Voltage regulation. The voltage regulator needs to be physically close to the circuits that it supplies in order to provide high quality power. To see an extreme case, look at the power supply circuits for the CPU on your motherboard. They are right next to the CPU socket. A modern Intel CPU is an incredibly demanding load.

Low voltage doesn't mean low power. You will have to deal with arcs and electrical fires. I've seen lots of screwdrivers and wrenches that were melted when someone accidentally shorted a low voltage power source to ground. Even worse is what happens when people wear rings and metal watch bands around hot circuits.

They should just ban negative option service contracts. There's too much incentive, even for legitimate companies, to structure them in a way that rips off their customers. I'm tired of being told that all I had to do to cancel was to send a passenger pigeon to Tierra del Fuego between the hours of 0300 and 0400, exactly 13 days before the contract is automatically renewed.

Part of it is that the documentation sucks, or doesn't even exist. The last time I bought a copy of Office, I received a box containing a CD and a license code. When did it become acceptable to deliver software with no documentation?

PIO and DMA have been around for over 50 years. That's a bit longer than the ATA interface.

It isn't Microsoft's fault. I've gotten used to the institutional paranoia that is rampant in the today's electronics industry. Everything is a trade secret. Schematics, if available, are mostly useless. When the product's functionality is hidden inside FPGAs and microcontrollers with proprietary firmware, you're screwed. In the old days, they used standard parts and you could learn something by reading the schematics, which were included with the product.

Steve Ballmer and the Download Experience, coming soon to a venue near you.

I've heard rumors that many government procurement managers are really pissed off at Boeing, and are more than willing to consider alternatives.

I think the problem is the huge amount of customization that they have to perform on any commercial aircraft to meet the requirements of Air Force One. Besides communications and emissions security, they have to be able to fly around in the middle of a nuclear war, without landing, for extended periods of time. Everything would have to be shielded against EMP. I read that the engines have extra oil tanks, so that they don't run out of lubricating oil during extended flights. They can refuel in air. They have countermeasures against surface-to-air missiles.

That's not what I said. I was looking for documented instances of anyone actually cooking their guts, as described in some urban legends.

I used to regularly get safety bulletins warning employees not to wear contacts while doing electrical work or carry disposable butane lighters while arc welding. The contacts would get stuck to your eyeball and a butane lighter could explode with the force of a quarter-stick of dynamite. All bullshit, but many people, including safety managers, believed it.

I'm not going to stand in front of a high-power RF emitter. I'd rather be safe then sorry, and I've worked around systems that combined multi-kilowatt transmitters with very high-gain antennas. I'd rather not get premature cataracts or some other injury. I don't worry about cell phones or VHF/UHF hand-held radios, which can often put out 5+ Watts on their high power setting. The only injury that I've seen real documentation on for hand-held radios is the accidental firing of electrical blasting caps that were carried next to a radio that was accidentally switched into transmit mode.

Another Southern saying, "Some people just need killin'". God made Man, but Colonel Colt made them equal.

Some disks have always been shipped formatted because they were used in systems that could not format their own disks. That was common for 8" floppy disks. See the DEC RX01 for an example.

All digital cameras have a format option.

I wouldn't bet on it. I've seen devices that could read, but not format, both FAT16 and FAT32.

The early versions of SCSI were limited to a 21-bit logical block address. This was later extended to 32 and 64 bits. That should last for a while.

The problem is, to quote Keynes, "In the long run, we're all dead". It took a long time for the stock market to recover from the Great Depression. How long can you afford to wait? What if the stock market spends the next few years in a slow decline?