No, even worse... the glass will be glued to the OLED, so replacing one will require replacing both, and a cracked-glass repair will cost $300 instead of $30.
Not to mention... fitting any kind of shock-absorbing drop-protection case onto a phone with no bezel at all will be almost impossible.
Jesus. Are these phones designed for use in padded cells or something? Or are they crazy enough to think they can get people to repeatedly pay $1,500 over the (short) life of the phone (say, $900 up front, then two $300 glass+display repairs.
Because doing otherwise would force them to scrap ss7 with something else, and nobody can agree what that replacement should be, or how to deploy it in a way that allows a gradual phase-in instead of a disruptive & risky instant switch-over.
The thing is, for this to work, we'd HAVE to make phone numbers at least 16-20 digits to keep the universe of numbers sufficiently sparse to frustrate random dialing attempts.
Personally, I think the NANP area should ultimately go to variable-length numbers... 12 digits for new numbers, 10 digits for legacy and 'gateway' phone numbers [ie, the main number people call to reach a business], and the ability to append up to 10-20 more digits to a 12-digit number [with logic to block calls from anyone who dials too many invalid sub-numbers].
Ex: Suppose my current cell # is 1-305-555-1234. That's mine in perpetuity. But I might ALSO have 111-7860-5555-2468, which would silently forward to some call-handler (like a recorded announcement I made) specified by me, and could have almost unlimited adhoc numbers like 111-7860-5555-2468-wwww-xxxx-yyyy-zzzz (the 'yyyy-zzzz' part would be passed along to my device, but not used by the phone network itself (so I could use it for any purpose I like, or omit it entirely). To fight call spam, callers would need a telco-signed x509 cert that unambiguously identifies them by organization, subsidiary, department, and caller (so I could block calls with certs associated with ${political-party}, calls from ${cruise-line-determined to sell me another cruise}, etc.
It looks like it began disappearing from US stores sometime around 2005, and Nestle pulled the plug and quit selling it altogether (in the US, at least) as a cost-cutting measure during the Great Recession (when the few stores willing to re-stock products *at all* eliminated anything they regarded as 'niche').
Yep. You can also blend aspartame and AceK (and in fact, that was what Pepsi did with first-generation Pepsi ONE, now reintroduced as "Diet Pepsi with aspartame"), but then you end up with a worse shelf life than aspartame alone.
Basically, aspartame breaks down over time, loses its sweetness, and eventually decays further into formaldehyde. I'm not sure what AceK breaks down into, but its half-life is comparable to aspartame's.
The main advantage of sucralose + AceK over aspartame + aceK is that aceK's taste-neutralization lasts longer than its sweetness. So, with sucralose + aceK, Pepsi can use enough Splenda to maintain acceptable sweetness long after the aceK has started breaking down, and use the aceK purely for taste-neutralization (nobody really minds if it's "too sweet" when fresh). With aspartame + aceK, you still get the flavor-smoothing effect, but after 3-6 months, it tastes almost as bad as pure decayed aspartame.
Tip: if you have diet soda that's ~3 to 12 months old, try adding a packet or two of aspartame or sucralose per 12oz before drinking... assuming you didn't store it in a hot Florida garage (causing more formaldehyde), this trick can resurrect an otherwise-ruined can/bottle of diet soda.
Splenda by itself doesn't quite taste like sugar. Combining it with acesulfame potassium neutralizes the 'off' taste (Pepsi has a patent on it... it's why the semi-new Diet Pepsi without aspartame tastes so good, and why Diet Coke -- even with Splenda -- is still kind of gross.)
UNFORTUNATELY, AceK is even more unsuitable for baked, cooked, or melted foods than aspartame, so it's a one-trick pony that only works for cold beverages (but, combined with sucralose, works miracles).
Years ago, I used to *love* Nestle's plain chocolate bars (the ones in red wrappers with white writing that were basically "Nestle Crunch, without the 'crunch' part".
