Yeah, I don't buy it. There are so many things wrong with this story that make it implausible, the least of which is that epoxy-filled devices are not intended to ever be serviced, as it is nearly impossible to do so without damaging them even more.

Assuming that your friend was telling you the truth, I bet it's probably more a case of him falling prey to a form of "greenhorn" joke, similar to what an apprentice or new construction worker would have to endure on the job site until they proved themselves, like "get me a left-handed hammer" or "go get me a bucket of spots for the spot welder".

This interesting mini-documentary by CGP Grey is totally relevant: Humans Need Not Apply.

Moley-moley-moley-moley-moley!

Ah man, I've got to watch Austin Powers again. What a classic!

And somehow the Dodge Viper made it in at #522 (5th from the bottom). What strange results...

I am simultaneously amused and disgusted by the imagery that your typo conjured; sort of like how I feel when I watch one of the Southpark episodes where the kids hug Mr Hankey the Christmas poo. I hope it was a typo, anyway...

Well duh, the next logical step is obviously to add sound by modulating the movement of the print head somehow (sort of like how you could on old HP ScanJet scanners in order to play music). Who'd want to play doom on their printer unless it also had sound?

Is it a linux VM? Or better yet, a VM that runs olde-tyme UNIX V7 on emulated PDP-11 hardware. Now that would be classic...

You forgot to add "present company excluded"..., right?

Anyway, reminds me of a George Carlin quote that I saw in somebody's sig once:

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” -- George Carlin

Not sure if the one you watched was "WWII in Colour" (by the History channel) on Netflix or not, but I watched that one and it was absolutely amazing, both in terms of its content, as well as the video production. Some of the film clips were still of poor quality even after restoration, (IIRC, a lot of clips they would have gotten from Russian archives were really bad), but in general the quality was phenomenal, all things concerned. You can also watch it for free online, apparently. Definitely worth your time, and I also plan on (re) watching this with my kids when they get a little older, too.

What he basically said was that all of the ancestors *on his side* of the family are all pure and without fault, but that his wife screwed everything up because she had an instance of colourblindness on her side. He probably didn`t even know about the impurity of her genes until the damage had already been done. Reading between the lines a bit, you definitely get the sense that the guy is a little pissed off about the whole thing and is annoyed at his wife...

touché!

I wonder if that sort of thing harkens back to the CRT days, when you were usually quoted the tube size (not the actual visible size). For example, the brand new, large-screen 24" TV you bought back in the 90's probably only had a 22" viewing size if you were to actually measure it. In your case, I wonder if Tigerdirect online was quoting the LCD panel size, while the box the monitor came in was referring to the viewing size...

I'm totally just guessing here, but perhaps it's only communist for those who can't afford to grease the right palms...

Harpoons in space ...for those as confused as I about what the hell the "Apollo 12 Rum Incident" was all about. Hint: probably some kind of "noodle incident"

Congratulations on your attempt. I'm not sure that having a functional drive would be any more spectacular, or would have gotten you any closer to total annihilation, though. All you blew was probably some protection diodes, which pretty much always go in the way that you describe (a pop and some smoke). You could have make the pop bigger and produced more smoke if you had powered your drive from a higher voltage supply, but I think that would be the extent of it. I once saw a youtube video of somebody destroying a hard drive using thermite. If you're going for total annihilation, you probably can't get much better than that.

For me, the next time I have a drive go and I need to destroy it, I think I might try and find an electronic motor controller and connect it directly to the spindle motor. I wonder how fast you can get a 10k RPM hard-drive to spin before it dies....