This is a typical example of journalism vs opinion. Journalists are supposed to be neutral and report facts, and leave opinion out of it... draw a defined line between them, like.
Oh, and since when did CNN get opinion out of their 'reporting'? I miss the fairness doctrine.
... but it sounds like a feature, not a bug.
Is this going to be like those explicit lyrics warnings on CeeDees? Heck, it may just sell more electronic devices. I don't know if I want to buy anything I didn't really wanna use all the time.
... looks like some of the ricer street racer kiddie Honda Civics around here. Just put some purple neon tubes underneath, some 19" rear rims and 15" steel wheels on the front (complete with cupped and heat deformed tires) and you can take it to the local industrial park for some good times.
... but I don't want to actually spend money on watching TeeVee if I can help it. The only reason I got Cable was because DSL in my area sucked so much ass I couldn't stand it.
I actually had cable when I first moved to Oakland many years ago, but it kept going out for a week at a time, and the picture quality was really bad when it was on. I complained, got really crappy customer service, so I dropped it. I still feel like an sucker for turning it back on and sending them $60 a month (broadband and minimal cable teevee).
Anyway, unless my teevee goes out, and only if I actually miss it if it does, I'm not going to spend any more money on something that already sets fire to way too much of my time. I'd rather spend the money on computer stuff and bicycle parts.
Secondly, why is the FCC selling off the public's property (the airwaves) to the highest bidder? To me, that is like selling off Yosemite to shopping mall developers.
...uh, no. Not as long as radio sprays wider signal than single point to point. Anybody who can actually accomplish this earns a Nobel Prize in physics. Think Light Saber. Let's face it. We have yet to see uncrackable encryption in a data path, given enough time to crack it.
Yeah, wire is messy, expensive, harder to physically install, and we are kinda running low on copper these days, but there is always going to be a place for it in moving data around.
... I bought a new HP laptop (or really, my boss did) with Vista. Ever since I've been running in reduced functionality mode.
I would be happy if my mouse stopped disappearing when I run an external monitor.
I guess they can't argue with this saying 'well you should have removed the battery' because they soldered that fucker in!
Funny, I have a co-worker who just went to the Dominican Republic on vacation with his iPhone. I should tell him to check his bill.
Now if we can just get the Executive branch to listen to... oh I dunno... ANYBODY else, this might mean something.
Is it me, or is the Legislative and Judicial branches a bunch of big fat pussies? No wonder the Executives are running away with all the marbles.
... and he got busted downloading a Star Wars film? Insult to injury. Too bad it wasn't a good film.:)
Okay, the last one was alright, but not great. Could have been worse. At least it wasn't a Jar Jar blooper reel, a Lindsey Lohan movie or something.
Why do the have to use terms like 'supersonic speed' when writing about a celestial body? There is no atmosphere to gauge the speed of sound, and if they are talking about the speed of sound at one atmosphere, that's only like... what just over 700 MPH? That is not fast for something in space. And regarding speed... didn't these people study Einstein? There is no speed unless you relate it to something else, so what are they relating it to? Here on Earth? Center of the Universe? Heck, maybe it's standing still and we are all moving at the Supersonic Speed of 290,000 MPH.
The same was true of the iPod when it first came out, and before the aftermarket kicked in. Does anybody here really believe that Apple has a little Apple Battery factory that chuns out batteries just for their phones and iPods? C'mon. Obviously they are buying some off the shelf battery from an industrial supplier, or battery mfgr.
When iPods first hit, replacement batteries were like $99 IIRC. Now you can get aftermkarket kits for like $20-30.
It's like going to your car dealership to find they charge like $30 for a button top that can be had form a parts house for $3.
The Hauppague PVR-150,250, and 350 are the best game in town for tuners. Fry's sells the PVR150 for $120 if you have to get it right away, or I've seen them online for as cheap as $60 for plain box with no remote. You can do remote through your LAN
I just built a MythDora 3.2 box (doh! Could have done MythDora 4.0!) and it works quite nicely on a P3/850 with an NVidia 6200 based video card with S-Video out. Just this last weekend, I rebuilt the thing with a 320GB drive instead of the tiny drive I had lying around so it wouldn't run out of space so quickly. It also sounds a lot less like a jet engine when running.
