"The Earth's internal heat comes from a combination of residual heat from planetary accretion (about 20%) and heat produced through radioactive decay (80%)"
In a sense, those "green geothermal" power plants are really nuclear power plants.
I think national funding of each campaign would be more fair. Same amount of money, no "donations" allowed. I'm sure there are drawbacks to this way too, but I'm not sure what they are... thoughts?
Either you permanently enshrine the two party system, thus resulting in nothing ever changing, or you allow every little two bit political party into the game, in which case it pretty much turns into a fundraiser for big media via ad sales.
You can see the commercials now:
"Hi I'm VLM from the goatse party. Vote for me, because just like you, I like Pr0n. This message paid for by the US federal govt election fund."
Oddly enough, since the vast majority of Americans like Pr0n but both major parties are prohibited from supporting it due to tiny extremist special interests, I'd probably end up winning.
So far I'm starting to lose hope in him; first the "health care reform" that does nothing but line insurance executives' pockets, now Tanenbaum and the RIAA.
Since you didn't mention it, are you for or against him giving the big bankers about a trillion dollars in exchange for them screwing up the economy? They did donate alot of money to his campaign, so at least they got their monies worth. How about his utterly ineffective attempt to close the gitmo concentration camp?
Note, its not as if the "other guys" would have done any better.
That is patently false. If you look at political donations from Hollywood, it overwhelmingly favors Democrats. If one looks at executives of RIAA and MPAA companies the imbalance is even greater.
Pay one cop $1M each month to look the other way. Pay the other cop $2M each month to look the other way. Which cop turns you in? Answer, neither, because both want the money, and killing the goose that lays the golden eggs is no way to make money.
I am a HAM and it is terrible they freaked out and did that.
Freaked out implies its not a normal part of their culture to destroy what we'd consider civilization. But it is a normal part of their culture. That's why the place was a dump before the earthquake and everyone who could, left years ago. Its a multicultural thing, you can't judge what they consider normal human interpersonal relations as "terrible" because to them what they're doing is a great idea. Not being able to usefully judge their culture doesn't mean you can't ostracize them or that you have to visit them or emulate them.
We have to keep trying.
No, we don't. If they wanted us, they wouldn't shoot at us. Shooting at us is not, like, a weird courtship or gift exchange ritual. They, as a culture, want to be left alone to die in squalor. Let them. Its not right to encourage our people to sacrifice our lives to interfere with their culture, their morals, their ethics.
When I first read about it, I heard one death in the convoy, but followup reporting does show the dead guy was not a ham so all the ham sites rather cavalierly report "no big deal" since the victim wasn't a ham.
"Within a few hours though, reports via the RCD Facebook page confirmed by a long telephone conversation between Hugo Ramón HI8VRS and Ramon Sanyoyo V, XE1KK reported that the HI8RCD team of eight amateurs, were back in the border town of Jimani (Dominican Republic). Their convoy, which included other non related Dominicans, was assaulted and one person reported dead."
I would fly to Haiti and help. Boy do they need it. The whole infrastructure is totally fucked. I have never cussed in a post before but it needed to be said.
It was like that before the earthquake... because they made a culture out of killing the guys whom build infrastructure... bring a bullet proof vest and consider the trip a success if you make it home alive.
Last week a team of ham radio guys tried to improve Haiti's commo infrastructure, so the Haitians shot and killed one of them, and the survivors retreated back to the D.R. Unless you believe the Klingon proverb of "today is a good day to die", stay out of Haiti.
Still, it is hard to see what a shrink or IT guy can accomplish during a 1 Week excursion. The whole idea of volunteering professional services without a much bigger time commitment is silly.
What you're looking for is a job shadowing gig, like a one week internship.
If you're the type that can keep your mouth shut, this works pretty well. If you won't shut up, you'll slow down the workers. However, if you get a good personality match, both sides get quite the education.
