If you have a microwave you know exactly how to build one. The freq. that a microwave functions at is damn near spot on 2.4 GHz so all you need is several rolls of metal window screen where the mesh size is the same as your microwave.Oh Yah, you also need to make sure that it is well grounded, you can tie directly to the ground lug of any triple prong outlet, or steam pipe, etc.
This also has the advantage of identifying appliances that have ungrounded "hot" metal cases by electrocuting anyone touching the metal case and the wall at the same time. Comes in handy for party games like "Stick the fork in the toaster."
Abolishing the Electoral College in favor of a straight popular vote is a bad thing because it eliminates the representation from small populations. The Founding Fathers were not stupid. They devised a solution to a problem that still exists today: Ensuring that large populations do not dicate law to smaller populations.
It is true that the Founding Fathers didn't want election by popular vote for fear that large states would dominate. However, the framers did not have it in mind that everybody would get to vote. The original idea was that only the great landowners got to vote in the electoral college, the unwashed masses couldn't be trusted to vote correctly. Keep control of the government in the hands of those who knew best!
We've come a long way since 1787. We can get the results of a national election in one night. The power of the individual states is waning. People move freely from state to state, and have greater allegiance to their favorite football team than to their state, and possibly their country. People are more informed on issues (debatable).
The Electoral College leaves many feeling their vote doesn't count. The electors can vote contrary to the will of the people of their state. In my home state, there's a $400 fine if an elector casts a vote contrary to the popular vote results. Wow, that's quite a disincentive!
I think few are as apathetic as you make them out to be. I think it would be helpful to make a parallel to jury duty. Many would prefer to avoid jury duty. Yet, the choice is not their own. It is a duty after all. And once someone has been chosen to serve on a jury, rarely do they just pick a verdict at random.
I didn't pick at random. The guy deserved to go to the chair. His damn trial made me miss all of the Farscape marathon on SciFi Channel!
So here we see where people deliberate and make the best decision they can even though they were loath to participate in the process in the first place. I see no reason voting cannot be the same way.
You can (maybe) legislate voting, but you can never legislate making an informed decision. At least in court they present evidence and arguments. In an election, politicians present lies and rhetoric on TV. And they don't give you anything at the polls to help you make an informed decision other than the "Pull Lever to Exit" sign.
I'm not going to pay money to get to vote, I've already given 8 years of my life. Or did you mean a free drawing from all registered eligible voters like in the Asimov story.
No, no, no! It's absolutely free. Everybody gets a ticket and votes. The "prize" is having the option of having the outcome of the election changed to be the candidate that you voted for. (You voted for X. Y won. You won the lottery, you can choose to have X appointed President).
I should add that the only way this can make any sense whatsoever (in as far as holding a national lottery during an election can) is that the prize can only be awarded if the margin of error is not exceeded. That is, if X wins 49% and Y wins 51% and the margin of error is +-5% (that's probably being conservative), one lucky contestant gets to win his choice of President. Obviously write-ins would not be allowed.
Which Asimov story, BTW? I haven't read them all...
someone keeps putting an elder sign around my 'vote Cthulhu' yardsign
In other news today, the Cthulhu "Vote for the Greater Evil" campaign manager Nyarlathotep, brother to Dick Cheney, issued this statement from R'lyeh:
Weak and puny mortals, tremble before the Herald of the Elder Gods! The Great Cthulhu, having dreamed long and hard on this election campaign, and in consultation with the Bush/Cheney campaign, has ceased His bid for election. The Great Cthulhu believes that His purposes would best be served by re-electing George Bush and Dick Cheney. The Great Cthulhu anticipates that His long slumber will be over soon after the election, and He promises to eat the heads of the losers (Kerry and Edwards) before engulfing the remainder of the world in Chaos. The Great Cthulhu will not, under any circumstances, eat the head of Ralph Nader.
Isn't it stupid? Simple survey of 1% of voters will give almost the same result as real elections but with smaller resource consumption (cheaper etc).
Why even go that far? The last election was decided by nine people. This election looks to be going the same way with the same fraud by the President's brother in Florida. Let's cut our losses and just have the Supremes vote. I've already gotten a migraine, and it's not even November.
Better yet, a national lottery to be THE voter that decides who becomes the President! That would get people out to vote!