More info here:
www.mythtvtalk.com
Check out the forums.
I deal with sealed lead acid batteries day in and day out. If you were to short the terminals on a car-sized SLA battery, it would boil, swell up and crack, sending battery acid spewing all over the place. I have to clean up these messes all the time in the siren systems I build. The main difference is we use car battery sized marine batteries, which are better at delivering less current but for longer periods of time than a car battery. Think of it this way: a car needs huge current to turn a starter, but only for 5 seconds or so. Marine batteries deliver less current, but in our usage, for 5 minutes at a time. Same AH rating, but spread over longer time. Modern sealed batteries don't offgas hydrogen unless they are being way overcharged to the point where the electrolyte boils.
First off, the NiMH battery in a Prius is mounted behind the back seat, nearly in the center of the car. It would take one heck of an accident to penetrate the body to the battery.
Secondly, if that freak occurrence happened to actually happen, the battery has internal fuses to burn in the case of a dead short.
I think all this paranoia stemmed from a car fire involving a Pruis in the early days of the Prius, and the fire department on call didn't know how to handle extinguishing the fire. The firefighters didn't know if shooting water at the car would make a toxic cloud or what.
What really kills me about all of this is that we can't just go buy these nice fat NiMH batteries to use in our own electric car conversions. I've been itching to do one, but only have access to SLA batteries, which means about 1200 pounds of batteries to haul around, and then replace every few years. With a NiMH battery, I could do the same job with 400 pounds of battery and get much more life out of them if I cared for them properly, not to mention being way less toxic.
Hmmmm. Just tried it on my '96 GTi (which has never had any sort of electrical problem whatsoever in 190k miles of ownership, other than frying a diode in the alternator while jump-starting another car) and it didn't work. Oh-well. I was hoping for a new VW trick.
I guess they started with electric sunroofs with the '94 model year. Previous ones were cranks, IIRC.
Get rid of the complicated electronics to bring the price down, install a manually operated multi-gear drivetrain, remove unneeded components to reduce it's weight to around 18 lbs, make it narrower to navigate between cars, make is street legal... oh wait, we have that already... a bicycle.
Way faster, simpler cheaper more efficient, you can take it on the bus/BART/Train, take it in the office. What's a Seguay good for again? Oh yeah, making our fat asses even fatter! Maybe I'm just too thick, but I totally don't get the point of the Seguay. Maybe as a replacement to a car, but heck, we have scooters if you don't wanna pedal... electric scooters if you don't wanna burn dino-juice (at least locally).
On a side note, there were folks demoing that goofy thing at the SF Grand Prix bike race. Everybody I was with was pointing and laughing. Here we have a celebration of the bicycle, and these clowns were hawking their oracle to lazyness. Way too fucking funny.
... apart from the waste issue. That's the thing, the main masty by-product of nuclear reaction is the waste, and what the heck do you do with it? If there was a way to safely recycle it into something safe, we would be high to not embrace nuclear power... but that's the thing, you can't.
solar, water (waves, tides) and wind should be worked on. I think there is real potential there to free ourselves from sucking carbon from underground and blowing it into the air.
Spoilers are for street racer kiddies who wanna look cool or real racecars on tracks with tight turns.
Spoilers actually slow you down, and often by quite a bit. They create drag and turn that drag into downforce.
I know, you were kidding, and I know I'm sucking the fun out, but I always have to laugh when I see the local streetracer kids with a Honda Civic (and often automatic) with a fat whale tale spoiler on the back. I often wonder what happened when they first got their car up to freeway speeds, found out how much speed they lost, but didn't say anything because they didn't wanna seem uncool.
He broke it clean in two. He had broken the same collarbone a year or two earlier, and it mended with a bit of a thin spot. When he broke it on TDF last year (in the first stange, IIRC) it broke the bone clean in two, and not splintered down the bone, which is really nasty.
