"Back in the day" doesn't necessarily mean "the first mobile phone you had". Maybe he's referring to this, from 1973. Or maybe the Motorola DynaTAC, the first commercially available cell phone, from 10 years later, priced at $3995.. Both feature 30 minute talk time and 10 hours to recharge. At least the DynaTAC only weighed 1-3/4 lbs, down from nearly 2-1/2 lbs for the earlier prototype.

I received chipped replacements for my credit card and ATM card (different banks) roughly 3 years before the old cards were due to expire. Apparently some institutions aren't waiting so long.

That would literally be quite a stretch. Actually, it's more like 16 oz. or so for a healthy adult. But it's hard to blow things up with a pint of pee.

Well, the details of the lawsuit aren't public, but there are other grounds besides not being paid; for example, "abusive layoff". It's France.

The article says that employees were let go due to falling revenue in 2013. In 2014 revenue rose and the former employees sued and won. The judgement forced the company into bankruptcy. The article says nothing about the laid off employees not getting paid.

I've had the 'starvation mode' discussion with people in the past. I lost 45 pounds at a rate of about 1-1/2 lbs/week by cutting my intake by an estimated 500 calories per day. There were people who responded essentially with "Can't be true -- after a couple of weeks your body would go into starvation mode and the weight loss would stop." While that might be true for some individuals with unusual metabolisms, it's not true in general. 500 calories is the difference between a burger and fries, and a burger and a side of fruit. Or the difference between a burrito slathered with sauce and cheese, and a salad. A year later, and the weight is still off; I have more energy, and my diet is definitely healthier by a long stretch.

Well then, let me introduce myself. A few months after my wife got an iPhone 4, I got one too, just so I could answer her "How do I ...." questions. It didn't take long for the iGloss to wear off for me, so as soon as I qualified for a "free" (well, heavily subsidized) phone upgrade from our carrier, I ditched the iPhone in favor of a Galaxy S4 specifically for the capabilities of Android that just aren't there with IOS. The wife is still happy with her latest iPhone, and I'm still happy with my Samsung. To each his (or her) own.

Yeah. Maybe what's important isn't so much what the books say, but what the fanatical believers actually do.

Too bad the only floppies he wants are shareware. I still have the 5-1/4" media for Windows 1.0 that came with my first PC.

I believe you may have stumbled upon a new cause for PETA.

Probably not enough rise to make that happen.

Although it is believed that the melting of floating ice shelves will not raise sea levels, technically, there is a small effect because sea water is ~2.6% more dense than fresh water combined with the fact that ice shelves are overwhelmingly "fresh" (having virtually no salinity); this causes the volume of the sea water needed to displace a floating ice shelf to be slightly less than the volume of the fresh water contained in the floating ice. Therefore, when a mass of floating ice melts, sea levels will increase; however, this effect is small enough that if all extant sea ice and floating ice shelves were to melt, the corresponding sea level rise is estimated to be ~4 cm.

However, if and when these ice shelves melt sufficiently, they no longer impede glacier flow off the continent, so that glacier flow would accelerate. This new source of ice volume would flow down from above sea level, thus resulting in its total mass contributing to sea rise.

Keurig shipped their first brewing machines in 1998; Nespresso, in 1988. Probably not a fad.

Yes. But what we really need is the Keurig of Internets.