The infra red space telescopes are positioned out of the sun ('behind' the earth) in order to keep cool. However, there's still the heat from the electronics, and there's no way to get rid of that apart from by radiating the heat away. Black radiates well, hence colouring it black will keep the spacecraft cool.

In sunlight, more heat is coming in than going out, hence black cars get hot, and normal spacecraft are coloured silver (or similar) to make them highly reflective and bounce the heat off. (Even those spacecraft will often have dark surfaces on the other side in order to keep cool.)

I'm guessing that the Blackbird SR-71 got so hot with the engines, that painting it black would result in far more heat radiated than the sun would put back in. It's all a matter of balancing heat in and heat out.

The summary is a little wrong: "Because the light absorption level is so high, the super-black material will also keep temperatures down for the instruments it is used on." I think that should be "Because the heat radiation level is so high, the super-black material will also keep temperatures down for the instruments it is used on."

I did an experiment years ago on a 5 inch floppy disk and a fridge magnet. I had to put the magnet in direct contact with the disk surface itself before I got any corruption. If it took that much on a 1980s floppy, it must surely take much more on a shielded and enclosed hard drive.

Cathode ray tubes certainly. Used to have lots of fun making the screen change colour, until my parents got upset. But it would still take a very strong field even for that.

Luxury! When I were a lad, we had to hand code the packages in byte by byte, and t'Gaffer would delete the lot if we got a byte wrong!

Need whooshed...

Very interesting. We had a problem in telephone exchanges about 25 years ago. All data was held in memory - no disk drives (except for billing records I recall). Some little old granny would mysteriously acquire a premium service. It only affected the lines that were hardly ever used. It was tracked down to "alpha particle corruption", which gradually eroded the charge, which effectively flipped the bit to a 1 and gave the subscriber a random service.

Don't know any more than that, but the old hand that described it to me, did so with unusual glee...

Absolutely swear by it! Comes with added Selenium and Zinc. Just ask your pharmacist.

Easy! Just infiltrate the crowd with thousands of trained trumpeters who play them 2.128ms after the person standing next to them!

Pity, that only cuts out one harmonic. However, I've occasionally had problems playing trombone next to a bass guitar. The amplified tone somehow cancels out my note and all I get is a muffled rasp.

Maybe we could have speakers concealed under the seats carefully tuned to play the exact opposite of whatever they pick up around them?

I know - how about installing colonies of African wasps trained to attack anything that sounds like them?

Good grief.

I'm just saying that with ad blockers becoming more common, and a technology that is potentially harder to block, advertisers would potentially pay extra for inline content.

Whether they will is another matter. I'm not bothered.

It may be now, but if I was an advertiser I'd see a strong case to require sites to embed it within the page. They couldn't do that with flash, but they can with HTML5

Not if it's done as embedded javascript and canvas within the page. You can block a flash download easily, but I'm guessing it would be harder to block canvas functionality, and it's messy trying to block a specific DIV or other element within the HTML

Correct. For special effect, if someone was watching, I would type my password, randomly hit a few keys, and then thump the keyboard four times. Then press Enter, and get logged in. It usually got quite a stunned expression from anybody nearby.

Don't solder on your mother's kitchen table. Or indeed anything valuable.

You need somewhere to get rid of excess solder. A damp sponge works well if you touch it briefly. Soldering iron stands usually have one in a tray on the base. If I'm in a hurry, I just use an old bit of paper, and tap the solder off. The metal isn't hot enough to burn the paper. Not so far, anyway...

Made them deliberately in school. Great fun. I got ten people to hold hands and gave them all a shock just as the teacher walked up the stairs.

Good timing Slashdot. You posted this at 9:30pm NZ time. It's already off the front page. Now nobody will know...

Looks like they've changed it - http://watchdog.co.nz/home.htm - it's now a metal dog. But I still have a mug with the duck logo on it. Watchduck, we used to call them...