First, you said it was a 9V AC adaptor so the DC peak is ~13V.
In North America, the accepted definition of the term "AC adapter" is a plug-mounted power supply which outputs a low AC or DC voltage. The reference to AC refers to the fact that it plugs into AC. If you're unclear about the common usage of the English language in this regard, you can see it in context merely by typing "ac adapter" into Yahoo's search field.
Second, a voltage doubler before the rectifier is entirely possible.
At least two diodes and at least two electrolytic capacitors. Why not just buy different rating AC adapters at the same price?
It doesn't have a voltage doubler in it, and neither you or I needs to open it to prove it. Doing so would be only marginally more ridiculous than looking for a flyback transformer in an AM radio.
It's not quite this simple with dynamic components (inductors/capacitors/coils). That's why speakers have 8 ohms impedance, not 8 ohms resistance.
Of course not. Maybe you'd like to teach the new Slashdot course, "Differential Calculus for Electrical Engineering", if you think that my ballpark approach, which anyone with high school physics ought to handle, is too simplistic.
There's no need to go to all this effort.
Sure there is. I was trying to prove my point mathematically.
You already said the AC adaptor is 300mA at 9V. Sustainable power is therefore approximately 3W. Peak power is an unknown because the internal circuitry could easily store enough energy to give 100s of watts of power, even if only for a short time.
Sure. Like looking for a pulse generator and a stack of oil-filled capacitors in a transistor radio. I dunno how they build electronics down under, but around here, we don't add the complexity, cost or unreliability of adding components unnecessarily.
Without opening the speaker boxes you can't make any judgement.
Sure I can. It's got a pair of LM386 ICs, held on with dull-gray blobs of solder on a printed circuit board that looks like the layout was done by a Parkinsons patient's left hand. Components will be skewed on the board, held in place only by cold solder joints. You might find it's actually built of discrete parts; I don't know and I don't care - but I assure you that there won't even be anything as substantial as a TDA2002 in them, despite the 250W claim.
I've always thought of the wattage ratings as the total consumed power... That is including transformer loss! If you think of it that way they aren't exactly lying, just not telling you anything useful about the product.
Sure they are. Power into the speakers is 9VDC @ 300mA from the AC adapter. 2.7 watts output from the adapter. Now, a modern transformer, even the one in a crappy wall-wart, is gonna be at least 90% efficient. Meaning that, no matter how you slice it, the speakers aren't drawing more than 3.5W on the *very* outside from the power line. How does that make them 250W speakers?
Not to say they aren't lying, they are, but capacitors can be charged to a higher voltage than the source using a voltage doubler circuit or a flyback voltage multiplier. Doesn't give you any more power but does trade current for voltage. See this page for some example circuits.
Of course they could. Or they could use an 18V 150mA AC adapter instead of a 9V 300mA AC adapter - which, it would strike me, would be a lot cheaper than adding to the parts count.
The only time DC-DC converter circuits are used in amps is car stereo amplifiers, where the power supply is DC and limited to 13.8V, which really can't offer you more than 20W into 4 ohms. (4 ohm speakers were initially brought into use as car stereo systems evolved from utilitarian car radios.)
Advertised "250 watt" computer speakers which weigh three pounds and are powered off a 9V 300mA AC adapter.
P = E x I, where P is power in watts, E is electromotive force in volts, and I is current in amperes.
1 amp = 1000mA. You do the math.
A real 200 watt power amplifier will generally have a power supply with a transformer which weighs at least 50 pounds, and that's *per channel*.
And they use the term "PMPO" - "Peak Music Power Output". Fine, putting aside the fact that this term has no accepted definition in electrical engineering - let's say that those little Taiwanese-made speakers contain an amplifier with a big bank of capacitors to dump out enough current to achieve 250 watts peak. If the power supply to them is only 9V, the capacitors would never get above 9V. If the speakers themselves have a standard nominal impedance of 8 ohms, then we can calculate.
A simple application of Ohm's Law reveals that 9V into 8 ohms could yield a maximum current of (I = E/R) 1.125 amps. 1.125 amps at 9 volts shows 10.125 watts absolute peak. And in real world situations, we must include the on-state resistance of all the transistors in the output stages.
10.125W < 250W. Therefore, they are lying. By a factor of almost 25.
Wattage ratings tend to be utter lies with any consumer electronics, especially car audio equipment and boom boxes. The absolute worst come from tiny little Chinese sweatshops making brands of computer speakers that no one has ever heard of.
My computer's sound system includes a pair of Acoustic Research AR-4x bookshelf speakers driven off a highly modified Sound A-5000 power amplifier. B+ to the output stages is 45V DC derived from a 10 pound power supply transformer, and it does produce a solid and stable 25W RMS per channel into 8 ohms, using a 1kHz sinewave driving a resistive load. And that's the accepted standard for wattage ratings of real power amplifiers.
As a former professional sound technician who has done lead sound for Garth Brooks, Harry Belafonte, and The Three Tenors at such prestigious venues at the SkyDome, I've frequently used 240 watt power amplifiers from companies like ElectroVoice, Crown and QSC to power stage monitors on 5000 square foot stages. I speak from experience that running some of this stuff in your house will make your nose bleed. You're not gonna tell me with inflated numbers that a set of $19.95 at Fry's computer speakers will do the same thing.
There's no shame in admitting that a given computer speaker system has a rating of 1W RMS per channel, but idiot consumers just buy the biggest number they can find. In reality, it takes four times the power to double the volume.
Jeez, it's almost as bad as the horsepower ratings on new cars...
I find it particularly disturbing that Red Hat is growing "exponentially" in size. I'm pretty sure that they don't have to include all the options but they don't make it easy to disable them.
I gotta agree, RH seems to be turning into Microsoft. Remember the bug list on RH 7.0? It rivalled Windows 2000.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's unwarranted. RH is the defacto standard Linux distro and will probably be the one to take the desktop from Microsoft, if ever anyone manages to. Installing everything by default is as a consequence of tech support nightmares:
"I thought this thing had a webserver"
"It does, sir, go to Start, Control Panel, Add and Remove Programs, Internet Information Server. Stick your Windows CD into the drive, restart when prompted, and you're done."
"Stop it, that's too technical!"
End-users *are* that stupid. I'd always thought it was an urban legend, but then I did tech support for a while, and was amazed to actually speak to someone who believed that the CD-ROM's drawer was a coffee holder.
As a consequence of the stupidity of users versus the cost of tech support, Windows tends to install and start IIS by default.
