I have neurosarcoidosis; it is a degenerative autoimmune condition. Like many others with NS, many people with multiple sclerosis, everyone with macular degeneration, many with Lupus, and even some with conditions most do not associate with light sensitivity such as rheumatoid arthritis -- I am highly sensitive to certain spectrums of light. With Lupus, and NS there are often issues with natural sunlight as well. I have special glasses that filter out parts of the blue spectrum, IR, UV, and most the red spectrum. They are similar to shooters glasses, but about 5x as expensive due to the IR coating requirement still being limited to NOIR. Some of you who work with higher powered lasers are probably familiar with NOIR. Lowbluelights is another company that makes specialty filters for things like smart phone screens, and has a few (but expensive) LED fixtures for those of us with special frequency needs.

Right now I can buy amber incandescent lights for $120 for a case of 40. I can buy a single 7w low-blue LED for $35... In terms of dollars its going to be an expensive proposition when I can't buy incandescent bulbs anymore, even if I have to shell out more for amber bulbs as it is.

  There is one maker of laptops that will work with people with custom needs, and that is Toshiba. They were willing to put in custom LEDs in my laptop to make it tolerable when they learned it was a disabilities issue. I wish Toshiba was as accommodating for TV's and computer monitors with the same issue (in fairness I haven't tried to get a custom back lighting TV from them yet, but I did try to purchase custom back lighting monitors from them without success.) I had to void the warranty on both of my ASUS monitors to get the back lighting correct as ASUS was not any more accommodating. The custom frequency LEDs exist (although they still tend to emit IR), but the demand isn't enough for the big makers to notice the need yet.

The challenges can be overcome switching to LEDs, but its not going to be cheap for those of us with needs for non-blue, no UV, and no-IR lighting. The market is at least two million people who have conditions like myself that benefit from them. People don't realize that the issue also includes: smart phones, tvs, monitors, laptops, flashlights, and light fixtures. I wish some of the larger appliance makers would wake up to the issue and I could just go buy a TV without having to make a parts swap. There is a growing body of evidence that it might be in everyone's interest to demand LEDs in those nicer frequency ranges: http://www.livescience.com/31949-led-lights-eye-damage.html

I'm law abiding for the most part, but I wouldn't be volunteering for this. 1) I have to take opiate pain medicines to be function 2) I don't want my DNA in a database somewhere. It was bad enough to have to be fingerprinted by the police for my occupation - and who knows what agencies have access to that data now. Why I voluntarily hand over DNA, and face a potential DUI for medicines that are about as impairing to me as you missing your first cup of coffee, but would likely make you unconscious in short order?

The cutoffs they have in place would likely mark me a drugged and impaired driver -- even though I could pass any type of "impairment" test that I am physically able.

Those two weeks are cool though watching the water bead up, and then quickly slide up the windshield.

That reminds me of my favorite family of lottery winners. They won just shy of Th 40 million dollars. Did they buy a house? No! A new boat? No! They bought a Bentley! Of course, the entire family are raging alcoholics and no one had a license to drive anymore. So they just have the courier drive to the liquor store for them. They still drink the same cheap swill beer they did before they wont the lottery.

They have a really nice Bentley, and someday when one of them actually completes SATOP successfully they will get to drive it again.

If your house was getting smoke from the fireplace inside of the house, you had a badly designed fireplace and/or other issues in the house. I have seen situations where people lack insulation in a spot in their attic that is causes such a severe stack effect that it can cause that situation. This is usually because the installation for blown insulation was skimped on by the contractor in a spot that isn't easily seen from a quick pop up by the homeowner (tons of people never bother to look). That is the most easy to rectify problem. One common sign for that would be doors that are pulled shut hard by the wind.

The WII U remote brings a lot of piece to my house. It reduces those fights of "I want to watch U-verse" vs "I want to play the WII" ... The only downside is only one remote with the glass display, and I'm fairly positive my 9 year old will break it in a million pieces before the year is out. I'll cross that bridge when we get there. The Wii U was mom's purchase, with the hope that she would get her TV back. So far its largely worked as planned, even though we rarely watch it in the family room. 70% of what I want to watch I can't with the kids in the room anyway. I think she has discovered the same thing, but her % of viewing materials inappropriate for children is probably a lot lower than mine. So it didn't make any difference for me other than a reduction in fighting over the TV in the family room. Throw in a horrible Netflix interface, and that is enough to keep the kids happy. Their enjoyment though, not mine. Wii has always been a kids system, and I pretty much think it always will be. There is plenty of money in that.

