There's a show called "Connections" that used to be on TLC (produced by BBC I think) that I loved.
Yeah, that was one of my favorite shows. My personal favorite fact was learning about the volatility of early celluloid based plastics: that imitation ivory billiard balls sometimes exploded and how "widow's(?) silk" got its name.
It's no where to be found.
Not sure how you define "nowhere to be found" did you mean its not available for download?
That may be so but at least three seasons of it were commercially released on VHS. You can get two of them on Amazon Season 2, Season 3. You might also try your public library. If they have a decent video collection they usually have bought most of the BBC series that have run on PBS. They likely would have ordered it directly from the Producer Ambrose Video, which can be kind of pricy - but they have released 10 episodes (two seasons I think) on DVD - the five disc set of which can be had for a mere $395.
first listed) search by customers there after was for clean undearwear
Since they added clothing I've notice that Clean Underwear from Amazon's Target Store is always listed first in the "Customers who wear clothes also shop for:" section. Unfortunately, what I want to know is the most shopped for items of customers who don't wear clothes - especially attactive female college students who don't wear clothes. In fact if they could break down that information by zip code, then I think Amazon would find themselves generating a lot more traffic.
Likely I'm not the first to propose this, but based on my monitoring of the IT industry I would propose this corollary to Moore's Law
Every six month's some pundit will predict that reached have reached the end of Moore's Law...and that the pundit's prediction will be posted on SlashDot...and that within three months some innovation will occur that ensure the continutity of Moore's Law... and finally, that SlashDot will post a story about that innovation.
the NPR story refers to apes as our 'ancestors', which of course they aren't,
I think you are misinterpretting the article. The quote you refer to "the finding appears to whittle away a little more of the divide between humans and their ape ancestors." the way I interpret it is referring to the common ancestors of both the Great Apes and Modern Humans.
In the case of orangs, they mention that they split off from our common ancestors 14 Million years (which I think was earlier than Gorillas and much earlier than Chimpanzees and Bonobos - elsewhere I've seen 8, 6, & 5.5 Million years ago as the approximation of these splits). By finding that all living descendants of these common ancestors share a common characteristic, they are inferring that the common ancestor(s) also shared the characteristic (in this case - culture). Of course there is no way of knowing whether this is true or whether each of the living species developed it independently at some point in their evolution since the split.
The fact that they have these types of social interactions is not new, what is new is that distinct geographically isolated populations have different ways of accomplishing the same thing.
NPR ran a nice piece on this today, and used the example of a fruit which one population eats by getting it open with a stick (a picture is included in the MSNBC article). A neighboring population seperated by a river, either eats the fruit by bashing it on rocks (much more inneficient) or by ignoring it as too hard to bother with. i.e. one population has learned to use a tool for specific task and has passed that information on the other Orangs in the community. Its the passing on of this knowledge, and the fact that it couldn't be passed to the neighboring population that makes this 'culture'.
From a SlashDot perspective, one could speculate that on the one side of the river, the solution for eating the fruit has been open sourced. But on the other side of the river, the solution was either never discovered, or if it was found, was closed source and died with its dicoverer(s).
Other examples given are a Kiss-Squeek gesture & sound, and "snag riding" a demonstration of male virility of breaking off trees and holding on to them while they fall, jumping off before they hit the ground (Orang candidates for the Darwin Awards perhaps?).
Yeah the technology is definately not new, this has been the standard format for tennis ball cans for well over a decade. The question is market acceptance and given the recycling concerns, I can't see that being too great.
You can already get beer in plastic bottles in the US but most people think the beer will not taste as good (for the Miller, Lite, and MGD brands that use the technology, taste isn't really a concern anyway - but somehow these consumers consider themselves beer conoisseurs if you change the bottling material). So given the limited acceptance of plastic bottles I've only seen them at sporting events where it is prefereable not to arm potentially drunken disgruntled fans with glass missiles just in case the home team loses.
Finally, she reached Hayden, who was sipping a beer. He suggested she use the pay phone he maintained in the restaurant. She haughtily replied: "I wouldn't be caught dead using a pay phone.