And any other mainstream operating system will have to tend to do similar things by default, both in order to remain financially viable and perceived as being easy enough for e-mail-virus-spreading simpleton end-users to be able to handle.
Now many of you may jump on the bandwagon and say "Wait, Linux is not meant to be easy". I'll retort by saying: Red Hat should be easy. If you're going to target users with a desktop application then you don't make things harder. Desktops were invented to make things easier or more efficient to use.
Absolutely. To viably get Linux onto the desktops of the masses, we need at least (but preferably only) one easy-to-install, works right out of the box distro that does everything. Red Hat appears to be it, though the consequences are necessarily going to be size and stability. However, I'd rather have a big, bloated and buggy Red Hat user base out there than the big, bloated and buggy Windows user base we have out there. At least it moves people to a real operating system, and once they're familiar with how UNIX works, they can go out and install any other UNIX variant of their choice and be reasonably competent. It also helps to slow down The Dark Overlord's plans for world domination.
And, in my experience, bugs in a UNIX/Linux environment tend to be less serious than those in Windows, due to better security models and better coding.
Interesting. I'm probably gonna get modded all to hell for this, but what are 50 karma points for, if not to be able to post controversial stuff at +2?
I've proven, via the previous statement, that either fundamentalist Islam is a cult or that Scientology is a real religion....
Fundamentalist Islamis, in a way, similar to a doomsday cult, although they don't believe in a soon-to-come end of the world. They believe that humanity is on a path to immediate self-destruction and thatFundamentalist Islamis the only way to "save" and "free" the world. They believe that they are superiour beings (members claim to have gained superhuman powers by theirbelief in Allah). We, the non-members, are just stupid "infidels", who can be cheated, lied to, even killed at will. Bin Ladenactually promised his members the superhuman power of having dozens of virginal wives who've never heard of Gloria Steinemby mere thought.
They also believe to be in a constant state of siege by the outside world, surrounded by enemies trying to enslave them. The outside world is seen as hostile, non-members are a grey goo of AH-mair-EEE-cansand critics are evil enemies who can be attacked withBoeings. Fundamentalist Islam's favourite weapon is martyrs...
Of course, Fundamentalist Islamsees this as pure self-defense against the hostile outside world. However, someone who dares to say something remotely critical of the cult is instantly labeleda "stupid Jew"and handled as such, making the small critic an even fiercer critic...
So, yeah, Fundamentalist Islamis making itself enemies from people who just expressed doubt. And this helps Fundamentalist Islam, because *having* enemies is proof of their worldview and is what keeps the cult together.
What is the it about the cult that causes geeks everywere to keep tabs on them?
That's easy. We're intelligent, and organizations which pray on the gullible proles amuse us.
Want proof? Last time someone forwarded you an e-mail about a virus hoax you'd never seen before, you read it from end to end, laughing at the stupidity of every fool who passed it on. Admit it.
In Canada, they've lost all the way to the Supreme Court - One case is Hill v. Church of Scientology of Toronto, 1995.
Heh. On Toronto's main street, Yonge, there's a multi-story Church of Scientology building, and there are always many whackos out there handing out flyers and trying to recruit new morons. While walking past, I've frequently been propositioned the same way a dope dealer will. Instead of hearing "hydro" or "blunt" whispered at you as you walk past, it's "personality test".
"Jobs Available: Hard Work, Low Pay", they advertise on a sign in the window. And people go in.
One time in about 1994, I was parked on a sidestreet nearby and when I returned to my car, there was a flyer under my windshield wiper, essentially attempting to induct me. I was so incensed that I took it home, used it to wipe a certain region after a certain requirement of the human digestive system, and mailed it back to them. I figured the satisfaction was worth the cost of the postage.
The scariest thing about the Church of Scientology is not their aggression or attempted suppression of freedom of speech. It's the fact that the their cult's survival proves the existence of people who are more stupid than Raelians.
But I gotta profess my most profound admiration for L. Ron Hubbard. It amuses me to go to a casino, sit on a stool, and watch obese programmed robots put quarter after quarter into slot machines. I don't gamble - I just get some sort of sick pleasure from watching the old saying "a fool and his money are soon parted" being proven on such a spectacularly grand scale. Scientology kinda makes Las Vegas and lottery tickets seem insignificant.
Stupidity and the consequential belief in superstition. Same things about salt over one's shoulder, not stepping on cracks, walking under ladders, etc.
Or the paranoid delusion that an invisible, omnipotent man is watching you whilst you engage in the process of expelling feces. And all the deaths which can be attributed to that particular delusion throughout human history.
Re: magnetic north. I'm looking forward to a Darwin Award for someone who freezes to death on a procreational trip up there. I had to go to Baffin Island once on business. Never, ever again.
I'm no found of the CPCC but this Lawrence Wade guy needs to get a life.
True. It's 3:AM, and I'm taking a break from teaching myself calculus, which I'm doing simply because I enjoy the stimulation. And it's a prerequisite to another one of my self-directed challenges, a challenge which involves microstrip, waveguide and a 25kW X-band radar magnetron.
He's surfing the web and just looking around for copyright violations? Is an IP lawyer or something?
Ahhh... A foreigner. Given past experience, you're probably incited to near-riot by my.sig. Go to www.circlist.org for instructions and help with your problem.
The "You've Got Questions, We've Got Answers" trademark is memorable (because it's so condescending) and runs on every Radio Shack commercial on TV. When I followed a Slashdot link to a CPCC website, I was surprised to see such a familiar trademark being misused by an agency charged with (in some backward way) protecting intellectual property.
Now, unless your smegma accumulation has had an effect similar to mercury on your brain, surely you can appreciate the irony of the situation, and at a stretch of your intellectual biceps, may fathom why I felt compelled to write an e-mail to InterTan.
And, as for my life, I get lucky any Saturday night I so choose. Looking like a cross between Wil Wheaton and Jerry O'Connell, combining a gregarious personality with a 6'4" 200lb frame (ooh, sorry, no hablo metric), and with gray matter in abundance, I have no trouble whatsoever fooling the ladies into thinking that I'm husband material. And while I don't subscribe to astrology (it's somewhere between Las Vegas and playing bingo on my scale of white trash), I couldn't possibly be more the stereotype of my Aries sign. The persuasiveness, cocky self-confidence and downright arrogance of my personality help me put Sam Malone to shame.
Yep, Eva-Tone made them, they stopped making them about a year ago...
A year ago?
Jeez, who was buying them a year ago?
That's incredible. I'd assumed they were as far back in the past as the double-chamber McDLT styrofoam box (keeps the hot side hot and the cold side cold...).
