Your responses definitely parallel the reasoning in the MS guy's letters, and are potentially valid from a moral perspective (though that's highly debatable). However, going against the "spirit of the license" is not the slightest bit illegal. US law holds a doctrine known as contra proferentum whereby any ambiguity in a contract is to be interpreted against the writer. In other words, if you write a EULA for your product and fail to explicitly prohibit a particular act, but your intent was to prohibit it, you are out of luck. It is assumed that the writers of contracts are skilled legal thinkers and writers who know what they want to do and how to accomplish it. Consequently, if the exact wording of the agreement ends up not accomplishing what the writer intended there is no recourse. Sliding through on a technical oversight by the writer of the EULA is perfectly acceptable and will stand up in court every time. Fundamentally, the question the court will ask is "if you specifically didn't want people to use extensions, why didn't you explicitly prohibit it in the EULA?" That's a tough question to explain to the court, since "we didn't think of it like that until they did it" is the worst possible answer to give.
It's a classic example of the differences between the Open Source and the closed sourced licensing model. I think it's perfectly clear, they provide a limited version of the product for free, the license forbids extending the functionality of Express. TestDriven extends the functionality, therefore it violates the license:
'You may not work around any technical limitations in the software'
You just clearly stated the very reason why his software is NOT in violation. The intent that the writer of the EULA was probably trying to achieve was to prevent extension. However, the developers failed to actually disable the extension functionality. There is no "technical limitation" to work around here. The "limitations" that prevent the use of extensions are not technical ones, they are simply documentational - Microsoft claims that extensions don't work on Express, so people believe them and don't try to extend it. This guy discovered that it atually works just fine. So, where's the "workaround" of "technical limitations"? Microsoft intentionally wrote the extension functionality into the software, and failed to disable it. He's just using their feature as designed.
TFA is no longer than the summary, but based on the concept it appears that this would improve only the peak current capability but not the total capacity (mAh). In fact, if anything, the addition of aluminum which does not participate in the electrolytic reaction would decrease the capacity. Not sure this is a very useful development.
Ideally, the police chief admits wrongdoing and reaches some financial settlement, min 10 k$
These sorts of incidents (wrongful arrest) are usually worth about $20,000 if the person is NOT held for any significant time and NOT charged inappropriately with a crime. This is very likely to be a mid six-figure settlement against the city, due to the length of time he was incarcerated, the charges that were filed and maintained, and the appalling lack of evidence in the first place. The high school may not bear true legal responsibility in a strict sense, but if they're smart they'll settle for a 5-figure sum to avoid the litigation and the risk of a jury award. If he has a good attorney and invests his money, this kid will be wealthy for the rest of his life. And he should be, I think.
Why aren't ordinary people outraged when they see these abuses and corruptions?
Ordinary people *don't* see these abuses, because they aren't paying any attention. If they took the time to understand how our government actually works, they probably would be outraged at the regulatory power wielded by unelected agencies -- most attorneys I know are!
6V or above is really pushing it. Fortunately, all you need to do is install a few (3 to 5) silicon diodes in series with the power supply. Each diode drops about 0.3 to 0.5V, thus reducing the voltage at the phone to within spec.
I shudder to think about the implications of remaining focused at a depth of less than inch from the eye for extended periods of time.
You're not. The focal distance is much further away than that -- the apparent focal plane floats in front of the user at a comfortable distance. Thus, eye strain should be reduced compared to normal computer use.
It should be noted that protection of foreign economic interests of the United States is a valid, publicly acknowledged function of the US Armed Forces. Defending US citizens from attack is not their only function.
MOD PARENT FUNNY! It's a geeky joke all of us should get. It ought to roffle your woffles. Data... bus... nevermind. The quality of geeks is really declining these days.
"There certainly were more than 2 board members who knew what was going on (if not, there certainly should have been, and the others should be removed for negligence)."
RTFA! You apparently haven't been paying attention to this story. The board members were the ones being spied on, not the ones doing the spying. They most certainly did NOT know what was going on -- the chairwoman instigated the operation secretly, to determine which board members were leaking to the press.
So how does a non-spinning solid-state gyro work?
The only thing I can think of is magic.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. However, this technology has been around for awhile, so think harder. There are several types of solid-state gyros. The simplest type is an integrating accelerometer (suffers from significant drift and all the maladies of integrating analog-digital conversion signals, but only cost a couple bucks). The next step up from that is a piezo ring gyro. These use a piezoelectric ring resonator to sense rotation via phase differential of a circular standing wave. Quite low drift, can be very sensitive, but cost $20-$80 usually. Finally, we have laser ring gyros. A laser ring gyro uses a laser with a circular or triangular optical resonator (often fiberoptic) to sense rotation via phase differential, the same mechanism as the piezo gyro. These are extremely sensitive, have almost no drift, and cost thousands.
