Hi Carl,

Thanks for your tip. I measured with a Fluke TrueRMS series meter, if that helps. The laptop is not connected to the cable line at the moment so I can't try, but when one part of my body was grounded (for instance to my mix desk chassis) and I touched one of the laptop's screws or the serial port shield etc, there was a very prominant (but not painful) current flow. Very similar to those prank toy shockers. That gave me reason to believe there is a significant flaw somewhere. I will measure again with a resistor in series next time as you suggested and see what happens.

My Clevo M57U (17" WUXGA Glossy, Core Duo) has a grounded adapter but easily transmits voltage from connected devices. I was getting shocks off it one day, measured 84 volts to ground, and started unplugging things until it normalized. Turns out the cable TV (coaxial F-type connector) was doing it. Puzzling, since the cable line is grounded in two places to water pipes.

I never drink and drive; all of my friends know that. However, there's no way IN HELL I'd ever want my car making decisions like this for me. Just another reason I'll stick with Chevy.

This is just a rebranded Clevo M57U/M570U, posted about the third time on here in yet another form. I'm using one right now -- it's a great machine if you can score a deal on one.

Why the huge negative reaction to this technology? It is not autonomous, the soldier is still responsible for the decision to pull the trigger just like before. The only difference is now he has a computer able to alert him of known potentially dangerous targets. This will save lives because it will reduce his response time to those threats. If you're scanning over a crowd of otherwise innocent iraqis and one of them is really a known terrorist with a hidden weapon, how do you know which one it is before he pulls it out and shoots? I don't think it's such a bad idea to have a system that can alert soldiers to where they should be focusing their attention...

I use FocusMagic as well... it fixes motion blur and out of focus photos both. It's basically a manual version of the software in this article -- you must tell it which direction the camera moved and how much (as determined by zooming in and analyzing a point of light etc) but once you have this information it does a fairly good job of putting the image back together.

It's a very sweet laptop, I'm using one right now (only not Rock-branded, and with a T2600 and 256mb 7900GTX)

The LED clock on the front panel is a real attention getter.

Letting the market decide works for those of us that have a choice -- it's the reason I don't own an iPod, for instance -- but what about those that don't? People who receive iPods as gifts, or choose to buy it simply because they think it's the best at the moment, but expect to get something else for their next player? It's fair for them to have to re-buy all of the music they actually paid for, when a "pirate" switching players doesn't have any trouble at all?

I support France's position here simply to give everybody an easier way to transcode music they legally bought so they can continue to use it. It's no surprise the US Govt is siding with Apple, I'm sure Sony and others have plenty of lobbyists that know this could be a blow to DRM's future, and I hope it is.