Most power supplies on both laptops and desktops are switching power supplies. Usually they just take the incoming 110V and convert it to high voltage DC; they then convert that to lower voltage by switching the high voltage on and off. They then use a big cap to try and lower the ripple that this would obviously cause. IF they do use transformers, they usually take the high voltage DC and oscilate it at a lot higher frequency than the 60hz that you get from the plug. If your AC power is oscilating at a higher frequency you can get away with using smaller, cheaper, cooler, and more efficient transformers. Of course I am no power supply design expert maybe I will track down the website of someone who is so someone else can explain it better than I can.
Who told me that switching power supplies are more efficient when used close to their maximum load? The spec sheet on most switching power supplies. Here is one: http://www.st.com/stonline/books/pdf/docs/9673.pdf . And no surge protectors won't stop normal power spikes, that is what the power supplies are for -- even cheap power supplies should stop normal power spikes. And if you have a circuit that is really sensitive to power spikes it should have a voltage regulator on the mother board.
I wasn't able to read the article, but there was something I wanted to say about power supplies. It is my understanding that switching power supplies (the kind that are used in pc's) often become more efficient when used close to their maximum rating. Often time people suggest to get a wattage rating a lot higher than you need so you can expand later; but maybe it is better to get a power supply matched to the wattage that you are using -- you could probably at least save on your energy bill that way. Also it may be ok to get a cheap power supply even if it has more AC ripple than more expensive ones because if there is a sensitive circuit on the mother board that needs clean power they always have a nice voltage regulator and cap to clean off the power. Of course you don't want spikes but that is why power surge protectors were invented. Sorry if that was all in the article but like I said it is slashdotted already.
Lots of other people have suggested Washington DC. If you go there and just want a taste of NASA you could go to NASA Goddard which is half way between Washington DC and Baltimore MD (about 15-20 miles north of Washington.) And while you are in the area NSA is pretty close too. I don't think you can actually go to NSA (unless you want to get shot) but I believe there is a security and encryption museum near by. While you are going north of Washington you might want to check out the National Aquarium as well as the inner harbor in Baltimore -- that is if you are into marine biology. If you want nature and are on the East coast I would also suggest the Appalachian trail. It is nice trail that goes through most of the Appalachian mountains on the East coast. Just a few little suggestions:)
Just because a CD burner can be used to pirate software doesn't mean CD burners should be illegal. CD burners have legitimate purposes too (like backing up data that does belong to you.) Likewise just because these tags can be used to track someone's every move without them knowing about it doesn't mean they should be illegal. These tags also have legitimate pruposes (like keeping track of the dog that keeps running away or the car that keeps getting stolen.)
Putting a flag on your front porch is a great way to celebrate the 4th of July. An even better way to celebrate the United States' birthday would be to go to this site and actually read the documents that define us as a country.
In this day in age when it seems everyone is a suspected terrorist and our liberties are stripped one by one in the name of homeland security, and in the name of the rights of large companies, I wish some of our elected officials would actually read these documents sometime.
A red white and blue flag isn't what makes this country great, nor does an extremely high gross domestic product -- it is the set of ideas that where written over 200 years ago that makes the USA great.
So everyone go to this site and read those documents. Even if you aren't American you should still read those documents because everyone has the right to the freedoms that our founding fathers wrote about.
The only server on our domain used to be an alpha running NT server. A while ago we wanted to upgrade our network to windows 2000 so we bought a brand new dell server with windows 2000. However when we read the directions on how to upgrade our network it said to first upgrade your main domain controller to windows 2000 before you can add more windows 2000 servers. Of course our main server was an alpha and we couldn't upgrade it to windows 2000 because windows 2000 never came out for the alpha. This took a good couple days of banging our heads against the wall before we figured out what to do. We took an old pentium 133 (since that was the only computer we had that no one was doing anything with) and put windows nt server on that (luckily we found the disk that came with the alpha and that had nt server for x86 too.) We then made the pentium our main domain controller so that we could upgrade it to 2000 before making our new dell our main server. Ahhh good times!!!
SCO seems to think it is up to Linus to make sure that he puts no patented software into linux. But is it up to Linus to check the patent library or is it up to the patent holder to make sure no one is violating their patent? If you don't enforce your patent do you loose it? Shouldn't the companies be the ones that are searching through the kernel trying to see if there is a problem? This is a legal question and I am not sure what the answer is.
