Rumor has it that Bryan Pope may have mentioned these words: And on two separate occasions, my brother would be pushing up daisies right now *had he been wearing his seatbelt*. Yes, sometimes wearing that damn thing can rob you of your constitutional rights, most notably the constitutional right to breathe... I'm not saying "Outlaw bicycle helmets and/or seatbelts." I'm saying "it should be the operators choice." If I want to spread my non-functional graymatter all over the pavement, I could certainly do so in a manner where a helmet/seatbelt would not stop me anyhow...[1] Laterz (and end of thread for me), Roger "Merch" Merchberger [1] The state of Michigan (US) is looking at repealing the required motorcycle helmet law, which is good. Would I stop wearing mine? Heck no! The wind frells with my contacts, so I prefer wearing a full-face helmet over 35mph (55km/h) anyway. But at least it'll be my choice... -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | A new truth in advertising slogan sysadmin, Iceberg Computers | for MicroSoft: "We're not the oxy... zmerch(a)30below.com | ...in oxymoron!"

Being "certified" has another meaning this side of the pond, but thinking of it , it may well apply to all who indulge in the passions of this forum . :^) Geoff. ----- Original Message ----- From: "R. D. Davis" <rdd(a)rddavis.org> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2004 8:18 PM Subject: Re: vintage computers and lead poisoning? animals: & such

Quothe Brian Mahoney, from writings of Thu, Jun 03, 2004 at 09:46:47PM -0400: Yet another reason as to why socialized medicine is a bad thing. It's bad enough to have to pay the expensive insurance premiums for an indemnity policy (and if everyone bought these instead of using those damned HMOs, most people would be paying into such policies and then most people would have much better health insurance for a reasonable cost, which existed before the blasted HMOs came into existence, ruined an excellent health-care system, making health insurance extremely inexpensive for young and healthy people while making it vastly more expensive for others as they got older, etc.), but worse yet to have the government pay and have even more control over people's lives. Who in their right mind wants more government control over everything? Next, you won't be allowed to work on electrical circuits because it's dangerous and the government pays for your health insurance... not that such insurance up there in Canada is worth much anyway, considering the number of people who come to the U.S. from Canada, paying their own way to be admitted to U.S. hospitals for surgery, etc. if they can afford to. Government paid health care is usually poor quality health care; surely people in countries such as England, and other parts of the U.K., can attest to that. It's just a bad idea that doesn't work right due to the bureaucracy and cost-cutting measures that don't take the patient's health into consideration (like a huge HMO, only worse since a government runs it). Damned nuisances; got caught twice by cops already for those seat-belt laws which have no right to exist in a free society. Well, helmets can cause injuries as well. I stopped wearing a riding helmet on horseback, since it limits vision to some extent---which negates safety benefits; there's no such thing as a guarantee of safety around horses, so, wearing a helmet just eliminates a very few, out of many, risks. Almost had a helmet caught in a tree branch while blazing a trail through thickish woods, which could have darned near pulled my head off my neck! When I was younger, I did a lot of bicycle riding, and never wore a helmet; wouldn't have enjoyed bicycling at all with one of those blasted annoyances on my head and would have refused to wear one. ...and would bicycle helmets have protected the bicycle riders that my horse could have easily kicked in the face when they came up too fast behind us on a trail, and then shouted loudly as they approached from several feet away? Naturally, she kicked out at them, barely missing them (darn!), and could have thrown me off as a result of their stupidity if I'd lost my balance. Remember this: helmets don't save stupid people from their own stupidity. Taking this topic back to classic computers, consider this: needlessly extreme safety precautions forced upon idiots, such as a government would institute, taken during the troubleshooting of power supplies and other circuits with lethal current levels, wouldn't save idiots stand on government approved rubber mats while working on electrical equipment" or "high-voltage probes not meeting standard X23124Y534Z5 are considered illegal devices, and anyone found possessing one will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law." -- Copyright (C) 2004 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals: All Rights Reserved an unnatural belief that we're above Nature & her other creatures, using dogma to justify such www.rddavis.org 410-744-4900 beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.

