I'm not sure I agree with you on this. From your descriptions your encounters with coffee and alcohol have been of pretty rough stuff. I believe that over time you develop a taste for particular types of food or drink. Over time certain less savoury aspects (bitterness etc.) get trained out and you detect other flavours.

I wasn't a coffee drinker until my early 20s and the primary reason for that was the crap my parents drank was AWFUL! If that was my only choice for coffee today I wouldn't drink it. Seriously International Roast Instant!!!!

Now though I can acknowledge I have a caffeine addiction (I will get head aches 3 days after my last coffee) but not only that I love the taste. In particular a well crafted Mocha based on a dark bean blend is fantastic. (1 shot coffee, 1 tbs cocoa & sugar mix, frothed milk)

When it comes to Alcohol I didn't drink at all till I was 18 (legal age in Australia) for no reason other than just because. Also I have never been a heavy drinker. But I am very partial to a nice Shiraz now which is a drink which is fairly inaccessible to people who haven't developed a taste for wine. It is much easier to drink a sweet white or a gentle merlot then a Shiraz with high tannin levels.

If you like Coronas you obviously prefer the lighter paler beers. And, assuming you are in the USA, I found their beers a little rough in general. Try finding a german pilsner or a uk pale ale. I would suggest you will find them a nice drink.

I caused an issue for AOL by accident back around that time.

I was operating on dialup and I was too young to have a credit card to be able to rent a server for an FTP site. So my friend and I came up with the idea of using an online email system (can't remember which one now) that allowed you to auto-reply to an email with a 1.5mb file. We then created an email address for every disk of the game (Krush Kill & Destroy in ARJ format). We then told people that was how you got the program, send an email to each address in turn and it will reply with the disk.

Seemed like a really really simple idea. Then a guy in the States sent an email to every address in one go. He was on AOL and had a 10mb email limit. So he got the first couple of disks before his system started replying mailbox full. That triggered another copy of the file to be sent etc etc etc etc. Apparently he was questioned by the authorities about being involved in a serious DDOS that took a chunk of AOL offline. I never heard whether anything else came of it. I assume not.

The nitrogen will still form a blanket of gas independent of the quantity or flow rate and this is what keeps you safe. The problem occurs if the liquid nitrogen pools or is otherwise forced into direct contact (like you could do with a suitably high enough pressure stream or immersion). That is when people get hurt.

Probably would have made sense to have started there but I started with noscript instead. I got it to stop audio and videos on websites and now it is on just about everywhere.

We covered this when I was about 15, which is Grade 10 in Australia. We also watched our teacher set fire to his hand after dipping it in methylated spirits. This was, depressingly, 20 years ago now so maybe things have changed.

The Nitrogen on the hand was only done by the teacher. We dropped water droplets on a hot plate to create the same effect.

In general auto-playing video is awful. I particularly hate it on news sites. For me it was the biggest reason for noscript.

If you did chemistry at highschool surely you did the gold fish in liquid nitrogen and then done the table spoon of dancing liquid nitrogen on your hand?

Like I get that this would be kind "geeky / cool" in MAD magazine or FHM.... But seriously I kinda thought slashdot played to a higher educated audience....

My favourite ones are ones that go along the lines of.
"My email is all gobbledy gook, can you fix it"
"Ok, forward the email to it@blah.com and I will have a look"
"How do I forward an email?"
"Push the button that says forward and has an arrow pointing right. It is on the right hand side of your email about half way up"
"No it's not"
"Ok. Can you see a menu up the top marked message"
"No - where would that be"
"If you start at the top left corner you will see File, then Edit, View, and finally Message"
"Oooo the forward button has appeared! It wasn't there before!"

Calm. Calm. Deep Breaths....

Understood and sorry that you are having problems. I have just been lucky then but my experience with commodity hardware has always been flawless. The exceptions have always been in random peripherals such as USB 3g modems.

Yes it is. But only because it is a brand that has a limited number of choices and the brand is huge to make up for it. It is also something which is essentially a closed platform that is not intended to have another OS installed upon it. Though it is X86 and windows may work on it, it is a little like saying Android won't work on an iPhone. There is no incentive for the manufacturer of the hardware to support anything other than OSX. You would be running the same risk buying a surface.

That is a mac book right? I've never had a system where the wifi hasn't worked out of the box, nor the bluetooth. As for the graphics processors I don't know. I've run SLI Nvidia fine.

I may be biased as my father was a copper for 35 years and hence I have been exposed to police both on and off duty. The coppers that I met were just normal people, mothers, fathers, sons & daughters. (In Australia) it is a hard thankless job that puts you in harms way and makes you the person that is perceived to be stopping someone else's fun. I saw what it did to my dad over the years, being spat on by 14 year old girls off their heads, pulling bodies out of cars and burning buildings.

In 35 years of being an on the street cop he never had to draw his gun once. There was one occasion where in a police pursuit the grub they were chasing fired a rifle from their car at him which hit the car window behind him.

Despite that what we don't have in Australia is much of a chance that a person being stopped by police is going to have a firearm. It immediately lowers the potential risk and hence the stress. Sure shit happens still, but we have an extremely low level of police shootings, or shootings of any kind for that matter.

Yes I suppose a new type of letter box. Might be hard in areas with preservation orders or heritage listing but easy everywhere else.

Reply to myself - Buy this - Gigabyte G1-SNIPER-M5 - it is the most stupidly over the top motherboard (it even has green bits) with all the latest fandangly bits and it works out of the box with linux.