I hadn't ever had a reason to think about it in this context until you questioned the issue. And since you did, I got to learn something myself. It happened to be immediately obvious to me, in my little pea-sized brain, and it seems my brief description has made it obvious to you as well.
But again, I'd never have thought of it if you weren't curious yourself. We both learned a bit.
None that I've seen, though I've been wondering the same since I wrote that reply. (The video cards I remember had DIP sockets for extra RAM, but the concept is the same.....)
Perhaps the time is now for such things to return. It used to be rather common on all manner of stuff to be able to add RAM to the device -- I even used to have a Soundblaster AWE that accepted SIMMs to expand its hardware wavetable synth capacity.
Assuming what you say is true (and I believe it can be if the API is properly implemented, for better or worse), then regular PCI Express x16 cards should be perfectly adequate.
Not to be offensive, but you used all that verbiage, and failed to realize that nobody needs or wants high-performance tab switching in Firefox. It'd be nice if it happened within a single monitor refresh period (60Hz, these days), but nobody notices if it takes a dozen times as long or more due to PCI Express bus transfers from main RAM.
In a game, or with an engineering visualization, however, is a different story.
But go ahead and chew on the math for that see what you come back with. I think you'll find that neither lack of video RAM nor the transfer speed between the GPU and system RAM are your limiting factor (spoken as someone who frequently has just as much, or more, stuff open at once as you do).
You took my practical argument and made it theoretical, but I'll play.;)
I never had an EGA adapter. I did have CGA, and the next step was a Diamond Speedstar 24x, with all kinds of (well, one kind of) 24-bit color that would put your Tseng ET3000 (ET4000?) to shame. And, in any event, it was clearly better than CGA, EGA, VGA, or (bog-standard IBM) XGA.
The 24x was both awesome (pretty!) and lousy (mostly do to its proprietarity nature and lack of software support) at the time. I still keep it in a drawer -- it's the only color ISA video card I still have. (I believe there is also still a monochrome Hercules card kicking around in there somewhere, which I keep because its weird "high-res" mode has infrequently been well-supported by anything else.)
Anyway...porn was never better than when I was a kid with a 24-bit video card, able to view JPEGs without dithering.
But what I'd like to express to you is that it's all incremental. There was no magic leap between your EGA card and your Tseng SVGA -- you just skipped some steps.
And there was no magic leap between your 4MB card (whatever it was) and your 32MB Riva TNT2: I also made a similar progression to a TNT2.
And, yeah: Around that time, model numbers got blurry. Instead of making one chipset at one speed (TNT2), manufacturers started bin-sorting and making producing a variety of speeds from the same part (Voodoo3 2000, 3000, 3500TV, all with the same GPU).
And also around that time, drivers (between OpenGL and DirectX) became consistent, adding to the blur.
I still have a Voodoo3 3500TV, though I don't have a system that can use it. But I assure you that I would much rather play games (and pay the power bill) with my nVidia 9800GT than that old hunk of (ouch! HOT!) 3dfx metal.
Fast forward a bunch and recently, I've been playing both Rift and Portal 2. The 9800GT is showing its age, especially with Rift, and it's becoming time to look for an upgrade.
But, really, neither of these games would be worth the time of day on my laptop's ATI x300. This old Dell probably would've played the first Portal OK, but the second one...meh. And the x300 is (IIRC) listed as Rift's minimum spec, but the game loses its prettiness in a hurry when the quality settings are turned down.
But, you know: I might just install Rift on this 7-year-old x300 laptop, just to see how it works. Just so I can have the same "wow" factor I had when I first installed a Voodoo3 2000, when I play the same game on my desktop with a 3-year-old, not-so-special-at-this-pint 9800GT.
The steps seem smaller, these days, but progress marches on. You'll have absolute lifelike perfection eventually, but it'll take some doing to get there.
If you think of the emulsion layer as being a three-dimensional object that has some depth to it, instead of a two-dimensional plane with zero thickness, I believe that you'll find that it is obvious: It will not be exposed equally throughout that depth, and there will be definite and observable paths that the light has followed within the emulsion layer.
