Speeding is far from the biggest contributor to traffic accidents. Illegal and poorly made left turns are far more dangerous and cause far more accidents - yet you never hear fo the cops setting upa left turn trap. Why? It's too hard and doesn't generate the revenue that issuing speeding tickets does.

FWIW, the Audi dealer still lists... must be at least 95% of the parts for my 80's audi, down to the nut. I don't think any american marque does that..

Of course they charge you for it, but they do carry it.

Legions more people who are getting into programming just because they heard there was money in it...even though they have no talent, interest or passion for it...

Perl went up in the ratings!

If I was running the Chinese space program, I'd put together a mission to the Sea of Tranquility, and bring bak some Apollo 11 souvenirs. It would be the most intense possible statement that there are now two nations on the Earth that have had the technology and will to travel to the Moon, and the USA no longer has a monopoly on it.

HA! I'm an avid sports non-fan. Years back, when they were starting to roll out cable TV service in Houston, they actually had door to door salespeople going around to sign people up. The packages available were clearly designed to extort as much money from the customers as possible. With that goal in mind, the service tiers that included ESPN and other sports channels were really expensive. I selected one of the less expensive service offerings, as I'd rather go to the dentist than watch a stick and ball game played on TV. The salesman was practically frantic, and threatened me that I absolutely wouldn't be able to watch ANY sports with that selection. I laughed in his face and asked if there was any way he could guarantee that no sports would leak into my channels. He left shaking his head - clearly, he'd never met an avid sports non-fan before.

Bullshit. Harper lives to bend over for Americans. He'll do it without them even asking.

I'm not british and like jaffa cakes. orange and chocolate is an awesome combination.

Yah, you're on to something here. I have thousands of hours of music available in digital form (most of it ripped lossless to FLAC). What I really enjoy listening to, though, is my old reel to reel tape deck. Even thought the fidelity is dramatically less than my digital collection, I enjoy thinking about the magnetic domains gliding by, being picked up by a coil and amplified into music. The dance of the VU meters is also hypnotic to watch, in time with the music.

Lithium cells are pretty benign in general. There are a few variants in chemistry, the worst would probably be the cobalt based ones. (others use various combinations of iron, nickel, manganese, and phosphorous, which are pretty tame). Though the cobalt variants are quite common.

NiCd is far worse, cadmium is fairly nasty... much more than cobalt.

In every 'dead' laptop battery I've torn down, one cell (or pair, in parallel) is totally kaput, and the remaining cells retain at least 50% of their nameplate capacity. Protection circuitry will lockout recharging of the whole pack, which wouldn't work with the dead cell anyway.

So the battery as a whole is utterly useless for the laptop, but 2/3rds of the cells or more have some life left in them, for other purposes.

I imagine a lot of the too-cheap-to-be-true off-label replacement laptop batteries are in fact combinations of two dead ones, with the remaining functioning cells rewired into one working (but lower capacity) pack. Certainly seems about right judging by the performance of them, anyway.

I noticed that Intersil still makes a rad-hard variant of the awful RCA 1802. (you know, the CPU in a COSMAC ELF).

When I saw that, I figured NASA and or the DoD probably give them enough money to make it worth their while... so they must use that antique for something.

Hmmm...this reminds me of the story about operational analysis of bomber armor in WWII. Briefly, the Allies examined bombers that returned from raids, compiled where they had been hit by flak and machine gun fire, and started a program to armor those spots. Then they realized, that the planes that hadn't returned probably had been damaged in the spots that the returning planes had not been, and that's where the armor was needed. In this case, singling out the people who get arrested over and over, while not a bad idea, is focusing on the incompetent criminals - the people who are good at it will get arrested at much lower rates than the ones who are in and out of the system all the time.

With his hands in the pockets of his jacket, he stared through the glass at a flat lozenge of vatgrown 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?