Also it is obvious that SCO is not interested in protecting their property they are insterested in making money off of it. If they tell Linus the parts of the code that violate their patent then I am sure in the next version of Linux those parts will be removed. SCO doesn't want to tell us the parts of the kernel with the problems now so they can sue us later for damages.
You are not supposed to be able to patent something that is obvious to an engineer working in the field. If an open source developer comes up with the same idea independently then wouldn't that be a good arguement that your idea was obvious and then you wouldn't be able to patent it?
I have a lot of great memories (as I am sure a lot of other poeople do) of using gwbasic -- and then qbasic on my 8088. I wrote tons of small programs using qbasic and dos.bat files to do all sorts of things automatically on my IBM XT circa ~1988. Yes Qbasic has MANY technical drawbacks (I think you used to only be able to write programs that were smaller than 64k) but it is also extremely easy to learn.
The online help is extensive and written with newbies in mind. Qbasic is one of the easiest languages to learn -- and once you have mastered qbasic it is much easier to then move on to a real language.
All the people that first learned to write code using qbasic or gwbasic please stand up!
I thought I would also like to point out that I would wish people would stop buying those "for dummies" books. Have a little self respect people! It is amazing to me that a group of books that openly insulting its user base could make so much money.
It is making it stand up in court that is hard. Everyone gets upset when company A claims to have a patent on the 1's in binary code or whatever. They may have such a patent but it probably will never stand up in court. Usually the cost of filing a patent is nothing compared to what you have to pay a patent lawyer to make sure that you patent is worded correctly; to make sure that someone can't claim that if they move the "on" switch over a few inches then the device becomea a different invention. I don't mind people getting useless patents -- if you want to pay that much money for something that is barely worth the paper it is printed on then that is fine! If there is too long of a wait to get your patent through they should just increase the cost of getting a patent. What I hate is when companies take their useless, never stand up in court, patents and try to get money out of the little guy. Maybe the patent system isn't the problem; maybe high legal fees and this sue first ask questions later attitude that we all (both the little guy and big companies) seem to have that is the problem.
True, antibiotics won't help with virsuses. But if they become inefective against some nasty strains of bacteria we could easily have an epidemic on our hands.
No one talks about the Flu epidemic of (I think) around 1910-1920. Killed people in towns so fast they had trouble burying them all. When the US sent troops to Europe in WWI I believe they were worried about spreading the flu virus (though they didn't know it was a virus) to everyone stuck on the small ships for the trip over seas. Not to scare people too much but this could happen again. We use our antibiotics way too much and aren't making new ones fast enough. And every year we get a new mutation on the flu. Most of the time it just makes you pretty sick maybe one of these days we will get another deadly mutation. Then again SARS and other deadly germs may be scary but in reality you are probably much more likely to get hit by a bus than to die of one of these things.
How many people bought 386's back in the day and just ran 286 and 8086 code on it? The 386 was 32 bit back in what? 1987? How long was it until we had a clean 32 bit OS with lots of 32 bit apps? I guess most home windows users (those who didn't use NT, 2000, or linux) didn't have a clean 32 bit OS until windows XP.
Yes, buy a laser printer! If I had moderator points to give away I would give it to this person. I bought an HP 6L laser printer like 3 years ago or so (can't remember the exact date) I wouldn't buy an HP low end laser printer again because I have heard that they aren't as reliable as other laser printers. Let's see almost 3 years of operation and I think I only replaced the toner once. It is starting to show its age though it often pulls a bunch of pages through when I only want to print one page (it happens less often if it has lots of paper loaded.) My wife and step dad both also have HP 6l's and they do the same thing. I understand it is because there is a wheel that wears out? This is what you can expect from a cheaply made laser printer. Next time I will buy a higher quality laser printer and maybe I will get 6 years or so out of it. Inkjets suck! Buy a laser! Yes they are a little more expensive and they don't do color but they last for YEARS instead of MONTHS! Oh and BTW linux drivers for hp laser printers? No problem! (although they may not have it for 6l if you use a driver for an older HP printer it seems to still work.) Also laser printers print on just about anything that can fit through the rollers (and won't melt.) No need to buy fancy inkjet paper of overhead projector slides. I would suggest having a laser printer for day to day stuff and then only having an inkjet if you must do color. And then I would buy the super cheap ones and only expect them to work a few times before I toss it (or at least buy more ink.)