Lots of higher ed professor types do this for a couple days in the summer, in order to integrate their teaching with the needs of the modern workplace, etc.
Expect to work with smaller companies and sign scary NDAs.
The only useful professional service you can do in a week, outside of an operating room, is attend a conference.
Try to do a presentation on something from back home that the locals would not know about. Topic selection should involve things that you can't just download off freshmeat or print PDFs from cisco.com... the locals can do that perfectly well without you. Give a presentation on something the locals could not possibly experience. If in a tropical area, a short presentation on arctic data centers, or if in a monopoly phone provider area, a presentation on playing multiple telcos off against each other. If their country does not use -48VDC in the data center, and you do, or vice versa...
Also try to get on a conference roundtable discussion, the odds of you being the token-"whatever" are far better when you're the foreigner.
Network with the locals, you can get very interesting tours and trade advice with each other. At least you'll have some fun telling fish stories. Make some friends and send them some gifts when you get home (careful of customs laws!).
And remember learning goes both ways, not exclusively 1st world to 3rd, you can probably learn a heck of a lot from attending the locals presentations and listening very carefully.
The problem is finding a place with both a computer/hacker con and a counseling con at the same time. I suspect one of you are going to be pretty bored every other year. Or you'll be taking two short vacations per year instead of one long week.
The best part, is you might get the boss to pay for at least some fraction of your vacation... Once you get home give a short presentation at the next staff meeting about what you learned, then get the cheap bastard to pay at least your conference entrance fee.
Why use freebsd with GNU apps, when you can just run freebsd?
Then you'd be stuck with freebsd apps instead of GNU apps.
If you have a mighty herd of servers, desktops, and kiosks, all sharing various automation scripts, supporting both freebsd and GNU command line apps could be a pain, due to subtle differences in command line options, etc. Its possible to create a blizzard of "if then" to work around, but why bother.
But I am missing the improvement for Debian here.
Overall, none really. The way ports work on Debian, is if enough people volunteer to maintain a port, and they are successful, then we have a new port. Heck, that is the way everything works in the Debian project, if something meets a certain standard of excellence, its in, no matter if its a package, docs, artwork, shared VCS, human language translation, a network service, a mirror, or in this case, a port. Debian is thankfully not a deletionist stronghold like that dumpy embarrassment known as wikipedia.
This link provides a one page summary of each attempted Debian port, successful and... not so successful :
When you think about it, it is just pure blasphemy to put references to Jesus on a weapon.
Theres a long enough history of it... St Constantine did it in AD 312.
"According to Lactantius, Constantine was visited by a dream the night before the battle, wherein he was advised "to mark the heavenly sign of God on the shields of his soldiers...by means of a slanted letter X with the top of its head bent round, he marked Christ on their shields.""
The point about e-ink is that it's passive. It doesn't emit light. That's what makes it very easy to read for extended periods.
No, that makes it harder to read. One of the primary advantages of eink is low power consumption and that goes away with a backlight. Therefore marketing pushes the crazy idea that its easier to read something thats all dim.
Anyone who knows anything about photography knows its easier to focus on a bright light due to smaller pupil size.
"Refresh rate: The number of times per second in which the monitor draws the data it is being given. Since activated LCD pixels do not flash on/off between frames, LCD monitors exhibit no refresh-induced flicker, no matter how low the refresh rate."
Sure that was an appeal to authority, quoting wikipedia. But lets think about it, a CRT flickers because an electron beam sweeps a fast decay phosphor. LCDs don't have a "sweeping electron beam" or a rapid decay phosphor. I suppose you could simulate a flickering CRT using an LCD by updating the entire screen at 120 Hz and alternating data and a black field.
If your eyes hurt looking an "old fashioned" LCD but feel great looking at a "new expensive" e-ink, then you probably have audiophile-itis, easily cured by following solutions:
1) Green marker around the perimeter of the LCD
2) Install the LCD in a $3000 brushed aluminum enclosure
3) Use monster cables instead of cheap interconnect cables.