Ahh, it saddens me to think of all the heroes that have fallen in countless D&D combats. The best warriors are routinely slaughtered, but for what purpose? What are they fihting and dying for?
Usually for pissing off the DM... Took the last powdered donut without asking? Your character's last words might be:
"What do you mean the feather fall wears off?" "C'mon guys, it's just a pile of dragon bones... guys?" "What's a tarrasque?" "HOW many Kobolds?"
And yet, it appears "they" were complying, and a thimblefull of "evidence" was fabricated and/or weighted, to support a decision not made by the international community, but by one man. He was not elected to protect the international community; Iraq posed no credible threat to America. Bush acted as a dictator does, on his own authority with no regard to law. And we see the results of that act: a system of abuse and torture by the occupying force, hidden detention of "material witnesses" and "enemy combatants," more than ten thousand innocent civilians killed, millions without clean water, power, jobs, or hope, more than a thousand U.S. troops killed, another war brewing on the horizon (on to Iran!), and insurgents taking advantage of the chaos by killing indiscriminately.
Hmmm, maybe I do agree with the rest of the world...
Only people from the Phillipines, Poland and Nigeria clearly backed Bush,
Hey, those guys know what a strong leader really is:
Philippines: There's nothing like electing a President who committed human rights violations under the Marcos regime.
Poland: Well, you wouldn't think they'd go for invaders, but...
Nigeria: Come for the stonings, stay for the floggings, amputations, and beheadings under Sharia law.
In any event, what does it matter who the "world" would vote for? The only ones that count are the roughly 25% of the population of the U.S. that bother to vote. And Diebold. And the Supreme Court.
I've seen lighting reach out 75 miles to touch a C130.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time Like tears in rain.
The perception is that politicians get re-elected by spending money in their constituencies. The aim of course is to spend tax dollars in whatever way will register with the largest group of voters.
That is true for someone in the House or Senate, but when applied to the pResident, that becomes quite chilling. Of course, that is exactly what we've got right now.
As evidenced by the Bush administration, politicians really don't give a fig about debt - they care about getting re-elected. If a few billion dollars of deficit spending will bring in the votes, that's what they'll do.
It's not a few billion dollars, it's a few hundred billion dollars of deficit spending. With devestating tax cuts for the wealthy, and pumping billions down the rathole of Cheney's old company, where is the money to pay for this administration's short-sighted goals? When you're pushing 60 and there's no Medicare or SS benefits waiting for you, what are you going to do? What's going to happen with health care? Education? What happened to the social contract? I guess that's just a liberal, left-wing, commie idea...
Of course, nobody ever got [re-]elected saying we need a tax increase, but the Republicans shout that Kerry is a "Tax and Spend Liberal" while nobody (including the Democrats) points out that Bush is a "Spend and Spend Neocon".
Irony is a foreign concept here that few of the pimply-faced mods or ACs can be expected to understand. Next thing, you'll be telling me that the "NEWS" in FOXNEWS is ironic.
Install the Windows XP off a CD that includes SP2 slipstreamed in, and your survival time online 'unpatched' goes up dramatically. Something about a reasonably good firewall that is turned on by the default installation...
Not an easy feat for Joe User without an MSDN subscription. It'll take a while before the new CDs hit the channel. I suppose they could leach it, but then they may get hidden "extras" if you know what I mean.
Want to make your own slipstream install CD? Go right ahead.
After about the age of 3 or 4 the trends have allready been set and it will be a battle getting women interested into deckery or linux.
Don't I know it! My girlfriend was raised on Emacs since she was 6 months old. I just can't get her to use Vi no matter how hard I try. It's like she's totally incapable of thinking in any other way.
So how many PDP-11's can you run on a Pentium 4 anyhow?
You could shell out some bucks for Ersatz11 and find out. It runs under Linux, and it runs fast. You can even attach Q-Bus and Unibus hardware with an adapter.
have you noticed console games don't need patches? I mean, I think they test a lot better because they KNOW they can't update them. with PC, I think there must be a mentality of "oh, well, we can always make them download a patch".
Well, first off, some of the PC game patches have to do with hardware incompatibility issues. A problem that a fully-specced and documented closed system console doesn't usually have. How much testing can a company do for their PC releases? If you write a game to DirectX 8 spec, shouldn't it work on all DirectX 8 compatible video cards without having to create a patch so it can work with Brand X video card? Then there's Windows Update's potential for creating ever changing OS incompatibilities...
