If you shame them in their one place to escape, they'll turn to another place to escape such as reading sci-fi.
The horror! Not sci-fi! (btw... it's spelled syfy now).
Won't somebody think of the children?!?! The rotund, wheezing, waddling children.
I'm surprised they can manage to turn somewhere at all. At least in the olden days kids had to walk to the library or bookstore, so sci-fi reading had an exercise component.
How many people can find pleasure only in gaming? It just doesn't seem plausible. At least when puberty comes along there's another thing they can do by themselves that's a lot more fun.
If one my co-workers (of either sex) told me they loved me, that would make working with them at least a little uncomfortable.
Getting in trouble just for the fact that you're attracted to people of whichever gender is wrong.
Getting in trouble for making a co-worker uncomfortable by telling them you love them is a legitimate thing. It's totally inappropriate.
I will admit that in the past I did once have a crush on a male co-worker, but I would never have let him know. People have to behave professionally in the workplace so that everyone can be comfortable working there.
Speaking as a gay guy with a lot of gay and lesbian friends, I can tell you that some people get really worked up over being "in the closet". They can start to worry about really stupid things that are outside of the bounds of possibility, and work themselves into all kinds of trouble.
Case in point: a friend of mine got herself fired over this. She knew that her supervisor didn't like gay people and so she was in the closet, as far as work was concerned. She got called up for jury duty. The court case didn't last long at all, but in the meantime, one of our mutual friends' father passed away. So, my friend was invited to the funeral which happened to fall on the day after her jury duty ended. She was so worked up over the idea that her boss would figure out that she's a lesbian if she took a personal day to go to her gay friend's dad's funeral that she lied and told her boss that she was still on jury duty for the day of the funeral. Well, the boss didn't like her and he called the court clerk to confirm that she was still on jury duty - and then fired her for lying about it.
Had she just took a personal day and said "I'm going to the funeral of a friend's dad" nothing would have happened. As far as I know, there's no mechanism by which you can figure out if the relatives of a dead person (whose name you don't have) are gay or not.
Maybe this lawsuit lady should read up on the Streisand Effect (you know her name's going to come out eventually), stop worrying so much about what other people think about her sexual orientation, and concentrate on living her life. Can she truly be deluded enough to think that anyone in her life (work, social, government or otherwise) is going to trawl netflix's database to figure out if she's a lesbian and then use that information against her?
Seriously, this is like when my boss didn't want to have his pay directly deposited because he thought the payroll company could snoop in his bank account. It's just not grounded in reality.
NO, no it does not. Given that he tried other options, and he seems to have remained calm for at least the first few KM of the problem, he probably did. from comments in the article and below, it does seem that at least some modern automatics are completely fly by wire affairs.
The article said it was a 2002 Ford Explorer. They're not drive by wire. He could have shifted to neutral and there's pretty much no mechanical failure that can prevent that. If it were a manual transmission and it was stuck in gear (kind of an unlikely failure at the same time the brakes and throttle mysteriously fail) then he could have still disengaged the clutch by holding the clutch pedal down.
The are several controls that can be used to stop or at least prevent further acceleration: The ignition key switch, the clutch pedal (on a manual transmission vehicle), the shifter, the brake pedal... The idea that all of these failed simultaneously is implausible.
What we have here is an idiot who became hysterical when his throttle pedal got stuck down. His parking brake probably didn't work because it was out of adjustment. The service brakes could have failed due to a fluid leak, but had he shifted to neutral he probably could have still used them to slow down because cars have dual-circuit brakes so if one side loses fluid you can still stop on the other circuit... He probably tried to downshift which resulted in stronger acceleration, when he should have just shifted to neutral and let the engine bounce off of the rev limiter (pretty much all fuel injected cars have a rev limiter routine in the engine computer).
Seriously, he sounds like a total numbnuts who just went to pieces and has no understanding of how his car operates and how he can control it:
"I was hysterical, I was absolutely hysterical. When the police opened the car door to ask if I was okay - I have never screamed so much in my life," he said.
I know, I know. Obviously beyond any real-world scenario in academia.
Actually, collaboration is very strong in US universities. At work we are constantly hearing about some research project or other being helped out by someone from a different department who brings new or unique skills or methodologies to the project.
What is not favored however, is falling behind schedule on your grant-funded research because you're waiting for some weenie to hack together an experimental sensor from scratch when you can go down to Gamestop and buy one for $39.
I work with a number of professors at several universities, and they have to pay their grad students for time spent on the projects we fund. I don't know what the hourly rates are but they're enough that when one project temporarily ran out of funding, the grad student took a job waiting tables at a restaurant. This suggests that the pay is in a similar range as what a waiter makes. Not a lot, but not $0 either.
