fox is a terrible source to redistribute

Would you prefer RT, TheBlaze, Telegraph, Newsmax, Press Examiner, Daily Mail, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Techworm, Gizmodo, or Yahoo News?

https://news.google.com/news/story?ncl=dTPTvX_VR45a17Mx4pUk47-AZAc9M&ned=us

Yes, it looks like you can still get pagers, but they appear to be just as expensive as full cell-phone service:

* http://www.pagersonline.com/

* http://www.npr.org/2012/07/18/156956159/are-pagers-obsolete

The switch to digital has also multiplied the number of channels available by approximately a factor of 3X. Most major stations now have multiple sub-channel showing films (ThisTV/Movies/GetTV/Grit/Escape) older TV shows (LAFF/AntennaTV/MeTV/Cozi/Retrotv/PBJ/Buzzr/Heroes&Icons/Decades), kids shows (Qubo/PBS Kids) various others (Create/LivWell/IonLife/MHz WorldView/NHK), and more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_over-the-air_television_networks#Table_of_broadcast_networks

OTA TV is now a lot like cable TV was in the early days... Best picture available, big selection of better-ish content, lots of groups trying to break-in and innovate, etc.

5% per year is plenty frequent. That's a 50/50 chance over 10 years. If you've got two cars, make that a 100% chance you'll need to replace one of them in 10 years. And none of this is including all the years people drive around with a cracked/chipped windshield before replacing it. That's not long enough of a horizon for solar panels, which should last 30+ years, easily.

Sounds like a great idea for car windshields... They're clear so should be street-legal, they block the infrared light responsible for much of the heat, they block the ultraviolet light that hurts your eyes and makes you squint, and they also float-charge your battery while you're parked in the sun, or maybe even turn an exhaust fan. A little less load on your alternator would improve gas mileage by a hair.

Only big problem with the idea is windshields get damaged and need to be replaced somewhat frequently, so the solar tech needs to be cheap enough that it doesn't quadruple the cost.

looks to me like that one is locked to Sprint. Sprint is completely worthless here.

The nice thing about Sprint/Ting/Republic (but not Boost/Virgin/most-MVNOs) is ability to roam (for free) onto Verizon wherever Sprint coverage is non-existent. Where Sprint sucks, however, is the areas where their coverage is just poor (1 or 0 bars), but the phone is reluctant to roam and you get stuck with a signal that keeps breaking-up. And they severely limit data while roaming.

The phone occasionally gets subjected to being crushed because it just gets in the way. If it's much more breakable than a pocketknife, it WILL get broken.

Look into heavy-duty smartphone cases before you dismiss them. http://www.otterbox.com/en-us/defender-series is a good place to start.

I have a flipphone that cost $12 purchased outright

You can get an Android 4.x+ used-but-working smartphone for $20 off of Amazon. Not a big investment there, either.

I prefer it because I can carry it in my pocket in the barn and not worry about it getting banged or wet -- won't hurt it a bit

A number of smartphones are water resistant. And it's cheap to add a case that'll absorb most any shocks without damage.

And it's FAR easier on both the hand and the ear than the smartphone was.

I find dumb phones don't have the nice noise-canceling that smartphones do. And input a few contacts or type a few text messages, and the smartphone is much easier on the hands.

What I'd really like is a flipphone with a full keyboard, such as used to exist but seem to have vanished

I didn't have any problem finding some on Amazon. And they're still making new (dumb) slider phones:
* http://www.boostmobile.com/shop/phones/kyocera-verve/

First is the assumption that this is not supposed to be a smartphone

Nobody said that. The topic is FLIP phones. Can you name any previous SMART phones that flip open?

Really, what these are is a smartphone with physical buttons. This is much more desirable in Japan

Please point me to any Japanese smartphones in production with a full physical keypad, I'd like to have a look. I just checked softbank.jp, and didn't find a single one. What I found there were iPhones, Galaxy S6's, and basically everything a western audience would be familiar with.

The Japanese seem to love their iPhones (HINT: Apple doesn't sell any flip or keypad phones):
"Last October, the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c also accounted for 76% of smartphone sales in Japan, marking a record high. All three major Japanese carriers including DoCoMo, SoftBank, and KDDI have been offering the iPhone 5s free on contract" http://www.macrumors.com/2014/05/14/apple-smartphone-market-share-japan-36/

Hacking Team had no exploits for an un-jail-broken iPhone.

