Um... http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080219133226.htm "ScienceDaily (Feb. 20, 2008) — Purdue University engineers have developed a new aluminum-rich alloy that produces hydrogen by splitting water and is economically competitive with conventional fuels for transportation and power generation. "We now have an economically viable process for producing hydrogen on-demand for vehicles, electrical generating stations and other applications," said Jerry Woodall, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue who invented the process. The new alloy contains 95 percent aluminum and 5 percent of an alloy that is made of the metals gallium, indium and tin. Because the new alloy contains significantly less of the more expensive gallium than previous forms of the alloy, hydrogen can be produced less expensively, he said."

A good digital camera and a copy of OziExplorer will get you GPS'ing your way round Ye Olde Mappes on your computing device of choice. http://terraperfecta.com/frontmap.php makes calibrating the maps a point & click jobby.

My god, a man talking sense rather than rushing off into wacky techno solutions...

For my 2p's worth I'd ask what's wrong with a £50 laptop off eBay with wireless, and then plug the line out into either some small & cheap PC speakers, or a reasonable amp & speaker combo depending on the required volume / quality.

If they can laser etch messages then the next step is using it to remove blemishes, enhance the appearance, and effectively "photoshop" food to make it appear more photogenic.

Then again, am I the only one who thinks this could be the next step in tattoo art - never mind some hairy goth with a needle, give me a CNC laser that can print my choice of design onto my arm at 1200dpi and I might consider it.

But we go to places where there is no signal. Not just no cell signal, but no TV or FM radio, nothing. In the woods, in RF-unfriendly geographies, even SiRF-III GPS can struggle to get a lock. Also - what about planes & boats? No GSM base stations at sea, well, not without a dedicated satellite uplink. What about military apps where a mobile phone could easily be detected & targetted by the enemy?

If you live in the US, then yes you probably want to be looking it up about now.

I'm in the UK so have enough police state bollocks to worry about locally.

As it's illegal in the US to argue over the accuracy of DNA evidence. Despite the flaws in traditional DNA profiling, and stuff like this, you are not actually allowed to point any of this out in court as part of your defence.

Because a universal microcontroller (such as Freescale s08 series) is cheaper than a dedicated keyboard chip.

In the UK it's one of the commonly used texts - my final GCSE project I compared 1984, Brave New World and Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers ;)

People don't hate the US because of this. They hate you for hundreds of other reasons, chief among them being that you don't know what all those other reasons are and why people might not like them.

If you can't make the 5.25's work, you can drop in a standard 3.5" floppy drive, the connectors may be the same or you may need an adapter - when I last pratted about with old tech like this I had some systems that had a small PCB to plug a 1.44Mb floppy into a system designed for 5.25" drives. The pinout is probably somewhere on the web, you could DIY it if needed. Even IBM XT's had BIOS settings to allow 720k (low density 3.5" floppy) disks to work, so you can transfer stuff between the Epson and a modern PC.

Having worked for an ex-public-now-privatised company in the UK I can confirm that privatising things which are public services is a really bad idea - no-one can really afford to duplicate the infrastructure (for example, lay a complete new rail network to compete with the existing one) so there is always a bottleneck with whoever owns that. Splitting it up would cause chaos, so instead you get agreed pricing from the regulator which then means everyone is just going to end up at roughly the same price anyway.

On the public transport issue, I could buy & run a Range Rover for less money per year than commuting by public transport, and my commuting times would be about 1/4 of what it would take by bus & train. That's including the fact I live on a main bus route and only ~5 miles from the nearest train station. When my lodger's car broke down he got the bus to work (15 miles) it took him nearly two hours on a good day. It takes him 30 minutes in his car or 20 on his motorbike and costs a lot less too. In what world does that add up?

Or just try any local small business that deals with or consults on electronics & design - they don't have to have anything to do with cameras to know how to nail a PCB together.

Yes and no, true thermal cycling does cause marginal components to fail but by leaving the thing on all the time rather than the half of the day you're actually using it you're halving the "useful" life of the thing anyway.

There is a balance between leaving it on 100% of the time and switching everything on and off every time you walk from your desk to the coffee machine and back.

Cast your mind back to 2004 when BT announced they would roll out 21CN (ADSL2, VoIP, etc. and replacing the entire UK core network with IP), they were due to be rolling over more than 10,000 customers per day by now onto this new network, and be finished in plenty of time for everyone to watch the 2012 Olympics in HD video-over-broadband.

Guess how many they've done so far...

Of course, if you read their website now the original goalposts have been burned and some new ones installed much further apart and in a different place on the pitch: http://www.btplc.com/21CN/Theroadto21CN/Keymilestones/Keymilestones.htm