Alternately your eyes might hurt when you look at a LCD screen because your eyes are screwed up. See an eye doctor before you go completely blind.
Now make an analogy using a cow, 5 bags of salt, and the Pacific Ocean.:)
So, near Hawaii, we have a cow and 5 bags of salt. Force feed the salt to the cow, which promptly dies (sorry PETA). The rotting cow corpse expands and finally detonates (sorry cDc), at, for example, the speed of light. Flaps of leather strike SFO, nothing unusual, but it is odd that they strike LA at about the same time. Scientist watching from a satellite says its as if leather was smeared in a line thru SFO and LA however the line must have moved at about a zillion times the speed of light, like the Enterprise had an accident while transporting some steers at full warp speed. No, scientist has it wrong, because the direction of motion is actually perpendicular to the line between SFO and LA, the motion was actually from Hawaii at merely light speed.
The difference in time of impact and distance between SFO and LA are just a math abstraction which by no means implies the leather moved along that path at a zillion times the speed of light.
Oh for heaven's sake, somebody post a car analogy!
Take yer hotrod up to about 25 MPH at night and spin some donuts. From far enough away, the headlights reflecting off the walmart wall will move way faster than 25 MPH, maybe 1000 MPH who knows.
Now does the cop give you a ticket for speeding because your headlight reflections are moving 1000 MPH? No, nothing was speeding. The reflection is just a mathematical construct that means nothing. The cop gives you a ticket for being a dumbass and disturbing the peace, not for speeding.
I have a friend who does destructive testing of Lithium Ion batteries --- apparently the engineers get freaked out when a pierced battery doesn't explode. The thought of a fragile battery like that, big enough to provide decent range, that close to my body gives me the willies.
You and your friend are probably too terrified to even discuss the far more dangerous vehicle gas tanks, propane grills, and electrical power outlets... Frankly, I think propane grills with a 20 pound pressurized tank just inches from a flamethrower of a burner and burning grease everywhere is an insane idea, although I do own one.
Whats the best way to blow up a lithium battery? Piercing didn't work for me. A couple years ago I had an old cell phone battery that wasn't holding a charge like it used to, after about 300 or so cycles. Being a typical slashdotter, I wondered just how dangerous these batteries are, because they spend most of their time approximately two inches from my balls in my pants pocket and I hear constantly about how they're terrifyingly dangerous, you know, like "refer madness" level of terror propoganda (agitprop?). So, safety glasses, leather gloves and clothing (don't laugh), all cotton everything else (no flammable fake fabrics), two fire extinguishers, full face shield, water hose at the ready, hard hat, nothing flammable or valuable for several meters around, earplugs in case of loud explosion, I hit the back yard patio like a bad episode of mythbusters. My wife is convinced there will be a giant blast crater and is not amused. I short it, I smash it with a brick, I drip water on it, nothing happens, although it did get pretty darn hot when I shorted it. Pellet gun rather explosively disassembled it, but no worse than anything else of similar size that I've shot, like, say, a Prince cassette tape. Lighting it on fire did nothing obviously different than lighting a comparable piece of plastic. Smashed it to freaking bits and continued its viking funeral. I did this at a very relaxing pace to make sure any "reactions" had plenty of time to bloom. Eventually gave up and disposed of the remains in the ash barrel. I don't think pyro kids are going to switch from gray market M-80s and bottle rockets to used lithium batteries anytime soon, to say the least.
Now I do realize there's a lot of stored energy in there. I've certainly seen some amazing equipment explosions in real life. In my little electronic lab at home, plenty of electrolytic caps have popped, reverse biased tantalum caps have blown up, and I've smelled the aroma of burning transformer/motor varnish and burning resistors on many an occasion. I've unintentionally blown up NiCads and NiMH batteries. I'm quite certain a lithium powered electrical fire could be most exciting, but then again, any electrical fire is exciting regardless of battery chemistry. I know journalists are profoundly ignorant, so smoking a laptop CPU power supply or high voltage backlight supply or lint in the CPU cooling fan catching fire, in a lithium powered laptop, WILL be reported as a "lithium battery fire", because thats how magic and mythology work, but that doesn't mean its a real problem.