At Franklin's (the local brewpub) they don't have a traditional payphone, what they have instead is a cellphone for customer use. You just make your call and drop $.50 into a box. A lot of businesses used to maintain payphones for their customers, often as a losing proposition for the business since the Phone Co's charge the biz something like $200/month to have one. At first businesses tried to get around this by instead using the oversized desktop payphones some independents were offering. But with "free" phones and unlimited mobile plans now running about $60 - $70/month I think a lot more places will be doing this. At $60/month it only takes 4 calls a day to break even - plus there is a redundant phone system available in case the main POTS line phones goes down.
What they should have been doing is include some additional content that makes you want to hold onto the disc. They're paired with TimeWarner for goodness sakes, you'd think that would give them compelling content.
Well they did recently run a promotion with CHEERIOS cereal to have the software included on the free DVD's glued to the cereal box.
They also get there software included on most name brand PC's at the factory, and get there icon installed on your desktop everytime you download a new version Netscape.
What surprises me is that they don't let you request a free Netscape installation CD with the AOL software on it. Instead they mail out AOL disks whether you want them or not, but if you want to get Netscape on CD you have to pay $5 shipping and handling.
MMC cards are typically $20 to $40 cheaper too (if you've found them cheaper, pass it along!).
Not any longer, as it seems that for example on Amazon's Sandisk page the Sandisk 32MB MMC card sells for $29.99, but the 32MB SD card is a little cheaper at $26.99. This may be partly explained by the SD having less user accessible space, but that is only a 5% difference, not the 10% shown here.
There is even a bigger discrepancy between Viking 64 MB cards, where the SD card is selling for $41.99, but MMC car goes for $52.99, a difference of over 25%.
I found 128 MB SD cards (which are the cheapest per MB of SD cards (just under $.50/MB typically) to be slightly cheaper than their MMC counterparts, and I can't even find MMC cards in the 256 MB range. So if he is looking for a 256 MB card he may not have any choice but to go with SD. SD even come in a 512 MB format but those cards cost much more per MB.
I also like ISBN.nu (though they may be having some technical dificulties currently) and Google's new Froogle site, all you have to do is search on the ISBN.
I've tried Froogle for some other products though and was less satisfied, since it seems to grab the price in closest proximity on the page to the search term you used - which is sometimes for a different product or for some other charge besides the product price like the shipping, warranty, cost of a peripheral.
The accompanying CD-ROM contains the author's own software for instantly locking out attackers and alerting system administrators. There are also exclusive iptables and ipchains firewall rules, as well as a collection of tools for monitoring network health, detecting and reporting suspicious activities, securing backups, simplifying recovery etc.
When you say exclusive, I hear closed license. Is that the case? If I get the book, and look at the iptables and ipchains configs provided am I actually allowed to use it on my own firewall box? Am I allowed to recommend them to my friends? My employer?
The review says the author's own software is also included. What sort of license is it provided under? Is there a EULA with proscriptive provisions? Will I only find out about the license/EULA after I have bought the book and loaded the CD?
"You can purchase Real World Linux Security from bn.com."
SlashDot must have some deal worked out with BN* since they are recommending you buy reviewed books there when they can be bought much cheaper ($34.99 at Amazon) elsewhere on the web.
* Full dislosure: yes I have a 'deal' worked out with Amazon in the form of their affiliate program, but it seems the typical shopper should care more about how much they are spending rather than where they are spending it.
I don't understand why the poster believes that if Miyamoto produced a mature-themed game would "rock the world".
Depends on the mature-themed game. The PS2 version of Rez with the add-on 'Trance Vibrator' enhanced rumble pack, certainly "rocked the world" of this gamegirl.
I think there is likely a large untapped market for mature themed but non-violent games. For some reason, as with movies the 'mature-themed' products that are mass marketed have no problem including grotesque violence but shun sexuality (except maybe of the 'Leisure Suit Larry' exploitive animated striptease variety - usually only included in games with significant violence).
