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Alan Cox's ThinkPad battery explodes
It appears that the exploding IBM ThinkPad that we spotted last week at LAX may not have been a fluke after all. Telsa Gwynne, wife of famed Linux kernel programmer Alan Cox, describes on her website how her husband's ThinkPad battery suddenly exploded last night (see the photo on the next page), after which "a couple of fires started where the (presumably) boiling battery landed," with one of the fragments taking out a nearby LCD monitor. Alan sustained a few minor burns, but other than the laptop itself there were no serious injuries, thankfully. Telsa does note, however, that the battery was third-party and was bought on eBay, so it may not be an authentic IBM pack at all. Still, somebody needs to get to the bottom of this, like, now -- after the Apple, Dell, Panasonic, and Toshiba recalls, the public demands and deserves complete and rapid disclosure.Update: We traded emails with Alan Cox and have posted some of our questions and answers with him on the next page.
