This made me Fry face and tab over to Google as well. I now have "since when do whales not have spines" in my search history.

Are we sure that letter wasn't posted by The Onion? It's too comedic to be true.

Like most, I boot from an SSD but use HDDs for storage and backups. Since my HDDs rarely spin up, are they in use? They're actively storing my data, but almost never perform any I/O. If just storing data counts as use, I have lots of old hard drives in my closet that I use the hell out of.

Yes, that was before we had all these electronic devices that tend to fry when exposed to such a field.

To be fair, their headgear might actually exacerbate the issue.

"It's like your Wi-Fi signal. If you can get a Wi-Fi signal, you'll be able to get power."

Yes, but now we can't get Wi-Fi signal.
Also, how often is the "beacon" signal refreshed? Do I need to stand perfectly still while my device is recharging? Why is my skin peeling?

i5 700 series, though I don't remember which one off hand. And yeah, the heatsink and fan is pretty much a joke. The first couple times I mounted it, the proc seemed to run hot. I just kept scraping and reapplying thermal paste til I got it seated well enough. Usually while gaming it'll climb to 50-52C. I keep an alarm set at 55C and I've never set it off. I keep my apt at around 22-23C. I do have 3 case fans that move a good bit of air and a fan behind my PC to keep air circulating around the room. Most of the noise from my PC is the Twin Frozr fans on my video card. Those things scream like a banshee if you turn up the RPMs.

Obviously I'm not running the same hardware, but I've never pushed my proc over 54C. That's with a stock cooler, lots of RAM, a very mild OC, OCd GPU, and poor cable management. I am, however, always surprised with how quiet my apartment gets on the rare occasion that I turn off my PC.

I guess not. I've never gotten a broken disk. I've had one that was lost in the mail, but I'm pretty sure one of my neighbors grabbed it as it showed up on my door weeks later. I've had a couple that were fairly scratched, but nothing my BD player couldn't handle. My computer, however, usually doesn't recognize a DVD unless it's pristine, so I often have to wipe them down with a wet cloth and try several times before my PC will read them.

Yep. I'm one of the few people I know that still uses Netflix for DVDs. I like the service, but it's already hard to justify the cost. If the price goes up, I imagine people will drop the DVD service en masse.

I was mostly raised by dogs from the time I was 6-15yo. Every day I'd set off into the woods with a pocket knife, a bb gun, and a doberman. I wouldn't come back home til it got dark or I got hungry. I plan to do the same when I have kids. Raise a good dog, then let the dog raise your kid.

Do I really need to bore you all with my cat flu story again?

This isn't war, silly. It's an "operation".

Um...that's when the asteroid will be passing close enough. I don't care how motivated we are, I don't think we can ask the asteroid to hurry up and get here.

This makes me a little less proud of the few times I've gotten submissions published.