I'm intrigued; can you really make a a transistor at home out of toothpaste? Normally I would assume this is hyperbole, but I really, really want it to be true.

I agree! I miss the food. Most everything else tastes bland in comparison.

In case anyone is wondering about the name, Chongqing is China's fourth municipality, and was apparently the location of the GNOME.asia conference last year. This will save you from having to Google it.

Yes. Redundancy is always good. (Let's see how much levels Slashdot can take before crashing :^))

Well played, sir.

Whoah, glitch in the Matrix! Have you posted this comment before on a similar topic? I just had a serious case of deja vu.

On first glance I thought your car analogy compared the Nissan Leaf to the F-15.

Some negative number. I've been thinking it was 2010 for weeks now. This has happened to me the last few years. I blame it on always looking at things scheduled to be released next year (tech, games, movies, etc.).

Same here, only t'other way 'round.

I completely believe this to be true of those printers whose cartdiges have the print head as part of the cartridge (looks at Hewlett-Packard).

They can also be very economical to run. You just have to refill them yourself. I buy my ink from inksupply.com (there are probably a dozen places on the internet to buy ink) and it costs me about $1.50 to refill a cartridge. I have had cartridges last for years. The trick is to refill them before they go completely dry.

Hmm, yeah, I’d forgotten the labels. That was innovative.

The integrated instant messaging was innovative, too, as far as I know.

The storage space was well ahead of its time. Other free e-mail providers have followed suit, but Gmail broke ground.

The main two things I admire about Gmail, though (and I’d forgotten one, until you mentioned it) are its spam handling and its mail search feature. Both are second-to-none.

I will attest to the cost of running the Canon Pixma series of printers. It is simply the cheapest of all, and also happens to produce the best-looking, plain-paper printouts I've ever seen.

The participant asked why digital file formats (jpg, mpeg-3, mpeg-4, jpeg2000, and so on) can't allow the same degradation and remain viewable.

Because all of those are compressed, and take up a tiny fraction of the space that a faithful digital recording of the information on a film reel would take up. If you want lossless-level data integrity, use lossless formats for your masters.