Of course, an EMP is likely to take out your radio system as well. In fact, due to the antenna, your radio would probably end up a pile of molten slag. While amateur radio is good for communications in a large variety of emergencies, an EMP would probably take communications down to the level of semaphore and smoke signals.
Still, Cisco has some of the best support in the biz. What do you think MS would say if you called about a bug in their software? I have had a high-level Microsoft tech tell me (and I quote, roughly), "If there was a bug, it'd be in the knowledgebase." Where do you think the KB people find out about bugs? Cisco isn't perfect, but a lot of support departments would be better if they imitated Cisco's tech support. I've never had a Cisco tech act rudely to me because I'm not as big a customer as the next guy waiting on the phone, and their techs seem to want to get your problem resolved, rather than just wanting to go home, grab a beer, and watch some TV. They're certainly not perfect, but they do have one of the better support departments in the IT industry.
With a hardware support contract, though, you can have a replacement part out the door and on a FedEx Overnight shipment within a couple of hours. While I know CCIEs who can do amazing router tricks (are there any that can't?), I don't know any who can whip up spare parts and get them to me in 24 hours or less. It's sort of like buying comprehensive insurance on an expensive car: sure, you'll save a lot of money if you don't buy any more insurance than the minimum, but the ability to save your sorry ass in an emergency is why you buy it.
While hardware support contracts aren't important most of the time, the ability to pull you out of the fire when you really need it is why you buy them. You might apply the same argument to essentials like redundant servers or backup power: why spend massive amounts of money on something that's not likely to ever be used? Because if you do need it, and it's not there, then you're doomed. Hardware support is expensive, but on something as mission-critical as a router, you'd be a fool not to buy it.
While Cisco's support contracts are expensive as hell, I've never once had a problem that they weren't able to handle. In fact, I'd say they have some of the best support in the industry: their techs are well-trained and willing to do whatever it takes to get dead equipment working again.
While I would be seriously pissed if I couldn't use the support my company had paid massive amounts of money for, that's never happened to me. As for the quality of the support techs, though, I just wish that other companies would take Cisco's lead and train their damn techs, rather than have them read off a computer screen, fail to solve the problem, and bump you up to Tier 2, where the whole thing starts over again.
Because it's there. While Linux is fairly easy to get a useful Linux distro under 2 MB, you can do things like strip the kernel to the bare essentials. Needless to say, you can't do that under Windows; there's a lot more challenge in getting Win 95 under 5 MB.
Also, making Win95 fit in small spaces may be of interest to people who want to run legacy Windows apps on embedded devices. I could see this put on an old Pentium with an all-in-one motherboard and a 16 MB solid state drive, with room for a small program or two. The only issue would be swap space. This might be useful in places looking for a small, simple pseudo-embedded PC that needs to run Windows apps. Linux might be better for 95% of these kinds of tasks, but if Windows is necessary to run legacy apps, then it would be best to run, well, Windows.
While it might not be eminently practical, neither is, say, running Linux or NetBSD on some obscure piece of hardware. Nifty hacks like this aren't always done for practical reasons; they're just as often done for fun.
I hate to say this, but the only solution is to take the CDs back. The problem is that the "CD"s have deliberate inconsistiences in the data and the error correction: the theory is that audio-only CD players will just throw away the error correction data, while CD-ROM drives will read it, attempt to correct it, and fail. Unfortunately, since your CD player is also designed to read ISO-9660 CDs (standard CD-ROM format) for MP3 playback, it probably checks the error correction data no matter what. Thus, since you have an MP3 device and are probably an evil pirate (after all, who but evil pirates use MP3s?), you are basically screwed.
As for the software player, it's reading off a second session of the CD, which contains valid error correction data (it's designed to be read by a computer). This contains the player installation files and some heavily compressed, DRM-laden audio files. It's probably impossible to get the audio into a format your CD player can read reliably without breaking the DMCA (at least if you're in the US; still, breaking the encryption on the files may be a rather daunting task).
Perhaps you should write a letter to the artist; tell them that you tried to buy one of their CDs but, due to EMI's copy protection, you could not play it. I would imagine the artist would be rather troubled after recieving a few of these letters; that is, if the record company lets them see the letters. As it is, you're stuck with a CD that basically comes from the factory with defects equivalent to a nasty spiral scratch along the entire length of the CD (one side effect of the copy protection technology is that CDs become very vulnerable to scratches; there's no error-correcting data that can be used to recover from bad data).