What determines the price of a scale is not just its equipment or accuracy.. but also the insurance the manufacturer has to carry in case something goes wrong. That's why medical devices are more expensive...
You're missing a couple other issues:
1) Provably sterile out of the box. If the patient has an open foot ulcer, and some Chinese dude sneezed on the board before he wrapped it up, and then the patient dies of infection...
2) Bodily fluid proof, if not disposable or autoclave-able. The board is too expensive to toss and too weak to autoclave, furthermore god only knows what it'll do electrically when a patient pees on it. Or if not pee, some highly conductive cleaning fluid. Or blood.
3) Intrinsically safe. In the unlikely event of using or storing the board in an atmosphere contaminated by flammable anesthetics, it won't blow up. Closely related to oxygen proof plastics. No great achievement to make a plastic that does not support combustion in plain ole air, but I have no idea what plastics (if any) will not continue to burn in pure oxygen. And you know some heart patient is going to drop their oxy mask on the wii board and the batteries will spark at the same time. Also if the patient collapses and you need to use the crash cart, you don't want the electronics inside to catch fire. Would be unfortunate to restart a patients heart only to have the patient die of infected burns.
4) Proven EMC/EMI compatibility. Last thing you want is for the board to interfere with the patients portable EKG machine or whatever.
5) There are all kinds of allergen related issues. For example, no latex (rubber bands) used internally for any part at any time during construction. Peanut oil sounds like a "green" lubricant for metal machining, etc, until you run into someone with an allergy.
6) Connected. It needs to be sold by the current collection of booth-babe saleswomen with open purchase order accounts at the hospital. Its possible the hospital has no pre-existing relationship with any place that sells wii balance boards... Literally no way for purchasing to buy one...
7) Software licensing which probably prohibits this kind of activity, along with controlling nuclear power plants and air traffic control. "Lean forward to lower the control rods, lean back to raise the control rods. Lean left and right to control primary circulation pumps. Walk in place as if running away to declare a SCRAM."
Theres a bunch of other "EE" related medical device rules that are pretty interesting, especially as regards AC power supplies, until it gets too creepy realizing a bunch of folks died before they figured the rules out.
Its not so hard to follow the rules, its just HARDER to prove someone in China followed the rules...
But there remains the possibility that someone, somewhere, was allowed access within cameraphone range of an iSlate without being NDA'd.
No need for a cameraphone, although the irony of using an Apple iPhone to spy on the iSlate would be hilarious. All you need to do is be within security camera range... And thanks to a blind love of 1984 style Big Brother, that is everywhere, right?
Slashdot Mirror
What happened to those? Sounds like an excellent power source...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_gradient
"The Earth's internal heat comes from a combination of residual heat from planetary accretion (about 20%) and heat produced through radioactive decay (80%)"
In a sense, those "green geothermal" power plants are really nuclear power plants.
3/4. Gitmo is being closed, even though everyone is yelling about the "folly" of bringing these criminals back to American soil.
Aint over till its over. They've been saying its closing since the coronation ... err ... the inauguration
I think national funding of each campaign would be more fair. Same amount of money, no "donations" allowed. I'm sure there are drawbacks to this way too, but I'm not sure what they are... thoughts?
Either you permanently enshrine the two party system, thus resulting in nothing ever changing, or you allow every little two bit political party into the game, in which case it pretty much turns into a fundraiser for big media via ad sales.
You can see the commercials now:
"Hi I'm VLM from the goatse party. Vote for me, because just like you, I like Pr0n. This message paid for by the US federal govt election fund."