That said, the UCF still does not allow pain drugs apart from Tylonol or Advil or 'light' drugs like that. I read Tyler was in so much pain, he had to have all of his molars capped because he ground his teeth down to nothing while bearing so much pain for so long.
That dude is seriously scary tough.
I have a bud who just picked up the new XT cranks which have the same concept as XTR and Dura Ace, but go for $225 on sale. Dang, they are frickin stiff as hell and still pretty light.
The deal is that the bottom bracket spindle is greatly oversized, since they don't need to make room in the BB shell for the bearings. The bearings are outside the shell and also supersized.
If you wanna see freaky stupid light bleeding edge technology, check this out:
This dude built up a 9.19 pound bike without leaving major components off, like chainrings, or doing anything stupid like drilling out rims and tubing.
The cycling federation has a minimum weight (or at least they used to) of 15 lbs. Last year's TDF, the Canondale team showed up with 11 lb bikes, and the Federation would not let them race until they strapped some weight on the bikes, which is totally silly. The point of the rule was to keep the racers from doing stupid stuff like drilling out their bikes and making them unsafe.
Wasn't there a post on/. yesterday where Sun was saying that the biz model of the future was to give away the hardware and sell subscriptions to the software? If they give away the hardware, and the software, where do they make money? Support?
Heck, for that matter, you could easily build a low rent rig with the paddleboat, a car alternator and a nice chubby bank of batteries.
Paddlewheel boat drives alternator(s), slow charges bank of batteries, which outputs to an inverter. The boat will quietly charge your batteries until you need the juice. When your power fails, an auto-switch kicks you off the grid and over to the inverter powered by the batteries for the duration of your blackout.
The tricks here is getting the alternator to spin fast enough to charge the batteries at a reasonable rate, and figuring out exactly how much battery you need (duration of blackouts) to run a big enough inverter. That is, figure out how much power you can live with and get an inverter rated at 1.5X that amount.
If you stick with off the shelf parts, you should be able to do this fairly cheaply and easily, and keep reliability up there.
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This is a typical example of journalism vs opinion. Journalists are supposed to be neutral and report facts, and leave opinion out of it... draw a defined line between them, like. Oh, and since when did CNN get opinion out of their 'reporting'? I miss the fairness doctrine.
... but it sounds like a feature, not a bug. Is this going to be like those explicit lyrics warnings on CeeDees? Heck, it may just sell more electronic devices. I don't know if I want to buy anything I didn't really wanna use all the time.
... looks like some of the ricer street racer kiddie Honda Civics around here. Just put some purple neon tubes underneath, some 19" rear rims and 15" steel wheels on the front (complete with cupped and heat deformed tires) and you can take it to the local industrial park for some good times.
...in some other parallel universe, they are right.
:)
uh...wait a sec....
Meeeteyer sheeit!
... but I don't want to actually spend money on watching TeeVee if I can help it. The only reason I got Cable was because DSL in my area sucked so much ass I couldn't stand it. I actually had cable when I first moved to Oakland many years ago, but it kept going out for a week at a time, and the picture quality was really bad when it was on. I complained, got really crappy customer service, so I dropped it. I still feel like an sucker for turning it back on and sending them $60 a month (broadband and minimal cable teevee). Anyway, unless my teevee goes out, and only if I actually miss it if it does, I'm not going to spend any more money on something that already sets fire to way too much of my time. I'd rather spend the money on computer stuff and bicycle parts. Secondly, why is the FCC selling off the public's property (the airwaves) to the highest bidder? To me, that is like selling off Yosemite to shopping mall developers.
...uh, no. Not as long as radio sprays wider signal than single point to point. Anybody who can actually accomplish this earns a Nobel Prize in physics. Think Light Saber. Let's face it. We have yet to see uncrackable encryption in a data path, given enough time to crack it. Yeah, wire is messy, expensive, harder to physically install, and we are kinda running low on copper these days, but there is always going to be a place for it in moving data around.
