I read that the silverware was made of silver for royalty, but commoner's flatware was lead, and lead pots, lead utensils lead to lead poisoning. IT wasn't just the pipes, but that almost everything metal was made from lead (aside from things like armor and things for royalty).

lead poisoning is, though.

That's strange. My WNDR3700v3 is rock stable. The only time it goes down is when I lose power, once or twice a year. The router Is always busy. Various members of in my household are constantly streaming videos. I've got laptops, i-device, and android devices pinging the intertubes constantly. Everything works. I don't use "device discovery", whatever that is, though.

So can we agree on these two premises?
1. iTunes software is garbage.
2. People tolerate garbage because video purchases made before UltraViolet, Amazon, and Google Play started operating work only with garbage.

During the time period I describe, that was the only format in which movie studios offered movie downloads for sale. Someone who spent a lot of money buying movie downloads on iTunes Store before Amazon and Google Play started operating would have to spend a lot of money to replace them with Amazon or Google Play movie downloads.

Thank you for clarifying that the big loss in electric heating is generation, not transmission. But I think batteries like this are intended to work with power sources other than "fuel", such as wind turbines and PV. These are not only unaffected by the Carnot limit but also intermittent enough to need energy storage between generation and use.

All "legal" is sophistry. Pretty much by definition. And it works in places that are police states that pretend to not be (the USA, for one). They will pretend to give you an option, durring the torture designed to elicit a confession, regardless of guilt. And when you make a choice, they'll hold it against you. Either way. Professing innocence is proof of guilt. That's what Martha Stewart went to jail for, not confessing (called Obstruction). When your choices are to admit guilt or go to jail for failure to confess, then you live in a police state.

Meter devices that measure each household's electric energy use for billing purposes traditionally express this value in kilowatt hours, each of which is 3.6 MJ. Billing is based on the difference between the reading this month and the reading last month, which is an average power in kWh/month.

I haven't read the British copyright statute, but both the U.S. copyright statute (Title 17, United States Code) and the English language version of the Berne Convention use "work", "author", "publisher", and "infringe" rather than "content", "creator", and "steal". Using the same terms as the law helps show that you aren't parroting the opinions of someone with a second- or third-hand understanding of what copyright really is. Perhaps I can try to overlook these terms, much as I overlook "could care less". But one thing I see on Slashdot and can't overlook is the use of "copywrite" to mean anything other than "creating the text of an advertisement".

Perhaps they're assuming that transmission losses in the electric grid will more than offset the theoretical gains of using electric heat over natural gas heat.

"If you bought non-DRM stuff" implied to me that you were aware of someone selling said "non-DRM stuff".

The method used to encode long file names in FAT32 is patented, unless that patent expired very recently. Did it?

That's in fact what I ended up doing when my PC was having problems with the implementation of MTP on my Nexus 7 tablet. But that doesn't help if you have authority to connect a device to the USB port but not to associate it to the WLAN. This has happened to me in various homes that either A. didn't have Wi-Fi or B. didn't want my devices on their Wi-Fi.

Last time I checked, lithium-ion batteries lost a substantial chunk of their capacity after a few years. Does the 10 percent loss figure that you stated include the cost of manufacturing a replacement battery?

It would actually be worse. If I had to pay the legal fees of X Corp if I lost, I'd probably be far less inclined to take them to court.
Currently, all I'd have to pay is my legal fee, and whatever fine may be imposed.

If I had to pay their legal fee as well...I'd probably think twice.

5 corporate law talking guys x 2 weeks x $200/hour each....a single individual would be screwed if he lost.
Now..if we stipulate that the 'winner' gets no more 'legal fees' than the loser paid to his legal team....that might be different. But that brings its own issues.

For internal storage on a PC, continue to use SATA. For internal storage on a smartphone, the manufacturer ought to just solder more flash memory to the motherboard.

CompactFlash (CF) is a storage interface proposed as an alternative to Secure Digital (SD). UDF (Universal Disk Format) is a file system proposed as an alternative to FAT.