2. PETE and polypropylene (the major components of single-use plastic bottles) have excellent compatibility with ethanol.

Indeed, the bottle of cheap 100 proof vodka that I have right over there says PETE on the bottom.

And separate seals aren't used anymore, AFAICT, on water bottles. The caps fit tightly enough into the neck of the bottle that additional gasketing is not needed.

So if the problem is transporting liquid alcohol in a more-convenient vessel, the solution is likely to already be in your recycling bin.

Or, you know: Stainless steel hip flask. Dissolve the soluables with a soak in strong isopropyl alcohol for a few days, wash with soap and water, install adult beverage, and insert into hip pocket.

Either way, this is a solved problem.

Scroll up: I was talking-down the "and it's fast!" mentality of some OP, above.

But it's not fast, compared to any paid-for example of the very old things that I have in front of me, for the things I actually use computers for.

I mean, srsly, I don't care if it can render 1080p h.264 in perfect quality. I really don't: I've got a $23 Chromecast for that, plugged into the TV in my home theater The "difficult" tasks I have are all CPU-bound, and the CPU in question in TFS is anything but "fast." It may be low-power, and amazingly low-power at that, but it's not "fast" by any long stretch of any modern definition.

(In other news: 8088 CPUs also received low-power varients, some probably still in production. As did the 80386. None were commonly found in the field. My own Pentium-M undervolts to Low-Voltage Pentium-M specs, and then some, with perfect stability: If I decide to tweak it again (which I may not, since I've had the computer a very long time), its power consumption will also be very low for the work being accomplished.)

(and when I was undervolting my Pentium-M, it was because I was trying to minimize fan noise and radiant heat through the keyboard in the very quiet office environment I used it in at that time. I still don't care about TDP in portable computing: The first thing I do when things look like they may be lengthy is look for an available outlet, and I've (so far!) got enough extension cord in my bag to make it work.)

(Oh, and TDP is a lie these days, because CPUs tend to be both self- and dynamically-overclocking. If the chip gets hot, it'll just refuse to operate at the higher clock speeds that might meet demand, and will instead just slog along at a clock that keeps the temperature within reasonable ("TDP") spec. And in doing so, the chip vendor gets great numbers...which are based on lies.)

I engineer my systems and tools for me, not you.

I need ports, expandability, and the ability to plug random hardware in. I don't need light-weight, and I don't need to run all day on batteries.

I have all of that, along with what I believe to be comparable speed...instead of none of that, and $499 less in my pocket.

I've got better things to spend $499 on than a side-grade to a different form factor that doesn't fucking work for me. But thanks anyway, asshole!

If the helium can't get out, the mineral oil can't get in.

The airship cost $300,000 to buy. It doesn't matter if it cost someone else $90,000,000 to build it; the loss of $89,700,000 is the government's loss, not the current owners.

Car analogy: I once paid $6,500 for an excellent car that had a new sticker price of $53,000, and I've been driving it like a $6,500 car ever since.

105W is not astonishingly bad; it was simply the cost of performance at the time (before the i7 brand and DDR3 became a common thing). The power consumption game had barely started for desktop components.

I expect my portable computers to be just that: Portable computers. I do the same things with a portable computer as I do with a desktop computer.

For me, this lately means software decoding of many concurrent high-resolution video streams, and heavy single-threaded software.

I doubt this new Atom part is even as fast as my (even more ancient) 1.83GHz, 2MB cache, single-core Pentium-M laptop at these tasks.

It doesn't if the battery lasts twice as long, if it also takes twice as long to accomplish the work before me.

Perhaps I am a corner-case in that I actually want a CPU to be "fast" compared to products from a decade or so ago, especially if the device is bigger than a cell phone. I'm not buying anything slower than what I already have.

My car has a few bad failure modes, too, but I still load my kids into it and take them wherever.

So does my neighbor. And my neighbor's neighbor.

*shrug*

I've always done it that way: Buy a humble bundle, give every last dime to the EFF.

So it's half as fast as the positively ancient Q6600 I write this on.

Which is interesting, I guess, but not anything approaching "fast."

OS/2 Warp's killer feature was an excellent TCP/IP stack, enabling people to use the Internet without voluminous and hacked-together third-party software. It also included one of the better graphical web browsers of the era.

If anything, it was ahead of its time.

