Really easy fix - just tell the user not to treat their laptop like a fucking place mat in a greasy spoon diner. I've had at least a dozen personal Apple laptops over the years and tested and worked on thousands more. Never had a key go bad on any of mine, and any time I've ever seen a problem with a user's keyboard, they were 99% of the time a slob who spilled food crumbs and who-knows-what-else into their keyboard and track pad. If you insist on treating your precious technology like a baby's bib, then get a cherry switch keyboard you can stick in the dishwasher once a week and put a vinyl cover over the built-in keys. Easy peasy.

Third hand smoke and farts are legitimate concerns, but until manufacturers stop putting toxic fragrance chemicals in personal care and laundry products I will be keeping my own private, personal vehicle for health reasons. Any time I take public transit I get sick for days. In the future, maybe people will wake up and stop drenching themselves in poison.

Actually, my hair is 1/16" long and I am very clean. For me, cleanliness also happens to mean free of extraneous chemicals, especially ones that stink. I use botanical and mineral-based deodorant, so I usually don't stink of ripe human at all. My fragrance-free lifestyle allows me to smell and taste my food and beverages better, experience the great outdoors in all its olfactory glory, and know exactly when everything in my refrigerator is no longer edible, among other benefits. That, and I don't get headaches and my immune system is like an industrial wood chipper. Until someone walks up to me sporting a three-to-five-dryer-sheets dose of freshness, when all that changes drastically with each second of exposure making it worse. Headache, runny nose, sneezing, burning watery eyes, exposed skin itching, swollen lymph nodes, respiratory distress, nausea, occasional vomiting, tremors and flu-like symptoms. I could go on, but to answer your question, I'm not a Grommet. Are you an Axe Boy? A perfumigator? A walking roach bomb? Do people know you've arrived at a party before you even walk through the door? Would I be able to track you down by following a trail of dead insects in your wake? I would rather huff the fumes of a steaming pile of wet pig shit than suffer a downy-unstoppable-axe-irish-spring-drakkar sprunt idiot any day of the week, but I guess that's just me.

Take off the foil hat, it won't save you from the real threat: all the toxic, totally unregulated shit that's in the air "fresheners" and laundry products, body sprays and perfumes, personal care products, textile chemicals, flame retardants, cleaning products, and all the other shit they have convinced so many people they must have in order for their lives to be complete. They put it in everything. They put some fucking bubblegum stinking perfume in my windshield wiper fluid, for fucks sake. I guess now some people can't handle the smell of ethanol, so they have to make it smell purrdy! (otherwise known as “masking fragrance” which doesn’t have to be disclosed on any label.) They put perfume in garbage bags, cat shit litter, children's toys, cars, and the ventilation systems of retail stores and airplanes. People think this shit is made from flowers and spices; it's not. It is basically the chemical waste left over from the distillation of gasoline, but some geniuses have figured out how to recombine and manipulate this crap so they can sell it to people for money, instead of having to dispose of it as the hazardous waste it really is. We're talking carcinogens, teratogens, neurotoxins, endocrine disruptors, skin sensitizers and allergens, asthma triggers. Things that fuck with your DNA expression. Paradichlorobenzene, anyone? That's what gives me migraines, not my fucking smart electric meter, which I've had for months now and can detect no ill effects from whatsoever. People are dying from "nothing" alright, only it's called strange diseases that can't be traced to a single, specific cause, which is exactly how the chemical waste peddling corporations like it. Our chemical laws are outdated and toothless, corporations are given "trade secret" exemptions and are constantly coming up with new permutations on the same old crap to skirt whatever whack-a-mole efforts are made to control them. Ban BPA? They just switch to its cousin, BPS. The ubiquity of this cloud of toxins virtually guarantees impunity for the perpetrators. You can't prove your Glade gave you cancer or made your kid slow, so they're in the clear and your problems are "externalities" as far as the corporate accountants are concerned.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was The Flying Hockey Stick, in which a kid straps an umbrella and a fan to a hockey stick, assembles a very long chain of extension cords and then proceeds to fly all around the world on various adventures. Even as a child I knew that such a contraption would never work in real life, but the important take-away for me was that I learned the willful suspension of disbelief in the interest of enjoying a fanciful story. Obviously, anyone who invests real money in a scheme to deploy airborne heavier-than-air wind turbine power generators is either engaging in the same sort of self-delusion, or dumber than a box of armpit hair. I hear there's one born every minute.

Funny how you start your homophobic rant by quoting a rock song written and sung by a queer, then you assume that someone referring to Mr. Banks' spouse as his "partner" implies a same-sex relationship. In fact, his partner is a woman, you ignorant piece of maggot slime. Fuck you, hater. I know, I know... YHBT YHL etc.

how about a building with some square footage, like the Pentagon?

OK, I'll give you a better reason. The toxic fumes from whiteboard markers give me migraines. But that's just one of many reasons why I don't work for [corporate code factory].

The original tubular Apple iSight camera had a three-piece mechanical iris lens cover made of white plastic that would open and close when the front bezel was twisted, in addition to the LED on top of the device. It was behind a glass cover, so there was absolutely no functional value to this "door" other than to let the user know that the camera could not possibly be looking at them when the device was switched off. I'm sure it must have added greatly to the cost of the camera, but Jobs and Co. must have thought inspiring a feeling of privacy and security in the user important enough to justify the cost. Once cameras got small and cheap enough to build into every machine, this method of visual feedback was dispensed with, at least on machines built by Apple. I have explained to countless Mac clients over the years that the light is indeed hard-wired to the camera and cannot be disabled, that after I get done configuring their machine it will be safe from any and all malware (assuming they do not change certain settings), yet if they still feel the least bit uneasy, a piece of tape or post-it note over the camera is nothing to be embarrassed about. After all, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you...

On the upside, maybe the compressed air will keep crumbs and other foreign matter out from underneath the keys, thus helping to prevent one of the most common modes of failure with existing keyboard technology.

The Extended Keyboard II is actually an ancient barge of a keyboard; beige plastic with the old six-color Apple logo in the corner. I picked up 10 of them for $50 on eBay a few years ago. It connects via the long-obsolete Apple Desktop Bus, requiring an adaptor for use with USB. I find the current keyboard offerings from Apple to be mediocre at best. If I am going to be typing more than a few paragraphs, I prefer to break out the old beige keybarge. I have often heard them referred to as "The One True Keyboard" by those who know. For me, the only thing that ever came close was the original keyboard that came with my IBM PC/XT (long since landfilled). I liked the springy sounds it made. Each key had a slightly different tone. Would love to have samples of those sounds to assign to keypresses. The sounds of serious typing...

Typing this on an Apple Extended Keyboard II plugged into an iMate USB To ADB Adaptor. Best. Keyboard. Ever.

Have they been slashdotted? All the so-called mirrors I have found so far point back to them.
Does anyone have a link to a working mirror or a torrent?

I was just browsing pictures on NASA's site the other day that showed workers on lifts wearing harnesses. In an environment where dropping a wrench could cause millions of dollars in damage, these have got to be some of the most careful workers around, which leads me to believe that something really unusual must have happened, like several things going wrong at once. TFA is quite short on details. It goes without saying that damage to expensive equipment can not be compared to the loss of a human life, but I'm saying it anyway.