I'm old enough to remember when some books and magazines included analog records printed on sheets of plastic... particularly music instruction books, and things of that nature.
"Sound Sheets", they were called.
Memories:
"Sound Sheets should not be used with automatic record changers."
"Place Coin Here If Sound Sheet Slips"
I remember as a kid, when Pierre Elliot Trudeau did that big constitution thing with the queen back in 1981, the newspaper came with Sound Sheets of the Canadian national anthem. Somewhere, I still have that and a few other sound sheets.
One of them is a little mutilated. At the ripe old age of 7, I *had* to know what would happen if I put it onto the old BSR record changer.
And now, it's consoling that a new generation shall know the horror.
More concerning is potential frost build up, and the effects of temperature cycling (get in your car, heat it up (-20 to 20C), get out, it cools down (back to -20C); repeat several time a day for 4 months) on mechanical components like the IDE harddrive.
Yeah, between that and automotive vibrations, I wouldn't want to have anything more than an old hand-me-down hard drive in there.
Hmmm... 4.3 gig drive kicking aroud here...
It's incredibly nice to know what the filesystem is. I can imagine going out and buying another mfr's player, with the included hard drive, having the hard drive fail, and not being able to simply partition/format/install a new hard drive. Worst case would be a non-standard filesystem. Ick. I'm not interested in paying $400 for a 20 gig hard drive whose only special feature is a proprietary filesystem.
My biggest problem with this thing is the apparent lack of any means to transfer music, short of physically removing the drive and plopping it onto your IDE bus. Note that it's late, I didn't read the review in depth, but checking out the specs I didn't see any mention of network connections, USB, FireWire, or even parallel ports on this thing. I'm not adverse to hiding a covered RJ-45 somewhere on my car. Wireless would be great, but at least I know I'll still be able to dig up an NE2000 ten years from now, and if I'm putting it into the dashboard of one of my cars, it's gonna be there for a while. (Ask me about the 12-year-old Alpine pullout CD player in my '76 Ram...)
At the very least, a serial port and Kermit would be good at this point, RS-232 can handle distance, and for cripes' sake, it's not like they'd have to look too hard to conjure up 12V to run a couple of serial line driver chips. Start the transfer when you get home, let it run overnight, and you might have made a small dent in the old hand-me-down hard drive. It probably already has enough RAM for its OS and playback needs that, in transfer mode, it could be designed to spin up the drive and write to it only when sufficient data has collected, then shut it back down to save the car's battery. (The current draw of a hard disk spinning overnight could make winter starting unreliable.)
The pinout shows RX and TX lines, so one can only hope and assume this is something they're working on. I'm sure as hell not ripping this thing's hard drive out of my dashboard every time I want to add another song to the collection.
A tuner is on my wishlist, too. I need my Howard Stern in the mornings. Internal amplifiers? Nah, I'll just build my own and bolt it somewhere.
Other than that, it's a nice alternative to having an old P100 kicking around in your trunk. I want one.
The fact that insulin helps memory is old news, so is the fact that exercise help memory. (these are the two tentative conclusions of the article.)
Nicotine, as a stimulant, is also known to do these things. So, perhaps frantically chewing Nicorettes during a test ought to help even more. (Unless you're a non-smoker, in which case you're likely to simultaneously vomit and keel over, thus gaining a medical reason for which to take a test over. Either way, you win!)
My only question is who the hell gave them a grant to do this, and what silly assed professor approved?
Importantly, this is another Useless Fact (tm) that can be bandied about when one needs to convince an imbecile of that which is common sense.
As for why the group wasn't bigger, more scientific, "pretend gum", etc., well, I'm sure the reason was that the study, being an exercise in proving common sense, wasn't going to attract the biggest grants, corporate sponsorships, etc.
No worry. It has served its purpose. I have printed out the article and shall leave it on the desk of a co-worker who always complains about my minty-fresh breath.
So, from like four feet away: "Jeeeee-zuz! Were you gargling pure methyl salicylate again?"
Fine. My breath smells like laboratory-grade oil of wintergreen. I'm nice enough not to tell him that his smells remarkably similar to the inside of sewage treatment plant's slurry pump.
This is *precisely* why human beings should be confined to this planet: this "compassionate conservative" wants to spread his "it's not my problem" immaturity to the stars, where it'll be free to destroy everything it doesn't understand or can't empathize with.
I resent and reject both the terms "compassionate" and "conservative".
I am a Libertarian by nature, and I like to let people celebrate the triumphs of good decisions and hard work, whilst suffering the perils of poor decisions and laziness, with an absolute minimum of government intervention.
Being called conservative is, frankly, offensive. Too often, conservative politics run synonymously with religion. And, of course, religious faith is symptomatic of a paranoid-delusional disorder. It terrifies me that George Dubya and Trent Lott really think that an invisible man watches them while they sit on the john, and instead of being locked up in a rubber room, they're elected to office.
Empathy? Well, I'm sure that it hurts being on the wrong side of Darwin, but it's not my fault. It's not my fault that HIV-infected Ugandan tribesmen think they can be cured by sleeping with a virgin. It's not my fault that all of Bangladesh is located on India's sewer (Ganges River) and that the whole country is doomed to frequent floods because it's barely above sea level. And it's not my fault that these savages in the Middle East are killing each other because of a warped game of "My Paranoid Delusional Fantasy Is Better Than Your Paranoid Delusional Fantasy". On September 11th, that one *did* become my problem, and while I thoroughly empathize with the needs for psychiatric treatment for religious people everywhere, like dealing with a rabid dog, euthanasia is an attractive and practical alternative.
Best outcome: the nukes do us all in, and the dolphins take over the top of the food chain.
For one thing, the Chernobyl nuclear plant was a disaster waiting to happen. Between the dangerous design of the reactor and the fact there was no containment dome, no wonder the disaster was so bad.
One idiot (while driving the stereotype poorly-tuned oil-burning VW Microbus and pretending to be an environmentalist) was telling me all about how sorry we'd be when Pickering (a CANDU-design nuclear plant outside Toronto) "goes Chernobyl".
Ahhh, yes. That would deny the fact, of course, that deuterium water is required as a moderator for U-238 to fission. And that when the reactor overheats, a pipe will burst somewhere and all the moderator (very expensive water) will escape as steam. And that, without the moderator, the reactor will cease to produce heat.
Instead, we're going to have tonnes of (solid, non-evaporating) graphite blocks with U-235 rods glowing red-hot within, belching smoke and radioactive dust across Toronto, all coming from a reactor which doesn't have any of these critical design flaws?
I told him to stop voting until he stopped smoking up.