I don't know if I'd call it "holographic," just due to the confusion that the term itself presents in common use (as GP pointed out), but it seems like an adequate and correct description nonetheless.
Seems like a good feature to me, too. Just about every browser behaves this way, these days.
It's been awhile (long enough that I am perhaps showing my age), but IIRC some of the last useful versions of pre-AOL Netscape browser zoomed text alone, instead of text+images.
This may have even lasted into the next iteration: I seem to recall a special method or add-on for early Mozilla or Firefox which added the ability for the browser to zoom both text and images at the same time. (I also seem to recall installing such an addon, and preferring it.)
Perhaps the complaint is from a user from Way Back When.
To the OP: Would you mind if I borrow your time machine?
I would be more excited if they had announced a new initiative to enable fast memory access between the GPU and system RAM.
Do you really think so? We've been down this road before and while it's sometimes a nice ride, it always leads to a rather anticlimactic dead-end.
(Notable examples are VLB, EISA, PCI and AGP, plus some very similar variations on each of these.)
2GB for visualization is just too small. 8GB would be a good start, even if it was DDR3 and not DDR5.
Maybe. I've only somewhat-recently found myself occasionally wanting more than 512MB on a graphics card; perhaps I am just insufficiently hardcore (I can live with that).
That said: If 512MB is adequate for my not-so-special wants and needs, and 2GB is "just too small" for some other folks' needs, then a target of 8GB seems to be rather near-sighted.
Something like Hypertransport that could enable low latency, high bandwidth memory access for expandable system memory on the cheap.
HTX, which is mostly just Hypertransport wrapped around a familiar card-edge connector, has been around for a good while. HTX3 added a decent speed bump to the format in '08. AFAICT, nobody makes graphics cards for such a bus, and no consumer-oriented systems have ever included it. It's still there, though...
Either that, or it's high time we got 8GB per core for GPUs.
This. If there is genuinely a need for substantially bigger chunks of RAM to be available to a GPU, then I'd rather see it nearer to the GPU itself. History indicates that this will happen eventually anyway (no matter how well-intentioned the new-fangled bus might be), so it might make sense to just cut to the chase...
Depending on location, indeed. If I had an opportunity to make $6-7k/month over the summer, I'd be telling my day job to stuff it, sign a loan on a new BMW M3, and I'd stick with that "6-7k/month" internship forever.
No, apps run on a rooted Android device don't run as root.
Sure they do. They just need to ask first*. I've got a number of apps on my Droid which use root access (SetCPU, Titanium Backup, and Adfree, to name a few) to accomplish their primary purpose, and I frankly have no idea what these things are actually doing.
*: Sometimes they need to ask. The first root hack I used on my Droid 1 involved simply using adb to replace su with a binary that just blindly granted root access, without confirmation or even notification. It worked fine, but specifying which apps were and were not allowed to run as root was beyond my control. Lately, with complete ROMs, it's better -- su asks first. But assuming that it will do so on all rooted Android devices fallacious.
Or it could have gone into lower prices, in a race toward the bottom.
Or it could have gone toward paying higher dividends to shareholders.
Or it could have gone toward any number of other things other than employing someone to do something useful, like keeping the lights on longer before being run out of business by Wal-Mart.
Not that I'm in favor of paying people to do useless things, or that I'm attempting to imply that any of the things I've listed here are bad in some way. I just want to point out that just because a store saves money on self checkouts vs. having a cashier run the till, does not mean that their savings will automatically be put into the employment of a productive employee.
Yeah, I said the same thing when they made slavery illegal. How am I supposed to make coffee and cook breakfast as efficiently as my boy did? Talk about technological regression!
This is what wives are for. When they're not cleaning, tending to offspring, fellating, or working to pay the mortgage, they should be cooking -- and making coffee.
I'm not terribly allergic to self-checkouts, though I do view them with a certain disdain (I'd like to have a discount if I'm going to be checking and bagging my own groceries). I often use them when I've just got one or two things that I need and find myself in a bit of a hurry (a missing ingredient for a meal that I've already started prepping, for instance), or if the lines are very long.
