They're already talking a matter of minutes, it's all in having a large array of Li/lip batteries. you can't change how fast you can charge each cell, but by having smaller cells, you charge faster by charging them all in parallel.
even the tesla roadster is talking about charge times in the minutes at special charging stations around california. The Tesla is a high performance electric that does 0-60 in just 4 seconds, top speed is 130 mph, no slouch there either.
yes, steel is terrible, but at least point out what's wrong with it.
Taconite is the primary source of iron ore, that is used to make steel, the debris remains of taconite are highly toxic, and there were companies dumping taconite debris in the great lakes, all the way into the early 90's now in the US it all has to be stored on land, but it's Toxic, and leaches into water! i guess nobody cares what happens in northern Minnesota though, so who cares if making iron released tons of toxic waste.
secondly, steel can only be produces with a very hot flame, coal needs to be modified to even achieve such a hot temperature, and a load of ozone is produced by steel production, ozone is good though right? not in the lower atmosphere, it makes allergy sufferers suffer worse allergies, and there are days when in steel country they issue advisories 'not to go outside' due to the high ozone levels, usually a stagnant pressure system that keeps the ozone locked in one place for several days is the cause for such 'advisories.'
oh and remember how i mentioned iron production creates tons of pollution? Guess what! Steel does too! http://www.sprol.com/?p=373 and US steel was caught doing it in 2005, dumping toxic slag into waterways.
Aluminum also produces toxic waste, but compared to steel, it's trivial for one thing most soil world wide already has a small percentage (around 1%) of aluminum oxides already...
although the carbon factor with aluminum is greater than with steel, it's also one of the better recycled metals. steel and iron sadly, do not get recycled nearly enough.
everyone i know turns their heat down as cold as they can stand it in sweaters. if not using single room/person heating options.
lights that produce heat yeah that heat has to go somewhere, but a normal house doesn't have enough convection to make a difference in personal temperatures. take for instance a split level house that lacks doors (common design flaw people 'like' open floor plans) all the heat rises to the top floor, causing as much as a 10 degree difference between the top floor and the bottom floor, yes lights that produce heat make the TOP floor warmer, but the ones in the bottom floor help no one on that floor at all!
the only way to really benefit from the heat from an incandescent bulb is to sit above it where you WILL get personal heat, rather than minuscule heat at the ceiling.
people saying convection works, then why do ceiling fans have a winter mode? huh, in practice the only devices that can produce convection warming are baseboard systems. forced air won't, light bulbs won't you need a LOT of heat to make convection work.
besides, even if you live in alaska, in summer months the cooling bill increase from incandescent lights will more than offset any supposed benefit, in the winter. sure, you could have 2 sets of lights, one for summer and one for winter, or waste a lot of time changing (and breaking) bulbs.. the energy savings already offset the cost of some LED bulbs (especially if you have children, those unbreakable bulbs are a godsend)
mass producible, affordable, quality LEDs are nothing but good.
plenty of other ways to use electric heat. where i live, wood pellets are cheaper than electricity, for heating, not to mention corn burners, if you stock pile the corn in summer you can pay about 1% the cost of electric heat.
a wordpress vulnerability is nominated for the pwnies.
it's probably patched, but not everyone uses the latest wordpress version, so it's still bad.
the compromise allowed remote attackers to put any kind of mal-ware distribution site on any vulnerable wordpress site.
not to mention the horrible debian flaw, dating back to 2006 where a programmer removed 2 critical lines of code, that limited debian to 15-bit keys for all openssl operations! that's about 15,000 keys.
