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I wonder about that myself. I personally feel better about optical media than magnetic media, but it seems optical media isn't the long-term solution many thought it was. At least optical disks aren't affected by stray EM fields. Thus far, I've had no problems with any optical media, and most...

:lol: I doubt it. All joking aside, though, provided the system only affected those who break in, and there was adequate warning of it should the Fire Department ever need to enter the premises, there might very well have been no basis for criminal charges or a lawsuit. The government uses...

Those 100-year claims are based on testing at high temperature and humidity, and then using an equation to correct for the lifetime at 25°C and normal humidity. While this method may work reasonably well for estimating the life of ICs the correlation doesn't necessarily hold for CDs. I tend to...

IIRC crime rates stopped going up during the last term of the Dinkins administration(c. 1993). Murder rates are now at levels not seen since before I was born. This isn't to say things can't be much better, but at least I feel reasonably safe walking the streets in 90% of the city. As for the...

Yep. I read about a guy who owned a store and was sick and tired of getting broken into. One day he decided to connect his store gate to 240VAC after he closed up. Next time somebody tried to break in they were electrocuted(good solution if you ask me). Anyway, I think he served jail time...

The solution to stolen car stereos is simple-take them out when you first get the car and put a "NO STEREO" sign in your window. Now you won't have to worry about someone breaking your window or otherwise trashing your car just to steal the stereo. As a bonus, you have one less driver...

Actually, I can tell you exactly what is missing. Remember basic physics-acceleration=dv/dt and change in acceleration, also known as jerk, is da/dt. A manual shift car has lots of rapidly changes in acceleration whereas a CVT just has a initial quick build up following by a slow dropoff as...

I think you've been misled a bit here. Most trolleys and electric MUs(i.e. subway cars) aren't really constant power. Rather, they have a quick burst of acceleration up to 20 or 30 mph, often at a constant acceleration rate, and then the power tapers off really fast after that, often to less...

They said something similar when we were pushing 20 Gb/in² and then 40 Gb/in², etc. Maybe IBM will come up with another form of pixie dust. The concept is essentially correct, though. Sooner or later we will not be able to make bits any smaller. The only question is at what areal density...

It's not that I dislike them(I think they're cool), it's just that I tend to think that the R&D money might be better spent getting fuel cell vehicles to market sooner and speeding up the conversion to a hydrogen economy. That would also make US involvement in certain parts of the world...

Our friend Tesla first thought of and attempted this. Here is a description of how the system works. He actually built and tested a working prototype of the system in Colorado Springs c. 1899. This account of his life tells of his many experiments, including that one(scroll about halfway down...

Actually, if the voltage was high enough you might have been able to get by with very thin wires, or perhaps a large very thin flat plate the entire width of the road(like a sheet of aluminum foil). Not very significant cost-wise, and the highways should have been built better anyway to...

Just to correct one thing, the torque curve of an electric motor is way different than that of a gas engine. A gas engine has a torque curve that looks somewhat like a flattened parabola with the maximum occurring slightly under the maximum power RPM. To a first approximation it is a constant...

That was the point of suggesting inductive pickup(which necessitates AC power) and using buried, insulated cables. You could just as easily have metal rails on the surface of the road and contact shoes on the cars(just like the amusement park kiddie car rides) but should a pedestrian trip...

Unless we have another blackout I probably won't be able to see it very well anyway. Damned light pollution. Guess I'll just have to wait until 46789 AD instead, or whenever the next close approach occurs. :(

I thought hybrids don't have a direct mechanical link between the engine and wheels. I was under the impression that electrical motors drive the wheels(either directly or through a one-speed gearbox) and receive their power from the battery which in turn is recharged via the gas engine powered...

Coug, It sounds to me like you really have your heart set on the Prius, so why don't you try to nurse your car through the next year or so and just get that? Or maybe if fuel prices keep going up like they have been around here(gas jumped from $1.92 to $2.09 per gallon in one week) more...

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2748609052&category=167 http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2748609051&category=167

It's a shame we live in a society where there are enough dishonest people to make the honest ones suffer through nonsense like bag and receipt checking. I generally show a receipt if asked, but I believe the security guards have no power whatsoever to detain you unless they have actually seen...

You're a one-person person who happens to have lost the one person they wanted to be with. I can certainly relate to that. I'm not sure that I would want to constantly have friends calling me but from time to time I think it would be nice to have a person in my life other than my immediate...

I'm not sure how much this develop affects disk technology, if at all. Drive platters are already coated with a very thin layer of carbon(i.e. diamond) for durability, and they're already priced at commodity levels. Pure diamond for drive platters may or may not be a good thing. Let's say for...

Can't say for your specific board but my AOpen AX6B had no problem with my 100 GB Maxtor before I installed a Promise controller. Assuming the board's latest BIOS is dated 1998 or later you should be OK with anything up to 137 GB.

Merc, my mom read this thread and she wants to congratulate you on getting your own home, as do I. The pride and security of having your own place makes all the extra work and expenses worth it.

Yes, the lamps are rated at 32 watts each but how much power they consume depends upon the ballast. Here I must digress to explain the vagaries of AC power measurement. Normally you get power consumption by multiplying volts and amps. For resistive loads on an AC line or anything on a DC line...

Although I don't own a home(I just live in my parents' house) I basically treat it as if it were my own. I do plan to buy it eventually(i.e. when I can save the $400,000 it would currently cost since I don't want the burden of sending out mortgage checks each month). Anyway, since you asked...

