Mm. Not only that, but Germans really do have very little airconditioning. Probably for this reason, but there's even a cultural avoidance of it.

What's amusing is encountering that same thing in, like, the south of France where you really could use it..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
"Windows 7 was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009"

So, he was almost dead on. October 22nd is 4.46 years ago.

Could be the parent was confusing embrittlement from stray neutrons with metal fatigue.

On that subject, I was amused that a dozen eggs for sale in the store were labeled "from vegetarian chickens!"

Translation. We aren't about to let our chickens free-range for bugs and such, so our chickens are fed a 100% vegetarian corn diet in their lil' cages.

Great. Same goal, more side effects. Also, the drugs are usually prescribed along with dietary changes.

Related:
http://healthland.time.com/201...

Lustig in his "Sugar, the Bitter Truth" youtube video claims the whole fat-is-evil thing started out based on a flawed study (one that failed to separate variables, and shaped an anti-fat public policy.

Food without fat tastes like cardboard, so Lustig says producers responded by cranking up the sugar. I'm sure the subsidising of corn and sugar didn't help. And certainly they are cheaper. But now they could argue their food was healthier "low fat" instead of having the bad mojo of it being made of cheaper lower quality ingredients.

The most sympathetic skeptical take on it would probably be: http://m8y.org/astrology.txt
snippet...
"The rules just kind of got there. They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... illusion you are probably seeing.

I ran into something similar on a YC discussion, of someone who was blatantly abusing store return policies.
Stores have liberal return policies because most people are good, and don't abuse it, so annoying customers too much in return policies has a higher cost to business than the occasional jerk.

As well as the cost of implementing the pin system, there's also the disincentive that a company that implements it is a higher hassle company than one that didn't. Up until now, the costs of fraud have been low enough that they've been worth it to provide people with the convenience.

About 14 years ago, a US bank actually sent me a chipped card, and a USB card reader. Was supposed to offer extra verification for online banking, and for a network of merchants using it. It never took off, I guess inertia and customer dislike of the hassle.

http://www.volokh.com/2014/01/...
"So, this makes a differenceâ"in a high-trust, low-fraud country it generally is not necessary to invest in as elaborate security protections as elsewhere. As an analogy, consider that in the U.S. very few restaurants, stores, or hotels routinely post visible armed guards at their front door, whereas this precaution is not uncommon in other countries."

That is interesting, but doesn't change anything on the point of replacing a vandalised window or cheapness of glass :)

But, yeah, my main point was, I don't get why the parent, way back up there, was so worked up about a store window having advertising. That's what those large front store windows are *for* and even today are often filled with transparent plastic decals, paper posters, store merchandise, TV screens, even animatronics.

And certainly if this comes down in price it could be worth augmenting all the other storefront stuff with. Assuming storefronts still exist :)

That occurred to me to, but I think it is a safe bet that a pane of glass will *always* be cheaper than glass plus nanoparticles plus circuitry and power. That being said, I'm sure there's a point where it'll eventually become cheap enough to make an entire storefront window out of it, and realise some benefit from the visuals over more traditional forms of advertisement.
Assuming storefronts still exist then, and assuming it becomes common to use, I'd move on to the main point. What's the big deal? Store windows basically are nothing *but* advertising...

Huh. Loathsome and terrible? A store window seems like the perfect place to be selling things. People have been putting animated advertisements in them for decades. That being said, this seems a rather expensive way to do it. Glass is much cheaper to replace.

With regards to minor impacts damaging the helmet, like your "getting banged around in the trunk example" such that bike owner might not realise it and fail to discard it. Surely this could be accounted for in the design? Some outer stiffer sheathing of maybe thin layer of plastic and polystyrene to shield the cardboard from minor impacts?

You might also find this article interesting.
http://hackademix.net/2010/03/24/why-noscript-blocks-web-fonts/

Personally, I find stuff like web fonts a bit more worrying since the content is served remotely, unlike installing this font, which you'd need root to do in the first place.

Well, our body is well evolved to handle natural sources of radiation which, nonetheless, can absolutely harm us.
We can handle a surprising amout of damage from UV, which luckily does not penetrate our entire body. And we've evolved to handle certain other kinds of radiation damage, heck, there's that evidence of hormesis. I don't know how that applies across the wholebody, nor how persistently high levels over a lifetime might cause an issue.

I also don't know how to address all the sources you listed because, well, I don't know much about this, that's why I was asking here. I did look for solar flux at radio frequencies here: http://www.astro.ethz.ch/people/pdf_files/benz/LBReview_thermal.pdf and if I'm reading the units right, it is not even close to being on the same scale, but... not sure really.
And I certainly don't know the power of all those other various sources.

But, this was interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBm

So, seems to me from that chart and inverse square estimate, that a cellphone up close against you would have 500x the wattage of an FM radio station 10km away. Not that that dude's research was necessarily exculpating FM radio stations.

Glancing at the technical data here...
http://www.bag.admin.ch/themen/strahlung/00053/00673/03012/index.html

Seems like a baby monitor transmits about 100mW which is about 1/5th the power of the phone and of course not pressed against the flesh. Sooo.... if the cellphone is cranking out 500mW at say 1cm from some part of the body you might be concerned about, and the baby monitor is cranking out 100mW but 100cm away, then presumably the baby monitor is 1/50,000th the concern of the cell phone, right?