so you're saying you actively forced them to explode?

Somehow I doubt your typical phone will sustain a 5x overvoltage for any meaningful period. For every story of capacitor exploding and raining fire from above there are thousands of stories of hearing a fizz and just losing some electrolyte all over the PCB.

The reality is we're comparing them to lithium batteries. In terms of safety I'll take a capacitor any day.

Where you going to put that current?

Thousands of amps are impossible to sustain even if you put them straight through a large screwdriver. The reality is safety is measured in terms of what can go wrong. Will someone open their phone and put a plate of metal across the terminals? Unlikely. Will someone get water into their phone? Definitely. Can someone accidentally touch battery terminals? Certainly. In these cases the lower voltage makes them quite safer due to the resistance of the object the capacitor is trying to discharge into.

Do you intend to die in the next few years? Because your alternate universe is becoming a reality already.

As it is with the emergence of USB high power specifications and the proliferation of computers everywhere we almost already have items 1 and 3 ticked off the list. Once wireless charging takes off, which several companies are already pushing, we'll have item 2 done as well.

In terms of our utopian view of future technology the three things you think may never happen are far closer to reality than pretty much any other prediction of the future.

Voltage is highly relevant. The difference between a 1.2V supercap and a 100V capacitor with the same total stored energy can be life and death. Not to mention higher voltages make many things more volatile.

Stored energy can be released slowly by a simple resistor. You have a 1.2V supercap with a massive charge and significant enough resistance in the discharge path and you end up with something inherently safe. Again as voltage rises you have more and more problems, now you're contending with dust, water, and several other things that can cause you to arc across traces.

The higher the voltage the more volatile and the harder it is to control the release of energy against external factors.

That's not what the article said at all. They said the student's primary motivation was being annoyed at waiting for a phone to charge. The end result is the same. Assuming that just because you can charge something instantly that it'll break down our powergrid overnight due to insane peak demands is ludicrous.

Except the target application in this case is phones which represents about 1/10th of the powerload. Suddenly you're at 840W to achieve a 30 second charge time.

But hey why go overkill? We the consumer are used to waiting for hours. Why don't we worry about small targets with smaller benefits first? Let's just charge my phone in 5 minutes. 84 watts now is less than most of my household appliances and I would be incredibly happy if we could do that.

She has. The only problem here is that the news itself is dumbed down to the point of being utterly pointless.

Science reporting at it's finest.

Sigh! Supercapacitors are inherently stable and generally won't explode unless you actively force them too (i.e. most things explode when you put 1kV up it's arse).
High energy densities and high currents are emitted when shorted and you end up with maybe a spark. Quite a safe spark though given the pathetically small voltages they can store. The same can be said for non-super capacitors too. The only only ones which really let go with a bang are tantalum caps, and even they are quite stable run under their rated voltage.

Sorry to drain the FUD out of your sarcastic post but with caps your biggest risk is electrolyte running down your ear.

You are talking about A standard. The OP was talking about THE standard.

I can categorically say in the last 20 years I have not received an email implementing any of S/MIME. S/MIME is only marginly more wide spread than RFC1149

I fail to see how this is a problem. The ISP will track your IP assigns and logins anyway to ensure you're not "sharing" an account.

Found that out rather quickly when my sister's router died and I gave her a spare I had here. She was surprised at how plug and play everything was and I got a nasty phone call at the very start of the next business day saying my account has been flagged as two people are logged in from two different IPs. The guy on the phone was able to give me the address and everything.

This is not a problem if a system is designed only ever to be accessed from one location continuously. I suppose someone could have logged in as me and modified my account settings like change my plan or maybe some robin hood could pay my bill for me, but either way I'd get an email that it happened.

The difference between historical design and best practice is somewhere in the vicinity of being able to power 6 million US households.

Not to mention the strawman you have made there. This isn't an either-or choice. Why can't we improve energy efficiency AND make an effort to rely less on bottled water?

In 2009 the EPA estimated that if historical trends for datacentre expansion continue (that is PUE remains steady as datacentres continue to be built) then USA datacentre power usage would consume 120 billion kWh/year. To put that into perspective a typical house uses about 12000 kWh/year. So datacentre usage was projected to be the equivalent of 10 million US households. Best case scenario currently puts this closer to 5 million US households.

That's just serving up data. Now add the insane amounts of network switching gear to allow data to get to the end users and then add the computing power of the end users themselves and you end up with a significant environmental footprint.

All this based just on environmental savings too. Don't forget energy costs money so by improving cooling efficiency there's significant opportunity for high ROI in the long run. Being energy inefficient these days is an express ticket to Chapter 11, especially for companies like Facebook and Twitter who had trouble monetising their services to being with. Many of these companies have a really large book value but very poor cashflows.

The antenna goes around the outside of the card. Cut a notch with scissors about 5mm into the card (opposite side of the magnetic stripe) and you've disabled the contactless portion.

Of course, but that's the point. Racks exist to allow you to take out components to swap. Often this is damage, sometimes this is upgrades, sometimes expansion.

Of note is that there's now several variants of the RPi including 256MB and 512MB versions. So upgrading may be a logical choice too.

I've always wondered that about people taking photos at playgrounds with kids. We stop it because we must protect the kids. Same logic appears to be applied here. Can you imagine how mentally scarring it must be that someone somewhere may be jerking off to a picture of you, and you have no idea it's happening?

Someone could be doing it right now. Oh my god, what-eh-to-do?