Does anyone here care to name a PC manufacturer with a spotless record of turning out nothing but quality, or who has always been 100% up front about dealing with legitimate manufacturing problems?

They've all turned out crap and they've all reliably concerned themselves with their own bottom lines first and foremost. It doesn't excuse Dell, but I can't really see why they need to be singled out either.

Many scientists need to realize that their goals, ideals, and ethical standards may not be universal.

Never worked with lead-free solder have you?

It's only very recently that it's become practical for widespread use and it's still not settled how well it will work in applications that require maximum reliability. The problems with higher melting points, reduced wetting, tin whiskers, appropriate fluxes, etc. took a long time to sort out.

I'm sure that when a lot of early supercomputers were being built the components used would have been destroyed by the temperatures required to solder without lead.

Would it really be so hard to read the article before posting?

How about the "if it was private they shouldn't have been screaming it in public to anyone who could hear" argument?

Where did you come up with all that?

I'm not self-employed, my wife is a stay at home mom, I make under $40k/year, and I pay out of pocket for health insurance. It's not even that expensive.

Thank goodness Obama has done so much to fix all that.

Lots of things can increase the tendency to knock.

Lean fuel-air mixture (which is common these days in efforts to improve emissions and mileage)
High load (due to towing, steep grade, heavy acceleration, high speed, etc)
High ambient air temperature
Too high heat range of spark plugs (which may happen when auto makers are trying to improve warm-up times for emissions purposes)
Too much boost in a forced induction system

I happen to live near a freeway (traffic commonly moving at 70+ MPH) that has a steep grade and summer temps over 100F (which means that air conditioning is adding to the engine load too). Knock can be a serious issue.

Not all newer vehicles benefit from higher octane gas, but it's more than the Car Talk guys would have you believe.

It's not like that? It's exactly like that. Your car has made you into an idiot.

High octane equals higher resistance to uncontrolled preignition (aka knock, or detonation). Higher resistance to preignition allows more advanced ignition timing. More advanced ignition equals higher cylinder pressures and longer burn duration. Higher cylinder pressure and longer burn duration allows more complete combustion and higher efficiency.

Modern vehicles with knock sensors can get greater efficiency from higher octane fuels due to their ability to keep ignition timing as advanced as possible without running into preignition.

Though it may not be obvious why to someone in a metropolitan area or Europe.

MPG is the more useful number when you need to figure out what the range of a vehicle is (and perhaps if you'll be able to reach the next station). In the western US it's not unheard of to find yourself 100 miles from any gas station.

This is about implementing the most technically elegant solution for printing from mobile devices, it's about keeping HP's printer business in the black.

Seeing as this is being pushed by the printer company who is worried over the fact that people are printing less, and not by the manufacturers of cell phones and web tablets that don't really have any reason to implement any kind of printing subsystem in their OS or applications; maybe that would explain the decision to use email?

Tell me these will use at least a whitelist to determine which emails get printed. I don't need a stack of full color Viagr@ spam in my printer tray.

The older I get, the more I realize that an efficient government is a nightmare. I'm not a fan of wastefulness, but impotence and gridlock is wonderful.