Now if U-Verse actually had all of the hockey games on demand without asking for another bundle of money -- that would make me happier.

After 9/11 the federal government offered up a TON of money to police departments for the war on terror, and to get them new equipment. Like everything else the federal government does, and generally any payer does - the money came with strings. The strings involved were that the places that took the money would lose a large chunk of local control (and in the event of an emergency -- ALL -- of their local control).

These cameras are a part of that that package, and the package which followed. They are all over any area near an airport (reasonable enough), but they are also along tons of our highways, and in many suburban jurisdictions; with a similar lack of privacy policy in place.

Its impossible for me to drive from my folks place in St Louis County to my home in St Charles County without seeing at least a dozen of these type of cameras. This issue isn't isolated to MN.

I have NO idea where the cameras feed to, who watches them, and what else they do with them. It does, however, creep me out.

I want Facebook amps not to be a completely privacy invading tool that puts anything I might send or say privately out into the world at large for sale to even a modest bidder.

On second thought...I think I want Facebook to die too. Their only viable business model is to put our stuff out in the street for profit. I've gotten to where I am hesitant to use it for anything important, and my contacts there are mostly "here is my new phone #, secure IM, and my email -- lets talk there". Facebook's privacy policy, and implementation of it leaves a LOT to be desired especially where apps are concerned.

You don't need to be in an accident to have issues with hearing. Hearing loss can occur from: occupational issues, a simple consequence of aging, at least 400 different medical conditions (including rare ones like neurosarcoidosis that I suffer from), and users with hearing loss are not the only beneficiaries of closed captioning; anyone with young & loud kids or barky dogs can tell you closed captioning can often save the day when trying to watch a show.

The market for closed captioning is nowhere near as small as you imagine. More than 22 million American's have significant hearing impairment, 43% of them are over the age of 65. When you add that to all of the parents with young kids that use CC, and those that just prefer to have it on -- it is not that small of a market that benefits. Its enough of a difference that it truly IS in Netflix's interest to add CC. Why not add a boost of 10-12% more customers? Is 3 million more customers adding 288 million USD from their US subscriber base alone not enough to justify doing the right thing that they should have done from the very beginning?

Most of the movies on their site already have the closed captioning done -- Netflix just didn't add it. Of those that remain, free sites for captioning have done about 90% of the work for them. However, unlike a movie I download off a torrent -- I can't use free captioning with Netflix due to their player.

There is a certain amount of truth to that. My grandmother had a plot that grew beans, pumpkin, watermelon, and okra; all of which had to be hand picked. Even with a free ride from town, and paying $10/hr (which the late 1970's, and early 1980's was pretty good money) it was hard to get people to show up for that work for an entire harvest. Not many people wanted to spend a 10-12 hour day, in 100F heat, 90% humidity, under the Missouri sun. However, we didn't have any illegals and somehow the stuff still got harvested.

Somehow the US construction industry still functioned too. People still showed up to be roofers (the worst, most miserable, and hot job I have ever done in my life was built up roofing!), driveway tampers, and HVAC repairmen. I'm not saying they don't churn through people in the beginning; they always have, and they always will. We don't need illegals for any of this.

This isn't a hardware issue, this is the issue of music fans thinking a CD is low quality if the volume doesn't red line their music player.

As an artist, if you make a recording and your CD/master is lower in volume than the typical commercial tripe people will assume it is of low quality. So you end up taking your CD/master to places like Music Masters where they apply the $50-60,000 compression units, and noise reducers to enhance its "red-line" potential.

This is the way the industry has been since at least 1993, and the only thing that has changed has been the introduction of lossy codecs. Lossy codecs have some interesting effects on their own where they tend to compress a sound, and ruin dynamics. Stuff that might only be a hidden layer on a CD can be very much front and center on an MP3/OGG.

Do we really want an Iran that funds terrorism around the globe to have the trump card of nuclear weapons? Right now Iran is mostly an annoyance, but an Iran with a capable nuclear weapons stockpile, and delivery platform is a serious, destabilizing problem that is more akin to lymphoma than to a bar brawl.