That's an extremely narrow anecdote that doesn't prove much of anything, just that the particular group mentioned doesn't happen put much effort into iOS. There's no denying there are LOTS of iPhone/iOS vulnerabilities. See:

* http://www.rapid7.com/db/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Apple+IOS&t=a
.

time and time again it seems that iOS is the most secure one of the three.

No, it doesn't seem that way at all:

"the vast majority of all mobile phone vulnerabilities that have been discovered so far have been found in Apple's smartphones. The firm found 210 vulnerabilities in the iPhone, giving iOS an 81% share of known mobile phone vulnerabilities"
* http://bgr.com/2013/03/26/iphone-security-software-vulnerabilities-ios-397421/
.

Even if I didn't have any phone service, I'd still carry around a cheap old phone (at least in the car) to take photos, get driving-directions/find stores, read email and RSS feeds (updating when near WiFi), play games, be able to call 911, give search&rescue a signal to follow, etc.

But I really can't see opting-out of having phone service these days, as there are several available for FREE, and very cheap, today.

If you've got just any licensed Android 4+ device, you can install the Hangouts Dialer to make and receive calls via your Google Voice number (via WiFi). Even without an Android device, you could still get a Google Voice #, and check your voicemail messages online.

If you have a Sprint/Boost/Virgin phone*, you can bring it to RingPlus and get 125 minutes/40sms/10MB without even giving your credit card#. They play music & ads (instead of just ringing back). and of course hope you'll want to upgrade to a paid service (starting at $2) later. NOTE: Verify phone compatibility right away, and quickly return/exchange any used phone that fails activation checks.

--Less Recomended--
FreedomPop also offers BYOD on Sprint & offers 200minutes/500sms/500MB if you don't mind paying $20 in activation fees, a few dollars for voicemail, and constantly trying to trick you into buying extra services.

You can buy an Ooma Telo VoIP device for ~$100 and get mostly-unlimited free VoIP calling if you're careful to opt-out of extra services, and already have a good internet service.

I hated the old days, when phone service I only barely used was $30+/month, plus some minimum monthly fee for long-distance I almost never used, and that on-top of monthly (slow) internet service subscription, while being inundated with sneaky telemarketers and worse.

* http://www.prepaidphonenews.com/2015/02/sprints-blacklist-is-gone-but-byosp-is.html

Actually, it's the OTHER systemd stories that hit |. that were slanted opinion pieces. Quite a few of them, too. I don't recall you complaining about any one of those. This doesn't qualify, because the claims made are factually supportable and settled, even when just correcting misconceptions and inaccurate arguments previously used. That you still can't see any of that says worlds about your own bias, and I doubt anything else I can say to you will help.

While a reasonable point, you certainly can't claim Linux was sleek and simple and clean before systemd. For many years there has been a huge mess with ConsoleKit, NetworkManager, avahi, dbus, dcop, hal, pam.d, udev, devfsd, sysfs, +proc, devtmpfs, kudzu, zeroconf, and much more crud. It seems to me that when USB came along and make extreme plug-and-play user-facing, Linux distros just kept throwing in everything but the kitchen sink to make each scenario work right for ignorant desktop users and GUI management tools (and a nightmare to configure and debug for administrators).

With systemd starting to take over bits of some of those, I'm hoping for a bright future where there's one little simple place where such device configuration can be done (and those being the same across distros, and also not changing between each major release), and not several that do different but partially-overlapping bits of the puzzle, as we have to tolerate now. Maybe systemd is not actually be the best answer to that problem, certainly the BSDs manage to work fine without the Linux insanity I listed above, but at least it is finally some progress towards unification and simplification of the complete mess.

It can be configured to automatically restart services that exit, provides features that support configuration management engines like Puppet, automatically handles service dependencies, and more.

You can also see "A short list of other features:"
* http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html

No, if this was /. this would be yet another ranting anti-systemd story... they love to fan the flames no matter what the facts might be. This is also not a |. editorial at all, either, click through to the source for yourself. Note all those pesy facts and figures...

At the risk of reigniting the flames, I think |. should have at least one systemd story that isn't negative and conspiratorial. Besides, maybe the issue can be hashed-out in on-topic comments, instead of spilling-over into all other stories.

It was found in the middle of the Pacific, actually.

