Amazing is it 3 days later (across the weekend) that I am reading here and there are no on topic posts to be seen. So I will start...

My review of Eton's products:
The one which I purchased had terrible workmanship. Unfortunately, I purchased it as part of a fundraiser, so I couldn't return it.

The model I had was a combination solar, wall-power, hand-generator powered unit, with a radio and an emergency (LED) light for output. My complaints all center on one item; however, as that item was the main power switch, its lack of performance (or poor design) made the whole unit inoperative. The switch was a rotary switch which ( IIRC ) had four settings indicated on the housing. I don't recall exactly how the settings were divided, but they were something along the lines of off/charge, on/solar, on/battery, light-on (less sure of this one). Whatever they were exactly, the actual switch only had three positions. In none of the on positions would anything work. I could however get the radio to work by holding the switch between two of the positions, and that only when plugged into the wall wart. The solar cell would not charge the battery at all (as far as I could tell). I could get the crank-generator to dimly light the LED lantern, but only briefly, and I was never able to get the radio to work off the generator, nor charge the battery that way.

As I could not return the unit, I decided to see if I could fix it. I thought I might remove the defective switch and replace it with one (or several) of my own. Unfortunately, the construction was extremely cheap, meaning that the switch mechanism was actually part of the circuit board. I might still have tried to solder to the traces, but decided that I had invested enough time already, and instead just junked it, after removing the solar cell, the LEDs, and a few other potentially useful bits.

I can only say that as a result of this experience, I have avoided buying any more Eton radios, even if the feature set of the advertised products sounded tempting.

Slashdot.org doesn't nag currently, but if it did, would you pay for it?

And, for those who care... Same question for Beta.Slashdot.org? (Now I'm just trolling, but the first was serious.)

THANK YOU! This makes the motives clear. The attempt is not to kill the ebook industry, just the ebook LENDING that libraries and schools allow.

So there shouldn't by a problem... Afterall, this is slashdot.

Love may have intrinsic value, but unless you are in one of a few counties in Nevada, trying to extract that value may end with your arrest.

MSRT could also be MicroSoft Removal Tool... but that would just be a Linux install disk of whatever flavor you choose.

(what's new right?)

I never even thought to conflate Std Deviation and Mean Deviation prior to reading this article/summary. I just thought of Std Deviation as that bit of the normal distribution which captures ~68.2% of the values (for +/- 1 sigma). And Yes, I knew how it is calculated, my mind just didn't go that direction.

15 years? ... Newbie.
(but I agree with you. Some people just need to relax a little.)

Well with a name that sounds like a tool used by a meat packer, CleaverBot, who wouldn't be disturbed. Oh, wait... Clever like smart... same comment.

You probably weren't supposed to use that entrance/exit combination. I know of at least two other cities where such a situation exists and they have solid white lines (not dashed) and signage specifically instructing you not to do it. (people still do, and accidents still happen). In both cases there were surface street exits that very quickly convey one to the same place as the freeway multiple-lane-crossing maneuver winds up.

Sorry to hear about your accident and injuries, but you lost me when you wrote "...when you are between a concrete barrier and an elderly driver that doesn't notice your horn there aren't many options." Now, I admit that I wan't there, and there may not have been any options as you assert, but generally if one is hitting the horn, one would be better served taking some other action instead; like hitting the brakes or otherwise taking evasive manuvers.

You mentioned defensive driving courses. As I understand it, one of the main tenents of defensive driving is "be prepared to control your vehicle, because you can't control the other persons vehicle" (Blowing the horn is essentially attempting to control the other vehicle.)

To get back on topic: This is the thing that the autonomous cars are actually quite good at, reacting to exactly what is happening, not what the "driver" is expecting to happen. That and not over-reacting; such as the tendency for people to steer out of one accident and right into another (often a worse, head on accident).

Replace the groups above with "The Democrat Party" and the change the country to the US and, unfortunately, it still applies. (Ok, you can't literally do the subsitiution and have it work, but the thought is the same. Promises, promises--> election -> things go downhill. )

The worse part is that Republicans in the last 20 years or so haven't been much better (only slightly). Thus the problems that we are in domestically.

As I understand it DDT was used in matresses specifically to kill/prevent bed-bugs, and was very effective. This is part of the reason that the US/Canada has had many decades of being reletively bed-bug worry-free (or at least it has been uncommon). The problem with DDT was that it was found to persist into the environment, would get into the fish, which were then eaten by birds, which resulted in soft egg-shells and the decline of species such as the California condor and bald eagle. This is why it was banned in 1972.

It has taken 30-40 years, the eagle population has returned, but so have the bed bugs.

I think you are slightly confused. You have it right when you are talking about the lack of competitive pressure increasing prices, but the solution is not to remove even more competitive pressure by switching to one plan to rule them all, which is essentially what Obamacare does. (You can have "competiting" plans, but they have to be the same, or you get hit for having a "cadillac plan".) The solution is to restore competitive pressure by implementing things like healthcare spending accounts (HSA) etc. which would place the consumer in the drivers seat for their own care. "... but doctor, is there a less expensive med that I can take?" (or test, or proceedure, etc.)

But this is where others start complaining that this leaves out the poor, etc. since they can't afford to contribute to a HSA. (I am afraid I don't have a good answer, except to say that Obamacare isn't shaping up to fix this issue either.)

Don't forget, there are people in Canada who come to the US to use our "shit" system, because they can't get care in a reasonable time-frame in their socialized healthcare system. It is well and good to have a "right" to healthcare, but if you have to wait in line for a year to treat something that is going to kill you in six months without treatment, it doesn't do you any good.

Let me expand on this post slightly. I too was going to point at the case currently in question as one of the better examples, but I was going to suggest that you have a hard drive that has NO encryption on it, but does have some unused partition space. (Perhaps from an old install of another OS, swap space, or some other ligitimate reason. In any case there is non-zero "noise" in the unused partition.) You are, in fact, innocent of any crimes, but have been accused of some data related crime. The police confiscate your hard drive and, finding the "empty" partition space, the courts say "You obviously have some sort of truecrypt volume here. Give us the password."

Since you never actually created a truecrypt volume, you can't provide the key, because it doesn't exist.

Without the Fifth Ammendment, you could be held in contempt of court for not complying with the court order. By claiming the Fifth, you are able to say "sorry, but no" to the order to provide the non-existant key.