... I bought a new HP laptop (or really, my boss did) with Vista. Ever since I've been running in reduced functionality mode. I would be happy if my mouse stopped disappearing when I run an external monitor.
I guess they can't argue with this saying 'well you should have removed the battery' because they soldered that fucker in! Funny, I have a co-worker who just went to the Dominican Republic on vacation with his iPhone. I should tell him to check his bill.
Now if we can just get the Executive branch to listen to... oh I dunno... ANYBODY else, this might mean something. Is it me, or is the Legislative and Judicial branches a bunch of big fat pussies? No wonder the Executives are running away with all the marbles.
... and he got busted downloading a Star Wars film? Insult to injury. Too bad it wasn't a good film. :)
Okay, the last one was alright, but not great. Could have been worse. At least it wasn't a Jar Jar blooper reel, a Lindsey Lohan movie or something.
Why do the have to use terms like 'supersonic speed' when writing about a celestial body? There is no atmosphere to gauge the speed of sound, and if they are talking about the speed of sound at one atmosphere, that's only like... what just over 700 MPH? That is not fast for something in space. And regarding speed... didn't these people study Einstein? There is no speed unless you relate it to something else, so what are they relating it to? Here on Earth? Center of the Universe? Heck, maybe it's standing still and we are all moving at the Supersonic Speed of 290,000 MPH.
Kirk is Soooo the bitch in that relation ship.
The same was true of the iPod when it first came out, and before the aftermarket kicked in. Does anybody here really believe that Apple has a little Apple Battery factory that chuns out batteries just for their phones and iPods? C'mon. Obviously they are buying some off the shelf battery from an industrial supplier, or battery mfgr. When iPods first hit, replacement batteries were like $99 IIRC. Now you can get aftermkarket kits for like $20-30. It's like going to your car dealership to find they charge like $30 for a button top that can be had form a parts house for $3.
The Hauppague PVR-150,250, and 350 are the best game in town for tuners. Fry's sells the PVR150 for $120 if you have to get it right away, or I've seen them online for as cheap as $60 for plain box with no remote. You can do remote through your LAN I just built a MythDora 3.2 box (doh! Could have done MythDora 4.0!) and it works quite nicely on a P3/850 with an NVidia 6200 based video card with S-Video out. Just this last weekend, I rebuilt the thing with a 320GB drive instead of the tiny drive I had lying around so it wouldn't run out of space so quickly. It also sounds a lot less like a jet engine when running. More info here: www.mythtvtalk.com Check out the forums.
Uh, no.
I deal with sealed lead acid batteries day in and day out. If you were to short the terminals on a car-sized SLA battery, it would boil, swell up and crack, sending battery acid spewing all over the place. I have to clean up these messes all the time in the siren systems I build. The main difference is we use car battery sized marine batteries, which are better at delivering less current but for longer periods of time than a car battery. Think of it this way: a car needs huge current to turn a starter, but only for 5 seconds or so. Marine batteries deliver less current, but in our usage, for 5 minutes at a time. Same AH rating, but spread over longer time. Modern sealed batteries don't offgas hydrogen unless they are being way overcharged to the point where the electrolyte boils.
First off, the NiMH battery in a Prius is mounted behind the back seat, nearly in the center of the car. It would take one heck of an accident to penetrate the body to the battery.
Secondly, if that freak occurrence happened to actually happen, the battery has internal fuses to burn in the case of a dead short.
I think all this paranoia stemmed from a car fire involving a Pruis in the early days of the Prius, and the fire department on call didn't know how to handle extinguishing the fire. The firefighters didn't know if shooting water at the car would make a toxic cloud or what.
What really kills me about all of this is that we can't just go buy these nice fat NiMH batteries to use in our own electric car conversions. I've been itching to do one, but only have access to SLA batteries, which means about 1200 pounds of batteries to haul around, and then replace every few years. With a NiMH battery, I could do the same job with 400 pounds of battery and get much more life out of them if I cared for them properly, not to mention being way less toxic.
