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MACBOOK UPDATE….Thanks to everyone who suggested resetting the SMC controller in my MacBook. It didn’t work, but it did cause the white LED on the front of the notebook to start pulsing again, which made me think it was working for a while and allowed me to go to bed happy. When I woke up this morning, though, the battery was still dead after a night of charging and the message on the menu bar was actually more ominous than before. Sigh. Off to the Genius Bar, I guess.

But I’m curious about something. An awful lot of people in yesterday’s thread seemed to think that I had committed some kind of technological malpractice by letting the battery discharge completely. Mind you, this wasn’t deliberate on my part. I just closed the lid one day (August 29, I think, after using the MacBook to blog about Sarah Palin during a power failure) and then didn’t happen to use it for the next two or three months. But frankly, even if I’d known I wasn’t going to use it I wouldn’t have done anything special. I would have just figured that the battery would discharge completely and I’d have to charge it before I used it next. No big deal.

But that’s not so? If you let your battery discharge completely, the entire machine dies and refuses to charge the battery again? Why? Just to teach me a lesson? Or what? I don’t understand why completely discharging a battery should have such dire effects. I thirst for knowledge, as always, so can anyone enlighten me?

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4 DAYS LEFT—AND EVERYTHING RIDING ON IT

A full one-third of our annual fundraising comes in this month alone. That’s risky, because a strong December means our newsroom is on the beat and reporting at full strength—but a weak one means budget cuts and hard choices ahead.

With just 4 days left, we need a huge surge in reader support to get to our $400,000 year-end goal. Whether you've given before or this is your first time, your contribution right now matters. All gifts are 3X matched and tax-deductible.

Managing an independent, nonprofit newsroom is staggeringly hard. There’s no cushion in our budget—no backup revenue, no corporate safety net. We can’t afford to fall short, and we can’t rely on corporations or deep-pocketed interests to fund the fierce, investigative journalism Mother Jones exists to do. That’s why we need you right now. Please chip in to help close the gap.

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