I disagree, I think Plastic has a lot of appeal. I now waste much more time there than on SlashDot.
As to status, Plastic having a lower membership would seem to make it somewhat more exclusive and therefore higher status. Plus regular members get to participate in the high status job of rating the submit Q.
Unfortunately it seems the red zones that appear on the map aren't color coded to represent that. Also aparently absent from the color scheme are green spots to identify the hash bars.
If they could get a representative sample of the population, this would be a great technology for city planners. What I would like to see are maps that instead of giving a week at a time - give cumulative maps for each half hour during weekday mornings and afternoons to identify which traffic routes to take or avoid.
Given enough devices with a real-time hookup and it would be invaluable in directing traffic around problem spots. The same could be done in the NorthEastern US by putting ez-Pass readers into all highway onramps and offramps that didn't charge a toll but tracked traffic flow. Of course this could also have serious privacy implications as well.
yeah, but even after your plug, the face transplant story on plastic has only 22 comments, as opposed to the 207 comments at time of writing here on slashdot.
Yes but of the now 212 comments on/. only 96 have current mod scores of 1 or higher. Whereas 21 of the now 23 comments on the Plastic story are at 1 or higher (the two others being anonymous posts, not down-modded posts). I think you'll find that when price is irrelevant, quality will trump quantity every time.
Here on slashdot I find there is a very real price in terms of my time taken up by low quality posts - or if raise my filter, by missing potentiall good AC posts.
Or better yet, allow users to moderate stories rather than just comments.
You should come over to PLASTIC then. Users with 50 or more karma (which you can generally earn much quicker than here) can moderate the submission queue which does significantly reduce repeats. Not that we don't revisit subjects where a given angle migh have been passed over before.
There's also a messaging system so its much easier to respond to off-topic posts without getting modded down. And there is spell checking for story submissions and comments.
While the choice of topics does vary from SlashDot in that there is a much smaller emphasis on Linux, BSD, the DMCA, etc. those issues do come up occasionally. And issues like this one on Face Transplants would be pretty typical of the scitech category on Plastic. But in additional there are categores for Film &TV, Music, Games (& sports), Politics, The Work (and academic) world, and a catch-all category called Etc (covering news of the weird / oddly enough type stories).
Finally after much Googling, I eventually came across this promising Press Release from about a year ago. That Company seems to have a product (basically an SDK), but it's not clear if anyone is putting it to use in consumer PDA application (Samsung uses them for some phones).
Since it doesn't look too promising I think you may want to expand your search beyond PDAs. I saw several references to the linux based simputer, maybe one of those with Linux based speech-to-text software is the way to go?
Just curious, but was the haphazard spelling of your comment supposed to be making some point about the historic problems of voice recognition, or do you really spell (type?) that poorly? If it's you, you might want to invest in voice recognition software for yourself (one with built-in grammar correction might be good too).
If it was the former, then you should know that most of the VR problems were with homophones, such as your use of 'forth' instead of 'fourth' and rarely would it involve inserting additional phonemes into words such as an additional 't' in equiptment or putting a 'd' in happens.
Alaska was happy enough to give me a card with limit of $10K.....Did I mention that Alaska gives me miles for my spending
I take it you are referring to the Alaska Airlines frequent flier credit card. It isn't issued by the airline, its' issued by a bank - Bank of America to be specific.
Isn't that redundnat since liquid CO2 does exist except under pressure. (By which I assume you mean pressure greater than one atmosphere, and not just a non-vacuum).
San Francisco plans to fight back, according to this Examiner article. Senior-citizen activists and walkers protested they don't want to share their space with a 95 lb machine traveling 12 mph.
Well while they might be mechanically able to travel at 12 or even 14 MPH, if you check the Segway website they are now using a reference speed of just 9 MPH on sidewalks (presumably it would be even less on dirt paths). If anything I think that is too slow.
