Was hired to pack up and move a company. We moved in, and then because of reasons we had to move again after building out most of the new location. In the meantime they had most of the workforce work from home, and the more important server room equipment was hosted off site. They had a bunch of ancient servers to build against (pre vm days) including an ancient IBM machine. Don't recall the model. Two moves in, and setting up the new new seever room, trying to breath life into this collection of antiques. 40 minutes of waiting on big blue to come back to life, I took the case cover off. A while later I happened to look up as the hard drive finally gave up the ghost and caught fire. Right place at the right time, cool headed me, I yanked the power to that machine and blew the fire out. No big red button explanations necessary!

While the medical equipment is one use of helium, it has nothing to do with why there's a shortage. This sums up the situation, including new facilities coming online that pretty much will make the "ermegerd heliumz" you've spewed a moot point. http://www.decodedscience.com/...

Jenny McCarthy to protest this? After all, who can really care for all those poor autistic monkeys this will create?

I want a house that will allow me to be as lazy as I want. A TV room on every floor, with room for a couch big enough to stretch out in? I want that. Dishwasher with garbage disposal? Yep, that too. Enough counter space so that I can make dinner with enough horizontal space that I don't have to use the kitchen table too? Yes please. I'd also like a large detached garage, as laziness is an indoor hobby (or at least in the house) and the garage is where work happens. Running water, electricity and plumbing? There's a reason the "homes of the future" from as far back as memory and history will go really only have such usable innovations as microwave ovens and garage door openers. Being able to turn my lights on from the office? I don't really need that, and if I ever do I can get a programmable timer for lamps. Programmable thermostat? I can get one now for $30 for a REALLY nice one at Home Depot or anywhere else. I suppose a smart meter will tell me when I'm using the most electricity or gas, but SURPRISE, it's probably when I'm at home with all the appliances on! The law of diminishing returns for retrofitting a house with programmable toys will be in effect in short order, and money will be better spent adding better insulation or a roof, not a light switch so my dog doesn't feel unloved for 20 minutes before I get home.

I went through a string of slider-keyboard phones, as I prefer the tactile feedback of a real keyboard. The troubles with them were numerous though. The slide-mech always ended up "gumming up" after a few months of use. The keyboard layout was always less than optimal, because while the alphabet on the keyboard was laid out as qwerty, everything else was suspect. No Tab key, no control keys, etc... These phones also went through a series of failures of ribbon cables etc. Over a dozen phones in two years. The thing that sealed the deal for switching to a touch-key phone was crushing my left thumb in an accident. I have slight nerve damage, and pressing keys with that thumb was discomforting, at best. I don't really think this issue is one for the carriers so much as it is the manufacturers not offering them, or if it's on the carrier end they probably don't want to deal with the breakage issues with the phones. Parts counts on a touch-key phone will be lower, and without the mechanical part of the phone to go bad they're inherently more reliable and lighter.

be a violation of the first amendment? I would imagine you would need to force an ironic tag as well, if you posted a sarcastic post without the tag, sarcastically.

a microwave with more than 300 watts of power. I've never had the issue of hot outside/cold inside, my problems have always been of the hot outside/nuclear inferno/solar coronal mass ejection on the inside variety, regardless of where I've microwaved them. I don't even follow the instructions on the package very closely, just pull it out of the wrapper, put it in the sleeve, toss it in, slap the door shut, 3 or so minutes, and out comes an external breading hot to the touch with napalm in the center. Maybe there are just a lot of broken microwaves, or even more likely, people that don't know how to use them properly?

the government now gets to experience the same bill-creep the rest of us poor suckers have been subject to all this time.

The study makes the assumption that people will wait for the free call period after 9pm, and assumes that if more people were waiting for that point that we would see a corresponding increase in crashes, but from what I can gather there's no segregation of the data to show how many of the test subjects have data plans that are not unlimited in call time. I have to imagine that if you're waiting for 9pm in order to make a call, it's an important call and you'll make it from someplace other than the inside of a car. Most people without unlimited call plans still make short calls after and before 9pm if they assume the calls will be short and not significantly impact available billed minutes.