"ICE" can be ambiguous.

I have my mom and dad listed as "mom" and "dad", both with multiple phone numbers. I figure if anyone needs to call someone in case of an emergency, "mom" and "dad" are good choices. Of course, most phones these days are locked with a PIN or pattern code, so good luck actually getting to the contact list.

My dad has a bunch of cards for various tasks, including credit cards, fuel station cards, access cards for the various company locations he needs to access and so on. I think he has at least 15 different cards either on him or in his work vehicle at all times, and they all have unique PINs.

So, being a guy who's worked with electronics for nearly 40 years, he puts the PINs right on the cards, in the format of resistor color codes. For instance, 1234 becomes "BRREORYE". Perfectly indecipherable to anyone who isn't into electronics, and still indecipherable to most electronics people if they don't know the secret.

Dude, Helvetica.

I listen to quiet music, just barely loud enough to drown out the tinnitus. Works pretty well.

Cooling doesn't have to be noisy. To be fair, my dual-core 3.2GHz Phenom II, GTX460 isn't the latest and greatest, but the TDP is up there and requires a decent amount of cooling. According to the sound meter on my phone (which is probably inaccurate), the noise level is 2-3dBA above ambient noise, sitting at my desk right next to the PC. Hard drive search noise is subjectively the most apparent, and it's still very mild due to vibration-damped mounting and could be solved completely by either using quiet laptop drives or SSDs. Heck, I'm even using the stock AMD CPU cooler, which is surprisingly quiet when you let the motherboard control its speed.

I make do with a well-designed case and some very quiet fans running at reduced voltage. Antec make some really nice cases for quiet computing, with layered panels, vibration-damped hard drive mounting etc., and I've found that BeQuiet! makes some of the best quiet fans that still provide good airflow.

Building a quiet yet decently-powered computer is not hard, you just have to start with the right components, and the case+fans+PSU are the most important by far. The case needs to be steel, relatively heavy to dampen vibrations, have multi-layered panels and soft rubber feet. It also needs to have space for large fans, the bigger the better. 120mm or even 140mm are prefereable, since they can still deliver good airflow when running at 7v instead of 12v for reduced noise. It also matters a lot to have the inside of the case as free of clutter as possible, the time taken to properly route cables really pays off in the end.

Are you telling me that the $6, ~6.5lbs side table I just bought isn't solid wood? The nerve!

Riced up hipster case? It's black, rectangular and has no bling aside from the manufacturer's logo.

I think perhaps you have no fucking clue what "riced up" means.

I don't know which CD version of the album you've heard, but the one I own sounds great, good dynamics, all of that richly layered signature Boston sound is intact. According to Allmusic.com, there have been 14 different CD releases of that album. I'm away on vacation at the moment, so I can't tell you which one I have.

It's a lot more complex than that.

Some of the best-sounding albums I own on CD were originally recorded on analog media. Like for instance Boston's first album, or basically anything produced by Alan Parsons back in the Pink Floyd and The Alan Parsons Project days. They sound great on LP, they sound great on CD, they sound great as FLAC files on my PC. The reasons is that the people doing the recording, mixing and mastering knew exactly what they were doing. They knew the benefits and drawbacks of the whichever medium they were targeting, and tweaked the mixes, levels and equalizing to suit.

You simply cannot just throw a spot-on mix made for LP on a CD and expect anything but a mediocre result, and vice versa. The basic reason for this is a vinyl is honestly pretty crappy. Low frequencies a noisy because of the RIAA equalization needed, high frequencies roll off around 12-15kHz at the most. And that's before you get into the massive problems with dust, scratches and wear and tear. Thus the mastering needs to work around these issues, and by the time the the CD was coming onto the market, LP mastering was pretty damn good, so people just threw those same masters directly to CD, with mediocre results because the medium was completely different. Some techs even forgot to apply RIAA equalization to their masters, leading to extremely tinny and weak-sounding CD releases, creating the idiotic audiophile myth that all CDs sound bad "because they're digital". Absolute bullshit, a CD will give back exactly what you put into it, every damn time.