At some point over the past 20 years, they silently vanished from the shelves of American stores (though Nestle Crunch remains), and Hershey's vomit-flavored chocolate was all that remained. Well, and Dove... Dove is better than Hershey's, but not as good as I remember Nestle chocolate being.
Hopefully, this will be the game-changer that gets Nestle back into American stores & breaks Hershey's hegemony.
Exactly. I didn't vote for Trump, and I'm not happy that he's going to be president, but hysterical articles like this are just getting silly.
America will survive Trump, just like it survived G.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Herbert Hoover (among others).
If Trump actually tried doing this, and the Republicans in Congress didn't stop him by modifying the statutes the FCC is tasked with enforcing, they'd be kicked out *wholesale* by angry voters in 2018 (the Republican Party almost never supports primary challengers against incumbent Republicans, but challenges DO happen anyway when voters are sufficiently pissed). Trump has plenty of hot (fart-scented) air, but if you accepted as true everything some Democrats are saying right now, you'd think he was literally omnipotent or something. He's not, any more than Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and even Reagan & before were.
I'm not sure whether Apple allows you to block Amber Alerts, but Android *absolutely* does... and you don't need root to do it, either. Launch text messages, go to settings -> advanced -> wireless alerts, then (cell broadcast) settings. From there, you can de-select amber alerts.
Kind of like how you can be arrested in Florida with no justification from the officer besides, "Resisting Arrest Without Violence".
The circular logic *alone* makes my head hurt. It basically gives the police authority to arrest anyone for anything at any time, then justify it if challenged by claiming the person they arrested gave them so much as a dirty look.
IE6 wasn't made to be "as proprietary as possible". It was made the way it was because it had to be compatible with web pages made for IE4 and IE5.
In 1997, Microsoft's only real competition for IE was Netscape Navigator... and Netscape Navigator 4 was a hot mess. Netscape 4 sucked worse than a whore with braces. Web developers HATED Netscape, because it would literally crash your whole computer and take Windows down with it on a regular basis. And W3C took an eternity to get its act together and agree about how css and dom should work.
Compared to Netscape, IE4 was like a gift from ${deity} to the world's web developers. Unlike Netscape, it actually worked. And IE4's DHTML did stuff that other browsers using "standards-compliant" HTML couldn't reliably do until ~2004. IE5 built upon IE4,and IE6 was their first real attempt to implement the new standards-compliant HTML. And from what I remember, IE6 or IE7 actually did a better job of rendering HTML5 than Firefox until ~2008. Microsoft even bent over backwards to allow web developers to use standards-compliant html 5 without screwing up their ability to use IE-specific DHTML.
Hell, back in 1998, Microsoft could have probably sold IE5 for Linux for $89 AND SOLD MILLIONS OF COPIES if it ran at least as well as IE5 for Windows. People here seem to have forgotten just how truly awful Netscape 4 was.
Proving that ${deity} truly has a sense of humor, Fidel Castro -- icon and architect of Cuban Communism -- died on Black Friday... a/k/a "Adam Smith Day" -- the day Americans gather in our grand cathedrals of commerce and celebrate capitalism by shopping like there's no tomorrow.
Right. Because bringing a car with a driver who falls asleep while using Autopilot to a complete stop in the middle of a rural interstate at 3am so someone else can rear-end them at 80mph is obviously safer than keeping the car moving along at the speed of typical traffic and staying in its lane.
A stopped car on a mostly-empty limited-access highway is just about the deadliest road hazard imaginable.
The accident in Florida happened because the driver didn't understand that something that's reasonably safe to do on an interstate isn't necessarily safe to do on a country road with cross traffic.
The internal PC speaker is a single-bit i/o line without a DAC (digital audio from it is bitbanged 1-bit pwm. Google: RealSound ). Assuming you could read the port all, the audio quality would be really bad since there's no way to quantize sampled pwm. And having at work at all assumes the i/o's data direction register can be changed.
