... share all of the typical traits of lizards with one obvious exception. ( you get three guesses and the first two don't count)

to wit:
Snakes do not have true auditory sense organs. Legless lizards have true ears, as do all lizards.

Snakes do not have eyelids. Legless lizards do, along with all other lizards.

Snakes have a forked tongue, and a special chemo-sensing organ. Only a few lizards do, IIRC legless lizards do not.

Snakes have a short neck and shoulder region, a long torso region and then a short hip and tail region (yes, Virginia, motherfucking snakes have motherfucking shoulders and hips). Legless lizards have proportionally shorter body segments and a very long tail section, similar in proportion to other lizards.

Snakes cannot drop their tail segments, and if severed, the tail will not grow back. Legless lizards, like many of their legged relatives, can voluntarily drop their tails as distraction to evade predators. The tail will grow back.

Snakes don't chew their food, they always swallow it whole. Legless lizards, like most of their relatives, will at least crunch it up a bit.

Snakes have teeth that curve toward the back of the mouth. Legless lizards and most other lizards have sharp ridges on their jaws that act to help cut and crush their prey. Larger lizards have more obvious teeth, but they are straight not curved.

Most snakes have an unhinge-able jaw that allows them to swallow prey that is several times larger than their hinged jaw.
Legless lizards like their kin have a firmly hinged jaw. They can only take prey that can be crushed to fit their jaws, or tear off bite sized chunks.

There are many other more subtle differences. Of course, the DNA evidence also confirms that legless lizards are lizards.... and not weird snakes.

There was a thread on this in Slashdot not too long ago and it came up that the noggin and its enclosed brain may not lose consciousness for up to a minute or so after a clean decapitation.... I'd think there would be a significant amount of emotional and physical suffering experienced during that final 60 seconds. I tried to find the thread but no luck....

However Google delivered a number of references to the observations of Dr Gabriel Beaurieux-1905 (which at least one person in that lost thread referenced) who wrote of interacting with the freshly guillotined head of Henri Languille:

[T]he eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds. [After several seconds], the spasmodic movements ceasedIt was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: “Languille!” I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions – I insist advisedly on this peculiarity – but with an even movement, quite distinct and normal, such as happens in everyday life, with people awakened or torn from their thoughts.

He goes on to describe a further interaction by calling the victim's name again in a strong voice and again having Henri's eyes fix him with a well focused gaze that seemed even more determined. A third attempt to call Henri to attend, returned no response.

^^ This... Properly made and safety tested miniature AC adapters are expensive. The BOM for quality parts is not the main issue. It is the UL and other 'authorities' that verify safety compliance that raise the cost of these devices. Testing for compliance is far more expensive than the engineering costs for the device. For Apple or anyone else to do this, especially for international products, the compliance process is insane. This is why a lot of device makers DO NOT make their own AC adapters. Instead they buy one made by rather boring engineering companies that specialize in AC power supplies and call it good.

Those $5 USB adapters and other similar devices that are designed and made by fly-by-night Chinese firms have never been compliance tested, nor do they use parts properly rated and qualified for use in high-voltage AC adapters. Add blatant and visually convincing counterfeiting and I can quite understand why Apple has gone over the top to prevent their customers from being killed, and then blamed for it.

Bullshit. Full stop.

Perpendicular writes began in the 5GB drive era.

Bit/domain sizes are considerably smaller than the thermal distortion + the mechanical distortion of the platter, and stylus. They have been since the late 80's (hint if it has a voice-coil stylus, it is dynamically positioning, earlier drives used stepper motors, and could not correct for distortions, so tracks had to be rather wide, even when the bitrates were considerably higher).

It doesn't matter (much) because positioning of the stylus is done using a closed loop system that dynamically detects where the head is relative to the desired track. Since the thermal and mechanical distortions happen over fairly long intervals (seconds to minutes) keeping lock is fairly easy. There are issues: The closed-loop servo data is written to the platters during final testing, and for almost all drive types( now) is NOT rewritable. In the early days a lot of SCSI drives were capable of rewriting their servo data. Very few if any IDE and later drives could do this. Initially it was because IDE drive manufactures didn't want to write and test the firmware for this function. Later is became infeasible due to advances in servo system implementations that used specialized waveforms that the onboard controller, for cost and implementation reasons could not perform. Special signals are provided by the test/verification harness to generate the servo data, and the drive-controller passes this on to the write amplifier. At this time unit specific tuning params (because every drive is mechanically unique) are encoded and stored on the drive and in the controller.

Once that servo data is corrupted, tracks and sometimes entire sections of the drive cannot be read or written ever again, because there are some practical limits imposed on the closed-loop system's feedback loop and its ability to acquire and maintain servo-lock during seeks.

One easy way for tracking data to become corrupted is noise in the power supply which can cause and early or late write into a physical data block. If that write stomps on the sync region, then that block and possibly the next block will become unreadable. If it hits the track sync region it may cause the entire track to be inaccessible. Well designed drives have a lot of safety monitoring to prevent writes during potentially risky operating conditions, but none of that is perfect. These losses are far more common than head crashes, which can also corrupt the servo data.