Considering marathoners go about 12 MPH, and sprinters go about about 20 MPH and they are both legal on the sidewalk (and most of them weigh over 95 lbs - except the women marathoners) why do they insist on keeping these things so slow if they are supposed to be just as safe as a pedestrians? I never could figure out why they think it will succeed at a speed half of what you can bicycle at comfortably. (Yes, I know bicycles are banned from sidewalks in most places but that is rarely enforced - and bicycles are generally allowed on running paths.)
The point of the Segway was to reduce the number of cars on the road. Cars kill thousands of pedestrians every year, not to mention reducing air quality and making any activity that requires breathing the air outdoors less pleasant and potentially unhealthy. (Though I guess the greenhouse effect has some net positive effect on providing more walkable days weather wise - assuming you don't want to walk along the beach.)
100% total eclipse is like being 99% pregnant versus 100% pregnant. Either you get the full experience, or it's basically a wash
Having 'seen' many partial eclipses, and then having gone to Hungary for the 8/11/99 Total Eclipse (we had just over two minutes totality) I have to whole heartedly agree. Though personally I would use the analogy of virginity rather than pregnancy.
While partial solar eclipses and total Lunar eclipses are entertaining, I can only describe the total eclipse in superlatives like mind-altering, orgasmic, cosmic, spiritual, etc.
I would disagree that all partials are interchangeable though. You have to get to something like 40%+ to really notice the lensing effect of the natural pin-hole cameras created by leafy trees (little crescent moon shadows are cast on the ground); and you have to get to somewhere like 90% for weather effects like the wind picking up or a noticeble change in temperature - or for the reaction this has on animals like the birds going quite.
I would eventually like to experience an anular eclipse - which is also a type of partial eclipse, which I imagine will be much like like a total eclipse though I doubt it will be quite the same. My guess is it will be somewhat analogous to sex with a condom vs. sex without a condom. For one thing, you can't view an anular eclipse without protection, like you can a total - so like sex with a one night stand vs sex with your spouse, perhaps?
That link is to a pen drive type device, note the size of the drive is "16MB to 128MB". There are USB hard drives that are bootable, but require USB boot support in the BIOS.
How old is you PC, and what version is the BIOS? I would check with the BIOS manufacture and see if they claim USB booting is possible, you may need to flash your BIOS, or it may not be supported at all on your machine.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a show called "Connections" that used to be on TLC (produced by BBC I think) that I loved.
Yeah, that was one of my favorite shows. My personal favorite fact was learning about the volatility of early celluloid based plastics: that imitation ivory billiard balls sometimes exploded and how "widow's(?) silk" got its name.
It's no where to be found.
Not sure how you define "nowhere to be found" did you mean its not available for download?
That may be so but at least three seasons of it were commercially released on VHS. You can get two of them on Amazon Season 2, Season 3. You might also try your public library. If they have a decent video collection they usually have bought most of the BBC series that have run on PBS. They likely would have ordered it directly from the Producer Ambrose Video, which can be kind of pricy - but they have released 10 episodes (two seasons I think) on DVD - the five disc set of which can be had for a mere $395.
first listed) search by customers there after was for clean undearwear
Since they added clothing I've notice that Clean Underwear from Amazon's Target Store is always listed first in the "Customers who wear clothes also shop for:" section. Unfortunately, what I want to know is the most shopped for items of customers who don't wear clothes - especially attactive female college students who don't wear clothes. In fact if they could break down that information by zip code, then I think Amazon would find themselves generating a lot more traffic.
the NPR story refers to apes as our 'ancestors', which of course they aren't,
I think you are misinterpretting the article. The quote you refer to "the finding appears to whittle away a little more of the divide between humans and their ape ancestors." the way I interpret it is referring to the common ancestors of both the Great Apes and Modern Humans.
In the case of orangs, they mention that they split off from our common ancestors 14 Million years (which I think was earlier than Gorillas and much earlier than Chimpanzees and Bonobos - elsewhere I've seen 8, 6, & 5.5 Million years ago as the approximation of these splits). By finding that all living descendants of these common ancestors share a common characteristic, they are inferring that the common ancestor(s) also shared the characteristic (in this case - culture). Of course there is no way of knowing whether this is true or whether each of the living species developed it independently at some point in their evolution since the split.