Basically, this exploit takes advantage of the audio chip's ability to use any line as an input or output, so you can sample stereo and output mono, or output stereo and sample mono.
And your solution is likely to be far worse. Government regulations are what enable us to live without having to scrutinize every business transaction as if you were bargaining with the devil for your immortal soul.
Places like Denmark, Switzerland, Singapore, and California have fairly expansive regulations. Somalia has basically no government-enforceable regulations. By all accounts, Somalia should be the ultimate libertarian utopia. In reality, you'd have to be completely INSANE to choose life in Somalia over life in Denmark, Switzerland, Singapore, or California.
Probably, but someone would have to file an official complaint with the FTC.
The FTC's role is to keep companies honest, so wronged consumers won't have to personally seek recourse by individually suing companies that engage in wrongdoing.
If companies know the only recourse consumers have to being defrauded is to personally sue them (and probably spend more to do it than they can actually receive in damages), they'll increasingly come to regard fraudulent behavior as falling somewhere between "a norm" and "a best practice for maximizing shareholder value".
Just look at the practices of, say, the Cable TV industry, which has trained consumers to think it's OK for companies to advertise prices like "$19.95/month" even if the cheapest bill any real customer could EVER see is $36.47/month (after fees, taxes, and surcharges are added).
Or the way it used to be common for credit card companies to make your bill due on a Sunday, but treat payments received after 9am Friday as if they were made on Monday.
Or the way banks used to process the day's payments from largest to smallest, and process deposits AFTER payments (so they could charge more overdraft fees). A few years ago, either Chase or Citibank got nailed HARD for policies where you could deposit a thousand dollars cash into your checking account at 9am, then get dinged $30 in overdraft fees for a $7 debit card purchase at McDonald's or a $20 ATM withdrawal a few hours later EVEN THOUGH the "available balance" printed on your deposit slip might have been "$1003.47" (because they'd ALLOW you to withdraw $1003.47, but would charge overdraft fees if you withdrew more than $3.47 before the end of the day when they officially credited your cash deposit).
And yes, I do think there's abundant evidence from the past 10 years that large public corporations owned by institutional investors can EASILY become detached from things most people would regard as self-evident social norms (ie, openly sociopathic), and will BRAZENLY do things that are just plain EVIL unless the government makes it clear (with penalties) that it's not acceptable behavior and it's watching them.
Does 802.11y-2008 hardware actually exist as a real retail product someone in the US can buy? With 802.11y, someone who's a mile or two away from the nearest fiber (or other high speed internet) could offer to pay for a friend's broadband in exchange for letting him plug in his own 802.11y access point. It would only be 54mbps (max), but it still beats IDSL and satellite (a/k/a "Broadband for the Damned and Desperate").
(802.11y-2008 is basically 802.11a, using 3.7GHz instead of 5GHz, with additional safeguards to enforce spectrum licensing & prevent interference. AFAIK, the FCC theoretically charges $100/year for the license to use it.)
An ISFP would probably be devastated by the loss of family members & friends.
An INTP might barely notice, aside from occasional pangs of nostalgia around the holidays, because he'd be fascinated by the new kitchen appliances and the technology behind them.
An ESTP would revel in his new celebrity status & go on the lecture circuit. Or self-destruct if nobody cared.
An INFJ would get depressed about the privilege that allowed him -- but not countless others -- to live.
An INTJ would prepare to emigrate to Mars, then change his mind and go to a mining outpost in the asteroid belt instead because there were fewer people there to annoy him.
Probably the same kind of programming logic that causes a computer with a quadcore 3GHz+ i7 running Windows to grind to a complete halt for several seconds whenever something triggers UAC...
Or the logic that causes my three LCD monitors to take longer to finish waking up (one... by... one...) after the screensaver puts them to sleep than it used to take me to COLD-BOOT GODDAMN WINDOWS 7 from my first SSD ~5 years ago.