When you take the CD back, make sure to bring in your portable and play the CD for the store manager. If they offer you a replacement, be sure to play it before you leave the store. If they try to tell you your player is defective, tell them that Windows Media Player clicks and you don't want to install their player. Good luck; it's a tough battle, but one you should be able to win.
I would strongly suggest using CompactFlash rather than SD. It's faster (no dealing with DRM), and is basically ATAPI: with a $5 reader, you can plug it directly into any ATAPI-compatible computer and boot just like a hard drive. Plus, if you've got your heart set on a full Win2K and Office XP install, Microdrives come in sizes up to 1 GB (although you lose the durability of flash; they're just tiny hard drives in a CompactFlash form factor). Plus, a quick trip to Pricewatch says that CompactFlash is about half the price of SD for any given size, and is availible in a wider range of sizes. You might lose Palm compatability, but, at least to my eye, the benefits outweigh that one loss.
I've never had to block Messenger before (translated: I'm talking out of my ass. My CCNA-certified ass), but what about a script that queries DNS for messenger.hotmail.com, then blocks the IP address returned? That way, you've got all your bases covered: if the IP is cached, it goes to a blocked address; if that fails or the IP isn't cached, it looks up a name that, according to the nameserver, doesn't exist.
The only problem then would be some sort of VPN tunnel across the firewall to an open box. Still, that would have to run on some open port; you might implement protocol-specific traffic filtering, or just proxy everything. Of course, even without blocking tunneling, you've just taken away Messenger from the 99% of users who don't know how to set up a firewall-piercing VPN.
Put those puppies on the charger as often as convenient, and NEVER run them out flat if you can avoid it.
The problem with that solution is "dumb" timer-based chargers. A lot of the cheap chargers sold by places like Radio Shack will be nothing more than a timer and supporting electronics to hit the cells with a certain current for a certain amount of time. If you charge up a cell to 95%, then run it down to 90% and put it on the charger, you're cooking it alive. I'd imagine people cooking cells due to the memory effect myth have been the primary cause of the myth in the first place.
The solution? Get yourself a decent charger, one that has a thermal cutoff and detects the end-of-charge voltage drop, rather than running on nothing but a timer. Not only do they not overcharge cells, but they also give you more life: they can detect the point where the cell is holding everything it can, rather than blindly guessing (timers tend to be set very conservatively so they won't cook cells on a single charge). A good "smart" charger is worth every cent you pay; it can easily extend the total service life of your cells by 200%.
That's a good one, but Maha just came out with a newer model, which I just bought. It seems to be doing a great job, and has one charger circut for each battery (as opposed to the C204, which has two circuts for four batteries). As for Thomas Distributing, I've found them to have great prices. No, I'm not a paid shill, but they do seem to have the best prices and service I've found for high capacity NiMHs (and I've done a lot of searching; buying rechargables from the wrong people is expensive!).
Most of the "smart" chargers I recommend will cut the current entirely once they detect the voltage drop that the cells exhibit at end-of-charge. As for using a NiCD charger on NiMHs, just don't. While trickle chargers tend to be fairly safe, NiCDs can safely take more charge current than NiMHs can; extra charge current for either chemistry is dissipated as heat and isn't good for the battery. You end up with the same problems as if you'd charged the NiMHs in a fast charger: the cells still work, but they won't last as long as ones that've been well taken care of.
As for using a timer, that's not a bad idea. In fact, the cheapo chargers than much of the world uses use a simple timer-based circut; they don't bother monitoring anything except whether there's something in the battery bay that passes current. However, this causes problems: if the charger or battery is malfunctioning, then it can zap a good battery, or pump too much current into a faulty battery and perhaps even cause a fire hazard. Most of the "smart" chargers are intelligent enough to detect faults in their own circutry and in the battery and will refuse to charge if things don't look right (like, say, the battery is passing 2000 mA). Using a timer is a good solution if for some reason you can't use any other charger, but I'd be in the market for a new smart charger if I just had a NiCD charger and lamp timer.
Overcharging is one of the fastest ways to kill any rechargable, be it NiCD, NiMH, LiIon, Pb-Acid, or anything exotic. As long as you're careful, however, overcharging can be avoided fairly easily.