In message <5.1.0.14.2.20040604002558.03934c98(a)mail.30below.com> Roger Merchberger <zmerch(a)30below.com> wrote: Sure, but C64s, VAXen and such never had any viruses written specifically for them, IIRC. People were too busy either using them to monitor scientific experiments (PDPs and VAXen especially) or playing games on them (C64s, BBC Micros, etc). 0.9% in my experience. The real problem is people who know enough to be dangerous, but don't know enough to fix the machine properly. Ah, but look at how many viruses exist for Windows (something like 130,000 last time I checked) then look at how many exist for Linux - four. Admittedly there are "rootkits", but as long as you make sure people can't log in as root (or don't want to log in as root - remove the GUI in superuser/root mode), getting the RK in there in the first place is difficult. Make the machine grab the relevant security patches as they're released and have it autoinstall them. Take MICROS~1 software (stretching the dictionary definition a bit, but bear with me) out of the equation and watch as the amount of bandwidth used on the Internet drops, then note the speed-up. Now the icing on the cake - RISC OS. 650 virus "strains" known. 95.5% of them exist only in virus collections. TTBOMK there was never a virus written for RISC OS that was capable of transmitting itself over the Internet. Ho yus :) Later. -- Phil. | Acorn Risc PC600 Mk3, SA202, 64MB, 6GB, philpem(a)dsl.pipex.com | ViewFinder, 10BaseT Ethernet, 2-slice, http://www.philpem.dsl.pipex.com/ | 48xCD, ARCINv6c IDE, SCSI ... Mr. Worf, set phasors on spin dry.

On Fri, Jun 04, 2004 at 06:31:35AM -0400, der Mouse wrote: It had two "hooks" - one for VAX, one for Sun But a worm is not a virus. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 04-Jun-2004 13:20 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -75.3 F (-59.6 C) Windchill -103 F (-75 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 5.7 kts Grid 135 Barometer 662.3 mb (11302. ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

On Fri, Jun 04, 2004 at 10:35:49PM -0400, der Mouse wrote: Worms propagate specifically by travelling over networks. Viruses (not 'virii' - learn Latin to know why) can use a network to get from machine to machine, but they require some level, however minimal, of human assistance to load. If I am running a machine with an IIS vulnerability or a sendmail vulnerability or whatever, listening to some port on the 'net, a worm can exploit it without me even being near the machine. The same machine can be sent a million copies of a "virus" by e-mail, but until I open these files with a vulnerable app (Outlook, etc.), my machine is not running any of the malicious code (i.e., infected). Viruses use to spread primarily through infected files by booting infected disks. Those are not worms. The lines can be blurry, especially when you inject additional risks like trojan horses, but those are, essentially, the salient distinctions. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 05-Jun-2004 02:40 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -82.7 F (-63.7 C) Windchill -124.9 F (-87.2 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 12.7 kts Grid 118 Barometer 663.6 mb (11249. ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

I would think the reason that the older machines do not have worms and virus (generally) is that ciding them back then was simply not in style. 20 years ago, if a worm was released for VMS, would it make the news? Would anyone outside of a few thousand sysadmins really care? What glory would there be for the hacker? Not much... I think the "first" was written on a Univac system.

On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Philip Pemberton wrote: I don't know about the VAX, but there certainly were "viruses" written for the C64, and the Apple ][, and I'm sure many other 8-bits (and also the VAX for that matter). Yeah, progress sucks. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

Less than 0.9% of the total population even know how to swap parts. Less than 0.0001% know enough to fix the machine properly.

Quothe Glen Goodwin, from writings of Fri, Jun 04, 2004 at 06:39:24PM -0400: Because it's less wasteful. Perhaps the problem is plentiful and inexpensive PCs for foolish and wasteful throwaway societies. If the idiots running computer companies would start charging several thousand dollars for them again, design them to be more repairable and upgradeable with less waste, then more would end up being repaired. If schematics, theories of operation, commented firmware sources, etc. were easily obtainable, more proper repairs would be made as well. More parts need to be re-used instead of dumped into landfills; repairing rather than replacing would help with this problem. -- Copyright (C) 2004 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals: All Rights Reserved an unnatural belief that we're above Nature & her other creatures, using dogma to justify such www.rddavis.org 410-744-4900 beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.

