I've made a mistake I hope someone can point it out.

Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates reparameterise the Swartzchild coordinates (t,r,thea,phi) with (v,r,thea,phi) where v = t + r* and r* = r + 2M log(r/2M -1). Note that r* -> -infinity as r->2M so as r->2M v -> t + infinity. For an outside observer, the ticks of a clock at the event horizon are infinitely far apart. Similarly, dt/dr -> infinity as r->2M.

From another perspective, for an outside observer we're not interested in infalling light rays, we want to know about escaping ones. Pulses emitted from an infalling light clock will appear to us to be farther and farther apart (and more and more redshifted) until they are infinitely far apart at the horizon.

From the perspective of the outside universe, it takes an infinite amount of time for anything to reach the event horizon. A black hole that evaporates on any timescale for an observer at a distance should have an event horizon that retreats from anything infalling.

There does seem to be a conflict between the outside observer and the falling one. It seems to me this is resolved in much the same way the twin paradox is in special relativity. If the infalling observer were to stop just before the event horizon and return to the outside observer, he would find that, while accelerating away from the hole, the outside universe was enormously blue shifted, making up for the blue shift he did not observe while falling inward. When he met up with the outside observer and compared notes he'd find that his clock had been running much slower.

In another way of looking at it, to the infalling observer the universe behind him is accelerating away and he would expect it to be redshifted, but it is not. The universe on the other side (light skimming the event horizon for example) IS enormously blue shifted.

If Amazon paid me directly for my connection I'd use them too. In fact, in the US Netflix did pay the postage on DVDs they mailed out. Was that unfair to competitors who didn't pay postage?

The insidious problem is that ISPs want to get paid twice - once by me and once by content providers who have deep enough pockets. That's like the post office charging Netflix to send me a DVD and then charging me again before they'd give it to me.

Ionizing H2 will absolutely break apart the molecules. You know that atomic bonds are made by the electrons, right? Two protons really don't like to be anywhere near each other unless there are electrons and/or neutrons involved.

All the diagrams I've seen are from the perspective of an observer falling into a static black hole, with the mass concentrated as a singularity in the centre. For the outside observer, it takes infinite time for something falling in to cross the event horizon.

So suppose black holes actually do evaporate. An infalling observer could find the event horizon retreating from him as the hole shrank.

The power in all the previous places I've lived was above ground and rarely went out. If a tree limb grew over the line, someone came and cut it back.

I was visiting a friend in New York just before (and during) hurricane Sandy. There were lines in his neighbourhood with tree branches that had grown around them. Sure enough, a bit of wind and down they came.

Going all nuclear today WOULD solve the problem. What they're saying is that, due to lots of factors other than the price of renewables, we can't implement them on a large enough scale quickly enough.

I have a good friend who did EMT training. I think it was a two year certificate program. But in our area, to actually work in an ambulance, especially ALS, you essentially have to be a paramedic, which is a four to five year degree program. Note that med school is also a four to five year degree program. MDs then get specialized training for various lengths of time in residency programs, but they also have a much broader focus than paramedics.

GDP is funny. Most formulas for it include not only production but also other economic activity. So production of steel and food and iPhones counts, but so does the activity of the PHB and the ad agency making popups. We certainly would be poorer if reduced working hours led to a decrease in primary production, but would we be if the service industry was reduced? Fewer investment bankers, fund managers, ad execs, and those people who stand in department stores spraying perfume in your face?

Western economies add mostly service industry activity as they grow. I suspect that this is really just a combination of the idea that we all have to have jobs and work forty plus hours a week and increasing wealth. Make work jobs.

There are lots of other factors as well. Two guys in the back of a van can't work as effectively as an ER team with as many people and as much space as needed. If it's a choice between maintaining continuous chest compressions and figuring out whether the patient's blood potassium is too low or high, which do you do? In a hospital you can do both at the same time. In an ambulance, particularly one that's moving, probably not.

The recommendations for advanced life support changed in 2010 to suggest that the chest compressions are actually more important.

No, you can prove very non-trivial programs will halt. There are entire languages that are restricted in such a way that ALL programs you can write in them are guaranteed to halt. Realtime operating systems even guarantee things are completed in a particular amount of time.

Running a program to a deadline is not cheating. It's a technique that's used all the time. It's also used in real life, by the way. The precise example problem in the article is solved in real-world justice systems by requiring a speedy trial. If you can't prove the evil programmer guilty within a reasonable amount of time, she is not guilty by default.