I've used rechargables for quite some time now, and they do seem worth the extra cost. A few things I've learned:
Buy a good charger. Cheap ones can fry batteries, take longer to charge, and can go up in smoke easily. Also, make sure it can charge NiMH batteries as well as NiCDs; if you have high-drain devices like digital cameras, then you want NiMHs, and probably don't want to pay for a new charger for 'em. Expect to pay $30-$50 USD for a decent one.
When you buy batteries, look at the milliamp-hour rating. That's the capacity they can hold: for example, an 1800 mAh AA could supply (theoretically) 1 mA for 1800 hours, 1800 mA for one hour, or anything in between. While mAh ratings do tend to be stretched a bit (the tests are performed under the most favorable circumstances possible), it's the best guide you can get to how long the battery will last in the device you plan to use.
Don't buy more battery than you need. Your TV remote probably doesn't need expensive 2200 mAh NiMHs, so put in cheaper 800 mAh NiCDs.
You'll be better off buying online than anywhere else. I've had good luck from several companies, but note that the "Energizer" branded batteries are relabeled and marked-up generics; you can get better batteries, cheaper if you go with other companies.
Get extra batteries. You should have a few sitting around for when something important goes dead; don't just buy what all your devices need. Get a few extra of each type you use, or just keep alkalines around to use while recharging.
Don't be too hard on your batteries. Many good chargers have a "fast" and a "trickle" setting; don't use the "fast" setting unless you absolutely can't wait overnight. Fast charges are hard on batteries; once or twice won't hurt much, but repeated fast charges can cause a significant drop in total battery life.
Finally, if you have some high-drain devices and want to get more battery life, try hacking something onto the AC adaptor. A good guide to doing this with your digital camera is here; the principles are pretty much the same for anything else that has an AC adaptor socket.
Who says it has to be entirely state-run? From my point of view (maybe not the same as the original poster's), medicine should be run like the school system: parents can get their kids a decent education from the gubmint, or a possibly better education with their own money from private schools. As for food and housing, there are housing-assistance programs and food stamps/government cheese. Neither mean that the government runs the entire industry, but both help give the poor a decent shot at living, if nothing else. Why should medicine be different?
It hasn't been a good idea to put things in the first PCI slot for a long time now, even without the shared IRQ worries. Fans need a decent amount of air around them in order to move the necessary air; if you've got a PCI card jammed up against the GPU fan, even one that doesn't generate much heat, you are almost guaranteed to get higher temps.
To echo other posters, though, who needs to use all the other PCI slots on their board? I have one for my SCSI RAID setup, one for my NIC, and that's it (I'm running an ASUS Nforce2 board; if I didn't care about Linux compatability, I wouldn't even need the NIC). The SCSI RAID is something most people don't have, and, like I said, the NIC is only there for Linux. The board's got five PCI slots. What's the problem with a GPU cooler taking up one, two or even three? Sure, I lose some expandability, but nobody's using it for anything, as far as I can tell.
It's just a really obvious pun, folks. Obvious enough that both a pro wrestler and game developers could come up with the name simeltaneously.
As for the wrestler Mr. Payne, he might have had a case if he hadn't waited so damned long. I find it amazing that he didn't at least hear from someone something along the lines of, "Hey, I saw a videogame that had your old stage name on it! Cool, huh?"
Even if he managed to not hear about it until now, you have to actively defend trademarks if you want to keep them. This means doing a modicum of research on your trademark - Googling it every month or so might not be a bad idea. He definatly would have had a case if he'd gone to the publishers before the game went gold, he might have had a (somewhat shaky) case if he sued right after the game hit shelves, but he doesn't have much of one now.
Finally, I don't see how he is in a "battle to save [his] identity." Most people can discriminate between a pro wrestler and a game character; the hypothetical "reasonable person" appealed to so often in court cases like this one certainly could. Sorry, Mr. Payne, you ain't getting squat.
Note: I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, contact a lawyer in your jurisdiction, you know the deal.
First, yes, carbon fiber and fiberglass are held together with epoxy. That's what makes the distinctive chemical smell of curing composites (just think of it as "offspring improver"). If you want to see some fiberglass in its natural state, take a look at the insulation in a house under construction. It looks kind of fluffy without anything holding it together (appearances are deceiving, though: if you rub up against it, you'll get thousands of glass fibers stuck in your skin. Ouch).
Second, wood acts as a sort of "natural composite". It's light, strong in one direction, and breaks easily if you bend the wrong way. If a wood plane is designed well, it It's also really easy to work with; many inexpensive kit planes and homebuilts are still wood and cloth. I'd imagine that bamboo, being one of the strongest woods available, would be a great material for bikes: not only cheap and renewable, but also much lighter than steel and possibly competitive with aluminum.
