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I appreciate the sentiment, and agree that I'd rather see people like those here reproduce, as it might improve the human race instead of heading the other way as we seem to be doing. That being said, for me personally the point is moot regardless of whether I desire children or not. Point of...

Everything I've read on the subject tells me CA desperately needs both the HSR and much more public transit. It isn't to improve traffic. Rather, it's to keep everything from grinding to a halt ten or twenty years from now. I forgot by what percentage CA is expected to grow in that time...

First off, Doug is right about the Prius. The electric motor and battery are just a black box designed to increase mpg by recapturing some kinetic energy when the car is stopped. Second, I agree that hybrids aren't really a great idea. They give slightly better fuel economy in exchange for...

Our system is pretty similar except the local property taxes are assessed based on property value, rather than income, and pay for the bulk of education ( along with other things such as garbage collection, public transit, roads, etc. ). That's mainly the reason they're so high. While state...

It's like anything else in life-if the good outweighs the bad, then it's worth it overall. I'd say the biggest issues with living here are the high housing costs ( only an issue if you're in the market, my mom's house is long paid for ), and the air quality. Oh, and the poor drivers. They...

My mom's paying over $2000 a year for her 2006 300C. She gets the good driver discount and hardly uses it. If she drove more than about 10K miles a year she would pay more. My brother is paying about $1000 a year just for basic liability on his 1993 Mark VIII. If I got my license, as a new...

Very interesting read, especially the comments. The big problem with living in a place where you depend upon a car to get around is price volatility. If gas suddenly spikes from $1.50 to $6 per gallon you really have no choice but to pay it. When you depend upon walking, biking, or public...

Thanks Tea and Doug! I glad to be the light of everyone's lives around here. :idea: Or at least not one of the dimmer bulbs on the string. :bglaugh: Oh, and Tea, plenty of decent LED internal lights for cars these days. Just try and find something using power LEDs as those are much more...

The S2 bins are coming any day now, any day..... :wink: Seriously, it didn't take Cree as long as you think to go from R2 to R5. They could have rolled out better bins in their XR-E series long before the XP-G came out, but they decided to end that product line. It took a while to design and...

R2 bin is 114 to 122 lumens at 350 mA. Typical Vf at 350 mA is ~3.0 volts, so that comes to 108 to 116 lumens per watt. In other words, Cree's new lab sample is nearly twice as efficient, so expect your lights to get twice as birght ( or have twice the run time at the same brightness )...

I'm not saying the article I linked to isn't biased. It's pretty obvious that the author has mixed feelings about the subject. He really can't decide if ambition is overall good or bad in today's society, although he acknowledges that it was in the past beneficial as a survival trait. I just...

I was thinking entirely in terms of publicly-owned companies with shareholders here, which is what just about all firms who can afford these types of luxuries are. Completely different animal. A boss in a private company can do whatever he/she wants because in essence they're using their own...

Related: Ambition: Why Some People Are Most Likely To Succeed

See here, pages 10 - 12. The limit is a simple function of the spectrum needed to give a certain CRI and the eye's sensitivity to the wavelengths in that spectrum. The maximum possible efficiency for any light source is 683 lumens per watt, and that's for monochromatic 555 nm green. Once you...

The researchers said that, in practical terms, the same business meeting could reach different decisions when held at a fancy resort as opposed to in a modest conference room. I happen to agree with this part of the article, but more from a practical standpoint. It likely creates resentment...

Apparently the recession is causing drivers to slow down Interesting that they only gave average speeds. The median and 95th percentile speeds are what I would find much more interesting. It only takes a relatively small percentage of people doing 45 mph to really bring down the average, but...

That's definitely good news. It seems like SSD prices haven't moved down in quite a while. I'd like to take the plunge on SSDs myself, but for now they're too pricey for my tastes. I'm hoping they get to ~$100 for 250 GB in the not too distant future. Last I checked on Newegg, they were...

Well, given that you hate where you live, and could be laid off in the not too distant future, the choice seems pretty clear to me. Granted, relocation is hard even in the best case, but I'd imagine not liking your present location at least gives a positive spin to the idea. When I was out of...

Possibly the most brain-dead idea I've ever seen Yes, I know it says it's for indoor training, but I'm sure you'll get some jackass using it on the road so he/she can catch up on reading while riding to classes.

Yes, I have a BSE from Princeton University, Class of 1985 Unfortunately, out of college I was unable to get that all important "first job" in my field which gets your foot in the door, and eventually leads to the types of promotions you're referring to. I sent out a ton of resumes, didn't...

No medical insurance here. I don't even have money to have the condition medically verified by a doctor, never mind having surgery. In fact, I haven't been to a doctor since 1980. Putting aside that my faith in the medical establishment is close to zero based on my parent's experience, I just...

Carpal tunnel syndrome? That's what I have anyway. It's worse in the right hand, and unfortunately it's bad enough in both hands that I'm occupationally limited to averaging ~10-15 hours per week of work.

In other words, it's a hobby for you. I'm the same way with rechargeables. I probably have way more than I'll ever use, and way more chargers than I need just for the battery-powered devices I have. However, I enjoy playing around with rechargeable cells for its own sake. It all started when...

If he listens to the limits you set, then there's no need for corporal punishment, or at least that's the point I think the article is trying to make. Lucky you. When I used to work with my neighbor's kiddie entertainment business, I found the under 5 year olds the worst to deal with. They...

Young children who are smacked 'go on to be more successful' Teenagers in the survey who had been smacked only between the ages of two and six performed best on all the positive measures. Those who had been smacked between seven and 11 fared worse on negative behaviour but were more likely to...