I can see the bumper stickers now...
on
Humanity Gene Found?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"My honor student has more copies of the DUF 1220 gene than yours!"
and
"Got DUF1220?"
Argh!
What the fuck does leveraged mean!?
I was under the impression that it involves a lever and a pivot point.
Yes, I know it's a buzzword, but this one is getting fucking ridicilous!
With all due respect, the meaning of the word "leverage" in every example you gave is plainly obvious, and not really even that buzzwordy.
Within the business world, "leverage" is ABSOLUTELY NOT a meaningless buzzword -- no more so than "quantum" is a buzzword in the science community. In case you really don't understand, the word is used to mean "utilize to one's own advantage", with a specific implication of coercive or forceful action. It's a single word that combines several concepts that would otherwise require more space to explain.
Moreover, within financial circles, "leveraging assets" is the practice of using items of value as collateral for further borrowing. For example, a real estate investor may mortgage existing properties to purchase more properties. This reduces cash investment, but increases debt and risk. Asset leveraging of some type is a necessary component of most investment schemes to attain a reasonable rate of return. Thus, whem business types speak of "leveraging assets" they aren't blowing marketspeak out their asses -- they are using specific technical jargon just like computer geeks talking about those so-called "memory leaks".
Now "synergy" on the other hand, is a total load of crap...
The Cornell researchers studied browsing habits in classes by giving students school-owned laptops that were known to track their browsing habits. Would people browse normally under those conditions? Also, the students being studied were probably not technophiles -- otherwise they would have their own laptopts, and not likely participate in the study. Technophiles in general have very different computer usage profiles than the general population. In my experience, it seems we are much more better at multitasking, and are better able to use computers while simultaneously interacting with the rest of the world.
It looks like this study did not actually investigate how *current* laptop use by students who own them affects performance. Instead, they investigated how the *addition* of a school-owned, monitored laptop to a non-techy student's repertoire changes their performance.
But, four billion watts is a lot of power. The HAARP power page says that for every four watts of power transmitted, ten must be generated (40% efficiency). That's ten gigawatts, and the six diesel generators mentioned on the site produce only fifteen megawatts. Where does the extra power come from?
It's not actually 4GW. It's only 3.6MW peak envelope power. 4GW is the max ERP, or effective radiated power, under optimal conditions. ERP accounts for antenna gain. In other words, the field strength is the same as that from a 4GW transmitter with an isotropically radiating antenna. See the HAARP site's technical info on phases of completion at: http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/haarp/phases.html
I wouldn't mention this except that you shine 90W lasers into people, but a laser is either CW or Q-switched (though many can operate in both modes). Q-switching is a way of making a laser emit short pulses, (typically a few nanoseconds with peak power in the 10 kW region and up) the opposite of continuous wave. According to Laserscope's website, the 800 series are CW lasers, which can be switched for exposure times down to.1 seconds -- not the same as Q-switching.
QCW (quasi-continuous wave) would be a more correct term for the Laserscope. Indeed, in the scientific world, that what we would call it. However, in the medical laser industry, QCW isn't in the lexicon. I suppose it would confuse the doctors to have to learn more about how their lasers work. Instead, it is understood that a CW laser is one in which the active medium is continuously pumped, with or without a free-running Q-switch. This is how thew Laserscope works -- it is, in fact, Q-switched. The arc lamp in a laserscope runs as long as the unit is armed. The Q-switch does, too. At all times, the laser is producing a continuous train of very short pulses at about 20kHz. The exposure control is done with a mechanical shutter in the beam path which dumps the beam when it's not needed. The term CW is applied to lasers of this type to distinguish them from "pulsed" lasers in which the pump source is a flashlamp, even though both produce pulsed beams. For medical purposes, a Q-switched CW laser acts like a continuous beam, whereas a flashlamp pumped laser behaves completely differently. As you point out, in a plain semantic sense any laser with a Q-switch cannot truly be "continuous wave" -- but people call them that anyways instead of saying "continuously pumped". Even the manufacturers do this, as evidenced by Laserscope's website.
What about the 100A of inrush @ 208 three-phase? What would that take with DC? I never did take a power engineering class in college.