To propose that we spend more money on NASA (with cutbacks already planned), the "nuclear fission" rocket may just be a pipe dream. It's hard to convince people that we need to explore space when the topic of the day is terrorism.
Well, they go hand in hand. The technology from space exploration affects our lives in thousands of big and small ways every day. The integrated circuit was first mass-produced for space exploration reasons. And it's a lot easier to peel my fried eggs off Teflon than it is off cast iron.
Any advance in getting the general public to get over their Three Mile Island and Chernobyl paranoia will require nuclear-powered triumphs.
Idiot hippy environmentalists speak of cutting dependence on (foreign) oil by moving to electric cars. That'd be nice. How do you intend to handle California's power crisis (remember, 2 years ago) when 10,000,000 Los Angeles commuters are plugging in their cars every night?
The very same environmentalists who scream about oil and air pollution are also at the mass rallies to ban genetically-modified agriculture. GM corn is probably the most economically feasible way, at this point, to make large quantities of methanol, which could replace gasoline very easily, simply retrofitting existing vehicles and infrastructure. These people also scream that we have to solve world hunger before we feed our cars. (My opinion? Theses savages are stupid enough to breed when they can't feed themselves, let alone their larvae. It doesn't take education or literacy to understand the problem; a below-average human intelligence should readily grasp the situation. It's not my problem, and I resent you attempting to make it my problem.)
Tidal/Solar/Wave power? Sure, they're neat science fair projects for the kiddies, but they're simply not capable of contributing substantially to our energy needs for the forseeble future.
Nuclear power is the only viable solution. And the proles have discarded it because they're too simple to understand that blaming nuclear power for Chernobyl would be like blaming gasoline for a car accident. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and the vast majority of car accidents are caused by imbeciles, not the fuel source.
What's all this got to do with terrorism? Simple. The sooner we get off foreign oil, the sooner we can dig a moat around the Middle East and let them do their thing in isolation from the civilized world. And if funding NASA to build huge nuclear public-relations projects which will inevitably bring us other technologies as a consequence, I'm all for it.
Go ahead. Mod me down. But I'm right, and all the politically-correct simpering you might want to do won't change the facts.
There is something in Canada called the CPCC and it exists to collect this money and disburse it.
Ahem... This organization exists to disperse funds collected due to alleged violations of intellectual property laws? How interesting and ironic, then.
The following e-mail was sent to several standard-ish e-mail addresses within the radioshack.ca domain. You know, legal@, sales@, webmaster@.
Dear Sirs,
It has come to my attention that your trademark, "You've Got Questions, We've Got Answers" is being used, presumably without your authorization, by a Canadian agency which was created to protect the intellectual property rights of others through dispersal of levies on media.
As I've come to associate "You've Got Questions, We've Got Answers" with my friendly and helpful local Radio Shack retailer, as a consumer, I find myself in a most distressing and confusing situation.
I hate tree-huggers. I say, fuck the trees. If god can't provide us enough tree's, then he doesn't mean us to have enough trees. What ever god provides is all we should use. Like my 94 ford f250. It has a 450 in it, and it ge about 5mpg. I can afford the gas, so who gives a fuck if I spend MY hard earned money on fuel. God is the "mother nature" that tree-huggers like to talk about. Just like I said before, if God doesn't provide it, he doesn't mean us to have it.
Heheheh...
You know, in all seriousness, nature would have eventually oxidized (burned) all that petroleum anyway. Man's modern cars simply do it more stoichiometrically than any way nature would have consumed it.
Environmentalist groups should therefore be grateful for the internal combustion engine; every time you fill up your SUV, you help to avert an eventual environmental catastrophe which would have made the Kuwaiti oil well fires look like a Zippo flame.
plus, I never trust a media outlet who can neither spell, nor use spellcheck.;) "They sorounded the house with guns before raiding it." - RTF Founder
Tell me about it. If anti-globalization protesters were literate, maybe people would listen to them. Currently, they're far more amusing than credible.
How about the use of the possessive to denote plural? "undercover's"? "government's"?
And the cream of the crop: "with they're eyes focused on the premises." With they are eyes...? "they're excuse" They are excuse?
I guess I understand what his site stands for: I'd be angry if I were illiterate, too.
But I am concerned that he got raided. He should be allowed to speak, even if he does desecrate the English language in the process.
I guess the simple truth is that now that 100 gig drives are a couple hundred bucks, we now have the ability to store anything we reasonably could need (unless you define "Reasonable" as "I need to store DNA Sequences").
Doesn't "640k ought to be enough for anybody" suggest that Bill Gates once felt the same way about RAM?
Of course, visionary that he is [snicker!], there's no way he could have imagined desktop machines being used to edit video.
Likewise, who knows how big and bloated Clippit The Office Paperclip can get if we have 100 gigs of hard disk space to burn... maybe, one day, he'll actually bear consultation when you need information, instead of when you need something to laugh at.
I love calculus so much, I want to give it to everyone! Come, get some integration!
MmMMmmm... calculus. Hours spent in the dentist's chair, with him scraping hard crusties off my teeth... And you're just giving that stuff away?
Yeah, I guess "tree huggers" are to blame for the problems you're having killing the environment in precisely the way that you want to. Every other kid has an asthma inhaler or is on some kind of allergy medication, but don't let that stop you from putting a bigger gasoline engine in your 2-ton pickup truck and hauling ass.
Running on 50% ethanol, I put out less H2SO4, less NOx and less CO than a fail for a NEW Toyota RAV4 and only marginally more unburnt HC than the average new pickup truck, according to my last emissions test. So I guess my rigorous tune-up schedule keeps a few kids off inhalers.
Building an engine for performance is simply a question of making it burn fuel as efficiently as possible. Even if you've only taken high school chemistry, you should still be able to see that the point at which an engine produces the most power is also when it produces the least emissions. And I've got a lot of money invested in maintaining that stoichiometric ideal.
So, how's that oil-burning Hyundai Excel of yours, anyway? Yeah, it's cleaner than your VW Microbus with the tie-dye paintjob and black stain over the exhaust pipe. Feel good about yourself, driving that to environment rallies?
Go take your bachelor of arts and your Bjork CDs and make out with a birch. Come back to discuss it with me when you understand a little chemistry, physics and engineering thermodynamics.
Slashdot Mirror
Two mistakes here.
Nope.
First, you said it was a 9V AC adaptor so the DC peak is ~13V.In North America, the accepted definition of the term "AC adapter" is a plug-mounted power supply which outputs a low AC or DC voltage. The reference to AC refers to the fact that it plugs into AC. If you're unclear about the common usage of the English language in this regard, you can see it in context merely by typing "ac adapter" into Yahoo's search field.