As another poster indicated, they are getting better:
The last encounter I had with one went something like this: Approach machine. Ignore prompts. Scan items, tossing each into a bag. Ignore prompts. Insert money. Ignore prompts. Take change and receipt. Leave with items.
This is good enough. In fact, I might even prefer this level of non-interaction over dealing with a human on some days...
It does throw a fit if I'm buying small things (packets of Kool-Aid, for example), as they sometimes seem to be of inadequate mass to make the scale register a change in weight. Pushing the "I don't want to bag this item" button fixes that, annoyingly enough. (The sequence of code which ensures that everything that one has scanned has also subsequently ended up in a bag should be eliminated, IMHO: It protects no one from anything, and is at best merely occasionally annoying.)
It's been years since the opposite has happened, with it over-weighing the bagging area and assuming that I'm putting things in bags that have not yet been scanned.
Buying beer is a bit of a bother sometimes -- some places have little wireless widgets that the person tending to the self-checkouts carries, which alert them wherever they're at in the store. At those places it works OK, especially if they recognize me: They will use the widget to satisfy the machine's want of age verification, and I'll be on my way in a few seconds.
Others are far worse, relying on an attendant to visually notice and act upon a red light that appears above the self-checkout, finish what they're doing, eventually stumble over, figure out if I'm old enough, and then enter an incantation into the machine.
Cell "towers" don't need to be huge if there are lots of them.
Rather, the opposite is true: The more if them you have, the smaller they must be due to frequency overlap issues.
Or, the corollary: The smaller they are, the more of them you can build without frequency overlap issues.
I would welcome a small cell tower, with its supporting gear and generator, right in my own backyard or on top of my house (I have a tall house and live at the top of a hill).
However, building new commercial communications towers (for any purpose!) in my municipality has been outright banned for the last 15 years. The consequences of this are as follows:
1. Limited total bandwidth, and an ever-growing userbase. 2. Genuinely giant towers popping up in a semi-circle immediately outside of the current boundaries of the -- sometimes, literally a few dozen yards away -- in an attempt to increase available capacity. 3. Eventually, those parts with recently-built giant towers will be annexed (we're growing), and they'll be in the city anyway. 4. Once this happens, capacity will still suck.
I'm sure I'm not the only person here who has had an opportunity to watch such a predicament unfold.
See also: Microcells, picocells, femtocells, and other buzzword-compliant magnitudes of "cell" that cost little and make sense...if they're allowed.
When I am being tailgated (which happens a lot to me when I'm in the work truck, which I tend to drive fairly conservatively both to save on fuel and because it is -- you know -- a truck), I behave exactly as I suggested to you.
Why? Because I might have to stop at any time, no matter what lane I'm in, what maneuver I'm performing, or whether or not I'm being tailgated. I also hate tailgaters, and they can make me feel very uncomfortable since while I am always aware that I might need to stop suddenly at any time, they are apparently unfamiliar with the concept.
So if I must stop, and I must also be rear-ended, I'd rather have this happen at (just to pick a number) 67 MPH instead of 73MPH. There's a quite a big difference in total energy between those two speeds, and I would prefer to have the smaller of those piles of Joules smashing the back of my vehicle.
Yep, this sometimes puts me right back where I was beforehand, as it would in your particular scenario. But I can get back to what I was doing quickly enough after I've slowed and moved right to let the tailgater pass, for only a small cost in time.
This also has the side-benefit of slightly punishing the tailgater: It's not that I mind if they want to drive faster than I, or even if they want to move a Ludicrous Speed. I simply mind that they're driving in a manner which is patently unsafe to me, and I am therefore reluctant to reward them. Hopefully, it helps discourage them from unduly endangering the next slower-moving vehicle they encounter.
In synopsis: You seem to think that speeding up to move to the right is a good option, and I disagree with that. I feel that it is generally safer to slow down and move right.
