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I got this "bad information" here among other places. Here's a link to a shorter explanation from the Fair&Isaac website, the people who make the credit score and provide them to Transunion, Equifax, etc.

Sorry, but 10% of your credit score is how many credit checks you've had in the last year. It's not at ALL neutral, unless you're the one checking. If someone told you that, they were misinformed. Here's an excerpt from the site I linked to...

# 35% of the score is based on your payment history. This makes sense since one of the primary reasons a lender wants to see the score is to find out if (and how timely) you pay your bills. The score is affected by how many bills have been paid late, how many were sent out for collection, any bankruptcies, etc. When these things happened also comes into play. The more recent, the worse it will be for your overall score.

# 30% of the score is based on outstanding debt. How much do you owe on car or home loans? How many credit cards do you have that are at their credit limits? The more cards you have at their limits, the lower your score will be. The rule of thumb is to keep your card balances at 30% or less of their limits.

# 15% of the score is based on the length of time you've had credit. The longer you've had established credit, the better it is for your overall credit score. Why? Because more information about your past payment history gives a more accurate prediction of your future actions.

#10% of the score is based on the number of inquiries on your report. If you've applied for a lot of credit cards or loans, you will have a lot of inquiries on your credit report. These are bad for your score because they indicate that you may be in some kind of financial trouble or may be taking on a lot of debt (even if you haven't used the cards or gotten the loans). The more recent these inquiries are, the worse for your credit score. FICO scores only count inquiries from the past year.

# 10% of the score is based on the types of credit you currently have. The number of loans and available credit from credit cards you have makes a difference. There is no magic number or combination of types of accounts that you shouldn't have. These actually come more into play if there isn't as much other information on your credit report on which to base the score.

You mean like Nextel's walkie-talkie feature?

Are you saying that the CD's people are encoding to mp3 have "inaudible" sounds on them?

I didn't think so.
--
Actually, that is what I'm saying. I did dumb it down a little, but if you'd like to learn how mp3 compression works, check out this site.

A quote from this site:
To make a good compression algorithm for sound, a technique called perceptual noise shaping is used. It is "perceptual" part because the MP3 format uses characteristics of the human ear to design the compression algorithm. For example:

* There are certain sounds that the human ear cannot hear.
* There are certain sounds that the human ear hears much better than others.
* If there are two sounds playing simultaneously, we hear the louder one but cannot hear the softer one.

Using facts like these, certain parts of a song can be eliminated without significantly hurting the quality of the song for the listener.

That is to say, parts of the audio signal (the parts that are inaudible to the human ear) are removed to save space.

After that is done, a regular compression algorithm is applied to the file, further reducing the size.

Some of the major dissidents of the mp3 format claim that these so-called "inaudible sounds", when removed, can affect the overall quality of the audio. I guess that's why they wanted a lossless compression algorithm in the first place. Actually, a lot of these people don't like digital transfers of music at all. They prefer an analog technology like vinyl.

For most people, though, the difference in quality is negligible, at best - especially when compared to the savings in data space.

Lossless compression doesn't "throw" anything out, it just rearranges the data so that redundant sequences can be represented in a smaller amount of space. Take a look at this. It simplifies how this type of compression is achieved.

Reminds me of the time a couple of Iowa State students got out of trouble for having a spud gun by claiming it was an internal combustion engine.

They were not telling a lie!

Doesn't seem to be anything too high tech in this year's Superbowl, unlike the Video Insertion System 2 or the spiffy replay rotation thingy EyeVision 2 we've had in previous years.

I doubt thats the case, arent the newer sony crts built using a better technology than trinitron anyway?

You shouldn't make statements like that without at least googling for support. I haven't heard of Sony having any more interesting CRT patents after Trinitron.

Besides anyone selling a trinitron monitor pays to use the name because of the quality recognition associated with it.

Trinitron is the same thing as "aperture grill". Plenty of people sell aperture grill monitors rather than Trinitron monitors. They are indeed outcompeting Trinitron licensees on price. Talk not out of thy ass, for it will leak and make thy underwear messy.

It has to do with the way master key locks work.

Here's a pretty comprehensive article on lock-picking, which also explains how locks work. (After all, you can't really pick a lock without knowing what's in there).

Go to howstuffworks and read about how locks and master keys work. You'll find a nice description of how the tumblers in master key locks are actually two sections / heights - one for the master, one for the original.

Howstuffworks has some good info on RFID based devices.

Smart Labels
E-Z Pass
Anti-Shoplifting Devices

From cocaine and lockpicking to quantum mechanics and C++, you have to admit that HSW is very comprehensive.

Howstuffworks has some good info on RFID based devices.