Getting a pilot's license probably isn't as hard or as expensive as you think. While a new Cessna or Cirrus may start at $200,000, there are other options. First, a decent rule of thumb is that a good used plane costs about as much as a good new car: you could probably find a used Cessna 150 or something for between $10,000 and $20,000.
If you have the time, another option is to put it together yourself, too. Something like a Van's RV-x kitbuild would probably cost $15 grand for the kit, $10 grand for a decent engine, and 100 to 200 hours of your time. True homebuilts are cheaper, but require a lot more time. If you do decide to go that route, check out Burt Rutan's designs; they not only look like a starfighter but get incredible performance and economy. As a bonus, you are eminently qualified to do any and all maintinance work on your airframe. Talk to the EAA (the Experimental Aircraft Association) to learn more about kitbuilds and homebuilds.
As for training, I have taken groundschool at my local community college. Flight instruction is also available for about $800 total (including all time in the airplane) with the number of training hours neccessary for a private pilot's license. Helicopter and commercial training are also available.
Trust me, there's nothing quite like the first time you go up in a small plane, pulling off the runway with yourself at the controls. The feeling of freedom is simply unrivaled, anywhere.
One note: if you decide to learn how to fly, I do suggest you learn to land first. Not knowing how could have some... serious consequences.
With email, if 1E-5 people are gullible enough to be taken in by a spam
10^-5 people? That's.1% of a person, or maybe a bit of a fingernail clipping. Problem is, even my fingernail clippings aren't dumb enough to launder money for deposed Nigerian dictators, and they have no penis or breasts to enlarge. Perhaps they could get a college diploma.
I have a friend who works for Qwest; he says that telemarketers that ignore the SIT tones entirely are quickly becoming the majority. While the Telezapper may only produce one of the tones, apparently a fair number of knockoff products are on the market that will play all three. Also, the telemarketers don't want to be caught again on the SIT tone trick; they won't let anyone come out with a "Telezapper II" that plays all three and get caught on the same trick twice.
While I am in favor of technological solutions to many problems, telemarketers and consumers will end up in a never-ending war if the only solution is tricking the other side into picking up or not calling. On the other hand, a legal solution is workable here: the telemarketing companies have to have offices, employees and a financial department, and thus can be punished legally and financially. When you get an $11,000 fine for every violation, it takes only a few angry people to hammer your business into bankruptcy. While scammers and other fly-by-night operations don't have these roots, big buisiness probably won't be very willing to deal with shady characters; they would probably end up burned by scammers themselves. Besides, they could be held responsible if they knew they were hiring a company to call people on the do-not-call list. The potential reward is way out of porportion to the risk.
Even though most pilot training centers will tell you that Flight Sim's are bad for learning how to fly.
That's because they want to make money selling you time in a real aircraft. While flight sims can't reproduce the minutae of flying or the subtle sensations that can tell you everything about your aircraft, they can be good practice (assuming you have a decent sim) and a way to learn emergency procedures in a consequence-free environment. If your sim is true-to-life, then you should be able to practice worst-case scenarios like an engine failure on takeoff without the risk of actually dying entering into the picture. While there's no way to really reproduce flight on the ground, PC sims can provide a very useful adjunct to a pilot's training.
Unfortunately, the problem with this technique is that the (ridiculously popular) Telezapper uses the SIT technique, so telemarketers are reprogramming their machines to ignore SIT tones. What works is to get them to face legal penalties if they call you. Get on the National Do-not-call list. In the meantime, tell them to place you on their do-not-call list; they're required by law to have one, and if they call you again, then they're in for stiff fines.
A note about one nasty little loophole in this, though: if you ask them to "remove my number from the database" then they have to remove it, but there's no time limit on how soon they can put it in (they could take it out and put it right back in). If you ask to be put on the "do-not-call list," however, then they are in for a world of hurt. Just get the telemarketing company name and ideally the telemarketer's name as well, and send an email to the FTC. They then are fined $11,000 (reduce your tax burden, eh?).
That game had some geniunely disturbing moments in it; there were things there that left you with a feeling of deep unease. Hell, the voiceover for the Punishment Sphere base upgrade sent shivers down my spine; it described how the torture was as much in watching and listening to your family and friends in pain as it was in being physically tortured yourself.