Oddly enough, since the vast majority of Americans like Pr0n but both major parties are prohibited from supporting it due to tiny extremist special interests, I'd probably end up winning.
So why cant the public unite to create a lobbying organization?
I think the EFF aligns closer to the needs of the public than most PACs.
www.eff.org
So far I'm starting to lose hope in him; first the "health care reform" that does nothing but line insurance executives' pockets, now Tanenbaum and the RIAA.
Since you didn't mention it, are you for or against him giving the big bankers about a trillion dollars in exchange for them screwing up the economy? They did donate alot of money to his campaign, so at least they got their monies worth. How about his utterly ineffective attempt to close the gitmo concentration camp?
Note, its not as if the "other guys" would have done any better.
That is patently false. If you look at political donations from Hollywood, it overwhelmingly favors Democrats. If one looks at executives of RIAA and MPAA companies the imbalance is even greater.
Pay one cop $1M each month to look the other way. Pay the other cop $2M each month to look the other way. Which cop turns you in? Answer, neither, because both want the money, and killing the goose that lays the golden eggs is no way to make money.
I am a HAM and it is terrible they freaked out and did that.
Freaked out implies its not a normal part of their culture to destroy what we'd consider civilization. But it is a normal part of their culture. That's why the place was a dump before the earthquake and everyone who could, left years ago. Its a multicultural thing, you can't judge what they consider normal human interpersonal relations as "terrible" because to them what they're doing is a great idea. Not being able to usefully judge their culture doesn't mean you can't ostracize them or that you have to visit them or emulate them.
We have to keep trying.
No, we don't. If they wanted us, they wouldn't shoot at us. Shooting at us is not, like, a weird courtship or gift exchange ritual. They, as a culture, want to be left alone to die in squalor. Let them. Its not right to encourage our people to sacrifice our lives to interfere with their culture, their morals, their ethics.
http://www.eham.net/forums/EmergencyCommunications/5917
When I first read about it, I heard one death in the convoy, but followup reporting does show the dead guy was not a ham so all the ham sites rather cavalierly report "no big deal" since the victim wasn't a ham.
"Within a few hours though, reports via the RCD Facebook page confirmed by a long telephone conversation between Hugo Ramón HI8VRS and Ramon Sanyoyo V, XE1KK reported that the HI8RCD team of eight amateurs, were back in the border town of Jimani (Dominican Republic). Their convoy, which included other non related Dominicans, was assaulted and one person reported dead."
I would fly to Haiti and help. Boy do they need it. The whole infrastructure is totally fucked. I have never cussed in a post before but it needed to be said.
It was like that before the earthquake ... because they made a culture out of killing the guys whom build infrastructure ... bring a bullet proof vest and consider the trip a success if you make it home alive.
Last week a team of ham radio guys tried to improve Haiti's commo infrastructure, so the Haitians shot and killed one of them, and the survivors retreated back to the D.R. Unless you believe the Klingon proverb of "today is a good day to die", stay out of Haiti.
Still, it is hard to see what a shrink or IT guy can accomplish during a 1 Week excursion. The whole idea of volunteering professional services without a much bigger time commitment is silly.
What you're looking for is a job shadowing gig, like a one week internship.
If you're the type that can keep your mouth shut, this works pretty well. If you won't shut up, you'll slow down the workers. However, if you get a good personality match, both sides get quite the education.
Lots of higher ed professor types do this for a couple days in the summer, in order to integrate their teaching with the needs of the modern workplace, etc.
Expect to work with smaller companies and sign scary NDAs.
The only useful professional service you can do in a week, outside of an operating room, is attend a conference.
Try to do a presentation on something from back home that the locals would not know about. Topic selection should involve things that you can't just download off freshmeat or print PDFs from cisco.com... the locals can do that perfectly well without you. Give a presentation on something the locals could not possibly experience. If in a tropical area, a short presentation on arctic data centers, or if in a monopoly phone provider area, a presentation on playing multiple telcos off against each other. If their country does not use -48VDC in the data center, and you do, or vice versa...