So slowing down wasn't an option, because I actually wanted to maintain my cruising speed and pass the guy on my right
I think I understand just fine:
You decided that slowing down "wasn't an option" because you didn't want to, so you elected to speed up instead.
And then, you got a ticket. It's really rather simple.
So how much time and money did it cost you to speed up for that tailgater? Was it worth the (perhaps) 30 seconds you might have saved if your decision to go faster had paid off?
Now, please realize: I don't believe you should have gotten a ticket. I do not believe that speed limits are, in most cases, reasonable. I simply believe that your method of dealing with a tailgater is wrong and that it can be handled more both more safely and while still remaining closer to the constraints of the law (as it stands).
Waitasecond. You were being tailgated, and your solution to the problem was to decide that you "had to" drive faster?
Feh.
I'm all for driving fast when conditions permit, but having some asshole trying to shove his car up your tailpipe isn't on the list of favorable conditions.
Next time you encounter a particularly egregious tailgater, try this: Ignore them. It usually works fine.
If not, slow down. And I don't mean "smash the brake pedal," but just decelerate some. If they persist, slow down more. Rinse and repeat as needed, while staying in the right-hand lane as much as possible.
They will either get bored/pissed and pass you, or realize that they're not going to improve their rate of travel by persisting in following so closely and back off. (You can assist with them passing you by allowing a gap, and/or slowing down even more when they begin to pass to expedite the maneuver, and/or staying close to the berm so they can better see other traffic.)
Either way, the tailgating situation is relieved, you can resume driving at a more normal speed quickly enough, and (perhaps most important) the actions of the cocksucker behind you won't result you getting a ticket.
I just noticed that http://open.mapquest.com/ includes some changes and deletions I made near my house a few months back. It is good to see that someone is actually trying to use the data I've provided, and seeing this encourages me to provide more updates to further make OSM match reality...while simultaneously discouraging me from playing with Google's new tools, which don't seem open at all.
Although commercial production techniques tend to use strong/pure muriatic acids, I would strongly recommend against using that for obvious reasons.
I don't see your reasons as being obvious at all. But then, I'm a practical guy when it comes to chemistry, not an experienced tinkerer.
I can get muriatic acid at Menards in gallon-sized tins for next to nothing: It's used for removing mortar from brick. (It's probably even cheaper, and in bigger containers, from the local masonry supply house.)
What are the reasons that I should use ferric chloride instead?
Oh sure, "sell it to the smelters", thanks for offering a non solution, you might want to try it before suggesting it.
Here's an easy test with a readily available toxic product, take an old 12 volt lead/acid car battery to a Lead Smelter and see how long they Laugh at you before they turn you away
One word: Scale.
Take a small amount of n to an n smelter, and they'll laugh at you -- it's not worth their time to deal with such quantities.
Offer to sell a few railcars full of n to them, and you'll have their interest immediately.
(Where n is this funky spent aluminum, or lead-acid batteries, or steel, or iron, or copper, or...)
This is where recycling centers and scrap yards come into play. They consolidate the goods into sufficient quantities that they are worth transporting and bargaining for. There's a place not far from here that pays $8 for old car batteries, and they're happy to buy them one at a time, but they're not a smelter.
To use a computer analogy: Try to buy a single CPU from Intel and see how long they Laugh at you before they turn you away.
I've got a couple of good-sized neon transformers here that I play with sometimes, and I must say that I sincerely doubt that they'd do anywhere near as good a job at neatly eroding aluminum as seen in the video.
In particular, they lack the overall anger that this 150,000 volt rig produces.
Which is why, when I nuke strange things in the microwave, I keep a cup of water in there as well (along with something wooden in it to act as a nucleation point to start it boiling). It soaks up energy that might otherwise find its way back to the magnetron.
Is it perfect? No. But it is good enough, in my experience: I've had the same microwave for 8 years, and it works just as poorly now as it did when it was new.
There is, of course, the odd chance that the thing I'm nuking will form a nice neat reflector and send a significant portion of the magnetron's energy back into itself before it can be converted to heat by the water. And standing waves, as you rightly describe, can be even worse.
