Repeat guests? C'mon, really? You shop for hotels the same way the rest of us do - Either your employer tells you "you will stay here", or you use a price search and pick the lowest place that doesn't mention rats in the toilet.

Would you book a place that mentions complaints along the lines of "The bathroom is clean, but cell phones of any provider don't work here and the room phone is 2 dollars per minute?"

As for the employer: the travel offices of big companies who regularly have their people work on site at major customer or other offices will consider putting their employees somewhere else if they all complain about a particular hotel. The repeat customer is not the individual person, but the employer.

"the carriers and phone makers are all REQUIRED by calea (in the US) to have backdoors on anything that has a 'network' aspect to it."

Citation needed.

"they have magic usb cables that get into your phone"

I think I saw a website of a company that claims to have such a device, but I had the distinct impression that it mostly helps with booting into recovery mode (android phones); it will tell you which combo of power/volume up/down to press during boot. Some phones don't have a locked bootloader or have a bootloader that allows installing software to the "ROM" from the bootloader. (I've seen this on low-end Samsungs and the popular Clockworkmod bootloader for Cyanogenmod allows this).

For phones that are switched on, it will.check for usb debugging and mass storage access.

Essentially, it has collected the known procedures for rooting for a lot of phones. Guess what, a lot of phones cannot be rooted without either having unlocked the screen or wiping all user data.

"Unless they have changed their stance since CM7, the privacy manager sucks compared to XPrivacy because XPrivacy will allow spoofing of data. If a permission is flatly blocked instead of spoofed then many apps will force close"

Well, they did. CM11 has a privacy manager that will allow you to block access to contacts and so on, without making apps crash. I have set it up such that it will notify me whenever an app tries to access contacts, sms, calendar, location and it is surprising how few suspicious popups I get. One weird thing: wifi related apps need location access in order to show access points. Makes some sense, but it took me a while to realize why those apps weren't working.

"You need it backed up on at least 4 pieces of media, of at least 3 different types, in at least 2 different cities, in at least 1 different state; bumping each of those numbers up by 1 is not unreasonable."

At least 2 different cities means two or more cities.
At least 1 different state means one or more states.

Well, at least, you don't store it in zero states.

"[Conventional plants] also produce so much more power that merely sending somebody by once a year to glance that the greed led is still softly glowing is more maintenance per watt."

That could be an interesting hypothesis, but if you put it down like a hard fact, you should also provide some data to support it so that we can have a meaningful discussion about it.

That is 0.50 $/Wh. You can buy USB powerbanks for EUR 7 per 2600 mAh, which is about 0.70 EUR/Wh or 0.85 $/Wh and includes a USB cable, fancy colored shell, USB connectors, charging circuits, and status LEDs.

I'm surprised that the economy of scale makes so little difference.

In LaTeX (and Word for that matter), I always prefix my notes with @@@ because that is a string that nnever occurs in normal text (easoly searchable) and that sticks out visually like a sore thumb.

Percent-sign-prefixed comments ("this needs an update") are much easier to overlook, or even guaranteed to be overlooked during proofreading. At least, I don't proofread my LaTeX markup, but rather the typeset document.

"It's called the F5 - From what I can gather, somewhere along the line they had to "enhance" the F ratings to get more f4's and ef 5's."

Not quite. From Wikipedia:

It was revised to reflect better examinations of tornado damage surveys, so as to align wind speeds more closely with associated storm damage. Better standardizing and elucidating what was previously subjective and ambiguous, it also adds more types of structures and vegetation, expands degrees of damage, and better accounts for variables such as differences in construction quality.
(...)
Since the new system still uses actual tornado damage and similar degrees of damage for each category to estimate the storm's wind speed, the National Weather Service states that the new scale will likely not lead to an increase in a number of tornadoes classified as EF5.

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

"I received a Pebble .... the battery life is such that I only need to recharge it a few times a week."

Îoey Pebble (1 year old) lasts an entire week on a charge, unless I have been using realtime apps (gps tracker). It helps to disable the "shake for backlight" setting.

"the only time the 5-star rating is going to go to a 3-star rating is if the national testing facilities start using these dummies. And if they do that..."

If they do that, you'll need twice the number of cars to sacrifice in crash tests and the dummies will wear out twice as fast. Likely, you'll need twice the number of testing facilities as well. A decision to make such tests mandatory should not be taken lightly.

My guess is that these dummies will be used to gain knowledge on how to translate standard test results to risks for nonstandard body types, and possibly to mandatory requirements on car/safety belt construction if the disadvantage of an obese person is large and preventable.

"4W charger can charge devices at the same rate as my 5 and 10 watt chargers! The last generation of phones use 5V 1A = 5 watt chargers"

That the charger is capable of delivering 5 W does not actually mean that the device will actually draw that amount. I have a dongle that measures the current and voltage of USB chargers and my smartphones rarely draw more than 0.8 A, and even then only if I use a low-resistance cable with a battery below 80%. Cables that are long enough to reach comfortably from the floor to my hands while I'm sitting usually do less than that.

Google "usb charger doctor", the dongle is only $7 or so.

"HAM radio operators have a statistically significant higher incident of cancer."

You seem to be selective in your interpretation of the data. From the second link:

"Among men, there were 14,630 deaths (SMR = 0.73 (95% CI = 0.71-0.74)) and among women, 760 (SMR = 0.72 (0.67-0.78)). There were 4,007 cancer deaths among males (SMR = 0.79 (0.76-0.81)) and 289 among females (SMR = 0.82 (0.72-0.92))."

Standardized mortality ratios (SMR) smaller than one for cancer mean that there are fewer cancer deaths among radio operators than among the total (US) population. The abstract continues to state that for some particular types of cancer, the SMR is slightly above one, but with very wide confidence intervals (CI), which indicate that there are too few cases for reliable statistics.