"you can only extract 20% of their capacity from them before you damage the battery by sulfating the plates."

You're confusing two issues, I think. Sulfation happens if a lead acid battery is kept in a (partially) discharged state for too long (weeks). That will happen with deep-cycle batteries as well.

The issue with starter batteries is that the plates are thin and tend to crumble during a deep discharge, when a large fraction of the lead plate is electrochemically converted.

"individual phones actually *poll* towers every few seconds"

I highly doubt that. A 2G gsm phone left next to an audio cable will only generate the familiar "bidibip" noise once an hour or so. I assume it does that in response to an "are you still there" request from the tower.

The radio transmitter in a cellphone is about one watt. For battery lifetime, you really don't want the transmitter to activate every few seconds.

But he did. Another RAID array of the same size would have sufficed. Oh, now I see what you mean. He didn't want to spend the money on a good way to backup that much data.

Another issue entirely :-)

"WIth a VM you have to install, maintain, patch and monitor everything yourself"

My experience with shared hosting is that they change system configuration all the time without informing me and thereby breaking my scripts. Never have that problem with a VM, but I admit that setting up a VM with dns, apache tweaks, iptables, and so on, is a major effort for someone who doesn't do that for a living, like me. But after that it's very little maintenance.

By the way, the site in my sig runs on shared hosting, including perl CGI and ssh, for EUR 7.95/yr. Cheaper than my time in figuring out how to setup multi-domain email in CentOS on my VM. But I had to tweak my scripts to deal with the peculiarities of this hoster and live error logs only available via directadmin...

front wheel drive for bikes in any sort of slippery conditions is dangerous because of the amount of acceleration from electric motors.

One would think that this problem solves itself because the motor uses friction with the front tire. Under slippery conditions, the motor has little traction as well.

But this box DOES have lights, as the ilustration clearly shows.

I hope the inventor knows what he is doing regarding the lights. Designing headlights such that they are usable and at the same time don't dazzle oncoming traffic is not entirely trivial.

the NYC law I wonder how it'd handle an electric bicycle that uses some sort of strain sensor to decide how much 'assist' to give the rider. IE you could set it to 100% and it'd try to match the power the user is putting into the bike

Well, it says: "motor that is capable of propelling the device without human power", so that should be legal. Here in the Netherlands, e-bikes have such a strain sensor; I think it measures strain near the back-wheel axis. And it is for legal reasons -- otherwise they would count as a moped and need a license plate and liability insurance.

By the way, e-bikes are getting rather popular in Netherlands, despite our lack of hills and bike-friendly temperatures. Still feels weird to be taken over at a considerable speed difference by an old lady sitting upright catching wind, with bags of groceries.

Build your own rims. It's surprisingly easy.

Does that include asymmetrically spoked rims (back wheel with derailleur gears)?

You would think that cinema speakers ... would be impervious to damage but some movies occasionally overdrive the speakers to a point that the drivers are damaged. ... there was 7 seconds of high pitched buzzing on reel 4 that could destroy the speakers.

A big difference is that those are speakers with separate woofers and tweeters. A typical audio signal has the vast majority of the acoustic signal in the low frequencies, so a loudspeaker capable of handling 100 W could have 90 W for the woofer and 10 W for the tweeter. If you send a maximum-amplitude high-pitched sound to the speaker, it will fry the voice coils in the tweeters. (I've had this happen when I tried to check whether I could hear up to 20 kHz from my loudspeakers ....)

One could wonder why tweeters are not fused, though. Apparently this is not trivial.

Anyway, laptop speakers are most likely a single driver for the whole frequency range, so tweeter overloading is not an issue.

Slashdot classic even if the code wasn't broken somewhat is great for a desktop but horrid on a mobile.

If you have a web server with cgi/perl support somewhere, you can try installing this: Avantslash. The main page loads in 33 kB and a typical comments page is below 100 kB at threshold 2. And it is optimized for efficient use of screen real-estate and low CPU demands. Works even on my ancient Nokia N82 (2008-era, 64 MB internal memory).

Yeah bunch of wankers :-P

Move to Evernote. It can import OneNote, AFAIK.

"Motion charging".... hehehehe.... yeah I bet they test that a lot at Apple.

"I'm still being redirected to SLASHDOT BETA"

Poor you. Try http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1 .

Overwrite your data once and it's gone. Even if you don't overwrite it randomly no data recovery group have been shown to be capable of recovering overwritten data

That's if you want the data to be overwritten and you're the owner of the drive. If you want to delete data on someone else's drive, you would have to ensure that the drive does not have some custom firmware installed that messes with the overwriting process...