Similar story here. My old (as in 3 PCs ago) yamaha scsi cdrw was the best audio cd ripper I have owned. Much better than the IDE or SATA DVD drives I have had since.
Problem was the scsi card I used was very cheap, but it worked just fine until support was dropped in the kernel. So one day I did an update, rebooted, and swore a lot.

Even better are car tyre measurements which are in metric (width and profile) and imperial (diameter) at the same time!

Very very convenient at work. Just google smartcafe and you'll see what I mean.

There are issues with these puppies and I wear them out after 6 months or so but they are still the best I've found for the workplace where taking your own electrical devices in is frowned upon and instant coffee just won't do.

Oh, and grinding the beans every morning makes a big difference.

As I understand it, in the UK you can pay up to 15 UKP by only holding the contactless card near the reader. Yes, in some cases they will ask for your PIN but below 15 they don't always.

The £15 value is chosen by the banks, it was 10 when the tech was introduced in this country and I think it is going up again soon.

No, the point was that people would have to (almost) stop pirating if the internet stopped working. I put the word almost in there because we would still have sneakernets so some piracy would still occur but it would be tiny in comparison to what is happening now.

This happened to me too, the cable that passed over my ears cracked. They were replaced twice under Shure's warranty. No quibble whatsoever. I kept the inserts each time so I didn't have to break in new ones.

When the 3rd set broke in the same way the 2 years were up so I bought the next model up and these haven't had a problem at all. Though they are out of the price range of this ask-slashdot question. The inserts I use now are the same flanged ones on my "musician's ear plugs" I wear to gigs, so my ears are used to the same shaped thing being in them and it is all very comfortable.

At least, according to a collegue of mine. He gets soooo chuffing annoyed by the number of ads he's willing to wait a day for something he could watch when it's broadcast, just to get the ads removed for him.

This is either 'yay, I don't want to talk to them anyway' or it will use the concept of 'accountless friends' (or virtual friends, or whatever you want to call them) where they effectively make an account on my behalf by entering me as a contact. I seem to recall someone (google or facebook maybe?) patenting something obvious like this recently. This also means that should I get a facebook account at some point afterwards then I will find my account readily populated with friends (it knows it's actually me because my phone number and name match rather than just my name - hopefully some measures will stop the theft of accounts like this that don't actually exist yet[1] - such as confirmation over text message to prove that I posses the phone number).

[1] A strange concept really, but cybersquatting case law should work here.

Instead the whole interface will be facebook. If you want to talk to someone, select them from your facebook friends. etc. Apply as appropriate to all other activities you do with smartphones. Other phone systems will still have the facebook 'app' but it will have worse features which will just encourage people to swap to a facebook phone.
You status could be constantly updated with who you are talking with or having multi-text conversations with or even where you are travelling to because it knows your calendar, 'likes', route searches and GPS data. Let's face it, if I have already spread the information that I am excited about going to a concert then if on the day of the concert the phone detects that I'm getting closer and closer to the venue then what is the (extra) harm in sharing that location information?

Not sure if the targetted ads will be (partly) based on info gleaned from voice recognition keywords as well as everything you type and look at but if I was an evil ad broker then that's what I would do if I could get away with it.

But what do I know? I don't have a facebook account.

I'll have to remember that if I ever get one of these calls (lucky so far!). If they are 'from Windows' I'll ask "front or back?". "Are you the double-glazed ones?"

Of course, if they ask me to run something and read out my ip address it's going to be 127.63.24.12

I'm no plant but even I crave it. It's got electrolytes after all.

I want a 'no dupes' alt-F2 history, just like Gnome2 had.
Most other things I'm fine with either as they are or with the right extension or gsettings(or whateverthehell is it called) incantation.

I had my iRiver H340 for less than 30 minutes before it ran rockbox. At the time of purchase it was, to my knowledge, the only way to get gapless playback and high capacity (40GB isn't enough now but it was the best you could get back in the day). I've tried it with a replacement SSD but while it works it is quite flaky and needs regular resets.

It's a shame there are very few high capacity players on the market now, I would love to get a new device which supports:
Lots of storage. Enough to encode all my CDs and a few 'try-before-you-buy' albums. Ahem.
Gapless.
Bookmarking capabilities that work with all files (apparently ipods require you to define things as an audiobook before they support bookmarking)
ogg support so I don't have to re-rip my CDs (I'd compromise on this if everything else was offered - it's only a few weeks of feeding CDs to the PC)
No need to 'make my own playlists' or any other such carp unless I want to. Music already comes with pre-defined playlists: also known as albums.

If this ever happens it will most likely run rockbox - I doubt the hardware manufacturers would do as good a job.

To Linus and the rest of the rockbox devs. Seriously. Thank-you.

Careful. Finding a compatible hard drive is hard and not cheap. My iRiver H340 now has a 128GB SSD but I might put the still-working HDD back as it is much less reliable now with the SSD. YMMV.

I admit I have to empty everything else from that pocket to fit it in but I can get into gigs with a G12. Most gigs I go to are the kind that let me in with my DSLR though