I remember it well because the prof told me that when he got his next funding increment he had to go down to the restaurant and get his grad student to come back.
If you're a grad student and you're doing research work for $0, well, I hope the work will look really good on a resume.
Having pushed a lawnmower around quite a bit, and having disassembled one for recycling of the parts, I can tell you that the optimum weight for a lawnmower is as close to zero as you can get it. There's no advantage to weight on a lawnmower at all. I pushed the empty chassis without the engine or blade and it still felt sturdy and controllable, just without all the fatigue. Extra weight on a lawnmower just wears the operator out.
Here's an interesting tidbit - a large portion of the power developed by a lawnmower's motor is used to move air. The airflow is used to make the grass stand up for cutting. The cutting takes very little power unless the grass is too long, wet, or dense.
Just like dropping and cracking a laptop case will void the laptop warranty, use in a smoking environment should void the warranty too. It's abuse, plain and simple, and manufacturers should write something into their warranties about exposure to excessive smoke.
My ex was a heavy smoker. We set aside a room for him to use his computer in and generally smoke himself to death - I even installed an exhaust fan in the room.
I would open up his computer about once a year and clean it out with a paintbrush and a shop vac. It was always clogged up with brown dust. His monitor screen was tinted an amber color, and when you'd wipe it off it was sticky.
You could actually see lines on the DVD drive drawer from the airflow (smokeflow). His DVD drives were lucky to last two years due to smoke coating the lens.
The color laser printer in that room one day reported that its laser unit had failed. I took the printer apart and discovered that all the optics were coated yellow-brown and the laser unit's photosensor couldn't see the laser beam any more. I cleaned the lenses and mirrors off with solvent and that got the printer working again.
Using electronics and computer equipment in a smoking environment should be a condition that would void the warranty - it was very clear that most of the problems with his computer equipment were caused by exposure to tobacco smoke.
I don't remember those characters at all, but I can see how kids might be a little creeped out by weird things that stare in through your window and can transport themselves through walls.
I was going to just copy and paste in my older post titled "The UK plug is the nanny state run wild", but I can't find the damned thing.
The simple fact of the matter is that the pins on the US plug are so short that by the point it is far enough out of the socket to expose enough of the pins to touch them with your fingers, it's unplugged. No partially insulated pins or other wacky design contrivances are needed.
The UK plug appears to have originally been designed by someone who was laboring under the misunderstanding that they were designing a connector for welding equipment, not domestic appliances. It can safely carry 100A of current, if you replace the fuse with a solid link. Why? The plug contains a maximum 13A fuse and the ring main circuit in a UK home is limited to about 40A if I remember correctly. Why a 100A connector when it can only ever be supplied with 40A?
Shutters on the sockets are a very recent development in the US, and a probably just being copied from the UK for no other reason than shutter envy. There's no real demand for them, because Americans are somehow able to resist the temptation that apparently so often overcomes their British counterparts to stick things in the socket other than a plug.
When my family moved from the UK to the USA back in 1982, I thought the US plug was flimsy compared to the UK plugs I was used to. But, really, a Honda Civic looks flimsy compared to a Caterpillar bulldozer, but I know which one I'd buy to drive every day. (Yes, I have to get a car analogy in.)
A major advantage of the USA plug is that it's smaller - you can plug six appliances into a power strip and not have the power strip be the size of a house. If you have a laptop bag, the USA plug isn't some great big lump in the bag. The US plug is designed for its intended use, not designed to be safe even if being used by newborn babies to plug in their industrial welding equipment.
You might say, well, the US plug can't carry as much current for heavy loads. It's true that you can't get as much power through a single US plug as you can through a UK 13A plug, but that's because the voltage is higher. The US plug can carry 15A at 125V all day long. My wire feed welder works just fine plugged into a normal US 15A outlet - the plug doesn't even get warm.
Hodgman... played minor parts in Tina Fey's Baby Mama, Ricky Gervais' The Invention of Lying and Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Battlestar Galactica.
No wonder the ending of BSG was so out there. Too many chefs spoil the stew.
I equipped my outdoor lights with a photo switch that says "ballast duty" on it - it's designed to turn on HID or sodium lamps which have long warmup times and which can't handle being turned on and off rapidly. It cost about $10 or $20, but it's worth it.
I put in some very cheap CFL floods and the same bulbs have been working just fine for over three years now. They have a nice light, certainly equivalent to an incandescent bulb, and they're saving me money on the electric bill as well as eliminating the trips up the ladder to change bulbs.