Granted, something as stupid as this Thief bug should have been caught in playtesting, but bugs are here to stay no matter what.
As far as console games being better tested, I have 3 PS2 games (I'm not much of a console player since my 2600 died years ago) and two of them have annoying bugs. Simpsons Hit & Run crashes occassionally for no reason (not a fun game if your reflexes were post-adolescent when "The Simpsons" were shorts on the Tracy Ullman Show, btw), while the camera in Dynasty Warriors 4 has gotten stuck and left me looking at a blank screen.
Don't send your cover letter as an attachment! It should be your email body. Really. I won't read an attached cover letter.
I agree with everything except the above statement. Send it as an attachment and in the body of the email, referencing an enclosure of the cover letter.
Here's what happens at the place I work: After inHuman Resources gets done with initial screening, they print out a copy of the email and any attachments, stamp it and send it via interoffice mail to the hiring department. While the attachments are usually nicely formatted and generally in the style that a human being would care to read, the same cannot be said of the printout of the body of the email. One person in HR apparently sets the text to 16pt for easy reading and prints it out that way. I've seen clipped sentences and far too much of the "System" or Courier 10pt emails. They never look good...
If you care enough about the position, ensure that you will be presenting your best face. About the only "safe" assumption you can make with emailing resumes is that your attachments should be Word documents unless otherwise stated. Oh yeah, and hit all the keywords for those companies that use HR as the initial screening process.
Absolutely, I've thought of this, and intended to do something similar for a project a few years ago. I wanted to create a rover that could negotiate terrain using onboard AI with only user defined waypoints determining its path. To do it cheaply, I planned on using a remote control car with a wireless camera affixed to it on a rotatable base. The PC would control the rover via a parallel port I/O board connected to the remote control. The PC was to do the vision processing work.
Good plan, but I got bogged down in perfecting the AI for the vision processing and path finding. I had more fun with that than implementing the actual rover.
Does your laptop have a parallel port? Here, here, and here are good places to look for schematics/project ideas. You can scavenge stepper motors out of dead hard drives and floppy drives. Here's a nice project that demonstrates building DC drive controller w/proportional speed control. Neat! I haven't built any such animals since my C64 and TI-994/a were new and shiny.
Back in the early to mid 90s, I was hooked on Windows. I'd be up late rebooting, two, maybe three times a night. It got bad. Real bad. I couldn't score a clean install no matter who I asked. Even Nancy couldn't get me to Just Say No.
It was beginning to impact my life in a bad way. I fell in with a bad crowd: more than 100 users. They called me all day long looking to score a fix for why their system went down. I went to my supplier, he put the squeeze on me. Said I needed to "upgrade." I scraped up all my money and bought untold kilos of the stuff. It's all the same, man. You're flying high, then, bam! You crash and burn. This new stuff I'm on, this "XP?" Yeah, it's good shit. But sometimes you still crash hard and your day goes to hell.
I've been freebasing Unix for a while on the servers. Yeah, the real deal's pricey, but there's this other stuff out there if you know where to ask, it's called Linux, ok? Keeps me flyin' high all day and night long. Just watch out, some dealers will cut you down if you don't buy from them. Others are just messin' with your mind.
Consider a possible consequence: immediate termination over a misunderstanding. Some people will think it's funny, some will think it's annoying, and the Sr. VP who didn't save his report last night before shutting down only knows that you messed with his system and he can't find his report. It won't look good on the ol' resume.
I'd like to know how replaceable the rechargable battery is in these units. This isn't mentioned at all in the article. Lithium-ion batteries charge great for about a year then rapidly go south. When the battery dies, you might be left with a stylish block of plastic and electronics to prop open the window in a rainstorm.
Getting screwed by Apple's wonderfully "engineered" virtually non-replaceable battery design, I'm loathe to part with more money on such products, even if it's only $50. Yeah, the iPod looked and functioned great. But it boils down to Apple selling me a $300 razor, telling me I need to buy a new one three months out of warranty, then eventually offering to sell me a new razor with blade (battery "replacement" program) for another $99.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have a microwave you know exactly how to build one. The freq. that a microwave functions at is damn near spot on 2.4 GHz so all you need is several rolls of metal window screen where the mesh size is the same as your microwave.Oh Yah, you also need to make sure that it is well grounded, you can tie directly to the ground lug of any triple prong outlet, or steam pipe, etc.
