I've got a Vostro 1500 right here, you've gotta take the whole lid off the bottom before you can get to the fan. But yeah, that's better than most laptops. On the other hand, there's a Fujitsu T900 in the house and it has a little plastic panel you remove, then you can blow air through the system as well as out of the intake. That's better than any of this other jazz by far.

Unless they are Sony, and invent a new protocol to control Blu-Ray players even though they don't need any buttons you don't get on a typical modern DVD remote.

Yeah, no shit. The first thing I told my mother when she wanted to become 'digitally literate' is to never trust the internet.

Never trust it's telling you the truth, never trust it cares about your interests, and never trust that someone might not be out to rip you off.

Then I'll show you how to actually get to it.

Not trusting the internet is a damned good starting point.

The U.S. is becoming a country in which only the government gets what they want.

How about:

The U.S. is becoming a country in which the government does what they're told by their corporate overlords.

The Free Software world has tried [and failed] time, and time again to produce a decent mobile interface. For its day, GPE was not too horrible, but it was nothing but a copy of other GUIs.

Android has the first new GUI in ages worth a crap. And it's got plenty of faults.

Everybody wants to be as cool as android. Keep trying, I guess.

The other big problem is that the NSA is destroying US company's credibility. No-one wants to buy Cisco networking gear because the NSA systematically infects their products with malware and even physically modifies them before they leave the country. No-one wants to store their data in Microsoft's cloud because the NSA has their grubby little fingers all over it. The entire US infosec industry is basically a joke now.

Would you even want to buy or fly on a Dreamliner now? Maybe that sounds paranoid, but if the Snowden revelations have taught us anything it's that we were not paranoid enough and there are almost no limits to what the US considers acceptable.

Note that the warranty is only rated for 40GB of writes per day. Not sure what happens if you exceed that. Sometimes I do more than that through my internet connection, let alone to the drive.

The problem is it depends if you are kind of idiot who buys the cheapest, lowest quality bulbs they can find or if you get reasonable quality ones. Most of the people moaning about bulb lifetime seem to have bought cheap rubbish, and probably never spent a penny on their home electrics either.

Do you have Lidl or Aldi in your country? I bought some 820lm/60W equivalent (more like 80W incandescent really) bulbs for £5 each there, so that's maybe $10 USD. They are dimmable and rated for 20k hours, and put out nice light with no flicker.

hobby lobby was not buying it for them in the first place. if you're going to have an opinion itneeds to have a solid factual foundation.

and contraception (note, this is not limited to drugs, we're actually talking about contraception in general...the actual case was NOT about abortificants, ie, drugs to induced abortion) is special because fell under what came to be called the contraception mandate (the press made everything a mandate) which is itself simply part of the preventitive care rules. namely, preventitive care is cheaper than the altnernative. therefore, preventative care will be covered by all plans, without requiring any forms of cost sharing (ie, copays, coinsurance, etc). this does NOT mean its free, nor that the employer is paying it. it means its paid for by the premiums. so its still paid for, just not out of pocket.

ill be clear: NO EMPLOYER MONEY goes to these things, even when your employer provides insurance. its a legal fiction of sorts. insurance is still compensation, its a benefit provided in lieu of higher wages. effectively, its your time and labor which is buying the insurance. all you've done is eliminate a step of two of the money chain by not simply having the employer give you a wad of cash that you spent yourself. the chief advantage of this system is that an employer, by essentially buying in bulk, is able to get a discount which is cheaper for everyone all around. but it is ultimately still your money that pays for everything, not the employers.

Gambling is illegal in Japan but also extremely popular and a mainstream pass-time for many people. They get around the law in various ways. For example many machines let you win non-monetary prizes (which are legal) that a little shop around the corner from the pachinko parlour conveniently pawns for a fixed amount and sells back to the pachinko operators again.

It's too bad you didn't read the link I provided, in which it is revealed that FreeDOS will use ACPI if APM is not present.

Do your 'sincerely held religious beliefs' outlaw blood transfusions? Looks like your exployees are going to be paying for that themselves.

A health insurance plan tuned for the beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses [jw.org] would still pay for blood substitutes [slashdot.org], iron supplements, and other expenses associated with bloodless surgery [wikipedia.org]. Some insurers might prefer bloodless surgery anyway because it keeps the insurer from having to pay for units of blood and pay to treat blood-borne diseases.

Now take it up a notch and consider religions that reject healthcare almost entirely, like Christian Science, or religions that insist on Eastern medicine, or.... At some point, you really do have to draw a line. The only question is where the line should be drawn. The easiest place to draw the line is "never allow exceptions". Everything from there gets progressively more complex.

There is no justification for forcing anyone to pay for anything. Not even spaghetti. Government economic coercion is the real "slippery slope". Contraceptives are predictable expenses and have no business being in insurance, abortion is an elective procedure and shouldn't be covered either.

Ignoring your last sentence (snipped), I mostly agree with you, but with an exception. Some use of contraceptives is not for prevention of birth, but rather to treat underlying medical conditions, such as ovarian cysts and endometriosis. If a policy excludes birth control, that exclusion should be allowed only when there is not a medically necessary reason for the prescription.

Oh, and the policies should also exclude other drugs that don't serve a medically necessary purpose, such as antihistamines (except for treatment of anaphylaxis), Levitra/Viagra/Cialis, etc.

...they are also free to work in another with/without religious beliefs who will purchase it.

Up until that bit, we were in agreement. However, that last part should really be left out of this discussion. The same faulty logic can literally be used to justify any level of abuse, legal or illegal:

• You don't like the fact that you have to work a twelve-hour shift, seven days a week? You're free to work somewhere else.
• You don't think our working conditions are safe? You're free to work somewhere else.
• You want to get paid more than ten cents an hour? You're free to work somewhere else.

And so on. The fact of the matter is that people are not free to leave a job and take a job somewhere else. There's a very high cost to doing so. You must find the time to search for other jobs, interview for those jobs, get those jobs, and then leave. And when there are no jobs in your field nearby, you must move somewhere that has jobs. And when businesses are not regulated by laws that require certain minimum standards, those other jobs are likely to be equally bad.

As for the issue on the whole, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I don't like the idea of being forced to pay for things that go against my convictions. On the other hand, there's nothing stopping business leaders from professing adherence to churches that refuse all medical care, then disclaiming their responsibility to provide insurance entirely. It's hard to conceive of an exception that protects against the first situation without allowing businesses to abort coverage outright through legal maneuvering.

It will take the court granting certiorari on several other lawsuits before there's an adequate line established, and this case really should have been the last one granted cert, not the first, because there's likely to be an awful lot of abuse in the meantime as a result of this decision being interpreted in an overly broad fashion.