The inrush results from charging filter capacitors in the server's switching PSU. With a DC source, such filtering isn't needed (okay, we'll still need some filter, but maybe only 10% as much). That's a major advantage of DC -- all that filtering occurs at the main converter that supplies the DC system, not at each device. There will still be some inrush, but only a fraction of the 750A predicted.
Yeah, but that is the current load for a single system. You put in half-a-dozen of these things, and you are talking serious quantities of copper. A quick check of a googled wire chart shows that 300A takes a conductor just shy of half an inch thick. Two of those together x 6 systems (by no means an unusal setup) starts to give me the heebie-jeebies, cable-routing wise. (Do we need a nastily thick conductor for earth ground also?)
True, the total load of the system will be large -- but no larger than for modern telecom systems. I'm not saying the wires are small, only that these problems have already been solved. Telecom systems run many thousands of amps at 48VDC using off-the-shelf solutions easily adaptable to a data center installation.
Anyone who knows of a medical device that has naked fiber being used to treat can feel free to correct me, but that sounds like a disaster waiting to happen for more reasons than the article states.
Most older general-purpose surgical lasers that I'm aware of use a naked fiber, and I do believe it is a disaster waiting to happen. I don't know about the new lasers coming on the market today, but I have worked with 80's and 90's vintage lasers still in service and they have no protection. For example, the Laserscope 800 is a 20W green (523nm) or 90W IR (1064nm) Q-switched CW YAG laser for general surgery. Its disposable delivery fiber is a 300 micron step-index core with no protection other than the bonded plastic jacket with a diameter of about 1mm. Cheap telecom fiber is better protected than this! The same system is used on the Trimedyne 1000 and the Lasersonics, both of which are 100 watt YAG lasers. I intentionally broke a fiber on my Trimedyne at full power, and was amazed by how dangerous it can be. The fiber can easily be kinked or broken by accident, which instantly results in a white-hot meltdown and separation at the point of damage. The broken end of the fiber then springs back and vaporizes or ignites whatever it flops against, potentially including nearby personnel. It also randomly radiates incomprehensible amounts of extremely dangerous invisible light in God knows what direction, likely frying the retinas of anyone foolish enough not to have excellent leak-proof goggles on. Considering how much they charge for these disposable delivery fibers, one would think some form of metal armor could be included to reduce the chance of damage.
An enterprise storage box, fully configured that I looked at requires 13,800 kVA of 208V three-phase power (100A inrush current). My mind can barely fathom the completely unbendable copper "wire" that supplying that much juice at 40-ish volts would require.
I think you meant 13.8kva, not 13.8 megavolt-amps. 13.8kva at 48VDC is only 288 amps. This is far less than what most telco systems run these days. The conductor size needed to handle this load is no larger than that feeding most newer homes, and is certainly flexible enough for installation.
MOD PARENT DOWN -- doesn't understand the legal system, or the grandparent's post. It is absolutely NOT allowable, and carries severe criminal penalties, to agree to drop criminal charges in exchange for a civil settlement. Moreover, no criminal act took place here. Breach of contract is NOT CRIMINAL and cannot result in jail time. The grandparent got it right too -- you can't "settle" a criminal case. Whoever provided that quote to the press about "not sending students to jail" didn't understand the case or the applicable law.
The manufacturing process errors that cause parts to be rejected vary greatly from part to part -- they don't all fail in the same ways. Additionally, some defects are acceptable for some applications and not others. It would require a great deal of time and effort to identify the exact nature and extent of each defect found in each part, and then to match that particular part to an application that will tolerate its fault. While it is conceivably possible, it would be very difficult to implement this sort of system. The only real exception here is for memory devices in applications that are universally fault tolerant (media). Processors and other devices do not lend themselves well to this because of the wide variety of fault types.
Our air here on earth is 21% oxygen, so to obtain the same partial pressure I assume we would need something like a 60% oxygen atmosphere. Wouldn't everything (including us?) be really dangerously flammable?
I like your thinking, but it doesn't work that way. Flammability, like life-support, depends on partial pressure of oxygen (or more correctly, molar concentration). Any environment with about one mole of oxygen per hundred liters of gas will support combustion equally well, just like it will support life equally well (assuming the other gases are relatively inert).
"Carry on with your life and you are still more likely to be killed by a lightening strike than an act of terrorism"
Unfortunately, that's not true anymore. About 100 people a year in the US are killed by lightning strikes. We have 20 years to go of zero terrorist activity before terrorism and lightning become equal hazards on average.