How do you handle the lack of dimming? I have a bunch of sockets with a dimmer and am afraid to put a CFL in there. Can I disable the dimmer easily? Or is it OK to just push the button all the way every time?
Thanks a lot,
Well, you can either buy dimmable CFLs (they do exist and are available in stores right alongside the non-dimmable ones), or you can leave the dimmer turned all the way up and just use it as an on/off switch. It will work fine and there won't be any damage to non-dimmable CFLs as long as you don't use the dimming function for any real length of time.
One difference with the dimmable CFLs is that the color temperature doesn't change much as you dim the light. With an incandescent lamp as you dim the lamp, the filament cools down, and the color temperature drops - so a dimmed incandescent lamp shifts towards the red end of the spectrum and changes how colors look. It's kind of nice to be able to dim the lights and have the colors of things in the room stay the same.
No. It should be up to society. Some people are just too thick at act responsibly. And car manufacturers are hardly going to build cars for 'a few stupid idiots' - they will design a car and market it hard, and try to sell as many as possible. Regulating will take away the option to make cars suitable for the dumb.
That's not how we do things in the USA. People are free to buy the products they want - and it is their responsibility to select appropriately. If you live here and you don't like it, I suggest you leave and go somewhere where freedom is frowned upon, like the UK for example.
I drive very few miles. I drive a vehicle that does about 10MPG. I chose it because it's very very safe, extremely comfortable, and it was inexpensive compared to many other options. Because I drive very few miles, even at 10MPG I am using far less fuel and producing far less emissions than my neighbor who drives much further every day in their fuel efficient vehicle.
We don't need jerks like you mandating what everyone does just so you can feed your own self-righteous sense of self worth.
Unless this glass cuts 100% of radiation, your garage door opener will work, and in any case most cars these days have an opener built in (presumably connected to the car's outside antenna).
The only thing that should be affected is cell phones, and I, for one, could do with a lot fewer idiots paying attention to their phone call than to the road.
Nope. Those three-button garage door opener things you see in many many cars these days are self-contained modules. All it needs is +12V and a ground. The antenna is inside the module.
If you think about it, it doesn't make sense to connect the garage door opener to the radio antenna. The standard remote that comes with most door openers operates just fine without an external antenna, so there's no reason for the car's door-opener module to need one. The door opener operates in a completely different frequency band from the AM/FM radio, so the antenna would give only limited gain. Also, the carmakers would have to add cabling (and therefore weight and expense) for the antenna connection.
It seems like Kalifornia's air resources board should stick to the things they are good at, although I'm not sure there's a very long list of that.
911) I'm sorry, unless there is a man in your presence who has made a credible threat against you or physically assaulted you, we can't do anything. Have a nice day.
--Jeremy
You should try calling the police sometime. They may have determined over the phone that she didn't need an immediate emergency response, but it's more than likely that she would have gotten to speak to someone who would have looked into it.
I've had dealings with five different police/sheriff's departments around here, and I've never seen anyone get the brush-off in the way that you mention. Police may be busy, but they don't just forget about it when they're told about someone being concerned for their safety either.
I know I've exceeded 100GB on my Sprint Mobile Broadband card. For a while I was using it as my main connection at home and everywhere else, and with two people and a lot of downloading it was easy.
The best part it's a Business Unlimited account and for $59.99 a month it actually is unlimited. They don't put 1,000 place separators (commas) in the "Bytes transferred" number on the bill, so I was pretty amazed when I marked the places and figured out I'd transferred that much data. Sprint's network didn't have any problems at all, as far as I can tell.
How is purchasing someone *elses* previously broken Apple at a "20-30% discount" a good deal? I'll buy certain things referbed (routers/switches, cable modems, some audio equipment, etc), but a computer? No thank you.
I've bought a few refurbished Apple products, including Macbooks, and apart from the packaging they're indistinguishable from new - including in terms of reliability.
I have someone in my office who just returned a brand-new Toshiba laptop because "the wrist rest rubs on my wrists wrong". There's nothing wrong with it, and it will be resold by the manufacturer as refurbished. Not everything refurbished is "previously broken", and my experience has been that after the second pass through Apple's quality control, the refurbished stuff is just as good as new. Just without the fancy packaging and the extra 20-30% on the price.
I forgot about HP's scanners. I have a Scanjet 5490C in my office. Cost about $1300. It's in perfect condition and is totally unusable. Why? The power supply failed, and HP decided in their infinite wisdom that they wouldn't bother keeping a supply of replacements in their parts warehouse. There are two versions of the power supply - a low current one for the scanner, and a high current one for the scanner with the optional automatic document feeder. Guess which one it needs?
