Aluminium is 30+ cents a pound, that's enough to buy some glass. They'll have to steal 10x as much to make the same money, but...

Many do... but not Russia, which happens to be where the guy is.

It's thinned about 25-50% with naphtha so that it flows. "diluted bitumen".

LiFePO4 would be well suited to things like cordless tools and the like. iDrill?

There's no switching (or otherwise) power supply in a SD card though. Not much of anything other than flash and a controller.

I'd imagine more harmful to ingest/inhale uranium ore... in addition to radioactivity, uranium is also a heavy metal like lead. (in both senses of the term "heavy metal".)

However most ore is quite weak, with 1% being pretty decent... I think it's economical to mine it as low as 0.1%. A few mines in Canada are near 20%, though (which I suppose is related to Canada being the biggest producer... 1/5th the ore is end product, instead of 1/1000th!). Ore will often have lead and such in it as well (decay products), which is also toxic.

It might be different in the US, but in Canada they always had terrible stock. So if your thing didn't have a broken lamp or speaker, or a dead battery - you were SOL, as they didn't carry anything else.

There's so much different silicon now that it isn't really feasible to stock even a small portion of it in every mall anyway, so most anything you fix you'll have to order in parts for...

It would have been more reasonable when I was a kid (and they only stocked a whopping 3 transistors and zero fets then, too).

Though it requires active cables, which cost quite a bit more. So it might have a place for bleeding edge stuff, but not so much for economy.

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.

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.

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.

land based MIRVs were banned with START-II from early 90s.

Scratch that, I guess it never went into effect and Russia still has some, though the US did get rid of theirs. Doesn't make much difference as the US still uses them on sub launched stuff anyway.