Second, a voltage doubler before the rectifier is entirely possible.At least two diodes and at least two electrolytic capacitors. Why not just buy different rating AC adapters at the same price?
It doesn't have a voltage doubler in it, and neither you or I needs to open it to prove it. Doing so would be only marginally more ridiculous than looking for a flyback transformer in an AM radio.
It's not quite this simple with dynamic components (inductors/capacitors/coils). That's why speakers have 8 ohms impedance, not 8 ohms resistance.Of course not. Maybe you'd like to teach the new Slashdot course, "Differential Calculus for Electrical Engineering", if you think that my ballpark approach, which anyone with high school physics ought to handle, is too simplistic.
There's no need to go to all this effort.Sure there is. I was trying to prove my point mathematically.
You already said the AC adaptor is 300mA at 9V. Sustainable power is therefore approximately 3W. Peak power is an unknown because the internal circuitry could easily store enough energy to give 100s of watts of power, even if only for a short time.Sure. Like looking for a pulse generator and a stack of oil-filled capacitors in a transistor radio. I dunno how they build electronics down under, but around here, we don't add the complexity, cost or unreliability of adding components unnecessarily.
Without opening the speaker boxes you can't make any judgement.Sure I can. It's got a pair of LM386 ICs, held on with dull-gray blobs of solder on a printed circuit board that looks like the layout was done by a Parkinsons patient's left hand. Components will be skewed on the board, held in place only by cold solder joints. You might find it's actually built of discrete parts; I don't know and I don't care - but I assure you that there won't even be anything as substantial as a TDA2002 in them, despite the 250W claim.
I've always thought of the wattage ratings as the total consumed power... That is including transformer loss!
If you think of it that way they aren't exactly lying, just not telling you anything useful about the product.
Sure they are. Power into the speakers is 9VDC @ 300mA from the AC adapter. 2.7 watts output from the adapter. Now, a modern transformer, even the one in a crappy wall-wart, is gonna be at least 90% efficient. Meaning that, no matter how you slice it, the speakers aren't drawing more than 3.5W on the *very* outside from the power line. How does that make them 250W speakers?
Not to say they aren't lying, they are, but capacitors can be charged to a higher voltage than the source using a voltage doubler circuit or a flyback voltage multiplier. Doesn't give you any more power but does trade current for voltage. See this page for some example circuits.
Of course they could. Or they could use an 18V 150mA AC adapter instead of a 9V 300mA AC adapter - which, it would strike me, would be a lot cheaper than adding to the parts count.
The only time DC-DC converter circuits are used in amps is car stereo amplifiers, where the power supply is DC and limited to 13.8V, which really can't offer you more than 20W into 4 ohms. (4 ohm speakers were initially brought into use as car stereo systems evolved from utilitarian car radios.)
Advertised "250 watt" computer speakers which weigh three pounds and are powered off a 9V 300mA AC adapter.
P = E x I, where P is power in watts, E is electromotive force in volts, and I is current in amperes.
1 amp = 1000mA. You do the math.
A real 200 watt power amplifier will generally have a power supply with a transformer which weighs at least 50 pounds, and that's *per channel*.
And they use the term "PMPO" - "Peak Music Power Output". Fine, putting aside the fact that this term has no accepted definition in electrical engineering - let's say that those little Taiwanese-made speakers contain an amplifier with a big bank of capacitors to dump out enough current to achieve 250 watts peak. If the power supply to them is only 9V, the capacitors would never get above 9V. If the speakers themselves have a standard nominal impedance of 8 ohms, then we can calculate.
A simple application of Ohm's Law reveals that 9V into 8 ohms could yield a maximum current of (I = E/R) 1.125 amps. 1.125 amps at 9 volts shows 10.125 watts absolute peak. And in real world situations, we must include the on-state resistance of all the transistors in the output stages.
10.125W < 250W. Therefore, they are lying. By a factor of almost 25.
Wattage ratings tend to be utter lies with any consumer electronics, especially car audio equipment and boom boxes. The absolute worst come from tiny little Chinese sweatshops making brands of computer speakers that no one has ever heard of.
My computer's sound system includes a pair of Acoustic Research AR-4x bookshelf speakers driven off a highly modified Sound A-5000 power amplifier. B+ to the output stages is 45V DC derived from a 10 pound power supply transformer, and it does produce a solid and stable 25W RMS per channel into 8 ohms, using a 1kHz sinewave driving a resistive load. And that's the accepted standard for wattage ratings of real power amplifiers.
As a former professional sound technician who has done lead sound for Garth Brooks, Harry Belafonte, and The Three Tenors at such prestigious venues at the SkyDome, I've frequently used 240 watt power amplifiers from companies like ElectroVoice, Crown and QSC to power stage monitors on 5000 square foot stages. I speak from experience that running some of this stuff in your house will make your nose bleed. You're not gonna tell me with inflated numbers that a set of $19.95 at Fry's computer speakers will do the same thing.
There's no shame in admitting that a given computer speaker system has a rating of 1W RMS per channel, but idiot consumers just buy the biggest number they can find. In reality, it takes four times the power to double the volume.
Jeez, it's almost as bad as the horsepower ratings on new cars...
I find it particularly disturbing that Red Hat is growing "exponentially" in size. I'm pretty sure that they don't have to include all the options but they don't make it easy to disable them.
I gotta agree, RH seems to be turning into Microsoft. Remember the bug list on RH 7.0? It rivalled Windows 2000.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's unwarranted. RH is the defacto standard Linux distro and will probably be the one to take the desktop from Microsoft, if ever anyone manages to. Installing everything by default is as a consequence of tech support nightmares:
End-users *are* that stupid. I'd always thought it was an urban legend, but then I did tech support for a while, and was amazed to actually speak to someone who believed that the CD-ROM's drawer was a coffee holder.
As a consequence of the stupidity of users versus the cost of tech support, Windows tends to install and start IIS by default.
And any other mainstream operating system will have to tend to do similar things by default, both in order to remain financially viable and perceived as being easy enough for e-mail-virus-spreading simpleton end-users to be able to handle.
Now many of you may jump on the bandwagon and say "Wait, Linux is not meant to be easy". I'll retort by saying: Red Hat should be easy. If you're going to target users with a desktop application then you don't make things harder. Desktops were invented to make things easier or more efficient to use.Absolutely. To viably get Linux onto the desktops of the masses, we need at least (but preferably only) one easy-to-install, works right out of the box distro that does everything. Red Hat appears to be it, though the consequences are necessarily going to be size and stability. However, I'd rather have a big, bloated and buggy Red Hat user base out there than the big, bloated and buggy Windows user base we have out there. At least it moves people to a real operating system, and once they're familiar with how UNIX works, they can go out and install any other UNIX variant of their choice and be reasonably competent. It also helps to slow down The Dark Overlord's plans for world domination.