If it was a DMCA takedown, the owner of the domain should have been notified, and it should only have been reinstated once the owner responded to the notice and accepted legal liability (no way any 3rd party could properly investigate a copyright infringement claim, certainly not in a few hours). Meanwhile "the Information Center said it received no explanation from the company for why its domain was taken down." and "Still we had not got a single communication from GoDaddy."

The problem I was referring to was interactive CLI commands which prompt you for input, like FTP.

That's just one more area where Microsoft is acting schizophrenic. Even while edit was going away, they added a command-line registry editor, exchange management console, among other utilities.
http://www.thewindowsclub.com/how-to-edit-the-windows-registry-without-opening-regedit-exe

If you think editing the registry by command-line sounds miserable, you're underestimating. Imagine editing the world's largest text file with "ex", and you're in the ballpark.

Unfortunately, nobody has really ported any *nix shell to Windows for use there, so there's no comparison. Before anybody mentions Cygwin, go start bash and run "edit", ftp, or any other interactive Windows CLI command... Doesn't work, does it?

These guys outlined exactly why the F-35 is such a poor design, why the Marines' requirement for short-takeoff vertical landing in the F-35 is responsible for most of the jet's design flaws.

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/fd-how-the-u-s-and-its-allies-got-stuck-with-the-worlds-worst-new-warplane-5c95d45f86a5

Indeed: https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-u-s-air-force-promised-the-f-4-would-never-dogfight-3e1a66da4e73

You're commenting on the submission pipe (where nobody will ever see it), rather than on the published story and discussion page. That's over here: https://pipedot.org/story/DNR0

there are good reasons google handles 90% of search engine requests.

Bing+Yahoo has about 30%, while Google is staying under 65%. These guys do well because they have brand recognition, and because they pay-out huge sums of money to get their search engines used by default in browsers, phones, apps, etc., where people can't or just don't choose to change them. Obviously the smaller guys are at a huge disadvantage to attract eyeballs.

Meanwhile, the smaller guys actually return better search results, and have innovative ideas that are quite useful. Years ago, I switched to Clusty because the automatic categories listed in the sidebar made it extremely easy to narrow down searches with a click. DDG does a watered-down version of that, but also has often-useful instant answers at the top, so you don't have to click-through to anything at all. Clusty got worse, and got bought-out by some religious-right group. DDG continues to returns better search results, in part because it more aggressively filters out spammy sites that flood Google.

I will be eternally grateful to Google for massively improving on the worthless mess that was search engines. They single-handedly took the internet out of the cesspool, where searching for articles on Rhinos turned up porn and warez sites at the top of the list... But Google has been going in the wrong direction since then, and others have taken-up the torch and run with it.

$40 is the minimum around here. Cable provider isn't offering anything cheaper/slower anymore, and DSL is no longer an option. FIOS is available, but starts at $55/mo (without 2-year contract) plus $10/mo for the router they really force you to rent as well (you have to jump through hoops to get rid of it, later). You can game the FIOS system a bit, if you've got the patience... Wait (months) until you can get a cheap (no-contract) deal, then quit it as soon as you can (wait for all your bill credits), and switch to another internet service for a year. After that, FIOS will be cheaper, since your location is now marked as pre-wired for FIOS, and they'll typically give you ~$10/mo off the regular price.

As for cell, it depends how happy you are with poor coverage... T-Mobile and Sprint MVNOs are reasonably cheap, but coverage ranges from poor to horrific. And with LTE, you can burn through 1.5GB in minutes!

There's a world of difference between no internet at all, and any internet, even if slow.

It amazes me how jaded people have become about internet speeds. Only highdef real-time streaming video really requires significant bandwidth, and DSL speeds can support slightly-lower-definition streaming perfectly fine. Personally, the cheapest internet plans I can find are always much faster than I really need; I'd rather have a lower monthly payment, particularly since I pay it twice, for home and cellular, while companies keep removing their lower-tiers, which raises the minimum price.

Not long ago, cell phones were limited to modest 3G speeds, well below what DSL can do. Heck, the first iPhone, way back in 2007, was even 2G... Were you chafing under the restriction of 3G? How much money are you spending on your cell-phone bill for LTE data usage every month? If you need the speed, you must be using it...