Because the only failure mode is the sudden and catastrophic sort of failure mode, and there is nothing that can be done to help promote safety after such a failure event occurs.

Also, as I'm sure you're aware: Airplanes don't glide, and helicopters don't auto-gyro.

[/sarcasm]

There is no FAA civil aerospace standard for commercially-operated unmanned drones.

Ummm well, that kinda depends on what you consider "cracked open". It took years to get it to boot and run something not designed to run on it. If you talk about, say, reading data on the system, that would not have taken years. Also, I have no idea how many people were working to crack PS3, I guess not that many, and the one who succeeded was some kid(no offence to smart kids, they are the ones who have time to work on things like cracking PS3 for fun) ? Just saying if the crackers had been people who had worked on such systems before the time might have been way shorter.

You know, I normally don't reply to ACs for a variety of reasons. I even have AC reply notification emails directed to /dev/null. I only see AC replies if I go looking for them, and I seldom do that. If you (or anyone else) wants to actually conduct discourse with me, please log in first.

It took years for the PS3 to be a general-purpose computer, outside of the (revoked, crippled) Linux environment.

Of course, a real impetus on a game console is piracy / copyright-infringment / making trial-ware out of pay-ware / running backups instead of originals. My own PS1 has a hardware mod chip that I installed myself, not to run Linux on the thing, but to make it run whatever the fuck I feel like -- even if it is a CD-R backup of a game that I've bought.

My original Xbox had a similar mod, though it was entirely done in software/firmware.

I have a hacked PS3. It required no soldering.

And it took *years* for this to happen. By then, the space-heater/radiator systems in TFS will have been supplanted with better ones. And with the current ease with which whole-disk and end-to-end network encryption is performed, I really don't see a clear-and-present security issue for companies using such machines as back-end database servers (indeed, perhaps the most available backup DB servers they have, on average -- with abilities to go live).

The PS1 hack happened without armed guards. It simply emulated a plain-to-the-eye barcode on the disc, and since the system itself had no on-board storage that was perfectly adequate to enable it to do whatever.

The Xbox hack was a buffer overflow using a saved game (I used 007), which allowed the Pentium-based machine to do the user's bidding: It booted a custom OS upon loading of a magical save-game. (wherein save-game itself was just a thing downloaded from the internet, stubbed onto an Xbox memory card using a special windows driver and a magic USB driver, and loaded into a memory card plugged into an official Xbox controller plugged into any run-of-the-mill PC, using a cheap big-box-store Mad Catz extension cable as a USB adapter and a soldering iron and/or a crimping tool to make the mismatched connectors mate.)

Those were all quick hacks, on the order of short weeks or months, with clear and present outcomes in terms of piracy.

The PS3 hack took *years* of fuckery to establish itself, and took such tomfoolery and even decapping chips (which was as-yet largely unheard of in such circles...) to make happen. And PS3 piracy still doesn't seem to be rampant, and backups are still hard to do.

But anyway, AC, my point stands: The PS3 took years to crack, and it was a much bigger crack than just reading a MySQL DB off of an unencrypted HD, or taking control of the system that provides heat for your house (==you're getting paid for). The former is simple with physical access (and most certainly isn't something that someone would install on a server intended for in a common abode these days), the latter is readily identifiable and actionable with failure and latency heuristics.

Truecrypt, OpenVPN == win.

Good bye again, AC. And good luck for getting "free" heat from the third-party servers installed in your house if you get them to do your bidding instead of their proprietors', or of 0wning them and taking the data for yourself. The very best you'll by fucking with them will be to break them so that they generate negative revenue for yourself, as they draw power and don't generate expected results.

You're better off plugging a big resistor into the wall: I think we call these "space heaters," and there is no contract required.

And despite this commonly-held belief, it took *years* for the PS3 to be cracked open, with millions of units in the field, without guards or locked doors.

Physical security is a hell of a good start toward stemming the tide, but it doesn't hold a candle to systems that are actually secure.

I used to heat a large 2-bedroom ground-floor corner apartment with waste heat from computers and audio gear. It did have baseboard heaters, which did get used once or twice on the coldest nights, but often there was a window or outside door cracked open to let the heat out (in Ohio, in January) instead..

This isn't about your parents. This is about you, and me, and that other guy over there.

(Yep. Old happens. Get over it.)