Vice versa, some modern LP releases have been lazily created from straight made-for-CD mixes, without compensating for the drawbacks of vinyl. The end result is a shitty, often severely overdriven and distorted sound. Luckily, some modern vinyl releases are seriously great. Blackwater Park by Opeth sounds amazing on vinyl, and there is a definite charm to peeling an LP out of its sleeve, putting it on the turntable, giving it a quick wipe with the carbon fiber brush and carefully dropping the needle into the groove yourself. Another example is Californication by RHCP, where the CD sounds like absolut shit due to the techs turning everything to 11 like a pack of shit-flinging monkeys, but the LP sounds great because you simply cannot overdrive an LP like that without destroying everything, so they were forced to make a better mix.

For some albums, I listen exclusively to good FLAC rips of the vinyl edition, because of the massive difference in mastering quality. Sure, the noise floor is much higher and there is some definite high-frequency roll-off, but I much prefer that to the "everything louder than everything else" approach that a lot of CDs have been mastered to. I could burn one of those vinyl FLAC rips to a CD and play it back to you on my inexpensive CD player, and your would swear I was playing an LP. Why they couldn't just put those well-crafted mixes on CD in the first place, I have no idea.

So what you're saying is that if music is catchy, is easy to sing-a-long to or has a nice danceable rhythm, which in turn causes it to become popular, it is automatically crap?

What a sad sad life you must lead.

I'm pretty certain that by "effective" they mean "something that is in effect", not "something that is very good at its function".

Fairphone manages to do pretty well on specs for €325 per phone, with an initial production run of 25,000 phones, while using ethically-sourced minerals, recycled plastics, reasonable wages and working conditions and so on:

http://buy-a-phone-start-a-movement.fairphone.com/en/specs/

Admittedly there's no 4G, it hasn't actually shipped yet (they should start shipping out in December) and it's running Android, so the software development costs are lower. But building a decent phone at those sorts of prices is definitely possible, even for relatively small production runs. I'm waiting patiently for my Fairphone, but I'll definitely be following Jolla closely. From their press releases and general design ideas, it seems like they've managed to retain some of the brilliance that Nokia used to have.

And you think this person should be grateful for the meagre scraps they receive in return for their back-breaking labour, because they could have gotten nothing instead? Is "struggling to pay for food, let alone housing or clothes, every single day of the year" equal to "gainfully employed" in your mind?

Screw that, let's pay those people a decent wage and work decent hours by local standards instead. Stop exploiting them. Help them get on their feet and move forwards instead of keeping them stuck in squalid no-hope lives, just because we rich, fat, lazy westerners want the latest gadgets as cheaply as possible.

Luckily, enterprises such as Fairphone are trying to make a difference, by supporting better working conditions, using only ethically-sourced minerals and recycled plastics, and by being 100% open with cost breakdowns down to the last cent of exactly where the money you pay for your phone is going. A percentage of that money goes directly to improving working conditions for the miners and assembly workers, as well as locally establishing responsible recycling and e-waste management.

Google, Apple, Samsung, Motorola, HTC etc. etc. can't match that, because they've grown fat and lazy and far too focused on their own greed.

Just disable automatic updates in the Play Store. That way, it will just notify you that updates are ready for some of your apps, letting you choose when to install them.

Absolutely, and I hate it so much. Try finding a tablet with a user-replaceable battery, it's nearly impossible. My Asus Transformer Infinity is still a pretty beefy tablet, with a great screen on it. Am I just supposed to throw it away when the battery dies, or send it to Asus so they can replace the battery for a ~$100 fee? When the time comes, I'll definitely try to replace it according to ifixit.com's guide, but it's still a major hassle.

Which is exactly why my next phone is going to be a Fairphone. Everything about it is designed to be as long-lived as possible. User-replaceable battery and the whole phone is made to be serviced by a savvy user with a standard micro screwdriver set. And it's made with conflict-free minerals by decently-paid workers, which is pretty cool too.