FOSS is vulnerable to bad flaws, clever hackers can complain about a 'problem' with code, and if they're lucky get a patch put in that makes software vulnerable, easily, and with debian manage to corrupt systems for 2 years.
more eyes is better, yeah right. I still have hope for linux, because even if one particular distro makes horrible mistakes, you still have the source to work with. not to mention it only costs time to harden a linux system, with windows it costs money.
my parents did try to get me interested in technology, and programming.
they got one of the few coleco vision adam systems, with logo, i played around with logo, but mostly i just played the video games...
then they got a 286 computer, and my dad brought home a disc full of basic games, i spent about 12 hours debugging a 'buggy' basic game, using the 10lbs manual that came with a 286, and the dot-matrix printer to print out the code, to look for bugs... but again, i lost interest. the point?
if you focus solely on coding, and the kid doesn't keep a high level of interest, perhaps it's time to try other hobbies, so they don't waste all their free time in front of a tv or playing games.
in my case, from my perspective, i realize that the reason i had so many problems as a child, was due to early symptoms of mental illness... I have never genuinely gotten interest in programming, although for a while i coded IRC bots of my own design...
if you've tried to get your child interested in things, and you keep on epic fail, it might be time to consider if they might have developed a mental illness of some type.
Because cornstarch is stronger than plastic, and is harmless if swallowed (it will break down, actually)
i know they make cornstarch cups and 'disposable' utensils, cornstarch is a byproduct of commercial corn syrup production, as well, making corn more valuable for use as a sweetener if the byproduct is used efficiently.
maybe kids blocks shouldn't be made with cornstarch, since then they might degrade too quickly. there is an advantage in that though, since you can price the blocks closer to margins, knowing they've got a limited shelf life in humid/hot environments...
if they're cracking they're probably being made from cheap soft woods, like pine.
there are still hard woods, but hard woods grow slower, and the best hard woods are often the ones used for nut/fruit farming, since they are given a very long growth cycle, because as long as they have good yields the cost of replacing them is too high to cut them down quickly..
but yeah, slow growth wood is the best for wood products, they also make a plastic version of tinker toys...
managed forestry doesn't have to push cheap fast growth soft woods, but as long as greed is the motivation, then we won't have a choice in the matter.
true, for the very young, you might want to stick with non interconnecting alphabet/number covered blocks, and teach the child their numbers and letters by Playing With the child... http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000067NXE
ah well. there are a ton of toys for kids, and edubuntu has a nice collection of FOSS tools for kids old enough to use a mouse on up!.
perhaps, maybe Lincoln logs, tinker toys. maybe knex, there was another toy that used nuts and bolts i cant' recall the name of... they might not make it any more, teaching kids how to build with wrenches and screwdrivers isn't as popular as it once was..
oh hey and Lincoln logs and tinker toys are made of renewable, biodegradable wood technology, it would be nice to know if anyone used cornstarch to build plastic like biodegradable interconnecting blocks.
i can find a google image, but not the name of the toy i was thinking of
this article is 'carbon negative' by using 'local, remote renewable energy sources' if you were burning coal to make all the limestone lime, it wouldn't help at all. oh, and irony of irony most limestone deposits came from the ocean in the first place.
seems to me to be a red herring, why not just built up efficient transmission systems and reduce the fossil fuels burned? AC power does lose efficiency, but HVDC is very efficient, over long hauls and under sea water, and hey, if the HVDC ends at a data center, or telecom facility they can convert the HVDC straight to low voltage DC, without making it AC current at all.
you're both missing the point, if the planet has water, then the only factor is compression ratio, aquatic life don't suffer from gravity like land bound creatures do, if they have neutral buoyancy the only effect of gravity they feel is the relative pressure of the water at the depth they live in.
considering there are whales that can go very deep in the ocean, to the very surface, the pressure regulation seems to be easily solved.
gravity only becomes an issue when life tries to evolve from aquatic life to land based life.
without oceans the planet won't develop enough diversity of life to populate the land. and it's far enough away that we can't tell if it has oceans.
the 'boom' wasn't an explosion, besides I've seen a thermite loaded laptop go off, in video with audio, it's a lot like a very large firework, hissing with a big gout of flame. the boom was just slang, because the data will be destroyed in a very entertaining way.
furthermore, both KDE and XFCE are both available as meta packages in the synaptic package manager, oh and then there is http://www.gnewsense.org/ originally, shuttleworth launched gobuntu to take all the non free software out of ubuntu, but then gnewsense took over, because richard stallman and the FSF liked it better, or something.
