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What matters is that some devices are officially (without weird exploits) unlockable.
Yes, there are lots of other devices that aren't, but so what, fuck them. Just vote with your wallet.

Off the top of my head, at least Motorola, Sony, and I believe Xiaomi have unlock procedures. And IIRC the Nexus/Pixel phones were even actively pushed to upstream Linux by Google themselves and have always been unlockable.
Still plenty to choose from!

Trusted boot is a useful protection against certain exploits. And yes that needs to be at the chip level for it to be trusted (in the computer meaning of the word).
Unlocking comprimises that, and most people don't want LineageOS, and most people choose phones that aren't unlockable. So why then would they make unlockable phones?

People just need to educate themselves. Do you want to be able to put a different OS on, or modify it (when official support stops)? Then choose an unlockable phone. As long as people keep throwing their money at those future paperweights (for whatever reason), they will keep making them.

Then again, I don't live in the US with the power drunk carriers demanding locked bootloaders (heard something like that)

Of course, the drivers will probably be binary blobs.

Are there any ARM vendors actually providing full driver sources? nVidia made noises about Tegra GPU sources (outright stating that Tegra was not encumbered like GeForce was, and they were capable of such a release) but... ah yes, thank you google. Wow, nVidia released Tegra driver sources in February. Alas, all Tegra SoCs are allegedly vulnerable to both MELTDOWN and SPECTRE... all three variants, too. Whee! nVidia has put out a bulletin about these vulnerabilities, but note that there is not a whisper about Tegra anywhere in that document.

Is it presumptive to assume that their attempt to pretend Tegra doesn't exist effectively means that Tegra no longer exists? RIP my TF201.

I bought two Huaweis so far, basically to give away. Considered picking up one for me as a low end replacement for my aging Nexus, but that thought is well and truly gone, completely, forever. Probably Motorola next, since I am nothing but impressed with the last one and they seem to agree that unlocking is a thing.

BT in the UK have a per device preprogrammed serial number for admin access to routers - they have a sticker on the underside of the device with the admin password and the Wifi password.

http://bt.custhelp.com/app/ans...

You can still change both though.

It's actually not a bad scheme at all - it means most people who don't care about this stuff will end up with a secure admin/wifi password and if someone cracked the scheme people who do care would still be able to change it.

And it's better than the usual router scheme of setting the password to something dumb like 'admin'. Most people won't change it which means they're vulnerable.

NB - Nothing in this comment should be taken to imply that BT are not an awful company to deal with most of the time, I just think the password scheme they use on routers is actually pretty sensible.

NVIDIA's own Security Bulletin says that their GPUs are subject to Spectre and Meltdown exploits: https://nvidia.custhelp.com/ap...

Funny. There was an NVIDIA driver security fix on Linux just a few days ago. So nice FUD, but you really need to be a lot more paranoid. GPU drivers are updated for security vulnerabilities often enough for it to have been the first thing I thought of when I saw this story, which is to say that those updates occur way more often than they reasonably should.

It's incredibly simple to have a customer owned cable modem. Maybe your provider changed from DOCSIS 2.0 to 3.0 and it's time to get a new modem, but generally speaking, I'm staring at a cable modem right now that I own and don't pay a monthly charge for. Most cable company's even publish a list of supported models, yours included.

In fairness to the original complainer, it's much, much more unlikely to use your own gear with FIOS. Especially if your FIOS includes a non-Internet service.

Some cities in PA also have an Occupation Privilege Tax.

Mostly people don't bother with all this stuff to start with, and the manufacturers are so busy trying to sell new TV's that they don't even bother to build good one to begin with.

For instance, I just set up a Sonos 5.1 surround system. During the process I checked compatibility with my TV and I found this list of televisions that don't pass 5.1 surround data out the TOSLINK port under various conditons: https://sonos.custhelp.com/app... . Some only pass it from specific sources and some don't pass it at all. I'm lucky, my TV works under all conditions. Never mind problems with HDMI/HDCP/CEC/ARC compatibility.

