I have a dying relative that I visited a few years ago, with a Sony Handycam I got in 2004 that records DRM tapes. After her funeral I dug around in the closet and found a box with the recorder and a dozen tapes. However, Sony no longer supports their nine-year-old camera and doesn't provide USB drivers for it anymore, so the videos are apparently trapped on the tapes unless I can find an old XP system. They can only be watched on the little camera screen, and when it breaks they're gone forever. I really hate Sony.

Note that the quoted article says absolutely nothing about "weather on Earth". It's talking about "dramatic changes in our solar system", i.e. a distortion in the shape of the termination shock, which lies 75 to 90 AU away from the sun. That is an effective boundary between the heliosphere and the ISM, where the solar wind and the interstellar wind are equally dominant.

Neptune orbits at 30 AU, but the "solar system" is understood to extend at least to the Oort cloud, 50000 AU distant. Earth orbits at 1 AU which is well inside the heliosphere, where the solar wind is much more important. That's why these spacecraft have to look at neutral helium atoms, which are the only interstellar wind components that can actually make it down here without being deflected by solar magnetic fields. Outside the solar system they have a rough density of about ten helium atoms per mL.

This has much less influence on the Earth's climate than the "sunspot activity" referred to by politicians, but you can expect to hear a lot of crap soon, e.g. "Weather on Earth might be shifting in part because of human activity, but larger context in which the Earth moves has some trends to deal with as well".

The helium drops were coming down straight just a few hundred years ago, and now they're angled slightly differently... I hope we start hearing about helium rain in the House because this Syria stuff is boring.

The 16K cartridge was a standard extra piece on the ZX-81 system, along with your tape cassette recorder and your TV. People assumed if you didn't have the 16K cartridge, you must be a little kid or an initial customer still getting a good feedback from the keyboard. (Or a later customer, wanting to feel the keyboard feedback from his raw device again.) The cartridges were so standard that anyone with 1K or a third party 32K or 64K RAM pack was beset with incompatibility issues.

And Sinclair's 16K was a piece of garbage. The connection to the ZX-81 didn't have any gold plating and once the computer got blazingly hot, the contacts started developing oxide layers and getting fussy. The board was expanding, and the merest, briefest decoupling from the cartridge filled the screen with garbage. The ZX-81 did have a thin aluminum heat sink layer lining the outer black case, but its only connection to the board was a single thin aluminum prong sticking up to it.

Sinclair's reputation got cratered from its standard user experience. By the time you had typed in a thousand lines of strange BASIC out of a magazine, the RAM pack started wiggling around with every keypress. It always nailed you at your most vulnerable moment. It made everyone scream at least once.

Everyone was always swearing or lecturing: you should keep two casette tapes around, and every 100 lines, swap tapes, rewind fully, start recording, wait ten seconds, enter a SAVE command, wait a few minutes for the different-looking cassette-associated screen garbage to disappear, and then continue typing. If the permanent garbage appeared, you had to turn it off, let it cool for about fifteen minutes, rewind the correct tape, and then LOAD it once or twice or thrice until you could get the BASIC lines back off the tape.

Cheap no-name blank cartridges never worked for saving anything; you ended up starting over unless you bought (and kept buying) the sleekest, most expensive blanks. They had to take abuse well, which cassettes don't. I remember some insane procedures... always doing two or three SAVE sequences in a row, for later desperate moments when screen garbage come up the end, LOAD after LOAD after LOAD. I sometimes twirled tapes through with my fingers looking for any stretch that might have gotten crumpled or scratched, so I could dab krazy-glue on it, twirl the glue backwards into the cassette, make a new leader, and rewind to that from then on. Otherwise I quickly ran out of cassettes. My parents gave me a separate wastebasket just for them. When I did run out, I had to fish the garbage, and failing that, I would then pick out my crappiest albums and defeat their write-protects with a little scotch tape.

One trick that worked really well on the ZX-81 was the cooling system I developed. I was in seventh grade, so I fixed the problem recklessly. I filled a plastic bag with ice cubes, and left it on top of the case, at the spot where the aluminum prong "heat sink" came up to it inside. That greatly increased the temperature gradient up and down their cheap little 5 mm prong, and actually hardened the system a lot. You could type in much more code before the ice melted. (It yet crashed sometimes- this was still the eighties.) I still swapped cassettes in and out, but now I had two bags of water that I was also swapping in and out of the freezer, basically whenever that cartridge was plugged in. This system really upset my parents one day when they came into my bedroom and found a transparent plastic bag of hot melted water sitting on top of my Sinclair. I kept saying, "it keeps it from crashing!" but they never took me seriously. "Nothing keeps this thing from crashing."

Don't be an idiot. I did have trouble describing what the stuff looked like but it was a floating voltage, not heavenly interference.

I had my brain connected once to a pulse generator via a surface grid of electrodes. (This was before epilepsy surgery at Stanford, and most of the grid was on the right occipital cortex.) During this procedure they would send an increasing series of pulses of 5, 10, 20 mA etc. down to each grid position and ask if I saw anything after each one.

About 80% of the electrodes were actually kind of boring. They would produce a characteristic speckling somewhere in the leftward field of view at a certain radius and angle. Other electrodes made very weird stuff appear. One caused everything on the left side of the room to suddenly look extremely brightly hued. It looked like a grocery aisle with cheap fruit drinks. The colors got more intense with additional current.

There was a problem near the end with a bunch of uncomfortable hallucinations. Every tiny little point from the pulse generator had this upsetting weird look to it, like a kitten with its head crushed. They somehow weren't going away, and I started bitching about something seeming to accumulate in my field of vision.

They told me at this point that my brain wasn't correctly grounded to the bed frame. I wasn't able to ground it myself since all I could reach on the bed was plastic. As soon as they regrounded it, for a split second I saw some sort of bright thunderbolt approach from the left and sweep all the stuff away. It felt like a relief somehow but I'm not sure WTF I was seeing.

Yeah that's the downside- having melted the glacier, just so we can see a plant, was a bad idea. (Well, in the deal we were also able to drive to work and heat our houses and stuff. And minor details obviously deserve a little of our consideration.) But obviously these were just side effects from when we let our cryogenic botany crowd bully our fossil fuel industry around. They said "Dig up all the filth from the Carboniferous Era that you can find, and burn it fast. Then we can melt this glacier and defrost these little bitches within our careers." Of course scientists always think that because of their ideology. But they were lucky this time because it melted anyway for them, didn't it?

The second planet now known to be wasted by humans.

So fire all the cops, firemen, garbage men, and teachers in your community if you think it will just improve your tax return, and still keep you just as safe from criminals, fires, cholera, and idiocy.

It may have been the way one of them was planted underneath a Russian flag at an international event that did it.

My gun only provides you transportation to heaven and hell.

Yeah, maybe just indications of one or two more pressure cookers embedded among dozens of people.

The point of that rambling was just that these psychotics may have been Chechens, but not all Chechens are psychotics. The uncle is clearly Chechen but not psychotic. I should add no Czechs are Chechen.

and that right there discredits your rambling post.

Why?