#15:
Takuan, that was *not* what I meant when I suggested foam earplugs ;-)

I wonder if those devices could be more or less defeated by wearing those (easily available) disposable foam earplugs that sound engineers often use.

And BTW, $1500 for what is basically a Motorola tweeter with a power oscillator in a box - production cost less than $50 - sure is an easy way of making money.

#9:
Weird. I've been drilling holes in circuit boards (and cutting and grinding them too) for nearly thirty years, and I never came across any type of board material that would smell like urine.

#2:
This ad is for Centraal Beheer, a Dutch insurance company which has its main office in the town of Apeldoorn. They have been doing this type of ads for as long as I can remember, maybe 20 years. The graphic usually depicts some funny and/or improbable kind of screw-up, and the punchline is always the same - and means "Ooops! I'd better make a phonecall to Apeldoorn!"

The ads have run on TV, on billboards, basically anywhere.

I dislike most advertising. But this one is a classic masterpiece.

#1,3,4:
The human eyesight and brain have a wonderful and rather efficient ability to determine if an object approaches or moves away. And, as I implied above, the punchline (always in Helvetica Bold) is so well known in Holland that it would give the game away long before anyone would start worrying.

#42:
It depends. If the concert is held in a public place like a town square or whatever, with free admission, one can usually freely take photographs of the performers on stage.

In most small venues, there won't be any problems either. I've been going to concerts at least once a week over the past few years, never without my camera, and I've always been welcome to take photographs. Of course, as a matter of courtesy, you'll ask the performers for an e-mail addy, and you'll be sending them a selection of your pics in web-ready format so they can put them on their myspace page or whatever. This will usually be very much appreciated.

Larger venues and big-name artists will often have a photo policy. In some cases just asking for permission will do the trick. Last summer I got away with taking my equipment into a Patti Smith concert, just by pointing out that the venue policy said "no flash photography", and pointing out that I would not be using flash since I had a nice fast film...

#26:
Deleted files on flash cards can usually be recovered, provided they have not been overwritten in the meantime. I'm not using digital cameras as yet, but I saved several other people's @$$es with this neat little program:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoRec

As for ignorant cops and equally ignorant members of the public, I have noticed that carrying a real camera (as opposed to a cellphone or a point-and-shoot) will set off the ZOMFG UR NOT ALLOWED TO TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS UR VIOLATING MY PRIVACY reflex in a fairly reliable manner. One may encounter agressive behaviour for merely carrying the camera in one's right hand and not even pointing it at anything...

#14: Since the circuit of the flash unit is not referenced to earth ground (techies refer to this as "floating") whether or not the "subject" touches earth ground won't make any difference at all.

And BTW, these disposable cameras are still quite popular. I regularly get them at the photo lab so I can scavenge the flash circuits, which can be put to use in a number of interesting ways apart from shocking people. Miniature strobes, "disposable" pocket size slave flashes...

If the guy used the flash circuit from a (disposable) camera, no way it could get anywhere near 600 volts. 250 - 300 volts would be closer to the mark. Even my rather powerful Metz tops out at 310 volts.
BTW, the part of the circuit that triggers the flash tube (as opposed to the circuit that powers it) can generate several thousand volts, but the amount of energy it is capable of is so tiny that you wouldn't even notice.

I think that by now, a distinction should be made between "steampunk" and "faux steampunk". For this purpose, I modestly propose criterium No. 1:

"If it has Phillips head screws, it's Faux. Real steampunk has slotted head screws."

The price is a bit steep (their web site sez they make limited runs, maybe once they come up to speed price might come down) and flammability might be an issue. But for damping down the acoustics of an overly "live" room they'd probably be great. Better than egg cartons, and more visually attractive.

Armoured Segway...

/coat

#12:

In august '45, secret negotiations with the Japanese were already under way. While the a-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki rendered these negotiations pointless, most historians agree that the Japanese would soon have surrendered anyway, and the bombs were merely a jolly little show for Stalin & Co.

Of course, they won't teach this in history lesseons in the U.S. as it would be tantamount to admitting to a war crime.

The Altoids tin does have *one* very clear advantage over the coconut shell: It has built-in electrostatic screening. Reliably screening a coconut shell is not going to be easy.

