I got the Belkin Wi-Fi Skype phone. I also bought the unlimited SkypeOut for $15 per year.

The phone kind of sucks. Call quality is poor. The other party hears an echo of what they said 5 seconds after they said it. My dad says that it sounds like I'm calling from Bangledesh.

The phone is a little buggy, too.

And I've got issues with my DSL. It's unreliability makes the Belkin even worse.

So that's the cost of a cheap service like Skype. It really can't replace a real phone, yet. Hopefully Belkin can fix the echo problem with updated software.

Yep. There is a laser detector, and either a special light tuned to the laser frequency or maybe another laser to shoot back at the LIDAR and confuse it.

Supposedly just driving with the high beams on lowers the effective range of LIDAR dramatically. When I had a long highway commute, I used to drive that way during the day. I have no idea if I was ever in a LIDAR trap (my Valentine One didn't do laser).

Okay, who's got the WORST SBC/AT&T DSL download speeds?

I had a home a few years ago that had 118 kbps downloads! You got that right, twice the speed of a modem. I did everything I could on my end to fix the problem (5' long Cat5e homerun from NIC to modem, MTU tweaks, etc) but nothing worked.

I moved and fixed the problem! I average 2 Mbps now, even though I pay for 3 Mbps.

Oh, also, I recently broke the original DSL modem. Maybe a static discharge, maybe it just crapped out on its own. It was about 4 years old. Anybody else have a DSL modem die with age?

Lidar is not radar. It's a laser, not radio waves.

It is much more precise than a radar gun. It can be aimed at specific cars more easily than radar.

The best thing about Lidar? It can be legally jammed!

I got the same laptop earlier this year for $499, but with a 14" screen, 256 ram, 40 gb HD, no DVD burner, and no wi-fi. So, even at $299, this is a screaming deal.

I've got a 2003 era 32" 4:3 Zenith CRT HDTV (32V37). I got it because it was the first reasonably priced HDTV I found with a built in HD tuner.

Actually, the 4:3 is a compromise that has worked out wonderfully. It works great with non-HD content (no bars), and I just zoom it on 16:9 material. It seems like the NFL and MLB have adjusted their HD content for 4:3, since the scores are no longer cut off when you zoom their 16:9 content.

I've seen a good number of 4:3 CRT digital TVs out there, all very reasonably priced. Some are HD, some are not. Either way, I would say to find something that you can afford, and just do it.

While most people have been hemming and hawing the last few years, I've been enjoying HDTV. Just get something that you can afford. CRTs are cheap, just do it. One day 50" 1080p plasmas will be $500, and THEN you can upgrade again.

VW's 1.9 TDi doesn't meet 2007 emissions standards, and will not be sold in the US.

VW's 2.0 TDi does not meet 2010 emissions standards, which Honda's diesel technology does. VW meets European diesel standards, which allow much more emissions of nitrogen oxides, which produce smog and are very difficult to remove from diesel exhaust.

The real question is, how much does Honda's technology cost? Diesels already cost a premium over gas engines. They're simply more expensive to produce. Now you add expensive catalysts to the exhaust, the cost just goes up and up. In Europe, where diesel can cost $5 per gallon easily, you get a quicker payback than when gas is $2.50 or less, as in the US.

It is the same dilemma you have with a hybrid. You can't pay back the extra cost of the hybrid technology in the useful life of the vehicle when gas is only $2.50 a gallon.

I was at Best Buy yesterday, and I wandered over to the TVs. I was surprised at how many CRTs are still being sold. I found a 30" widescreen CRT Toshiba that looked like a nice deal. And they still sell the Sony 34" widescreen for a blistering $1100. That thing is a beast, it is so huge.

Just about everything has an ASTC tuner, so you're getting an ever better value for your CRT dollar.

I've got a 32" 4:3 Zenith CRT HDTV that I got in early '04. I'm not getting rid of this puppy until I can get a 50" Plasma for less than $1000.

Yeah, the article is alarmist crap.

In fact, good engineering design does anticipate possible failure modes, including those during manufacture, and provides design controls to minimize the effects of those failures. It's a two step process, the first being "Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis" (DFMEA) and the second being "Process Failure Mode and Effects Analysis" (PFMEA).

So, doing things like monitoring the temperature of every cell, and protecting each cell with a metal case, go a long way towards eliminating the (very small) chance of fire.

And if the probability of failure is 300failures in 1B products (300/1B=0.00003%), the fact that there are 7000 cells raises the probability to 0.21% over the life of the cells. 99.79% of the vehicles are never going to have a problem.

I must say that, from articles in Wired and Autoweek, the engineering of the Tesla is decent, maybe better than the EV-1. It appears to me to be an electric Lotus Elise, which is a good thing. Lots of Lotus engineering is in there. I don't think that it is worth $70k, when you can pick up an Elise for less than $50k, but to each his own.

It's the power supply that draws the most standby power. For example, even when your computer is completely off, the power supply is still drawing power and one of the rails (3.2V?) is still energized. Even if nothing is drawing power on that rail, the fact that it is energized and that power supplies are not 100% efficient means that some amount of power is being wasted.

Wall warts have the same issue.