Sounds about as useful as fake engine noises. Lots of back and forth ersatz shifting action to go along with the faux "vroom-vroom". Probably be a hit with the target market.

I don't travel often and generally refuse to fly when I do, seeing how air travel has devolved to treating passengers like livestock over the past couple decades. Is there even a "safe" way to travel in and out of the U.S. with any devices (laptops, cellphones) at all? Seems one would be better served by carrying *nothing*, and procuring necessary (disposable) devices when at destination, and discarding them before return trip. If I have nothing on me or in my luggage that has digital content at all, then nothing to search, right?

Seems highly inconvenient, but no way would I be willing to submit so a search of my hardware, for all the many reasons noted elsewhere in this thread...

Yep, same here, though more like 2-3x/week for me. Quit cigs after 30 years in '09, switched to occasional pipe or cigar a year later, never looked back and my lungs are *much* happier for it. I do notice, though, that I have zero tolerance for a smoke-filled room, so never smoke indoors, and would rather not be around other indoor smokers either.

Problem is, what's going to drive the witch hunt against tobacco is increasingly going to come from the Tyranny of Capital, as represented by health insurance providers and organizations who use them to underwrite employer-provided insurance: with ACA, insurance providers can't charge more than a 50% surcharge for smokers, but have no interest in distinguishing between a 2 pack a day cigarette smoker heading fast toward a future of emphysema and oxygen supplementation (or worse) and an occasional user of older forms of tobacco usage which have demonstrably lower health risk profiles. Want to enjoy tobacco in any form? Then pay for your own health care out of pocket; you're not wanted in any insurance risk pool.

Yeah, too bad, that. I bailed from Sprint's awful service and even worse smarmy lame customer service to T-Mobile, and now I tremble in fear that the one reasonable nationwide carrier may be swallowed and I'll get to choose between 3 flavors of scumbags. I love consumer choice!

I really really hope this acquisition is blocked, just as the attempt by AT&T was blocked a couple years ago.

Yep. Also, because it's so heavily "processed", much of its nutritional value (vitamins, minerals, other trace nutrients we may not even know about yet) are destroyed, and when manufacturers even care to correct this they "fortify" the end product to try to replace the missing/destroyed nutrients, resulting in a completely different composition than the original raw food materials had, further contributing to the mess, and probably contributing to 'binge eating' in many cases as the body craves something that is missing from the processed foods being consumed, triggering further consumption.

Meh, since the fundamental file block size is based on 1K == 1024 bytes, all multiples should use the same consistent multiplier, so that 1M == 1024^2, 1G == 1024^3 and so on. Anything else is, well, inconsistent and illogical.

Or are we now going to change disk formats so that the fundamental block sizes are multiples of 1000? That'd be way efficient... there are programmatic (and hardware) reasons why disk blocks have sizes that are multiples of 2, not 10.

Unfortunately they won't go out of business over stuff like this. Most consumers don't care about consequences of their purchasing choices, the reasons for which are numerous -- too dumb, busy, or simply apathetic. "The customer is (almost) always right" only applies if the available customer pool is small enough for that to matter; once a market grows beyond a certain size, companies only have to make X % of their customers happy, and marginalize or ignore the rest.

I'd love for things to be different, for for a completely DRM-free eBook to be available, but I'm also too cynical to believe this could ever happen.