...and the common reply is "I like the sport but I suck at playing it."

Just render the ad screen unusable. Why the hell do appliances (especially a fridge) need a screen for? Oh, wait - they want us to buy a fridge every few years because of course the fridge won't work without an operative screen.

First thing I'd do is disable networking on these devices.

First in the sense that Apple made the first tablet. ;-)

It kind of boggles my mind that after spending how many thousands on geek stuff/tech toys he balks at another 150 to try to protect them...

And this is why any one business should not own infrastructure, it should be publically owned and maintained.

...and the latency is 88 ms.

Yep. Don't forget, the cloud is the solution for everything.

I have an open Sennheisers that sound great, but by design others in the room can hear the music. Now if the Beats' phones are supposed to be closed and this happens, that's bad. Never heard of Beats and have no desire to try listening to a pair.

Every adult in Switzerland has an assault rifle, but (almost) none of them have any bullets to go with it.
You see, the assault riffle is issued when you finish the military training, and you're supposed to maintain it until the day when the country gets invaded and the government distributes the rounds through the populace.

Even if you maintain the rifle diligently, wouldn't you want to occasionally test it to make sure it still fires?

To me that's akin to doing backups but never actually checking to see if there's an actual working copy of the backup.

...in frequencies humans can hear. I remember reading two years ago that plants do emit a very high frequency sound when they are cut. There are studies that support it. Heck, I probably read this on slashdot.

Considering the Nexus 10 has an 'extremely repairable' rating that requires the removal of five Philips screws, I'd say it's far easier than the iPad that requires special tools?

You must be young. I still remember back when Gates was talking about making ACPI a black box (unfortunately it still is, I can see) so that no other vendors but Microsoft could use the power interface. Some companies (like Intel) are pretty good about these types of specifications. I still have an Intel desktop/workstation board on my main computer at home and it has no problems sleeping and waking up.

I have had, unfortunately, problems with some other manufacturers doing the same thing - like Asus. (By the way, this isn't strictly linux, I couldn't get Windows 7 to suspend/resume on certain model Asus boards.)

It most definitely has something to do with hardware vendors. If the auto manufacturers had it their way no DIY'ers would even be allowed to work on cars. Computers are no different.

2014.4

Where has this idea that Databases can't scale come from?

MS Access.