#19: "(subject, of course, to extraction costs). "

It so happens that the Iraqi crude - Oilmen call it "sweet light crude" - is one of the easiest (thus cheapest) types of crude to extract and refine.

Basically you make a hole in the ground and it will ooze out by itself...
It has low sulphur content, low residue and high yield of readily useable fractions (petrol and kerosene).

#5: "What does China bring to the party?"

Lots and lots and lots of cheap crappy stuff that you can buy.

Heh. Eminem, Rage Against The Machine, Aphex Twin, Deicide...

Kid's stuff.

If I'd want to torture people, Id go for a mix of Abba, Boney M, and...

Marco Masini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xFbNiASTIg

Now *that's* torture.

#2:

Nat'l Geo's "Toxic Computer" interactive graphic contains an awesome heap of BS, which I would not have expected from such a prestigious publication.

* Mercury in switches and relays? Nope. Mercury wetted relays are used in specialist applications only. And the only relay in the average computer is the line relay on the analogue modem card if you still have one (it is the part that produces the audible "clunk" when you start dialing in).
Mercury is still used these days but only in fluorescent lamps, in very small amounts.

* Beryllium in the motherboard? Nope. Beryllium Oxide (BeO) is a ceramic which is both an excellent electrical insulator and a very good thermal conductor, which is a very useful combination in high power electronic components such as transmitting tubes and magnetrons. It is highly toxic, and as such has been phased out of any consumer products a long time ago - but you may bump into the odd microwave oven with a BeO-containing magnetron. Professional components that still contain BeO are required to have warning labels.

* Cadmium and hexavalent chromium are being agressively phased out of electronics under ROHS. As are lead and mercury. Cadmium, hexavalent chromium and lead are still present (the latter in very significant quantities) in most older kit though. Phasing out of mercury has been underway from the mid-eighties since it has been recognized as especially dangerous due to its volatility.

That is not to say that e-waste is not a (huge) problem. It is, mostly because:
a) Only a low percentage is being recycled properly. According to current estimates, up to 80% of e-waste - even, in some instances, the stuff you may have paid for in order to be recycled properly! - ends up being dumped in Africa or China.
b) The lifetime of most electronics is increasingly expressed in months rather than years, which means that the production of e-waste is indeed increasing very sharply.

I wonder what pollutes more: A product which contains some toxic materials but is built for eternity, or ten products (replacing the former) which contain very little toxic materials...

That said, I warmly welcome no-nonsense, low power, low cost computing hardware. But I am of course in a state of sin as I'm currently looking at the screen of my power-guzzling HP-Panasonic 21" (the Humvee of displays, bought second hand for a mere €50) and I'm not letting go of it anytime soon... Haven't yet seen a reasonably priced LCD display that can match its color rendering and sheer screen real estate.

The IR-LED trick will work with most cheap compact surveillance cameras. These cameras themselves often use IR-LEDs as illuminators - half a dozen or so positioned around the lens and facing in the same direction as the lens does - so they will work reasonably well in low light conditions. One or two LEDs of the same type pointed at the camera will effectively blind such a camera.
Such LEDs produce a fairly narrow beam, without external optics.

With professional grade surveillance kit tho, I doubt it will work reliably under all circumstances. At night, probably well enough to blank out the features of a person, but as mentioned by securityinsider, you'll probably set off an alarm of some sort, with the likely result of the local rent-a-cop goon squad swooping down on you.

As far as motorcycle helmets go:
In Italy as in most European countries, wearing a helmet is compulsory for motorcycle and moped riders. A few months after this law was introduced, a kid went into a tobacconist's in a bit of a hurry and forgot to take his helmet off. The shopkeeper panicked and unloaded both barrels of his 16 gauge into the kid's chest. You can imagine the result.

I must say that €114k looks like a bargain for a machine like this. The wet-process machine my photo printing lab uses costs more than that and doesn't look half as impressive, but I'll admit I'm comparing apples and aardvarks here.

It also reminds me of the Xerox we had in high school. One of the first high volume photocopiers, did an estimated 120ppm, and it was huge - though not *that* huge - and really noisy. It had a room of its own, being in there for five minutes you'd carry the ozone smell with you for the rest of the day.