And, in my experience, bugs in a UNIX/Linux environment tend to be less serious than those in Windows, due to better security models and better coding.
Interesting. I'm probably gonna get modded all to hell for this, but what are 50 karma points for, if not to be able to post controversial stuff at +2?
I've proven, via the previous statement, that either fundamentalist Islam is a cult or that Scientology is a real religion....
Fundamentalist Islam is, in a way, similar to a doomsday cult, although they don't believe in a soon-to-come end of the world. They believe that humanity is on a path to immediate self-destruction and that Fundamentalist Islam is the only way to "save" and "free" the world. They believe that they are superiour beings (members claim to have gained superhuman powers by their belief in Allah ). We, the non-members, are just stupid " infidels ", who can be cheated, lied to, even killed at will. Bin Laden actually promised his members the superhuman power of having dozens of virginal wives who've never heard of Gloria Steinem by mere thought.
They also believe to be in a constant state of siege by the outside world, surrounded by enemies trying to enslave them. The outside world is seen as hostile, non-members are a grey goo of AH-mair-EEE-cans and critics are evil enemies who can be attacked with Boeings. Fundamentalist Islam 's favourite weapon is martyrs...
Of course, Fundamentalist Islam sees this as pure self-defense against the hostile outside world. However, someone who dares to say something remotely critical of the cult is instantly labeled a "stupid Jew" and handled as such, making the small critic an even fiercer critic...
So, yeah, Fundamentalist Islam is making itself enemies from people who just expressed doubt. And this helps Fundamentalist Islam , because *having* enemies is proof of their worldview and is what keeps the cult together.
Google will undoubtedly get backlash from the Scientologists again.
What about Slashdot? They're hosting a discussion saying nasty things about the CoS.
What is the it about the cult that causes geeks everywere to keep tabs on them?
That's easy. We're intelligent, and organizations which pray on the gullible proles amuse us.
Want proof? Last time someone forwarded you an e-mail about a virus hoax you'd never seen before, you read it from end to end, laughing at the stupidity of every fool who passed it on. Admit it.
In Canada, they've lost all the way to the Supreme Court - One case is Hill v. Church of Scientology of Toronto, 1995.
Heh. On Toronto's main street, Yonge, there's a multi-story Church of Scientology building, and there are always many whackos out there handing out flyers and trying to recruit new morons. While walking past, I've frequently been propositioned the same way a dope dealer will. Instead of hearing "hydro" or "blunt" whispered at you as you walk past, it's "personality test".
"Jobs Available: Hard Work, Low Pay", they advertise on a sign in the window. And people go in.
One time in about 1994, I was parked on a sidestreet nearby and when I returned to my car, there was a flyer under my windshield wiper, essentially attempting to induct me. I was so incensed that I took it home, used it to wipe a certain region after a certain requirement of the human digestive system, and mailed it back to them. I figured the satisfaction was worth the cost of the postage.
The scariest thing about the Church of Scientology is not their aggression or attempted suppression of freedom of speech. It's the fact that the their cult's survival proves the existence of people who are more stupid than Raelians.
But I gotta profess my most profound admiration for L. Ron Hubbard. It amuses me to go to a casino, sit on a stool, and watch obese programmed robots put quarter after quarter into slot machines. I don't gamble - I just get some sort of sick pleasure from watching the old saying "a fool and his money are soon parted" being proven on such a spectacularly grand scale. Scientology kinda makes Las Vegas and lottery tickets seem insignificant.
Stupidity and the consequential belief in superstition. Same things about salt over one's shoulder, not stepping on cracks, walking under ladders, etc.
Or the paranoid delusion that an invisible, omnipotent man is watching you whilst you engage in the process of expelling feces. And all the deaths which can be attributed to that particular delusion throughout human history.
Re: magnetic north. I'm looking forward to a Darwin Award for someone who freezes to death on a procreational trip up there. I had to go to Baffin Island once on business. Never, ever again.
I'm no found of the CPCC but this Lawrence Wade guy needs to get a life.
True. It's 3:AM, and I'm taking a break from teaching myself calculus, which I'm doing simply because I enjoy the stimulation. And it's a prerequisite to another one of my self-directed challenges, a challenge which involves microstrip, waveguide and a 25kW X-band radar magnetron.
He's surfing the web and just looking around for copyright violations? Is an IP lawyer or something?Ahhh... A foreigner. Given past experience, you're probably incited to near-riot by my .sig. Go to www.circlist.org for instructions and help with your problem.
The "You've Got Questions, We've Got Answers" trademark is memorable (because it's so condescending) and runs on every Radio Shack commercial on TV. When I followed a Slashdot link to a CPCC website, I was surprised to see such a familiar trademark being misused by an agency charged with (in some backward way) protecting intellectual property.
Now, unless your smegma accumulation has had an effect similar to mercury on your brain, surely you can appreciate the irony of the situation, and at a stretch of your intellectual biceps, may fathom why I felt compelled to write an e-mail to InterTan.
And, as for my life, I get lucky any Saturday night I so choose. Looking like a cross between Wil Wheaton and Jerry O'Connell, combining a gregarious personality with a 6'4" 200lb frame (ooh, sorry, no hablo metric), and with gray matter in abundance, I have no trouble whatsoever fooling the ladies into thinking that I'm husband material. And while I don't subscribe to astrology (it's somewhere between Las Vegas and playing bingo on my scale of white trash), I couldn't possibly be more the stereotype of my Aries sign. The persuasiveness, cocky self-confidence and downright arrogance of my personality help me put Sam Malone to shame.
How many notches on your bedpost, cheese-doodle?
Yep, Eva-Tone made them, they stopped making them about a year ago...
A year ago?
Jeez, who was buying them a year ago?
That's incredible. I'd assumed they were as far back in the past as the double-chamber McDLT styrofoam box (keeps the hot side hot and the cold side cold...).
I'm old enough to remember when some books and magazines included analog records printed on sheets of plastic
"Sound Sheets", they were called.
Memories:
I remember as a kid, when Pierre Elliot Trudeau did that big constitution thing with the queen back in 1981, the newspaper came with Sound Sheets of the Canadian national anthem. Somewhere, I still have that and a few other sound sheets.
