"There's plenty of cases of electronics misbehaving due to exposure to strong light"...Around a million years ago, when the earth was young and laser printing hadn't been invented yet, I was an electronics tech working on phototypesetting machines. These machines (Mergenthaler VIPs) had a large zoom lens mechanism in them for producing different size print. One afternoon, a junior tech called me over because, he reports, "the zoom lens on one of the machines is going crazy". I get there and see that the zooms are running back and forth,. full speed, at random. I noticed the tech has a trouble lamp inside the machine. I turned it off and the lenses stopped their manic dance. He hadn't realized that the zoom lens travel was controlled by optical switches - the lamp turned them all on at once, producing the crazy bahavior.

It might be different in the US, but in Canada they always had terrible stock. So if your thing didn't have a broken lamp or speaker, or a dead battery - you were SOL, as they didn't carry anything else.

There's so much different silicon now that it isn't really feasible to stock even a small portion of it in every mall anyway, so most anything you fix you'll have to order in parts for...

It would have been more reasonable when I was a kid (and they only stocked a whopping 3 transistors and zero fets then, too).

Shoot, a feller could have himself a pretty good weekend in Moscow with all this stuff.

Though it requires active cables, which cost quite a bit more. So it might have a place for bleeding edge stuff, but not so much for economy.

You were lucky - here in Houston, if you pass the roadside breath test, the cops routinely charge you with being intoxicated on drugs, rather than admit you weren't impaired and shouldn't have been pulled over. That's one of the reasons lawyers here recommend that you don't take the breath test at all.

Speeding is far from the biggest contributor to traffic accidents. Illegal and poorly made left turns are far more dangerous and cause far more accidents - yet you never hear fo the cops setting upa left turn trap. Why? It's too hard and doesn't generate the revenue that issuing speeding tickets does.

FWIW, the Audi dealer still lists... must be at least 95% of the parts for my 80's audi, down to the nut. I don't think any american marque does that..

Of course they charge you for it, but they do carry it.

Legions more people who are getting into programming just because they heard there was money in it...even though they have no talent, interest or passion for it...

Perl went up in the ratings!

If I was running the Chinese space program, I'd put together a mission to the Sea of Tranquility, and bring bak some Apollo 11 souvenirs. It would be the most intense possible statement that there are now two nations on the Earth that have had the technology and will to travel to the Moon, and the USA no longer has a monopoly on it.

HA! I'm an avid sports non-fan. Years back, when they were starting to roll out cable TV service in Houston, they actually had door to door salespeople going around to sign people up. The packages available were clearly designed to extort as much money from the customers as possible. With that goal in mind, the service tiers that included ESPN and other sports channels were really expensive. I selected one of the less expensive service offerings, as I'd rather go to the dentist than watch a stick and ball game played on TV. The salesman was practically frantic, and threatened me that I absolutely wouldn't be able to watch ANY sports with that selection. I laughed in his face and asked if there was any way he could guarantee that no sports would leak into my channels. He left shaking his head - clearly, he'd never met an avid sports non-fan before.

Bullshit. Harper lives to bend over for Americans. He'll do it without them even asking.

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.