11m pounds, 11m dollars who cares? Instead of an insane amount of money -- with current exchange rates he is making an insane amount of money and then some. I would do the money for 11m pounds, dollars, or euros. Heck I'd do the movie for 11m pesos but that is just me.
You could play Sega master games on a Sega Genesis if you bought the adapter. The Genesis had a z80 processor just so this would be possible. You could also play atari 2600 games on many later atari systems. Before Sony came around many had tried the reverse compatibility trick but it never worked before. Sony has done a lot of things that were considered mistakes when others had tried them before; but I guess the other companies never had the money to spend on advertising that Sony has.
I don't think anyone has mentioned scilab. It is a good GPL alternative (along with octave) to the expensive (expensive if you are a college student) matlab. It has been a while since I played with them alot but I found that matlab had the best graphing functions.
Anyway the best package for you in part depends on what you are using it for. Matlab, scilab and octave are great for doing linear algebra things -- manipulating matrices and arrays etc. Some people complain about how slow matlab is. I find matlab is pretty fast as long as you use it for what it was designed for. You should use their built in functions as much as possible and use as few loops as possible. If you find yourself using a lot of loops try writing a mex function in C or FORTRAN.
Maple and Mathmatica are great for Calculus differential equations etc. If you are doing a lot of matrix mulitiplies in Maple, you should be using matlab.
Mathcad is user friendly but it is SLOW. Even old people who have been doing insane integrals in their heads since the 50's and refuse to even look at a computer can see a Mathcad print out and tell exactly what the program is doing.
Hope this helps. Personally I like to use Octave and Scilab since they are GPL. Scilab is prettier IMHO but Octave is closer to Matlab (which I am already used to.)
Putting an alternative OS on a laptop? You still have to pay the evil lindows tax! Don't try to send in your unused lindows cd for a refund since they won't give it to you. And if something goes wrong they will blame the OS even if it is the hardware. Chances are that the tech support people will have never heard of windows and won't be able to help you. It is possible to put an alternative OS that not many people use on a laptop, but it can be a pain in the butt.
You say that now, but if you were hungry enough I bet you would eat it anyway. Hopefully you will never live through a famine which tests exactly what you would eat to keep yourself alive. Not everyone in this world can just go down the street to mcd's to get a burger.
People still use punch cards. Where I used to work, the people in the lab next to us still used 9-track tapes. They also had an analog and a digital/analog hybrid computer. There were even amigas in the lab (no os/2 though.) No matter how dead os/2 may seem to be I bet you in 10-20 years someone somewhere will still be using it for something. If it ain't broke don't fix it.
It said in the article that they were applying counter measures to help the body adapt. They may have lots of data to see what happens in space (maybe enough to tell that lying on your back is a good substitute) but if the counter measures are new they probably don't have much data on them. Paying $20,000 a pop to get some untrained volunteers to stay in bed for three months is a heck of a lot cheaper than sticking them in a space station.
Everyone is talking about how we need to put triangles and such on our money so you can tell the value of the note quickly. I think people are overlooking the fact that the most important shape on every bill is the picture of a human face. If we know someone we can all quickly tell them from a glance. I think our friends Washington, Hamilton, Jackson, et al, do as much to tell the value of a note as any funky shape would. I understand it takes people from other countries a while to get to know our friends but then again life sucks sometimes. Yes people in the US can be Amero-centric. Yes I can see how it gets annoying -- get over it! Oh I also think the human face is a good anti-counterfit method. Yes, changing the size of the different bills would be good for the blind -- aint gonna happen though. Look how much money it costs for them the switch to the Euro. Think we are going to spend that much over here? Also legal tender should have this rock solid -- you can trust me -- I will be worth this much forever feel. Changing the design every few years isn't going to help that image. When the new $100's and $20's came out am I the only one who thought it looked like Monopoly money (and I don't mean cash in M$'s bank account?) Yes it is just a slip of paper (well US money is more like cloth than paper) but it should somehow feel like it is something more.
Let's see that is only like 3-4 hourse from my job near Washington DC or my house in Baltimore. Yes that is quiet a drive but hey you get free broadband! What the heck the heck I-95 seems to get worse all the time maybe in a few years it will take 3-4 hours to get from Baltimore to DC and you don't even get good broadband (crappy comcast@ home err I mean comcast.net.)
