You can't reason your way into religion, it has to touch you personally. Someone in 1700 Europe would not be able to reason his way into belief that such things as elephants existed. He's have had to visit Asia or Africa to believe.

God is only invisible to those who choose to ignore him.

I believe you're confusing Vogons with wizards. Too much pipeweed, Gandalf?

All a smith needs is coal, steel or iron, wind, and water. The only tool he would have a hard time building himself would be the anvil, those are usually cast. The forge isn't all that hard to construct (maybe the fan or bellows) and all the other tools are trivial to make.

The only real cost is steel and fuel unless you have your own mine.

I took a blacksmithing workshop in college and one of the things the 74 year old instructor stressed most was that a blacksmith who doesn't make his own tools isn't much of a blacksmith. He taught us how to make all sorts of tools.

Who makes hammers and tongs? The blacksmith. Who writes compilers? Programmers. Maybe I'm getting old but a programmer who can't write a compiler or interpreter isn't much of a programmer (I wrote an interpreter once, years ago).

In my experience, with young children your best chance at teaching them these things is to relate it to their current interest. My 4 year old is really into maps right now, he draws me one every day at his preschool. I've been showing him different maps and trying to relate the concept of directions etc. With his interest in drawing hopefully I can work in the alphabet at some point too. It's a tricky task to put things in terms a 4 year old mind and attention span can digest without overwhelming them.

* white label tablets. Presumably built and sold in China, elsewhere.

White label tablets are sold in China, but also everywhere else. Rebranded as Aldi / Staples / Wal-Mart or what have you.

We need to recognize that premium android might as well be a different OS than white label android. The apps will be different, the languages will be different, the monetization will be different, the fragmentation will be different.

What are you talking about? I have a white-box Chinese Android tablet. It came with Android 4.2, gmail, Play store, google maps, etc. All of the no-name (Aldi Branded / Walmart / etc) tablets I've seen are the same.

For all intensive purposes premium android is as removed from white label android as it is from kindle.

Totally incorrect. The cheaper manufacturers actually provide a better android experience as they're using 'pure' android rather than putting shitty touch-wiz / sense style overlays & attempting to sign you up for a million stupid Samsung / etc services.

Oh - and you say "for all intents and purposes". Think about it. Intensive purposes makes no sense in the context this phrase is typically used in.

Why in the world would anybody need POTS in the first place? And why would anybody pay $40 per month for it?

Also, the title is misleading -- TFA says he didn't have cable, only phone and internet. No cable, no cable bill, he had a phone/internet bill.

I don't have cable, an antenna is good enough since TV went digital. I'm paying $40 for unlimited everything on my Android, $46 for DSL (unfortunately that's the cheapest internet available here, cable internet is almost twice DSL and since I live alone, DSL suffices nicely).

Your being an asshole doesn't excuse my being an asshole.

So if I walk into a bar and take my cell phone out of my pocket to show a friendl I should expect people to object?

Of course not, but if you pull it out and point it at someone you can expect a reaction.

I think that what one ought to imagine here is something like a smith who doesn't own his tools, but has access to tools which he does not control

That's a terrible analogy. Like a programmer, a smith can make his own tools. A carpenter would have been a far better analogy.

The same as Nobots.

just wait until they discover ( re-discover ) SNMP and all the hooks in there. Reminds me of the time our local news discovered, with horror, IRC.