Go back? I have a tracfone, which is perfect for me. Costs around $100 per year, and I don't use all the minutes up.

@dsands: I think the smart shopper should wait till the price drops to $219.99.

@FriarNurgle: But students SHOULD be taking notes. And more and more often, they just don't — they sit and watch the PPT slides like a TV show, and don't actually internalize the information, which decent note taking facilitates.

@XanderCrews: Flooding the mind with random anything is going to prevent encoding of a lot of kinds of information. We have limited short-term memory and attention capacities.

@bookmatch: To expand on this, I was referring to Orwell's idea of Newspeak (a central premise of 1984, the topic of the appendix to the book, and similar to comments in general about language he made in a mid- 1940s essay.) The idea is that banning any word, or phrase, referring to X (freedom, liberty, choice,…

@bookmatch: I'm wrong — it does have a tuner. My bad.

@phiyuku: I have an HDTV, and it has no tuner built in. (Samsung 42").

@Mark 2000: Orwell was dead wrong.

@Technogamer1992: They have a lip. Imagine the manhole is three feet across. You make the manhole cover three feet, two inches wide, then cut a rabbet around the perimeter on the underside, making that part slightly under three feet across.

@geolemon: Actually, Studley was a piano maker, and used all these tools (though this is obviously a work of love, not just a storage case). The toolbox is possibly made from scraps of exotics left over from the pianomaking. Some of the tools Studley made himself. See more here:

@Go Vols!: Yes, it'd be the third worst way of harvesting lumber (after burning it to the ground, and waiting for lightening to hit the trees and blow them up). Could not have been designed by a forester.

@Almightywhacko: I agree. In fact a friend bought a Highlander around the time we noticed the Gen 3 RAV restyle, and we thought the same thing — they look an awful lot alike, so what's the point? Why not keep a nice small crossover in the line?

I want four of them, arranged in a square.

@Almightywhacko: Agreed very much on the styling. We have an 03, built in 02, and what they did with the redesign is borderline criminal!

@Fuzzy Logic: I have the SensGard ZEM Hearing Protection SG 26. Basically, the foam things you see are thin foam over a hard plastic cylinder. You stick them into your ears, rotate the headband backwards to your neck, then forward again to an upright position. This seats the foamies in the ear canal.

@Ducttape-Guru: Yes, I've heard that argument many times. Here's the problem: ANY focused research program that goes on for 30 years with billions of dollars invested stands a good chance of yielding great stuff for the masses. Take the same amount, hire a cadre of great scientists and engineers, and invest in and…

I have a pair of their hearing protectors, which don;t have headphones in them, but otherwise look very similar. Exceedingly uncomfortable, unfortunately.

I say good riddance. The Shuttle was/is 1960s technology, eating up many billions of dollars and with a terrible safety record, and for what, exactly? Rides to the International Space Station. Which exists mainly to give the shuttle something to do. Bleh.

@GreasyPig: It's probably the other way around. The more these services are used, the more they are protected from cuts.

@holyspidoo: Oops, comment to ploopsy was supposed to be to you.