Ah, there's someone still reading Slashdot who actually remembers this stuff, even used it. These young folks speak of the Zenith tuning fork remote as if it were a relic unearthed in an archaeological dig, and are as unaware of why we call it the "clicker" as they are wondering why we say "dial" the phone.

And what's funny is that same guy is sitting here tinkering with his Perl script that reads radio show RSS feeds, downloads the shows, resamples the audio, combines the show hourly fragments into a single MP3 file, then automatically loads them into iTunes. I feel like my early drafting teacher who would tell us he was born before the Wright Brothers had flown and was now headed out on a jet for a vacation.
 

My folks were in the TV sales business and I never encountered a remote like the article describes. The first remotes I saw in the 50s were wired: a big box with the channel and volume controls was connected by a thick cable to the TV. The channel tuning was mechanical (a cylinder in the set had a separate tuned circuit for each channel and channel changing required rotating the cylinder to switch in the correct one), so when you changed the channel, the tuner in the set would go *clunk* clunk* *clunk* until it got to the right one. The next ones I remember were Zenith wireless. The remote consisted of several metal cylinders that emitted a tone when struck by a mechanical pushbutton on the remote. Trouble with those was other household sounds would trigger the TV, like the metal tags on a pet's collar.

And I'll bet almost no one here has ever encountered a vertical or horizontal "hold" control. In those days, we had to establish picture sync ourselves, AND WE LIKED IT!

I thought Amazon folded rather abruptly on the CA sales tax issue after having put up a big fight for years. Now I know why. Look for this deal to be cut in other states as well.

If giving false info to the public is certain death to a government then "controlling the message" sounds like a rational response and the panicked flurry of emails in TFA is explained. I'd love it if US bureaucrats were as afraid of lying to the public as Canadian ones apparently are.

Assuming for the sake of argument that global war ... uh, climate change is happening and it's entirely caused by human activity, the solutions the CC evangelizers (I get to call them that because other posters are using the equally loaded term, 'deniers') are proposing are more onerous and liberty-infringing than necessary. There are a number of proposals that would use technology to cool the earth, and cheaply, rather than demand such a drastic change in lifestyle and consumption that third-worlders would never attain the state of developed nations. The fact that CC enthusiasts dismiss that type of solution out of hand in favor of transforming and controlling essentially all human activity tells me that this is about more than climate change. It's about power and the shaping of society into the form the CC hypers want.

And if you want to see some "denying" in action, watch this get modded down.

Maybe I've gotten cynical as I've gotten older, but it seems to me that a lot science is being politically weaponized these days. Perhaps it was always so, but it's become particularly noticeable to me in recent years. A good case in point is the climate change (nee global warming) debate. I don't get the sense that anyone involved has the attitude of, "Let's see what the evidence really is, what it means, and what we should do about it if anything". The science has become tainted by the money and political power at stake. Science itself is our best source of understanding, but like all human institutions it can be perverted into a form that's less than the ideal. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." The products of scientific inquiry have to be acknowledged as the output of potentially-faulty human beings and should be treated as skeptically as we treat politics, news, and the latest diet fads. "Treated skeptically"' doesn't mean to just discard it, it means to subject it to rigorous and independent verification.

The makers of Miracle Whip once sued some guy who produced a product he called Yogurt Whip, asserting a claim to all uses of 'whip' in food products. After a court battle, they lost, with the court agreeing that you can't trademark a generic food term like 'whip'. The downside: it cost the guy $250k (this was a long time ago and that was even more significant a sum at the time) and years to "win".

I use Citi Mastercard for online purchases. Citi offers a "virtual account number" feature that can be used to generate a one-time-use number for a specific purchase. I've not had anyone yet attempt to use a number a second time, but if it happens they won't be successful, or so Citi claims.

We had a case locally where a guy ticketed for speeding demanded the calibration and maintenance records for the speed gun used. The cops couldn't produce them and the case was dismissed. If I'm ever hauled in for something that an instrument claims I did, the first thing I'll do is subpoena everything related to it that exists or should exist. People get lazy and complacent and there's a good chance they didn't follow procedure.

More than fraud, it's evidence tampering and knowingly submitting false evidence. I wouldn't be surprised to see the wrongly-convicted sue the city over this. The DA should also be prosecuting the cops who falsified the paperwork.