My Yamaha VStar 1300 speedometer reads 10% fast through it's entire range. I have been told that the size of the rear tire was changed right before production, and never corrected in the speedometer.

Scrap steel is purportedly going for $800 US per/ US ton according to http://www.scrapmonster.com/PricesCharts/Metals/Steel.aspx I think this is for bare clean steel. I know locally in the US midwest the junk yards are buying scrap steel + iron for $200 US per US ton. Based on this, the 10,000 british ton ship at $200 / ton is worth $2.2 million USD to a dealer who will put a lot of labor into tearing it down. Torn down into just scrap, I would say the ship is worth about $8.8 million. I don't think $2.2 million is completely out of line for a data center facility, but it would need a lot more capital to make it usable, and since a data center needs connection to the outside world, building one on a ship has little benefit, as there is no data cables in the middle of the ocean. On the upside, there is plenty of sea water to use for cooling.

Diesel fuel standards in the U.S. have improved starting in 2006 with the introduction of ULSD (ultra low sulfur diesel). ULSD will become mandatory in 2010. It is common now to see at large gas stations "truck" diesel for sale at the semi pumps and "car" diesel for sale at the car pumps. I believe the difference is the sulfur content. The US standards for emissions on diesel passenger cars are a bit more stringent than Europe (probably due to lobbyists). This makes many of the cars sold in Europe not eligible for import. Its also a bit of a chicken and egg problem in that most people know of diesel either from semi trucks or early 80's Mercedes that had poor acceleration, and took forever to warm up. In the late 70's GM made a line of diesel engines based on the famous Chevy 350 gas engine, and they were notoriously bad. Recently, Chrysler sold their "Common Rail Diesel" in Jeep Liberty's here. It had about the same horsepower, significantly more torque, and better fuel consumption compared with their V6, but it sold poorly and was discontinued. VW cars are becoming pretty popular here with younger, more affluent, environmentally aware people, so I think they have a chance with their new Jetta TDI. Unfortunately, people resist change, even in the face of logic.

That doesn't stop a number of people.

I work for / partially own InDesign, LLC (http://indesign-llc.com) that does exactly this type of contract product design. Located in Indianapolis, we have in house approximately 60 employees. Most are engineers, with many years of electrical, firmware, PCB layout, PCB assembly, test, and mechanical experience. We have done several camera related products, and a large number of our product designs include USB in some capacity. We can do just hardware and mechanical if you have firmware resources available. We can do quick low volume prototypes, or design for and work with an outside third party manufacturer for high volumes. Feel free to respond to my email address above, or contact one of our account managers from the InDesign website to learn more about our capabilities.

The last 3-5 years of Slashdot have been pretty painful. I find the insightful posts to be less and less insightful, and the humorous comments to be more and more predictable. I have sworn I was leaving several times, only to come back out of habit and boredom. It is no longer "News for Nerds, stuff that matters.", it is "Easily explained subsets of news for wannabe nerds, and pointless articles that are rarely interesting and often old". It saddens me, as I learned a lot of technical knowledge on this site.

I generally don't let these types of things affect the CPU I use for work. I have found that in order for a system to be fast, all components much be equally matched. When the CPU is overclocked by a factor of 2, and the memory is not, the amount of time spent waiting on memory will increase significantly. If a designer knew the chip would be run at the higher speed, more cache would generally be included to make up for the disparity between CPU speed and memory speed. A good rule for buying new systems is to upgrade in two halves. I generally buy motherboard, RAM, CPU, and power supply at the same time for compatibility reasons. A year or two later, I will update my storage and video card. I buy a motherboard that supports the fastest memory made, I buy a lot of memory, and I buy a CPU that is at a point on the price to performance curve where spending more doesn't yield much more performance. In a year or two when software starts to actually use this capacity, Ill upgrade storage and video for a bit of a boast. Unfortunately, faster hard drives only make a bit of difference.

We don't know. Many people call Obama a savior, and think he will magically fix problems. He is inheriting a difficult situation. Both sides are so biased into thinking their point of view is correct. I wish people would just say "We don't know how big of a help his programs will be" or "We are optimistically hopeful" He does not have enough experience to show how effective he will be. I am not a fan of many of his programs, but I agree we need to try some new solutions. I think it is important that we, as citizens, remember that this is our government, and therefore we need to write our representatives at all levels often on issues of all types.

Let's be fair here: $400 jacket and $15,000 machine with engines that are a 50 year old design. Hopefully a $100 helmet too. I think it would take only a small number of things to displace Harley in the motorcycle market. 1.) Their competitors do not have the paint quality and style that they do. 2.) Many people buy Harley's because they are American made. All of their serious competitors are foreign made. 3.) Let's stop fighting this crotch rocket vs. cruiser thing. Give me an easy chair with the power of a crotch rocket. A ridiculous amount of chrome wouldn't hurt either. With that said, there are several groups of Harley riders. Some of them just love motorcycles and ride a million miles on theirs. Some are rich doctors and lawyers who want to look cool, and generally sit around at gas stations trying to act natural and failing. The final group of people is the dumb people, who I think you identified. These are the people riding their bikes to bars and trying to act like badasses with tatoos and skulls and crap. Don't base perception of a manufacturer's quality based upon one of the stereotypes of their riders. I ride an '81 Yamaha Maxim XJ550, which is an inline 4 with 4 carbs feeding dual exhaust. It is very simple with no frills, and I have personally rebuilt pretty much everything on the bike. Many people do not understand the appeal of older Japanese bikes, their simplicity, and knowing every detail inside and out is pretty cool. It is one of the few blends of early ricer / cafe racer with some cruiser style. Id love to buy a Harley, I dig their styling, but I just cant seem to bring myself to spend the amount of money they cost. When I pull up somewhere, I know I'll (almost) never see anyone else on my model of bike, and I constantly get asked questions, get pictures taken, get smiles, etc, and that beats trying to look cool on a shiny Harley.