but that is based on gnome, but i'm sure switching it to kde or xfce is easy...
big dogs are old school, what's the saying "it's a three dog night"
true, they work in a power failure, but have you seen the price of dog food these days? i've never had the power fail on me in winter, and i'm 30 years old. Sure i've heard of it happening, but when you've never experienced something you don't think you ever will.
considering that you could potentially replace streetlights with those bulbs, and they're the 2nd most energy efficient form of lighting that has produced at least a working example... nano crystal coated LEDs (the nano crystal coating is expensive though) are the theoretical #1, if only we had vast factories in space to produce the stuff for a mass market...
there is a shocking amount of research about lighting, what i like about this approach, is that it can theoretically be mass produced and here on earth. if only a few problems are solved first.. but researchers are predicting a 2 year turnaround until these silicon wafer LEDs are practical. so at least, we don't have long to wait to see if it catches on and if it does how much the price will be.
"Compare this to the cost of a minor traffic accident where a tail light is cracked. No, you cannot replace the lens or any individual part, just the whole assembly. Instead of $100-$200 for an incandescent bulb assembly expect to pay $1500-$2000 for the LED tail light."
umm, where do you come from. a LED costs about $.75 cents TFA is quoting prices of 'after market light bulbs' at the $100 range, and even that is unrealistic, the places i shop online a good quality LED light costs $35-75, and that's for at least 100 watt equivalence.
TFA suggests that someday LEDs based on mass produced silicon wafers will be cheaper than existing tech which relies on sapphire.
seriously, where did you pull the $2,000 price tag from, because no honest vendor is going to charge you 2 grand for LED replacement lighting even if the whole fixture is bad.
you do realize, that except for lighting, and simple fans, virtually everything requires DC power to run.
so putting in a rectifier into lighting doesn't add $10 to the cost of a light bulb, it adds about $2.
in order for LEDS to be energy efficient, they require rectifiers anyways, since they only stay on 35% of the time when run straight off AC current. besides, to perform dimmer functionality an IC that can switch the power on and off rapidly is needed, and it's easier to put it in the bulb.
and some people aren't bothered by flicker, I for one have a very low sensitivity to flicker. I've had headaches from using older style CRTs but only when i was 'changing' my viewing behavior, eg: vacations away from the PC i'd be prone to headaches from not being around the flicker, and maybe when i first got back to staring at a monitor all day.
OTOH, i easily get headaches from both caffeine, and aspartame. oh yeah, and i'm very near sighted, perhaps my lack of sensitivity to flicker has something to do with the quality of my optical inputs.
'Me: "I live in Canuckistanbul - we NEED the heat, you ignorant clods!" '
um, that heat really does you a lot of good up there on the ceiling, that 60 watt desk lamp is probably too far away from you as well.
just pointing out that thermodynamics mean that all that waste heat is really wasted, unless you want to sit directly above your light source, you're getting 0 benefit.
besides, there are plenty of efficient electric heat sources that let you heat just one room, or 'just one person' not to mention you could just wear a parka all the time.
electric blankets don't cost much, and are nice and cozy even from the couch. although in practical terms, you need to keep the pipes from freezing etc, you can keep a place nice and cold, without risking bursting pipes.
I beg to differ, without a full wave rectifier, or DC converter, LEDs Will flicker, specifically,
"For an imaginary cycle of 360 degrees of the AC line, about 26.5deg (1.2msec) pass before the line gets to 75V and the LEDs start to emit light. Then the LEDs are on for 127deg (5.9msec), and off for the remaining 206.5deg (9.6msec). That means we get a 5.9msec hump or pulse of light every 16.7msec: The LEDs are actually ON only about 35 percent of the time "
not good, although a full wave rectifier can be built for less than $5 worth of parts at radioshack.. oh hey, and some bulbs actually take advantage of being able to make LEDs switch on and off quickly to emulate dimmer functionality.
