Happened to me but what's worse is it that the spark plugs had only ever been touched by the main dealer as part of a routine service (as required to maintain the service history). So even the "trained" junior mechanic managed to screw it up. Spark plugs actually popped out while driving, stripping the thread in the process.

I wouldn't trust them to fix it, but the little local garage round the corner rebored and inserted a new helicoil and replaced the spark plugs, all for about £130. Next day, whereas the main dealer wanted to charge twice that and do it the following week...

With senility, in various forms, it's no longer you suffering. You are not you any more. The memories, thoughts, experiences are all gone. You are just an animal. An empty physical shell. Probably sitting in your own shit.

No, I'd rather die. The trouble is I can only make that decision for myself while I'm still physically capable of implementing the decision, even though at that point I have some quality of life left.

Oh come on. Just. No. Suffering from which you recover, even partially, is one thing. Suffering of a largely senile old man? How can that be important?

The cat has more dignity because it isn't made to suffer.

I saw both my grandparents go through it, confused, in pain and - in their lucid moments - praying for the end to come.

Unless you want to run your own server, internet available, it's a way to have access from wherever you happen to be. Web interface, phone... whatever, wherever.

I use gmail, download all of it to my PC inside Thunderbird for archiving, and get the best of both worlds. Permanent local copy, plus ready access to incoming mail on my phone when I'm out.

I'm using Wunderlist for tasks and Evernote for notes, but I'm happy to use separate applications for each. The gmail calendar is good enough for me as I don't get out much :)

That's a good point, and one I had considered. I'd have preferred a separate screen, but the mini is underpowered and the pro is way over the top.

I figure I won't be upgrading any time soon anyway. Hardware improvements have tailed off, and even my old PC was good enough for most of my needs. I got the Mac in part because I wanted the screen and in part because I wanted to switch.

It's the best way to get a unix OS that can run commercial software. I need to use Lightroom and Photoshop. I prefer to use unix. I like a very high res screen. So the 27" iMac is perfect for my needs. YMMV.

Devil's advocate:

Why?

Most of the sites I visit don't require logins and so I can't see a reason to use https. Why would I need it in Wikipedia unless I'm editing it? Why would I need it on the internet archive unless I log in? Why would, say, the BBC News website need it at all?

Yes, for anything where you actually log on and do anything under a user account, https is important. I can't see any real reason for static content served to users who aren't logged on to be encrypted if it's just a news website, personal blog or whatever.

Encryption brings its own headaches to shared servers - name based virtual hosts being the obvious one. It's an overhead that isn't really required in most cases.

I see talk about trade sanctions and so on as a way for the EU to "punish" the US.

Germany are leading the way in that regard. I work for a UK company with subsidiaries in Germany. We are looking at moving various services in the cloud (management's bright idea), including Office 365 and one of the cloud based authentication services to tie it all together.

At the moment Germany are pretty much vetoing it. Nothing can be US hosted. That rules out Office 365 for email, anything running on AWS or Azure... unless it's hosted in the EU (or for some data, Germany itself) they tell us it's not compliant with their data protection laws.

I don't moderate, but that's worth a funny.

Unlikely, the market just isn't big enough.

Photoshop and Lightroom would be nice. I use a Mac because I need the Adobe suite and prefer the unix underpinnings of OSX to Windows (to be honest, having used all three - Windows, OSX and Linux - for a number of reasons I'm now happy on OSX).

Not so sure about Dreamweaver. I use it, since it's part of my Creative Cloud subscription and saved me searching out an alternative, but I'm sure there are plenty of better options.

I had a look at Concrete, but to be honest it's the ubiquity of Wordpress that appeals to me. I avoid plugins wherever possible, and the ones I do use are mainly on the admin and content creation side rather than presentation of content.

The popularity of it means that I can quickly find answers and code snippets when I want to do something, and I feel I have the experience to sort good suggestions from bad.

Do these unqualified people know how to use line break tag?

No, they're probably not serious about making money with the internet. They want to make money doing their core business and feel they need an internet presence to market it. I'd agree if selling online is a priority, Wordpress is not the way to go, but for a mostly brochure style site with a blog, it's fine.

I know someone who makes good money building Wordpress sites for small customers, and I've used it for a couple of personal sites and a small business site for a friend. It's not ideal, but it's relatively easy to hack (in the good sense of getting up to speed on customising it).