This also has the advantage of identifying appliances that have ungrounded "hot" metal cases by electrocuting anyone touching the metal case and the wall at the same time. Comes in handy for party games like "Stick the fork in the toaster."
Abolishing the Electoral College in favor of a straight popular vote is a bad thing because it eliminates the representation from small populations. The Founding Fathers were not stupid. They devised a solution to a problem that still exists today: Ensuring that large populations do not dicate law to smaller populations.
It is true that the Founding Fathers didn't want election by popular vote for fear that large states would dominate. However, the framers did not have it in mind that everybody would get to vote. The original idea was that only the great landowners got to vote in the electoral college, the unwashed masses couldn't be trusted to vote correctly. Keep control of the government in the hands of those who knew best!
We've come a long way since 1787. We can get the results of a national election in one night. The power of the individual states is waning. People move freely from state to state, and have greater allegiance to their favorite football team than to their state, and possibly their country. People are more informed on issues (debatable).
The Electoral College leaves many feeling their vote doesn't count. The electors can vote contrary to the will of the people of their state. In my home state, there's a $400 fine if an elector casts a vote contrary to the popular vote results. Wow, that's quite a disincentive!
I think few are as apathetic as you make them out to be. I think it would be helpful to make a parallel to jury duty. Many would prefer to avoid jury duty. Yet, the choice is not their own. It is a duty after all. And once someone has been chosen to serve on a jury, rarely do they just pick a verdict at random.
I didn't pick at random. The guy deserved to go to the chair. His damn trial made me miss all of the Farscape marathon on SciFi Channel!
So here we see where people deliberate and make the best decision they can even though they were loath to participate in the process in the first place. I see no reason voting cannot be the same way.
You can (maybe) legislate voting, but you can never legislate making an informed decision. At least in court they present evidence and arguments. In an election, politicians present lies and rhetoric on TV. And they don't give you anything at the polls to help you make an informed decision other than the "Pull Lever to Exit" sign.
I'm not going to pay money to get to vote, I've already given 8 years of my life. Or did you mean a free drawing from all registered eligible voters like in the Asimov story.
No, no, no! It's absolutely free. Everybody gets a ticket and votes. The "prize" is having the option of having the outcome of the election changed to be the candidate that you voted for. (You voted for X. Y won. You won the lottery, you can choose to have X appointed President).
I should add that the only way this can make any sense whatsoever (in as far as holding a national lottery during an election can) is that the prize can only be awarded if the margin of error is not exceeded. That is, if X wins 49% and Y wins 51% and the margin of error is +-5% (that's probably being conservative), one lucky contestant gets to win his choice of President. Obviously write-ins would not be allowed.
Which Asimov story, BTW? I haven't read them all...
someone keeps putting an elder sign around my 'vote Cthulhu' yardsign
In other news today, the Cthulhu "Vote for the Greater Evil" campaign manager Nyarlathotep, brother to Dick Cheney, issued this statement from R'lyeh:
Weak and puny mortals, tremble before the Herald of the Elder Gods! The Great Cthulhu, having dreamed long and hard on this election campaign, and in consultation with the Bush/Cheney campaign, has ceased His bid for election. The Great Cthulhu believes that His purposes would best be served by re-electing George Bush and Dick Cheney. The Great Cthulhu anticipates that His long slumber will be over soon after the election, and He promises to eat the heads of the losers (Kerry and Edwards) before engulfing the remainder of the world in Chaos. The Great Cthulhu will not, under any circumstances, eat the head of Ralph Nader.
Isn't it stupid? Simple survey of 1% of voters will give almost the same result as real elections but with smaller resource consumption (cheaper etc).
Why even go that far? The last election was decided by nine people. This election looks to be going the same way with the same fraud by the President's brother in Florida. Let's cut our losses and just have the Supremes vote. I've already gotten a migraine, and it's not even November.
Better yet, a national lottery to be THE voter that decides who becomes the President! That would get people out to vote!
Ahh, it saddens me to think of all the heroes that have fallen in countless D&D combats. The best warriors are routinely slaughtered, but for what purpose? What are they fihting and dying for?
Usually for pissing off the DM... Took the last powdered donut without asking? Your character's last words might be:
"What do you mean the feather fall wears off?"