you can't put fluorescent lighting on a dimmer, albeit, LED dimmers are a bit more sophisticated than 'dumb' dimmer knobs, at least it's possible.
thermite packed around the ram seems the best way to go. then if they tamper with the case, it triggers a 'tramper switch' the thermite goes off, and boom just a molten blob of goo. also, if you're going to have a self destruct on the ram, you may as well do the HDD as well, and you might as well throw in a manual switch along with the 'tamper switch' in case the FBI comes knocking, and have a good plan for how to circumvent your 'tamper switch'.
thermite is a bit extreme, but if you want your data irretrievably destroyed, there is nothing like thermite.
yes, there are 50 states, but you might have noticed, new york state and California both have significantly more than 1/50th of the us population. it's like saying the typical american family has 2.3 children, and then ignoring the fact that there are some with 10 or more children, and thus saying a family with '3' children is a large family. california has about 6 times the population of arizona.
if arizona found 'dozens' of matched fingerprints, then california should have found even more, i think it would be more than 6x 'dozens' (the theoretical minimum) because with 6x the test subjects, there should be a higher rate of duplicates, especially given a fixed number of possible dna fingerprints.
sales reps can always make you eligible for new phones, the catch? your contract gets extended from the END of your existing contract. if laws get changed to the point where companies can't do that, then of course sales reps won't be able to make you eligible for new phones.
it is a little counter intuitive though, if they didn't give you a new free phone all the time, wouldn't they make more money off you if you stayed with them without getting a new phone? although, if you're upgrading to a phone that has more features (read more stuff to bill for) it does make sense, since even if you get basic, you'll pay more than you were with phone without the fancy features.
Slashdot Mirror
They're already talking a matter of minutes, it's all in having a large array of Li/lip batteries. you can't change how fast you can charge each cell, but by having smaller cells, you charge faster by charging them all in parallel.
even the tesla roadster is talking about charge times in the minutes at special charging stations around california. The Tesla is a high performance electric that does 0-60 in just 4 seconds, top speed is 130 mph, no slouch there either.
yes, steel is terrible, but at least point out what's wrong with it.
Taconite is the primary source of iron ore, that is used to make steel, the debris remains of taconite are highly toxic, and there were companies dumping taconite debris in the great lakes, all the way into the early 90's now in the US it all has to be stored on land, but it's Toxic, and leaches into water! i guess nobody cares what happens in northern Minnesota though, so who cares if making iron released tons of toxic waste.
secondly, steel can only be produces with a very hot flame, coal needs to be modified to even achieve such a hot temperature, and a load of ozone is produced by steel production, ozone is good though right? not in the lower atmosphere, it makes allergy sufferers suffer worse allergies, and there are days when in steel country they issue advisories 'not to go outside' due to the high ozone levels, usually a stagnant pressure system that keeps the ozone locked in one place for several days is the cause for such 'advisories.'
oh and remember how i mentioned iron production creates tons of pollution? Guess what! Steel does too! http://www.sprol.com/?p=373 and US steel was caught doing it in 2005, dumping toxic slag into waterways.
Aluminum also produces toxic waste, but compared to steel, it's trivial for one thing most soil world wide already has a small percentage (around 1%) of aluminum oxides already...
although the carbon factor with aluminum is greater than with steel, it's also one of the better recycled metals. steel and iron sadly, do not get recycled nearly enough.
everyone i know turns their heat down as cold as they can stand it in sweaters. if not using single room/person heating options.
lights that produce heat yeah that heat has to go somewhere, but a normal house doesn't have enough convection to make a difference in personal temperatures. take for instance a split level house that lacks doors (common design flaw people 'like' open floor plans) all the heat rises to the top floor, causing as much as a 10 degree difference between the top floor and the bottom floor, yes lights that produce heat make the TOP floor warmer, but the ones in the bottom floor help no one on that floor at all!
the only way to really benefit from the heat from an incandescent bulb is to sit above it where you WILL get personal heat, rather than minuscule heat at the ceiling.