I don't care about increased resolution because I can't be sure that the next TV I'll buy will meet my minimum specs. Purchasing is a gamble these days and once you engineer a working solution why would you upgrade? I didn't jump on the 3D idiocy and I'll bet you didn't either. Even if you have a 3D TV did you buy extra, or any glasses for it?

The producers, in a genius move enabled by "vertical integration", will add a new broadcast or regional flag or change an encryption key or some shit and stop making media in the old format. People will run like lemmings to Walget or TarMart to buy new equipment because the old stuff has been artificailly obsoleted. It's enough to make me stop watching altogether. Good luck selling your advertising time when no one gives a shit assholes.

I've seen in general, three lines of HDDs. Basic desktop/laptop drives, premium desktop/laptop, and enterprise grade drives which are designed to all wind up at the same firmware level to minimize issues when in RAID controllers.

However, a "NAS" hard drive? Is this something a step down from enterprise drives, but designed for a device like a Drobo, or some other solution that really doesn't care about background drives, uses RAID 5 or 6, and expects drives to blow out over time?

Are the Red drives designed to be paired or run in RAID arrays specifically, as opposed to the Green line that is made for power savings?

I always thought that the NAS/RAID drives allowed Time Limited Error Recovery to be specified, which would prevent RAID controllers from interpreting a long error recovery interval as a drive timeout and erroring out that drive and removing it from the array. The NAS and Enterprise drives do allow this option to be set.

I just bought a new phone. There's instructions on the manufactures website for unlocking the bootloader https://motorola-global-portal...
From there all you need is the included usb cable and Superboot.

No new firmware is flashed in the process, just a couple of files copied.

Yes. Next question?

I realize you're jesting, but that's only because you haven't seen the list of blockable things:

http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/46809/kw/parental%20controls/c/346,6679,6680/related/1

ie. It's not just "porn".

TorrentFreak *is* covered by that list and was therefore blocked.

I just looked at that list, and cannot see a relevant category.

Yes. Next question?

I realize you're jesting, but that's only because you haven't seen the list of blockable things:

http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/46809/kw/parental%20controls/c/346,6679,6680/related/1

ie. It's not just "porn".

TorrentFreak *is* covered by that list and was therefore blocked.

Well, I dug through the links to BT's list, and it seems web forums aren't on there. However, it's worse than you could imagine.

That's a trap. The mobo comes with integrated intel, yes. But in most cases the end user also has a discrete card. You can guess which one is actually used.

Depends if its WebGL in a browser nvidia locks you to intel: Option to select the preferred graphics processor is greyed out for IE, Chrome, and Firefox. and https://www.scirra.com/blog/ashley/7/nvidia-hobbles-webgl-performance-on-laptops

My POTS is much more reliable than the electric power - can't remember the last time, if ever, that it was down.

Would you notice? I notice the one-a-year or less that there's an interruption in my electrical supply, as some digital clocks need resetting. It doesn't matter if I'm in/awake or not, and a 1-second interruption is enough.

If I used the POTS phone for all calls while I'm at home, I'm only going to notice it's not working if I try and make a call, which is a small fraction of the week.

Example (since I have a BT line): http://btbusiness.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/12209/~/do-faults-ever-occur-on-the-bt-network%3F "BT currently clears 89% of business faults within five hours. We are committed to continuous improvement. Published network reliability statistics suggests on average only one fault in seven years."
So they are more reliable, but probably not more than 10 times more reliable.

Actually, that rule changed a few weeks ago: ...

From the article:
  - They are also retroactively reinstating the warranties of people who already asked for an unlock code and had their warranty voided as a result.
  - They are posting "return to factory images". (Nice pun, that. They let you flash your phone back to the factory image, which you'll want to do before returning it to the factory for service.)

