The communicators in the original Star Trek were sort of like this. The original Moto Razr copied some design elements from that - if you just take that phone and permanently flatten it, you have something roughly the same shape and size as an iPhone.

Plexico, is that you? Did that gunshot wound to your thigh heal properly?

And what do I use it for? Mainly to unlock PasswordSafe. I have the YubiKey NEO, so it has a USB connection so I can plug it into the PC. And it also has NFC, so I can use it to unlock the same password database on my Android phone.

I don't know why, but to me it brings to mind the Borg.

I would have thought that the original author must have had DRM on the original copy of the ebook, and yet these pirate copies also have DRM.

So what happened here? Did the original author not use DRM on the original book, or did the pirate break the DRM so that they could distribute?

Every year or two we undergo emissions inspections - they use a sensor to measure what is in the exhaust gas, and if things are outside of the required limits, you have to fix it. In addition, they use the OBDII port to see if there are any codes being thrown by the engine, and if there are you have to fix those as well.

Older cars were grandfathered in, and only need to pass whatever the standards were at the time they were manufactured.

I had the Cliq myself back in the day. As a phone, I liked it, but by today's standards it was short on memory with a slow CPU, and the display couldn't support pinch-to-zoom.

The more critical problem however is that app developers stop properly testing apps against older versions of the SDK. You might get an "update" of some sort to some app, and it turns out to be broken. This was ultimately the thing that forced me to install Cyanogenmod on the Cliq - the old 1.6 SDK (was it Donut?) was just too old, and I could get to Froyo (and I believe ultimately Gingerbread) by switching roms.

Then again, perhaps the SDK has stabilized enough that maybe those things don't matter much for most apps.

Please cite your evidence for this assertion.

Please cite evidence to back up your assertion.

When there is a hurricane or severe storm, then TWC is 2nd to none. The McWeather thing they replaced it with is total crap. Their comment was that most people get their weather from the internet, and now that they dropped TWC, I really do.

Honestly I think they should drop those other programs that they have in the evening as well. Note however that they will drop them in an instant when there is severe weather out there somewhere, and switch over to live coverage.

SOME people like sports. All I say is that those people who do should cover the 100% of the costs of what they watch, and not get need to get a subsidy from the rest of us.

Ahh, but I don't want to each sports. Ever. And even if I did, ESPN effectively only has basketball and football - if there are other sports you want you are almost always out of luck as well. And yet I have to pay for it whether I want it or not.

And what do they do with all of the money that they pick from our pockets? They overpay for the rights to televise sports. The scandals involving the huge amounts of money out there for both college football and basketball are directly related to how much TV money is floating around out there.

And I would venture a guess that there are a far more people out there who don't watch sports that you might think there are.

There isn't a single cable or satellite provider that doesn't include ESPN as a part of the basic package. That's the whole point - ESPN insists that these terms be in the contract so that they can spread the costs to the myriad of people that don't watch sports.

The other thing that torques me about Verizon is that they recently dropped the Weather Channel in favor of McWeather. Most of the time TWC is boring and repetitive, but when there is a tropical storm or snowstorm, you can get very good and useful information. I didn't have a choice about that either. And the only way to get that back is to switch providers and in the process give up some other channels that those other providers don't offer.

So then what do you do? Sign up with multiple providers (and pay the ESPN tax for each of them)?

There is absolutely nothing innovative about what they do other than pick the pockets of every cable/satellite subscriber in the country. It is attitudes like theirs that are pushing more and more people to just cut the cord and build their own a-la-carte bundles from Netflix or Hulu.

Say some kid doesn't quite get what they were talking about in the lesson, and has additional questions. Where would that kid go? The local tech wouldn't be of any use - the kid's family would need to hire an outside tutor or some such. And if the family can't afford a tutor, well that's too bad.