I replaced my Macbook Pro's battery at 4 years old, though it still would give me an hour or two of life (down from the initial 6 hours). Since the laptop was still working well, I spent the $100 and put a new battery in a year or so ago; so now I get 5 or 6 hours of life out of it again. At this point my biggest issue is that the processor is slow, so rendering pictures and videos can take a while. It's probably time for me to upgrade.

I don't recall noticing lens flares in either movie. But that might be because I went to be entertained for two hours or whatever, not to nitpick the movies apart because they don't match my exact definition of what Star Trek should or shouldn't be.

We had a debate in a "Current Events" class in high school about violent lyrics. As a heavy metal fan, this was important to me. Unfortunately, at the time, I wasn't very familiar with the words to "Suicide Solution", and one of my classmates had transcribed only one verse, showing how it was "advocating suicide". (To keep this semi-relevant, I'll also add that he said the lyrics were hard to understand and took him a while to discern.) I told him he was taking it out of context, but unfortunately I couldn't remember the full context of the song. He just shrugged as though context didn't matter, when, in fact, "Suicide Solution" is probably something everyone should listen to and think about. I wanted to kick myself when I remembered the theme of the song.

The debate accomplished nothing other than teaching me that I need to be as familiar as I can with the music I love, because people have a lot of misconceptions about it. I still get very strange looks when I say I listen to metal. I've even gotten my wife into some of it - I catch her singing Ozzy songs now and then, things she never listened to before she met me, and she's gone with me to Rush and Queensryche concerts. :) Of course, in recent years, "Crazy Train" and Judas Priest's "Electric Eye" intro have appeared in minivan commercials, so it's apparently not quite as bad as it supposedly once was.

I've got a Samsung S3 with a broken screen sitting at home. I was getting out of our truck with my hands full, and my phone fell. I think it actually broke when it hit the running board. My fault, and these things happen. I have a new screen to put on it, but I haven't gotten a heat gun yet to remove the old one. I didn't know how easy they were to replace until I was at a car dealer, and the financing guy saw the broken phone and showed me the kit to replace the screen, and says he does it all the time for friends and family. (He happened to have one in his office because a coworker had broken her phone.)

-5 seconds to comply...
-10 seconds to comply...
(They're unarmed.)

Don't believe everything you read on the internet. I've lived in the US my entire life, and I've read a lot about the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, but the GP post was the very first time I'd heard this supposed strong connection between Reagan's speech and the wall falling. His speech may have been a significant event - everyone remembers "Tear down this wall!" - but I've never heard the theory that that's what caused the opening. I've also never heard that the Hoff had anything to do with it, either, other than singing atop it after the gates opened. I didn't bother to check the article for the other three people.

It's probably the same list for each candidate from the two major parties.

Often, they build an assembly plant in the US to get around this issue. Then, this happens.

Why? You'd have the gov't spend money to overbuild or be able to scale a website for the one time every few years it gets overloaded? Seems like a waste of money to me. It does just fine 99.9999999% of the time.

The other issue was that all the news articles said things like, "X Million Hondas Recalled!" As a Honda Accord owner, I clicked on the article and looked, only to discover it was for rather old Accords (nothing newer than like 2003; ours is a 2012). Others probably went to safercar.gov instead, only to find it didn't apply. (That headline should have been in the favorite clickbait poll. "X Million Cars from 1998-2003 recalled!" would have been better, but...fewer clicks!)

I know of one near DC where the speed limit is 55 mph and there are traffic lights (it's actually a very well-known road - Pennsylvania Avenue - but the Maryland portion of it). However, during rush hour, the traffic rarely moves as fast as 55 mph, at least inside the beltway, I suspect because of volume and people are conditioned to think "traffic lights = max speed is 45 mph" or something like that. The latter theory is based on seeing people doing 45 mph with a clear stretch of road in front of them, and the next light quite a ways away.

I saw a documentary that demonstrated the Exxon Valdeez was large enough to support life for quite a few people...as long as no one dropped a match into the tanks, of course.

I lost faith when I saw this entry:

A small family sedan that hasn't been made since 1994 still hits #7 in getting the most tickets? It's the Mercury version of the Ford Tempo, which didn't make the top 20 at all. And I'd be willing to bet Ford sold a lot more Tempos than they did Topazs...

I had a similar problem with a work-issued Blackberry 9930. The only chargers that worked with it were the included Blackberry charger and the charger for my Samsung S3. We have at least 30 chargers laying around our house and cars, ranging from name brands like Apple and Samsung to no-name chargers we got for free, including chargers for my wife's iPad and my Asus tablet, and I tried them all. Only the Blackberry and Samsung adapters worked to charge the Blackberry. The cable didn't seem to matter - as long as it had the correct USB port, it worked - but the power adapter did.

Here in the US, I've done it once, and that was to confirm the chip in my card worked before I flew off to Europe with it. Turns out it's a chip-and-signature card, so it was as useless there as any other non-NFC card...perhaps even more useless come to think of it, because it ACTED like it was working. (From reading Slashdot, I knew this was likely the case before leaving, and I'd asked my banks about a chip-and-PIN card and got back, "Wuuhhh?", so I was prepared for this problem.)

So, for us, the Apple pay is actually a nice leap forward - as others said, right now it's a very fragmented market. I've had an Android phone with an NFC chip for two years now, and I've used it perhaps half a dozen times, just playing around to see if I could scan a credit card, my passport, or my cat's RFID chip (no go on the cat). Until I saw the Apple Pay announcement, I didn't care whether my next phone (which I had already decided was going to be an iPhone) had an NFC chip or not. I get why people in other countries wouldn't care as much about it, though.

Only 3rd party alarm apps - the built-in app from Apple works fine whether it's in the foreground or not.