But the revolving platter (or stirrer, in other models) will keep the duration of this reflection down to a very short duration, while also keeping the standing waves moving instead of possibly forming a particularly destructive, static pattern.
Unless I make a retroreflector out of metal and microwave that. Hmm....
Slashdot Mirror
Naah. Thanks, to you, for raising the question.
I hadn't ever had a reason to think about it in this context until you questioned the issue. And since you did, I got to learn something myself. It happened to be immediately obvious to me, in my little pea-sized brain, and it seems my brief description has made it obvious to you as well.
But again, I'd never have thought of it if you weren't curious yourself. We both learned a bit.
None that I've seen, though I've been wondering the same since I wrote that reply. (The video cards I remember had DIP sockets for extra RAM, but the concept is the same.....)
Perhaps the time is now for such things to return. It used to be rather common on all manner of stuff to be able to add RAM to the device -- I even used to have a Soundblaster AWE that accepted SIMMs to expand its hardware wavetable synth capacity.
Assuming what you say is true (and I believe it can be if the API is properly implemented, for better or worse), then regular PCI Express x16 cards should be perfectly adequate.
Not to be offensive, but you used all that verbiage, and failed to realize that nobody needs or wants high-performance tab switching in Firefox. It'd be nice if it happened within a single monitor refresh period (60Hz, these days), but nobody notices if it takes a dozen times as long or more due to PCI Express bus transfers from main RAM.
In a game, or with an engineering visualization, however, is a different story.
But go ahead and chew on the math for that see what you come back with. I think you'll find that neither lack of video RAM nor the transfer speed between the GPU and system RAM are your limiting factor (spoken as someone who frequently has just as much, or more, stuff open at once as you do).
You took my practical argument and made it theoretical, but I'll play. ;)
I never had an EGA adapter. I did have CGA, and the next step was a Diamond Speedstar 24x, with all kinds of (well, one kind of) 24-bit color that would put your Tseng ET3000 (ET4000?) to shame. And, in any event, it was clearly better than CGA, EGA, VGA, or (bog-standard IBM) XGA.
The 24x was both awesome (pretty!) and lousy (mostly do to its proprietarity nature and lack of software support) at the time. I still keep it in a drawer -- it's the only color ISA video card I still have. (I believe there is also still a monochrome Hercules card kicking around in there somewhere, which I keep because its weird "high-res" mode has infrequently been well-supported by anything else.)
Anyway...porn was never better than when I was a kid with a 24-bit video card, able to view JPEGs without dithering.
But what I'd like to express to you is that it's all incremental. There was no magic leap between your EGA card and your Tseng SVGA -- you just skipped some steps.
And there was no magic leap between your 4MB card (whatever it was) and your 32MB Riva TNT2: I also made a similar progression to a TNT2.
And, yeah: Around that time, model numbers got blurry. Instead of making one chipset at one speed (TNT2), manufacturers started bin-sorting and making producing a variety of speeds from the same part (Voodoo3 2000, 3000, 3500TV, all with the same GPU).
And also around that time, drivers (between OpenGL and DirectX) became consistent, adding to the blur.
I still have a Voodoo3 3500TV, though I don't have a system that can use it. But I assure you that I would much rather play games (and pay the power bill) with my nVidia 9800GT than that old hunk of (ouch! HOT!) 3dfx metal.
Fast forward a bunch and recently, I've been playing both Rift and Portal 2. The 9800GT is showing its age, especially with Rift, and it's becoming time to look for an upgrade.
But, really, neither of these games would be worth the time of day on my laptop's ATI x300. This old Dell probably would've played the first Portal OK, but the second one...meh. And the x300 is (IIRC) listed as Rift's minimum spec, but the game loses its prettiness in a hurry when the quality settings are turned down.
But, you know: I might just install Rift on this 7-year-old x300 laptop, just to see how it works. Just so I can have the same "wow" factor I had when I first installed a Voodoo3 2000, when I play the same game on my desktop with a 3-year-old, not-so-special-at-this-pint 9800GT.
