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Flaming Cellphones
phorm writes "Many of us have heard the urban legend of cellphones causing fires at the gas pump, but how about the hazards of replacement batteries? Reuters is carrying a story about a woman whose cellphone burst into flame, causing her superficial burn injuries. According to Nokia, the problem has occured before, and is related to non-brand replacement batteries. For various reasons, these batteries may overheat and catch fire, or even explode! So far I haven't found much info on whether this has happened with other brands of phone, though I do know that my little flip-phone gets very hot when running in analog mode. Perhaps some slashdot readers have had a similar experience?"
I didn't even realize cellphone batteries did get hot.
My motorola flip phone has never got warm from usse or changing batteries or anything else.
Get a different phone.
clifgriffin > blog
i think using gasoline means our continued dependence on fossil fuels. if batteries are dangerous in an accident, then we must find a way to make them safe, not use it as an excuse to keep burning gas.
Except that when you start talking about the generation and distribution systems required to charge all the batteries in electric cars, the combined inefficiencies are greater than those of gasoline powered cars... never mind the safety.
What fuel are you going to burn to generate the electricity to charge all those electric cars? Forget wind and solar, they're not practical yet and possibly never will be.
Think of what will happen when 10 million Los Angeles commuters plug in their electric cars each night...
if you don't like electricity as a solution, how about offering a positive alternative? instead of waiting around to laugh at people if your worse case scenario comes true.Actually, I won't be laughing if my electric bill goes up to $0.75 per kWh because demand from charging electric cars out-strips supply, nor will I be laughing when I get sprayed with the electrolyte from the ruptured batteries of an electric car which hits me.
We do have a solution which is far more practical and safe, but which is either ignored or maligned by environmentalists. Grow genetically-engineered corn and process it to produce methanol (alcohol). It's a liquid fuel (easier to contain than gases and therefore safer, also can be handled with existing infrastructure) which will require little work to retrofit existing cars to use. While the corn is growing it would strip x mols of CO2 from the atmosphere and when the fuel is burned it would produce x mols of CO2, so there would be no net increase in CO2. And alcohol is a great fuel for internal combustion engines. It's cleaner than gasoline in terms of other pollutants, producing only some NOx (inherently unstable in our atmosphere) at the temperatures and pressures inside an engine's cylinders. Oil companies embrace it - let's face it, they don't care what they're pumping as long as they make a profit on it.
Why don't we have it? Well, for one thing, you have all the people running around freaking out about genetically modified plants. The other problem is the same left-wing zealots who want electric cars (without looking at the problem of the power requirements) start jumping up and down screaming that "you can't feed cars while there are children starving in Somalia!". (Sexual restraint is the solution to that one, and I ain't talking about leather fetishists.)
hey, he's running IIS guys.I am? That's news to me! Someone must have broken my house, upgraded my webserver's hardware and then installed Windows on it! I'd call the police, but if the hardware is nice, I'll just quietly format the drive and stick OpenBSD on it.
i guess that explains it. you think gasoline is dangerous, try running Windows!Tell me about it. At the height of Code Red, I was getting about 3000 hits per day from infected Windows webservers.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.