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What laptop doesn't have a webcam these days? I thought those were integrated in just about everything since I bought my Acer Aspire One over three years ago (which is still working just fine, battery life and all). The AAO is shit for upgrading (it's maxed out at 1.5 GB of RAM and of course the Intel graphics suck) but it did pack a bunch of features into its tiny shell and they all work. The Atheros wifi is replaceable, if you find it to be too flaky.

On the non-netbook side, I got an Aspire 5253 (1.6 GHz E350, so 2 cores and a Radeon all on-die). Frankly, 2 GB was disappointing for everything but light gaming or running Cubase in a live setting (which is what I bought it for) until upgraded to 8 GB. I ended up trading it with a friend in exchange for a similarly specced Dell, except that it has Intel video (which is fine, I *never* game on this dedicated unit). He drags the Acer around everywhere, unless the Dell does something it doesn't (like drive S-Video output) and I have to lend it back. The HD in the Acer was also disappointing in speed terms (250 GB was OK in space terms) but when I found my 500 GB external drive to be too small and replaced it with a 1 TB drive, we reassigned the drive to the Acer. After these two upgrades, the Acer performs quite admirably for most tasks. I wouldn't want to use it for encoding video because I have a 6-core desktop machine, but it's only marginally slower than the 2.4 GHz dual-core desktop machine I had previously (which ALSO still works just fine, I lent it out when my cousin's laptop died).

Basically, get something that's built solidly enough to take the knocks you expect to dish out and has the features you need (or the known ability to add them, if it's short on RAM). I don't see that it's worth worrying about much else.

If you want to know if an upgrade is possible, don't ask around IF you can do it. Ask HOW. If it CAN be done, chances are very good that someone already HAS.

It's a shame that this is basically a means of identifying short recordings, rather than actual speech recognition. If they'd achieved 99% success at turning six spoken words (with obscuring noise) to text, that would actually be a significant advance in speech recognition rather than a means to attack one specific implementation. It would come in very handy for interpreting someone trying to yell into the phone in a noisy environment. It might even greatly reduce the texting-while-driving problem, if people could trust that they could SPEAK their outgoing texts rather than having to type them or at least proofread them.

I think that's one reason hockey isn't more popular as a spectator sport. Other big sports come in bite-size chunks, good for both the casual watcher who wants to have a social event AND the stats-obsessed geek. Hockey might go 10 seconds from face-off to having the puck deflected out of play, or it might have 5 minutes of continuous end-to-end action during which it is hard to talk AND pay attention sufficiently to understand the flow of the game. Soccer suffers from much the same problem. I have a feeling that's just TOO MUCH WORK for most people, and they consequently find these sports "boring". It's not that there isn't enough going on, it's that it requires dedicated watching that most people don't want to give. It's also why following a play-by-play commentary on radio is taxing if you know the names of the players on at least one team, and downright incomprehensible if you don't. The small size of the puck used to be a problem for televised hockey, but it's much less of an issue in HD. HD has also allowed the cameras to take a wider angle and show action significantly away from the puck. (This is also a great boon for football and basketball, or any other sport with significant strategic happenings away from the ball. It's NICE with baseball but doesn't really contribute that much to comprehension, as baseball is very "quantized".)

Baseball has innings and at-bats and individual pitches. Basketball doesn't stay stopped for very long early in the game, but at the end of a close game (the only time most people REALLY watch closely), there are many stoppages. Football has plays, and also has similar stoppage tendencies at the end of a close game. Both "goal" sports feature fairly high levels of scoring, so it's pretty easy to tell which team is out-playing the other (where both hockey and soccer can fall into a defensive "wait for the other team to make a mistake" mode which is highly effective but DULL). They also are all fairly amenable to verbal description of the action and thus radio-friendly.

For me it depends how familiar I am with the music. If it's cheesy pop, I can be familiar with the song by the time they get through the first verse -- the rest of the song is essentially the same shit with sometimes different lyrics. If it's complex, I may require years and dozens or hundreds of listenings to be able to call it familiar. Once I get to that level, I can use it as background music, because I can mentally fill in anything I missed due to attention to another task.

What really drives me nuts is watching a plot-and-dialog-driven TV show or movie, with other people in the same room who insist on talking about tangents the entire time. First I move closer to the TV, and if that doesn't work well enough to let me follow what's going on, I leave. I'd rather give up and miss the whole thing than catch bits and pieces of it and not know what is going on or why. If it's broadcast TV or a DVR, I'll probably retreat to another room and complete it there. I've given up complaining, but when someone finds I'm in another room watching the same thing they are, ALONE, they can usually figure it out.

