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.

The US had a similar program, but it never got as much use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

Could be. I know in Canada pennies are^Wwere only legal tender in groups of less than 25. (so you can't pay your income tax or parking tickets in pennies). I'm unsure if the US has a similar restriction?

It's a two stroke from the 50s. Not sure how that reflects on communism (apart from them making them mostly unchanged for 40 years..). A DKW from the other side of the wall had just as brutal emissions.

The fact that it is only nine fold is pretty impressive, really.

To keep all the Ukrainians out, away from the jobs and higher wages?

25 years later and there are still American bases in Germany. So there can't be that much resentment - not enough to force change anyway.

You'd think resentment would be much higher now, when there isn't even an illusion of requirement of american 'protection'.

Yeah, certainly the way to stop the decline is to say "oh, it was/is way worse somewhere else", put your head in the sand and do nothing.

frei is generally of the unrestrained variety

free stuff is usually said to be kostenlos (without cost).

Where do you come up with this? Russia spans UTC +2 to UTC +12. (or Moscow time -1 to +8).

Do you really think people in Vladivostok get up at midnight and go to bed at 4pm?

Presumably he is going for worst case of injustice within the danish legal system in recent years. I imagine it's still a bit of a hyperbole though.

Denmark isn't some backwater where they execute people with room temperature IQ, or put them in jail for life for stealing three chocolate bars though, so maybe it isn't.

-1, bullshit. How does FUD like this get modded to +5?

Lead free solder had some process related growing pains and is slightly more difficult to use, but that's about it.

I suppose my 6 year old lead free cell phone should have died from microfractures by now huh. or my motherboard. or my TV. or dishwasher. or basically anything electronic made in the last decade.

"They don't make 'em like they used to" is generally a fallacy. Survivor bias. (and I love old stuff).

My NES still works as poorly as it did 25 years ago.