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I recently went back to a Bell 2500 desk phone on the bedside stand. The newer, more fangled phone I was using there has a speakerphone button on the corner. The cat kept walking over the phone and taking the phone 'off hook.'

Added benefit of the 2500: if an intruder breaks in at night, I can brain him with the handset.

Unlimited cloud storage now means you can store stuff until they decide that they are done letting you store any more of your stuff.

So, you think that "Unlimited" means "Unlimited until we say you've reached our limit of Unlimited", right?

So, "Unlimited" for certain values of "Unlimited"?

I certainly agree that storing 75 TB of data in their "Unlimited" storage is supremely asshat-ish; but that doesn't mean that they violated (or even "abused") the limits of "Unlimited".

Microsoft said one thing, and have been lying to so many people for so long, that they apparently never bothered to figure out that some people would actually take them at their "word".

Pretty stupid for a corporation with enough lawyers on staff to form a small Army, and which feels fit to require EULAs for the most trivial of software packages that have more words in them than the AT&T Divestiture Decree.

Maybe tell me this "eco pod" isn't hippy liberal as anything can be? Or that it's not totally inferior to a 1960s Airstream?

> Not to mention you're totally wrong.

The UK banned guns, violent crime immediately DOUBLED.
Australia had a similar experience. Liberals cool idea for the US this year - try banning guns, it'll work, I'm sure!

Solar electric was the future in 1954.
http://www.beatriceco.com/bti/...

Tell me again how liberals learn from the past and change their ideas based on what works and what doesn't.

I do appreciate that they get excited by cool new ideas, I really do. They just fail to check whether the idea is in fact new (it rarely is), or what happened the last 4,000 times the idea was tried.

Western Electric

Just saying, there are other options; whether we pursue them is a different story. Google's non-search activities (like Google Apps, Chromium, other Google Lab stuff) generally only make significant financial sense to the company in the context of their search business, so breaking up Google means those spinoff businesses would probably immediately go bankrupt.

What was really wrong with an AT&T that funded Bell Labs and created UNIX with government-mandated 5% or so of revenue to be spent on (free and open source) R&D like was the case with AT&T? As someone once said, Bell Labs was funded by people dropping dimes into boxes across the country. Telephone costs have changed in the USA since the breakup, *but* it is not really clear how much of that had to do with the "baby bells" and competition and how much had to do with Moore's law an an exponential reduction in computing costs per MIP that made packet switching (even in the home) so much cheaper.

See:
"The End of AT&T: Ma Bell may be gone, but its innovations are everywhere"
http://www.beatriceco.com/bti/...
"It's 1974. Platform shoes are the height of urban fashion. Disco is just getting into full stride. The Watergate scandal has paralyzed the U.S. government. The new Porsche 911 Turbo helps car lovers at the Paris motor show briefly forget the recent Arab oil embargo. And the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. is far and away the largest corporation in the world.
AT&T's US $26 billion in revenues--the equivalent of $82 billion today--represents 1.4 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. The next-largest enterprise, sprawling General Motors Corp., is a third its size, dwarfed by AT&T's $75 billion in assets, more than 100 million customers, and nearly a million employees.
AT&T was a corporate Goliath that seemed as immutable as Gibraltar. And yet now, only 30 years later, the colossus is no more. Of the many events that contributed to the company's long decline, a crucial one took place in the autumn of that year. On 20 November 1974, the U.S. Department of Justice filed the antitrust suit that would end a decade later with the breakup of AT&T and its network, the Bell System, into seven regional carriers, the Baby Bells. AT&T retained its long-distance service, along with Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc., its legendary research arm, and the Western Electric Co., its manufacturing subsidiary. From that point on, the company had plenty of ups and downs. It started new businesses, spun off divisions, and acquired and sold companies. But in the end it succumbed. Now AT&T is gone. ...
Should we mourn the loss? The easy answer is no. Telephone providers abound nowadays. AT&T's services continue to exist and could be easily replaced if they didn't.
But that easy answer ignores AT&T's unparalleled history of research and innovation. During the company's heyday, from 1925 to the mid-1980s, Bell Labs brought us inventions and discoveries that changed the way we live and broadened our understanding of the universe. How many companies can make such a claim?
The oft-repeated list of Bell Labs innovations features many of the milestone developments of the 20th century, including the transistor, the laser, the solar cell, fiber optics, and satellite communications. Few doubt that AT&T's R&D machine was among the greatest ever. But few realize that its innovations, paradoxically, contributed to the downfall of its parent. And now, through a series of events during the past three decades, this remarkable R&D engine has run out of steam. ...
The funding came in large part from what was essentially a built-in "R&D tax" on telephone service. Every time we picked up the phone to place a long-distance call half a century ago, a few pennies of every dollar--a dollar wo

"Valve" is a generic term, slightly archaic for an electronic switch. Some vacuum tubes are called valves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube

Since a transistor is simply a crystal triode, the terminology is reasonable.

http://www.beatriceco.com/bti/porticus/bell/belllabs_transistor.html