You shouldn't blindly follow the lead of anyone, of course, no matter what credentials they have. But that's not my main point. The main point is that unless a person is educated to think critically, then they're really not able to accurately assess who might be right, and who is obviously...

What to buy for the person who has everything They're even throwing in free shipping. ;)

The author is being optimistic that if we actually change how we educate people, we might not continue to have the masses believing every pundit out there. There was actually a time when schools taught kids to think critically. I even vaguely remember one of my teachers talking about how...

It seems I'm not the only one to have complained about the growing phenomenom of uneducated "experts". Some of my favorite lines from the article: "Over the last ten years, we’ve been inundated by a constantly growing stream of punditry and in a quest to give every view its time in the sun and...

Interesting info, although 4000 yen ( ~$40 US ) still might not be some people's idea of "low-priced" (although I think it's pretty reasonable for a screw-base LED lamp ). Also, nice to see that some LED screw-base lamps are exceeding CFL efficiency. Here's another lamp from Toshiba...

I actually loved playing around with that utility. Some drives were better at squeezing in more space than others. I remember I could squeeze in roughly 2 MB in some cases as the utility allowed you to use mixed sector sizes, and as many tracks as the drive could support ( some drives could do...

Yep, I agree 100%. Udaman was banned mostly because he pissed off a few of the long-time members by challenging their long-held ( but not necessarily correct ) ideas. They called it trolling, just as they did when I received my 3-day ban. I've since learned not to get into a fight over there...

Banning over there seems pretty arbitrary if you ask me. There are a few posters there who have crossed the lines multiple times, and yet they've never been banned. It seems once you're a benefactor you gain some sort of immunity from banning. Besides udaman, one of my friends was permanently...

I tend to think long term we'll be putting SSD modules into slots on the motherboard same as we're already doing with RAM. A serial interface, even one of 6 Gb/sec, is going to limit you compared to a massively parallel on-board interface accessing 64 or 128 bits at a time.

That should be possible with a microcontroller and a little programming. The driver ICs I use can have PWM dimming, and most microcontrollers do PWM. Yes, I've thought of that. That's one reason why I suggested adding reds and cyans, with each color driven by its own driver. If/when the tint...

Hence my suggestion of using low-voltage wiring. I think anything 48VDC or less is considered low-voltage, and not subject to the same regulations as 120VAC house wiring. Agreed. Perhaps even start a thread on CPF to solicit other opinions. The lens on that light does make it appear somewhat...

If you're thinking in terms of eventually replacing the LEDs with better ones, then I'd say consider 1 amp drive currents, especially if you'll be dimming them much of the time. As that document I linked to shows, at 1 amp with enough cooling you can still get in excess of 60,000 hours ( > 13.5...

I'd try to put in low voltage DC wiring as much as possible. Common voltages are 12VDC, 24VDC, and 48VDC. To convert 120VAC to these voltages a variety of options exist. PC power supplies are one if you want 12VDC. 48VDC is a common voltage in industry and I'm sure many options exist to...

Cree lab tests 186 lm/W @ 350 mA LED It looks like we might have high S bin or even T bin ( > 192 lumens @ 350 mA ) XP-Gs in the next year or two. Morever, if this new lab samples scales like the XP-G I tested, we should expect about 500 lumens at 1 amp, probably in excess of 800 lumens at 2 amps!

And that's always been the biggest problem I've had trying to make any sense of most religions. OK, I'll grant that there exist beings more powerful than humans, more advanced. Perhaps millions of years more advanced. As Charlton Heston said in Planet of the Apes: "I'm a seeker too. But my...

Did anyone look at the RSS feed? It's a combination of nonsense text plus vulgar images. Where's Doug lately? Some of these spam threads have been here for over a day. We really need to give a few long-time members privileges to remove spam and/or delete accounts which post spam.

Considering that huge 4000+ HP diesel locomotives burn 3 to 5 gallons per hour at idle, I doubt that a car with 1/20th to 1/10th the horsepower burns 1 or 2 as some here are saying. I know gasoline engines are about half as efficient as large diesels, but still that figure seems rather high...

I guess they figure the costs of shipping the other tubes back, combined with the chance of damage in transit, probably makes it not worth their while. I'll guess that their costs for a 25-pack of 830 tubes are less than the return shipping costs. Maybe not as good as you might like but is it...

Trust me, if you get the proper size tires for your rim, then airless tires are perfectly safe. A lot of people don't bother to measure their rim properly, order the wrong size tires, and then blame the tires falling off on the manufacturer. There's so much FUD spread around the Internet about...

Just be cautious with any type of general lighting replacement using 5mm LEDs. I'm currently in the process of test screw-in LED lamps for someone. The ones using 5mm LEDs took around 300 hours to degrade to 70% brightness. Power LEDs on the other hand last much longer. There's one in my...

Please let me know your impressions. I may eventually order a case myself.

No arguments from me there. I'm not big on the warmer tints myself inside.

I mentioned this earlier regarding CCT preferences, and here is a survey from CPF which confirms that (I added the CCT corresponding to each bin): Note the strong preference for 3700K to 4300K, although large numbers of people still like CCTs in the 5000s. There is also an uptick in the...

Philips also makes CRI 98, 6500K tubes according to this. Their TL-D 90 family actually has a more continuous spectrum than the TL90 series, and about 15% higher output, despite both having the same CRI. Only problem is the TL-D 90 are only sold in Europe as far as I know.

In case anyone might want the Philips TL 950s I linked to 2 posts above, I found them cheaper here. $6.41 each for a case of 25 versus $7.50 in the original link. Not a bad price for such a high quality tube IMO. If I needed tubes I'd consider buying some myself. If anyone local to me is...