There is a hell of a lot going on in these drives. At times I am astounded that they work as well as they do. Platter size is more of a mfg. cost and marketing issue than a technical issue, and has been for a long time.

Yeah it is a beam-forming phased array system. They use an RF back channel to report energy received at the collecting antenna, thus allowing them to hunt down the collector in the transmitter's working volume. Once they have a vector to the collection antenna they tune the beam to get the best energy transfer, and probably also detect when the path has been occulted, and either find another path or report that no path is possible/safe.

Personally I had no idea that beam forming was this far along. If they can pull this off safely, I think it could be very interesting.

It may be that going to 64 bit will allow them to map the FLASH into the CPU OS address space, rather than having to access it as a block device. I could see that being rather handy. It would save some DRAM usage for file access, especially file reads.

In my junk pile I have a 20GB 1.8" form factor x 5mm disc... circa 2005 it was made by Toshiba. A year later Toshiba had another one that was slightly smaller that was also 5mm thick and had 30GB storage. Sorry I just don't see how this 'new' design is much of an improvement. These drives were readily available up to 160GB at a time when 2.5" drives were only a little cheaper and about 25% larger storage.

If Toshiba and Samsung had kept up with this format, this would be a non-story. Both of these OEMs make a lot of FLASH... and they could see where the market was headed... Now Seagate is late to the party with a drive that is simply too big to fit the devices they want to target... 5mm was acceptable when tablets and iPods were 1.5cm thick, but now... the devices are thinner and the battery takes up as much volume as can be squeezed out of all the other components.

500GB of Failsauce!

primary lift in a submarine or a dirigible is provided by buoyancy. That is the difference between the displacement of the surrounding medium relative to the lighter medium stored in the lifting cells. In a submarine you decrease the buoyancy by allowing the lifting cells to fill with water, thus compressing the air that fills the cells. The reduced volume of the air in the cells reduces the displacement relative to the surrounding medium. The air is conserved in high-pressure tanks, so that later it can be forced into the cells to displace the water, and restore 'lift'.

In a similar way, removing He from the lifting cells in the dirigible and compressing it into high-pressure tanks, reduces the volume of gas displacing the air. This reduces the buoyancy of the vehicle. Doing this using lightweight pumps, and carbon-fiber reenforced plastic tanks makes the control system light, and capable of compressing the He to fairly high pressures (at least several 100 PSI maybe more) and this compressed gas will provide NO LIFT, as it now displaces far less air than it weighs compared to when it is stored in the lift cells at ambient air pressure.

TL:DR if you compress the He in a toy balloon to 1/100 of its free-air volume, the balloon will not 'float'.

PS... the tech capacity of /. has damn near leaked out of the braincells that still participate here,

The last time I used Windows as a primary desktop was at a startup. We were working on a dedicated Linux server app. As new employees we were given a choice to use Linux or Win XP as our host OS with the other as a VM. Initially I chose to use XP as the host OS thinking that I'd have more control over the target OS (Linux) if it was the VM'd OS. That lasted about two weeks. I had so many problems with XP tripping over it's own two feet that I reversed the situation. After that I never looked back. For the next 5 years I will probably have to run some version of Windows for some damned thing or other, but it will NEVER, EVER, not even if pigs fly, be my host OS.

If I could easily run OSX as client OS I'd consider Linux as the host. With OSX as the Host am quite happy, and I can run Win, and Linux clients very reliably and with excellent performance. Everything just works.

Where are you getting your numbers?

I think a citation is in order.

This!
Hardware PHYS CODECS (ADC/DAC) have gotten several orders of magnitude more accurate and total bandwidth is no longer an issue. At any given Nyquist-sensible sample rate the result is so close to transparent that it is difficult to measure.

The archival is process issue. to keep data accessible you migrate it through the technology via consistent process. You can count on losing archived data if you do not keep it moving up the technology chain using the lowest common format that does not lose data.

We do have some serious issues due to proprietary DAW formats because they encode edit decisions and signal chain configurations in formats that are not standardized and this is where most of the loss of transparency is introduced.

There is simply no excuse for losing master sources, and rendered Two-Track or rendered-N-Track masters anymore. These are easy to keep kicking up the technology ladder. This assumes that producers practice proper processes protecting their assets.

Some reptiles (lizards) are suspected of changing genders, but it has not been directly observed. Parthenogenesis has been observed in some species of (female) lizards. While all confirmed parthenogenesis with lizards result in females there are some rather bizarre relationships with some of the species that are known to do this. That is there seems to be multiple linkages between several closely related species. In each lineage the genetic diversity is small and almost all of the lines are females. There apparently are males born often enough to keep the genetic mixing going... what is not clear is where the males are coming from.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis#Reptiles

Moore's Law is still active, but no longer influences single thread performance. Multi-cores are limited by Amdahl's Law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law
Software needs to find better ways to gain in parallel.... this is a VERY hard problem.

However if you have many single threaded tasks that are unrelated, your computer remains fairly snappy due to the scheduler balancing your apps across all available hardware threads.