#20: I remember reading a SF novel, can't remember the title, it was quite a few years ago, in which any book was simply printed on demand...

My favourite typeface for printed matter is probably Robert Zapf's Optima aka Zapf Humanist. Classy, eclectic and a joy to read.

Basically what these guys are doing is they're scanning a pretty powerful laser across a pretty large surface.
As long as the beam is *scanned*, it won't harm anyone's eyes. The energy of the beam will be effectively spead out evenly over the entire surface being scanned. The beam's intensity will be high, but the average time the beam rest on any particular point will be very, very short. The average energy will be way too low to do any harm. If an observer in the building used as the "projection screen" were to look directly toward the laser, he/she would see a moderately bright spot of green light. Not unlike the spot of red light you see when you look into a supermarket checkout scanner.

However, if the scanning mechanism were to fail and the beam would come to rest stationary onto one's eye... that *would* be a problem.

If the guy was using the same camera(*) he can be seen cradling in the pic, no wonder.

Go to a mall and take a pic with your mobile phone or one of these compact point-and-shoots, and hardly anyone will notice. Pull out a *real* camera, and take the time to properly compose and focus your shot, you'll be in trouble. If the guy was caught with a Hasselblad, they'd have probably lynched (tasered?) him on the spot.

(*)It looks like a SLR, and by the way the guy cradles it, I'd say it has manual focus, which means the camera is likely to be quite old and almost certainly film, not digital.

@#16: Of course it is possible to brute-force (crack) a PGP encrypted disk. But it will take
1) a lot of time, and
2) a lot of processing power,
to the extent that it really is not feasible for the mere purpose of sending someone to jail on child pornography charges.

Another point that should be made: The immigration official who happened to view the file judged it to be "child pornography", but this might have been a matter of opinion. I have a collection of David Hamilton's photography on one of my hard drives, I wonder what the immigration official in question might think of that. From what I know about the mindset of the average U.S. immigration official, I'd rather make sure to have it on an encrypted partition if I ever were to travel to the U.S. with a laptop. (however unlikely)

@#32: The socket strip looks like it has Schuko sockets, which are originally German (SchuKo = SCHUtzKOntakt which means the plugs/sockets carry a protective ground, like the US standard 3-prong), these are used in many European countries. Thus the voltage is probably 230V, which is the EU "harmonized" nominal mains voltage.

If the extension cord is wired correctly, the GFCI will most likely trip as soon as an appreciable amount of water gets into the socket strip. GFCI's are mandatory in domestic circuits in most of Europe, but some not-so-recent installations *might* not have GFCI's fitted. A plain circuit breaker is not likely to trip and will not offer any protection.

That said, anyone in the pool would be unlikely to get fried unless they'd contact some firmly grounded object. But I'd rather not be in there all the same...

"A siren tears the night in half
'cuz someone lost his wallet
yeah it's surveillance of assailance
if that's watchawannacallit

And Small Change got rained on
with his own .38"

(The workings of the NYPD according to Tom Waits)

Amphigorey,

Women's shirts have a different cut, in order to ehm... "highlight certain anatomical features". Therefore they take slightly more work to make. Which would explain the price difference.

(I know this 'cause my mother used to be a taylor. Not in New Orleans, and she didn't sell my new blue jeans... :-)

Tom,

Apart from the fact that the whole carnivore/vegetarian diatribe IMHO is slightly off topic here, currently the tendency is to a consensus that daily meat consumption does lead to an increased chance of developing bowel cancer.

Furthermore, the meat industry has a *huge* ecological footprint, which is something the world could well do without in this day and age.

Mind you: I'm not a vegetarian, much less vegan. But I do keep my meat consumption to a minimum, and avoid bio-industrial meat whenever possible.

Mark, as far as I know Greenpeace is based in Europe. Which means that they cannot send you a list with their employees names and dates of birth. European privacy law forbids this, unless there are legal requirements and the recipient of the data is vetted accordingly.
In fact, it would be quite an irresponsible and probably harmful thing to do: knowing one's name and date of birth makes identity theft a whole lot easier.

Don't wear this in the London subway if you don't want a clipful of hollow point bullets pumped into your head.

Photography in museums is usually forbidden because of copyright issues. One could conceivably photograph, say, Warhol's Marilyn and sell the prints.