I guess losing a touch more than a third of a billion dollars ($342 million) in one year CAN sometimes get executives to look at customer complaints and try to address them. B-)

MOTOROLA STRONGLY RECOMMENDS AGAINST ALTERING A PRODUCT'S OPERATING SYSTEM, WHICH INCLUDES UNLOCKING THE BOOTLOADER, ROOTING A DEVICE OR RUNNING ANY OPERATING SOFTWARE OTHER THAN THE APPROVED VERSIONS ISSUED BY MOTOROLA AND ITS PARTNERS. SUCH ALTERATIONS MAY PERMANENTLY DAMAGE YOUR PRODUCT, CAUSE YOUR PRODUCT TO BE UNSAFE AND/OR CAUSE YOUR PRODUCT TO MALFUNCTION. IN SUCH CASES, NEITHER THE PRODUCT NOR ANY DAMAGE RESULTING THEREFROM WILL BE COVERED BY THIS WARRANTY.

My experience with random Android devices is it's hit or miss on rooting. If you have a good OEM (Asus has been good to me) then it's not a problem. But if you have ones that lock it down it's not any different than having an iPhone.

Actually, it's a lot better than what you think (and much better than it used to be several years ago -- I looked into this the other day). Motorola, HTC, Sony and even some of the smaller providers such as Huawei all provide the means to officially unlock the bootloader on many of their phones. Even Samsung provides "Developer Editions" of their major phones that come with an unlocked bootloader by default; and of course every Nexus device is simply a "fastboot oem unlock" away from complete freedom. Impressive, no? There's now an awful lot of devices that you can officially install a custom recovery on and root out of the box, and it's testimony to the strength of the Android dev community that manufacturers actually want to provide this functionality.

Although I wish someone would port apt-get to Android so we can install apps like you can with Cydia.

Well, you don't really need it, unless you have a particular boner for apt-get. Google's own Play Store hosts many apps that do the same thing as those provided by Cydia; since Google has always promoted rooting rather than been adverse to the practice, there's never been a need to have a separate software repository for rooted devices. There are, of course, several other alternate app stores around should you wish to install software through non-Google means and be notified of updates.

um, another device does this.

http://looxcie.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/65/related/1
"Looxcie's Capture to Buffer feature that let's you "go back" and grab video moments from the past. Often times when recording you will see something that just happened and want to grab what you just saw.
In this case, you are simply accessing the last 30 seconds of our continous video buffer to create this "instant clip"."

Frankly it's linux kernel compatibility I'm most concerned about. If Fedora 18 comes out next week with an updated kernel which breaks compatibility with the current 7-series driver, what are the chances it's going to get fixed?

The 7 series will be supported on Linux through 2017.

I'm wondering if such a pipe system is used (or such a service is enabled) on the NVIDIA binary driver blob for the Linux kernel. Could that be another possible attack vector, or is that not possible with this?
.
NVIDIA for unix/Linux had another vulnerability earlier this year pointed out in the article at also at Nvidia's own customer web site http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3140 custhelp.com site for nvidia which showed that using VGA access to RAM allows indiscriminate access to RAM and possible escalation of user privileges with this memory access. Here's the comment from Dave Airlie at the email archive on seclists.org:

Notice how with binary blobs how end-users are screwed and dependent upon the provider of the blob to fix things. Nvidia didn't do anything until after public disclosure of the bug, even though they were notified of the exploit more than three months earlier.

I'm wondering if such a pipe system is used (or such a service is enabled) on the NVIDIA binary driver blob for the Linux kernel. Could that be another possible attack vector, or is that not possible with this?
.
NVIDIA for unix/Linux had another vulnerability earlier this year pointed out in the article at also at Nvidia's own customer web site http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3140 custhelp.com site for nvidia which showed that using VGA access to RAM allows indiscriminate access to RAM and possible escalation of user privileges with this memory access. Here's the comment from Dave Airlie at the email archive on seclists.org:

Notice how with binary blobs how end-users are screwed and dependent upon the provider of the blob to fix things. Nvidia didn't do anything until after public disclosure of the bug, even though they were notified of the exploit more than three months earlier.

the cited one from the grandparent was first known in 2004, not fixed until 2006

Not true. The advisory writer confused an X server bug (also exploitable!) from 2004 with the nVidia one from 2006. http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1971/~/linux---how-does-the-rapid7-advisory-r7-0025-affect-the-nvidia-unix-driver

and allowed someone to anyone who could make you display an image (e.g. in a web page) run arbitrary code in your kernel. It gets cited a lot because it's a perfect case study in stunningly incompetent security.