I can - or else, I can't think of any that ever were. The only question is what level the FRU is at. In the days of early (firebottle) consumer electronics, swapping out a tube with a blown filament was a routine repair for many, though many were afraid to try it; replacing something else - say, a fried resistor - was the province of repair shops and the rare end-user. The valves would be considered FRUs in today's terminology, the resistors not. Repairing a defective tube was out of the question for almost everyone. Today, we have exactly the same situation in computers, except that the "tubes" are now called things like "PCI cards" and the "resistors" are things like power supplies and motherboards. (There are numerous differences, of course, such as the number of "tubes" and "resistors" in a typical computer is rather different, but I believe the principle is basically valid.) For most people, repairing a PCI NIC with a defective transceiver chip is as out of the question as repairing a valve with two grid accidentally shorted together would have been in the heyday of valve electronics. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Teo Zenios wrote: To say nothing of the evolution of new (sometimes cool or useful) features... -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

----- Original Message ----- From: "Tony Duell" <ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk> To: <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Saturday, June 05, 2004 6:39 PM Subject: Re: vintage computers and lead poisoning? repairable. player There will always be devices to listen to your old recordings, you can still find record players and vcrs all over the place along with tape decks. All the new computers are made with custom parts many of which are proprietary and very hard to replace because of surface mounting. The reason electronics are so cheap today is because of the massive integration of components. The whole throw away commodity industry has also caused the massive recycling movement. Instead of landfilling all the old items they get recycled now and reused. Very few people can troubleshoot problems to component levels (and most don't even want to if they could) and with the prices for new items being so low most of the repair shops in the industry have closed. How many people go to tech school to be an electronics repairman? I can look in my basement and find 100's of devices that still work just fine but are obsolete to anyone except a collector, so even if we repaired everything it would still end up in the trash sooner or later. I would say quite a few of the people here grew up at the same time as the computer industry and know how to fix and troubleshoot computers, but the next generations will only know specialized areas of it.

I do have one or two service manuals but nothing with a schematic. Admittedly a schematic may be of little use given the nature of the components (a significant proportion of which may well be made of unobtanium). Having said that, the only problem with such devices that I've had is one portable CD player that got dropped and suffered some broken plastic. Having received a little mechanical care, it now works as well as it ever did. In my experience these things seem to suffer from mechanical failure rather than electronic failure. (So, yes, the mechanical side is cheap to keep the costs down but the electronics seem to be OK ... chips mostly just keep working!) Modern cassette players (OTOH) seem to need a constant diet of fresh tapes :-( Now that I look, I cannot find the link, but there is at least one place which will allegedly re-ball the IC for you. You obviously still will have some problems actually getting the IC back onto anything without access to a somewhat expensive rework station. (so that 7410 PPC chip will remain just a pretty ornament for now ...) I think you are in a definite minority with this. I'm with Einstein: "things should be as cheap as possible, and no cheaper" :-) I'm happy that my washing machine is relatively cheap (bad example: easily repaired anyway). I'd be even happier if my cars were cheaper. I'd probably pay an extra ?10 to have my portable CD player made with a metal case, but it's worth no more than that to me. Agreed. When I replace this 21" monitor with something, it will almost certainly be a flat-screen (the weight and space savings alone make this an easy win) but now that it's on the desk I have no real reason to care about those potential savings ... Our hardware engineers seem to be able to build stuff that works. Our stuff looks nothing like a PC so it's not a modification of anything else. They may not be able to do much with valves (I have no idea, I'm just assuming ...) but that's not a terrible short-coming these days. You just must be meeting the wrong professionals. Comes from being in London and the Banking effect I guess :-) Antonio -- --------------- Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org

