Comcast won't let me activated the modem that I purchased brand new from Amazon and used to have active on a Comcast account in another state. They say they own it. I have the box and receipt from the purchase. After a couple of hours talking with various people they admitted that perhaps they had made a mistake, but couldn't fix it as it involved two different 'regions' of their service. They said it might be fixable in a customer service center, but at that point I was disgusted with it and instead bought a new modem.

We have about 1100 of several brands and types deployed in our organization, and have seen a lower than hard disk failure rate, even on the cheap OEM Lite-On drives. How's that for an anecdote? (I do agree about the controller problems - we had to push out a firmware update for those Lite-Ons to fix a Deep Sleep issue.)

How do you handle backing up the 4TB of data?

If you get a different hash each time you rip a file, your CD reader or encoder are broken.

So why don't built-in webcams have a sliding cover? It seems like the equivalent of a 'WiFi Disable' switch for the camera would stop these things dead. Of course it could just be a switch on the power supply line, but that wouldn't encourage the same sort of consumer confidence as an actual sliding cover.

Many of the Windows ones look like a specific default theme - XP's blue Luna theme or the default OS X theme. How about if the default color scheme was mildly randomized? It wouldn't change things for users who set things to something other than the defaults, but that way everyone who just leaves it at the default settings would have slightly different colored windows. They would know their 'system color' and a fake window would stand out like a sore thumb as it would be a different color. The range of random colors would not even have to be that large to make it obvious to most people. If the Mac default color was 'nearly gray' instead of pure gray, nobody would notice until a fake window popped up that was a different gray.

This is assuming you don't consider Social Security tax to be a tax at all. The rest of us who work for W-2 income do believe that's a tax.

Seat heaters can do quite a lot to increase core body temperature, and they're often less than 100W. A 1000W heater properly designed should have no trouble staving off hypothermia. The bigger problem with your hypothetical scenario is that the power of the batteries decreases as well at low temperatures. Thankfully the truly life,threatening temperatures are a corner case. Most of the population doesn't live there.

Yes, it really is. The older Intel chips don't have an onboard memory controller. The newer sockets support an onboard memory controller but required revision in order to add that capability. Without that they wouldn't have been able to leapfrog AMD in this most recent generation.

Wait a second there ... [citation needed] on that one. I find it very difficult to believe the seatbelts cost that much. There were many safety changes mandated starting in 1967, lots of them serious lifesavers. Here's a period article on the subject which highlights how much the industry had to do to cope with it. Of course it also shows how the driver training versus safety aid debate was raging even then, with the muscles car era in full swing.

Specifically, a review of the Mazda Rotary Engine Pickup. In 1974 cars had the truly horrible seatbelt interlock system, which would kill the ignition if you didn't put the seatbelt on at the right time. Pickup trucks were exempt from the requirement, as well as many other safety requirements, leading to the following lovely little snippet of text:

"We found the Rotary's cab refreshing in one way: it is devoid of a bunch of buzzers and warning lights and the seatbelt interlock system afflicting today's passenger cars. Once again, we are left to our own judgment as to whether to belt up (we always do), or whether to leave the key in the ignition switch when leaving the pickup. It was nice. We felt almost like grown-ups again."

I have disabled my car's seatbelt buzzer. It's a much calmer place now. I still wear my belt every time.

Lens:Photographer::Pen:Author

Some of the most stunning photographs in history were taking with equipment that would make the measurbators cry. All the sharpness in the world cannot make a boring picture into an interesting one.

For sure the Mercedes Kompressors and the Mini Cooper S. However there were also some missed out.

You can improve this situation by adding a 'Troll' bonus modifier in your settings. I moderate, and I use a +5 Troll and +5 Flamebait to catch mismods.

It's getting very close to running on the Classic. Some of the newer players have been decrypted due to a bug in the Notes app allowing unsecured code to run. The 2nd gen Nano is working now, and it was the first encrypted player.