Also not true. It required carefully-crafted fonts and let you run code in the X server (which usually runs as root, but doesnt have to).

"My parents own a carry-out restaurant. They are forced by competition to accept EBT (food stamps)."

I don't know what they're selling via EBT, but to clarify for those interested...

http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/Retailers/ELIGIBLE.HTM

From the site: "In some areas, restaurants can be authorized to accept SNAP benefits from qualified homeless, elderly, or disabled people in exchange for low-cost meals."

http://asktheexpert.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5336/kw/buy%20meal/session/L3RpbWUvMTM0MzE1NDUxNC9zaWQvMXpORERZMWw%3D

(via the advanced search using term "buy meals" on usda SNAP FAQ dated November 28, 20011)

"In some States, restaurants can participate in SNAP as a meal service that serves special populations (e.g., elderly, homeless or disabled persons), and the restaurant has been approved to participate in this program. At this time, Michigan and California are the only States that participate in this initiative, with a couple of other States in pilot phase. Participating restaurants must offer meals only to these three groups of program recipients and offer them at concessional prices. Other SNAP recipients cannot use their EBT cards in these restaurants. USDA works with States to authorize restaurants participating in these special program where they exist. Whether or not States offer these special programs is totally up to individual States, not USDA."

Otherwise, hot foods are not eligible. Cold prepared items in retail packaging are allowed under normal rules.

So how should one produce a game in a genre traditionally associated with consoles so that one has something to put in a portfolio before one has a chance to move and work for The Industry? What are the most representative examples of a debut game in a console-associated genre among your "mountains of examples"? I'm having trouble coming up with Google keywords this time, but I did a couple searches on Metacritic, and it appears only nine PC fighting games (eleven if you count wrestling as fighting) and one PC party game in the past decade have met the bar of having been "reviewed by multiple publications" (that is, four). I realize I am missing something very basic, that I don't know what I don't know.

So how should one produce a game in a genre traditionally associated with consoles so that one has something to put in a portfolio before one has a chance to move and work for The Industry? What are the most representative examples of a debut game in a console-associated genre among your "mountains of examples"? I'm having trouble coming up with Google keywords this time, but I did a couple searches on Metacritic, and it appears only nine PC fighting games (eleven if you count wrestling as fighting) and one PC party game in the past decade have met the bar of having been "reviewed by multiple publications" (that is, four). I realize I am missing something very basic, that I don't know what I don't know.

There should be ways to detect the wirings and whether there is a mux and where, but the documentation is not available to the developers (maybe you can help us figure out how to do this, have any ideas? You can also 'petition' nvidia for releasing these specs: nvidia customer help ? )

Western Digital is pretty clear about things. They don't intentionally design their desktop disks to fail in a RAID. Other brands may work better for you for a variety of reasons. But you seem to be mistaken about what's happening with the TLER setting. In fact the desktop drives have no TLER in their firmware at all. Thus when they get bad sectors and have to reallocate, they end up bogging down and the array will kick them out. The enterprise drives do have TLER, which changes the way the error recovery works so that they don't time out. Why you have problems only with western digital, I don't know, because I don't know of any desktop class drive that implements TLER.

In any case, if you really are trying to have enterprise-class storage, there are reasons to go with enterprise disks (we prefer seagate). They spin faster (desktop drives are slower now than in years past even), don't power down, and have TLER. Sorry but WD is not doing anything intentionally to force you to the right product. They warn about the problems you state you had, and then when you had them, you blamed WD.

