I understand the use-case of replacing the carburetor with fuel-injection, and computer-controlled fuel injection allows you to optimize the performance of the engine for a variety of cases that are only measurable with electronic (i.e. computer) sensors. But what's the use-case for replacing the camshaft. It's got a monkey-stupid job, lifting and dropping poppet valves. It performs that job perfectly because it's dead-simple. It's directly connected to the crankshaft, so it operates for as long as the engine is turning. It's got a dead-easy task, of lifting and dropping lightweight valves, so it contributes virtually no parasitic drag to the engine, and because of the simplicity of the design, (it's a rod with bumps on it) it lasts FOREVER. Whoever heard of replacing a camshaft? The reason why nobody's moved to electronic valve control is that the camshaft is in the Dieter Rams design hall of fame. It's great design: It's not part of the problem, so don't change it.

You're approaching this all wrong, thinking you need a storage medium that's heat-resistant, when we don't even know if such a thing exists. (At least for consumer media, like disks and tape and hard drives.) And the answer is much simpler: Get a safety deposit box at your bank, make a copy of everything in your safe and put it in the safety deposit box. Your bank is EXTREMELY resistant to fires at your home.

It's incomprehensible to me that there are this many people on /. using online services to pay their taxes. Why on Earth would you pay those fees?

I download the 1040 (whatever flavor I need to, it's been changing over the years) in PDF format, fill it out, print it, and mail it to the IRS. I live in New York State, and they allow free e-file this year, so I do that for my state taxes. In previous years that wasn't available, so it was again a filled out PDF, mailed to the appropriate agency, just like the Feds.

The notion that I would pay a DIME over the absolute minimum to file my taxes is insane to me. I will pay money for the right to pay more money?!? Are you kidding me? The 1040's aren't that hard to figure out, and any questions can be answered using Google inside of 5 minutes.

• Total time I spent filing my taxes this year: 93 minutes.
• Total money I spent filing my taxes this year: $0.49 (For the Forever Stamp)

Hellzyeah. I *am* a developer, and you get more done with a half-dozen regular expressions than you usually do in any IDE.

This is what the teardown of a genuine Apple charger looks like. http://www.righto.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger-teardown-quality.html Say what you will about Apple - They made a really really nice product here. It ain't easy engineering 110VAC to 5VDC in 2 cubic inches...

It's absolutely possible to screw up that badly. All you'd need to do to electrocute someone through a USB charger would be short the wires that go from mains power to the 5V lead. And that's really easy to accomplish by accident if you're using a linear voltage regulator (wasteful - which means lots of HEAT) and you're not getting the required clearances between your high-voltage and low-voltage traces. Heat melts the solder, which shorts the connection, which gives you the shock. It doesn't matter in the slightest that "the cables aren't generally thick enough to carry enough 220V current". For one thing, there ain't no such thing as 220V current. 220V is voltage. Current is measured in amps. Secondly, the rating on the cable simply means they'll get hot and melt. But if the phone was on the woman's ear the moment the short occurred, there's plenty of time to electrocute her before the cables degraded. Shortly thereafter I'm sure the charging cable got hot and melted, breaking the circuit. Which would have been cold comfort to the woman's corpse.

Boot linux off removable media and then run the following command:

for i in 1 2 3 4 5 \
do \
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda \
done

Wherefore art thou, Zoolander phone?

There's a larger issue than just "people don't change formats for picture quality," though I _do_ agree with that:

Picture quality isn't a compelling argument for most consumers because:

a) It's a fairly minor improvment - I'm sure some moron's going to waste our time blathering about resolution, but the truth is: Doubling the resolution of a 240 line VHS with DVD represents a vastly more important improvement than (somewhat less than) doubling the the resolution of a 480 line DVD with a 720p Blue-ray. 1080 is more, sure; But you're still just throwing pixels at a picture that already looks pretty damn good.

b) A nontrivial fraction of consumers can't tell the difference anyway - You need a large HDTV set to be able to see a difference. What distance do people watch movies at? 12, perhaps 15 feet? At that distance all formats are indistinguishable on sets smaller than 50':

http://s3.carltonbale.com/resolution_chart.html

Ultimately, Blu-ray is going to go the way of Laser-disc because it's an answer to a question that nobody ever asked.

Oh, and also because of porn. Between Sony discomfiture releasing porn on Blu-ray, and the porn industry's reluctance to get into bed with Blu-ray (ho, ho), porn's not driving Blu-ray adoption. (A lot of porn stars have to get work done before they'll appear on Blu-ray - Think the HDTV scene from 30 Rock.)

For Blu-ray to succeed it would have to be the first new media to succeed without porn since the Guttenberg Bible.

...what I've said for years: IDE's are for p#$$!@s.