IMHO, the continental US should have three timezones: Eastern (UTC-4.5), Central (UTC-5.5), and Western (UTC-6.5) that are constant all year.
Benefits:
* Sunrise and sunset times in California and Nevada would be comparable to cities along the east coast (Sunrise/sunset times in SoCal & Nevada are ABSURDLY early compared to cities of comparable latitude on the east coast).
* It would make collaboration between east-coast and west-coast offices easier... in most companies, there would be an overlapping hour in the morning, a second overlapping hour before or after lunch, and two overlapping hours in the afternoon.
* The half hour year-round shift would give us most of DST's sunset-delaying benefits for most of the year, without subjecting northern cities to early-morning darkness for more than a few weeks, and without forcing everyone to adapt to time shifts twice per year.
Worst-case, if UTC-6.5 made sunrise intolerably late in Washington & Oregon, they could be allowed to remain in Pacific time, or possibly a new "Northwest" timezone at UTC-7.5.
Legally, there might still be a difference. Just *try* openly selling dilute synthetic acetic acid as 'vinegar', or vaporizer fluid containing synthetic nicotine that didn't come from processed tobacco. You'll be shut down (and probably arrested) almost immediately.
In Florida, ballots are laser-printed on the spot. If a polling site ran out of paper, toner, or working printers, they'd just grab more from another site.
In Florida, anyone who's in line to vote one second before polls close is guaranteed to be allowed to vote, regardless of how long it takes to finish. Your race against the clock ends the moment you arrive and get in line.
Maybe, except NOW Clippy would look like he's walking back and forth along the top of your monitor. With some appropriate haptics, you could probably even give him a satisfying punch, send him flying, and watch him splatter onto the wall.
Slashdot Mirror
No, even worse... the glass will be glued to the OLED, so replacing one will require replacing both, and a cracked-glass repair will cost $300 instead of $30.
Not to mention... fitting any kind of shock-absorbing drop-protection case onto a phone with no bezel at all will be almost impossible.
Jesus. Are these phones designed for use in padded cells or something? Or are they crazy enough to think they can get people to repeatedly pay $1,500 over the (short) life of the phone (say, $900 up front, then two $300 glass+display repairs.
Because doing otherwise would force them to scrap ss7 with something else, and nobody can agree what that replacement should be, or how to deploy it in a way that allows a gradual phase-in instead of a disruptive & risky instant switch-over.
Finally, someone who Gets It(tm)...
The thing is, for this to work, we'd HAVE to make phone numbers at least 16-20 digits to keep the universe of numbers sufficiently sparse to frustrate random dialing attempts.
Personally, I think the NANP area should ultimately go to variable-length numbers... 12 digits for new numbers, 10 digits for legacy and 'gateway' phone numbers [ie, the main number people call to reach a business], and the ability to append up to 10-20 more digits to a 12-digit number [with logic to block calls from anyone who dials too many invalid sub-numbers].
Ex: Suppose my current cell # is 1-305-555-1234. That's mine in perpetuity. But I might ALSO have 111-7860-5555-2468, which would silently forward to some call-handler (like a recorded announcement I made) specified by me, and could have almost unlimited adhoc numbers like 111-7860-5555-2468-wwww-xxxx-yyyy-zzzz (the 'yyyy-zzzz' part would be passed along to my device, but not used by the phone network itself (so I could use it for any purpose I like, or omit it entirely). To fight call spam, callers would need a telco-signed x509 cert that unambiguously identifies them by organization, subsidiary, department, and caller (so I could block calls with certs associated with ${political-party}, calls from ${cruise-line-determined to sell me another cruise}, etc.
Update: found a pic of their old [70s/80s/90s(?)/early-00s(??)] chocolate bar wrapper:
http://tinyurl.com/zfu2mgx
It looks like it began disappearing from US stores sometime around 2005, and Nestle pulled the plug and quit selling it altogether (in the US, at least) as a cost-cutting measure during the Great Recession (when the few stores willing to re-stock products *at all* eliminated anything they regarded as 'niche').