Slashdot Mirror
Most power supplies on both laptops and desktops are switching power supplies. Usually they just take the incoming 110V and convert it to high voltage DC; they then convert that to lower voltage by switching the high voltage on and off. They then use a big cap to try and lower the ripple that this would obviously cause. IF they do use transformers, they usually take the high voltage DC and oscilate it at a lot higher frequency than the 60hz that you get from the plug. If your AC power is oscilating at a higher frequency you can get away with using smaller, cheaper, cooler, and more efficient transformers. Of course I am no power supply design expert maybe I will track down the website of someone who is so someone else can explain it better than I can.
Who told me that switching power supplies are more efficient when used close to their maximum load? The spec sheet on most switching power supplies. Here is one: http://www.st.com/stonline/books/pdf/docs/9673.pdf . And no surge protectors won't stop normal power spikes, that is what the power supplies are for -- even cheap power supplies should stop normal power spikes. And if you have a circuit that is really sensitive to power spikes it should have a voltage regulator on the mother board.
I wasn't able to read the article, but there was something I wanted to say about power supplies. It is my understanding that switching power supplies (the kind that are used in pc's) often become more efficient when used close to their maximum rating. Often time people suggest to get a wattage rating a lot higher than you need so you can expand later; but maybe it is better to get a power supply matched to the wattage that you are using -- you could probably at least save on your energy bill that way. Also it may be ok to get a cheap power supply even if it has more AC ripple than more expensive ones because if there is a sensitive circuit on the mother board that needs clean power they always have a nice voltage regulator and cap to clean off the power. Of course you don't want spikes but that is why power surge protectors were invented. Sorry if that was all in the article but like I said it is slashdotted already.
Lots of other people have suggested Washington DC. If you go there and just want a taste of NASA you could go to NASA Goddard which is half way between Washington DC and Baltimore MD (about 15-20 miles north of Washington.) And while you are in the area NSA is pretty close too. I don't think you can actually go to NSA (unless you want to get shot) but I believe there is a security and encryption museum near by. While you are going north of Washington you might want to check out the National Aquarium as well as the inner harbor in Baltimore -- that is if you are into marine biology. If you want nature and are on the East coast I would also suggest the Appalachian trail. It is nice trail that goes through most of the Appalachian mountains on the East coast. Just a few little suggestions :)
Just because a CD burner can be used to pirate software doesn't mean CD burners should be illegal. CD burners have legitimate purposes too (like backing up data that does belong to you.) Likewise just because these tags can be used to track someone's every move without them knowing about it doesn't mean they should be illegal. These tags also have legitimate pruposes (like keeping track of the dog that keeps running away or the car that keeps getting stolen.)
Putting a flag on your front porch is a great way to celebrate the 4th of July. An even better way to celebrate the United States' birthday would be to go to this site and actually read the documents that define us as a country.
In this day in age when it seems everyone is a suspected terrorist and our liberties are stripped one by one in the name of homeland security, and in the name of the rights of large companies, I wish some of our elected officials would actually read these documents sometime.
A red white and blue flag isn't what makes this country great, nor does an extremely high gross domestic product -- it is the set of ideas that where written over 200 years ago that makes the USA great.
So everyone go to this site and read those documents. Even if you aren't American you should still read those documents because everyone has the right to the freedoms that our founding fathers wrote about.
The only server on our domain used to be an alpha running NT server. A while ago we wanted to upgrade our network to windows 2000 so we bought a brand new dell server with windows 2000. However when we read the directions on how to upgrade our network it said to first upgrade your main domain controller to windows 2000 before you can add more windows 2000 servers. Of course our main server was an alpha and we couldn't upgrade it to windows 2000 because windows 2000 never came out for the alpha. This took a good couple days of banging our heads against the wall before we figured out what to do. We took an old pentium 133 (since that was the only computer we had that no one was doing anything with) and put windows nt server on that (luckily we found the disk that came with the alpha and that had nt server for x86 too.) We then made the pentium our main domain controller so that we could upgrade it to 2000 before making our new dell our main server. Ahhh good times!!!
SCO seems to think it is up to Linus to make sure that he puts no patented software into linux. But is it up to Linus to check the patent library or is it up to the patent holder to make sure no one is violating their patent? If you don't enforce your patent do you loose it? Shouldn't the companies be the ones that are searching through the kernel trying to see if there is a problem? This is a legal question and I am not sure what the answer is.