If you want the touch panel, you'll have to take the mobo with it -- the panel is integrated hardware that requires the embedded linux functionality to work properly. Of course, a real h4x0r would reverse engineer the interface and whip up some drivers, but I doubt it's worth the effort.
Slashdot Mirror
Your responses definitely parallel the reasoning in the MS guy's letters, and are potentially valid from a moral perspective (though that's highly debatable). However, going against the "spirit of the license" is not the slightest bit illegal. US law holds a doctrine known as contra proferentum whereby any ambiguity in a contract is to be interpreted against the writer. In other words, if you write a EULA for your product and fail to explicitly prohibit a particular act, but your intent was to prohibit it, you are out of luck. It is assumed that the writers of contracts are skilled legal thinkers and writers who know what they want to do and how to accomplish it. Consequently, if the exact wording of the agreement ends up not accomplishing what the writer intended there is no recourse. Sliding through on a technical oversight by the writer of the EULA is perfectly acceptable and will stand up in court every time. Fundamentally, the question the court will ask is "if you specifically didn't want people to use extensions, why didn't you explicitly prohibit it in the EULA?" That's a tough question to explain to the court, since "we didn't think of it like that until they did it" is the worst possible answer to give.
You just clearly stated the very reason why his software is NOT in violation. The intent that the writer of the EULA was probably trying to achieve was to prevent extension. However, the developers failed to actually disable the extension functionality. There is no "technical limitation" to work around here. The "limitations" that prevent the use of extensions are not technical ones, they are simply documentational - Microsoft claims that extensions don't work on Express, so people believe them and don't try to extend it. This guy discovered that it atually works just fine. So, where's the "workaround" of "technical limitations"? Microsoft intentionally wrote the extension functionality into the software, and failed to disable it. He's just using their feature as designed.
TFA is no longer than the summary, but based on the concept it appears that this would improve only the peak current capability but not the total capacity (mAh). In fact, if anything, the addition of aluminum which does not participate in the electrolytic reaction would decrease the capacity. Not sure this is a very useful development.
Ideally, the police chief admits wrongdoing and reaches some financial settlement, min 10 k$
These sorts of incidents (wrongful arrest) are usually worth about $20,000 if the person is NOT held for any significant time and NOT charged inappropriately with a crime. This is very likely to be a mid six-figure settlement against the city, due to the length of time he was incarcerated, the charges that were filed and maintained, and the appalling lack of evidence in the first place. The high school may not bear true legal responsibility in a strict sense, but if they're smart they'll settle for a 5-figure sum to avoid the litigation and the risk of a jury award. If he has a good attorney and invests his money, this kid will be wealthy for the rest of his life. And he should be, I think.
Why aren't ordinary people outraged when they see these abuses and corruptions?
Ordinary people *don't* see these abuses, because they aren't paying any attention. If they took the time to understand how our government actually works, they probably would be outraged at the regulatory power wielded by unelected agencies -- most attorneys I know are!
6V or above is really pushing it. Fortunately, all you need to do is install a few (3 to 5) silicon diodes in series with the power supply. Each diode drops about 0.3 to 0.5V, thus reducing the voltage at the phone to within spec.
I shudder to think about the implications of remaining focused at a depth of less than inch from the eye for extended periods of time.
You're not. The focal distance is much further away than that -- the apparent focal plane floats in front of the user at a comfortable distance. Thus, eye strain should be reduced compared to normal computer use.
It should be noted that protection of foreign economic interests of the United States is a valid, publicly acknowledged function of the US Armed Forces. Defending US citizens from attack is not their only function.
MOD PARENT FUNNY! It's a geeky joke all of us should get. It ought to roffle your woffles. Data... bus... nevermind. The quality of geeks is really declining these days.
"There certainly were more than 2 board members who knew what was going on (if not, there certainly should have been, and the others should be removed for negligence)."
RTFA! You apparently haven't been paying attention to this story. The board members were the ones being spied on, not the ones doing the spying. They most certainly did NOT know what was going on -- the chairwoman instigated the operation secretly, to determine which board members were leaking to the press.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. However, this technology has been around for awhile, so think harder. There are several types of solid-state gyros. The simplest type is an integrating accelerometer (suffers from significant drift and all the maladies of integrating analog-digital conversion signals, but only cost a couple bucks). The next step up from that is a piezo ring gyro. These use a piezoelectric ring resonator to sense rotation via phase differential of a circular standing wave. Quite low drift, can be very sensitive, but cost $20-$80 usually. Finally, we have laser ring gyros. A laser ring gyro uses a laser with a circular or triangular optical resonator (often fiberoptic) to sense rotation via phase differential, the same mechanism as the piezo gyro. These are extremely sensitive, have almost no drift, and cost thousands.