Also try to get on a conference roundtable discussion, the odds of you being the token-"whatever" are far better when you're the foreigner.
Network with the locals, you can get very interesting tours and trade advice with each other. At least you'll have some fun telling fish stories. Make some friends and send them some gifts when you get home (careful of customs laws!).
And remember learning goes both ways, not exclusively 1st world to 3rd, you can probably learn a heck of a lot from attending the locals presentations and listening very carefully.
The problem is finding a place with both a computer/hacker con and a counseling con at the same time. I suspect one of you are going to be pretty bored every other year. Or you'll be taking two short vacations per year instead of one long week.
The best part, is you might get the boss to pay for at least some fraction of your vacation... Once you get home give a short presentation at the next staff meeting about what you learned, then get the cheap bastard to pay at least your conference entrance fee.
What about a performance comparison with original FreeBSD?
The "original"? Just for laughs, get the results for version 1.0 from 1993 along with 8.0-RELEASE and 9.0-CURRENT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD#Version_history
but other than a gui I see no outstanding advantage over the FBSD package system
As a gauge of relative activity level in each package system:
The weekly list of UPDATED (and possibly NEW) BSD packages at
http://www.freshports.org/ports-new.php?interval=week
is roughly equal in size to the weekly list of NEW Debian packages at
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg
So, each week, there is about as much new stuff added to Debian as there is updated preexisting stuff in BSD.
Why use freebsd with GNU apps, when you can just run freebsd?
Then you'd be stuck with freebsd apps instead of GNU apps.
If you have a mighty herd of servers, desktops, and kiosks, all sharing various automation scripts, supporting both freebsd and GNU command line apps could be a pain, due to subtle differences in command line options, etc. Its possible to create a blizzard of "if then" to work around, but why bother.
But I am missing the improvement for Debian here.
Overall, none really. The way ports work on Debian, is if enough people volunteer to maintain a port, and they are successful, then we have a new port. Heck, that is the way everything works in the Debian project, if something meets a certain standard of excellence, its in, no matter if its a package, docs, artwork, shared VCS, human language translation, a network service, a mirror, or in this case, a port. Debian is thankfully not a deletionist stronghold like that dumpy embarrassment known as wikipedia.
This link provides a one page summary of each attempted Debian port, successful and ... not so successful :
http://www.debian.org/ports/
Infocom made a great series of text adventure games, so they logically moved into the database arena, which sank the company.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infocom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_(software)
I can ... translate to my native language.
Bootstrap... translate docs and error messages for developer tools, so your fellow native developers can work in a native language.
And when you find stuff thats too icky to translate, rewrite and feed it back upstream.
When you think about it, it is just pure blasphemy to put references to Jesus on a weapon.
Theres a long enough history of it... St Constantine did it in AD 312.
"According to Lactantius, Constantine was visited by a dream the night before the battle, wherein he was advised "to mark the heavenly sign of God on the shields of his soldiers...by means of a slanted letter X with the top of its head bent round, he marked Christ on their shields.""
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_the_Great
It's all about imposing your faith on others, which also runs contrary to the basic tenets of said faith.
Sounds like you're new to this whole "religion" thing.
The point about e-ink is that it's passive. It doesn't emit light. That's what makes it very easy to read for extended periods.
No, that makes it harder to read. One of the primary advantages of eink is low power consumption and that goes away with a backlight. Therefore marketing pushes the crazy idea that its easier to read something thats all dim.
Anyone who knows anything about photography knows its easier to focus on a bright light due to smaller pupil size.
Its just endlessly repeated marketing BS.
Well, that and the screen doesn't have to refresh.
