I think the FBI messed up on several levels here. When Apple said (not publicly) they wouldn't make the back door the FBI should have found another way in and not told us or Apple about it. Apple would infer that they figured out another way in when they told all of us they got in, but there would have been no big publicity thing that - it seems to me - the FBI lost.

Also, before the announcement about hiring the Israelis to do it for $15K I had been placing the cost to break into an iPhone around $60K to $100K to decap the chips and read stuff out with an electron microscope. I still wonder if my estimate is about right for the decap method and the Israelis just know a shortcut that makes it cheaper.

I need help turning off the update and won't settle for anything else. They will help me or hang up on me. Who's with me?

The thing with my "hotspot" is, there is no place to connect an external antenna to point at the cell tower. I intend to one day soon try an experiment where I put the hotspot at the focal point of one of my old Dish Network dishes and see if I can get better signal.

I live in an Internet desolate place and we use an AT&T "hotspot" that connects to a cell tower and is a little Wi-Fi "router" (that seems to only have one route, but that's a different rant). AT&T recently upgraded a cell tower in my area to LTE and the little hotspot connects LTE - but with only one bar. It actually seems to work though.

The hotspot does appear to have two places to connect external antennas, but I'm almost positive they're for the Wireless-N router part - not for the LTE part.

Me too. dwinker@visi.com That'd be awesome. Thanks.

The guarentee is that I promise to do my best. That's what I charge for working on people's cars. It's basically half price, barely worth my time (really), and the warrenty sucks. I make sure they understand all that before I proceed. I don't end up with $40/hr because I spend a lot of time reading the manuals and stuff like that. The 15% markup is because I have to drive 1/2 hour to get the parts. The $2.50 shop charge is just to remind them that they'd pay a bigger shop charge at Goodyear.

Mostly you just have to be assertive and stick to your guns. That's why having a set price works for me. There's no negotiation and no special deals because I like you better.