"C'mon guys, it's just a pile of dragon bones... guys?"
"What's a tarrasque?"
"HOW many Kobolds?"
The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint
And yet, it appears "they" were complying, and a thimblefull of "evidence" was fabricated and/or weighted, to support a decision not made by the international community, but by one man. He was not elected to protect the international community; Iraq posed no credible threat to America. Bush acted as a dictator does, on his own authority with no regard to law. And we see the results of that act: a system of abuse and torture by the occupying force, hidden detention of "material witnesses" and "enemy combatants," more than ten thousand innocent civilians killed, millions without clean water, power, jobs, or hope, more than a thousand U.S. troops killed, another war brewing on the horizon (on to Iran!), and insurgents taking advantage of the chaos by killing indiscriminately.
Hmmm, maybe I do agree with the rest of the world...
Only people from the Phillipines, Poland and Nigeria clearly backed Bush,
Hey, those guys know what a strong leader really is:
Philippines: There's nothing like electing a President who committed human rights violations under the Marcos regime.
Poland: Well, you wouldn't think they'd go for invaders, but...
Nigeria: Come for the stonings, stay for the floggings, amputations, and beheadings under Sharia law.
In any event, what does it matter who the "world" would vote for? The only ones that count are the roughly 25% of the population of the U.S. that bother to vote. And Diebold. And the Supreme Court.
I've seen lighting reach out 75 miles to touch a C130.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
All those moments will be lost in time
Like tears in rain.
-Apologies to Philip K. Dick
The perception is that politicians get re-elected by spending money in their constituencies. The aim of course is to spend tax dollars in whatever way will register with the largest group of voters.
That is true for someone in the House or Senate, but when applied to the pResident, that becomes quite chilling. Of course, that is exactly what we've got right now.
As evidenced by the Bush administration, politicians really don't give a fig about debt - they care about getting re-elected. If a few billion dollars of deficit spending will bring in the votes, that's what they'll do.
It's not a few billion dollars, it's a few hundred billion dollars of deficit spending. With devestating tax cuts for the wealthy, and pumping billions down the rathole of Cheney's old company, where is the money to pay for this administration's short-sighted goals? When you're pushing 60 and there's no Medicare or SS benefits waiting for you, what are you going to do? What's going to happen with health care? Education? What happened to the social contract? I guess that's just a liberal, left-wing, commie idea...
Of course, nobody ever got [re-]elected saying we need a tax increase, but the Republicans shout that Kerry is a "Tax and Spend Liberal" while nobody (including the Democrats) points out that Bush is a "Spend and Spend Neocon".
Irony is a foreign concept here that few of the pimply-faced mods or ACs can be expected to understand. Next thing, you'll be telling me that the "NEWS" in FOXNEWS is ironic.
Fox News?
All the political news that I, or any other God-fearing, flag-waving, SUV-driving, red-blooded American needs is at http://www.foxnews.com/
I can tell how good they are because I agree with everything they report.
If you don't pay mafia protection fees, then "bad things happen to you".
Lovely campus you've got here guvnah. You wouldn't want any of those lab computers to get broken now, would you?
Install the Windows XP off a CD that includes SP2 slipstreamed in, and your survival time online 'unpatched' goes up dramatically. Something about a reasonably good firewall that is turned on by the default installation...
Not an easy feat for Joe User without an MSDN subscription. It'll take a while before the new CDs hit the channel. I suppose they could leach it, but then they may get hidden "extras" if you know what I mean.
Want to make your own slipstream install CD? Go right ahead.
After about the age of 3 or 4 the trends have allready been set and it will be a battle getting women interested into deckery or linux.
Don't I know it! My girlfriend was raised on Emacs since she was 6 months old. I just can't get her to use Vi no matter how hard I try. It's like she's totally incapable of thinking in any other way.
So how many PDP-11's can you run on a Pentium 4 anyhow?
You could shell out some bucks for Ersatz11 and find out. It runs under Linux, and it runs fast. You can even attach Q-Bus and Unibus hardware with an adapter.
have you noticed console games don't need patches? I mean, I think they test a lot better because they KNOW they can't update them. with PC, I think there must be a mentality of "oh, well, we can always make them download a patch".