people saying convection works, then why do ceiling fans have a winter mode? huh, in practice the only devices that can produce convection warming are baseboard systems. forced air won't, light bulbs won't you need a LOT of heat to make convection work.
besides, even if you live in alaska, in summer months the cooling bill increase from incandescent lights will more than offset any supposed benefit, in the winter. sure, you could have 2 sets of lights, one for summer and one for winter, or waste a lot of time changing (and breaking) bulbs.. the energy savings already offset the cost of some LED bulbs (especially if you have children, those unbreakable bulbs are a godsend)
mass producible, affordable, quality LEDs are nothing but good.
plenty of other ways to use electric heat. where i live, wood pellets are cheaper than electricity, for heating, not to mention corn burners, if you stock pile the corn in summer you can pay about 1% the cost of electric heat.
a wordpress vulnerability is nominated for the pwnies.
it's probably patched, but not everyone uses the latest wordpress version, so it's still bad.
the compromise allowed remote attackers to put any kind of mal-ware distribution site on any vulnerable wordpress site.
not to mention the horrible debian flaw, dating back to 2006 where a programmer removed 2 critical lines of code, that limited debian to 15-bit keys for all openssl operations! that's about 15,000 keys.
FOSS is vulnerable to bad flaws, clever hackers can complain about a 'problem' with code, and if they're lucky get a patch put in that makes software vulnerable, easily, and with debian manage to corrupt systems for 2 years.
more eyes is better, yeah right. I still have hope for linux, because even if one particular distro makes horrible mistakes, you still have the source to work with. not to mention it only costs time to harden a linux system, with windows it costs money.
my parents did try to get me interested in technology, and programming.
they got one of the few coleco vision adam systems, with logo, i played around with logo, but mostly i just played the video games...
then they got a 286 computer, and my dad brought home a disc full of basic games, i spent about 12 hours debugging a 'buggy' basic game, using the 10lbs manual that came with a 286, and the dot-matrix printer to print out the code, to look for bugs... but again, i lost interest. the point?
if you focus solely on coding, and the kid doesn't keep a high level of interest, perhaps it's time to try other hobbies, so they don't waste all their free time in front of a tv or playing games.
in my case, from my perspective, i realize that the reason i had so many problems as a child, was due to early symptoms of mental illness... I have never genuinely gotten interest in programming, although for a while i coded IRC bots of my own design...
if you've tried to get your child interested in things, and you keep on epic fail, it might be time to consider if they might have developed a mental illness of some type.
Because cornstarch is stronger than plastic, and is harmless if swallowed (it will break down, actually)
i know they make cornstarch cups and 'disposable' utensils, cornstarch is a byproduct of commercial corn syrup production, as well, making corn more valuable for use as a sweetener if the byproduct is used efficiently.
maybe kids blocks shouldn't be made with cornstarch, since then they might degrade too quickly. there is an advantage in that though, since you can price the blocks closer to margins, knowing they've got a limited shelf life in humid/hot environments...
if they're cracking they're probably being made from cheap soft woods, like pine.
there are still hard woods, but hard woods grow slower, and the best hard woods are often the ones used for nut/fruit farming, since they are given a very long growth cycle, because as long as they have good yields the cost of replacing them is too high to cut them down quickly..
but yeah, slow growth wood is the best for wood products, they also make a plastic version of tinker toys...
managed forestry doesn't have to push cheap fast growth soft woods, but as long as greed is the motivation, then we won't have a choice in the matter.
true, for the very young, you might want to stick with non interconnecting alphabet/number covered blocks, and teach the child their numbers and letters by Playing With the child... http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000067NXE
ah well. there are a ton of toys for kids, and edubuntu has a nice collection of FOSS tools for kids old enough to use a mouse on up!.
ah it's so obvious now... erector.
perhaps, maybe Lincoln logs, tinker toys. maybe knex, there was another toy that used nuts and bolts i cant' recall the name of... they might not make it any more, teaching kids how to build with wrenches and screwdrivers isn't as popular as it once was..