"My honor student has more copies of the DUF 1220 gene than yours!" and "Got DUF1220?"
Argh! What the fuck does leveraged mean!? I was under the impression that it involves a lever and a pivot point. Yes, I know it's a buzzword, but this one is getting fucking ridicilous!
With all due respect, the meaning of the word "leverage" in every example you gave is plainly obvious, and not really even that buzzwordy.
Within the business world, "leverage" is ABSOLUTELY NOT a meaningless buzzword -- no more so than "quantum" is a buzzword in the science community. In case you really don't understand, the word is used to mean "utilize to one's own advantage", with a specific implication of coercive or forceful action. It's a single word that combines several concepts that would otherwise require more space to explain.
Moreover, within financial circles, "leveraging assets" is the practice of using items of value as collateral for further borrowing. For example, a real estate investor may mortgage existing properties to purchase more properties. This reduces cash investment, but increases debt and risk. Asset leveraging of some type is a necessary component of most investment schemes to attain a reasonable rate of return. Thus, whem business types speak of "leveraging assets" they aren't blowing marketspeak out their asses -- they are using specific technical jargon just like computer geeks talking about those so-called "memory leaks".
Now "synergy" on the other hand, is a total load of crap...
The Cornell researchers studied browsing habits in classes by giving students school-owned laptops that were known to track their browsing habits. Would people browse normally under those conditions? Also, the students being studied were probably not technophiles -- otherwise they would have their own laptopts, and not likely participate in the study. Technophiles in general have very different computer usage profiles than the general population. In my experience, it seems we are much more better at multitasking, and are better able to use computers while simultaneously interacting with the rest of the world. It looks like this study did not actually investigate how *current* laptop use by students who own them affects performance. Instead, they investigated how the *addition* of a school-owned, monitored laptop to a non-techy student's repertoire changes their performance.
But, four billion watts is a lot of power. The HAARP power page says that for every four watts of power transmitted, ten must be generated (40% efficiency). That's ten gigawatts, and the six diesel generators mentioned on the site produce only fifteen megawatts. Where does the extra power come from?
It's not actually 4GW. It's only 3.6MW peak envelope power. 4GW is the max ERP, or effective radiated power, under optimal conditions. ERP accounts for antenna gain. In other words, the field strength is the same as that from a 4GW transmitter with an isotropically radiating antenna.
See the HAARP site's technical info on phases of completion at: http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/haarp/phases.html
I wouldn't mention this except that you shine 90W lasers into people, but a laser is either CW or Q-switched (though many can operate in both modes). Q-switching is a way of making a laser emit short pulses, (typically a few nanoseconds with peak power in the 10 kW region and up) the opposite of continuous wave. According to Laserscope's website, the 800 series are CW lasers, which can be switched for exposure times down to .1 seconds -- not the same as Q-switching.
QCW (quasi-continuous wave) would be a more correct term for the Laserscope. Indeed, in the scientific world, that what we would call it. However, in the medical laser industry, QCW isn't in the lexicon. I suppose it would confuse the doctors to have to learn more about how their lasers work. Instead, it is understood that a CW laser is one in which the active medium is continuously pumped, with or without a free-running Q-switch. This is how thew Laserscope works -- it is, in fact, Q-switched. The arc lamp in a laserscope runs as long as the unit is armed. The Q-switch does, too. At all times, the laser is producing a continuous train of very short pulses at about 20kHz. The exposure control is done with a mechanical shutter in the beam path which dumps the beam when it's not needed. The term CW is applied to lasers of this type to distinguish them from "pulsed" lasers in which the pump source is a flashlamp, even though both produce pulsed beams. For medical purposes, a Q-switched CW laser acts like a continuous beam, whereas a flashlamp pumped laser behaves completely differently. As you point out, in a plain semantic sense any laser with a Q-switch cannot truly be "continuous wave" -- but people call them that anyways instead of saying "continuously pumped". Even the manufacturers do this, as evidenced by Laserscope's website.
What about the 100A of inrush @ 208 three-phase? What would that take with DC? I never did take a power engineering class in college.
The inrush results from charging filter capacitors in the server's switching PSU. With a DC source, such filtering isn't needed (okay, we'll still need some filter, but maybe only 10% as much). That's a major advantage of DC -- all that filtering occurs at the main converter that supplies the DC system, not at each device. There will still be some inrush, but only a fraction of the 750A predicted.
