I have seen SIM card vending machines near the luggage retrieval at some international airports in the U.S.

U.S. phones aren't so much frequency locked to carriers - they are what they call "subsidy locked" to one specific carrier, but that happens when you purchase a phone from a U.S. carrier. If you are coming from outside of the U.S., and have an unlocked phone, then all you should need is the SIM card.

Some older phones had a more limited set of frequency bands - my old Motorola Razr was a "quad-band" phone that could work anywhere that I could find a GSM signal. But even older phones had fewer bands, which typically meant that they might not work in some locales.

With my ancient Razr not-so-smart phone, I had to manually change the settings for the phone to select a different set of frequency bands. But it was doable.

WIth my current smartphone, I don't seem to need to do anything. I got off the plane at Heathrow and it just worked.

Not every school is big into athletics. Smaller liberal arts schools may have football and basketball teams, but it is much more low-key and I don't think the coaches earn that much more than the rest of the faculty.

I graduated from college back in 1980, and college tuition has gone up roughly 10-fold in the intervening years. But peoples earning power has not gone up by a similar amount over the same period.

I think part of the problem goes back to the era of easy credit. Parents could take out loans on their houses, and students could borrow all kinds of cash - thus the students and parents weren't all that price conscious. But what they looked for were amenities - nice student centers, athletic centers, all kinds of bells and whistles. Some were academic (new libraries, computer centers), others were just to make the place look like a cool place to be. The thinking was that colleges would be better able to attract students if they had this stuff. But it all came at a cost - in particular higher tuition.

In the current climate people are far more aware of the costs of colleges than they were before. But the colleges have already spent the money on all of the amenities, and need to pay back the bonds. Thus they can't easily drop tuition.

They seem to fix some, and then others crop up. Whenever you complain, they insist that it must be the addons or something else outside of the core. Or it is poorly written javascript. The upshot is that nothing ever changes. Except for pointless changes to the UI.

I had to kill/restart Firefox just this morning. It was up to well over 1G in memory, and it was burning CPU in the background for no apparent reason. People have been pleading for years that they should give us the tools to help identify the offending tab that is burning CPU, and all we get are crickets.

We never had one either

We also have a DVD player, but we rarely use it any more.

That's clearly part of it, but there is a lot of backoffice related stuff that needs to be present for it all to work as there is encrypted information that needs to get passed back and forth from the card to the issuer.

But a small merchant might not have that much to do in that I am guessing that their own bank would handle all of that.

I was in London in Feb, but I have a chip card from BofA. Technically not chip-and-pin, it is chip-and-signature. But I didn't have any problem whatsoever when I was there. Everyone knew what to do with it, and it worked without a hitch.

As I recall, it was Dr Strangelove. But the ones they had back then had glitches that caused the hand to attempt to strangle the person to whom it was attached. I am sure that they have this problem corrected by now..

Except for Windows. I have seen patches that remove windows portability, so the windows port and portability code will need to all be done over again.

If you want to remove portability to only truly dead OS versions, that's one thing. But I saw a patch that removed portability to Windows. And most certainly something sort of like that would need to be added back again in some form or another. And by doing all of this, what have you accomplished other than potentially introducing new bugs?

Well - we were about 8 miles from the pad, but that was about as close as they would let the public go. But it seems like it was such a long time ago...

Well they seem to be ripping out a lot of things related to portability, so my guess is that this new effort is a dead end that the rest of us will never see. All the OpenBSD developers care is that the thing works on OpenBSD.

I don't agree. Some kids aren't athletic, might not be all that coordinated, and might not have much of an interest in sports. And for that matter, some of them might not be inclined towards violence unless they are repeatedly provoked. In some (many?) cases the bullies are the athletes so they already have the physical advantage over the victims.

But to force the kid to learn self defense or to try and toughen them up by forcing them to play some sport they might not like doesn't sound like a good plan.

And those stock options came on a convenient roll that conveniently mounts on the wall in the mens room.