or random theft. Then gets sold on eBay.

I used to come across this quite regularly. In general banks don't (didn't? This is going back 10 years) offer cheque guarantee cards to (small) businesses, so paying by cheque was a pain. Quite a few of the high street retailers used services like this (such as buying stationery from WHSmiths)

Not if they have kids. I only watch films Friday or Saturday nights now, when you can't easily go out without baby sitters or other childcare nights in become important. Weekday evenings tend to be getting to bed early so not to be tired at work if the kids wake up at some silly time of the morning / middle of the night. I bet a very large proportion of Netflix customers have young families, I would imagine the 25 - 40 age bracket is their largest customer base.

Wind was my first thought as well. For quad-copters the simple fact is the lack of collective pitch does massively affect the maneuverability in adverse conditions. You need a high volume of airflow over the blades to compensate and fixed pitch there is not much you can do to increase airflow without climbing rapidly. (although whether you could do it with an octocopter with four of the blades pulling down and four pushing up to counteract the climb?) There are plenty of model sized helicopters (even some microhelis with 8" blades can handle 15mph with a skilled pilot) that handle wind very well - they just need a high head speed.

I don't know about that species, a but a lot of (tropical) forest roaches need high humidity and won't survive in the average house for long.

How come? Is it because they are vertically mounted? There have been wing in ground effect aircraft with turbines. Genuinely interested, as have an interest in ground effect vehicles (mainly propellor based models, but still)

It might be a good indication of what the mainstream hosts will be using in a couple of years though. As with your formula one analogy, (a subset of the) technology developed at the extreme high end is commoditised and trickles down.

unfortunately this second attempt will be owned by the censors.

Using ctrl-F to search the page in firefox just seemly causes the page to goto a seemingly random location as you type - presumably its searching the hidden comments for some reason

Ctrl + scroll works fine here on Firefox 3.6.13. Arg. Preview takes forever though.

iirc the most recorded for an electric eel was about 600volts and a bit over 1 amp. Wikipedia claims 500v, 1amp produced through a series of cells each producing 0.15v. Of course this discharge is pretty short, each pulse being incredibly quick. Not sure on electric eels, but electric catfish can only discharge once every hour or so as it takes time for them to charge up again.