I've seen the $80 power supplies going used on eBay for $200, because they're next to impossible to find.
I replaced the HP with a Kodak i65. More expensive, but scans both sides at once and is built like a battleship. No jams or failures in over 50,000 pages scanned so far. Not that I'd buy a $2000 scanner for home though, but the HP wasn't low-cost enough when you consider how much lower in quality it was than the Kodak.
That formatter board I mentioned, it cost $1280 to replace, and failed again within a year. The fact that the HP service guys never used any kind of test equipment didn't really instill confidence either. Between those two HP printers and their document finishers (stapler/stacker gadgets), I threw about $17,000 in the dumpster. We were glad to get the floor space back.
I won't even look at an HP printer any more. They used to be fabulously reliable, but no longer.
Now granted, most of my experience is with their larger machines, but my experience with their SOHO inkjet machines has sucked too. The last of those went in the dumpster last year, when it told me the cartridge we'd had on the shelf for a year had expired and it refused to print with it.
Last year I took a Torx screwdriver and a hammer and dismantled and threw out my office's HP 9500hdn and the old HP 8550DN.
Both of these printers were used lightly during most of the year, to print the occasional office print job (5 person office), and then for two months of each year they'd be run about 6 hours a day continuously, to produce duplexed and stapled documents for a conference.
The 8550 you could charitably say had worn out - over firve years we'd gotten over 150,000 prints out of it, but the monthly duty cycle rating was supposed to be up around 100,000 pages anyway, so that's not much. At the end it jammed more often than it printed, but long before the mechanical parts started to fail, the formatter board had decided that it wouldn't boot with the internal IDE hard drive attached (or any other IDE drive attached), and this was the second formatter board - the first one died years ago. This meant that it could no longer produce more than one copy of any multi-page document. This, coupled with the constant jams and the 4 page per minute print speed spelled the end of this machine.
The 9500... well, that was a huge disappointment. We got about two years out of it. It was a lot faster than the 8550, but after about 18 months it started to jam. A lot. We spent close to $2000 on having HP's on-site support people take guesses at the problem, and they honestly had no idea why it was jamming. We'd tried everything including putting it in a special room with controlled temperature and humidity, and even using a power conditioner and a variac to play with the line voltage - at this point I would have brought in a Voodoo priest if I could have found one. I don't think we even broke the 150,000 page mark on this piece of junk.
Both printers were replaced with a Ricoh Aficio SP C811DN-DL. Talk about a night and day difference. We're on our second year with the Ricoh and it has jammed once, when someone put a folded piece of paper in the supply drawer. It is a thing of beauty. We also have one inkjet machine, a Ricoh GX5050N - totally trouble free, prints two-sided and has huge ink cartridges.
We also had an HP 3500N. It actually costs more to buy a full set of all four toner cartridges than it does to buy a Brother all-in-one color laser fax/scanner. So that's what we did. We have two of the Brother machines, and they only complain when they need toner or a drum.
In short, my advice is buy a Brother or a Ricoh, but whatever you buy, research it - find reviews from people who own the printer model you're looking at.
I think the funniest part of that video is at 5:25 where the cabinet falls over that the guy had tried putting things on top of earlier to save them...
I started laughing when he was trying to save the contents of what looks like a cash drawer, but ends up dumping the thing over in the water. It just needed the yackety sax music from Benny Hill dubbing over it.
Try being blind and then guessing when it's safe to cross the road...
I've read the articles where the blind people are freaked out by hybrid cars that they can't hear (when the car pulls away from a stop, for example). We can all understand why we want blind people to know there is a moving vehicle near them.
The thing is, simple economics dictates that it would make far more sense to equip the blind people with car proximity sensors of some kind, rather than make every car noisy.
There are far fewer blind people than cars. We can reasonably assume that in the future there will be many more hybrid or electric cars which produce little to no sound at low speeds.
Imagine the benefit of having areas free from engine noise - why artificially make every car noisy just for the safety of a very small portion of the population who can't see them?
It'd be easy enough to equip every car with something that produces ultrasonic sound or low power radio waves, and give blind people a device they can wear that will detect the car proximity signal and indicate to the blind person (perhaps by vibration) where nearby cars are.
Slashdot Mirror
If you shame them in their one place to escape, they'll turn to another place to escape such as reading sci-fi.
The horror! Not sci-fi! (btw... it's spelled syfy now).
Won't somebody think of the children?!?! The rotund, wheezing, waddling children.
I'm surprised they can manage to turn somewhere at all. At least in the olden days kids had to walk to the library or bookstore, so sci-fi reading had an exercise component.
