Amen. Actually, I consider lamps in general to be like buggy whips -- no house built after Rural Electrification (say, 1939ish) should ever require a lamp. Building a house that needs lamps to light it makes about as much sense as building a house with no plumbing, because buckets work just as well.

The poll question and the discussion seem to treat rotating magnetic media as not "solid state." Those disks sure seem solid to me.

If your magnetic media is in a solid state, it's not rotating and you're not getting any data into/out of it.

Solid State == no moving parts

(I also feel obliged to mention that, for myself personally, meeting someone with a US accent in the flesh is often a surreal experience. It feels a bit like some kind of a line---probably a glass screen of some kind---has been crossed.

I'm an American, and I get the same feeling when I meet someone with an Australian accent. I haven't met an Irish person yet but I bet it'd be the same thing.

I gotta tell you, I love listening to Irish accents on TV. It's elegant, almost musical. American English seems crass in comparison.

?! Why on earth would you want to skip The Phoenix Guards and start with 500 Years After? TPG sets up FHYA and is a great read.

Meh, I didn't find TPG as interesting as 500 and the Viscount.

I'll second Zelazny's Amber series as well as Brust's Dragaera (Jhereg) series. Brust also wrote some "historical fiction" in the same Dragaera world -- just skip the first book and start with 500 Years After and continue with the three Viscount books.

George RR Martin's Song of Fire and Ice is also masterful. But, you may want to wait until he finishes the series. He's a slow writer (but riveting).

since its Android, you can just install apps from the APK files and totally ignore the app store.

And how, pray tell, do I get the APKs? 99.9% of apps are only available in Market, and I see no way to download the APK from Market -- just "Install".

I live where we get weather, ... I happen to own hip-waders too.

Tell me where you live so I can avoid it!

You're right that $1 and $2, very possibly even $5 and $10, should be coins only

That's a terrible idea. Coins are heavy and bulky. I can keep several one dollar bills in a back pocket and never know they're there until I need them (for feeding vending machines).

Keeping 5 big heavy coins in a pocket is a (literal) pain in the butt.

One of the big problems with the TSA is that they scare people into taking more dangerous forms of transportation out of a misplaced sense of fear

I don't think my fear of the TSA or the government it serves is misplaced. I'd say it's pretty well-founded.

From what I can tell from the Wikipedia article, Beidou is an active system where the "client" sends data to the satellites in orbit. It makes perfect sense for the Chinese though, because now they can track where their users are -- something not possible with the passive US system since the receivers only receive and can't transmit any data back. In short, Big Brother Beidou always knows where you are.

Seems like an active system has a huge disadvantage, though. You can DOS the satellites by pointing an antenna at each satellite and jamming their uplink frequencies, knocking out the whole system for everyone, everywhere. In the US system, you can only jam local terrestrial reception and anybody over the next hill won't be affected.

They also had special twin balls that were chained together and fired out a single barrel, that would be aimed at sail masts. If the shot was on and luck was good, a ball would go past both sides of the mast, and the chain would slice right through the mast

I'm dubious. Mythbusters should test that myth... oh wait.

ALL of my money becomes worthless and my savings becomes zero.

Hence, the current popularity of gold and silver.

And guns.

It's not a simple "flip a switch" kind of change.

Sounds like poor software design to me. TCP/IP didn't suddenly break when 802.11b came out; things continued to "just work" because of the nice OSI layer system.

Properly designed and implemented, it shouldn't matter one lick to the other layers (like the rendering engine, or the theme engine) where you move the tabs to.

What about overclocking?

CPU is normal-clocked (1.somethingGHz), and the GPU is actually underclocked by about 100MHz to keep it cooler -- my case isn't ventilated very well.

I can turn on ATSC closed captioning without trouble, yes. Just another surface (OpenGL I believe) for the card to render, as you said.

Incidentally, VDPAU also does some very nice deinterlacing.