I find some small amount of advertising useful. Some new products are genuinely useful, and if you avoid advertising, you'll be the last one to hear about them. And how do you find out about new TV shows and movies you may want to watch? DVR users were the first to find that, if you skip all advertisements, your world just keeps getting smaller.

I can't say I've found myself being manipulated by ads. Instead I'm consistently disappointed when no amount of useful information about the product is presented... They aggressively go for name recognition, and fail miserably to give anyone a reason to care about their product, versus a competitor's. I mostly buy cheaper generic/store brand food & drinks. I only buy cars used, and then only after my current one has proven unreliable. Even more, I simply don't spend much money, and save most of what I earn.

Mostly I'm annoyed with them. Even if they had good information, after about the 3rd time, I'm done, and yet will typically have the same damn ad pushed down my throat 10 times a day for weeks on-end.

OpenNIC claiming to be awesome just isn't much of a story. However... Cisco buying OpenDNS sounds like it's a story, and OpenNIC can certainly be a footnote in there, as a non-corporate alternative.

You COULD do that, but you're wasting a lot of energy pumping it back up to the surface from the depths of the aquifer, for no good reason.

More people coming in means more tax revenue. And when purifying wastewater, you can save money that would otherwise need to be spent on sewage treatment plant upgrades.

There are a couple options:
http://pipedot.org/story/2014-09-22/largest-desalination-plant-in-the-hemisphere-to-supply-7-of-san-diegos-water

Boy, you conspiracy theorists sure have gotten harder to please... We've got a Secret Service and DEA agent going down for grand theft, money laundering, informing, and more, and still it's not enough for you?

New York is one of the Great Lakes states, and a pretty thirsty one at that.

Any of the many states through which a water way to/from the Great Lakes passes (e.g. the Mississippi) has a solid claim to a significant fraction of the water in the Great Lakes, by proxy, which can be enforced by the federal government, if bordering states don't want to cooperate.

No matter how upset they may be, money is still a good motivator, and some major cities offering good money for almost no work, will probably get a deal. Even if most of the Great Lakes states holds out, only one needs to cave to get a deal through, and undermine the others.

You shouldn't worry about him. There are always malcontents who will complain about anything and everything, as if they're being personally harmed by something they can easily skip over.

As far as news value: First in Washington with plans to build several more is notable, something that most people probably haven't heard about, not to mention it's news just because it hasn't been covered by pipedot before.

Don't worry, I frequently need to rewrite submissions. It'll just have to wait a bit until I have more time.

All your complaints about this story are already IN THE SUMMARY.

If non-tech stories anger you, you'll have to ignore everything in the science, environment, anime, categories. This was even up-voted by readers while in the pipe, no down-votes, and there sure weren't any tech stories that got passed-over for it, anyhow.

As long as nearly all stories are submitted by me, it's going to be science/tech I find interesting... Even at that, |. still has a far narrower focus than any other sites. If you want more tech, then submit a tech story every few days...

Perhaps you should replace your solar panels with a water-wheel...

480p is not 65% of the bandwidth of 720p, it is 33.3%.

You're mistaken... You're using uncompressed numbers, while video compression does NOT scale-up linearly like that, at all. It does NOT take 4X the bandwidth just because the picture has 4X as many pixels. I generally ballpark a doubling of frame-rate or resolution as a 50% increase in bandwidth, and it's quite possible to do better.

You shouldn't humor him. I happen to be an expert on lossy video coding.

The founder & president of The Ocean Cleanup provided an item-by-item list, responding to all the criticism of the idea:

http://www.theoceancleanup.com/blog/show/item/responding-to-critics.html

I certainly like the stated goal of making users feel more responsible and involved, but I don't think the idea would work very well, as described.

Citizendium did a better job than I can, explaining why Wiki's don't work out:

* no coherent narrative
* disconnected grab-bags of factoids
* degraded by minor ill-judged tweaks
* intelligent laymen are often mistaken
* "squaters" always win
* blatant and shameless levels of bias
* Vandalism is a headache
* part anarchy, part mob rule
* disputes sometimes go on interminably
etc.
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Why_Citizendium%3F

Frankly, stories are fairly ephemeral, so those obsessed with (minor) typos just need to relax. Monitoring user-submitted edits would sap all kinds of extra time & effort, instead of saving any.

I don't think |. has anything like the same problems as /. so it's not necessary to try and fix their problems, over here.

