When there are enough footnotes to chase down the data, there ARE books I'd call non-fiction. Here are two:

http://www.randomhouse.com/book/10335/age-of-betrayal-by-jack-beatty

https://www.powells.com/biblio/9780393318371

big-screen Skype (until I told my sister-in-law about the always on spy camera "feature").

I had a Westinghouse LVM-37w1. No tuner, no "smarts", basically a display with multiple inputs: 2 DVI, 2 Component, Composite AND S-Video, plus separate audio inputs that could be paired to the video. Nicely, the speaker cabling was external, so I could use it as "center" from my A/V amp.

The backlights eventually failed, but I looked hard for a simple replacement. Only thing I could find were commercial (ruggedized) displays at an order of magnitude more cost than the "TV"s of the same size/resolution. Can't use the TV tuner on cable (EVERYTHING is encoded), and the HDMI input doesn't let me assign which channel feeds the builtin speakers, so I had to add a center speaker.

Since it lacks the sensor/communications mast knocked off during the attack on the second Death Star, it is post-Return. Maybe that's when the lift blades were added.

Between the electric cars and bicycles, internal combustion motor sounds are becoming rare, and I happen to appreciate a well-tuned exhaust (think 1969 Camaro 350 or Z/28).

These go back more than a century, so they need to be preserved.

I haven't tuned a radio to a station in ages, but my preamp has internet radio capability that I use frequently (and donate/subscribe). I can also get streams on my Ouya, through XBMC and plugins.

The FCC really screwed up one of my favorite radio stations. They gave an LPFM (low-power KOCI) the same frequency as a powerhouse down the coast. I can only get the LPFM in a few block radius. Fortunately, the LPFM also has a shoutcast stream, so it's available on my computers, main sound system, the bedroom, and at work.

0: I do shave my neck. :) In fact, the beard has been gone for more than a year.

1: a bit later, early 1990; we all got a big laugh out of the 486SX/487 when those came out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80486SX

Too many clueless comments already that don't understand the difference between "blaming the hardware" and hardening to deal with demonstrably-broken hardware (and/or firmware for devices). I've spent years writing drivers for various OS', including Windows and Linux. It is rare for any complex device to be bug-free at the hardware level (look how many patches are BIOS-applied to CPUs, for example). Sometimes, under NDA, of course, the Windows driver writers are apprised of the deficiencies, or, at least, get better response from the vendor when an anomaly appears. Linux rarely gets that same assistance.

My favorite example, though, is all-IBM. We were porting AIX to the PS/2s and 370s. We consistently had problems with the diskette interface under AIX and the response from Boca Raton was always "it works in MS-DOS, so it's your code, not our hardware". When OS-2 came around, they ran into exactly the same problem in the hardware. By then, we had a work-around (slower, more locks, but no more glitches) which was how OS-2 got around it, as well.

Resident or expats, please try to fill in the blanks.

Is there simply enough anti-homosexual bias in Russian culture, as in much of the USofA, for Putin to make political "points" by picking on them?

Is he thinking of using a relatievly powerless "out" group for a Kristallnacht if the economy experiences problems due to falling oil prices?

Pay-back, which he is known to do, for not supporting his acquisition of power?

Wild idea: is he thinking he can pressure homosexuals to produce more children as as some sort of social "cover", to build a population for a war?

Something else?

So, how much less WITHOUT ESPN?

As a TWC "customer", I'm stuck paying off the billions that they stupidly gave the LA Dodgers, and there's nothing short of internet-only that, at least for now, gets me out from under that load. Should we all switch to that model, I suspect that the internet-only price will go through the roof, since our only alternative is AT&T, which is hardly a low-cost, consumer-friendly provider.

I'm really hoping that there's a data-only plan coming from T-Mobile or Sprint that lets me cut TWC out of the loop completely, even if there's a bandwidth and latency cost.

It's a very long distance from fanciful imagery in ancient texts (Ezekiel's wheel is a UFO, obviously, for example) to the historical existence of a nuclear war.

Explanations for natural and/or artifical oddities have to be seriously sought before giving credence to theories developed by those looking to use seeming correlations to bolster possible fantasies. How many times has Nostradamus been proved "correct"? It is a human trait to look for correlations; if the first three times your tribe passed a rock outcropping it was attacked by a lion, maybe those who noticed the pattern survived to pass down the trait of observation. There is, to my knowlege, never been a seriously funded and staffed attempt to look for rational explanations for fear of offending the believers.

We make artificial diamonds now; it's just not cost-effective compared to low-wage workers digging and dying in Africa.

When's the last time Buddhists staged a jihad?

Just repeating a VERY old joke. I first heard it back in the late 1950s.

Reminds me of the bit from A Tramp Abroad where the companions were planning to get from the mountain to the village by riding down on glacier.

Turned out to be faster to walk.

As a slightly-more-in-touch segment of the population, many of us already discounted the FBI's claim against NK, and (I hope) nearly all of us now understand that it was an inside job. Let President Obama know that his sanctions just make him look foolish.

Go north, instead.

Death Valley is definitely worth a visit, but Zion, Bryce, Arches, are, IMO, better places to start.

http://www.visitutah.com/parks-monuments/national-parks/

Yosemite and Yellowstone are the crown jewels of the lower 48 (again, IMO), but neither is proximate to Las Vegas.