At last, we know why Gordon Freeman was so handy with the crowbar... AND the most solid clue yet as to why Black Mesa went blooey!

Thank you, sir! You've done us a great service!

Above posters have already addressed privacy. I agree with that.

But here's another reason: to keep market costs *real.*

When you pay with a credit or debit card, the card network charges the business some amount just for the privilege of handing over your money. This nibbles away at the business's profitability, ie: the reason they stay open to sell you what you're after in the first place.

With cash, you pay the same price, but the money stays between you and the business. You're not paying a VISA/MC/DISC/AMEX middleman for a "carry your money from A to B' fee.

Cash is more efficient that electronic in that regard.

Plus it makes it easier to fill up your piggy bank with spare change for a little splurge spending later on. (Can't do that with receipts!)

Yeah, I felt pretty good about the deadbolts on the front door. Until a thief broke in through the window to undo the bolt from the inside, just to walk right in.

That's when I learned two lessons: there's more than one way in, and thieves don't have qualms about breaking stuff.

All citizens are criminals until proven wealthy.

Did anyone else miscue the title as "eLEGO exoskeleton?"

Awesome unlock for Hawking, dude. LEGO Physicist is the funnest game ever!

Ignite-style presentations tend to get around this by forcing the speaker to advance a slide every fifteen seconds with a twenty slide limit. Result: five minutes of good stuff. The creed is, "Enlighten us, but make it quick," and this structure does a pretty good job.

I volunteer at Ignite New Mexico, and we've had dozens of fascinating PowerPoint presentations -- a weird paradox, I know. Even if you find a presentation less than invigorating, at least it's short. Chances are you'll be surprised by how interesting *any* topic can be, though.

Check out our YouTube channel.

The NAS I'm running at home has RAID5 and powers down the disks when not in use. It consumes about 15W idle. (Don't recall the model offhand.)

I figured I could map /home to that via SAMBA. It runs Linux underneath it all, but I haven't figured out how to get root on it yet, otherwise I'd try it out as more than a file server.

I'll look into the Linkstation, though. Thanks for the thoughts.

Meds, dude. Take a breath.

Otherwise, Flashblock will stop working and all those ads and banners and devil-may-care craziness will be UNSTOPPABLE.

Seriously, how can I strip out HTML5 content that I hate? What plugin can tell what should stay and what should go? Flash is the best thing ever for people who want to enjoy the web, because the Flash elements are easy to detect and discard before rendering.

I'm in the design phase of opening a consulting business (non-IT related) to run out of my home. Marvell's plugs look very attractive to me as a right-sized server for my modest needs. Email, web, file storage (especially with a RAID NAS or via DropBox) -- the wall wart looks just right for that kind of workload. I've worked in IT with big, fancy servers, and I just don't need them.

The alternative is to lease something like a Linode. I like the way Linode does business, but five months of their low-power service would buy a SheevaPlug. All I'm missing then is a static IP and the always-up cloudiness that Linode provides. The choices are tempting.

I really liked Paul Williams, too. He was the best engineered Muppet EVER.

The best feature about the IID is that is only has to be a little bit possible in order to be inevitable.

Still not a good reason to kill off MP3. It's still ubiquitous. It's what all *my* music is in. I want to listen to it on *my* stuff, see?

Is that so unreasonable?

The Creative MuVo in my pocket comes to mind. Bought that 2 years ago, works great, it's cheap, has a decent mic for voice notes and a user-replacable battery... It even pops apart for use as a usb stick with it's own little connector built right in. It's a nice little piece of tech.

Now I'm wondering why I now have to replace it by Apple fiat.

Moreover, I wonder why you're so hard to bring people into technology you've chosen as right for *you*. People are well within reason to complain. As technology expands, it can open up *more* options while retaining compatibility with what's been established to work in the past. Apple uses technology to constrain options. That's the crux of it.

Correction again:

Steve Job sticks fat wads of cash in his ears. "iTunesiTunesiTunesiTunes."