Smart Labels
E-Z Pass
Anti-Shoplifting Devices

From cocaine and lockpicking to quantum mechanics and C++, you have to admit that HSW is very comprehensive.

Howstuffworks has some good info on RFID based devices.

Smart Labels
E-Z Pass
Anti-Shoplifting Devices

From cocaine and lockpicking to quantum mechanics and C++, you have to admit that HSW is very comprehensive.

It has been my experiance that most mauals are set up so that you have to go out of your way to get to reverse or have a gate bloking reverse. In my car, I cannot go strait from 5th to reverse, but if I go to nuetral then I can get to reverse. Even if you do get to reverse, ss another poster that was crazy enough to try it said, it shouldn't do too much damage. here is a link to the How Stuff Works article on manual transmissions. When you move the shifter, you are not really connecting gears.

If the basestation is located in the aircraft, then the phone will use that one and does not try to use basestations on the ground. Obviously this requires that basestation is connected to cellphone network via satellite link.
See description how cellphones work with basestations & cellular network.

Not quite, the most common tags today are the sensormatic acoustomagnetic type, found at a wide range of retailers from WalMart to Home Depot to many cd/movie stores. This type has a number of advantages, over the older RF based tags. In fact, many consumer items can be found with an Acoustomagnetic tag inside the item. Recently, I disassembled an answering machine I had purchased from KMart and inside the case was a (presumably deactivated) tag. Because 58khz acoustic echos are not much affected by the container, (after all these are just sound waves) tags can be embedded rather than on the surface of the item (as with radio frequency tags) where a shoplifter can easily peal them off. Don't expect the RF tags to actually be embedded in too many items, metallic items and objects containing water will either absorb the RF energy or detune the tag, itself a simple LC (inductor-capacitor) network tuned to 8.2 mhz (most common - or 9.5 mhz). The above posts are indeed correct, the common RF tags are deactivated by a high intensity RF signal, but usually of a different (usually lower)frequency that the tag also has resonance at. The fusable link is commonly a crimp across the capacitor which upon deactivation shorts the capacitor out, thus detuning it, rather than burning itself out.
The saturation type strips the parent refers to are actually prone to false alarms from certain metal objects with a low (and abrupt) saturation point. These systems are commonly found in libraries, rather than retail stores. Several other types are in use.
Read here and here.

to quote from cryptogram: "If you have ever wondered how the special anti-shoplifting tags you see on merchandise work, this article is a real eye-opener!"

I was just reading about barcodes the other day...
Check out This if you are interested.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/social-security-numbe r.htm

Sony and Nintendo doesn't sell their consoles at loss. But price dumping should be illegal also in console market.

Here's the link I forgot...

http://www.howstuffworks.com/fax-machine1.htm

Incidentally, does anyone know how much weight the Segway is designed to handle?

From the How Stuff Works Website:

Weight capacity: 250 pound (110 kg) person with 75 pounds (34 kg) of cargo.

(Good link about more Segway stuff without all of the marketing hype at Howstuffworks, too.)

You may want to take a look at:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/question660.htm

Unless classifications have changed radically in the last few years.

(draught can=keg with valve?)

nah, it's a can with a... well... a widget inside.

Theres an article on keyboards at how stuff works!

...maybe we could just lock in the coordinates on our freight transporter and teleport it directly into the sun. You're thinking 1000 years, not 100. Think of what we have accomplished in the past 100 years and stop being ridiculously optimistic.

*Please note, however, that I am not a lawyer.**

**Not that there's anything wrong with that.

How can you have better than 20/20? Isn't that the most by definition? ;-)

Nope. Some people can have better then 20/20 vision. Read this How Stuff Works article (One of the most useful sites I have ever seen!). An excerpt:

You can also have vision that is better than the norm. A person with 20/10 vision can see at 20 feet what a normal person can see when standing 10 feet away from the chart.

Many airplane pilots (and some astronauts) have vision that is better then 20/20, as I learned with dismay when I was 10 years old (I have like 20/999999 vision :).

Nice troll lord hunter. the parent is talking about the molecules in liquid crystal displays which have to line up and block the light coming from the backlight. This kind of device takes a lot more time to change state than a device which exploits the emission of photons from electrons which are jumping to a lower energy level (i.e. all light emitting diode technologies).

Try reading this site before calling anybody a moron.

I'm going to bite off a bit more here and respond to your second point: what's the point of having the most expensive, overclocked system that can render a complex game at huge fps if your monitor can only do 40fps? If you are building the ultimate system, you want the bottleneck to be in the user, not the system.

("Can't you see the extra fps? must be your eyes, then. certainly nothing wrong with my system.")