Yeah, but that is the current load for a single system. You put in half-a-dozen of these things, and you are talking serious quantities of copper. A quick check of a googled wire chart shows that 300A takes a conductor just shy of half an inch thick. Two of those together x 6 systems (by no means an unusal setup) starts to give me the heebie-jeebies, cable-routing wise. (Do we need a nastily thick conductor for earth ground also?)
True, the total load of the system will be large -- but no larger than for modern telecom systems. I'm not saying the wires are small, only that these problems have already been solved. Telecom systems run many thousands of amps at 48VDC using off-the-shelf solutions easily adaptable to a data center installation.
Anyone who knows of a medical device that has naked fiber being used to treat can feel free to correct me, but that sounds like a disaster waiting to happen for more reasons than the article states.
Most older general-purpose surgical lasers that I'm aware of use a naked fiber, and I do believe it is a disaster waiting to happen. I don't know about the new lasers coming on the market today, but I have worked with 80's and 90's vintage lasers still in service and they have no protection. For example, the Laserscope 800 is a 20W green (523nm) or 90W IR (1064nm) Q-switched CW YAG laser for general surgery. Its disposable delivery fiber is a 300 micron step-index core with no protection other than the bonded plastic jacket with a diameter of about 1mm. Cheap telecom fiber is better protected than this! The same system is used on the Trimedyne 1000 and the Lasersonics, both of which are 100 watt YAG lasers. I intentionally broke a fiber on my Trimedyne at full power, and was amazed by how dangerous it can be. The fiber can easily be kinked or broken by accident, which instantly results in a white-hot meltdown and separation at the point of damage. The broken end of the fiber then springs back and vaporizes or ignites whatever it flops against, potentially including nearby personnel. It also randomly radiates incomprehensible amounts of extremely dangerous invisible light in God knows what direction, likely frying the retinas of anyone foolish enough not to have excellent leak-proof goggles on. Considering how much they charge for these disposable delivery fibers, one would think some form of metal armor could be included to reduce the chance of damage.
An enterprise storage box, fully configured that I looked at requires 13,800 kVA of 208V three-phase power (100A inrush current). My mind can barely fathom the completely unbendable copper "wire" that supplying that much juice at 40-ish volts would require.
I think you meant 13.8kva, not 13.8 megavolt-amps. 13.8kva at 48VDC is only 288 amps. This is far less than what most telco systems run these days. The conductor size needed to handle this load is no larger than that feeding most newer homes, and is certainly flexible enough for installation.
MOD PARENT DOWN -- doesn't understand the legal system, or the grandparent's post. It is absolutely NOT allowable, and carries severe criminal penalties, to agree to drop criminal charges in exchange for a civil settlement. Moreover, no criminal act took place here. Breach of contract is NOT CRIMINAL and cannot result in jail time. The grandparent got it right too -- you can't "settle" a criminal case. Whoever provided that quote to the press about "not sending students to jail" didn't understand the case or the applicable law.
The manufacturing process errors that cause parts to be rejected vary greatly from part to part -- they don't all fail in the same ways. Additionally, some defects are acceptable for some applications and not others. It would require a great deal of time and effort to identify the exact nature and extent of each defect found in each part, and then to match that particular part to an application that will tolerate its fault. While it is conceivably possible, it would be very difficult to implement this sort of system. The only real exception here is for memory devices in applications that are universally fault tolerant (media). Processors and other devices do not lend themselves well to this because of the wide variety of fault types.
Our air here on earth is 21% oxygen, so to obtain the same partial pressure I assume we would need something like a 60% oxygen atmosphere. Wouldn't everything (including us?) be really dangerously flammable?
I like your thinking, but it doesn't work that way. Flammability, like life-support, depends on partial pressure of oxygen (or more correctly, molar concentration). Any environment with about one mole of oxygen per hundred liters of gas will support combustion equally well, just like it will support life equally well (assuming the other gases are relatively inert).
"Carry on with your life and you are still more likely to be killed by a lightening strike than an act of terrorism" Unfortunately, that's not true anymore. About 100 people a year in the US are killed by lightning strikes. We have 20 years to go of zero terrorist activity before terrorism and lightning become equal hazards on average.
If you want the touch panel, you'll have to take the mobo with it -- the panel is integrated hardware that requires the embedded linux functionality to work properly. Of course, a real h4x0r would reverse engineer the interface and whip up some drivers, but I doubt it's worth the effort.
the picture right before and the picture right after don't show any problems on the lens
What was the frame rate?