How many people can find pleasure only in gaming? It just doesn't seem plausible. At least when puberty comes along there's another thing they can do by themselves that's a lot more fun.
If one my co-workers (of either sex) told me they loved me, that would make working with them at least a little uncomfortable.
Getting in trouble just for the fact that you're attracted to people of whichever gender is wrong.
Getting in trouble for making a co-worker uncomfortable by telling them you love them is a legitimate thing. It's totally inappropriate.
I will admit that in the past I did once have a crush on a male co-worker, but I would never have let him know. People have to behave professionally in the workplace so that everyone can be comfortable working there.
Speaking as a gay guy with a lot of gay and lesbian friends, I can tell you that some people get really worked up over being "in the closet". They can start to worry about really stupid things that are outside of the bounds of possibility, and work themselves into all kinds of trouble.
Case in point: a friend of mine got herself fired over this. She knew that her supervisor didn't like gay people and so she was in the closet, as far as work was concerned. She got called up for jury duty. The court case didn't last long at all, but in the meantime, one of our mutual friends' father passed away. So, my friend was invited to the funeral which happened to fall on the day after her jury duty ended. She was so worked up over the idea that her boss would figure out that she's a lesbian if she took a personal day to go to her gay friend's dad's funeral that she lied and told her boss that she was still on jury duty for the day of the funeral. Well, the boss didn't like her and he called the court clerk to confirm that she was still on jury duty - and then fired her for lying about it.
Had she just took a personal day and said "I'm going to the funeral of a friend's dad" nothing would have happened. As far as I know, there's no mechanism by which you can figure out if the relatives of a dead person (whose name you don't have) are gay or not.
Maybe this lawsuit lady should read up on the Streisand Effect (you know her name's going to come out eventually), stop worrying so much about what other people think about her sexual orientation, and concentrate on living her life. Can she truly be deluded enough to think that anyone in her life (work, social, government or otherwise) is going to trawl netflix's database to figure out if she's a lesbian and then use that information against her?
Seriously, this is like when my boss didn't want to have his pay directly deposited because he thought the payroll company could snoop in his bank account. It's just not grounded in reality.
NO, no it does not. Given that he tried other options, and he seems to have remained calm for at least the first few KM of the problem, he probably did. from comments in the article and below, it does seem that at least some modern automatics are completely fly by wire affairs.
The article said it was a 2002 Ford Explorer. They're not drive by wire. He could have shifted to neutral and there's pretty much no mechanical failure that can prevent that. If it were a manual transmission and it was stuck in gear (kind of an unlikely failure at the same time the brakes and throttle mysteriously fail) then he could have still disengaged the clutch by holding the clutch pedal down.
The are several controls that can be used to stop or at least prevent further acceleration: The ignition key switch, the clutch pedal (on a manual transmission vehicle), the shifter, the brake pedal... The idea that all of these failed simultaneously is implausible.
What we have here is an idiot who became hysterical when his throttle pedal got stuck down. His parking brake probably didn't work because it was out of adjustment. The service brakes could have failed due to a fluid leak, but had he shifted to neutral he probably could have still used them to slow down because cars have dual-circuit brakes so if one side loses fluid you can still stop on the other circuit... He probably tried to downshift which resulted in stronger acceleration, when he should have just shifted to neutral and let the engine bounce off of the rev limiter (pretty much all fuel injected cars have a rev limiter routine in the engine computer).
Seriously, he sounds like a total numbnuts who just went to pieces and has no understanding of how his car operates and how he can control it:
"I was hysterical, I was absolutely hysterical. When the police opened the car door to ask if I was okay - I have never screamed so much in my life," he said.
What Psystar did would be analogous if Compaq bought an IBM PC, changed a few chips, put it in a new case, and resold it as Compaq's IBM PC.
Actually, that would be totally legal, because you're talking about a physical object being bought, modified and resold.
Psystar modified and resold copyrighted works without obtaining a license to do so. That's the problem.
Solution: collaborate.
I know, I know. Obviously beyond any real-world scenario in academia.
Actually, collaboration is very strong in US universities. At work we are constantly hearing about some research project or other being helped out by someone from a different department who brings new or unique skills or methodologies to the project.
What is not favored however, is falling behind schedule on your grant-funded research because you're waiting for some weenie to hack together an experimental sensor from scratch when you can go down to Gamestop and buy one for $39.
I work with a number of professors at several universities, and they have to pay their grad students for time spent on the projects we fund. I don't know what the hourly rates are but they're enough that when one project temporarily ran out of funding, the grad student took a job waiting tables at a restaurant. This suggests that the pay is in a similar range as what a waiter makes. Not a lot, but not $0 either.