To tell you the truth, it was turning into a cesspool before Dice. Probably started around the time when the politics section was created. When I go and look at stories back in 2004, it was not uncommon to see some of the top experts in obscure fields chiming-in, making insightful and nuanced observations about the topic, and getting +5 for the effort. It was truly awesome. Over the years, that dissolved into a "me-too" rant and ditto-fest, where mindless, feel-good but completely inaccurate comments were +5. Anything challenging the group-think was -1 Troll, no matter how accurate, which gradually pushed all the experts away.

My editorial style mostly comes from what I saw was horribly wrong with summaries over there... Far too many were superficial, inaccurate, one-side pablum, which resulted in the vast majority of comments being readers trying (much like Sisyphus) to correct the misinformation or slant of the summary on each story. Which is why it irks me when people (namely: editors at SoylentNews) use the number of comments that an article gets as if it's a series of up-votes, or otherwise valuable and necessary.

Anybody know why we should care? I used to use cdbXP (on the rare occasions I was stuck using Windows) for a while, but ran into some problems, and found that BurnOnCDDVD was much better.

Sadly, there are more duplicate posts from billshooterofbul out there than their should be.

If ANYONE ever deserved the "Redundant" mod...

FWIW, I think we could do without the regex entirely. A clever idea, but only extremely rarely does it come in handy. Even linking to stories and comments, people usually want link/alt text. And the false positives are significant. Probably lots of people wasting time wondering why would someone irretrievably link a serial number: Serial #87654321
etc.

There's no need to "hope". All the firmware/BIOS does is drop an EXE and DLL on the file system. Maybe if WINE gets better, Linux users will be lucky enough to get infected, too.

It's public info how this thing works. They're trying to sell it to IT departments, so lots of info is right on their site.

It is based on a Windows application, and needs a FAT or NTFS file system on the hard drive to infect it, so non-Windows users are pretty safe.

If you buy from one of the 6 biggest manufacturers, you almost certainly have it, even if you don't know it.

Last time it was submitted, I searched and found this is a (serious) product proposal (not a news story) which has been repeatedly submitted all over the web. How he found his way to |. I don't know...

Pretty hard to follow, probably not native English, so I didn't really try. There are hordes of people out there in the perpetual motion community, coming up with motor and turbine designs every day, which don't hold-up to any scrutiny.

I always Imagined that as automation goes up, the wealth gap also goes up. As those with capitol spend it in such a way that it does not benefit laborers.

Go back several hundred years, and you don't see a nice even distribution of wealth, despite the lack of automation. Instead, the wealth gap is caused by laws (like taxes) that are too-favorable for the wealthy, disadvantaging the middle-class... Property, stocks, and other assets appreciate faster than wages, while being subject to much-lower tax rates. As long as that holds, the wealth gap can only continue increasing, and it will do so regardless of the progress of automation.

It's automation that has made goods so incredibly affordable, today, that people can afford huge volumes of stuff. Go back before the industrial revolution, and you'll see homes that are nearly barren of commercially-produced goods... Remember when people had 90-hour work-weeks, and still couldn't afford to pay rent and food? Compare to today's 40-hour work-weeks, with everyone spending less than 15% of their income on all the food they can eat. When was the last famine in the western world?

But historically there was a dynamic between labor and capital that lead to the betterment of all.

That dynamic only existed for a very brief period, and it wasn't ever the case that paying for more, less-productive labor, benefited anyone. Instead, it was the growing efficiency of labor (assisted by automation) that made it possible for those jobs to become high-paying. And the US was on top because automation allowed high-paid union workers to make products that were exported to 3rd world countries, cheaper than being built locally by poorly-paid 3rd world laborers without the automation.

Rich Guy A buys ipad from Rich Guy B. Ipad completely automated, zero humans involved in the design or manufacturer of said Ipad. Rich Guy B just owns the robots that did everything.

1) This ipad can be manufacturered for $1 more than the cost of materials. If Rich Guy A tries to sell it for more than that, Rich Guy C will be able to start making ipads cheaper and will sell them to Rich Guy B.

2) As long as there are ANY jobs left for humans, even modest wages will allow those workers to afford a large amount of said ipads, thanks to automation driving the prices towards zero. And the cost of materials will continue to fall as well, as the automation allows for cheaper solar power, and more efficient mineral extraction and more.