I think that there must be batches of weak magnets out there on Apple-branded MagSafe connectors. I have destroyed two MagSafe plug/cable combos, mostly due to exposure to moisture and ensuing damage to the ID chip embedded in the plug. I've replaced them with chinese off-eBay knock-offs that work great and seem to have magnets much stronger than the original. It is nearly impossible to yank them out by mistake.

Well, maybe those are not knock-offs, just recycled parts or parts swiped off the production line, but they don't look like hang been recycled at all. The replacement involved breaking apart the power supply enclosure, as I didn't want to splice the cable. It was a bit of a pain the first time, I admit. The cable is simply soldered onto the power supply board and trivial to replace once you get to it.

It's not about electrocution risk, it's about the risk of blowing the gold off the connector's pins when you accidentally short-circuit them across, say, the corner of a unibody macbook. You do not want to have the low-impedance DC supply circuit energized until you know the connection has been made. The little spring-loaded pins are quite fragile, short-circuiting across them will make them useless in short order.

Alas, my magsafe I system doesn't turn the power supply off when the load is detached. You can still make some impressive sparks if you touch the connector to the corner of the machine, so this isn't really a feature of magsafe I at least.

There's no such thing as "penetrating the skin". You will always get some current flowing, even if you "touch" the skin across a circuit that has a few millivolts across it - it will simply be too small to affect your nervous system, in most circumstances. The impedance of the circuit dictates what the current will be at a given voltage, and it's the magnitude of the current that matters. Knowing merely the voltage without knowing the impedance is fairly useless. 24V can kill you if you insert the electrodes into the (low impedance) arteries of both forearms :) 48V, a "safe" voltage, can be quite unpleasant if you're wet, even more so if you're wet with saltwater.

You won't get mildly electrocuted by a plug with 16V potential difference across it. Even if you're very wet with seawater, you might feel a slight tingle at best. The potential to Earth is at worst in the same ballpark, if it isn't potential-free to Earth to start with (as in isolated from Earth).

There's this thing called aesthetics. It's often a matter of personal taste, even. Basically you're saying that when it comes to computing, personal preferences and taste be damned. Now go crawl back under the rock you came out from under.

Ah, I have another Radio Shack story from 1989. I went to a store with my dad, and there was another customer with a question that my dad, as an EE, was able to answer. He then asked the clerk, perhaps a tad naively, something along the lines of why didn't he know this or that about the products he sold. The answer was "If I knew it, I wouldn't be working here now, would I?". Still gives me a chuckle, but there's a lesson there: ultimately, corporations are keeping their employees just passably able to do their jobs. RadioShack, as well as many other corporations, don't care much for people with anything but most rudimentary knowledge for customer-facing positions. They want to keep their costs as low as possible, no matter how many people are pissed off. As long as "few enough" are pissed that the company is afloat, everything is considered peachy. That's a bit sad.

I don't know when did you learn that, but no physicist worth their salt would say that by mid 1930s at the latest, I'd hope.

These days you buy a radio on a chip, who cares about variable caps? It's digitally tuned. If you really insist, use a varicap.

There's this moment when you're acting out when you cross from plausible belief to total, in-your-face disbelief. Does NSA seriously imply that such an attack would have lasting consequences? Do they really think that there wouldn't be many BIOS recovery solutions popping up left, right and center literally within hours? My bet is that within a week there'd be a thriving BIOS recovery business going on all around us, and the damage would be well contained in spite of whatever bullshit the clueless media would be spewing around.

I'd like some thing tangible to back it up, since I think it's bullshit. There may have been some bioses like that, maybe even popular ones, but this is not the case anymore since at the minimum such a thing would need at least a minimal USB stack with it - it wouldn't be anywhere near "small" anymore.

The real deal is not BIOS or anything, but XP going out of support, and plenty of XP-running hardware simply has no driver support for Windows 7. At work we still have a bunch of XP-running machines that we will replace simply because it's cheaper to replace them than have me and/or another IT guy here spend time doing driver testing on obsolete hardware.

Same applies to a gun. You can take someone down with a gun if you don't care much for your life, same as if that person was good with a knife. Arguably close-quarters gun use requires less training to be lethal, but man, I've seen rather low-key (not para/military!) people who, with a knife, are pretty much unapproachable without the approacher being dealt serious damage. Arguably, people might be more inclined to run after someone with a knife, but hey, that's only a psychological effect and has no source in reality: they can be taken out by a skilled knife-wielder just as if he/she had a gun.

I've seen a recording of an experiment done with zip ties with real human participants, and that's why I even bother to mention them. I'd say they are a diversion so big that it almost guarantees untouchability. Scenario: you run up to someone and in about 400ms they have a zip tie tightly wrapped around their neck. Then you move on to the next target, as long as they are 20-30ft away. Whoever was next to that first person who is now in the process of collapsing will help them first, they won't he chasing no assailant. In the right hands and circumstances a bunch of zip ties is almost a perfect weapon.

To me that's all within the same order of magnitude, so no real increase. It's all hovering about 0.1 shooters/million.

Are you nuts? How can you, with a straight face, recommend a product that you can't fucking buy? There's no "buy now" link on their site. End of story. It's vaporware as far as individual users are concerned. Their sales people would probably laugh you out of the room if you called them up and said "well, I need it for my old mum".

There are two kinds of software: software that you can individually buy by instantly paying online, and software that you can't. The latter usually is a big fucking mess in some way. That's been my experience. The exceptions are few and far between. Usually the reason it's not available for instant purchase is precisely that it's a mess so bad that making it easily available would expose it for the crap it often is.

Mainly because MS Office by default drags in the entire, unwanted in this case, operating system with it.

Practically speaking, though, MS Office 2010 works great on wine, even on OS X, so I wouldn't worry. And I personally would NOT advise anyone to use MS Office for Mac. It's a disaster - all the purported compatibility benefits simply aren't there, since it's a separate code base. If you really want office on OS X or Linux, use it via wine. Otherwise, use libreoffice and be done with it.