Also it is obvious that SCO is not interested in protecting their property they are insterested in making money off of it. If they tell Linus the parts of the code that violate their patent then I am sure in the next version of Linux those parts will be removed. SCO doesn't want to tell us the parts of the kernel with the problems now so they can sue us later for damages.
You are not supposed to be able to patent something that is obvious to an engineer working in the field. If an open source developer comes up with the same idea independently then wouldn't that be a good arguement that your idea was obvious and then you wouldn't be able to patent it?
I have a lot of great memories (as I am sure a lot of other poeople do) of using gwbasic -- and then qbasic on my 8088. I wrote tons of small programs using qbasic and dos .bat files to do all sorts of things automatically on my IBM XT circa ~1988. Yes Qbasic has MANY technical drawbacks (I think you used to only be able to write programs that were smaller than 64k) but it is also extremely easy to learn.
The online help is extensive and written with newbies in mind. Qbasic is one of the easiest languages to learn -- and once you have mastered qbasic it is much easier to then move on to a real language.
All the people that first learned to write code using qbasic or gwbasic please stand up!
I thought I would also like to point out that I would wish people would stop buying those "for dummies" books. Have a little self respect people! It is amazing to me that a group of books that openly insulting its user base could make so much money.
It is making it stand up in court that is hard. Everyone gets upset when company A claims to have a patent on the 1's in binary code or whatever. They may have such a patent but it probably will never stand up in court. Usually the cost of filing a patent is nothing compared to what you have to pay a patent lawyer to make sure that you patent is worded correctly; to make sure that someone can't claim that if they move the "on" switch over a few inches then the device becomea a different invention. I don't mind people getting useless patents -- if you want to pay that much money for something that is barely worth the paper it is printed on then that is fine! If there is too long of a wait to get your patent through they should just increase the cost of getting a patent. What I hate is when companies take their useless, never stand up in court, patents and try to get money out of the little guy. Maybe the patent system isn't the problem; maybe high legal fees and this sue first ask questions later attitude that we all (both the little guy and big companies) seem to have that is the problem.
True, antibiotics won't help with virsuses. But if they become inefective against some nasty strains of bacteria we could easily have an epidemic on our hands.
No one talks about the Flu epidemic of (I think) around 1910-1920. Killed people in towns so fast they had trouble burying them all. When the US sent troops to Europe in WWI I believe they were worried about spreading the flu virus (though they didn't know it was a virus) to everyone stuck on the small ships for the trip over seas. Not to scare people too much but this could happen again. We use our antibiotics way too much and aren't making new ones fast enough. And every year we get a new mutation on the flu. Most of the time it just makes you pretty sick maybe one of these days we will get another deadly mutation. Then again SARS and other deadly germs may be scary but in reality you are probably much more likely to get hit by a bus than to die of one of these things.
How many people bought 386's back in the day and just ran 286 and 8086 code on it? The 386 was 32 bit back in what? 1987? How long was it until we had a clean 32 bit OS with lots of 32 bit apps? I guess most home windows users (those who didn't use NT, 2000, or linux) didn't have a clean 32 bit OS until windows XP.
Yes, buy a laser printer! If I had moderator points to give away I would give it to this person. I bought an HP 6L laser printer like 3 years ago or so (can't remember the exact date) I wouldn't buy an HP low end laser printer again because I have heard that they aren't as reliable as other laser printers. Let's see almost 3 years of operation and I think I only replaced the toner once. It is starting to show its age though it often pulls a bunch of pages through when I only want to print one page (it happens less often if it has lots of paper loaded.) My wife and step dad both also have HP 6l's and they do the same thing. I understand it is because there is a wheel that wears out? This is what you can expect from a cheaply made laser printer. Next time I will buy a higher quality laser printer and maybe I will get 6 years or so out of it. Inkjets suck! Buy a laser! Yes they are a little more expensive and they don't do color but they last for YEARS instead of MONTHS! Oh and BTW linux drivers for hp laser printers? No problem! (although they may not have it for 6l if you use a driver for an older HP printer it seems to still work.) Also laser printers print on just about anything that can fit through the rollers (and won't melt.) No need to buy fancy inkjet paper of overhead projector slides. I would suggest having a laser printer for day to day stuff and then only having an inkjet if you must do color. And then I would buy the super cheap ones and only expect them to work a few times before I toss it (or at least buy more ink.)
11m pounds, 11m dollars who cares? Instead of an insane amount of money -- with current exchange rates he is making an insane amount of money and then some. I would do the money for 11m pounds, dollars, or euros. Heck I'd do the movie for 11m pesos but that is just me.
