I want my fridge to remain at the temperature to which I set it, I want to be warm when I am active (or cooled in the summer), and I want my water to be hot when I need it, not when you think it's good for you.

I had that kit and loved the voltage step up kit. I built it and then hooked it up to my brother when he was napping and turned it on. He was pissed at first then fascinated to see a 9V battery did that to him. :-D

> The "universal" charger did not charge an 18650, because it was a quarter inch too short. I was pretty shocked.

Oh come on, the voltage isn't high enough. ;)

> . They were openly hostile to the few that ventured in, demanding name, address, and phone number for the privilege of buying a battery.

I once bought batteries there paying cash and didn't feel like getting on their mailing list so when they asked my name I said "cash" and held up a $20 bill. The clerk remarked that that was fraud. Fraud? Really? Because I'm making a wisecrack to inform him I'm not giving him junk mail info? How am I defrauding the store by paying cash for frigging batteries?

"You can get more stuff done with Facebook than any other tool that we know of, and we'd like to make that available to the whole world."

I dunno, a private jabber server works fine for us and is far more secure than Facebook.

Good - so give SystemD to the Hurd fanatics and give Linux users SysVinit back. :-p

Maybe they should roll X, the desktop environment, and hell, why not imagmagick and gimp into Systemd already?

Systemd sucks for the enterprise, and there wasn't anything really wrong with SysVinit. Yes, init was antiquated but it fucking worked and it is stupid-easy to navigate and troubleshoot very, very quickly - and very easy to extend init scripts with additional commands. You simply can't do it with systemd.

Whatever happened to the UNIX mantra of a single tool performing a single task, and perform that one task extremely well? Systemd does far too much, and not any one task particularly well. "runlevels" are overly complex to configure, it totally fucks up syslog and boot logging (logging to binary files? Really? Dafuq?), and a true single user mode is now history, requiring you to boot to an alternate directory or from a boot disk if you need emergency access. Oh, and it fucks up networking by changing NIC names. What the hell was wrong with eth0 and eth1 anyhow? I know the MAC address of a given interface. I don't want names generated by "location on the board;" I want eth(n).

It sucks that RHEL has jumped on the SystemD bandwagon along with everyone else. I think RedHat have lost their minds; I think a PHB saw SystemD and said "oooh, shiny" and saw that Ubuntu and OpenSuSE were riding the bandwagon. The thing is, I'm okay with it on the desktop; if a desktop crashes no big deal, but if a server breaks it will be far more time consuming to recover if a given tape is not available and we need to wait on Iron Mountain.

I hope whoever made the decision to go with SystemD at RedHat dies in a fire. Seriously. SystemD takes on far too much, and goes against everything *nix is supposed to be about.

One tool should perform a single task and perform that one task perfectly.

> blacks that are actually black,

I call shenanigans. ;)

> near perfect color reproduction

LCDs surpassed CRTs a while back with IPS and derivative technology screens.

I just got rid of CRTs that cost over $1500 back in the day. I gave away one and recycled the rest and have only one left. I was keeping them for the vertical resolution but now that good 1440p and 4K monitors are in the $700-$850 range I didn't need the other CRTs any more. I am keeping that last one until I feel like dropping the coin on one more high resolution monitor.

Good riddance to CRTs. I always hated that sound. Every so often when I go to an office that has an old TV running, ugh. That sound always drove me nuts.
When composite-input TVs came out my dad would leave the TV on with the cable box and VCR off and I'd ask him why the TV is still on. He'd say "it's not on." It most definitely was and that annoying whine was driving me batty.

I used to take apart my TVs to put baffling in to cancel out that sound. I am 43 now and I can still hear past 17.5KHz. Why? Because it was drilled into me by my mom to not blast my ears with headphones, and when using power tools I use hearing protection. I have an even greater appreciation for my hearing now because once I got a sinus infection so bad it spread to both ears and I had 95%+ hearing loss for more than three months when my inner and middle ears filled with fluid, and there was so much pressure it perforated my eardrums, so I'm even more strict about hearing protection having experienced near-total deafness for an extended period. Since then certain frequencies cause some pain due to reverberation because those frequencies seem to be amplified to me - it may be due to scar tissue where my ear drums perforated or something, I don't know and haven't bothered to find out.

But flyback transformer whine? Ugh. Same with PC power supplies that are going bad - they have a very similar high pitch whine. When I go to my old office to maintain the servers for my partners, I need to stay out of the lobby because the power supply whines like mad. No one else in the office can hear it.

"Intel's strategically timed CES 2015 launch of their new 5th Gen Core Series processors for notebooks was met with a reasonably warm reception"

Was the warm reception due to inadequate cooling in those laptops? ;)

So what is your opinion of intersex people? If you don't know what that is google it.

Bullshit.

From Intel's spec sheet for that processor:

Processor Base Frequency 2.7 GHz
Max Turbo Frequency 3.7 GHz

The rated full-time clock speed for that processor is 2.7GHz. The "max turbo frequency" which is intended for short jobs that are not massively parallel is 3.7GHz. This is not anything remotely similar to cable companies advertising 100Mbps where the only thing you ever see that speed is to their bandwidth test server.

Good. Cut down the number of channels. I now have about 900 channels of shit on the TV and nothing to choose from. Cut down the extra channels and deliver some quality programming. I'm constantly exploring TV shows that were on before I was even born - Hogan's Heroes, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeanie, and stuff like that. I couldn't be bothered with so-called "reality TV." My cousin was on one of those so-called "reality" shows and I never once tuned into it. No interest in that shit.

I'd rather go back to a handful of networks that offer quality programming, or better yet, loosen up "licensing" a bit so Hulu, Amazon, etc. can expand their offerings. I will not tune into "reality" TV shows. It's utter shit.

High resolution audio does not guarantee they have not compressed the dynamic range to shit. It just means that instead of being mastered at 44.1kHz they have mastered it at a higher rate, like 96kHz.

It depends on the source. If I am listening to jazz, classical, or progressive rock (Pink Floyd) the difference is immediately apparent - especially through my home system. In my SAAB with its crappy stereo that I cannot upgrade without fudging up the CAN bus (the stereo head unit is a CAN hub - can you believe that?!) it's not so noticeable but on my home system with Klipsch reference series speakers or through even just halfway-decent headphones there is a WORLD of difference between 128kbps, 320kbps, and a CD or high definition DVD or Blu-Ray audio. On my home system highs are nice and crisp with the source material but with compressed audio the highs are distorted - almost a "sizzle" sound.

With highly compressed pop music, yeah, it's not much of a difference. It all depends on the subject matter.