The steps seem smaller, these days, but progress marches on. You'll have absolute lifelike perfection eventually, but it'll take some doing to get there.
If you think of the emulsion layer as being a three-dimensional object that has some depth to it, instead of a two-dimensional plane with zero thickness, I believe that you'll find that it is obvious: It will not be exposed equally throughout that depth, and there will be definite and observable paths that the light has followed within the emulsion layer.
I don't know if I'd call it "holographic," just due to the confusion that the term itself presents in common use (as GP pointed out), but it seems like an adequate and correct description nonetheless.
Seems like a good feature to me, too. Just about every browser behaves this way, these days.
It's been awhile (long enough that I am perhaps showing my age), but IIRC some of the last useful versions of pre-AOL Netscape browser zoomed text alone, instead of text+images.
This may have even lasted into the next iteration: I seem to recall a special method or add-on for early Mozilla or Firefox which added the ability for the browser to zoom both text and images at the same time. (I also seem to recall installing such an addon, and preferring it.)
Perhaps the complaint is from a user from Way Back When.
To the OP: Would you mind if I borrow your time machine?
Interoperability is particularly good for everyone. Choice just follows naturally.
Do you really think so? We've been down this road before and while it's sometimes a nice ride, it always leads to a rather anticlimactic dead-end.
(Notable examples are VLB, EISA, PCI and AGP, plus some very similar variations on each of these.)
Maybe. I've only somewhat-recently found myself occasionally wanting more than 512MB on a graphics card; perhaps I am just insufficiently hardcore (I can live with that).
That said: If 512MB is adequate for my not-so-special wants and needs, and 2GB is "just too small" for some other folks' needs, then a target of 8GB seems to be rather near-sighted.
HTX, which is mostly just Hypertransport wrapped around a familiar card-edge connector, has been around for a good while. HTX3 added a decent speed bump to the format in '08. AFAICT, nobody makes graphics cards for such a bus, and no consumer-oriented systems have ever included it. It's still there, though...
This. If there is genuinely a need for substantially bigger chunks of RAM to be available to a GPU, then I'd rather see it nearer to the GPU itself. History indicates that this will happen eventually anyway (no matter how well-intentioned the new-fangled bus might be), so it might make sense to just cut to the chase...
Depending on location, indeed. If I had an opportunity to make $6-7k/month over the summer, I'd be telling my day job to stuff it, sign a loan on a new BMW M3, and I'd stick with that "6-7k/month" internship forever.
But I'm in Ohio, not the SF Bay. YMMV.
Sure they do. They just need to ask first*. I've got a number of apps on my Droid which use root access (SetCPU, Titanium Backup, and Adfree, to name a few) to accomplish their primary purpose, and I frankly have no idea what these things are actually doing.
*: Sometimes they need to ask. The first root hack I used on my Droid 1 involved simply using adb to replace su with a binary that just blindly granted root access, without confirmation or even notification. It worked fine, but specifying which apps were and were not allowed to run as root was beyond my control. Lately, with complete ROMs, it's better -- su asks first. But assuming that it will do so on all rooted Android devices fallacious.
Or it could have gone into lower prices, in a race toward the bottom.
Or it could have gone toward paying higher dividends to shareholders.
Or it could have gone toward any number of other things other than employing someone to do something useful, like keeping the lights on longer before being run out of business by Wal-Mart.
Not that I'm in favor of paying people to do useless things, or that I'm attempting to imply that any of the things I've listed here are bad in some way. I just want to point out that just because a store saves money on self checkouts vs. having a cashier run the till, does not mean that their savings will automatically be put into the employment of a productive employee.
This is what wives are for. When they're not cleaning, tending to offspring, fellating, or working to pay the mortgage, they should be cooking -- and making coffee.
Hope this helps. :)
I'm not terribly allergic to self-checkouts, though I do view them with a certain disdain (I'd like to have a discount if I'm going to be checking and bagging my own groceries). I often use them when I've just got one or two things that I need and find myself in a bit of a hurry (a missing ingredient for a meal that I've already started prepping, for instance), or if the lines are very long.