One of them is a little mutilated. At the ripe old age of 7, I *had* to know what would happen if I put it onto the old BSR record changer.
And now, it's consoling that a new generation shall know the horror.
Now, if they can make one that is absorbant as well, we'll be able to save some money and use those damned AOL CDs to wipe our butts.
You're kidding, right?
Ahem. Philips' North American jingle is taken from a Beatles tune:
I've got to admit
It's getting better,
A little better all the time...
What their marketing department apparently doesn't know is that the very next line is:
It can't get no worse
More concerning is potential frost build up, and the effects of temperature cycling (get in your car, heat it up (-20 to 20C), get out, it cools down (back to -20C); repeat several time a day for 4 months) on mechanical components like the IDE harddrive.
Yeah, between that and automotive vibrations, I wouldn't want to have anything more than an old hand-me-down hard drive in there.
Hmmm... 4.3 gig drive kicking aroud here...
It's incredibly nice to know what the filesystem is. I can imagine going out and buying another mfr's player, with the included hard drive, having the hard drive fail, and not being able to simply partition/format/install a new hard drive. Worst case would be a non-standard filesystem. Ick. I'm not interested in paying $400 for a 20 gig hard drive whose only special feature is a proprietary filesystem.
My biggest problem with this thing is the apparent lack of any means to transfer music, short of physically removing the drive and plopping it onto your IDE bus. Note that it's late, I didn't read the review in depth, but checking out the specs I didn't see any mention of network connections, USB, FireWire, or even parallel ports on this thing. I'm not adverse to hiding a covered RJ-45 somewhere on my car. Wireless would be great, but at least I know I'll still be able to dig up an NE2000 ten years from now, and if I'm putting it into the dashboard of one of my cars, it's gonna be there for a while. (Ask me about the 12-year-old Alpine pullout CD player in my '76 Ram...)
At the very least, a serial port and Kermit would be good at this point, RS-232 can handle distance, and for cripes' sake, it's not like they'd have to look too hard to conjure up 12V to run a couple of serial line driver chips. Start the transfer when you get home, let it run overnight, and you might have made a small dent in the old hand-me-down hard drive. It probably already has enough RAM for its OS and playback needs that, in transfer mode, it could be designed to spin up the drive and write to it only when sufficient data has collected, then shut it back down to save the car's battery. (The current draw of a hard disk spinning overnight could make winter starting unreliable.)
The pinout shows RX and TX lines, so one can only hope and assume this is something they're working on. I'm sure as hell not ripping this thing's hard drive out of my dashboard every time I want to add another song to the collection.
A tuner is on my wishlist, too. I need my Howard Stern in the mornings. Internal amplifiers? Nah, I'll just build my own and bolt it somewhere.
Other than that, it's a nice alternative to having an old P100 kicking around in your trunk. I want one.
The fact that insulin helps memory is old news, so is the fact that exercise help memory. (these are the two tentative conclusions of the article.)
Nicotine, as a stimulant, is also known to do these things. So, perhaps frantically chewing Nicorettes during a test ought to help even more. (Unless you're a non-smoker, in which case you're likely to simultaneously vomit and keel over, thus gaining a medical reason for which to take a test over. Either way, you win!)
My only question is who the hell gave them a grant to do this, and what silly assed professor approved?Importantly, this is another Useless Fact (tm) that can be bandied about when one needs to convince an imbecile of that which is common sense.
As for why the group wasn't bigger, more scientific, "pretend gum", etc., well, I'm sure the reason was that the study, being an exercise in proving common sense, wasn't going to attract the biggest grants, corporate sponsorships, etc.
No worry. It has served its purpose. I have printed out the article and shall leave it on the desk of a co-worker who always complains about my minty-fresh breath.
So, from like four feet away: "Jeeeee-zuz! Were you gargling pure methyl salicylate again?"
Fine. My breath smells like laboratory-grade oil of wintergreen. I'm nice enough not to tell him that his smells remarkably similar to the inside of sewage treatment plant's slurry pump.
This is *precisely* why human beings should be confined to this planet: this "compassionate conservative" wants to spread his "it's not my problem" immaturity to the stars, where it'll be free to destroy everything it doesn't understand or can't empathize with.
I resent and reject both the terms "compassionate" and "conservative".
I am a Libertarian by nature, and I like to let people celebrate the triumphs of good decisions and hard work, whilst suffering the perils of poor decisions and laziness, with an absolute minimum of government intervention.
Being called conservative is, frankly, offensive. Too often, conservative politics run synonymously with religion. And, of course, religious faith is symptomatic of a paranoid-delusional disorder. It terrifies me that George Dubya and Trent Lott really think that an invisible man watches them while they sit on the john, and instead of being locked up in a rubber room, they're elected to office.
Empathy? Well, I'm sure that it hurts being on the wrong side of Darwin, but it's not my fault. It's not my fault that HIV-infected Ugandan tribesmen think they can be cured by sleeping with a virgin. It's not my fault that all of Bangladesh is located on India's sewer (Ganges River) and that the whole country is doomed to frequent floods because it's barely above sea level. And it's not my fault that these savages in the Middle East are killing each other because of a warped game of "My Paranoid Delusional Fantasy Is Better Than Your Paranoid Delusional Fantasy". On September 11th, that one *did* become my problem, and while I thoroughly empathize with the needs for psychiatric treatment for religious people everywhere, like dealing with a rabid dog, euthanasia is an attractive and practical alternative.
Best outcome: the nukes do us all in, and the dolphins take over the top of the food chain.Uh-huh. Tell that one to my tuna sandwich.
For one thing, the Chernobyl nuclear plant was a disaster waiting to happen. Between the dangerous design of the reactor and the fact there was no containment dome, no wonder the disaster was so bad.
One idiot (while driving the stereotype poorly-tuned oil-burning VW Microbus and pretending to be an environmentalist) was telling me all about how sorry we'd be when Pickering (a CANDU-design nuclear plant outside Toronto) "goes Chernobyl".
Ahhh, yes. That would deny the fact, of course, that deuterium water is required as a moderator for U-238 to fission. And that when the reactor overheats, a pipe will burst somewhere and all the moderator (very expensive water) will escape as steam. And that, without the moderator, the reactor will cease to produce heat.
Instead, we're going to have tonnes of (solid, non-evaporating) graphite blocks with U-235 rods glowing red-hot within, belching smoke and radioactive dust across Toronto, all coming from a reactor which doesn't have any of these critical design flaws?
I told him to stop voting until he stopped smoking up.