The whole game had some interesting themes about how society would use technology in the future; the "living city" secret project swallowing up the dissenters made me think about how things like nanotech or pervasive computing would affect society.
A lot of HP's LaserJets have had IRDA support (offered mostly on laptops and PDAs) for a while. Look for a little black plastic window. Also, there have been various inkjets marketed towards laptop users that are just barely larger than 8.5"; they were and are just miniaturized inkjets, with no real new technology.
That said, carrying around a Laserjet and the power supply necessary to make it truly wireless would probably telescope your spine, or at least give you a massive hernia.
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Of course, an EMP is likely to take out your radio system as well. In fact, due to the antenna, your radio would probably end up a pile of molten slag. While amateur radio is good for communications in a large variety of emergencies, an EMP would probably take communications down to the level of semaphore and smoke signals.
Still, Cisco has some of the best support in the biz. What do you think MS would say if you called about a bug in their software? I have had a high-level Microsoft tech tell me (and I quote, roughly), "If there was a bug, it'd be in the knowledgebase." Where do you think the KB people find out about bugs? Cisco isn't perfect, but a lot of support departments would be better if they imitated Cisco's tech support. I've never had a Cisco tech act rudely to me because I'm not as big a customer as the next guy waiting on the phone, and their techs seem to want to get your problem resolved, rather than just wanting to go home, grab a beer, and watch some TV. They're certainly not perfect, but they do have one of the better support departments in the IT industry.
While hardware support contracts aren't important most of the time, the ability to pull you out of the fire when you really need it is why you buy them. You might apply the same argument to essentials like redundant servers or backup power: why spend massive amounts of money on something that's not likely to ever be used? Because if you do need it, and it's not there, then you're doomed. Hardware support is expensive, but on something as mission-critical as a router, you'd be a fool not to buy it.
While I would be seriously pissed if I couldn't use the support my company had paid massive amounts of money for, that's never happened to me. As for the quality of the support techs, though, I just wish that other companies would take Cisco's lead and train their damn techs, rather than have them read off a computer screen, fail to solve the problem, and bump you up to Tier 2, where the whole thing starts over again.
Jeez, I screwed up the link there. It's supposed to be to tomsrtbt, the best damn floppy Linux distro anywhere.
- Because it's there. While Linux is fairly easy to get a useful Linux distro under 2 MB, you can do things like strip the kernel to the bare essentials. Needless to say, you can't do that under Windows; there's a lot more challenge in getting Win 95 under 5 MB.
- Also, making Win95 fit in small spaces may be of interest to people who want to run legacy Windows apps on embedded devices. I could see this put on an old Pentium with an all-in-one motherboard and a 16 MB solid state drive, with room for a small program or two. The only issue would be swap space. This might be useful in places looking for a small, simple pseudo-embedded PC that needs to run Windows apps. Linux might be better for 95% of these kinds of tasks, but if Windows is necessary to run legacy apps, then it would be best to run, well, Windows.
While it might not be eminently practical, neither is, say, running Linux or NetBSD on some obscure piece of hardware. Nifty hacks like this aren't always done for practical reasons; they're just as often done for fun.As for the software player, it's reading off a second session of the CD, which contains valid error correction data (it's designed to be read by a computer). This contains the player installation files and some heavily compressed, DRM-laden audio files. It's probably impossible to get the audio into a format your CD player can read reliably without breaking the DMCA (at least if you're in the US; still, breaking the encryption on the files may be a rather daunting task).
Perhaps you should write a letter to the artist; tell them that you tried to buy one of their CDs but, due to EMI's copy protection, you could not play it. I would imagine the artist would be rather troubled after recieving a few of these letters; that is, if the record company lets them see the letters. As it is, you're stuck with a CD that basically comes from the factory with defects equivalent to a nasty spiral scratch along the entire length of the CD (one side effect of the copy protection technology is that CDs become very vulnerable to scratches; there's no error-correcting data that can be used to recover from bad data).
When you take the CD back, make sure to bring in your portable and play the CD for the store manager. If they offer you a replacement, be sure to play it before you leave the store. If they try to tell you your player is defective, tell them that Windows Media Player clicks and you don't want to install their player. Good luck; it's a tough battle, but one you should be able to win.
