These ran NiCd cells. Here's some TL;DR from NASA about a variant of NiCd they use(d), not sure if it applies here.

http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oc...

Short notes:
Fancy NiCd, Higher density and sealed. They rely on precise chemistry to be hermetically sealed units (lean on one element, for limiting and only O2 production).
High pressure at full charge (~60PSI at room temp), higher if things go south, Pressure drops with charge state.
Excess discharge causes hydrogen production.

So, tin can, pressure changing with charge cycles (metal fatigue over many cycles?), H2 production, O2 production... maybe there is some chance for catastrophic failure there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Though the units in question do have batteries, which have historically been of the NiCd variety, and are in this case as well. I'm not sure if any newer satellites use newer battery tech? (NiMH or some sort of lithium ion..).

Aluminium is 30+ cents a pound, that's enough to buy some glass. They'll have to steal 10x as much to make the same money, but...

Many do... but not Russia, which happens to be where the guy is.

It's thinned about 25-50% with naphtha so that it flows. "diluted bitumen".

LiFePO4 would be well suited to things like cordless tools and the like. iDrill?

There's no switching (or otherwise) power supply in a SD card though. Not much of anything other than flash and a controller.

Don't worry - the aliens are waiting for us to finish the process of nuclear disarmament - then it will be safe to proceed with their invasion.

I'd imagine more harmful to ingest/inhale uranium ore... in addition to radioactivity, uranium is also a heavy metal like lead. (in both senses of the term "heavy metal".)

However most ore is quite weak, with 1% being pretty decent... I think it's economical to mine it as low as 0.1%. A few mines in Canada are near 20%, though (which I suppose is related to Canada being the biggest producer... 1/5th the ore is end product, instead of 1/1000th!). Ore will often have lead and such in it as well (decay products), which is also toxic.

With his hands in the pockets of his jacket, he stared through the glass at a flat lozenge of vat grown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal of imitation jade. The color of its skin reminded him of Zone's whores; it was tattooed with a luminous digital display wired to a subcutaneous chip. Why bother with the surgery, he found himself thinking, while sweat coursed down his ribs, when you could just carry the thing around in your pocket?

"There's plenty of cases of electronics misbehaving due to exposure to strong light"...Around a million years ago, when the earth was young and laser printing hadn't been invented yet, I was an electronics tech working on phototypesetting machines. These machines (Mergenthaler VIPs) had a large zoom lens mechanism in them for producing different size print. One afternoon, a junior tech called me over because, he reports, "the zoom lens on one of the machines is going crazy". I get there and see that the zooms are running back and forth,. full speed, at random. I noticed the tech has a trouble lamp inside the machine. I turned it off and the lenses stopped their manic dance. He hadn't realized that the zoom lens travel was controlled by optical switches - the lamp turned them all on at once, producing the crazy bahavior.

It might be different in the US, but in Canada they always had terrible stock. So if your thing didn't have a broken lamp or speaker, or a dead battery - you were SOL, as they didn't carry anything else.

There's so much different silicon now that it isn't really feasible to stock even a small portion of it in every mall anyway, so most anything you fix you'll have to order in parts for...

It would have been more reasonable when I was a kid (and they only stocked a whopping 3 transistors and zero fets then, too).

Shoot, a feller could have himself a pretty good weekend in Moscow with all this stuff.

Though it requires active cables, which cost quite a bit more. So it might have a place for bleeding edge stuff, but not so much for economy.

You were lucky - here in Houston, if you pass the roadside breath test, the cops routinely charge you with being intoxicated on drugs, rather than admit you weren't impaired and shouldn't have been pulled over. That's one of the reasons lawyers here recommend that you don't take the breath test at all.