I remember it well because the prof told me that when he got his next funding increment he had to go down to the restaurant and get his grad student to come back.
If you're a grad student and you're doing research work for $0, well, I hope the work will look really good on a resume.
Having pushed a lawnmower around quite a bit, and having disassembled one for recycling of the parts, I can tell you that the optimum weight for a lawnmower is as close to zero as you can get it. There's no advantage to weight on a lawnmower at all. I pushed the empty chassis without the engine or blade and it still felt sturdy and controllable, just without all the fatigue. Extra weight on a lawnmower just wears the operator out.
Here's an interesting tidbit - a large portion of the power developed by a lawnmower's motor is used to move air. The airflow is used to make the grass stand up for cutting. The cutting takes very little power unless the grass is too long, wet, or dense.
Just like dropping and cracking a laptop case will void the laptop warranty, use in a smoking environment should void the warranty too. It's abuse, plain and simple, and manufacturers should write something into their warranties about exposure to excessive smoke.
My ex was a heavy smoker. We set aside a room for him to use his computer in and generally smoke himself to death - I even installed an exhaust fan in the room.
I would open up his computer about once a year and clean it out with a paintbrush and a shop vac. It was always clogged up with brown dust. His monitor screen was tinted an amber color, and when you'd wipe it off it was sticky.
You could actually see lines on the DVD drive drawer from the airflow (smokeflow). His DVD drives were lucky to last two years due to smoke coating the lens.
The color laser printer in that room one day reported that its laser unit had failed. I took the printer apart and discovered that all the optics were coated yellow-brown and the laser unit's photosensor couldn't see the laser beam any more. I cleaned the lenses and mirrors off with solvent and that got the printer working again.
Using electronics and computer equipment in a smoking environment should be a condition that would void the warranty - it was very clear that most of the problems with his computer equipment were caused by exposure to tobacco smoke.
I don't remember those characters at all, but I can see how kids might be a little creeped out by weird things that stare in through your window and can transport themselves through walls.
This video featuring them is much better, far less creepy: Sesame Street Yip Yip Martians try Gangsta Rap. It's a great piece of editing.
I was going to just copy and paste in my older post titled "The UK plug is the nanny state run wild", but I can't find the damned thing.
The simple fact of the matter is that the pins on the US plug are so short that by the point it is far enough out of the socket to expose enough of the pins to touch them with your fingers, it's unplugged. No partially insulated pins or other wacky design contrivances are needed.
The UK plug appears to have originally been designed by someone who was laboring under the misunderstanding that they were designing a connector for welding equipment, not domestic appliances. It can safely carry 100A of current, if you replace the fuse with a solid link. Why? The plug contains a maximum 13A fuse and the ring main circuit in a UK home is limited to about 40A if I remember correctly. Why a 100A connector when it can only ever be supplied with 40A?
Shutters on the sockets are a very recent development in the US, and a probably just being copied from the UK for no other reason than shutter envy. There's no real demand for them, because Americans are somehow able to resist the temptation that apparently so often overcomes their British counterparts to stick things in the socket other than a plug.
When my family moved from the UK to the USA back in 1982, I thought the US plug was flimsy compared to the UK plugs I was used to. But, really, a Honda Civic looks flimsy compared to a Caterpillar bulldozer, but I know which one I'd buy to drive every day. (Yes, I have to get a car analogy in.)
A major advantage of the USA plug is that it's smaller - you can plug six appliances into a power strip and not have the power strip be the size of a house. If you have a laptop bag, the USA plug isn't some great big lump in the bag. The US plug is designed for its intended use, not designed to be safe even if being used by newborn babies to plug in their industrial welding equipment.
You might say, well, the US plug can't carry as much current for heavy loads. It's true that you can't get as much power through a single US plug as you can through a UK 13A plug, but that's because the voltage is higher. The US plug can carry 15A at 125V all day long. My wire feed welder works just fine plugged into a normal US 15A outlet - the plug doesn't even get warm.
Hodgman ... played minor parts in Tina Fey's Baby Mama, Ricky Gervais' The Invention of Lying and Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Battlestar Galactica.
No wonder the ending of BSG was so out there. Too many chefs spoil the stew.
I equipped my outdoor lights with a photo switch that says "ballast duty" on it - it's designed to turn on HID or sodium lamps which have long warmup times and which can't handle being turned on and off rapidly. It cost about $10 or $20, but it's worth it.
I put in some very cheap CFL floods and the same bulbs have been working just fine for over three years now. They have a nice light, certainly equivalent to an incandescent bulb, and they're saving me money on the electric bill as well as eliminating the trips up the ladder to change bulbs.