LCDs dont refresh. Please let that very tired meme die. Next meme up to bat, "e-ink refresh rate".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refresh_rate#Liquid_crystal_displays
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_crystal_display
"Refresh rate: The number of times per second in which the monitor draws the data it is being given. Since activated LCD pixels do not flash on/off between frames, LCD monitors exhibit no refresh-induced flicker, no matter how low the refresh rate."
Sure that was an appeal to authority, quoting wikipedia. But lets think about it, a CRT flickers because an electron beam sweeps a fast decay phosphor. LCDs don't have a "sweeping electron beam" or a rapid decay phosphor. I suppose you could simulate a flickering CRT using an LCD by updating the entire screen at 120 Hz and alternating data and a black field.
If your eyes hurt looking an "old fashioned" LCD but feel great looking at a "new expensive" e-ink, then you probably have audiophile-itis, easily cured by following solutions:
1) Green marker around the perimeter of the LCD
2) Install the LCD in a $3000 brushed aluminum enclosure
3) Use monster cables instead of cheap interconnect cables.
Alternately your eyes might hurt when you look at a LCD screen because your eyes are screwed up. See an eye doctor before you go completely blind.
Maybe you could have learned more in a comparative religion or practical art class, but would you have? Methinks, there'd be some other distraction.
Yes, those places have girls. Although I did play DnD when I was 19 in a group with a girl. Once.
Now make an analogy using a cow, 5 bags of salt, and the Pacific Ocean. :)
So, near Hawaii, we have a cow and 5 bags of salt. Force feed the salt to the cow, which promptly dies (sorry PETA). The rotting cow corpse expands and finally detonates (sorry cDc), at, for example, the speed of light. Flaps of leather strike SFO, nothing unusual, but it is odd that they strike LA at about the same time. Scientist watching from a satellite says its as if leather was smeared in a line thru SFO and LA however the line must have moved at about a zillion times the speed of light, like the Enterprise had an accident while transporting some steers at full warp speed. No, scientist has it wrong, because the direction of motion is actually perpendicular to the line between SFO and LA, the motion was actually from Hawaii at merely light speed.
The difference in time of impact and distance between SFO and LA are just a math abstraction which by no means implies the leather moved along that path at a zillion times the speed of light.
Oh for heaven's sake, somebody post a car analogy!
Take yer hotrod up to about 25 MPH at night and spin some donuts. From far enough away, the headlights reflecting off the walmart wall will move way faster than 25 MPH, maybe 1000 MPH who knows.
Now does the cop give you a ticket for speeding because your headlight reflections are moving 1000 MPH? No, nothing was speeding. The reflection is just a mathematical construct that means nothing. The cop gives you a ticket for being a dumbass and disturbing the peace, not for speeding.
I have a friend who does destructive testing of Lithium Ion batteries --- apparently the engineers get freaked out when a pierced battery doesn't explode. The thought of a fragile battery like that, big enough to provide decent range, that close to my body gives me the willies.
You and your friend are probably too terrified to even discuss the far more dangerous vehicle gas tanks, propane grills, and electrical power outlets... Frankly, I think propane grills with a 20 pound pressurized tank just inches from a flamethrower of a burner and burning grease everywhere is an insane idea, although I do own one.
Whats the best way to blow up a lithium battery? Piercing didn't work for me. A couple years ago I had an old cell phone battery that wasn't holding a charge like it used to, after about 300 or so cycles. Being a typical slashdotter, I wondered just how dangerous these batteries are, because they spend most of their time approximately two inches from my balls in my pants pocket and I hear constantly about how they're terrifyingly dangerous, you know, like "refer madness" level of terror propoganda (agitprop?). So, safety glasses, leather gloves and clothing (don't laugh), all cotton everything else (no flammable fake fabrics), two fire extinguishers, full face shield, water hose at the ready, hard hat, nothing flammable or valuable for several meters around, earplugs in case of loud explosion, I hit the back yard patio like a bad episode of mythbusters. My wife is convinced there will be a giant blast crater and is not amused. I short it, I smash it with a brick, I drip water on it, nothing happens, although it did get pretty darn hot when I shorted it. Pellet gun rather explosively disassembled it, but no worse than anything else of similar size that I've shot, like, say, a Prince cassette tape. Lighting it on fire did nothing obviously different than lighting a comparable piece of plastic. Smashed it to freaking bits and continued its viking funeral. I did this at a very relaxing pace to make sure any "reactions" had plenty of time to bloom. Eventually gave up and disposed of the remains in the ash barrel. I don't think pyro kids are going to switch from gray market M-80s and bottle rockets to used lithium batteries anytime soon, to say the least.
