Don't know about where you live, but in my house, a normal PC whirring 25m away in the other room is far from silent - perhaps drowned out by the AC system when it is blowing, but still far from silent.

Forgot, connected to two external 2TB hard drives that store, and mirror, all the things.

My i5 NUC is near-slient, w/ 100GB SSD and 8GB RAM for less than $500 total.

Connected to the family room TV, runs Hulu, Neftlix and Kodi (XBMC) quite nicely, also will run VLC and pull camera feeds from around the house - makes a "virtual window with night vision" in the living room wall.

The old NiMH rechargeables start at 1.2V fully charged. If devices stop working below 1.3V, then they can't use these rechargables at all.

However, a "1.5V boost converter sleeve" on a NiMH does make an interesting case....

Ignorance of the law is an excuse?

>the conventional criminal conduct requirement of 'awareness of some wrongdoing.'

What percent are hoaxes in registered phones?

Came here to say this, pleased that it is so near the top.

40 loaves of bread is costing more than $100 (fiat US dollars) these days.

Sure it's high, and I get soot on my bumper - if I drag race and don't wash the car for a year.

Irony is that the soot in the air around there is 90+% produced from non-vehicular sources, but it's the vehicles that are strictly regulated.

Sure, there's plenty of steam coming from the stacks and it's easy to point to.

There is also fine particulate hydrocarbon (tar) that settles on things and makes a sticky film. I lived in Taylor Lake Village, next door to Space Center Houston, not far enough from Pasadena, apparently. My car, parked under a carport but with open walls, would get a visible, sticky film on it in a very short time after being washed.

The crap was so pervasive it made it into our air conditioned house and got all over the electrostatic air cleaners - again, covered in tar within days of washing. When we moved to Gainesville, Florida, those same air cleaners would get covered seasonally, with pollen, but the tar from the air of Houston never showed up.

This is /. we extrapolate...

I'd love to build an electric car - and the design I find most exciting is direct drive with one motor per rear wheel. You could do all kinds of cool handling tricks and optimizations with that, and also put yourself in a world of hurt if you got it wrong.

I'd be fine with "Warranty voided, liability limited" if you mod your factory ECU - but making it illegal under the DMCA is just silly, silly like letting a camel stick its nose inside your tent.

Make sure to change that air regularly.

They won't prevent you from doing an oil-change, at first. That will come later - along with the mandatory 3000 mile maintenance checks at the dealer - for your safety and a cleaner environment, of course.

You think you own your phone today? Sure, you pay for it, but try to move it between the major carriers and tell me that your phone isn't IP locked to Verizon, or Sprint, or AT&T. Yes, some multi-band phones can move between some carriers, but largely, it's still a lock-in game - that device that you pay for is all but useless the day your carrier says it is.

Depends heavily on the state, county, etc.

I was pretty livid living in Harris County (Houston, TX), driving past the petro-refineries pumping out visible tons of pollution per day to take my 3rd round smog test because my 1600cc car that I drive 4000 miles a year was measuring 230ppm hydrocarbons instead of the legal 220 - meanwhile our 5900cc pickup truck had a legal limit of 330ppm....

The price of a car (and everything else, for that matter) has never been been determined by value, or utility, it is determined by what the market will bear.

What they are hoping here is that the market will continue to pay current prices for cars while losing the right to modify or repair them. I'm sure the people who lease a new one every 2 years won't mind a bit; mechanics, tuners, and gearheads are another story.

Since this is a democracy, we have to hope that people standing on principles of freedom / property rights / etc. weigh in big on this issue, because tuners, gearheads and mechanics are nowhere near 50% of the population.