Well, I didn't write that, but... ...yes. However, I see nothing wrong with using "flat" to refer to something that's, oh, say, 15"x18"x4" as compared to, say, 15"x18"x20". Unless you mean there are flat-screen CRTs that have also done away with the long neck? /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Rumor has it that der Mouse may have mentioned these words: Did the attribution actually say you'd had? My "Spewdora" gave the correct attribution on my copy, but that certainly doesn't mean that there's no bugs in Spewdora... If it did come thru wrong, my apologies! I do - being flat has nothing to do with being thin. Of course, I also object to seeing "Flat-screen" meaning "LCD" as there are many other flat-screen-based technologies that have little or nothing in common with LCDs -- Plasma displays (yes, both old and new versions), rear projection TV monitors, OLED displays, etc. Those all have flat screens, too. [[ Of course, my screen door has a flat screen, too! I'll start calling that a flat-screen! Whoohoo!!! In the wintertime, I keep my beer just outside the flat-screen, to keep it cold. ;-PPPP ]] [1] Altho there are several "short-neck" varieties of monitor tubes (with both flat and non-flat faces) it's by no means as thin as an LCD. Generally, a 19" short-neck monitor is slightly thinner than a standard 17" monitor, shorter, they generally aren't any lighter! My point is: The language (especially around technology) has been bastardized enough - for all those who become up-in-arms over the media's bastardization of the term 'hacker,' IBMs bastardization of the term "Personal Computer," Radio Shacks bastardization of the term "Color Computer," etc. etc. etc....... Oy. Roger "Merch" Merchberger [1] I learned over the weekend: Don't mix Vioxx & Beer. Bad combo... -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | JC: "Like those people in Celeronville!" sysadmin, Iceberg Computers | Me: "Don't you mean Silicon Valley???" zmerch(a)30below.com | JC: "Yea, that's the place!" | JC == Jeremy Christian

der> Well, I didn't write that, but... der> ...yes. However, I see nothing wrong with using "flat" to refer der> to something that's, oh, say, 15"x18"x4" as compared to, say, der> 15"x18"x20". der> Unless you mean there are flat-screen CRTs that have also done der> away with the long neck? What's the issue? The word is "flat-screen" and indeed the SCREEN is flat. The whole unit is not, but that's not what the word claims. Contrast "flat panel" where indeed the whole thing is flat. As marketing terminology goes, this one is quite reasonable. Confusingly similar between two different devices, yes, but each term is accurate as it stands. paul

Err, I really can't call something a 'service manual' if it doesn't include a schematic (OK, for the pedants out there, a service manual for something electronic). It's a 'board swapper guide' ;-). Not so. If you have several identical broken devices, you have much better chance of getting one working one if you break it down to smaller parts (suppose there are n ICs on the board, if any one is dead then the board won't work, but if you have 2 boards with different dead ICs, you can make one working board out of the the pair). A schematic is _very_ useful in figuring out which IC is dead... I've had to repair both on consumer electronic devices. Sure, the mechanical stuff wears out (which is why you change the pinch roller in your VCR every couple of yuears if you have any sense (to prevent tape mangling), but chips do fail. And in my experience, the more complicated a chip, the more likely it is to fail (it may well be more reliable than the board of 100 chips that it replaced, but that's not the point here). But capacitors certainly don't. Nor do power-handling devices (chopper transistors, motor drive ICs, etc). Very liekly. I'm in a minority for most things... The quote I've heard is '... as simple as possible and no simpler'. That is not the same thing. Odd that I like Asko washing machines.... I've had enough of expensive products, like cars, that cut corners, and save perhaps \pounds 50 on the price, but have plastic knobs that fall off, screws in silly places, and the like. I can assure you that if I'm about to spend \pounds 10000 or whatever on a car, I don't care about +/- \pounds 50. I do care when I have to keep on going back to the parts counter to get some trivial component that was underspecified... I much prefer CRTs to LCDs. At the moment I find them a lot clearer (that may improve), and they're certainly a lot easier to repair. -tony

On Tue, 8 Jun 2004, Rob O'Donnell wrote: I'm using a 233 MHz Dell laptop that was discarded because they lost the NT login password

On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 02:10:24PM -0700, Fred Cisin wrote: Nice! My "daily drive" is a Dell P-II 300 on which I'm running RedHat 9.0. It was a freebie from a friend who cobbled it together from the scrap bin at the company he works at, after my old laptop was stolen from a convention we were both at. It was literally assembled from stacks of random laptop parts on a shelf. I asked him if I'd left my P-166 Latitude in his suite after the party... he said "I didn't find any antiques there", and he offered to build me a replacement after it was clear that mine had grown legs. The only thing I really "lost" with the old one was two weeks of work on ZDungeon that hadn't been backed up yet. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 09-Jun-2004 03:00 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -79.0 F (-61.7 C) Windchill -120.9 F (-85 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 13.2 kts Grid 047 Barometer 669.1 mb (11038. ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