You could play Sega master games on a Sega Genesis if you bought the adapter. The Genesis had a z80 processor just so this would be possible. You could also play atari 2600 games on many later atari systems. Before Sony came around many had tried the reverse compatibility trick but it never worked before. Sony has done a lot of things that were considered mistakes when others had tried them before; but I guess the other companies never had the money to spend on advertising that Sony has.
I don't think anyone has mentioned scilab. It is a good GPL alternative (along with octave) to the expensive (expensive if you are a college student) matlab. It has been a while since I played with them alot but I found that matlab had the best graphing functions.
Anyway the best package for you in part depends on what you are using it for. Matlab, scilab and octave are great for doing linear algebra things -- manipulating matrices and arrays etc. Some people complain about how slow matlab is. I find matlab is pretty fast as long as you use it for what it was designed for. You should use their built in functions as much as possible and use as few loops as possible. If you find yourself using a lot of loops try writing a mex function in C or FORTRAN.
Maple and Mathmatica are great for Calculus differential equations etc. If you are doing a lot of matrix mulitiplies in Maple, you should be using matlab.
Mathcad is user friendly but it is SLOW. Even old people who have been doing insane integrals in their heads since the 50's and refuse to even look at a computer can see a Mathcad print out and tell exactly what the program is doing.
Hope this helps. Personally I like to use Octave and Scilab since they are GPL. Scilab is prettier IMHO but Octave is closer to Matlab (which I am already used to.)
Putting an alternative OS on a laptop? You still have to pay the evil lindows tax! Don't try to send in your unused lindows cd for a refund since they won't give it to you. And if something goes wrong they will blame the OS even if it is the hardware. Chances are that the tech support people will have never heard of windows and won't be able to help you. It is possible to put an alternative OS that not many people use on a laptop, but it can be a pain in the butt.
You say that now, but if you were hungry enough I bet you would eat it anyway. Hopefully you will never live through a famine which tests exactly what you would eat to keep yourself alive. Not everyone in this world can just go down the street to mcd's to get a burger.
What is the functionality of having a computer in the shape, and in as many colors, as the imac? How many imac's did apple sell?
People still use punch cards. Where I used to work, the people in the lab next to us still used 9-track tapes. They also had an analog and a digital/analog hybrid computer. There were even amigas in the lab (no os/2 though.) No matter how dead os/2 may seem to be I bet you in 10-20 years someone somewhere will still be using it for something. If it ain't broke don't fix it.
Who saw the title of this story and thought: Oh, here is Henry my Cock Roach. I taught him to roll over, play dead, and survive a nuclear war?
It said in the article that they were applying counter measures to help the body adapt. They may have lots of data to see what happens in space (maybe enough to tell that lying on your back is a good substitute) but if the counter measures are new they probably don't have much data on them. Paying $20,000 a pop to get some untrained volunteers to stay in bed for three months is a heck of a lot cheaper than sticking them in a space station.
Everyone is talking about how we need to put triangles and such on our money so you can tell the value of the note quickly. I think people are overlooking the fact that the most important shape on every bill is the picture of a human face. If we know someone we can all quickly tell them from a glance. I think our friends Washington, Hamilton, Jackson, et al, do as much to tell the value of a note as any funky shape would. I understand it takes people from other countries a while to get to know our friends but then again life sucks sometimes. Yes people in the US can be Amero-centric. Yes I can see how it gets annoying -- get over it! Oh I also think the human face is a good anti-counterfit method. Yes, changing the size of the different bills would be good for the blind -- aint gonna happen though. Look how much money it costs for them the switch to the Euro. Think we are going to spend that much over here? Also legal tender should have this rock solid -- you can trust me -- I will be worth this much forever feel. Changing the design every few years isn't going to help that image. When the new $100's and $20's came out am I the only one who thought it looked like Monopoly money (and I don't mean cash in M$'s bank account?) Yes it is just a slip of paper (well US money is more like cloth than paper) but it should somehow feel like it is something more.
Let's see that is only like 3-4 hourse from my job near Washington DC or my house in Baltimore. Yes that is quiet a drive but hey you get free broadband! What the heck the heck I-95 seems to get worse all the time maybe in a few years it will take 3-4 hours to get from Baltimore to DC and you don't even get good broadband (crappy comcast@ home err I mean comcast.net.)