As another poster indicated, they are getting better:
The last encounter I had with one went something like this: Approach machine. Ignore prompts. Scan items, tossing each into a bag. Ignore prompts. Insert money. Ignore prompts. Take change and receipt. Leave with items.
This is good enough. In fact, I might even prefer this level of non-interaction over dealing with a human on some days...
It does throw a fit if I'm buying small things (packets of Kool-Aid, for example), as they sometimes seem to be of inadequate mass to make the scale register a change in weight. Pushing the "I don't want to bag this item" button fixes that, annoyingly enough. (The sequence of code which ensures that everything that one has scanned has also subsequently ended up in a bag should be eliminated, IMHO: It protects no one from anything, and is at best merely occasionally annoying.)
It's been years since the opposite has happened, with it over-weighing the bagging area and assuming that I'm putting things in bags that have not yet been scanned.
Buying beer is a bit of a bother sometimes -- some places have little wireless widgets that the person tending to the self-checkouts carries, which alert them wherever they're at in the store. At those places it works OK, especially if they recognize me: They will use the widget to satisfy the machine's want of age verification, and I'll be on my way in a few seconds.
Others are far worse, relying on an attendant to visually notice and act upon a red light that appears above the self-checkout, finish what they're doing, eventually stumble over, figure out if I'm old enough, and then enter an incantation into the machine.
Cell "towers" don't need to be huge if there are lots of them.
Rather, the opposite is true: The more if them you have, the smaller they must be due to frequency overlap issues.
Or, the corollary: The smaller they are, the more of them you can build without frequency overlap issues.
I would welcome a small cell tower, with its supporting gear and generator, right in my own backyard or on top of my house (I have a tall house and live at the top of a hill).
However, building new commercial communications towers (for any purpose!) in my municipality has been outright banned for the last 15 years. The consequences of this are as follows:
1. Limited total bandwidth, and an ever-growing userbase.
2. Genuinely giant towers popping up in a semi-circle immediately outside of the current boundaries of the -- sometimes, literally a few dozen yards away -- in an attempt to increase available capacity.
3. Eventually, those parts with recently-built giant towers will be annexed (we're growing), and they'll be in the city anyway.
4. Once this happens, capacity will still suck.
I'm sure I'm not the only person here who has had an opportunity to watch such a predicament unfold.
See also: Microcells, picocells, femtocells, and other buzzword-compliant magnitudes of "cell" that cost little and make sense...if they're allowed.
When I am being tailgated (which happens a lot to me when I'm in the work truck, which I tend to drive fairly conservatively both to save on fuel and because it is -- you know -- a truck), I behave exactly as I suggested to you.
Why? Because I might have to stop at any time, no matter what lane I'm in, what maneuver I'm performing, or whether or not I'm being tailgated. I also hate tailgaters, and they can make me feel very uncomfortable since while I am always aware that I might need to stop suddenly at any time, they are apparently unfamiliar with the concept.
So if I must stop, and I must also be rear-ended, I'd rather have this happen at (just to pick a number) 67 MPH instead of 73MPH. There's a quite a big difference in total energy between those two speeds, and I would prefer to have the smaller of those piles of Joules smashing the back of my vehicle.
Yep, this sometimes puts me right back where I was beforehand, as it would in your particular scenario. But I can get back to what I was doing quickly enough after I've slowed and moved right to let the tailgater pass, for only a small cost in time.
This also has the side-benefit of slightly punishing the tailgater: It's not that I mind if they want to drive faster than I, or even if they want to move a Ludicrous Speed. I simply mind that they're driving in a manner which is patently unsafe to me, and I am therefore reluctant to reward them. Hopefully, it helps discourage them from unduly endangering the next slower-moving vehicle they encounter.
In synopsis: You seem to think that speeding up to move to the right is a good option, and I disagree with that. I feel that it is generally safer to slow down and move right.
I think I understand just fine:
You decided that slowing down "wasn't an option" because you didn't want to, so you elected to speed up instead.