Yep. You can also blend aspartame and AceK (and in fact, that was what Pepsi did with first-generation Pepsi ONE, now reintroduced as "Diet Pepsi with aspartame"), but then you end up with a worse shelf life than aspartame alone.
Basically, aspartame breaks down over time, loses its sweetness, and eventually decays further into formaldehyde. I'm not sure what AceK breaks down into, but its half-life is comparable to aspartame's.
The main advantage of sucralose + AceK over aspartame + aceK is that aceK's taste-neutralization lasts longer than its sweetness. So, with sucralose + aceK, Pepsi can use enough Splenda to maintain acceptable sweetness long after the aceK has started breaking down, and use the aceK purely for taste-neutralization (nobody really minds if it's "too sweet" when fresh). With aspartame + aceK, you still get the flavor-smoothing effect, but after 3-6 months, it tastes almost as bad as pure decayed aspartame.
Tip: if you have diet soda that's ~3 to 12 months old, try adding a packet or two of aspartame or sucralose per 12oz before drinking... assuming you didn't store it in a hot Florida garage (causing more formaldehyde), this trick can resurrect an otherwise-ruined can/bottle of diet soda.
(blush) found the answer... it's "levulose"
If regular (right enantiomer) sugar is 'dextrose', is left-enantiomer sugar officially named 'levose', 'levtrose', 'levorose', or 'levotrose'?
Splenda by itself doesn't quite taste like sugar. Combining it with acesulfame potassium neutralizes the 'off' taste (Pepsi has a patent on it... it's why the semi-new Diet Pepsi without aspartame tastes so good, and why Diet Coke -- even with Splenda -- is still kind of gross.)
UNFORTUNATELY, AceK is even more unsuitable for baked, cooked, or melted foods than aspartame, so it's a one-trick pony that only works for cold beverages (but, combined with sucralose, works miracles).
Years ago, I used to *love* Nestle's plain chocolate bars (the ones in red wrappers with white writing that were basically "Nestle Crunch, without the 'crunch' part".
At some point over the past 20 years, they silently vanished from the shelves of American stores (though Nestle Crunch remains), and Hershey's vomit-flavored chocolate was all that remained. Well, and Dove... Dove is better than Hershey's, but not as good as I remember Nestle chocolate being.
Hopefully, this will be the game-changer that gets Nestle back into American stores & breaks Hershey's hegemony.
Exactly. I didn't vote for Trump, and I'm not happy that he's going to be president, but hysterical articles like this are just getting silly.
America will survive Trump, just like it survived G.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Herbert Hoover (among others).
If Trump actually tried doing this, and the Republicans in Congress didn't stop him by modifying the statutes the FCC is tasked with enforcing, they'd be kicked out *wholesale* by angry voters in 2018 (the Republican Party almost never supports primary challengers against incumbent Republicans, but challenges DO happen anyway when voters are sufficiently pissed). Trump has plenty of hot (fart-scented) air, but if you accepted as true everything some Democrats are saying right now, you'd think he was literally omnipotent or something. He's not, any more than Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and even Reagan & before were.
I'm not sure whether Apple allows you to block Amber Alerts, but Android *absolutely* does... and you don't need root to do it, either. Launch text messages, go to settings -> advanced -> wireless alerts, then (cell broadcast) settings. From there, you can de-select amber alerts.
(disclaimer: Nexus 6p, Android 6.0.1)
Kind of like how you can be arrested in Florida with no justification from the officer besides, "Resisting Arrest Without Violence".
The circular logic *alone* makes my head hurt. It basically gives the police authority to arrest anyone for anything at any time, then justify it if challenged by claiming the person they arrested gave them so much as a dirty look.
IE6 wasn't made to be "as proprietary as possible". It was made the way it was because it had to be compatible with web pages made for IE4 and IE5.
