I'm not british and like jaffa cakes. orange and chocolate is an awesome combination.

Yah, you're on to something here. I have thousands of hours of music available in digital form (most of it ripped lossless to FLAC). What I really enjoy listening to, though, is my old reel to reel tape deck. Even thought the fidelity is dramatically less than my digital collection, I enjoy thinking about the magnetic domains gliding by, being picked up by a coil and amplified into music. The dance of the VU meters is also hypnotic to watch, in time with the music.

Lithium cells are pretty benign in general. There are a few variants in chemistry, the worst would probably be the cobalt based ones. (others use various combinations of iron, nickel, manganese, and phosphorous, which are pretty tame). Though the cobalt variants are quite common.

NiCd is far worse, cadmium is fairly nasty... much more than cobalt.

In every 'dead' laptop battery I've torn down, one cell (or pair, in parallel) is totally kaput, and the remaining cells retain at least 50% of their nameplate capacity. Protection circuitry will lockout recharging of the whole pack, which wouldn't work with the dead cell anyway.

So the battery as a whole is utterly useless for the laptop, but 2/3rds of the cells or more have some life left in them, for other purposes.

I imagine a lot of the too-cheap-to-be-true off-label replacement laptop batteries are in fact combinations of two dead ones, with the remaining functioning cells rewired into one working (but lower capacity) pack. Certainly seems about right judging by the performance of them, anyway.

I noticed that Intersil still makes a rad-hard variant of the awful RCA 1802. (you know, the CPU in a COSMAC ELF).

When I saw that, I figured NASA and or the DoD probably give them enough money to make it worth their while... so they must use that antique for something.

Hmmm...this reminds me of the story about operational analysis of bomber armor in WWII. Briefly, the Allies examined bombers that returned from raids, compiled where they had been hit by flak and machine gun fire, and started a program to armor those spots. Then they realized, that the planes that hadn't returned probably had been damaged in the spots that the returning planes had not been, and that's where the armor was needed. In this case, singling out the people who get arrested over and over, while not a bad idea, is focusing on the incompetent criminals - the people who are good at it will get arrested at much lower rates than the ones who are in and out of the system all the time.

With his hands in the pockets of his jacket, he stared through the glass at a flat lozenge of vatgrown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal of imitation jade. The color of its skin reminded him of Zone's whores; it was tattooed with a luminous digital display wired to a subcutaneous chip. Why bother with the surgery, he found himself thinking, while sweat coursed down his ribs, when you could just carry the thing around in your pocket?

Oh man, the self-modifying code canard. Look, DNA modifying itself happens, right? It even sort of happens by design.

That doesn't mean mutations are necessarily meaningful. Most are terminal. Code is exactly the same. Most modifications are terminal. None are going to result in substantial changes to the architecture of the system. Not without lots of natural selection.

And you're underestimating our understanding of our brains.

You know what, fuck it. Here's another post for you racists to mod down.

Not one goddamn person has supported his notion that Africa hasn't had progress.

Multiple people have modded me down for calling him out on his racist bullshit.

One of you ignorant fuckers defend this shit.

I mean, just look at the HDI growths, and keep telling me nothing changed.

There's just nothing to this bullshit. And you guys just eat it the fuck up.

What's wrong with you?

What's wrong with you?

Yeah, okay, they're also a bureaucracy with side projects supported by wikipedia's popularity.

You won't believe this, but if you live in a rich area, and you support your local NPR station, chances are you're subsidizing other stations broadcasting in poor areas. Community supported projects tend to be a bit socialist like that.

Oh, unsubstantiated accusations of racism.

I love this.

"Black people are by their nature stupider than whites"

"That's not true and your own damn link undermines you, racist"

"Ha, you called that totally innocent rational person a racist! You must just shout that at everyone."

Oh, I see, you assume because I give a shit about things I couldn't possibly be white or male.

I love when bigots apply their bigotry and turn out wrong.

Except they keep doing it, instead of learning their damn lesson, about making mindless judgements.

Every time we get one of these no AI researchers coming in and saying this stuff, I feel forced to repeat it.

AI isn't magic. It does exactly what it's designed to do: break down and understand problems. It isn't motivated. It isn't emotional. It isn't anti-human. And imaging some "strong AI" nonsense is just like creationists claiming a fundamental distinction between microevolution and macroevolution. It just ignores the reality of what "strong AI" would entail.

AI is not magic. And it won't ever be. It won't be smarter than people, except by whatever arbitrary metric of smart any given application requires.

Yeah, but there's this threshold where you're wrong enough, and shitty enough, that public hatred for your opinions isn't some chilling effect that's going to supress free speech. He has a right to be wrong, but he has no goddamn right not be hated for it when it's this level of awful.