Only those communities that are remote enough to depend solely on satellite are affected. FTA: "Northwestel said all communities across Nunavut, N.W.T. and Yukon that receive their long distance calling and data service via satellite are affected."

S. Keshav, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Tetherless Computing at the University of Waterloo, calculates that the marginal cost of an SMS message is about 0.3 cents (testimony before the US Congress, June 2009). His calculation includes channel costs and billing costs, but assumes negligible additional paging costs because "once a mobile has been located, either for a call or an SMS, it no longer needs to be paged." But as someone pointed out, this is the same industry that gives us $3 MP3s.

Not all prototypes: most of the items I see in the collection are production models. Not all failures: quite a few of the items dominated a market niche during their time, even if they didn't take over the world and find a home on every desktop, and are still available for purchase.

Almost every contact my family has had with a emergency room has resulted in overbilling. In several cases, when I've complained "insurance already paid for that" or "the patient did NOT receive that treatment" both insurance and hospital have disclaimed any knowledge, and my paper records were my sole defense against paying hundreds or thousands of dollars. Sometimes those bills arrived years after I thought everything had been settled. I guess if you have a couple hundred grand you're willing to spend on such waste over your lifetime, then yeah, it's not worth caring about. Or maybe you live in a place (certainly not the US) where you really can trust medical billing.

For most purchase decisions, economics (to some degree) accounts for the amount of energy used in production. An exception is when some group tries to bias the market in favor of buying the "new, efficient" thing, even when it means that the "old, inefficient" things go to a landfill before their natural end of life.

An important, but often neglected, point to make is that energy used at the factory CAN come from more efficient, cleaner sources. Or at the very least, the energy-related pollution may be dumped a little farther from the neighborhoods you care about the most.

Why not just 2 APs with some runs of "leaky coax" (RADIAX or equivalent)? Leaky coax has been bringing all manner of signals into tunnels and metal buildings for years.

"We saved those books for you. That's what we do." Unfortunately, that perspective on librarianship is becoming as hard to find as books on vacuum tubes. The more common approach is, "We facilitate access to information. So that our library can be more modern and spacious, we got rid of OUR copy, but you can rely on databases or interlibrary loan to get that item." Meanwhile, every other library has made the same decision to "weed" that item. In my own research, I'm increasingly encountering items which were commonly available a just a year or two ago, but are now not available from any library (and yes, I've looked on WorldCat and its brethren).

What items get weeded from a library? When I've personally observed the weeding practices of my local libraries (public and academic), actual circulation is rarely considered, and utility or rarity or ILL availability is never considered. The official weeding policy of the library notwithstanding, weeding is all too often a 1-to-3-second judgment based on the age and condition of the item, a judgment made by one specialist librarian who is being graded on weeding productivity.

Sad weeding decisions I've witnessed recently: Classic childrens books weeded because "the book is older than the child." Brand-new (copyright 2011) books weeded because they are part of a collection that is being discontinued. Reference books weeded because other libraries do NOT have the same book (standardization, y'know). Short-run local history books weeded because the cover was dirty or because the book was old. Electronics books weeded because "no one needs that stuff." Paper journals weeded when I know that the digitized version is missing some of the content.