Anyway for those interested, see http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1397/~/difference-between-desktop-edition-and-raid-(enterprise)-edition-drives about this issue.

Google will do nothing to change their stance, but they will work to better integrate in to Android and make it so people want them not Baidu.

In what way is that not changing their stance? So lets get started with our reasonable demands: first thing is, not being able to drag a running app to the trash or equivalent is pure brain damage. Let's see Google climb down off the patronizing justifications for this design flaw and fix it.

Fair enough, I did not read the analysis by NMap, I admit that. :) Not understanding the stupid part or the seething hate but that's a different story.

Having read the analysis and then went perusing though CNet, I found this interesting bit on the vendor upload side: CNET DOWNLOAD.COM INSTALLER FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS.

See Stumbles, rather than just assume that CNet had an altruistic reason for providing a software repository, I assumed there would be a catch (in life there ALWAYS is a catch). In this case they clearly provide to both end-user and vendor the reason for the installer and the foreknowledge that they will be adding a piece of pre-screened software along with the install.

So in this case, the vendor, NMap, perhaps should have read the terms and conditions a bit more carefully. I know I certainly do before I enter any transaction.

Well there's no native client so you can't set up automated syncing to your account but you can access the files via your browser of choice. So you could manually upload your music collection from your PC and install the client on your mobile device of choice as long as it runs Android, BB, or iOS and tell your mobile device to sync with those files. You never connect the two devices to transfer files again.

3. Is my direct download URL still available?

Yes. Right under the main "Download Now" button is the direct HTTP download URL which registered CNET members can access.

http://cnet-upload.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2064

The WD TV Live HD Media Player does not contain the necessary hardware to support Netflix and some other commercial content providers, unfortunately. Happily, most of the other features of the WD TV Live Plus and even the WD TV Live Hub in many cases have been brought back to the WD TV Live where possible. As for Netflix Canada support on the WD TV Live Plus and WD TV Live Hub, this is supported and should be fully operational.

Western Digital KB 6612: NetFlix support in Canada for the WD TV Live Plus and Live Hub

Disclaimer: I am a technical support auditor for Western Digital.

As for the future, well, digital copies are actually a LOT harder to preserve long term. I myself have files that I can no longer open, because I no longer have a copy of the word processor "Sprint" running on MS-DOS 5.0. They're less than twenty years old, and are essentially unusable.

What file formats are supported by WordPerfect? Borland Sprint is listed. Grab yourself a copy of Word Perfect Office X5. It's available for less than $50 on eBay.

Hey OP, if all you found was addresses on Ancestry.com, then you're not making any effort to find information. They do have metric boatloads of data of all sorts for your money, but you do have to have a clue about finding it, and make the effort.

Definitely agree, the anonymous reader didn't try very hard. And records for living people are necessarily scarce because of privacy issues.

That said, I do agree Ancestry.com is a pricey service. Check out MyHeritage.com. You can do a free 250-person tree, or add more with payment. The software is a free download and use, and is pretty thorough. The online piece includes the ability to match to other people's trees and import their data to your tree.

Actually, just creating and editing your family tree on Ancestry is completely free. And there's no limit to the number of people, AFAIK. The paid service is just for accessing their database of sources and connecting with other users who might have overlapping family trees.

I have acquired a "ScreenPlay(TM) TV Link, Director Edition" to replace my old Emprex-1 which was nice but not perfectly reliable. It plays music (MP3) and videos (AVI or ISO) from SMB shares It also handles Mythtv streams allowing me to provide recorded programs over UPNP. When appliances like this fetch data from a network share you have a risk whether it will support your data format but the ScreenPlay seems to be sufficiently capable for my purposes.

I recommend this over many of the other suggestions for the following reasons:
      1. cheap - £80.
      2. Small - about 1cm high (smaller than a DVD case), slides in next to my V+ box.
      3. energy efficient, I think about 10 watts.

