Not exactly. It's produced from alpha particles, mostly generated by the decay of uranium.

I wouldn't have believed this post if it weren't in boldface.

I did not know "incompetence" was a synonym for "time zone."

Yeah, that's the wrong milk source for government cheese.

So no one can have children until they turn 20? Clever way to end teen pregnancy.

Um, the "firewall" in China is mostly to keep Chinese from getting out, not others from getting in. I assure you, systems in China are hacked all the time. Mostly for things like botnet recruitment, of course.

You laugh, but Nerf cars would be pretty awesome. I'd actually enjoy my commute then.

Have you seen Jeremy Clarkson in them?

Then you've been punished enough already.

Yeah, but any law against obfuscation is almost guaranteed to self-destruct. I mean, it'd be written by lawyers.

The old (NCR/AT&T/Lucent) WaveLAN cards came out before the first 802.11 standard - in fact, they were one of the inputs to the standards process. I know our group had actually set up a network with the pre-standard cards back around 1995-6. These had all been replaced by the "IEEE" (standard) versions by the time I came.

The Slate article does make clear that this only works on something with the old Commodore 64 character set (PETSCII). And that it is a loop.It's not exactly a great article, but it does get these things right.

Their application was rejected. The patent examiner said, "sorry, this just looks like a bunch of chicken scratches!"

(They were actually sparrow scratches, but never mind that.)

Dude, they're helicopters. Just fly them back when you're done.

I got one of those calls once. It was a woman with a very strong Indian accent, and for no particular reason I decided to pretend it was phone sex ("I have viruses? Oh my God, that's so hot!"). This just confused her for a little bit - I don't think she really followed what I was saying - and she kept on trying to continue with her script. Finally, I said she really needed to find a better job, and she cursed and hung up.