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"Harte Hanks Potpourri" are the most common of these mailers. Your local supermarket's monthly coupon books may be handled by these companies, so be sure to specify if you want to continue to receive those. Your letter carrier is accustomed to giving each house a bundle, so you may also need to inform him or her of your action separately. The post office is prohibited by law from delivering unaddressed mail, so you should have little trouble convincing the carrier.

The sentence on "post office prohibited by law" is incorrect. The post office will deliver mail to "resident" or to "john doe or current resident" and the mailers know this. They also know your address and it would be stupid of the mailers to actually produce a piece with no address. There is also NCOA rules that came into effect this year which requires mailers to validate the addresses through a couple of means. i.e. it's going to get to you.

I find the credit card crap the most offensive and I don't know who maintains that list.

I've always wondered if one could use them as a roofing material (though fashioning a fastener for the rather large central hole would be a pain)

A quick search on Google leads one to this page though:

http://www.obviously.com/recycle/guides/hard.html

where it has some information and lists two addresses which will take them to recycle (and CD-Rs has ~20mg of gold --- who knew?)

William

DICE C, wildly popular on the Amiga is free and available here. DICE was how Matt Dillon (As in DragonFly BSD) made his name as a programmer.

VBCC, also popular on the Amiga, is free.

The proposed new messaging layer sounds really interesting and powerful. A little like Mach or QNX, perhaps?

Consider the "need to know" shortcuts in this article. For example "1859, when the first lead acid battery was made in France". This was the first cell using Planté type plates which are still in use today, but the history of lead acid and other cells goes back a bit further than that. It's a reasonable shortcut, but it does illustrate that this kind of article only skims the very surface. If you want insights, you have to go and do your own research.

On the other hand, they do make an important point: "Of the billions [of cells and batteries] sold each year, most wind up in landfills and incinerators". Well, that's pretty much true of AA type alkalines and carbon-zincs, but actually clunky old automotive lead acids are now recycled 95% of the time. NiCad's though are death in a tube: nobody wants to touch the bloody things. NiMh's and Lithium Ions are a little nicer, if you can find a local recycler who will handle them. Power Express used to accept small amounts of NiMh's and LiIons by mail, but they've changed their site and I can't find any mention of it now, which perhaps indicates the volatility (ha ha) of the recycling market. If you want some sleepless nights, have a look here for a decent overview of what you can and should be recycling.

Oops, but then we slip into the land of delusions again: "Batteries, which have long been derided for polluting the environment, will soon do their part to clean it up, MIT's Sadoway said. The same research that is shrinking cell phones has a higher purpose: an exhaust-free electric car."

Uh huh. Like the T Zero? Again, the site has changed, and I now can't find mention of the technologies, but from memory, it's either 300kg of lead acids (shorter range or quicker death from deep discharges) or nickel metal hydrides (landfill ahoy) with quoted replacement costs and times of $3000 and 3 years for the lead-acids. Yes, that's 100kg of lead, acid and plastic to be recycled every year for every vehicle, or about half a pound (and $2.75) a day. OK, it can be recycled, and the problem is concentrated rather than distributed. But it's a lot of nastiness to deal with, and remember that rules only apply to nice middle income people. Scurrilous low income types are just going to abandon their twenty year old wrecks (complete with 200kg of lead) in the nearest ditch, street corner, or even front yard. We'd better be prepared to treat these things as environmental time bombs and have policies in place to collect and recycle them, with or without the owner's consent. Designing in a large recycling burden just makes less sense than investing in a clean and long lived internal power source.

I think that the intro sums it up: the problem is chemistry. There's only so much energy you can store in a sealed unit. If we want significant energy density from a renewable source and no ongoing recycling nightmare, then we have to go to hydrogen cells or even good old fashioned alcohol burners. Sealed cell technology is not the long term answer to our energy needs, and we can't just blame the manufacturers for that, seeing as how it's us that keeps buying their products by the billion then (mostly) throwing them in the trash.

This guide offers all sorts of good info on stopping unwanted mail, e-mail, and phone calls.

How to stop junk mail from even arriving
Pre-emptivly strike out junk mail, so you don't have to waste your time and recyclables!

The Post Office has an official policy that there is no such thing as junk mail - that all advertising mail is valued by both parties. Check here, and search for "junk".

All these tactics sound cool, but are ineffective. If you want the mail to stop, get off their lists. Junkbusters is a good place to start, and a quick Google search will find others. A truly noble thing would be to lobby your congress person for European-style laws that allow opting out on a national level.

This is probably the best choice for unwanted junk mail. All that mail is an environmental nightmare, killing trees, poisong rivers through the paper-making process, and filling landfills with 70 billion pieces of junk a year. Let 'em know what you want (I still get ThinkGeek mailings), and let 'em know what you can do without.

Well, there's gcc, borland C is coming soon. Dice C and VBCC both compile on linux as well as AmigaOS, and VBCC in particular would be a viable replacement for the C subset of GCC. And there's also LCC.

Free source for DICE, compilable on Amiga, FreeBSD & Linux.