Well, first off, some of the PC game patches have to do with hardware incompatibility issues. A problem that a fully-specced and documented closed system console doesn't usually have. How much testing can a company do for their PC releases? If you write a game to DirectX 8 spec, shouldn't it work on all DirectX 8 compatible video cards without having to create a patch so it can work with Brand X video card? Then there's Windows Update's potential for creating ever changing OS incompatibilities...
Granted, something as stupid as this Thief bug should have been caught in playtesting, but bugs are here to stay no matter what.
As far as console games being better tested, I have 3 PS2 games (I'm not much of a console player since my 2600 died years ago) and two of them have annoying bugs. Simpsons Hit & Run crashes occassionally for no reason (not a fun game if your reflexes were post-adolescent when "The Simpsons" were shorts on the Tracy Ullman Show, btw), while the camera in Dynasty Warriors 4 has gotten stuck and left me looking at a blank screen.
Don't send your cover letter as an attachment! It should be your email body. Really. I won't read an attached cover letter.
I agree with everything except the above statement. Send it as an attachment and in the body of the email, referencing an enclosure of the cover letter.
Here's what happens at the place I work: After inHuman Resources gets done with initial screening, they print out a copy of the email and any attachments, stamp it and send it via interoffice mail to the hiring department. While the attachments are usually nicely formatted and generally in the style that a human being would care to read, the same cannot be said of the printout of the body of the email. One person in HR apparently sets the text to 16pt for easy reading and prints it out that way. I've seen clipped sentences and far too much of the "System" or Courier 10pt emails. They never look good...
If you care enough about the position, ensure that you will be presenting your best face. About the only "safe" assumption you can make with emailing resumes is that your attachments should be Word documents unless otherwise stated. Oh yeah, and hit all the keywords for those companies that use HR as the initial screening process.
Absolutely, I've thought of this, and intended to do something similar for a project a few years ago. I wanted to create a rover that could negotiate terrain using onboard AI with only user defined waypoints determining its path. To do it cheaply, I planned on using a remote control car with a wireless camera affixed to it on a rotatable base. The PC would control the rover via a parallel port I/O board connected to the remote control. The PC was to do the vision processing work.
Good plan, but I got bogged down in perfecting the AI for the vision processing and path finding. I had more fun with that than implementing the actual rover.
Does your laptop have a parallel port? Here, here, and here are good places to look for schematics/project ideas. You can scavenge stepper motors out of dead hard drives and floppy drives. Here's a nice project that demonstrates building DC drive controller w/proportional speed control. Neat! I haven't built any such animals since my C64 and TI-994/a were new and shiny.
Back in the early to mid 90s, I was hooked on Windows. I'd be up late rebooting, two, maybe three times a night. It got bad. Real bad. I couldn't score a clean install no matter who I asked. Even Nancy couldn't get me to Just Say No.
It was beginning to impact my life in a bad way. I fell in with a bad crowd: more than 100 users. They called me all day long looking to score a fix for why their system went down. I went to my supplier, he put the squeeze on me. Said I needed to "upgrade." I scraped up all my money and bought untold kilos of the stuff. It's all the same, man. You're flying high, then, bam! You crash and burn. This new stuff I'm on, this "XP?" Yeah, it's good shit. But sometimes you still crash hard and your day goes to hell.
I've been freebasing Unix for a while on the servers. Yeah, the real deal's pricey, but there's this other stuff out there if you know where to ask, it's called Linux, ok? Keeps me flyin' high all day and night long. Just watch out, some dealers will cut you down if you don't buy from them. Others are just messin' with your mind.
Consider a possible consequence: immediate termination over a misunderstanding. Some people will think it's funny, some will think it's annoying, and the Sr. VP who didn't save his report last night before shutting down only knows that you messed with his system and he can't find his report. It won't look good on the ol' resume.
I'd like to know how replaceable the rechargable battery is in these units. This isn't mentioned at all in the article. Lithium-ion batteries charge great for about a year then rapidly go south. When the battery dies, you might be left with a stylish block of plastic and electronics to prop open the window in a rainstorm.
Getting screwed by Apple's wonderfully "engineered" virtually non-replaceable battery design, I'm loathe to part with more money on such products, even if it's only $50. Yeah, the iPod looked and functioned great. But it boils down to Apple selling me a $300 razor, telling me I need to buy a new one three months out of warranty, then eventually offering to sell me a new razor with blade (battery "replacement" program) for another $99.