FAQ below:
https://iomega-eu-en.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/iomega_eu_en.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=22760
One recommendation I would offer if you bought one - put something over the activity LED as it is bright enough to read by.

Thanks to the story here about Bigpond's file library decision, in the process of further reading I found out about their discount offer, which they probably only want new customers to hear about. As an existing customer, I wasn't notified, though to avoid complaints of discrimination, is also available to existing customers.

Their file library decision has now saved me (cost them) $180/yr — plus I get enough extra allowance to download a Linux distro a week. Thank you Slashdot and the anonymous story poster.

(I know there are better plans from other vendors, but being so far from an exchange, I need to stick with cable to get decent speeds.)

What am I missing here?

Ok, I run wifi via an Airport Extreme and Optimum Boost (30mbps down, $10 a month extra.)

I have four Airport Expresses with AirTunes and PandoraJam sending either "radio" (AirTunes) or Pandora to each Express, each hooked up to its own stereo/wireless speakers.

I can send different content to each Express, which I don't think a Roku/Grace device can do. So what's the advantage? Serious question, not being rhetorical....

For anyone who's interested I wrote a letter to Sony Customer Support about this. Here is the letter I received as a response. Names were removed

Discussion Thread
Response (xxxxxxxxxxxx) 03/30/2010 04:38 PM
Hello xxxxxxx,

Thank you for writing us with your concerns for the upcoming firmware release and it's features.

The Playstation®User agreement states that we may update the system which may change the operating system.

11. MAINTENANCE AND UPGRADES
From time to time, it may become necessary for SCEA to provide certain content to you to ensure that PlayStation(R)Network and content offered through Playstation®Network, your PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system, the PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) system or other SCEA-authorized hardware is functioning properly in accordance with SCEA guidelines. Some content may be provided automatically without notice when you sign into Playstation®Network. Such content may include automatic updates or upgrades which may change your current operating system, cause a loss of data or content or cause a loss of functionalities or utilities. Such upgrades or updates may be provided for system software for your PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system, the PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) system, or other SCEA-authorized hardware. Access or use to any system software is subject to terms and conditions of a separate end user license agreement found at http://www.us.playstation.com/termsofuse. You authorize SCEA to provide such content and agree that SCEA shall not be liable for any damages arising from provision of such content or maintenance services. It is recommended that you regularly back up any data located on the hard disk that is of a type that can be backed up.

If you'd like to read the full user agreement, you may do so at the link below:

Article Title: Terms of Use and User Agreement
Article Link: http://playstation.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1109


Regards,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I just bought two of the WD Green 500GB drives to be used in a hardware RAID (Adaptec 2610SA, aka Dell CERC SATA1.5/6ch) on my Ubuntu-based server. I was going to format it in ext3. Will this problem affect me?

You should be immune. It seems that only >640GB drives have this problem. See the affected drives.

False. The advisory that claimed that was mistaken because they didn't contact NVIDIA first and confused it with an earlier X server bug (which was also remotely exploitable, thank you very much). The actual problem only existed in two beta driver releases and never existed in the legacy drivers.

See the NVIDIA response for more details: http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nvidia.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1971

The affected drives are listed on Western Digital's site.

In 2005 there were 18 orbital commercial launches worldwide, of which 5 were licensed by the FAA. Those 18 launches represent 33 percent of the 55 total launches conducted in 2005 for government and commercial customers worldwide. This marked an increase over 2004, which saw 15 commercial orbital launches worldwide.

—How many commercial launches take place each year? in the FAA FAQ

This means that the FAA licensed 1/11th (about 9%) of the total launches in 2005. That's not that bad, is it?

in the UK you pay for a certain amount of data transfer, and from what I understand can be charged for overages or cut off.

