The only reason franchised dealers were created in the first place was so manufacturers could "shift the responsibility for providing the land, buildings and inventory to dealers". The whole point of the franchise model is so manufacturers can screw their dealers whenever they like.

From the link, this hilarious quote: "Even a small dealership requires an investment of between $12 million and $16 million. ... No successful auto manufacturer could or would want to assume the financial burden of taking over those operational." (He then goes on to claim that dealerships magically produce tax money and jobs that somehow wouldn't exist in a company store or end up back in the consumers' pockets.)

So when a manufacturer comes along with a product that actually makes it cost-effective to properly invest in their customer experience, they get cut out simply because previous companies were too cheap to do it themselves.

Good news! Your theory is being tested in practice as we speak. Hope you are pleased with the results.

Does Comcast need to rebuild all their infrastructure too? There may not be any landline game in town for some time.

The engineers at Verizon aren't complete idiots, you know. I'm sure they've calculated the cost of adding some cells to handle the demand and found it cheaper than running new copper. And if the business drones are worth the suits on their backs they'll be worried about Comcast poaching customers, so they wouldn't balk at *some* investment to recover from a disaster with some of their reputation intact.

This is not necessarily true anymore. Several times our neighbors' phones went out with the power, but our FIOS phone and cell phones still worked (and continued to work when I plugged our terminal into a bigger UPS). I chalk it up to a bad/insufficient UPS on the copper-to-fiber switches somewhere upstream. We don't get copper back to the switch board anymore.

Also, what Verizon didn't say was how many customers in the town were actually subscribed to copper landlines before the storm. It's possibly most of them had cut the cord already.

Because if you take the "super" off of "supersonic" you get "sonic", not "subsonic". If you fly AT the speed of sound, wouldn't end up producing a steady stream of sonic booms? That really would suck.

That is a good point about the treaties. Thus the law is only applicable in the hilarious circumstance where they can say to a judge, "We know the owner is a U.K. citizen, but we don't know who."

They're making YOUR content usable by corporations. What they are NOT doing is applying the same standard to works of corporations that no longer want your money so that Google Books et. al. can serve them up to the masses. Not surprising at all, really.

Wouldn't it be awesome if as soon as the original rights holder stopped offering a work for convenient sale, it entered the public domain? Sure, there are a zillion loopholes in that idea, but still...

Actually, statistics work in these guys' favor. It's the old defense vs. offense saying: sure, you want it to fire at that one particular second every 5 years, but the other 157679999 seconds you're sure as hell don't want it going off. It makes sense to put more effort into stopping false positives than false negatives. You might then ask, "Why have a gun if its only purpose is to be NOT fired", and then I ask, "Why indeed"? But that is a different conversation.

Guns kept in the home for "self protection" are alarmingly likely to be used against their owners, either by burglars who find them first, children by accident, or the owner himself for suicide (not that this tech would prevent that). Even the latest James Bond movie made this point, where the first time anyone pulled the trigger on his smart gun it was the (very disappointed) bad guy pointing it at Bond's head. Yes, not firing when you want it to is bad, but it is just as bad if not worse to have it fired against your will, especially in situations where it is the only firearm in the fight.

Their example of using the tech in a war zone is both good and bad, since it prevents you from being ambushed and shot with your own weapons, or stolen supplies arming the enemy. But you couldn't use them with gloves on, burned fingers or a number of other situations. A way to temporarily disable the fingerprint recognition would be a step toward your "false positive rather than false negative" idea.

That said, don't compare the reliability of this electronic gun with the reliability of a PC or cell phone. They had better be using military grade components and have a battery that lasts for years of use. And the user had better stick to whatever maintenance schedule required by the manufacturer, in which the battery would need replacing every few years. If they can't be bothered to do that then they have no business owning any kind of gun, smart or otherwise.

They appeared to pay the most because Notch and his gang always fight for the top spot and raise the average.

Well duh, we're in a closed, bounded system so any variable, including pollution, is going to have a maximum value. In our case, that maximum is somewhere north of turning every body of fresh water on the planet into a chemical sewage pit, every piece of arable land into an oily run-off field, and every forest into an acidic open wildlife graveyard. THAT would be hard to dilute without, say, dumping the oceans of Europa onto our crazy asses.

But there's only so much you can dilute on our tiny little planet...

Is this something you know for a fact? Because copper digital cables have grounds in them too, and it's not just the signal on the cable that gets affected once you set up a resonating network.

Unplugging a 5-amp 20V connection is still going to produce some arcing. That takes a toll on both connectors, so you could easily end up with a warranty nightmare if there isn't a suitable plug-preemption mechanism going on.

The main benefit of TOSlink is avoiding ground loops in audio systems. This is especially important if you have a long run between ends of the building with a significant resistance in the building ground system between them.

SpaceX FALCON 9 rocket!!! The Dragon capsule is just what goes on top.