I would strongly suggest using CompactFlash rather than SD. It's faster (no dealing with DRM), and is basically ATAPI: with a $5 reader, you can plug it directly into any ATAPI-compatible computer and boot just like a hard drive. Plus, if you've got your heart set on a full Win2K and Office XP install, Microdrives come in sizes up to 1 GB (although you lose the durability of flash; they're just tiny hard drives in a CompactFlash form factor). Plus, a quick trip to Pricewatch says that CompactFlash is about half the price of SD for any given size, and is availible in a wider range of sizes. You might lose Palm compatability, but, at least to my eye, the benefits outweigh that one loss.
The only problem then would be some sort of VPN tunnel across the firewall to an open box. Still, that would have to run on some open port; you might implement protocol-specific traffic filtering, or just proxy everything. Of course, even without blocking tunneling, you've just taken away Messenger from the 99% of users who don't know how to set up a firewall-piercing VPN.
The solution? Get yourself a decent charger, one that has a thermal cutoff and detects the end-of-charge voltage drop, rather than running on nothing but a timer. Not only do they not overcharge cells, but they also give you more life: they can detect the point where the cell is holding everything it can, rather than blindly guessing (timers tend to be set very conservatively so they won't cook cells on a single charge). A good "smart" charger is worth every cent you pay; it can easily extend the total service life of your cells by 200%.
That's a good one, but Maha just came out with a newer model, which I just bought. It seems to be doing a great job, and has one charger circut for each battery (as opposed to the C204, which has two circuts for four batteries). As for Thomas Distributing, I've found them to have great prices. No, I'm not a paid shill, but they do seem to have the best prices and service I've found for high capacity NiMHs (and I've done a lot of searching; buying rechargables from the wrong people is expensive!).
As for using a timer, that's not a bad idea. In fact, the cheapo chargers than much of the world uses use a simple timer-based circut; they don't bother monitoring anything except whether there's something in the battery bay that passes current. However, this causes problems: if the charger or battery is malfunctioning, then it can zap a good battery, or pump too much current into a faulty battery and perhaps even cause a fire hazard. Most of the "smart" chargers are intelligent enough to detect faults in their own circutry and in the battery and will refuse to charge if things don't look right (like, say, the battery is passing 2000 mA). Using a timer is a good solution if for some reason you can't use any other charger, but I'd be in the market for a new smart charger if I just had a NiCD charger and lamp timer.
Overcharging is one of the fastest ways to kill any rechargable, be it NiCD, NiMH, LiIon, Pb-Acid, or anything exotic. As long as you're careful, however, overcharging can be avoided fairly easily.
- Buy a good charger. Cheap ones can fry batteries, take longer to charge, and can go up in smoke easily. Also, make sure it can charge NiMH batteries as well as NiCDs; if you have high-drain devices like digital cameras, then you want NiMHs, and probably don't want to pay for a new charger for 'em. Expect to pay $30-$50 USD for a decent one.
- When you buy batteries, look at the milliamp-hour rating. That's the capacity they can hold: for example, an 1800 mAh AA could supply (theoretically) 1 mA for 1800 hours, 1800 mA for one hour, or anything in between. While mAh ratings do tend to be stretched a bit (the tests are performed under the most favorable circumstances possible), it's the best guide you can get to how long the battery will last in the device you plan to use.
- Don't buy more battery than you need. Your TV remote probably doesn't need expensive 2200 mAh NiMHs, so put in cheaper 800 mAh NiCDs.
- You'll be better off buying online than anywhere else. I've had good luck from several companies, but note that the "Energizer" branded batteries are relabeled and marked-up generics; you can get better batteries, cheaper if you go with other companies.
- Get extra batteries. You should have a few sitting around for when something important goes dead; don't just buy what all your devices need. Get a few extra of each type you use, or just keep alkalines around to use while recharging.
- Don't be too hard on your batteries. Many good chargers have a "fast" and a "trickle" setting; don't use the "fast" setting unless you absolutely can't wait overnight. Fast charges are hard on batteries; once or twice won't hurt much, but repeated fast charges can cause a significant drop in total battery life.
- Finally, if you have some high-drain devices and want to get more battery life, try hacking something onto the AC adaptor. A good guide to doing this with your digital camera is here; the principles are pretty much the same for anything else that has an AC adaptor socket.
Good luck!Who says it has to be entirely state-run? From my point of view (maybe not the same as the original poster's), medicine should be run like the school system: parents can get their kids a decent education from the gubmint, or a possibly better education with their own money from private schools. As for food and housing, there are housing-assistance programs and food stamps/government cheese. Neither mean that the government runs the entire industry, but both help give the poor a decent shot at living, if nothing else. Why should medicine be different?