In the UK it depends entirely on your ISP and contract. For example, my ISP is Virgin Media, which essentially owns the entire UK cable network. They have no limit on data transfers or extra charges or being cut off. What they do have is 75% speed throttling at certain times of day after a given amount of data is transferred.
http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html

BT (British Telecom) has various options, some of which have extra charges per GB over a set limit and some don't. No cut off though.
http://bt.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/bt.cfg/php/enduser/cci/bt_adp.php?p_faqid=10495&cat_lvl1=346&p_cv=1.346&p_cats=346&s_cid=con_FURL_broadbandusagepolicy

1. I never said heat would break the lamp itself. I said that heat can fry the circuitry in the base of a CFL. The fact that you've never observed early failure from CFL heat death doesn't mean it doesn't occur. The Energy Star website agrees with me that this is a problem with at least some CFLs. There's your citation.

2. I certainly did not intend to imply that LEDs could not be used in refrigerators. I intended for the refrigerator part to be just about CFLs and for the oven part to be about both CFLs and LEDs. Sorry if that wasn't clear. The epoxy shell of LEDs would almost certainly melt in ovens (Epoxy apparently melts at about 375 degrees F), and although a fluorescent tube might survive, provided the ballast were located elsewhere, such an installation would require significant modifications to the oven, making it impractical to eliminate this use for the foreseeable future. And of course, when it comes to refrigerators, fluorescent tubes don't appreciate extreme cold, though LEDs could conceivably be used there, provided that the rapid temperature swings when they come on don't cause the solder joints to crack too quickly. I'd probably want to do some experimentation before I said LEDs would be fine there, but it's quite possible that they'd be fine.

3. LED-based bicycle lights and flashlights are a largely unrelated subject. These devices do not use any voltage conversion except possibly a current limiting resistor in series with the LED. The parts that are problematic in terms of requiring adequate ventilation don't exist in those devices because you're starting with DC instead of AC.

4. The failure mode of CFLs dimming is just one of several failure modes that these bulbs can exhibit. Other failure modes include the flicker of death (when the tube won't quite come on) and the electrolytic big bang (where the capacitor in the charge pump blow and the light fails to illuminate entirely). I don't have any statistics on the frequency of these failure modes. It would be an interesting bit of information to have. You know, now that I think about it, it might not be possible to get the flicker of death with CFLs because of the way their ballasts are designed. So it may just be the two failure modes---fading in brightness or suddenly going dead (or fading in brightness and then suddenly going dead).

5. I'm assuming when you said that your lights don't contain electrolytic capacitors, you meant that you spent more money to use film or ceramic caps instead. Unfortunately, most mass-produced devices use mostly electrolytic caps whenever they can because they are cheaper. Expecting your design decisions to be the norm is like expecting people not to eat.

If you don't use any capacitors at all, then how precisely to you generate anything approaching filtered DC without capacitors? And if you say that you use a full wave bridge without any smoothing caps like those @$&% LED Christmas lights that flicker obnoxiously as the light pulsing interacts with the facets on the bulb, I'm going to have to hurt you. :-D

The one in my shower light only got turned on once or twice a day, and would be on for 30 minutes or so. Yet it would die in a few months, even with an exhaust fan running in the room. The same bulbs in other areas of the house have lasted for years with more light cycles and other abuse.

See also the EPA energy start faq: http://energystar.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/energystar.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=2567

You can sent them email at:
        http://toyota.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/toyota.cfg/php/enduser/ask_intercept.php

You might want to tell them that you are opting out of any of their marketing campaigns.

What were they thinking?

RLH

Virgin Mobile here in .au are both official Apple partners and allow tethering, so it would have been pretty unusual if it had been disabled.

You have the 40GB model. Two USB ports etc is another dead giveaway.

http://playstation.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/playstation.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=232&p_sid=u1F*a*qj

Maybe you were lucky to get a bigger harddrive, maybe you bought it of somebody who then claimed it to be a model it wasn't. It seems to have happened to someone at least:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090220194654AAIWEMn

Blaming Sony, however, is just stupid.