oh hey and Lincoln logs and tinker toys are made of renewable, biodegradable wood technology, it would be nice to know if anyone used cornstarch to build plastic like biodegradable interconnecting blocks.
i can find a google image, but not the name of the toy i was thinking of
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.toycon.com/quercetti/images/big_38024.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.toycon.com/quercetti/quercetti2.html&h=375&w=340&sz=45&hl=en&start=11&tbnid=iawHzVFVzlcQYM:&tbnh=122&tbnw=111&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dkids%2Btoy%2Bscrews%2Band%2Bbolts%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN
this article is 'carbon negative' by using 'local, remote renewable energy sources' if you were burning coal to make all the limestone lime, it wouldn't help at all. oh, and irony of irony most limestone deposits came from the ocean in the first place.
seems to me to be a red herring, why not just built up efficient transmission systems and reduce the fossil fuels burned? AC power does lose efficiency, but HVDC is very efficient, over long hauls and under sea water, and hey, if the HVDC ends at a data center, or telecom facility they can convert the HVDC straight to low voltage DC, without making it AC current at all.
you're both missing the point, if the planet has water, then the only factor is compression ratio, aquatic life don't suffer from gravity like land bound creatures do, if they have neutral buoyancy the only effect of gravity they feel is the relative pressure of the water at the depth they live in.
considering there are whales that can go very deep in the ocean, to the very surface, the pressure regulation seems to be easily solved.
gravity only becomes an issue when life tries to evolve from aquatic life to land based life.
without oceans the planet won't develop enough diversity of life to populate the land. and it's far enough away that we can't tell if it has oceans.
I realized now 'Kaboom' == cartoon explosion not boom, completely different words man.
the 'boom' wasn't an explosion, besides I've seen a thermite loaded laptop go off, in video with audio, it's a lot like a very large firework, hissing with a big gout of flame. the boom was just slang, because the data will be destroyed in a very entertaining way.
you should read up more on slang, since you assume boom means explosion, 'bang' means explosion. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=boom
furthermore, both KDE and XFCE are both available as meta packages in the synaptic package manager, oh and then there is http://www.gnewsense.org/ originally, shuttleworth launched gobuntu to take all the non free software out of ubuntu, but then gnewsense took over, because richard stallman and the FSF liked it better, or something.
but that is based on gnome, but i'm sure switching it to kde or xfce is easy...
big dogs are old school, what's the saying "it's a three dog night"
true, they work in a power failure, but have you seen the price of dog food these days? i've never had the power fail on me in winter, and i'm 30 years old. Sure i've heard of it happening, but when you've never experienced something you don't think you ever will.
well, how about a luxim plasma light? http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/04/luxim-plasma-lifi-light-bulb-led-cfl.php
considering that you could potentially replace streetlights with those bulbs, and they're the 2nd most energy efficient form of lighting that has produced at least a working example... nano crystal coated LEDs (the nano crystal coating is expensive though) are the theoretical #1, if only we had vast factories in space to produce the stuff for a mass market...
there is a shocking amount of research about lighting, what i like about this approach, is that it can theoretically be mass produced and here on earth. if only a few problems are solved first.. but researchers are predicting a 2 year turnaround until these silicon wafer LEDs are practical. so at least, we don't have long to wait to see if it catches on and if it does how much the price will be.
"Compare this to the cost of a minor traffic accident where a tail light is cracked. No, you cannot replace the lens or any individual part, just the whole assembly. Instead of $100-$200 for an incandescent bulb assembly expect to pay $1500-$2000 for the LED tail light."
umm, where do you come from. a LED costs about $.75 cents TFA is quoting prices of 'after market light bulbs' at the $100 range, and even that is unrealistic, the places i shop online a good quality LED light costs $35-75, and that's for at least 100 watt equivalence.
