This is Sci-Fi because somebody in marketing thought they could get more buzz if they called it that. It deflects shockwaves, not projectiles. Then again who knows; maybe the blasters in Star Wars just make photon shockwaves? But this just looks like trademark infringement to me.

The sad thing is their clickbait worked. But a shockwave deflector shield is pretty neat tech anyway.

Geez, I've heard of (and experienced) unexpected out-of-warranty replacements but this is ridiculous. No wonder Apple cracked down on the practice. It's really too bad though that we can't get $100-200 repairs for free out of warranty anymore.

It sounds like your daughter is a competent individual capable of knowing full well what she wants. So why are you here asking for advice? Are you going to ambush her with your perfect choice and refuse to let her get the one she really wants?

You used to be able to upgrade the storage and the RAM pre-Retina. Now the RAM is soldered into the motherboard and the storage is a PCI Express-based (SATA-based in 2012-2013) chip in a proprietary socket. Also, now the battery is a series of bare cells held in place with very strong adhesive, and everything is locked away by pentalobe screws. Easy to repair it certainly is not.

What regulators? This is the 21st century dammit. Regulations are for industries that existed when our government worked.

WTFTPIA = What The F*** This Poll Is About? SMFWAAAMS

The argument isn't stupid. It's actually an ad hominem. I wouldn't normally support ad hominem arguments, but in this case it's not just attacking the credibility of the other party. It's attacking the credibility of all the party shills jumping on the "Clinton is evil" bandwagon. It's arguing against certain readers in particular for being OK with it when their side did it but not OK with it now. Myself, I don't even remember this Bush "scandal".

If you thought Bush was bad and you think this is bad, that's fine. If you don't care about either, that's OK too. If you only care about one and not the other, that's hypocritical. Let's not talk hypotheticals or generalizations. Cahuenga wasn't picking sides; s/he was mainly pointing out that it's too late to worry about the other side doing it once it's OK because they already have. Nobody should be but can we stop acting so surprised and outraged that it did? Focus on the future in which Clinton's emails are unprecedentedly available to the public (not just by FOIA or subpoena like normal) and she doesn't do this anymore. I'd like to think that future includes nobody doing it again but no amount of fake outrage is going to make that happen anyway.

And if your outrage is genuine, well power to you but you are in a vanishingly small minority lost in a sea of party shills ready to attack Clinton for anything and everything

Don't call me a party loyalist. I don't really like Clinton. I just find this whole thing ridiculous.

All politicians are hypocrites regardless of this situation. The attackers I'm talking about are the media circus happening over this manufactured scandal. Then all the Twitterati and the rest of social media that has just made media circuses worse as they've grown in presence. I don't expect politicians to do any better than attack their opponents for whatever stupid reason they've got this week. But I would hope that the rest of us would stop acting like the only reason to use a private email account instead of a work email account is to hide something. We all know somebody that ignores the rules (or has tried to and been told to stop).

You mean the same way that clueless sycophants will attack opposing politicians? She's Hillary Rodham Fucking Clinton after all. Naturally she is a demon woman trying to destroy the American way and cover the world in pantsuits.

...I don't really like her myself, but this is ridiculous.

This isn't an argument that it was OK. It's an argument that those attacking her are being hypocrites. There's an awful lot of hypocrisy going around and I am shocked by the number of people who act like they know of absolutely nobody that forwards work email to a private account. It's wrong and loads of people do it anyway, whether they're working in government or elsewhere. The only reason to make such a big deal of it is because she's expected to announce a run for the president and far too many people want to shoot her down for whatever stupid reason they can find.

...mumble mumble sopeniaed [sic] mumble mumble benghazi mumble mumble fucking mumble mumble power mumble mumble felon...

Steve Jobs was mentioned by the OP. His cancer only progressed to the incurable stage because he wasted years trying alternative therapies like you are suggesting rather than the proven effective strategies that could have halted his rare treatable form of pancreatic cancer. The OP who is doing the right thing by accepting reality and using what time he has left to benefit his loved ones. I say this for the benefit of those in the earlier stages who still have a chance: believing in unaccepted alternative treatments is dangerously attractive to the highly educated innovative types. Innovation requires us to question authority and pursue the neglected alternatives. But innovation also means failing 20 times before you succeed. You don't have 20 failures to make with your health. You get one chance to treat a terminal disease. Two or three if you're really lucky. Don't put off conventional therapies with known success rates so you can try that one weird trick.

...I was about to say something about reconciliation and making the first gesture toward peace, but you've discredited yourself fairly well. Anarchy only appeals to a rather small minority of the population, and the minority is even smaller once people start really thinking about what it would be like without a government to maintain roads, staff fire departments, hire teachers...hell screw that, what really whittles down the minority is thinking about how fast the terrorists would take over the country without any - ANY - military left to stop them.

That is, if Canada doesn't annex us first.

What's with all the disrespect for secretaries? Have you never been in an office with one, or do you just assume that an office of a dozen plus people just magically holds itself together? A secretary answers the phones, keeps things organized, keeps the copiers stocked, and above all knows enough about their coworkers' business as to tell the difference between a question that can be simply answered and one that needs the coworker's attention. A doctor's expertise is quite a bit more advanced than fielding the same question coming from dozens of people, and that doctor's time is more valuable being spent on things that actually require a judgment call. And while secretaries won't know why patient X needs X medication (at least not until spending years on the job and learning by osmosis), you can be sure that secretaries know every single prescription made because the doctor will have tasked them with sending them all to the pharmacy.

Secretaries spend their entire workday making everyone else around them more productive. It is not something a monkey could do. It is not something every person could do either. And they know an awful lot more about the work their coworkers do then you think. These people silently keep the world running smoothly. The least you could do is say "thank you" instead of running around like a snarky asshole acting like what they do amounts to nothing.