To propose that we spend more money on NASA (with cutbacks already planned), the "nuclear fission" rocket may just be a pipe dream. It's hard to convince people that we need to explore space when the topic of the day is terrorism.
Well, they go hand in hand. The technology from space exploration affects our lives in thousands of big and small ways every day. The integrated circuit was first mass-produced for space exploration reasons. And it's a lot easier to peel my fried eggs off Teflon than it is off cast iron.
Any advance in getting the general public to get over their Three Mile Island and Chernobyl paranoia will require nuclear-powered triumphs.
Idiot hippy environmentalists speak of cutting dependence on (foreign) oil by moving to electric cars. That'd be nice. How do you intend to handle California's power crisis (remember, 2 years ago) when 10,000,000 Los Angeles commuters are plugging in their cars every night?
The very same environmentalists who scream about oil and air pollution are also at the mass rallies to ban genetically-modified agriculture. GM corn is probably the most economically feasible way, at this point, to make large quantities of methanol, which could replace gasoline very easily, simply retrofitting existing vehicles and infrastructure. These people also scream that we have to solve world hunger before we feed our cars. (My opinion? Theses savages are stupid enough to breed when they can't feed themselves, let alone their larvae. It doesn't take education or literacy to understand the problem; a below-average human intelligence should readily grasp the situation. It's not my problem, and I resent you attempting to make it my problem.)
Tidal/Solar/Wave power? Sure, they're neat science fair projects for the kiddies, but they're simply not capable of contributing substantially to our energy needs for the forseeble future.
Nuclear power is the only viable solution. And the proles have discarded it because they're too simple to understand that blaming nuclear power for Chernobyl would be like blaming gasoline for a car accident. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and the vast majority of car accidents are caused by imbeciles, not the fuel source.
What's all this got to do with terrorism? Simple. The sooner we get off foreign oil, the sooner we can dig a moat around the Middle East and let them do their thing in isolation from the civilized world. And if funding NASA to build huge nuclear public-relations projects which will inevitably bring us other technologies as a consequence, I'm all for it.
Go ahead. Mod me down. But I'm right, and all the politically-correct simpering you might want to do won't change the facts.
There is something in Canada called the CPCC and it exists to collect this money and disburse it.
Ahem... This organization exists to disperse funds collected due to alleged violations of intellectual property laws? How interesting and ironic, then.
The following e-mail was sent to several standard-ish e-mail addresses within the radioshack.ca domain. You know, legal@, sales@, webmaster@.
Dear Sirs,
It has come to my attention that your trademark, "You've Got Questions, We've Got Answers" is being used, presumably without your authorization, by a Canadian agency which was created to protect the intellectual property rights of others through dispersal of levies on media.
As I've come to associate "You've Got Questions, We've Got Answers" with my friendly and helpful local Radio Shack retailer, as a consumer, I find myself in a most distressing and confusing situation.
Your claim of trademark is available here:
http://www.radioshack.ca/eStore/content/legal.aspx ?language=en-CA
And the confusing use of your trademark is available on the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC)'s website, right here:
http://www.cpcc.ca/English/FAQ/faq.html
I would hope that you will take prompt measures to address this issue.
Thank you,
Lawrence Wade
Toronto, Canada
CPCC: I love you like a cold sore.
I hate tree-huggers. I say, fuck the trees. If god can't provide us enough tree's, then he doesn't mean us to have enough trees. What ever god provides is all we should use. Like my 94 ford f250. It has a 450 in it, and it ge about 5mpg. I can afford the gas, so who gives a fuck if I spend MY hard earned money on fuel. God is the "mother nature" that tree-huggers like to talk about. Just like I said before, if God doesn't provide it, he doesn't mean us to have it.
Heheheh...
You know, in all seriousness, nature would have eventually oxidized (burned) all that petroleum anyway. Man's modern cars simply do it more stoichiometrically than any way nature would have consumed it.
Environmentalist groups should therefore be grateful for the internal combustion engine; every time you fill up your SUV, you help to avert an eventual environmental catastrophe which would have made the Kuwaiti oil well fires look like a Zippo flame.
plus, I never trust a media outlet who can neither spell, nor use spellcheck.
"They sorounded the house with guns before raiding it." - RTF Founder
Tell me about it. If anti-globalization protesters were literate, maybe people would listen to them. Currently, they're far more amusing than credible.
How about the use of the possessive to denote plural? "undercover's"? "government's"?
And the cream of the crop: "with they're eyes focused on the premises." With they are eyes...? "they're excuse" They are excuse?
I guess I understand what his site stands for: I'd be angry if I were illiterate, too.
But I am concerned that he got raided. He should be allowed to speak, even if he does desecrate the English language in the process.
I guess the simple truth is that now that 100 gig drives are a couple hundred bucks, we now have the ability to store anything we reasonably could need (unless you define "Reasonable" as "I need to store DNA Sequences").
Doesn't "640k ought to be enough for anybody" suggest that Bill Gates once felt the same way about RAM?
Of course, visionary that he is [snicker!], there's no way he could have imagined desktop machines being used to edit video.
Likewise, who knows how big and bloated Clippit The Office Paperclip can get if we have 100 gigs of hard disk space to burn... maybe, one day, he'll actually bear consultation when you need information, instead of when you need something to laugh at.
I love calculus so much, I want to give it to everyone! Come, get some integration!MmMMmmm... calculus. Hours spent in the dentist's chair, with him scraping hard crusties off my teeth... And you're just giving that stuff away?
Yeah, I guess "tree huggers" are to blame for the problems you're having killing the environment in precisely the way that you want to.
Every other kid has an asthma inhaler or is on some kind of allergy medication, but don't let that stop you from putting a bigger gasoline engine in your 2-ton pickup truck and hauling ass.
Running on 50% ethanol, I put out less H2SO4, less NOx and less CO than a fail for a NEW Toyota RAV4 and only marginally more unburnt HC than the average new pickup truck, according to my last emissions test. So I guess my rigorous tune-up schedule keeps a few kids off inhalers.
Building an engine for performance is simply a question of making it burn fuel as efficiently as possible. Even if you've only taken high school chemistry, you should still be able to see that the point at which an engine produces the most power is also when it produces the least emissions. And I've got a lot of money invested in maintaining that stoichiometric ideal.
So, how's that oil-burning Hyundai Excel of yours, anyway? Yeah, it's cleaner than your VW Microbus with the tie-dye paintjob and black stain over the exhaust pipe. Feel good about yourself, driving that to environment rallies?
Go take your bachelor of arts and your Bjork CDs and make out with a birch. Come back to discuss it with me when you understand a little chemistry, physics and engineering thermodynamics.