How do you handle the lack of dimming? I have a bunch of sockets with a dimmer and am afraid to put a CFL in there. Can I disable the dimmer easily? Or is it OK to just push the button all the way every time?
Thanks a lot,
Well, you can either buy dimmable CFLs (they do exist and are available in stores right alongside the non-dimmable ones), or you can leave the dimmer turned all the way up and just use it as an on/off switch. It will work fine and there won't be any damage to non-dimmable CFLs as long as you don't use the dimming function for any real length of time.
One difference with the dimmable CFLs is that the color temperature doesn't change much as you dim the light. With an incandescent lamp as you dim the lamp, the filament cools down, and the color temperature drops - so a dimmed incandescent lamp shifts towards the red end of the spectrum and changes how colors look. It's kind of nice to be able to dim the lights and have the colors of things in the room stay the same.
>But should be up to the customer.
No. It should be up to society. Some people are just too thick at act responsibly. And car manufacturers are hardly going to build cars for 'a few stupid idiots' - they will design a car and market it hard, and try to sell as many as possible. Regulating will take away the option to make cars suitable for the dumb.
That's not how we do things in the USA. People are free to buy the products they want - and it is their responsibility to select appropriately. If you live here and you don't like it, I suggest you leave and go somewhere where freedom is frowned upon, like the UK for example.
I drive very few miles. I drive a vehicle that does about 10MPG. I chose it because it's very very safe, extremely comfortable, and it was inexpensive compared to many other options. Because I drive very few miles, even at 10MPG I am using far less fuel and producing far less emissions than my neighbor who drives much further every day in their fuel efficient vehicle.
We don't need jerks like you mandating what everyone does just so you can feed your own self-righteous sense of self worth.
Unless this glass cuts 100% of radiation, your garage door opener will work, and in any case most cars these days have an opener built in (presumably connected to the car's outside antenna).
The only thing that should be affected is cell phones, and I, for one, could do with a lot fewer idiots paying attention to their phone call than to the road.
Nope. Those three-button garage door opener things you see in many many cars these days are self-contained modules. All it needs is +12V and a ground. The antenna is inside the module.
If you think about it, it doesn't make sense to connect the garage door opener to the radio antenna. The standard remote that comes with most door openers operates just fine without an external antenna, so there's no reason for the car's door-opener module to need one. The door opener operates in a completely different frequency band from the AM/FM radio, so the antenna would give only limited gain. Also, the carmakers would have to add cabling (and therefore weight and expense) for the antenna connection.
It seems like Kalifornia's air resources board should stick to the things they are good at, although I'm not sure there's a very long list of that.
911) I'm sorry, unless there is a man in your presence who has made a credible threat against you or physically assaulted you, we can't do anything. Have a nice day.
--Jeremy
You should try calling the police sometime. They may have determined over the phone that she didn't need an immediate emergency response, but it's more than likely that she would have gotten to speak to someone who would have looked into it.
I've had dealings with five different police/sheriff's departments around here, and I've never seen anyone get the brush-off in the way that you mention. Police may be busy, but they don't just forget about it when they're told about someone being concerned for their safety either.
Are you seriously comparing Star Trek to Survivor on technobabble?
There was a sci fi show named Survivor, long before there was a "reality" show with the same name.
What machinery exists inside an artillery shell?
All kinds of gadgets, for example a timing mechanism so that the shell's explosive charge doesn't go off inside the gun.
I know I've exceeded 100GB on my Sprint Mobile Broadband card. For a while I was using it as my main connection at home and everywhere else, and with two people and a lot of downloading it was easy.
The best part it's a Business Unlimited account and for $59.99 a month it actually is unlimited. They don't put 1,000 place separators (commas) in the "Bytes transferred" number on the bill, so I was pretty amazed when I marked the places and figured out I'd transferred that much data. Sprint's network didn't have any problems at all, as far as I can tell.
How is purchasing someone *elses* previously broken Apple at a "20-30% discount" a good deal? I'll buy certain things referbed (routers/switches, cable modems, some audio equipment, etc), but a computer? No thank you.
I've bought a few refurbished Apple products, including Macbooks, and apart from the packaging they're indistinguishable from new - including in terms of reliability.
I have someone in my office who just returned a brand-new Toshiba laptop because "the wrist rest rubs on my wrists wrong". There's nothing wrong with it, and it will be resold by the manufacturer as refurbished. Not everything refurbished is "previously broken", and my experience has been that after the second pass through Apple's quality control, the refurbished stuff is just as good as new. Just without the fancy packaging and the extra 20-30% on the price.