In 1997, Microsoft's only real competition for IE was Netscape Navigator... and Netscape Navigator 4 was a hot mess. Netscape 4 sucked worse than a whore with braces. Web developers HATED Netscape, because it would literally crash your whole computer and take Windows down with it on a regular basis. And W3C took an eternity to get its act together and agree about how css and dom should work.
Compared to Netscape, IE4 was like a gift from ${deity} to the world's web developers. Unlike Netscape, it actually worked. And IE4's DHTML did stuff that other browsers using "standards-compliant" HTML couldn't reliably do until ~2004. IE5 built upon IE4,and IE6 was their first real attempt to implement the new standards-compliant HTML. And from what I remember, IE6 or IE7 actually did a better job of rendering HTML5 than Firefox until ~2008. Microsoft even bent over backwards to allow web developers to use standards-compliant html 5 without screwing up their ability to use IE-specific DHTML.
Hell, back in 1998, Microsoft could have probably sold IE5 for Linux for $89 AND SOLD MILLIONS OF COPIES if it ran at least as well as IE5 for Windows. People here seem to have forgotten just how truly awful Netscape 4 was.
Proving that ${deity} truly has a sense of humor, Fidel Castro -- icon and architect of Cuban Communism -- died on Black Friday... a/k/a "Adam Smith Day" -- the day Americans gather in our grand cathedrals of commerce and celebrate capitalism by shopping like there's no tomorrow.
Right. Because bringing a car with a driver who falls asleep while using Autopilot to a complete stop in the middle of a rural interstate at 3am so someone else can rear-end them at 80mph is obviously safer than keeping the car moving along at the speed of typical traffic and staying in its lane.
A stopped car on a mostly-empty limited-access highway is just about the deadliest road hazard imaginable.
The accident in Florida happened because the driver didn't understand that something that's reasonably safe to do on an interstate isn't necessarily safe to do on a country road with cross traffic.
The internal PC speaker is a single-bit i/o line without a DAC (digital audio from it is bitbanged 1-bit pwm. Google: RealSound ). Assuming you could read the port all, the audio quality would be really bad since there's no way to quantize sampled pwm. And having at work at all assumes the i/o's data direction register can be changed.
Basically, this exploit takes advantage of the audio chip's ability to use any line as an input or output, so you can sample stereo and output mono, or output stereo and sample mono.
And your solution is likely to be far worse. Government regulations are what enable us to live without having to scrutinize every business transaction as if you were bargaining with the devil for your immortal soul.
Places like Denmark, Switzerland, Singapore, and California have fairly expansive regulations. Somalia has basically no government-enforceable regulations. By all accounts, Somalia should be the ultimate libertarian utopia. In reality, you'd have to be completely INSANE to choose life in Somalia over life in Denmark, Switzerland, Singapore, or California.
Probably, but someone would have to file an official complaint with the FTC.
The FTC's role is to keep companies honest, so wronged consumers won't have to personally seek recourse by individually suing companies that engage in wrongdoing.
If companies know the only recourse consumers have to being defrauded is to personally sue them (and probably spend more to do it than they can actually receive in damages), they'll increasingly come to regard fraudulent behavior as falling somewhere between "a norm" and "a best practice for maximizing shareholder value".
Just look at the practices of, say, the Cable TV industry, which has trained consumers to think it's OK for companies to advertise prices like "$19.95/month" even if the cheapest bill any real customer could EVER see is $36.47/month (after fees, taxes, and surcharges are added).
Or the way it used to be common for credit card companies to make your bill due on a Sunday, but treat payments received after 9am Friday as if they were made on Monday.
