I'm 31 and still hear these things just fine, despite having abused my hearing on occasion. No one over 40 in my office could hear an 18 kHz tone when I fired up a function generator on the PC, but then we only had about 4 people, not much of a sample set.

This is actually one of the reasons I'm so happy that flat panel displays are common now. Some old monitors used to drive me nuts with that high-frequency whine. If you turned one of these gadgets on in the room, I'd probably just assume there was a TV or monitor someplace that I couldn't find

#10, #22 - Duke Nukem 3D came out in 1996. It's Duke Nukem Forever that's been in development for so many years.

Your tongue is apparently a nudibranch in disguise. They're sneaky like that, but the rhinophores always give them away.

There's no way I could ever work for a company like IWT - I just wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to program the device to translate some random phrase as 'my hovercraft is full of eels'.

#14 - Switching power supplies are a common culprit. Many people can't hear the high frequencies much past adolescence. I'm 31 and still hear them pretty well most of the time. Expect to run into this more often as energy saving regulations force adoption of these in favor of less efficient but quieter transformers. Most of them are getting better, but cheap ones still suck.

I designed a Geiger counter with a higher voltage version of one of these supplies, and the whine bugs the heck out of me. It's just some kind of mechanical resonance in the components at that frequency. Shifting the frequency lessens it, but reduces the efficiency of the power transfer in my particular design.

On the cell phone, crosstalk from the digital circuits into the audio output is a possibility. Keeping the two separate can be a pain.

I used to answer my old phone before it rang because I could hear the slight interference with the car radio as the phone acknowledged the incoming call. Don't discount your brain's ability to pick up on things like that without conscious awareness.

Hey, that's my backside at 5:33! Didn't know they were still taping at that point. Was nice meeting you, Xeni!

I spent most of the weekend with the WWCC and had a blast. Stephen's new fire control system worked great - Wired had some coverage of it. Historically everyone's always used dumb R/C controllers and servos to aim and fire their guns, but his is the first to use a microcontroller to slave all of the guns together and aim them with a single heading and range control. If you look closely, you can see it in use on the HMS Hood. The guns on front and back will swivel in opposite directions to converge on a target at a specified range.

I have trouble imagining how this could be practical for any but the most specialized of components. I would imagine something like the F-35 uses mostly commodity parts - processors and FPGAs, for example. Parts that can do millions of different tasks.

I don't have any specific knowledge of military avionics, but I've dealt a little with satellite systems. More than a few satellites use a variant of the PowerPC 750, for example - basically the same chip that's in a PowerBook G3.

Say you've got the ability to put malicious circuitry in a PowerPC 750, and you want to use it to shut down an enemy's spy satellite. How can you possibly have the processor tell, without intimate knowledge of the software it'll be running and the hardware it'll be part of, whether it's part of a satellite or a laptop? And you have to not just recognize that it's a satellite, but have the ability to receive a kill signal, or otherwise determine that the malicious circuitry should be used.

If you're having something like a radar signal processing assembly produced overseas, then sure, I can see that. But at a component level, it just doesn't seem feasible.

Of course, if the DoD is worrying about it, it might be because they've already done it to someone else. Other than the speculation about the Syrian radar mentioned in the article, the only case of that sort of sabotage I can recall dealt with some bugged printers. But those were complete systems, not generic parts.

They've got some really smart people working on it, though, so they must know something I don't. That, or it's a lot of corporate welfare for certain contractors.

I used to work in a secure building on a military base, where everyone had at least a Secret level security clearance, with armed guards in the lobby and security cameras in all of the hallways - and as I recall they had to take out the honor system snack box due to ongoing theft problems.

On the other hand, I visited New Zealand in '99 and the honor system seemed to be alive and well there. I drove up to a nice resort in the Marlborough Sounds, and after the owner showed me a room and I said I'd take it, he just asked for a name to put in the book. That was it; no ID, no credit card, no deposit, and I can't recall getting a key - though there might have been one in the room. When it came time to check out, I had to remind them that I'd bought some groceries from their store and still owed them money for those.

I've seen the one in London, but this is even more incentive to go visit the Computer History Museum. They came and picked up my old VAX 6000-510 last year (I was tired of moving it with me and didn't have the 3-phase power to run it) and I'm curious if they've put it on display yet.

I've seen this personally. A Chinese supplier just mentioned to me yesterday that they're seeing their currency appreciate at the rate of about 1%/month vs. the dollar. Quotes don't stay valid long, and every time I order something it's a little more expensive.