Israel can be a PITA, and I'm no fan of many of their actions over the past 40 years. However, once in awhile they are right. They were right about Iraq, and they are right about Iran. The problem is, they truly lack the capability to tackle the problem on their own. The United States is a little better off in that regard, but not a lot. We gave up the strategic position of being able to use Iraq as a spring board, and we don't have much capability in Afghanistan (the topography is very poor for any ground based invasion). The only weapons in our inventory capable of delivering the blows needed would be B2's, nuclear weapons, or a sustained ground invasion. Fighter-bombers just doesn't have the payloads necessary to truly destroy hardened facilities (meaning Israel really can't do a lot here on their own without a cooperative neighbor that shares a border). [I've seen some very interesting photos of facilities the United States targeted in Iraq -- one of them was hit with more than 60 cruise missiles, and bombed with more 20 1000lb bombs. The damage on the inside was rather unimpressive. If Iran has hardened its nuclear facilities -- cruise missiles, and non-nuclear weapons launched from fighter-bombers are not going to be enough to do the job.]

Your argument is basically: We should give up the idea of nuclear containment because the world is a lot safer, and less likely to blow itself up if everyone has a bomb -- including the truly crazies of the world.

My argument: Iran has funded all kinds of terrorism in the world, and has a track record of being a persistent thorn in the side of the United States, and much of the civilized world. An Iran with a nuclear trump card is far more likely to act even more poorly, and to spread nuclear weapons all over the region, and beyond. They might also spread chemical, biological, and other types of weapons all over the world since they would be beyond the reach of the United States to deal with barring an extremely costly exchange of weapons I would prefer don't come out of storage.

We can deal with a little bit of pain now with some air strikes, or even a full scale invasion (though I would hope it doesn't come to this) --- or we can deal with a world where every single conflict has the potential to go nuclear, and the next set of terrorists may be wielding nuclear materials.

I'm sorry the Iranians have poor leaders. I'm sorry the United States has an incompetent president. I'm sorry the Palestinians got a raw deal, and I'm sorry that Israel has some poor leadership as well. I have anguish for the Iranians that will have to die to fix the problems their leaders are creating. However, I'll take a world without a nuclear, chemical, and biological threat on every street corner over one that has it. Its a lot cheaper to deal with the problem now than to try to deal with it later; not just for us, but for every citizen of the globe.

Sometimes playing "world police" IS in our national interests, and in the interests of the world at large.

I don't watch any anime, but the picture quality in VLC v2.0 has improved quite a bit over v1.1. VLC is still not offloading as many things as I might like to my graphics processor *(HD 6870), but its CPU utilization is not high on my Core i5 based system. I forgot which settings I used before to make some content end up forced to decode on the graphics card; I went ahead & axed the old settings in case they would break things in the new version.

The big positives I noticed right away: The technique VLC uses for dealing with interlaced content improved in terms of output quality in v2.0. I still don't have a solution for the 24 frames issue that causes some HD to stutter a bit, but I imagine that has to do more with how things are encoded than the player.

I've only played around with a few videos with it so far, but I do like the improvements that I can see. I also like the improvements that I can hear!

Its nice when a new version is actually an improvement, and not just more pure bloat that gives the same level of performance at many times the original install size.

I'm actually inclined to agree with the anonymous "troll". My beloved is a counselor, and simply taking people off of caffeine for 8 weeks is enough to eliminate many cases of: severe anxiety & panic disorders, psychotic episodes, memory problems, some cases of depression, and sometimes even symptoms that mimic personality disorders. High caffeine intake also tends to make chronic pain worse as the user feels tense, stressed out, and high doses often lower the ability to cope with stress.

The character "Tweak" from South Park isn't too far from the truth in a great many cases. Caffeine does not do kind things to the brain, or for your blood pressure with high dose chronic use.

I still love having a couple cups of tea, but since I started abstaining from coffee I am a ton less stressed out than when I was consuming 1-2 16oz QuikTrip coffees a day. The little bit of lift caffeine gives tends to largely disappear with chronic use, but the negative aspects of high caffeine intake remain.

I don't know, but MicroCenter seems to be able to do it. I haven't looked at their books, but on price, they compete against the Newegg's, Amazon, and everyone else on the major items that matter. You pay a slight convenience fee for some items (1-2% above to have it today), but most things it works out in your favor even with the tax.

Now they could be bleeding money left, and right ... However, I don't think so. I think they are just making slightly less money on each sale.