But cds are only 44.1khz so they arent better quality, than say a record.. although im not sure how that compares to cassette

The question to answer is:
What if I shot my Television

Aside from making a mess in your living room, you'd probably find yourself with more productive time, better educated children, and a well-used library card.

There have been many well thought out (and a lot more no so well thought out) proposols for putting up a practical space station, as well as colinization plans, and yet NASA takes a dim view on "outsiders" views of how space exploration should progress.

Google has a ton of links, but to get started How Stuff Works has a good, basic introduction, with several links to various places.

This page at NASA gives the up side.
I'll put a small quote from it here;
The classical example, often cited, is the discovery of x-rays by Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen in 1895. Within a year of their discovery, x-rays were being put to practical use in medicine, and in time became of enormous value in medicine, industry, and scientific research. Roentgen's discovery resulted from experimenting with electron beams in evacuated tubes. Had he been directly seeking something of value for the medical profession, he would most likely have put away his electron beams and taken up some more "practical" line of investigation, and the discovery of x-rays would have been postponed.

If you demand a guarentee of payoff for scientific investigation, virtually all research would stop. There just isn't anything that's a sure thing.

Planetary modelling just might allow us to have some idea of how fast we are burning this biosphere out, or get a solid handle on weather patterns, floods, and droughts.
Or who knows it might lead to self tieing shoe laces.

Check out his book The Pinball Effect for history on how unrelated inventions created almost everything we associate with modern civilization.

May I suggest a little reading?

try this page: Music and the human ear

Very interresting stuff about human hearing.

And also this page:
Is the sound of vinyl better than CD

Wich explain the difference between analog and digital. The graphic example given clearly demonstrate that even at 10Khz, the CD gives only a raw approximation of a wave. If you go up to the theorical 22Khz, you must understand that you only have one sample per oscillon of a sine wave for example. So at these frequencies, a sine wave, square wave of triangle wave all sound the same. Imagine a complex wave full of harmonics from a musical instrument (or 20 instruments at once). All this detail get lost.

Sure, the dynamic range and noise floor is a lot better on CD than vinyl, but the resolution is awful.

Maybe SACD will give us better music and less bits.

Yea, CD does an awesome job of recreating complex high frequency wave forms, huh?

-S

It's more like living in the past. Early refrigerators didn't use electrical compressors and such. Your Grandmother's refrigerator used a pilot flame to do its cooling. Sure, it wasn't able to cool and freeze quite as well modern refridgerators do but, it still kept food cold and made ice.

How cool is that, to use a flame for refrigeration? It's so cool that it is still used today in things like Recreational Vehicle refrigerators. See here.

VDSL holds a bit more promise, I think.

My ADSL was converted to VDSL last month. I live in Korea, and this county doesn't have the issues that consumers in the US are forced to endure. The telco's in the US are still trying to squeeze pennies out of legacy communications infrastructure...I don't see any change coming soon.

[ I shall elaborate in hopes that my anonymity will not obscure the merit of my argument]

This product may not quite be the Apple Computer of the coming hydrogen revolution (cheap enough for the common user), but it's an important move in that direction (landmark when they market it for home use). As costs inevitably deflate with mass production and improved processes (especially well illustrated by the computer analogy), people will buy these for their many virtues.

- Lack of pollution, which contrary to current thinking, has Economic Value

- Greater efficiency, meaning more useful energy from the same fuel

- Diversity of fuels: Hydrogen for the Fuel Cell can be reformed from any hydrocarbon ( some info here)

- Renewable fuels: Fuel Cells are Bi-Directional! That means that with no hydrocarbon supply and an empty hydrogen tank, hydrogen fuel can be created for later use (by electrolysis) with renewable electrical sources like solar and wind, or any other source

- Higher Density: Batteries are the main bottleneck to portable technology. They are heavy, expensive, and have a dirty-lifecycle. Direct Methanol Fuel Cells (currently expensive) will allow small cartridges of methanol to take the place of heavy additional batteries ( like here).

Although Fuel Cell technology is in its infancy and is still expensive, it is our bass-ackwards economic framework that give nobody (individual, organization, and mass power producer alike) -any- --Economic-- incentive to produce their power without pollution the environment common to us all.
This economic framework assigns no value to non-pollution whatsoever. When the free-market along with legislative guidance (there are a few things only governments can do, and protecting shared natural resources is one of them) places a fair value on non-pollution, Fuel Cell power production will be much cheaper.

For better or for worse, the masses are slow to catch on. One way that it's better (in a capitalist economy) is that those who see it first can buy stock, sit back, and wait for the others to catch on.

