Did you seriously just compare incandescent light bulbs to leaded gas and PCBs? And then claim that *other* people "don't have any idea what they're talking about"?

Fluorescent lighting, including CFLs, have been a massive unmitigated environmental catastrophe with the release of PCBs and mercury directly into the living environments, schools, workplaces, and food chain for most humans. Resulting in poorer health and lower quality of life for people around the world. Including you and me.

Can you explain how the impact of incandescent lights is comparable to this? How can you justify putting any resources into banning incandescent bulbs when noting is being done about fluorescent lighting? And what are the disposal challenges that you referenced?

Halon is still around in various forms but it's no longer considered to be the gold standard. From a risk management perspective it doesn't always make sense to play with hazardous, environmentally unfriendly, and expensive chemicals to provide imperfect protection to systems that are not life-critical and don't have hard realtime requirements.

And no form of fire suppression is an adequate replacement for failover, business continuity, and disaster recovery planning plus regular exercises.

I am around the same age as you, slightly myopic, and also spend lots of time in front of a screen.

My suggestion is the following: If you wear glasses, get a second pair that is +1.0 weaker than your normal prescription. If you wear contacts, get a pair of +1.0 reading glasses to wear over them.

Make sure they are decent quality glasses. I get mine from Zenni although I'm sure are many other suppliers. Absolutely do not pick up a pair of reading glasses from the drug store. Those are terrible.

Wearing these will shift your focus point as if the object you are looking at is farther away. Think of it like a simulation of going outside for your eyes.

Don't wear them all the time, just a few hours a day when you are looking at a screen. At first it will be blurry and you will have to lean in to see anything but you'll be able to gradually push yourself back to your regular reading distance. Stop wearing them whenever you feel any significant discomfort. It'll take a while to adjust.

I found this to help my vision significantly. I was able to reduce my prescription after doing this for only a few months.

I also suggest spending a few extra bucks to have the correction engraved on your extra glasses. After a couple of years you might accumulate a few different pairs and it can be frustrating to tell them apart.

Most electronics are pretty resilient again x-rays. In fact they routinely use x-ray machines for inspection at assembly houses.

I suppose it's impossible to rule out any possibility but it seems like there's an equal chance that it finally gave up the ghost due to some sort of mechanical failure or damage from a long-ago ESD strike. Early flash chips especially were infamous for gradually cracking through due to assembly issues. It was amusing to take apart a broken flash drive only to find the IC visibly split in two, while still soldered in place!

Wait, really? It can't handle a CNAME? If so, that's strange. I guess I have some reading to do.

The Surface Laptop looks nice but at that point I might as well grab my Thinkpad x201 and have a better keyboard than anything on the market today :)

I guess I have fond memories of using my old Eee PC rather than lugging around a proper laptop. I don't know yet if the Go can actually fill that role but it has a better chance than any other 10-inch device that I've been able to find.

You should have seen the look on their faces when I asked for a paper receipt. After some deliberation they sent the smallest guy crawling through the dust bunnies to get it. Apparently the printer is taped to the bottom of a huge table.

And yeah I'm fully prepared to use the return policy if I don't like it.

I actually bought one. I've been looking for a while for something that's lighter and has better battery life than my antique Thinkpad.

It wasn't cheap. $550 for the tablet part, $100 for a keyboard, and $100 to upgrade to non-crippleware Windows. You can actually switch to Windows 10 Home for free but it doesn't support Bitlocker. (WTF?)

Despite all the astroturfing I've seen about these online, no one else was looking at them in the store and the staff seemed surprised when I asked to buy it.

Really?

Don't get me wrong, I am all for fully-mechanical parking brakes and am also wary of the electronic ones. Especially the "smart" ones that that automatically disengage when the computer thinks that's what you want, those are straight up dangerous.

But I've seen the mechanical ones fail in all sorts of ways. It's something you have to keep track of and occasionally maintain.

Right now I have one of the foot-operated ones and the bracket is bent enough that sometimes the catch doesn't engage on the first try.

Once I saw the chassis screws vibrate free on one of the center-mounted ones, one day the driver tried to pull the lever and the entire assembly just lifted off the floor.

My favorite though was in a bus, the valve for the air brakes fell to pieces when the operator was trying to let passengers disembark. She sat there with both her feet on the brake pedal while everyone got off and had to go straight to the shop.

I'm absolutely willing to believe that I'm misinterpreting those tables. On second look is lists "Macro Tx power" as 46dBm and "eNB Tx power" as 24-30dBm. Without knowing the lingo it's hard to say but that could mean that the 5GHz stuff is limited to a more reasonable power level.

These articles are light in details and anything involving LTE is mostly incomprehensible to those of us who aren't in the industry. However I did find one report that makes it look like they will be transmitting at 46dBm -- 40 watts -- in the "underutilized" 5GHz band. Such high power levels feel incompatible with the claim of coexistence and more like a move to drown out unlicensed WISPs.

Also, LTE-U seems to be designed to function only if the operator also owns a licensed LTE control channel. If this technology is actually capable of coexisting with ISM devices, why not open it up for everyone?

That looks pretty nice. I've been using a simple robocopy script lately but it's not really ideal.

If 10 is anything like 8.1, the upgrade will silently stop your backups and remove your ability to access any backups made in the Windows 7 backup utility. I discovered that one the fun way.

The CX-10 nano quadcopter can be charged from one of those. The whole kit is small enough to fit in your pocket, which is pretty cool.

Many people on here are suggesting the use of wifi to avoid having wires going everywhere. Don't do that. Many embedded devices don't do sanity checking on their firmware images. A dropped packet could silently corrupt the firmware, or cause the process to stall for no apparent reason, or some other headache that you don't want to deal with.

In any case, these devices are on isolated machine networks and it's probably best to keep it that way. You should really just get multiple laptops. Once you get a rhythm going it's easy to babysit 3 or 4 laptops. You'll crank through the job pretty quickly and the constant motion from one to the next will keep boredom at bay for much longer than just staring at a progress bar.