And then, you got a ticket. It's really rather simple.
So how much time and money did it cost you to speed up for that tailgater? Was it worth the (perhaps) 30 seconds you might have saved if your decision to go faster had paid off?
Now, please realize: I don't believe you should have gotten a ticket. I do not believe that speed limits are, in most cases, reasonable. I simply believe that your method of dealing with a tailgater is wrong and that it can be handled more both more safely and while still remaining closer to the constraints of the law (as it stands).
So much for art, eh? Must pretty boring around your place.
Waitasecond. You were being tailgated, and your solution to the problem was to decide that you "had to" drive faster?
Feh.
I'm all for driving fast when conditions permit, but having some asshole trying to shove his car up your tailpipe isn't on the list of favorable conditions.
Next time you encounter a particularly egregious tailgater, try this: Ignore them. It usually works fine.
If not, slow down. And I don't mean "smash the brake pedal," but just decelerate some. If they persist, slow down more. Rinse and repeat as needed, while staying in the right-hand lane as much as possible.
They will either get bored/pissed and pass you, or realize that they're not going to improve their rate of travel by persisting in following so closely and back off. (You can assist with them passing you by allowing a gap, and/or slowing down even more when they begin to pass to expedite the maneuver, and/or staying close to the berm so they can better see other traffic.)
Either way, the tailgating situation is relieved, you can resume driving at a more normal speed quickly enough, and (perhaps most important) the actions of the cocksucker behind you won't result you getting a ticket.
Ah, cool. Thanks for the links.
I just noticed that http://open.mapquest.com/ includes some changes and deletions I made near my house a few months back. It is good to see that someone is actually trying to use the data I've provided, and seeing this encourages me to provide more updates to further make OSM match reality...while simultaneously discouraging me from playing with Google's new tools, which don't seem open at all.
I don't see your reasons as being obvious at all. But then, I'm a practical guy when it comes to chemistry, not an experienced tinkerer.
I can get muriatic acid at Menards in gallon-sized tins for next to nothing: It's used for removing mortar from brick. (It's probably even cheaper, and in bigger containers, from the local masonry supply house.)
What are the reasons that I should use ferric chloride instead?
One word: Scale.
Take a small amount of n to an n smelter, and they'll laugh at you -- it's not worth their time to deal with such quantities.
Offer to sell a few railcars full of n to them, and you'll have their interest immediately.
(Where n is this funky spent aluminum, or lead-acid batteries, or steel, or iron, or copper, or...)
This is where recycling centers and scrap yards come into play. They consolidate the goods into sufficient quantities that they are worth transporting and bargaining for. There's a place not far from here that pays $8 for old car batteries, and they're happy to buy them one at a time, but they're not a smelter.
To use a computer analogy: Try to buy a single CPU from Intel and see how long they Laugh at you before they turn you away.
I've got a couple of good-sized neon transformers here that I play with sometimes, and I must say that I sincerely doubt that they'd do anywhere near as good a job at neatly eroding aluminum as seen in the video.
In particular, they lack the overall anger that this 150,000 volt rig produces.
Fuck.
You've invoked Godwin's Law. It's all downhill from here...
I derived no such implication from the posting, because the implication is not present.
What planet are you living on, anyway?
Yep.
Which is why, when I nuke strange things in the microwave, I keep a cup of water in there as well (along with something wooden in it to act as a nucleation point to start it boiling). It soaks up energy that might otherwise find its way back to the magnetron.
Is it perfect? No. But it is good enough, in my experience: I've had the same microwave for 8 years, and it works just as poorly now as it did when it was new.
There is, of course, the odd chance that the thing I'm nuking will form a nice neat reflector and send a significant portion of the magnetron's energy back into itself before it can be converted to heat by the water. And standing waves, as you rightly describe, can be even worse.
But the revolving platter (or stirrer, in other models) will keep the duration of this reflection down to a very short duration, while also keeping the standing waves moving instead of possibly forming a particularly destructive, static pattern.
Unless I make a retroreflector out of metal and microwave that. Hmm....