To echo other posters, though, who needs to use all the other PCI slots on their board? I have one for my SCSI RAID setup, one for my NIC, and that's it (I'm running an ASUS Nforce2 board; if I didn't care about Linux compatability, I wouldn't even need the NIC). The SCSI RAID is something most people don't have, and, like I said, the NIC is only there for Linux. The board's got five PCI slots. What's the problem with a GPU cooler taking up one, two or even three? Sure, I lose some expandability, but nobody's using it for anything, as far as I can tell.
As for the wrestler Mr. Payne, he might have had a case if he hadn't waited so damned long. I find it amazing that he didn't at least hear from someone something along the lines of, "Hey, I saw a videogame that had your old stage name on it! Cool, huh?"
Even if he managed to not hear about it until now, you have to actively defend trademarks if you want to keep them. This means doing a modicum of research on your trademark - Googling it every month or so might not be a bad idea. He definatly would have had a case if he'd gone to the publishers before the game went gold, he might have had a (somewhat shaky) case if he sued right after the game hit shelves, but he doesn't have much of one now.
Finally, I don't see how he is in a "battle to save [his] identity." Most people can discriminate between a pro wrestler and a game character; the hypothetical "reasonable person" appealed to so often in court cases like this one certainly could. Sorry, Mr. Payne, you ain't getting squat.
Note: I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, contact a lawyer in your jurisdiction, you know the deal.
Nah, way off base. I mean, a good conspiracy theory has to have at least an element of the believable.
Second, wood acts as a sort of "natural composite". It's light, strong in one direction, and breaks easily if you bend the wrong way. If a wood plane is designed well, it It's also really easy to work with; many inexpensive kit planes and homebuilts are still wood and cloth. I'd imagine that bamboo, being one of the strongest woods available, would be a great material for bikes: not only cheap and renewable, but also much lighter than steel and possibly competitive with aluminum.
If you have the time, another option is to put it together yourself, too. Something like a Van's RV-x kitbuild would probably cost $15 grand for the kit, $10 grand for a decent engine, and 100 to 200 hours of your time. True homebuilts are cheaper, but require a lot more time. If you do decide to go that route, check out Burt Rutan's designs; they not only look like a starfighter but get incredible performance and economy. As a bonus, you are eminently qualified to do any and all maintinance work on your airframe. Talk to the EAA (the Experimental Aircraft Association) to learn more about kitbuilds and homebuilds.
As for training, I have taken groundschool at my local community college. Flight instruction is also available for about $800 total (including all time in the airplane) with the number of training hours neccessary for a private pilot's license. Helicopter and commercial training are also available.
Trust me, there's nothing quite like the first time you go up in a small plane, pulling off the runway with yourself at the controls. The feeling of freedom is simply unrivaled, anywhere.
One note: if you decide to learn how to fly, I do suggest you learn to land first. Not knowing how could have some... serious consequences.
While I am in favor of technological solutions to many problems, telemarketers and consumers will end up in a never-ending war if the only solution is tricking the other side into picking up or not calling. On the other hand, a legal solution is workable here: the telemarketing companies have to have offices, employees and a financial department, and thus can be punished legally and financially. When you get an $11,000 fine for every violation, it takes only a few angry people to hammer your business into bankruptcy. While scammers and other fly-by-night operations don't have these roots, big buisiness probably won't be very willing to deal with shady characters; they would probably end up burned by scammers themselves. Besides, they could be held responsible if they knew they were hiring a company to call people on the do-not-call list. The potential reward is way out of porportion to the risk.
A note about one nasty little loophole in this, though: if you ask them to "remove my number from the database" then they have to remove it, but there's no time limit on how soon they can put it in (they could take it out and put it right back in). If you ask to be put on the "do-not-call list," however, then they are in for a world of hurt. Just get the telemarketing company name and ideally the telemarketer's name as well, and send an email to the FTC. They then are fined $11,000 (reduce your tax burden, eh?).
The whole game had some interesting themes about how society would use technology in the future; the "living city" secret project swallowing up the dissenters made me think about how things like nanotech or pervasive computing would affect society.
That said, carrying around a Laserjet and the power supply necessary to make it truly wireless would probably telescope your spine, or at least give you a massive hernia.