Now, IANAL, but I'm pretty certain the announcement of a product has no legal ramification on its existence. A product exists as soon as they begin development of it, and it exists as a concept as soon as they begin the design process. If things had to be announced in order to exist then there would be no trade…

My big thing is I like them to be tiny. Like the LaCie MosKeyTo. Or my Patriot X-plorer. I like to throw a couple hundred mp3s on there and stick it in the port on my car stereo (in addition to using it for "real" stuff). Tiny ones are more expensive, though.

How would a ship's anchor know that? COME ON NOW.

It's also possible that, by understanding the tech, things like stealth might be countered, increasing the risk of our pilots.

"Fuck, this water is cold! Couldn't he park his ship somewhere temperate? Why did I have to be on a ship sunk in North-goddamn-Carolina? The Hunter's Galley sunk in Bermuda... lucky sonofabitch. What is that crawling across my back? It better not be another goddamn barnacle... little knobby bastards..."

How does that make what I said wrong?

Honestly, having lexical arguments is about as much fun as being punched in the face. We apparently own different dictionaries. I don't care. Really. It was a joke that you've managed to suck all of the fun out of. Twice.

Pleonastic has two definitions. One is to be redundantly wordy (such as "free gift") and the other is simply using more words than necessary. But thanks for taking the fun out of it!

"Pleonastic." Using more words than necessary is to be pleonastic (which saves you 66% over "being needlessly wordy").

Using the internet to prey on children for sex would do it, I imagine.

There is no legal right to have access to information in general. Being able to surf Facebook != freedom of speech. You may feel the internet has become an inalienable right, but it's not yet codified as such in law.

I don't think this has ever been an issue for me... but more power to them, I guess.

I have this constant, inexplicable desire to buy ever larger USB thumb drives. I've stopped at 8Gb so far, because between it, Dropbox, my phone and my website I really have enough storage for everything I need and then some... and yet...

My last place had a toilet that had apparently been installed 6 inches farther from the wall than they'd planned, so they strung no less than 4 different adapters between the copper pipe and the tank fill tube to make up the distance. We never noticed until one of the adapters cracked... took all of ten minutes and a…

I'm not sure how you got the assumption that the statement from Shell ends at "extraordinary opportunity or misery." The entire article quotes various sections of Shell's Signals and Signposts report, a 78-page forecast of market condition through 2050 (which was pointed out in the article a mere 7 sentences in). And…

Shell Oil disagrees with you. Not in the presence of oil, but that it will continue to marketable as our demand exceeds production. Maybe you have tech the second largest corporation in the world doesn't, though.

Seriously? 1,000 words is too long? ... Jesus.

Good, because it was too long, anyway. Can you sum it up in six syllables or less?

I have no idea how explosive they are. I'm not a chemical engineer. It's kind of irrelevant, though, at least with regard to the discussion at hand, about whether the device would require extra internal space to accomodate a swelling battery. My creative license was simply for illustrative purposes as to why an iPhone…

I don't think this is intended to be a recoverable failure, but rather a catastrophic failure for the device that's not catastrophic for your face or thigh (or wherever your phone is resting). By that I mean, I think the battery will be the same size, and it may even pop the back off your phone when/if it swells...…