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I'll do that after I build a better mousetrap. ;) Hopefully now that the work stuff is winding down for a few weeks I can do a few fun things like the bike light. I need a brighter light more than ever for those rides on cold, dark winter nights.

Been busy with work-related stuff the last two weeks. I'm amazed I had time to post what I did. I'm really tired. Assembling 500 LED regulator boards with 16 parts each will do that to you. Ugh, that's 8000 little parts I had to put into place. :mad: Well, after the next batch of 500 I'm doing a...

If I built that many systems in a month I think my hands would be practically immobile for about the next year. I guess you don't have CTS, at least not yet, anyway. If you're really lucky you're not prone to it, either. Interesting numbers. I guess it just proves the anecdotal evidence that...

Oh, I forgot to mention, as far as the poor "owning" their own homes, I have two words-subprime loan. Between these shady loans, and borrowing what little equity there was in their homes, many "poor" managed to live above their means, at least up until now. Look for lots of foreclosures soon as...

Most of those trinkets aren't terribly expensive, and quite of bit of them are probably bought used, especially the car, or even taken from dumpsters in richer neighborhoods. And I'm sure a fair amount is stolen. Also, maybe you and I have a different definition of "poor". To me poor is someone...

The graph shows the upper 25% with much of the tax burden. That's upper middle class, a group I'm not concerned with here as they usually get there through hard work. The upper 1% has a relatively small share of the tax burden compared to their ability to pay. Under Hong Kong's system I think...

BTW, if anything I just wrote above sounds incoherent, it's because I spent 18 hours today assembling regulator boards full of components the size of fleas. In other words, I can't even see straight right now.

OK, let's do it a little different. We agree that the poor shouldn't be taxed at all, and those who make well above average should be taxed more than those who are middle class. How about a sales tax with the following characteristics: 1) Basic necessities like food and items of clothing...

Brain fart-the results should be closer to 1000 amps at 480VAC, not 100. And that would be one heck of a huge cable. Of course, no reason charger can't step up the voltage so you can use a smaller cable.

BTW, the multiple ~400kW charging stations needed in a service station don't represent a huge engineering challenge. Networks for electric trains regularly supply spikes of a few megawatts every time a train passes by.

By 2022 we'll probably all be using made in China ultra inexpensive EVs so the new standards will be irrelevant. I agree by then there won't be any American automakers to apply them to. First, 5-minute charging can only be done at a service station equipped for it. For home charging, figure...

Even if in the end it's no more "fair" than the income tax (which isn't really very fair) it'll be a heck of a lot simpler to implement. And finally April 15 will be just another day on the calender for most people. Sure, accountants and lawyers will fight this tooth and nail for obvious...

Going by their figures of 5 cents per kilowatt-hour over the reactor's 40-year lifetime the cost would be about $3.5 million (200kW x 8766 hours per year x 40 years x $0.05 per kilowatt-hour). Something like this might be interesting for a group of maybe 100 homeowners to share also...

Funny but something just occurred to me. All that managerial dead weight you mentioned can no longer be written off as a business expense. I tend to think the FairTax will make companies streamline their operations as much as possible. That includes getting rid of all those do-nothing top...

You could get around the smaller percentage tax burden on higher income people by taxing luxury items at a higher rate. Sure, it adds complexity, and it's probably not in keeping with the FairTax philosophy of simplicity, but if milking the rich is your goal, then an income tax is not the only...

And what do you do for businesses? There's just no simple way to have an income tax on businesses. If you tax solely by gross income (revenue) then a business with huge income and huge expenses, but little profit, would pay an enormous amount in taxes. Another business with less income, but far...

And food would be exempt under the FairTax as well, as would anything else currently exempt under most state tax laws. This myth of the poor being taxed more comes up every time the idea of a national sales tax is floated. Fact is a single person making $10 an hour in a place like NYC currently...

That may well be a possibility down the road should he ever need to install software which requires Vista. I may have to take the plunge myself in a year since it's rumored the new MS Train Simulator coming out then will require Vista.

You've actually had times where you were using >4GB of RAM? Honestly, given how cheap RAM is these days, if I started regularly using a page file I'd probably just buy more. Just for kicks I tried enabling the page file. Windows wouldn't let me set it larger than 3GB (the amount of physical...

As a cyclist I love it! No more getting doored by idiots exiting their cars without looking. Well, I could still hit the idiot themself, but they're a lot softer than a car door. Given the size of a lot of auto drivers these days, if I hit them they would probably just :bounce: off anyway. As...

I think it's going to be a case of if you can't beat them/join them. Mechanical disks will never be able to compete with SSDs in terms of latency. There's just no way something which rotates can have a sub-0.1 ms access time. For now they can compete in transfer speeds, but even that advantage...

Yeah, but my point is that if the OS is incapable of addressing more than 4GB (physical and disk combined), and you already have 4GB physical memory, then there's nothing to be gained with a page file. Let me just state for the record that I've always hated the idea of page files. They were...

Yes, 4 GB is overkill here, but I can foresee a time that 2GB might not be enough. My brother may decide to do a lot more with this machine than his present machine just by virtue of its capabilities. I can easily see him getting into video editing perhaps. Let's not forget that since we have...

Looking at the latest offerings while researching the PC for my brother has led me to one conclusion-that the idea of virtual memory, paging to disk, or whatever other names may have been used, seems to be obsolete. I disabled the page file on my machine when I installed XP. I only had 1GB at...

I think you meant 1-2TB. :tounge: A lot of whether or not SSDs take over in the next few years, besides cost per GB, is indeed capacity. I really don't see magnetic drives increasing capacity by leads and bounds. It seemed like we were stuck at 500GB for ages before the bumps to 750GB and...