I've been known to wear headphones at the poker table, without bothering to run a signal through them. I'll also hum vaguely, and "dance" a bit in the chair to music that's not there. It's amazing how much people are willing to say on the assumption that I can't hear them.

Isolation booths big enough to house a person doing narration can be had for a few thousand dollars. Ones big enough to hold an entire large drum kit, maybe $10k. Sure it's not free, but it fits in a normal residence and pays off quickly when compared to studio time.

Why not reference the synopsis on Memory Alpha?

MHz? Try just plain Hz. A "tick" (the minimum unit in redstone circuitry) is 100 ms. If you set up a circuit to run on both the rising and falling edges of the clock, you get a whopping 10 Hz.

That's vanilla Minecraft, it appears the mod may double the speed. It also appears that the 6502 emulator can run multiple operations per clock, but you're still talking about something a couple orders of magnitude slower than the original 6502 in operation. I don't use any of these mods since I'm almost exclusively a Multiplayer player (which means such mods have to be server-side) but have designed plenty of redstone circuits in the vanilla game. Even something as simple as a binary counter still has significant latency problems -- my 5-bit counter would take up to three or four seconds for all bits to stabilize after it was incremented, and in a worst-case scenario, a five-second reset signal was required to flip all bits to zero (otherwise the low bits flipping to zero after the high bits had already cleared could cause the high bits to flip again). Redstone is S-L-O-W.

Also... which pet? And when? Pets get old and die, and I've had some online accounts longer than the lifespan of your average cat, dog, or parakeet.

We're talking about struggling against a system that lacks due process. Sometimes it is necessary to fight as dirty (or dirtier than) the established forces if you want to accomplish your goal.

If the U.S. government likes you while you do it, you're a Freedom Fighter. If they don't, you're a Terrorist.

Sometimes there is no "better", only dead or alive.

Last weekend, I took in a damaged Onkyo stereo receiver. The headphone jack was missing, and the switch for the "B" speaker set was stuck ON. I didn't even repair it -- I promptly hooked it up to the living room TV to replace a cheap-to-middling receiver from the late 1970s. I hooked the main speakers to the "B" posts since there's no need to turn them off, and if someone wants to watch TV with headphones (which we sometimes do), well, the TV has a headphone jack of its own and the amplifier need not even be used. For some reason, it did not want to pull in FM reception using a splitter on the TV's rabbit ears and I had to run a second antenna. We HAVE a 5.1 system, but the wires and satellites have been deemed too ugly and too prone to accidental tripping so it sits in the box unused.

I decided to put it to use as is because there was nothing wrong with it that wasn't trivial to work around, and this particular unit sells for $170 NEW, with free shipping. Still, that is $170 NOT spent, and money saved is better than money earned because it has no paper trail (and thus no taxes).

The prior weekend, we repaired a 30-year-old alarm clock whose buttons had long since stopped working (it was being used only as a radio but is fully functional now) and cleaned up an equally old toaster oven and put it back into service. It's not like a newer toaster oven is going to convert electricity to heat any more efficiently than an old one! I can see a point to replacing a refrigerator or a washing machine or a dryer or a dishwasher or even a stove (pilotless does save gas), but a toaster oven?

I'll ditch really old computers. Generally I will dump them when even the poorest of my friends and acquaintances have something better, and I have no practical use for them myself (even as backup). Those who have nothing will take what they can get.

Never seen a PayQuick terminal at ARCO? Granted I've never owned a car that was happy with ARCO gas and typically do what I can to avoid fueling up there, but they accept bills just fine.

Paging override can be done simply enough at the output end with amplifiers that have an input override. This is not limited to particularly expensive amplifiers -- the one I use every day has this ability and cost less than $100. Certainly they're going to want more than 50W/channel (except perhaps where the speakers are more or less right next to the people), but the point is that this provision exists in a lot of off-the-shelf equipment and its primary purpose is to provide a paging override in commercial installations.

The one glitch is that it requires a certain level to activate the relay to switch inputs, meaning that it can clip a fraction of a second. The easy fix is to have the paging system send a slight DC bias (or a short tone, which you know will be dropped at the output due to the relay lag) whenever the Talk button is pressed. That way the relays on the amplifiers will switch inputs BEFORE the person doing the paging starts talking. The same glitch means that the paging system does have to have low noise levels when NOT active, or the relays will stick on the Paging side, or (worse yet) bounce frequently between the two states.