This is perfectly acceptable. My choice is to sometimes (depending on the restaurant and situation) as a courtesy to the people at the same table, excuse myself and go outside or stand in the hallway next to the restrooms.

How is most of this 'list' news?

If you're in a noisy situation, or in a delicate one (sans movie theatre) where you're not in a one-on-one conversation with someone. Silent Mode + Text Messaging = Everyone else is happy, and you're able to communicate freely.

Oh wait, i forgot about PHBs that need to be reminded that they're not the only people on the planet... nevermind, carry on.

This is the truth. They'll get a cost plus contract and then throw as many fresh out of college graduates at the program to charge as many hours as possible. Quality doesn't go up at all, but the bill to the government does.

How soon until Laki blows again?

I see geothermal power as a bit of a trade off, especially for IT needs; you get a nice sustainable power source, but you're probably in an area where the activity could just as soon destroy your data as well as power it. Then again, if you hosted your Data Center in Iceland, you could probably afford to have backups in another country far, far away from any 'event'.

In my opinion, I don't believe that most people ever knew this tidbit of information in the first place. Sure some people would parrot what they heard on the network news after 9/11, "I won't be afraid and let them take my freedoms!", but then they blindly support the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act.

I agree with you 100% though. People being retarded and killing other people is a fact of life that is perfectly handled by proper detective work.

Also, people need to realize that 'terrorism' is being used by both sides of the fence. The best example, the 'national threat level' has never been set to Blue or Green. This is a system meant to make the citizens of their own country 'feel safe' but all it does is make people think, "Hey.. you gonna get blowed up real-good-like someday.".

With subsystem sensors, for analog components, becoming more and more digital, I'd hope that problems like that would be isolated using a maintenance panel/IBIT combination that could feed that information into the ARMAR.

I agree that's how patents are intended, most definitely. I've just become jaded by the industry standard practice to file a patent for something obvious and non-novel, and then sue the heck out of companies actually doing something. As it turns out my knee jerk reaction was exactly as advertised.

After reading the abstract, background, and summary of the invention it appears that Kodak 'built a better mouse trap', and then patented it. Also, TFS doesn't properly define the 'preview' functionality, Kodak uses 'preview' in the sense that you use the eye viewfinder to 'preview' your photo before it is taken. So what they really patented was a method in the hardware to deliver quickly and efficiently the image you're about to capture to a low-res LCD, and then use a more power-intensive algorithm to generate the high-res still photo.

(Emphasis mine)

My knee jerk reaction to this (no patent is given directly in TFA) is this: How is the act of previewing a photo novel? I could see that having a *specific technology* that enables this patented, but not the act of allowing the user to preview the photo. Plus, it's something that everyone since the personal camera came out wanted. I remember when you had to wait to develop a whole roll of film and hope that the exposure/lighting was correct while thinking to yourself, "Man, I wish i could see the photo i just took without taking it to the store and getting it developed."

Prior art on the analog side? Polaroid allowed 'photo preview' with their cameras before it was available in a digital format

What about an air-droppable military grade (i.e., MIL-STD) device with a generator/battery/solar power source that sets up a cellular phone hot spot, and can link with the national carrier?

There are plenty of technical hurdles to overcome, but if they're recoverable and 'inexpesive' enough to deploy on a one-to-two week bases. It would allow for rapid dissemination of communication signals across a disaster area while the more permanent infrastructure is brought back online.

I'm not sure I agree with the moral of that story (as it is presented in your comment) - the real problem (from a business perspective) is that parents picking up kids late means lost revenue in terms of having to keep a proportional number of employees (possibly paying OT) to the number of kids that haven't been picked up yet. So by charging a fee, I can at least cover my costs of retaining my employees, if not charge a little extra to make a bigger margin on the truant parents.

Similarly, Comcast could use the behavior everyone is hypothesizing to show that they need more bailout money because, "Gosh, Mr./Mrs. Congress Critter - We've been trying to implement better connectivity, but usage keeps going way, way up! We need more money to increase infrastructure!" At which point they pocket 99% of any corporate welfare money they get, and use the remaining 1% to increase the cap by 25GB/month.

And their delivering it all on the infrastructure of 1994 (this is what gets me angry mostly).

On the Technical side, this isn't any major feat. You're correct.

However, this is a tool that they'll start using to socially condition people into tiered plans. Imagine an ad from comcast in the near future, "Be Green! Lower your monthly usage! To find out how, check our Tips and Tricks section, and track your online usage using our 'IntelliGreen Online Usage Tracker'*"

*use of the IntelliGreen Online Usage Tracker will count toward your monthly usage cap at 1/2 the byte rate because it's Green!