The fact that they have these types of social interactions is not new, what is new is that distinct geographically isolated populations have different ways of accomplishing the same thing.
NPR ran a nice piece on this today, and used the example of a fruit which one population eats by getting it open with a stick (a picture is included in the MSNBC article). A neighboring population seperated by a river, either eats the fruit by bashing it on rocks (much more inneficient) or by ignoring it as too hard to bother with. i.e. one population has learned to use a tool for specific task and has passed that information on the other Orangs in the community. Its the passing on of this knowledge, and the fact that it couldn't be passed to the neighboring population that makes this 'culture'.
From a SlashDot perspective, one could speculate that on the one side of the river, the solution for eating the fruit has been open sourced. But on the other side of the river, the solution was either never discovered, or if it was found, was closed source and died with its dicoverer(s).
Other examples given are a Kiss-Squeek gesture & sound, and "snag riding" a demonstration of male virility of breaking off trees and holding on to them while they fall, jumping off before they hit the ground (Orang candidates for the Darwin Awards perhaps?).
Yeah the technology is definately not new, this has been the standard format for tennis ball cans for well over a decade. The question is market acceptance and given the recycling concerns, I can't see that being too great.
You can already get beer in plastic bottles in the US but most people think the beer will not taste as good (for the Miller, Lite, and MGD brands that use the technology, taste isn't really a concern anyway - but somehow these consumers consider themselves beer conoisseurs if you change the bottling material). So given the limited acceptance of plastic bottles I've only seen them at sporting events where it is prefereable not to arm potentially drunken disgruntled fans with glass missiles just in case the home team loses.
Finally, she reached Hayden, who was sipping a beer. He suggested she use the pay phone he maintained in the restaurant. She haughtily replied: "I wouldn't be caught dead using a pay phone.
At Franklin's (the local brewpub) they don't have a traditional payphone, what they have instead is a cellphone for customer use. You just make your call and drop $.50 into a box. A lot of businesses used to maintain payphones for their customers, often as a losing proposition for the business since the Phone Co's charge the biz something like $200/month to have one. At first businesses tried to get around this by instead using the oversized desktop payphones some independents were offering. But with "free" phones and unlimited mobile plans now running about $60 - $70/month I think a lot more places will be doing this. At $60/month it only takes 4 calls a day to break even - plus there is a redundant phone system available in case the main POTS line phones goes down.
What they should have been doing is include some additional content that makes you want to hold onto the disc. They're paired with TimeWarner for goodness sakes, you'd think that would give them compelling content.
Well they did recently run a promotion with CHEERIOS cereal to have the software included on the free DVD's glued to the cereal box.
They also get there software included on most name brand PC's at the factory, and get there icon installed on your desktop everytime you download a new version Netscape.
What surprises me is that they don't let you request a free Netscape installation CD with the AOL software on it. Instead they mail out AOL disks whether you want them or not, but if you want to get Netscape on CD you have to pay $5 shipping and handling.
MMC cards are typically $20 to $40 cheaper too (if you've found them cheaper, pass it along!).
Not any longer, as it seems that for example on Amazon's Sandisk page the Sandisk 32MB MMC card sells for $29.99, but the 32MB SD card is a little cheaper at $26.99. This may be partly explained by the SD having less user accessible space, but that is only a 5% difference, not the 10% shown here.
There is even a bigger discrepancy between Viking 64 MB cards, where the SD card is selling for $41.99, but MMC car goes for $52.99, a difference of over 25%.
I found 128 MB SD cards (which are the cheapest per MB of SD cards (just under $.50/MB typically) to be slightly cheaper than their MMC counterparts, and I can't even find MMC cards in the 256 MB range. So if he is looking for a 256 MB card he may not have any choice but to go with SD. SD even come in a 512 MB format but those cards cost much more per MB.
I also like ISBN.nu (though they may be having some technical dificulties currently) and Google's new Froogle site, all you have to do is search on the ISBN.