Hell, my bicycle has more horse power.(with me pedeling)

Not likely, look at this article on horsepower and see for yourself. I am sorry to say but there is no way you can output 8.5 horsepower on your bicycle.

AS other pointed out Hubble would probably get fried. ALso, even if it could do it, it would only be able to see things down to about 100 meters across.

see here

and here

You know we have different power outlets here too? Another adaptor to buy.

As you well know, but our poster may not, the United Kingdom has different voltage, frequency, and outlets. Although almost all recent laptops come with switching power supplies which elegantly handle U.S. and all European voltages, it would be a bummer to blow a power supply (or a whole laptop) on such a thing. If your power supply is such a beast, it is probably labelled right on it "120-400V, 30-80Hz" or something of that sort.

As far as specifics go, for the UK, it's 50Hz, 230V AC. And Howstuffworks has a somewhat spiffy illustration of the plug appearance. Three flat prongs, two horizontal, one vertical for grounded plugs (which hopefully your laptop has). Two round prongs for non-grounded.

Proper barcodes shouldn't allow you to do that. The barcode "number" should only relate to a database entry which then should give information such as price/discount details. Barcodes do not (or should not) contain any pricing information of any sort (see how barcodes work)

In your scenerio, you should need to alter the barcode to reflect another database entry corresponding to the discount you are after (and I'm sure/hope the store doesn't sequentially allocate discount codes) AND get it past any fail safe systems the EPOS has in place ($0.05-$10.00: reject) AND hit on a discount code which at least slightly reflects the product description (say the discount voucher was for a bottle of shampoo and you just happen to hit on a $30.00 off champagne voucher - then the till-operator should spot the difference). Oh: don't forget the checksum at the end of the barcode as well.

If you can get away with this as easily as you make out - well, that store is just about asking to be ripped off: so name it here so they can be Slashdotted in a physical sense (imagine loads of geeks hitting the same store chain with faked vouchers :) )

Now, the scary part is that I wrote a report on this maniac/genius back in high school and I remembered his name so I could google for it...

How Stirling Engines Work

Here's How this stuff works - decaffeination anyway.

More info and how to Kick the habbit, amongst other infos.

The caffiene in your cola/other drink often comes from the coffee decaffeination process.

Perhaps the reason your heart keeps beating is that these processes do not remove all the caffiene? I tend to believe other magics are at work here (chemicals), but they don't discount that in the article....

• Lab experiments are allowed with strict containment procedures.
• Field experiments and production are allowed provided the modified organism is easily distinguished without any special technology.

Bt Corn does not meet this test. Bt Corn looks just like normal corn, but can kill you or make you sick if you eat it and do not tolerate the Bt toxin. It has a survival advantage in the wild to boot. While North American farmers plant from high tech hybrid seeds, South American farmers may soon find their major food crop contaminated. Eventually, a Bt tolerant human population will emerge via natural selection, but only after much human suffering.

Using corn to grow drugs does not meet this test either.

Actually there was such a console called the Indrema. It ran Linux, the geeks loved it.

However the games were practically non-existant and this wasn't significantly offset by the fact it ran Linux.

Yes, shocking as it might be to some readers, the average console player doesn't give a toss about the OS under the hood. They didn't give a toss about the Indrema either and it sank into the depths of console obscurity.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but There aren't 'hundreds of Gs on rentry.' Anything over 5 Gs is pretty dangerous, with anything over 10 Gs meaning Certain Death. G-forces are Usually highest at Launch, and in fact the Space Shuttle only generates 3-Gs as this article points out
In fact, to achieve 100 Gs you would have to drive around the texas motor speedway corners at 1,056 miles per hour. Those are some mean turns, there. And remember just because the space shuttle can achieve a speed of 17,500 mph, doesn't mean it can make a 750 foot radius turn at that speed (which at 27,450 Gs would tear the shuttle to itty bits, and make puree out of the crew inside).
Just for comparison sake, the G forces of accelerating, in a Straight line, at the speed of light is a mere 267 Gs. However, traveling around the curve at the Texas motor speedway at the speed of light would generate 3,110,837.4 Gs.
Obviously, the tighter the curve you're making the higher the G forces.
Hope this helped, and BTW, I used the speed that light travels in this solar system, not the theoretical speed in a pure vacume.

It's pretty rare that any human invention outdoes mother nature.

Cheers.

Of course, light guns are based on technology almost as old as arcade games are (70's at least) so maybe someone will come around and develop a new one soon that will work with LCDs. I think we can all agree that LCDs are going to become common: they use less electricity, less space, and are 'cooler' ;)

On How Stuff Works If you didn;t get it.