I only experienced sustained sonic booms once.

When I was a kid I lived about 3 miles inland from the ocean. One summer there was a two day period when it was pretty much sonic booms throughout the day. They were extraordinarily loud, like weird thunderclaps going on throughout the sunny day. I never did see any aircraft.

I assumed the military was doing some training of some kind, or maybe some base got some new aircraft and decided to check it all out.

Even though I was a kid, I vividly remember the booms. People aren't going to be very happy about this if it's the same magnitude as what I experienced.

I do not need a USB-C charger to charge my phone. A cable is not a charger.

I live outside of London. I use a charger that is compatible with the local mains power and a Qi wireless charging pad. You may have different needs depending on where you are, where you go, and how you use your phone.

The generic chargers that all manufacturers have "thrown in" have never been well suited for everyone's needs.

Sure, maybe Cadillac is coming back, but Cadillac hasn't had a steady track record for decades on end, and there is no evidence that they're going to start. It is a far safer bet for a dealer to take the large pile of cash and sell other brands.

I'd certainly take a 6 or 7 figure windfall during a pandemic, instead of selling a brand whose heyday was literally 60+ years ago. My GREAT grandfather was a huge Cadillac fan, and he had many over the years. But he gave them up in the 1960s due to quality problems. The brand diminished when his generation were put off with GM quality and/or died.

Place the blame where it is deserved.

There are thousands of others like him that were not "YouTube influencers" that have also died due to their ignorance. These are people near you, who believed the same nonsense he believed and then died from COVID.

It was not deserved. These are innocent (but gullible) people that were duped by incessant propagandists, and their flashy propaganda corporations, and their distasteful supporters and distasteful enablers. Companies like Sinclair Broadcasting and Facebook and others that make millions by promoting literally dangerous distortions of the truth. Being gullible shouldn't lead to death, it should lead to someone helping set the record straight. These companies are doing the opposite in exchange for cash and/or political power.

These deaths are on the souls of the propaganda scumbags. No one deserves it.

I fully agree that "a good mesh system can make things better for everyone", but the vast majority of consumer mesh systems are bad.

Most home WiFi mesh routers fail to support most of the "23 non-overlapping channels", and many amp up the radios for "greatest performance". All this leads to heavily saturated airwaves, which in turn leads to more people buying lousy products.

The most popular Eeros models are limited in this way.

A case is a stupid investment, and here's why:

- Worst case I drop it and my mom makes me get it repaired with a new display.
- But sometimes they just trade out the whole phone with a new one instead of repair.
- Best case I drop it harder and my mom buys me a new phone.

Win. Win bigger. Win biggest.

I don't trust the police. But I don't trust anyone else either.

If Bultmann or Robinson have any suspected history in terms of dealing with child porn, it seems quite possible that the police are targeting them based on the totality of evidence and not exclusively the idea of "TOR".

Google will still offer the free service in low-income areas. That's a kiss-up statement by Google and nothing more.

What the hell is a low-income area? A zip code? A low-income apartment building with poor senior citizens? A house with a poor family?

There is a 15% share of poverty in extremely wealthy places like Greenwich, Connecticut. Will Google refuse to support those low-income people, encouraging them to move to poverty-stricken places like Bridgeport, Connecticut which has 70%+ poverty?

This is uncool. A normal supplier would offer tiers so that there would be a reasonable price point to keep as many customers happy as possible. A monopolistic supplier would remove low-end tiers and force users into higher tiers, as there is no competition to sell products at the lower price points.

Blackphone is MY only way to go.

after all, how can I trust anything on any other device? The manufacturers and Google are very much interested in keeping a major part of their official ecosystems CLOSED SOURCE.

I am putting the keys to my kingdom on them: on-line banking, SSH, VPN, and all sorts of other stuff is accessed by my phone. Just a tiny bit of mystery code could be slurping up all these credentials and key data and storing it on the device... only to transmit it later via covert means (DNS requests or whatever). How do I know this is NOT happening? I don't. I need to have faith in the multitude of vendors and app authors. Vendors that I have no reason to trust.

Two factor authentication? HA! The second factor is ALSO on my phone. Sorry to say, that's ZERO FACTOR if someone already has code running as root on the device.

Here's the secret fix: change the default password on your home router.

Phew! Black hats thwarted again!

I agree that there is little if not zero "tower-to-handset" bandwidth cost for SMS messaging.

However, SMS (and MMS) messaging does depend on all that infrastructure that's in place, and by providing SMS services, the telcos are required to reliably route and deliver the messages around the world. That message handling and routing certainly has a cost, and therefore I believe that providers have a right to fairly pass on a portion of the cost of their infrastructure investments (plus a fair profit) to the users of SMS services.

HOWEVER, I am no apologist here. At least in the USA, providers charge very high fees for text messages. If I send a 15 character text message to my wife, we get charged $0.40. A few pennies may be fair, but far more than $0.39 of that $0.40 is profit. Furthermore, SMS is configured to be parasitic - my friends (and spammers) like to send me text messages without my authorization. That costs me $0.20 every time, and there is no way for me to stop them without giving up my wireless service altogether.

What is even more disturbing is that all the telcos in the US have generally increased their SMS rates to a new high. They now charge the same outrageous fee ($0.20 in, $0.20 out), leading me to believe that instead of competing, they are colluding.

In short, telcos have decided (individually or together) not to compete in this area, to the detriment of all telco customers. Laws should be considered to encourage fair and healthy competition in this space, which will encourage healthy SMS industry growth and efficiencies.

Well, it depends.

If you want that 3G Microcell to connect to the Verizon network, and have Verizon route and manage the connections and otherwise provide reliable data or voice transport service through Verizon's infrastructure on the back-end, then you should expect Verizon to charge you for that service.

On the other hand, if you do NOT want Verizon to provide that service to you, you simply don't need to use the Microcell device. In that case, you will not be using any of Verizon's infrastructure, and Verizon won't charge you any per-use charge of any kind. That's right: completely FREE.

Pretty sweet, eh?

This is ominous to the iPhone user. Next I expect to hear that ActiveX and Real will be booted from the iPhone, and then we'll never get anything done. The iPhone simply doesn't support ALL of the web.

And it doesn't stop there. I bet that MS-Office macros will be considered a programming language, and then will be booted off ot the Mac!

This is the END! I'm tired of these control games.

Yes, I remember that too. Billing by CPU time was an IBM lease option. They'd charge you back per CPU cycle. It was a great incentive for IT departments to write efficient code. If you were maxing out your mainframe's CPU, IBM would give you a more powerful one. But your goal, as a programmer, was to minimize CPU consumption.

Of course, if you outright owned the machine, there was no such chargeback.

The IBM program was used by IT departments to manage their mainframe utilization, and to effectively lease mainframe time instead of having to take the risk of buying a $250k+ machine and running out of CPU capacity.

WAT & WGA is nothing like the IBM program. At all. In any way.

Well, it could be worse: they could have said "We've decided to go with Microsoft Exchange".

Given the uproar in my office when we went to Exchange, that surely would have sparked a full-scale revolution. The one good thing to get out of it: the new Exchange admins all have more attractive resumes now.