Thinking of these: Case (Lian-Li PC-60-I've already bought two of them and I just love them) Power Supply (seems as good as Seasonic for half the price, doesn't have a PCI-E connector. Would that ever be important?) HDD (500 GB Samsung. Newegg's shipping methods on HDDs concern me however...

The AMD690 has a parallel port and SATA Raid (neither of which my brother is likely to use or need). The 7025 has IEEE1394 (probably won't be needed either) but it does have a DVI output (definitely useful once my brother gets an LCD monitor). For those reasons and others you mentioned then I'm...

I didn't buy anything yet (busy these past few days assembling regulator boards) but here's what I was thinking about: RAM (I've had good luck with this brand in two other machines, and it's on sale) Processor (actually the same one you linked to) Motherboard (one of these three)...

The kind of idiot likely to buy one is the same idiot who never bothers to read the fine print or do research before buying. I can picture it now: The idiot gets home, and proudly shows off his new drive to a friend: "Hey look! It's got a gazillion billion bytes! Cool man!" The friend says...

I plan to put up lights this year because it cheers things up, and there's really not much else cheery in my life these days. That being said, Tannin has some good points. Putting up enough lights to dress up a house is quite a bit different than getting into a oneupsmanship with the guy next...

Those prices bring back memories (no pun intended). I remember when I first started getting into computers in late 1998. Next year a friend gave me his old 386-40. I was happy to spend a whopping $99 to fill all the slots with 32 MB of RAM. That seemed like a ridiculous amount compared to the...

Agreed. Since this is a new build, and we won't be reusing anything from his old machine, we'll stick with SATA. That's a very remote possibility. Seeing that '98 is only at this point finally becoming pretty much obsolete even for casual users, by the time XP or XP64 is a burden we may well be...

Anybody try either of these? GIGABYTE GA-MA69VM-S2 GIGABYTE GA-M68SM-S2 Both are a little more pricey than the AMD board Merc linked to but they're more or less what I'm looking for (i.e. four RAM slots).

He'll be using XP instead of '98. XP can handle up to 4 GB natively as far as I know. There is a registry tweak or something similar to allow it to handle even more, IIRC.

My brother has been stuck using an aging AMD K6-2 450 MHz machine. It's come to the point where the thing is both slow as molasses and very unstable, especially in hot weather. Me and my mom want to surprise him with a new machine for Christmas. I want to "future-proof" him as much as possible...

More detailed reply later-I just woke up and will be busy for a while soon. The real problem with aeroplanes (besides the fact that they do crash on a far too regular basis) is that they're unsustainable over the long haul. Think the fights over rail right-of-way by NIMBYs will be bad? They're...

It probably is, at least until you run up against a school of Orca.

No wonder it broke. Definitely an overheating problem, just like their video cards. :D

I just came back from Home Depot. I noticed something interesting with the n:vision CFLs regarding the output. The 14 watt "60 watt equivalent" warm whites give 900 lumens. The 3500K bright whites are 800 lumens, and the 5500K daylights are 630 lumens. Respective efficiencies in lumens per watt...

The ones which have mercury amalgam instead of liquid mercury tend to take a few minutes to come up to full brightness. However, they also tend to be able to endure more starts. Even the CFLs that seem to come up to full brightness right away actually get a little brighter as they run. In fact...

Doing things in a more analytical manner, let's say that the CFL is rated for 6000 hours. This is based on a 3 hours on, 30 minutes off cycle as most fluorescents are, so for this lamp it lasts 2000 starts. Generally, you'll get about 40% more life than rated if the lamp is left on continuously...

The problem is that the quality of those spirals is vastly inconsistent. Some makes last for their rated life or better with no problems. Others burn out soon after they're screwed in. Avoid the ones in the dollar stores. They're usually garbage. The ones Home Depot sells under the n:vision...

I hope it's nothing tax related. That's probably even worse than a lawsuit. I had an acquaintance who failed to pay about $100 in taxes in 1976. In the 1990s when they found irregularities on some of his recent returns they elected to go back. Contrary to popular belief the IRS can go back...

For now. As new homes are built or fixtures reach their end of life they can be replaced with purpose-built fixtures. The life cycle of the average mass-produced incandescent fixture from Home Depot is less than ten years. By then it either breaks, or looks like crap. When that happens, it's no...

You could put a big plastic diffuser the size of a light bulb around an LED right now if that's what you want. Of course, you'll lose 15% to 20% of the light in the process. This is why it isn't done. Just compare the lumens for a 100 watt clear and frosted bulb to see for yourself. An easy 10%...

Very easy-the spectrum is different. The luminous efficacy of the emitted spectrum of blue plus YAG phosphor white LEDs is about 330 lm/W. Furthermore, some energy is inevitably lost in the conversion of blue light to white light. These are termed Stokes losses. The least these losses can...

Hmm, terrorist attack or Angelina Jolie-tough choice... ;-) Obviously I don't spend a whole lot of time worrying about this stuff, or having conversations about it. Honestly. Most of my conversations lately center on the whole sub-prime loan debacle. If the economy goes south on account of...

Believe it or not, a lot of TGV lines have intrusion sensors all along the line to detect trespassors. And they definitely have means of detecting broken rail, whether from weather or explosion. Sure, what you describe can happen, but I'd wager to guess only once or twice. After that, security...

Terrorists won't be hitting the Chunnel or any other high-speed train anytime soon. They just don't make good targets. Put a bomb on a train and at best you'll kill a few dozen people in whatever car the bomb is in. You won't derail the train or cause a major accident because the car body will...

A few months ago my mom's doctor recommended trying tonic water. The quinine is supposed to relieve inflammation. Turns out a doctor was actually right about something for a change. I've tried it myself. It greatly helped with my carpal tunnel syndrome, and may have been the reason the foot pain...