I think it'll be a good thing for the Chinese people, though. They've got a HUGE potential domestic market - far larger than the US - but their purchasing power has been kept low by the same manipulation of the Yuan that has kept Chinese imports attractive to the US. Now that that's changing, I'd expect to see the Chinese selling more to their own people, which should also lead to more innovation and a higher standard of living - but yeah, cheap Chinese electronics are on the way out.

But we've still got Vietnam, India, most of Africa, and many other developing regions to exploit still, right?

The end of cheap Chinese electronics doesn't bother me particularly. I'm just curious how long it will take to bring essentially the entire world up to a standard of living such that very cheap labor exists nowhere.

Wish they had some better pictures. I ship a fair number of tracking devices to the UK and Ireland (for tracking of emergency responders and such, nothing designed for covert installation) and while it doesn't look like any of the equipment is mine, it'd be interesting to examine it in more detail.

I'm curious what the row of modular connectors are for. Normally these things don't need any external connectors other than power, GPS antenna, and cellular (or 2-way radio) antenna. What else was it wired into? It says bugging device, so was it just microphones?

I just wanted to point out that Mir's Spektr module suffered a hull breach, and didn't kill anyone, though they had to abandon the module. Sozuz 11 had a valve failure that resulted in decompression, but it didn't kill everyone instantly. Too quickly for them to find and fix the problem, unfortunately.

Explosions work just fine in space, no need for an oxidizer for a high explosive. No fireball maybe, but then most explosions on Earth don't involve the kind of fireball shown in the movies.

Nukes in space (away from the atmosphere) are interesting. In an atmosphere the bulk of their energy is transfered to the air in a very short distance - those x-rays don't go far. In space you don't get the same blast damage, but you get direct radiation and nasty charged particles at a greater distance.

Ok, I happen to work in the water security world - I'm a programmer, not a chemist, but I've learned a bit along the way.

This is a big political issue right now, and there's a lot of money being spent on it. I know, because we get a little bit of it. But it's honestly not the type of terrorist attack I'd be most concerned about.

Even attacking treated water (say, at a reservoir within the distribution network, or by pumping water back into a fire hydrant) requires a LOT of contaminant if you're trying to kill more than a handful of people. Obtaining the contaminant and successfully delivering it would be far more difficult than, for example, setting off a few bombs at a sporting event. While it's not totally infeasible, it's still more of a movie plot sort of attack.

I only feel good about my job because I know that if what we're working on works, it will catch REAL health threats, like e. coli and cryptosporidium. A lot of people in the water business feel the same way - they'll take the money in the name of homeland security if it means improving quality and safety in normal operations.

If you're worried about contamination, get a reverse osmosis system for your tap, and keep it maintained properly.

At least with analog signals you can almost believe that it'd make a difference. But high-end digital cables? I think some people don't quite understand how it works.

The bottom line is that cables are very high-margin items, and stores love them. If you can get a customer to buy a $20 USB cable to go with their 20% margin $80 printer, you've just doubled your profit.

Consumer-grade cables are CHEAP to produce. How cheap? Well, I just got my first shipment of some custom-made cables from China today. Actually, the company is based in Taiwan, not the mainland, so I probably paid a bit of a premium, but I got good customer service. I bought 200 each of a few different cables - a very small quantity as such things go. One cable was designed as a replacement for a proprietary cable that sells for $30 or so. My cost: 95 cents each. Throw in shipping, duties, wire transfer fees, small order surcharge, and so on, and I probably paid about a buck and a half. I'll sell them for around $10 or $12, I expect.

Not only does it keep those deleted messages around, every once in awhile if it crashes it'll just throw them back into your inbox when it restarts! Twice now I've had hundreds of already-read emails get dumped back in. Not fun.

I grew up in a suburban neighborhood, in a house with a half-acre lot. For close to 20 years we raised chickens (for eggs, not for slaughter) and never had any complaints.

Yeah, roosters are loud and annoying, especially when they're just learning to crow. We only had roosters a couple of times, when raising chicks. We got rid of them quickly.

Hens are generally pretty quiet. They'll cluck a bit and make some noise, especially when they've laid an egg, but it's not in the same league as a neighbor with a drum set. Not even like a neighbor with a weed whacker.

As for smell, I can't recall any to speak of. Keep things relatively clean and it's not a big deal.

I remember debates locally about backyard compost piles, and how the city wanted to ban any that weren't in airtight containers. That's actually about the WORST thing you can do for them - turns 'em into smelly, anaerobic slime. A well-tended compost pile smells... well, 'earthy' I guess - certainly not offensive, and not strong. Chickens, too, are pretty inoffensive when cared for properly.