No, they were moved by stepper motors on quite a few hard drives. I'm sure some may have used linear actuators, but certainly not any hard drive I ever worked with back then.

I dunno. All of the prime stuff is also free shipping anyway, so long as it's over $35 on your order and you don't mind it not getting there in two days. I'm not usually that impatient, so everything is free shipping, stuff shows up in 3-4 days, and I don't have to pay for prime.

And now that they've started charging sales tax, I'm definitely not paying for prime, I'm buying from alternate sources whenever I can. Sales tax adds damn near 10% to the price.

Umm...?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_aircraft

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_boat

With the new no light bulb required EZ-Bake oven maybe?

Rewire your house? How bad is your wiring?

My house was built in 1920. While the plug circuits have been replaced since then, the overhead lighting circuits are still the original knob and tube wiring (and the dual-fuel lighting gas pipes are actually still up there too, they're just disconnected now). The stuff is actually incredibly safe (big air gaps and ceramic insulators are, you know). And most of those overhead lights are now CFL and LED, they work perfectly with 93 year old wiring.

Sure, I could see biker goths. Makes perfect sense. And well, yeah, kinda been there done that.

I could see biker surfers, I suppose, but wouldn't transporting the gear be difficult?

But goth surfers? Such a thing exists?

I'm not quite a boring old fart yet, or at least I'd like to think I'm not.

Actually, $0.10 is more than I pay, it's $0.08358 per kWh here as of 11/1.

I just bought 3 LED bulbs, 9.5 watt - 60 watt replacements. They were $13 each.

I think that alters your cost calculation a bit.

I didn't get them for the cost savings, though that will be nice. I got them because they're going in a ceiling fan with a remote control dimmer, and CFLs won't work there. I've been using incandescents, but I'm nearly out of them.

Maybe their GSM phones, I don't know. But they sold a LOT of really cheap TDMA/CDMA phones in the US that were absolutely horrible. For years, when I got a call with bad audio, I'd ask "Do you have a Nokia?" and the response was almost always yes. I don't know if it was bad microphones or bad audio circuits, but Nokia was synonymous with bad phone. I remember being surprised when I discovered that they were European and not Korean (remember when Korea made low end electronics?) or Chinese.

And it was obvious to anyone watching that it would happen. I mean, a Microsoft phone? Everybody HATED their phone OS, and as soon as alternatives became viable (iPhone, Android) people ran screaming, never to return. Throw in that their new phone OS was even worse than their old one, and it was a forgone conclusion.

Throw in that Nokia made some of the worst dumbphones on the US market, phones that had a reputation for being cheap but having horrible audio quality, which is pretty much fatal for a phone where audio is the only feature, and they were doomed.

If that's actually true, you're an extreme outlier. Most people can speak much faster than they can type, and that's true for even very fast typists.

If by large percentage, you mean less than 10%, sure.

Very few of my clients have either boot camp or a VM set up, and the ones that do use it for one app. Most Mac users HATE having to deal with the GUI abomination that is a MS operating system.

What's "wrong" about watching a dubbed movie?

If I'm not interested in actually learning the language, it's not a learning aid.

If I'm reading the subtitles, I may not be able to pay full attention to the visuals.

If I'm watching the visuals, I may miss an important few words.

And if I'm just watching for entertainment, perhaps I don't want to devote my full attention to the screen, perhaps I'm listening to the movie, goofing off on Slashdot, and eating dinner, while occasionally glancing up at the action.

Sure, the director would probably prefer I learn his or her language perfectly beforehand and watch the original with full attention, but it's not the director's prerogative to control that. A movie can be just entertainment, and there's nothing wrong with that. Not everyone wants to learn every language, and there's nothing wrong with that. And not everyone enjoys reading the dialogue instead of listening to it, and there's nothing wrong with that.

No it doesn't. Just hit Command-Q at the registration screen. You get a Skip button.

So will doubling the speed of the cars.

Or adding lanes.

But carpooling isn't a solution unless two people are coming from the same place and going to the same place.