I've tried Froogle for some other products though and was less satisfied, since it seems to grab the price in closest proximity on the page to the search term you used - which is sometimes for a different product or for some other charge besides the product price like the shipping, warranty, cost of a peripheral.
The accompanying CD-ROM contains the author's own software for instantly locking out attackers and alerting system administrators. There are also exclusive iptables and ipchains firewall rules, as well as a collection of tools for monitoring network health, detecting and reporting suspicious activities, securing backups, simplifying recovery etc.
When you say exclusive, I hear closed license. Is that the case? If I get the book, and look at the iptables and ipchains configs provided am I actually allowed to use it on my own firewall box? Am I allowed to recommend them to my friends? My employer?
The review says the author's own software is also included. What sort of license is it provided under? Is there a EULA with proscriptive provisions? Will I only find out about the license/EULA after I have bought the book and loaded the CD?
SlashDot must have some deal worked out with BN* since they are recommending you buy reviewed books there when they can be bought much cheaper ($34.99 at Amazon) elsewhere on the web.
* Full dislosure: yes I have a 'deal' worked out with Amazon in the form of their affiliate program, but it seems the typical shopper should care more about how much they are spending rather than where they are spending it.
I don't understand why the poster believes that if Miyamoto produced a mature-themed game would "rock the world".
Depends on the mature-themed game. The PS2 version of Rez with the add-on 'Trance Vibrator' enhanced rumble pack, certainly "rocked the world" of this gamegirl.
I think there is likely a large untapped market for mature themed but non-violent games. For some reason, as with movies the 'mature-themed' products that are mass marketed have no problem including grotesque violence but shun sexuality (except maybe of the 'Leisure Suit Larry' exploitive animated striptease variety - usually only included in games with significant violence).
Simply put: Plastic has low status and appeal.
I disagree, I think Plastic has a lot of appeal. I now waste much more time there than on SlashDot.
As to status, Plastic having a lower membership would seem to make it somewhat more exclusive and therefore higher status. Plus regular members get to participate in the high status job of rating the submit Q.
Of course YMMV.
Unfortunately it seems the red zones that appear on the map aren't color coded to represent that. Also aparently absent from the color scheme are green spots to identify the hash bars.
If they could get a representative sample of the population, this would be a great technology for city planners. What I would like to see are maps that instead of giving a week at a time - give cumulative maps for each half hour during weekday mornings and afternoons to identify which traffic routes to take or avoid.
Given enough devices with a real-time hookup and it would be invaluable in directing traffic around problem spots. The same could be done in the NorthEastern US by putting ez-Pass readers into all highway onramps and offramps that didn't charge a toll but tracked traffic flow. Of course this could also have serious privacy implications as well.
yeah, but even after your plug, the face transplant story on plastic has only 22 comments, as opposed to the 207 comments at time of writing here on slashdot.
/. only 96 have current mod scores of 1 or higher. Whereas 21 of the now 23 comments on the Plastic story are at 1 or higher (the two others being anonymous posts, not down-modded posts). I think you'll find that when price is irrelevant, quality will trump quantity every time.
Yes but of the now 212 comments on
Here on slashdot I find there is a very real price in terms of my time taken up by low quality posts - or if raise my filter, by missing potentiall good AC posts.
Or better yet, allow users to moderate stories rather than just comments.
You should come over to PLASTIC then. Users with 50 or more karma (which you can generally earn much quicker than here) can moderate the submission queue which does significantly reduce repeats. Not that we don't revisit subjects where a given angle migh have been passed over before.
There's also a messaging system so its much easier to respond to off-topic posts without getting modded down. And there is spell checking for story submissions and comments.
While the choice of topics does vary from SlashDot in that there is a much smaller emphasis on Linux, BSD, the DMCA, etc. those issues do come up occasionally. And issues like this one on Face Transplants would be pretty typical of the scitech category on Plastic. But in additional there are categores for Film &TV, Music, Games (& sports), Politics, The Work (and academic) world, and a catch-all category called Etc (covering news of the weird / oddly enough type stories).
