It's all good... battery dies at the same time you use up your data cap for the month. After 41 minutes. (2GB at 6.44Mbps)

Lawmakers have generally made the citation worse for parking in a handicap stall than parking in the middle of the road, blocking fire lanes, etc. Nothing like a financial incentive encouraging the best behavior in society.

Hey, brookstone has a wifi-controlled car that I bought for this very reason (for my daughter who has been asking for a robot she can program).

I have figured out the control protocol and my plan is to attach a smartphone to the car and work together with her on some ways to have it smartly control the car. A phone already has much better cpu and sensors (camera, gps) than something like a low-end mindstorm has.

There should be no soldering required. I also want to focus on software. I'll let you know in a couple of months how it's going :)

poison groundwater. Why should it matter if an earthquake happens sooner or later than it might have? There's a lot of science to be done to determine that, but it's easy to see that the land and water are being ruined.

The upgrade to an iPad 3 is going to be a killer.

Home depot refused to tell us details about someone who used my wife's name and social security number to get a credit card with them. It turns out that would violate the thief's right to privacy. The local police were waiting for a "serious" crime to be committed before they would get involved.

I've seen hardware like an awful touchscreen flat panel or an embedded arm board that reportedly support "linux 2.6" in their marketing materials. This could literally mean they ship a kernel module or patches or whatever that haven't worked with a current kernel for something like **7 years**! Yes, we should have meaningless version bumps in the kernel, but they should happen more often than once or twice each decade.

will totally love this

This comparison to MSDOS/PCs really bothers me. I see it all the time. There's a huge problem with drawing the comparison to MS-DOS--the lack of a standardized bios on android phones.

I could upgrade a PC with a new os without worrying about who made the PC. There's no situation like that with android devices. You're lucky if the manufacturer still supports upgrades on your device, then you fall back to community support if there is any, then you're stuck. There are several examples of android phones that were already end-of-lifed when they were still being sold new. When was that ever happening in the PC market?

It looks like this is unrelated, but a fun adventure for everyone.

I had a motorola flip phone I was using for tethering with verizon in 2007. I started getting bills for $600, $700, $800 for each month. I would call in and they would fix it. After about three months of this they told me they would not fix it any more. I had to get a firmware upgrade after which tethering stopped working. The device was worthless to me.

When I looked at the bill, it seems I was being charged per minute if I connected through the 1xrtt network. One rep actually told me "unlimited broadband" meant only unlimited when it was 3g and I was responsible to pay for when it connected at the slower speed. But there was no way to disable the 1xrtt fallback. It was just a convenient lie.

Then the collections department started calling me, saying "when do you think you will be paying this $1800 bill?" I asked them if they knew there were open tickets on the account to fix the broken charges. It basically came back to "but when do you think you will be paying this bill?"

I insisted on a device replacement and they got me a palm treo that worked ok but never as well as the flip phone for what I needed. They also reversed all the bad charges.

I quit verizon when the contract was done and I'm never going back.