This is true, though I'd expect someone to break the SIM lock before too long.

(It's worth noting that it *IS* legal to unlock a cell phone that you own. It's an exception to the DMCA.)

I've seen Eleanor Holmes Norton speak several times; she is really great!

Unfortunately, since she represents DC she doesn't actually get to vote on any bills in Congress. She's techinically a "Delegate" not a congresswoman.

I think partly they make impatient pedestrians feel better. Same for elevator "door close" buttons, which are also almost always fake.

NYTimes did an article on this in 2004: "For Exercise in New York Futility, Push Button"

"The city deactivated most of the pedestrian buttons long ago with the emergence of computer-controlled traffic signals, even as an unwitting public continued to push on, according to city Department of Transportation officials. More than 2,500 of the 3,250 walk buttons that still exist function essentially as mechanical placebos, city figures show. Any benefit from them is only imagined."

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E02E6DE113CF934A15751C0A9629C8B63

The outside is a ground, right?

I fear this will not end well.

@brit - The Telegraph is a tabloid.

The Guardian and AP, however, are more or less serious news organizations.

@Ployntabs - Sounds legit to me. Naive, perhaps, but consider he's coming from Northern Tanzania. That really is a different world. Would you prefer an AP article? http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/wire?section=trackandfield&id=3341770

When I lived in Switzerland a few years back, it was so rare to see anyone checking municipal bus tickets that it was essentially the honor system. Seems like most people happily bought tickets.

(Of course, I have no idea what the penalty for getting caught without a ticket is, so that may be part of it.)

Apparently, Bolton withdrew the US from the ICC treaty in 2002, however

Actually we were never in it. Clinton signed the ICC treaty, but intentionally never submitted it to the Senate for ratification. Bush later "unsigned" it.

bugmenot for the WSJ.com? I really doubt that works.

Great!

Now it's only fair to point out that if you create/edit a cookie named SALON_PREMIUM with the value:

SALN_REG%3DY%2CUSERNAME%3DSHOE_ON_OTHER_FOOT%2CSALN_SHOW_ADS%3DN%2C%2CSLNCRUMB%3Dx%0A

you can read Salon.com as a premium user (without ads!) for free. Don't forget to set the cookie expiration in the far future.

I think that if you're a frequent stun gun user, you probably have more to worry about than the cost of replacement batteries

@DOGGO - Pretty much every lock is useless against serious bike thieves with power tools...

I guarantee a bunch of gadget writers stayed up late last night to rewrite all those Sony press releases

Oh really?

Betcha $5 those gadget writers got early press releases on the condition they stay embargoed until Tuesday. They wrote up posts on them yesterday, and scheduled them to auto-publish at 12am PST (aka 3am EST).

I was also there at last year's GDC. The demo was pretty weak. It seems like the thing is generating (at most) a few bits of information.

It's definitely *not* the sort of thing where you can just think of moving up and the screen moves up.

It might be a cool preview of things to come, but the demo I saw was pretty uninspiring. At the time, I remember wondering if it did anything at all, or was just a hoax playing on the power of suggestion.

Gee, and fans of a certain failed Republican presidential candidate wonder why they get accused of being spam bots.

Verizon has decent service in big cities, but their Terms Of Service are stifling! Hope you don't plan on, you know, downloading or streaming anything... because that's verboten. Along with using VoIP, webcams, or "automatic data feeds" (rss?).

@Raian - I think that's the worst part. I live in DC and the Vice President insists on driving himself to work every morning.

So the Metro PD has to close the entire road along his commute. So everytime he drives to work, it costs DC taxpayers $2,000 in police overtime. Good thing DC police have nothing better to do...

Uh, I think you'll mostly just catch busy servers rounding off your tip so it's easier to type in the machine.

If you're really worried, save your receipts.

@binaryloop - You're a jerk and troll. RLS is not like feeling like you want to go for a run. I have it, so I can tell you first hand. Indeed the more physical activity I do (and the more tired I am) the worse it is.

I had never heard of the disease before I was diagnosed with it (so much for the drug companies "giving" me the disease). It wasn't until a doctor referred me to a neurologist to figure out why I often had trouble falling asleep and woke up still tired. (You see, I did not realize it was abnormal to frequently have an uncomfortable twitchy feeling in my legs because I'd had it my whole life and had never heard of RLS)

Also, if you bothered to read my earlier comment, you would know that there is a genetic component to the disease that makes it rather difficult to explain away.

The scare quotes are a little unfair. I know it's fun to take a dig at the pharma companies, but RLS is a real disease -- in fact, researchers in Germany recently identified a genetic component: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/19/health/19leg.html

Surely there wouldn't be a common genetic link among suffers if this disease were invented by the drug companies, no?

Aaron- I agree. Particularly the one sourced to "a New York newspaper." Someone get Snopes in on this.

It's interesting who history tends to gloss over these sorts of events. And then repeats them.

As the gold started running out many Americans started blaming Chinese immigrants for steals their jobs. Shrewd politicians capitalized on this, and built enough support to pass the bluntly named Chinese Exclusion Act.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act_(United_States)

Merc: You forgot the initial velocity. Odds are they didn't gently release the balloons -- they likely chucked them downwards.

Sorry, but ya just don't go around picking up furniture off the curb in Brooklyn. (It's very hard to "un-piss" something)

Uh, you guys are missing the point. Reread the title of this post: Twain is arguing for the Copyright *Extension* Bill. (The author of this article is saying we should take him seriously since he already has this nutty scheme to work around the limits as they affect his books).

Twain argued that ownership over writing and ideas, as in real estate, should never expire.