Or the way banks used to process the day's payments from largest to smallest, and process deposits AFTER payments (so they could charge more overdraft fees). A few years ago, either Chase or Citibank got nailed HARD for policies where you could deposit a thousand dollars cash into your checking account at 9am, then get dinged $30 in overdraft fees for a $7 debit card purchase at McDonald's or a $20 ATM withdrawal a few hours later EVEN THOUGH the "available balance" printed on your deposit slip might have been "$1003.47" (because they'd ALLOW you to withdraw $1003.47, but would charge overdraft fees if you withdrew more than $3.47 before the end of the day when they officially credited your cash deposit).
And yes, I do think there's abundant evidence from the past 10 years that large public corporations owned by institutional investors can EASILY become detached from things most people would regard as self-evident social norms (ie, openly sociopathic), and will BRAZENLY do things that are just plain EVIL unless the government makes it clear (with penalties) that it's not acceptable behavior and it's watching them.
Does 802.11y-2008 hardware actually exist as a real retail product someone in the US can buy? With 802.11y, someone who's a mile or two away from the nearest fiber (or other high speed internet) could offer to pay for a friend's broadband in exchange for letting him plug in his own 802.11y access point. It would only be 54mbps (max), but it still beats IDSL and satellite (a/k/a "Broadband for the Damned and Desperate").
(802.11y-2008 is basically 802.11a, using 3.7GHz instead of 5GHz, with additional safeguards to enforce spectrum licensing & prevent interference. AFAIK, the FCC theoretically charges $100/year for the license to use it.)
It depends on your personality type.
An ISFP would probably be devastated by the loss of family members & friends.
An INTP might barely notice, aside from occasional pangs of nostalgia around the holidays, because he'd be fascinated by the new kitchen appliances and the technology behind them.
An ESTP would revel in his new celebrity status & go on the lecture circuit. Or self-destruct if nobody cared.
An INFJ would get depressed about the privilege that allowed him -- but not countless others -- to live.
An INTJ would prepare to emigrate to Mars, then change his mind and go to a mining outpost in the asteroid belt instead because there were fewer people there to annoy him.
Probably the same kind of programming logic that causes a computer with a quadcore 3GHz+ i7 running Windows to grind to a complete halt for several seconds whenever something triggers UAC...
Or the logic that causes my three LCD monitors to take longer to finish waking up (one... by... one...) after the screensaver puts them to sleep than it used to take me to COLD-BOOT GODDAMN WINDOWS 7 from my first SSD ~5 years ago.
IMHO, the continental US should have three timezones: Eastern (UTC-4.5), Central (UTC-5.5), and Western (UTC-6.5) that are constant all year.
Benefits:
* Sunrise and sunset times in California and Nevada would be comparable to cities along the east coast (Sunrise/sunset times in SoCal & Nevada are ABSURDLY early compared to cities of comparable latitude on the east coast).
* It would make collaboration between east-coast and west-coast offices easier... in most companies, there would be an overlapping hour in the morning, a second overlapping hour before or after lunch, and two overlapping hours in the afternoon.
* The half hour year-round shift would give us most of DST's sunset-delaying benefits for most of the year, without subjecting northern cities to early-morning darkness for more than a few weeks, and without forcing everyone to adapt to time shifts twice per year.
Worst-case, if UTC-6.5 made sunrise intolerably late in Washington & Oregon, they could be allowed to remain in Pacific time, or possibly a new "Northwest" timezone at UTC-7.5.
Legally, there might still be a difference. Just *try* openly selling dilute synthetic acetic acid as 'vinegar', or vaporizer fluid containing synthetic nicotine that didn't come from processed tobacco. You'll be shut down (and probably arrested) almost immediately.
In Florida, ballots are laser-printed on the spot. If a polling site ran out of paper, toner, or working printers, they'd just grab more from another site.
In Florida, anyone who's in line to vote one second before polls close is guaranteed to be allowed to vote, regardless of how long it takes to finish. Your race against the clock ends the moment you arrive and get in line.
Maybe, except NOW Clippy would look like he's walking back and forth along the top of your monitor. With some appropriate haptics, you could probably even give him a satisfying punch, send him flying, and watch him splatter onto the wall.