I tend to agree - but I was given them for nothing so I'm not in much of a position to complain. Anyway, when I've been forced to purchase a real service manual for something I've needed to fix, the price has been anywhere between ?20 and ?90 (I assume the upper limit is higher and I've just been lucky). For a ?20 MP3 player I think I'll have to think long and hard before shelling out that much. Dunno. I'd want a CD player anyway :-) Maybe if I take away SWMBO's credit and cash-point cards I can stem the influx of cheap stuff ... My Zanussi laster 15 or so years before needing anything done to it (drain pump replacement IIRC). It made the 20 year mark before giving up the ghost. The Bosch seems to be going well but 3 years is a little early to be sure I guess. These both fit into the "cheap" category and wash with acceptable performance (or so I'm told). Of all the household items, these are the only ones on sub-millisecond response times in the event of failure :-) OTOH there's eejits who are trying to drive the price up :-) I hate junking stuff (although I drew the line at keeping the drum out of the old Zanussi "just in case"). But I can do simple sums to calculate expected cost-per-year of a product and if a cheap MP3 player costs ?20 and lasts 5 years (a guess, mine's still going after 3 despite being dropped) and an expensive one costs ?100 I'm going to want some significant reassurance that the ?100 one will last 25 years. If all you are saying is that you would like the opportunity to buy a ?100 MP3 player (I'm assuming that you can find one built to a spec that satisfies you for that price) then I'm all for that. But some of us would like to have a range of choices available which includes cheap stuff too. I occasionally pick up the TV rags here in the UK (I mean rags aimed at TV Service Engineers and not listings magazines). Pretty much every month there is a bit of a whinge about people not being prepared to pay to have a TV fixed (cost new, maybe ?50-?100 for a small one, typical call-out fee ?25 + ?25 for the first hour or part thereof: no I wouldn't pay that either!). The problem is not cheap goods but expensive people :-) Antonio -- --------------- Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org

The stuff I have does not seem to break very often. Off-hand there's been this MP3 player that was dropped, a solar powered garden light, a washing machine, a cassette player and two TVs. The MP3 needed no manual (just glue!), the light was trivial to trace (probably not worth the effort since the fault was always going to be the LDR, but fun nevertheless), no manual needed for the washing machine (although I did buy that Haynes guide a while ago) and the TVs I could find schematics for in the RTSE Guide (is that still going these days?). I'd be upset if something broke three times :-) I'm not sure how you can tell, before buying, that the manual is of any use (short of having previously seen one). I expect sedning it back with "insufficient data, please refund" won't work. I've seen Mauritron do a bunch of CDs with manuals - not too expensive for a CD I guess but I have no idea what the manuals themselves would be like. I may take a punt on a CD if I ever need one ... Why am I not surprised :-) Most of the stuff I buy, I buy to have it perform a specific function. I don't want the washing machine to do anything other than wash perfectlt, time after time, without ever failing (or, if that's too hard, without ever failing during my lifetime). I also want to minimise the amount I spend on it. I don't see why I should pay more purely to justify any future repairs on an economic basis. Same goes for TVs and the rest. As it happens I'll fix both of those if it seems worthwhile, but there are other things I'd rather spend my time and money on. Oh yes :-) In fact, I still have the original broken pump. And much of the wiring and the circuit boards. When I get half a mo, I'll sit down and figure out roughly how it works - I assume that most of the machines will be similar at least in principle. I only have a Rainbow and a CUB monitor at myn parent's house - luckily they settle for a bit of reprogramming of the TV and Sat Receiver. When TVs were more expensive (like in the 1970s) people did indeed pay for repairs. I just don't think that's a good reason for them to be more expensive. There are expensive TVs around today: if you want to you can pay maybe ?1500+ for a large widescreen one with all the trimmings. I'm not convinced that Horizon would look or sound much better but that's stingy old me :-) No. But it makes no economic sense to pay say ?50 to fix a ?6 calculator. I happen to have a faulty Casio fx-83 and one with a shattered display (quite how my kids manage to achieve this I do not know). The innards are basically an LCD, a keypad and an IC covered in you-can't-see-me gunk. I'll use one as an LCD-donor for the other but that seems to be the limit of what I can do here. It's not even worth my time to try, but there's a decent magnifying lens right by the soldering station at work ... The fact that it is not worth fixing it is not a good justification for taking the price back up to the ?40-?50 I remember having to pay for a less well specified calculator when I were a lad ... (although if someone comes out with an indestructible one, my TCO calculations may well need tweaking ...) I assume that you are not offering this service as a business ... otherwise you would be rapidly out of business. During my days as a freelancer I did odd bits on the side as the opportunity presented itself. I think I was charging about ?300/day ten years ago. Plumbers round here seem to advertise rates as low as ?40/hour. Antonio -- --------------- Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org