Now I do realize there's a lot of stored energy in there. I've certainly seen some amazing equipment explosions in real life. In my little electronic lab at home, plenty of electrolytic caps have popped, reverse biased tantalum caps have blown up, and I've smelled the aroma of burning transformer/motor varnish and burning resistors on many an occasion. I've unintentionally blown up NiCads and NiMH batteries. I'm quite certain a lithium powered electrical fire could be most exciting, but then again, any electrical fire is exciting regardless of battery chemistry. I know journalists are profoundly ignorant, so smoking a laptop CPU power supply or high voltage backlight supply or lint in the CPU cooling fan catching fire, in a lithium powered laptop, WILL be reported as a "lithium battery fire", because thats how magic and mythology work, but that doesn't mean its a real problem.
What determines the price of a scale is not just its equipment or accuracy.. but also the insurance the manufacturer has to carry in case something goes wrong. That's why medical devices are more expensive...
You're missing a couple other issues:
1) Provably sterile out of the box. If the patient has an open foot ulcer, and some Chinese dude sneezed on the board before he wrapped it up, and then the patient dies of infection...
2) Bodily fluid proof, if not disposable or autoclave-able. The board is too expensive to toss and too weak to autoclave, furthermore god only knows what it'll do electrically when a patient pees on it. Or if not pee, some highly conductive cleaning fluid. Or blood.
3) Intrinsically safe. In the unlikely event of using or storing the board in an atmosphere contaminated by flammable anesthetics, it won't blow up. Closely related to oxygen proof plastics. No great achievement to make a plastic that does not support combustion in plain ole air, but I have no idea what plastics (if any) will not continue to burn in pure oxygen. And you know some heart patient is going to drop their oxy mask on the wii board and the batteries will spark at the same time. Also if the patient collapses and you need to use the crash cart, you don't want the electronics inside to catch fire. Would be unfortunate to restart a patients heart only to have the patient die of infected burns.
4) Proven EMC/EMI compatibility. Last thing you want is for the board to interfere with the patients portable EKG machine or whatever.
5) There are all kinds of allergen related issues. For example, no latex (rubber bands) used internally for any part at any time during construction. Peanut oil sounds like a "green" lubricant for metal machining, etc, until you run into someone with an allergy.
6) Connected. It needs to be sold by the current collection of booth-babe saleswomen with open purchase order accounts at the hospital. Its possible the hospital has no pre-existing relationship with any place that sells wii balance boards... Literally no way for purchasing to buy one...
7) Software licensing which probably prohibits this kind of activity, along with controlling nuclear power plants and air traffic control. "Lean forward to lower the control rods, lean back to raise the control rods. Lean left and right to control primary circulation pumps. Walk in place as if running away to declare a SCRAM."
Theres a bunch of other "EE" related medical device rules that are pretty interesting, especially as regards AC power supplies, until it gets too creepy realizing a bunch of folks died before they figured the rules out.
Its not so hard to follow the rules, its just HARDER to prove someone in China followed the rules...
But there remains the possibility that someone, somewhere, was allowed access within cameraphone range of an iSlate without being NDA'd.
No need for a cameraphone, although the irony of using an Apple iPhone to spy on the iSlate would be hilarious. All you need to do is be within security camera range... And thanks to a blind love of 1984 style Big Brother, that is everywhere, right?