Charging for caller ID on landlines is a scam (like pretty much everything about telecommunications billing), but I've never seen cell phone service without caller ID.

I'm guessing you're not old enough to have ever had analog cell-phone service. I don't recall if caller ID was even offered as an add-on service, but I know I didn't have it with my phone and my service. Vibrating call alert and an 8-character dot-matrix alphanumeric LED readout (so you could attach names to the phone numbers stored in memory!) were expensive enough.

Yes. Technically, MakeMKV is a ripper, not a player, but once you have a disc ripped, you can play the ripped file with the player of your choice: VLC, mplayer, etc. You can also stream it over your network, transcode it to take less space, etc.

In kindergarten, I walked over a mile to/from the school every day unaccompanied. So did all the other kids in the neighborhood.

I walked to and from school in kindergarten. Google Maps says it was a little bit over a half-mile. The only issue that came up was on the first day of school, when not knowing what the buses were all about, I ended up on one. It didn't take long to get that straightened out, and it only happened once.

I suspect the events described in TFA are a consequence (not necessarily unintended) of our hyperlitigious society...consider, for instance, the sledding bans that have been popping up like metastatic tumors all over the place lately, or that you can't get someone to build you a pool with a diving board.

Better yet is H.L. Mencken's description: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."

Radio, on the other hand, even if you hear a piece of music that you like, the chance of actually being told the name of the artist is close to zero.

Many car radios at least will display artist/title information on FM, if the station provides it. If they don't (or if yours doesn't do that), you can fire up SoundHound or something similar and see what it says.

Data migration and expanding RAID containers is a major PITA. I absolutely loath the task!

That's why you don't use RAID. Instead, use something more flexible. I've been running Greyhole for a while now. Adding storage doesn't require shifting files around (unless you want to rebalance storage), you can use drives of different sizes, and you can control the level of redundancy you use (more for important files, less for stuff that's easily replaced). You can yank a disk out of a Greyhole installation and read all of the files off of it with standard file-copy tools.

Important stuff that doesn't take too much space (documents, Git repos, etc.) is backed up daily to Tarsnap. Less-important stuff (movies, music) and larger files (photos) get dumped to BD-R and are stored in binders in my desk at work; images are prepared with dvdisaster for added error recovery capability and are burned to single-layer BD-R HTL media.

My parents moved from Phoenix to Dayton a few years ago...they had gotten tired of triple-digit temperatures for 7-8 months of the year and, as they put it, wanted four seasons. As for me, I'm still in Las Vegas, 26 years after we moved here.

As for sounds you don't hear much anymore, try this: multi-engine prop planes with piston engines. The sound of a B-17 (or anything similar) taxiing or flying overhead is different from any airplane you're more likely to run across. There's no turboprop whine, and four radial engines sound nothing at all like the 4- or 6-cylinder boxers you'll find in smaller aircraft. (For a sample, pop in your copy of Airplane!, where they dubbed this kind of sound over 707 flight footage as a joke.) At this point, about the only time you're likely to come across it now is at the larger airshows where they can afford to bring in an old bomber or cargo hauler (they're more expensive to keep flying than fighters).

Cox charges $10 extra for Internet-only service. It was still a big win to drop TV. With a DVR in the living room, we were paying about $160 per month (and that was without HBO, Showtime, etc.). I'm now paying just $63 per month for (IIRC) 50 Mbps down/5 Mbps up (or is it 50/10?). For what little TV I watch, there's a Netflix Blu-ray subscription, Usenet, and Bittorrent.

(Even at this level, local TV is still available in HD and maybe 40-50 cable channels are available in analog SD. Last time I used that was to tune in Fox News on election night. Most of the time, I can't be bothered to deal with live TV.)

They establishment Republicans have already rolled over with the passing of Cromnibus. I expect that if the push Jeb Bush to the front there will be record apathy among conservatives in the 2016 election.

To amplify on that point, never underestimate the ability of the Republican Party to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. :-P

the composition and political thrust of the parties changed dramatically with the Republican southern strategy of the 60s

Let me put you some f'in knowledge.

And more.

And even more.

On top of that, how do you explain the Democrats' only really starting to lose their stranglehold on southern-state governorships and legislatures in the '90s and later?

And they can't afford $500 for a phone or $800 on a game console but they still do. $1000 is within reach of enough people to be called "consumer grade". That doesn't mean everyone can afford it. Not everyone can even afford a computer, but we still consider them consumer goods.

What if I want my server in a different room from my router?

Minimal solution: run a cable between rooms.

Better solution: put in structured wiring and use that to make the connection between rooms.

Best solution: buy a home where the builder put in structured wiring, and use it. :-)

We keep hearing this is going to be the vehicle that's going to take us to Mars. Excuse me? Exactly how is a vehicle that can only carry 6 people carry supplies for even one person for nearly a year?

Multiple launches to first put supplies for the trip in orbit, with the last launch bringing the crew up on one of these. Assemble the Mars-bound bits in orbit, then send them on their way. I read something about this the other day, but don't remember where.

Actually it'd have to go through the Tropicana, and/or swerve around several blocks because the side of the airport that faces the strip is the runways. Getting the monorail out there would be a clusterfuck to say the least.

The part of Trop that passes north of the airport is mostly empty near the street, with the few businesses in there set well back. They could bring the monorail down to ground level (or even dig a trench for it) to keep from obstructing air traffic. Instead of bringing it down alongside Paradise Road, they could avoid that disruption by turning south sooner and going through the economy-parking lot and by Terminal 2 (which AFAICT is no longer in use) to bring it to Terminal 1. There should already be something in place to move people between Terminals 1 & 3, but if they want to extend the monorail out to Terminal 3 (I've only flown through it once), that'd be a bonus.

ownCloud's worked pretty well for me the past few months, but v7.0.3 caused all sorts of breakage on Android when accessing WebDAV shares. Switching photo uploads from FolderSync to the ownCloud Android client fixed that, but Keepass2Android still won't open my password archive directly. I can get to it over WebDAV with ES File Explorer and open it read-only in Keepass2Android, but that's a kludge I didn't need with the previous version. I'd downgrade, but the previous version is only available as source and the downloaded .deb for the previous version is gone from /var/cache/apt/archives. Hopefully they'll undo this breakage in 7.0.4.