On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 07:58:30PM +0100, Antonio Carlini wrote: I've fixed two dropped Nomads (neither were mine, thankfully) this winter... Both seemed to have hit "earphone jack first" and torn loose the same three components - the jack itself, and two caps that are part of the filter chain coming out of the DAC. One had poor solder joints and just disloged components, the other tore the pads from the PCB. The fix was strictly mechanical and done by visual inspection, OTOH, I did have to repair 4 "8 and 8 rule" traces - I used a single strand of wire out of a chewed up IDE ribbon cable, after using superglue to put the pads back on the board. I've also fixed my own Rio PMP300 - cold solder joints attaching the chromed battery terminals to the main board. Nobody has brought an iPod to me to fix yet... after reading about battery and connector issues, I'm just waiting... -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 10-Jun-2004 02:30 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -89.3 F (-67.4 C) Windchill -126.6 F (-88.09 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 8.6 kts Grid 061 Barometer 665.8 mb (11168. ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

And thusly Roger Merchberger spake: Plus we would still have a wonderful thing known as *competition*!. Cheers, Bryan Pope

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 A related note appraer on the reg today Toxic dust found lurking in tech kit By Lucy Sherriff A study conducted by environmental groups in the US has found yet another way our computers are trying to kill us. The research found that dust on computer processors and monitors contains several chemicals that have been linked to neurological and reproductive disorders. The source? Brominated fire retardants, such as polybrominated diphenyl (PBDEs). http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/04/killer_pc/ - -- Collector of vintage computers http://www.ncf.ca/~ba600

At 04:08 PM 6/3/04 -0400, you wrote: Pencils used lead in the time of the Romans. Some people haven't caught onto the fact that pencils now use graphite and have for the last 200 years or more. Joe

Teo Zenios wrote: So what was the REAL LEAD pencils used to write on?> I am still looking for the HAM in a Hamburger. Ben.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Joe R." <rigdonj(a)cfl.rr.com> Yes, Joe. In addition to VWs, there were *no* graphite pencils when you were a kid. Glen 0/0

On Thu, 3 Jun 2004, ben franchuk wrote: ...and what part of a horse goes into Horse Radish?

At 05:50 PM 6/3/04 -0400, you wrote: Believe me, you don't want to know what's in hotdogs :-/ Joe

... and sometimes they add grosser stuff in.

Quothe Teo Zenios, from writings of Thu, Jun 03, 2004 at 07:17:27PM -0400: ...but isn't it still recycled into hot dogs when the remains of the dogs get collected from dog pounds, etc. by same the rendering companies that collect roadkill and sell the rendered product to the hot dog companies? Gee, I thought that everyone knew about that. ;-) -- Copyright (C) 2004 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals: All Rights Reserved an unnatural belief that we're above Nature & her other creatures, using dogma to justify such www.rddavis.org 410-744-4900 beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.

Quothe Joe R., from writings of Thu, Jun 03, 2004 at 06:18:19PM -0400: ...and, in vegetarian hot-dogs, rumor has it that they contain all of the moldy vegetables and parts of vegetables that would normally be discarded, etc. -- Copyright (C) 2004 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals: All Rights Reserved an unnatural belief that we're above Nature & her other creatures, using dogma to justify such www.rddavis.org 410-744-4900 beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.