My $35k Nissan Leaf already does that. I have to assume that the Model S had that feature from the beginning.

As the article notes, no medical personnel would have to be involved. So the prosecutor who sought the death penalty could be required to throw the switch/open the valve/whatever. I've always thought that prosecutors would be much more reluctant to ask for the death penalty if they were the ones who had to do the killing.

Besides which, an incandescent needs a bulb that can handle a hard vacuum, a machine to make a hard vacuum, and an entirely separate manufacturing line to all your other electrical bits and pieces.

Lightbulbs haven't used vacuum for decades. They're typically filled with an inert-gas mix (predominantly nitrogen or argon, possibly with small amounts of other gases) at atmospheric pressure. Not only does this allow use of a thinner, lighter envelope, it also makes the filament last longer.

Ummm...citation?

I did read the article. What's your point?

Despite the article's claims, the discussion directly below it makes it pretty clear that a lot of finger-pointing is going on around the whole thing. Some people assert that "firmware should never try to adjust anything to get around an OS bug", yet that's been commonplace for well over a decade now!

(Anyone remember the old PC BIOS's which would require you toggle "Plug and Play" to Yes for a Windows '9x type OS, or select "No" for others? How about the ones that let you enable or disable the USB 2.0 "high speed" functionality? If that wasn't a work-around for OS/driver issues, what was it? Because USB 2 is supposed to be backwards compatible with the slower 1.1 devices. Heck, I remember a few BIOS's out there where I had to specifically set "OS/2" to "Yes" so they'd work right with installing it.)

The poster I replied to was talking about a Toshiba machines the purposely disabled ALL of the devices if it couldn't determine you were booting a version of Windows. That's a lot more extreme than things like "the on-board sound not initializing if the Linux default value for ACPI gets presented to it".

Now THAT would make me apt to return the computer for a refund and buy something different.... It's one thing for Linux to support a newer level of ACPI that many popular vendors/machines don't behave well with. (I get the idea of reporting a value of 2 instead of 5 to make things work in these cases. Why not? It's a one character solution to the OS misbehaving on those systems. Just make a note as to why it's done and allow users to edit a file to change it to 5 for full ACPI functionality in cases where it will work.

But to have a computer that willfully disables hardware because it thinks you're "trying to run something other than Windows"? That's done on purpose by Toshiba, if you ask me -- and was a ploy to ensure only Windows stays on the machine. (Maybe for tech support reasons, so they don't have to worry about fielding calls from users of Linux or other OS's who they have no support database built for?) I'd prefer not to use something designed like that.

When they first announced it, I was excited. But the most details that come out, the less interest I have.

I thought at one point in time, it was agreed on that no single nation "owned" the moon. Therefore, what happens if someone goes up there for a commercial project and sells material gathered there? Is it "first come, first to profit"?

It just seems to me that although right now, people might think it obvious that whoever spends all the money and effort to get there and retrieve a substance should have the rights to it -- what happens when this process gets cheaper and easier to do? Will people who arrive there try to stake a claim for a certain number of square kilometers of the moon as "their work area" and fight about it if someone extracts helium 3 or something else while on their claimed area?

If nothing else, I'd certainly advocate for changing railroad overpasses/underpasses to make them less accessible to people, wherever possible. My reasoning is, anyone wanting to use "getting hit by a train" as a means of suicide is selfishly affecting the lives of others who shouldn't have had to get directly involved. Those trains aren't automated ... They're operated by engineers, who have to deal with the memories of running over a person while operating the locomotive and are often haunted with the "What if?" questions, if they could have stopped the train sooner or not approached a station so fast, or ?

The person who equated this article to advocating "blocking the exits" is exactly right. The individual who actually plans to end their life in a fully conscious, fit state of mind has also surely come up with a plan that will get around any number of "blocked exit" strategies (like locking up personal guns in a cabinet, or hiding the keys to the car). They're not who this article refers to, IMO.

But the person who is distraught enough to actually go through with a plan that has a high likelihood of ending their life (as opposed to FAR more of them who might talk about it or use a half-hearted attempt as attention-seeking behavior) are going to do it when the mood strikes them. And the original article seems to be saying it's effective and appropriate to remote as many possible means to accomplish this as possible, so the means will be lacking when the mood strikes.

My problem with this is that it's only a band-aid for the underlying issue ... someone's severe depression. If it's not possible to get a person to get back the will to live, what quality of life do they have anyway, while you've "succeeded in preventing their suicide" by locking all of your knives up in a box?

Yeah, professional flash... professionals have those on their professional cameras. I've never had one.

If you've ever had an SLR (hardly the exclusive domain of professionals, though it does imply a familiarity with photography beyond snapshot-taking), you probably have a flash for it kicking around. I dug up my old camera bag the other day to test a K-mount to EF-mount adapter so that I might use my old lenses with my new camera. My old flash, a Sunpak Auto 222, still works. I've had it since I was 13 (just realized that makes it (and most of the other stuff in the bag) 30 years old). The new camera has a pop-up flash, but this one is probably a fair bit more powerful. It's definitely aimable from straight ahead to straight up, which is something you can't do with the pop-up flash. Put the camera in manual-exposure mode and the flash works the same with the EOS Rebel T5 as it did with the K1000.

Is this stuff common? Probably not. In the domain of professional photographers, though? Definitely not.

Correct. And carbon nanotubes are structurally pretty similar.

That may be true. But the statement "The reality is that the Air Force, Army, and Marines want the A-10 kept alive" is clearly false.

You think a military truck is going to drive around covered in perfectly clean mirrors?

I can think of a couple problems there.

Was there a reason that Firefox went off a cliff a couple years ago? It seems like it was great, and then started to suck horribly.