I forgot about HP's scanners. I have a Scanjet 5490C in my office. Cost about $1300. It's in perfect condition and is totally unusable. Why? The power supply failed, and HP decided in their infinite wisdom that they wouldn't bother keeping a supply of replacements in their parts warehouse. There are two versions of the power supply - a low current one for the scanner, and a high current one for the scanner with the optional automatic document feeder. Guess which one it needs?
I've seen the $80 power supplies going used on eBay for $200, because they're next to impossible to find.
I replaced the HP with a Kodak i65. More expensive, but scans both sides at once and is built like a battleship. No jams or failures in over 50,000 pages scanned so far. Not that I'd buy a $2000 scanner for home though, but the HP wasn't low-cost enough when you consider how much lower in quality it was than the Kodak.
That formatter board I mentioned, it cost $1280 to replace, and failed again within a year. The fact that the HP service guys never used any kind of test equipment didn't really instill confidence either. Between those two HP printers and their document finishers (stapler/stacker gadgets), I threw about $17,000 in the dumpster. We were glad to get the floor space back.
I won't even look at an HP printer any more. They used to be fabulously reliable, but no longer.
Now granted, most of my experience is with their larger machines, but my experience with their SOHO inkjet machines has sucked too. The last of those went in the dumpster last year, when it told me the cartridge we'd had on the shelf for a year had expired and it refused to print with it.
Last year I took a Torx screwdriver and a hammer and dismantled and threw out my office's HP 9500hdn and the old HP 8550DN.
Both of these printers were used lightly during most of the year, to print the occasional office print job (5 person office), and then for two months of each year they'd be run about 6 hours a day continuously, to produce duplexed and stapled documents for a conference.
The 8550 you could charitably say had worn out - over firve years we'd gotten over 150,000 prints out of it, but the monthly duty cycle rating was supposed to be up around 100,000 pages anyway, so that's not much. At the end it jammed more often than it printed, but long before the mechanical parts started to fail, the formatter board had decided that it wouldn't boot with the internal IDE hard drive attached (or any other IDE drive attached), and this was the second formatter board - the first one died years ago. This meant that it could no longer produce more than one copy of any multi-page document. This, coupled with the constant jams and the 4 page per minute print speed spelled the end of this machine.
The 9500... well, that was a huge disappointment. We got about two years out of it. It was a lot faster than the 8550, but after about 18 months it started to jam. A lot. We spent close to $2000 on having HP's on-site support people take guesses at the problem, and they honestly had no idea why it was jamming. We'd tried everything including putting it in a special room with controlled temperature and humidity, and even using a power conditioner and a variac to play with the line voltage - at this point I would have brought in a Voodoo priest if I could have found one. I don't think we even broke the 150,000 page mark on this piece of junk.
Both printers were replaced with a Ricoh Aficio SP C811DN-DL. Talk about a night and day difference. We're on our second year with the Ricoh and it has jammed once, when someone put a folded piece of paper in the supply drawer. It is a thing of beauty. We also have one inkjet machine, a Ricoh GX5050N - totally trouble free, prints two-sided and has huge ink cartridges.
We also had an HP 3500N. It actually costs more to buy a full set of all four toner cartridges than it does to buy a Brother all-in-one color laser fax/scanner. So that's what we did. We have two of the Brother machines, and they only complain when they need toner or a drum.
In short, my advice is buy a Brother or a Ricoh, but whatever you buy, research it - find reviews from people who own the printer model you're looking at.
I think the funniest part of that video is at 5:25 where the cabinet falls over that the guy had tried putting things on top of earlier to save them...
I started laughing when he was trying to save the contents of what looks like a cash drawer, but ends up dumping the thing over in the water. It just needed the yackety sax music from Benny Hill dubbing over it.
Try being blind and then guessing when it's safe to cross the road...
I've read the articles where the blind people are freaked out by hybrid cars that they can't hear (when the car pulls away from a stop, for example). We can all understand why we want blind people to know there is a moving vehicle near them.
The thing is, simple economics dictates that it would make far more sense to equip the blind people with car proximity sensors of some kind, rather than make every car noisy.
There are far fewer blind people than cars. We can reasonably assume that in the future there will be many more hybrid or electric cars which produce little to no sound at low speeds.
Imagine the benefit of having areas free from engine noise - why artificially make every car noisy just for the safety of a very small portion of the population who can't see them?
It'd be easy enough to equip every car with something that produces ultrasonic sound or low power radio waves, and give blind people a device they can wear that will detect the car proximity signal and indicate to the blind person (perhaps by vibration) where nearby cars are.