Since it doesn't look too promising I think you may want to expand your search beyond PDAs. I saw several references to the linux based simputer, maybe one of those with Linux based speech-to-text software is the way to go?
people don't want mutts or "mixed breed" dogs. People want pretty coats
Thanks for that bit of insight Cruella.
Just curious, but was the haphazard spelling of your comment supposed to be making some point about the historic problems of voice recognition, or do you really spell (type?) that poorly? If it's you, you might want to invest in voice recognition software for yourself (one with built-in grammar correction might be good too).
If it was the former, then you should know that most of the VR problems were with homophones, such as your use of 'forth' instead of 'fourth' and rarely would it involve inserting additional phonemes into words such as an additional 't' in equiptment or putting a 'd' in happens.
Alaska was happy enough to give me a card with limit of $10K.....Did I mention that Alaska gives me miles for my spending
I take it you are referring to the Alaska Airlines frequent flier credit card. It isn't issued by the airline, its' issued by a bank - Bank of America to be specific.
Liquid C02 under pressure
Isn't that redundnat since liquid CO2 does exist except under pressure. (By which I assume you mean pressure greater than one atmosphere, and not just a non-vacuum).
San Francisco plans to fight back, according to this Examiner article. Senior-citizen activists and walkers protested they don't want to share their space with a 95 lb machine traveling 12 mph.
Well while they might be mechanically able to travel at 12 or even 14 MPH, if you check the Segway website they are now using a reference speed of just 9 MPH on sidewalks (presumably it would be even less on dirt paths). If anything I think that is too slow.
Considering marathoners go about 12 MPH, and sprinters go about about 20 MPH and they are both legal on the sidewalk (and most of them weigh over 95 lbs - except the women marathoners) why do they insist on keeping these things so slow if they are supposed to be just as safe as a pedestrians? I never could figure out why they think it will succeed at a speed half of what you can bicycle at comfortably. (Yes, I know bicycles are banned from sidewalks in most places but that is rarely enforced - and bicycles are generally allowed on running paths.)
The point of the Segway was to reduce the number of cars on the road. Cars kill thousands of pedestrians every year, not to mention reducing air quality and making any activity that requires breathing the air outdoors less pleasant and potentially unhealthy. (Though I guess the greenhouse effect has some net positive effect on providing more walkable days weather wise - assuming you don't want to walk along the beach.)
100% total eclipse is like being 99% pregnant versus 100% pregnant. Either you get the full experience, or it's basically a wash
Having 'seen' many partial eclipses, and then having gone to Hungary for the 8/11/99 Total Eclipse (we had just over two minutes totality) I have to whole heartedly agree. Though personally I would use the analogy of virginity rather than pregnancy.
While partial solar eclipses and total Lunar eclipses are entertaining, I can only describe the total eclipse in superlatives like mind-altering, orgasmic, cosmic, spiritual, etc.
I would disagree that all partials are interchangeable though. You have to get to something like 40%+ to really notice the lensing effect of the natural pin-hole cameras created by leafy trees (little crescent moon shadows are cast on the ground); and you have to get to somewhere like 90% for weather effects like the wind picking up or a noticeble change in temperature - or for the reaction this has on animals like the birds going quite.
I would eventually like to experience an anular eclipse - which is also a type of partial eclipse, which I imagine will be much like like a total eclipse though I doubt it will be quite the same. My guess is it will be somewhat analogous to sex with a condom vs. sex without a condom. For one thing, you can't view an anular eclipse without protection, like you can a total - so like sex with a one night stand vs sex with your spouse, perhaps?
Booting from USB hard drives seems to work,
That link is to a pen drive type device, note the size of the drive is "16MB to 128MB". There are USB hard drives that are bootable, but require USB boot support in the BIOS.
How old is you PC, and what version is the BIOS? I would check with the BIOS manufacture and see if they claim USB booting is possible, you may need to flash your BIOS, or it may not be supported at all on your machine.