Thar she blows, captain! :rofl: :lol: :rofl:

Cool. :D Only drawback for me is the nonrechargeable lithium cell. I hate making the battery companies rich. BTW, I was walking around last night with one of my bike headlights doubling as a flashlight. The light was from an underdriven Luxeon star but I could still light up a tree pretty...

Just some sporadic looting in some of the worse neighborhoods. Other than that people were civil. I saw many volunteers at intersections directing traffic. As I said earlier, the main downside was no A/C. If it was maybe 20°F cooler this blackout would have been nothing more than a minor...

Power went out here at 4:09PM. Just came back at 7:59AM. Almost 16 hours. Truth is the two main things that bothered me were not having AC and not having a computer(or any other means to occupy myself). It was actually nice to see the sky without the ever present light pollution. So many...

I don't mind. Since this thread's irrelevant now that the sale is over we might as well recycle it into a shaving thread. :mrgrn: And conserve electrons in the process. :wink: Do your bit for the environment. Always recycle old threads rather than starting new ones.

If I had to move every year or two I don't think I would bother unpacking. I probably wouldn't bother accumulating much stuff, either, or perhaps I would just leave it at my parents house so when the time comes that I did live in a place for more than a few years it would be there...

The more I read this thread the more I hope I never, ever have to move again. Hopefully I'll be like my brother's landlady. She lived in the same house since the time she was about 8. She just moved to Kalifornia at 84 so her niece could take care of her. Moving definitely sucks.

An 80 GB drive should probably work on a PII. IIRC, the 32 GB problem dated back to some old Pentium M/Bs with an Award 4.51PG BIOS. Anything newer should work up to 137 GB. The purpose of a Promise controller is twofold. First, it lets you use drives larger than your M/B may be able to...

In case you're interested in seeing if your password recovery program works here are the pdfs: http://www.lrc.rpi.edu/library/pdf/NN_ies1.pdf http://www.lrc.rpi.edu/pdf/NLPIP/SR/SR_DEB99.pdf

Ghostview 4.4(which requires Ghostscript 8 to be installed) displays and prints the pdfs just fine. Ghostview and Ghostscript can both be obtained here in case anyone else has a similar problem. Thanks everyone for pointing me in the right direction. :D

BTW Blake your avatar hasn't been showing up the last few days. IE tries to download the image for a while and then just gives up. No red x there, just a blank as if you don't have an avatar.

Text selection is also disabled or I would have tried that. I also tried print screening but my monitor only goes to 1024x768 so the result is practically unreadable(which is the reason why I wanted to print these pdfs in the first place). Magnifying and reading in Adobe reader is annoying to...

The program in the link works, but since it's a demo it only converts the first 10% of pages and substitutes blanks for the rest so I'm back to square one. To buy the program is $60. :o Are these people nuts or what? $60 for something I'll use maybe 5 times in my life? It's only a very...

Why not relocate the elephants instead of killing them? Or send them to a zoo? Admittedly a zoo is not the best option, but I'm sure the elephants would prefer it to being dead. There has to be a better way to control elephant populations than just killing them. Maybe we need a pachyderm...

I have a few PDFs that I downloaded which I need to print so I can read them. My screen is too small to make reading a 20+ page document comfortable, and I want to have a paper copy for easy reference when I'm away from my machine anyway. The problem is whoever created these decided not to...

I can't believe how many posts some of those people at AR have. The highest I saw, without looking too hard, was over 14000. In not much more than three years. Don't these people have a life?

My mom has it. My dad and I have Time Warner Cable. The DirectTV box has coax, audio/video, S-video, and DB-15 data connections. I don't know what the data connector is used for. It also has a phone jack which needs to be connected to a phone line only if you want to order PPV movies(which...

Ice on the cold side fins can happen even with a normally functioning A/C and a clean filter. When I bought my bedroom AC in 1994 one of the first things I did was to change the range of the thermostat. Most mechanical thermostats have a one on two screws inside for this. One controls the...

Tiger ate a moth once. My mother didn't want to be kissed by her for a few weeks after that. Kimba used to chase and kill the roaches we had when we used to live in an apartment. He didn't eat them, though. Even he had his limits. He did like to eat flies. :puke-l:

I'll third that. I also think that Friends is another pointless, awful show which never should have stuck around this long or been this popular. Actually, almost anything these days on the big three networks(and most of the stuff on the FOX, UPN, and WB) stinks. Even Enterprise is getting a...

Don't worry, Merc. This too will pass. BTW, that last sentence is to be taken literally, although I can see how it might have another meaning in the context of this thread. :lol:

Sales and excise taxes. Easy to calculate, easy to collect. You just need to exempt certain items(mostly items that are already exempted from normal state sales tax now) so the tax doesn't hit the poor who can't afford it. Another good thing about these types of taxes is that you'll be...

I've known females who were more obsessed with toilet humor than Beavis and Butthead. Besides, I think it's kind of funny seeing a group like this talking about their bodily functions. You would never expect it. I was on one site where somebody started a thread called "How big is it?" That...

This just underscores how unnecessarily complex our tax laws are, especially regarding corporate tax. I've heard that in many cases nobody, including the accountants and IRS, is really sure exactly how much tax a corporation owes. It depends on how the various laws are interpreted. One thing...

Assuming you could find enough of them the wall would probably be stronger than bricks. Of course, aluminum is an excellent conductor of heat so you might have the first R0 wall in history.