TFA suggests that someday LEDs based on mass produced silicon wafers will be cheaper than existing tech which relies on sapphire.
seriously, where did you pull the $2,000 price tag from, because no honest vendor is going to charge you 2 grand for LED replacement lighting even if the whole fixture is bad.
you do realize, that except for lighting, and simple fans, virtually everything requires DC power to run.
so putting in a rectifier into lighting doesn't add $10 to the cost of a light bulb, it adds about $2.
in order for LEDS to be energy efficient, they require rectifiers anyways, since they only stay on 35% of the time when run straight off AC current. besides, to perform dimmer functionality an IC that can switch the power on and off rapidly is needed, and it's easier to put it in the bulb.
and some people aren't bothered by flicker, I for one have a very low sensitivity to flicker. I've had headaches from using older style CRTs but only when i was 'changing' my viewing behavior, eg: vacations away from the PC i'd be prone to headaches from not being around the flicker, and maybe when i first got back to staring at a monitor all day.
OTOH, i easily get headaches from both caffeine, and aspartame. oh yeah, and i'm very near sighted, perhaps my lack of sensitivity to flicker has something to do with the quality of my optical inputs.
'Me: "I live in Canuckistanbul - we NEED the heat, you ignorant clods!" '
um, that heat really does you a lot of good up there on the ceiling, that 60 watt desk lamp is probably too far away from you as well.
just pointing out that thermodynamics mean that all that waste heat is really wasted, unless you want to sit directly above your light source, you're getting 0 benefit.
besides, there are plenty of efficient electric heat sources that let you heat just one room, or 'just one person' not to mention you could just wear a parka all the time.
electric blankets don't cost much, and are nice and cozy even from the couch. although in practical terms, you need to keep the pipes from freezing etc, you can keep a place nice and cold, without risking bursting pipes.
"Well, they won't flicker"
I beg to differ, without a full wave rectifier, or DC converter, LEDs Will flicker, specifically,
"For an imaginary cycle of 360 degrees of the AC line, about 26.5deg (1.2msec) pass before the line gets to 75V and the LEDs start to emit light. Then the LEDs are on for 127deg (5.9msec), and off for the remaining 206.5deg (9.6msec). That means we get a 5.9msec hump or pulse of light every 16.7msec: The LEDs are actually ON only about 35 percent of the time "
not good, although a full wave rectifier can be built for less than $5 worth of parts at radioshack.. oh hey, and some bulbs actually take advantage of being able to make LEDs switch on and off quickly to emulate dimmer functionality.
you can't put fluorescent lighting on a dimmer, albeit, LED dimmers are a bit more sophisticated than 'dumb' dimmer knobs, at least it's possible.
then use kubuntu. and get KDEitis.
really, now you didn't realize that ubuntu was the gnome version?
thermite packed around the ram seems the best way to go. then if they tamper with the case, it triggers a 'tramper switch' the thermite goes off, and boom just a molten blob of goo. also, if you're going to have a self destruct on the ram, you may as well do the HDD as well, and you might as well throw in a manual switch along with the 'tamper switch' in case the FBI comes knocking, and have a good plan for how to circumvent your 'tamper switch'.
thermite is a bit extreme, but if you want your data irretrievably destroyed, there is nothing like thermite.
yes, there are 50 states, but you might have noticed, new york state and California both have significantly more than 1/50th of the us population. it's like saying the typical american family has 2.3 children, and then ignoring the fact that there are some with 10 or more children, and thus saying a family with '3' children is a large family. california has about 6 times the population of arizona.
if arizona found 'dozens' of matched fingerprints, then california should have found even more, i think it would be more than 6x 'dozens' (the theoretical minimum) because with 6x the test subjects, there should be a higher rate of duplicates, especially given a fixed number of possible dna fingerprints.
sales reps can always make you eligible for new phones, the catch? your contract gets extended from the END of your existing contract. if laws get changed to the point where companies can't do that, then of course sales reps won't be able to make you eligible for new phones.
it is a little counter intuitive though, if they didn't give you a new free phone all the time, wouldn't they make more money off you if you stayed with them without getting a new phone? although, if you're upgrading to a phone that has more features (read more stuff to bill for) it does make sense, since even if you get basic, you'll pay more than you were with phone without the fancy features.