Hmmmm. Just tried it on my '96 GTi (which has never had any sort of electrical problem whatsoever in 190k miles of ownership, other than frying a diode in the alternator while jump-starting another car) and it didn't work. Oh-well. I was hoping for a new VW trick.
I guess they started with electric sunroofs with the '94 model year. Previous ones were cranks, IIRC.
... that's skating.
I gotta say, tho. Not bad for homebrew!
Get rid of the complicated electronics to bring the price down, install a manually operated multi-gear drivetrain, remove unneeded components to reduce it's weight to around 18 lbs, make it narrower to navigate between cars, make is street legal... oh wait, we have that already... a bicycle. Way faster, simpler cheaper more efficient, you can take it on the bus/BART/Train, take it in the office. What's a Seguay good for again? Oh yeah, making our fat asses even fatter! Maybe I'm just too thick, but I totally don't get the point of the Seguay. Maybe as a replacement to a car, but heck, we have scooters if you don't wanna pedal... electric scooters if you don't wanna burn dino-juice (at least locally). On a side note, there were folks demoing that goofy thing at the SF Grand Prix bike race. Everybody I was with was pointing and laughing. Here we have a celebration of the bicycle, and these clowns were hawking their oracle to lazyness. Way too fucking funny.
... apart from the waste issue. That's the thing, the main masty by-product of nuclear reaction is the waste, and what the heck do you do with it? If there was a way to safely recycle it into something safe, we would be high to not embrace nuclear power... but that's the thing, you can't. solar, water (waves, tides) and wind should be worked on. I think there is real potential there to free ourselves from sucking carbon from underground and blowing it into the air.
Spoilers are for street racer kiddies who wanna look cool or real racecars on tracks with tight turns. Spoilers actually slow you down, and often by quite a bit. They create drag and turn that drag into downforce. I know, you were kidding, and I know I'm sucking the fun out, but I always have to laugh when I see the local streetracer kids with a Honda Civic (and often automatic) with a fat whale tale spoiler on the back. I often wonder what happened when they first got their car up to freeway speeds, found out how much speed they lost, but didn't say anything because they didn't wanna seem uncool.
He broke it clean in two. He had broken the same collarbone a year or two earlier, and it mended with a bit of a thin spot. When he broke it on TDF last year (in the first stange, IIRC) it broke the bone clean in two, and not splintered down the bone, which is really nasty. That said, the UCF still does not allow pain drugs apart from Tylonol or Advil or 'light' drugs like that. I read Tyler was in so much pain, he had to have all of his molars capped because he ground his teeth down to nothing while bearing so much pain for so long. That dude is seriously scary tough.
I have a bud who just picked up the new XT cranks which have the same concept as XTR and Dura Ace, but go for $225 on sale. Dang, they are frickin stiff as hell and still pretty light.
I D= 21
The deal is that the bottom bracket spindle is greatly oversized, since they don't need to make room in the BB shell for the bearings. The bearings are outside the shell and also supersized.
If you wanna see freaky stupid light bleeding edge technology, check this out:
http://weightweenies.starbike.com/articles.php?
This dude built up a 9.19 pound bike without leaving major components off, like chainrings, or doing anything stupid like drilling out rims and tubing.
The cycling federation has a minimum weight (or at least they used to) of 15 lbs. Last year's TDF, the Canondale team showed up with 11 lb bikes, and the Federation would not let them race until they strapped some weight on the bikes, which is totally silly. The point of the rule was to keep the racers from doing stupid stuff like drilling out their bikes and making them unsafe.
Wasn't there a post on /. yesterday where Sun was saying that the biz model of the future was to give away the hardware and sell subscriptions to the software? If they give away the hardware, and the software, where do they make money? Support?
Heck, for that matter, you could easily build a low rent rig with the paddleboat, a car alternator and a nice chubby bank of batteries. Paddlewheel boat drives alternator(s), slow charges bank of batteries, which outputs to an inverter. The boat will quietly charge your batteries until you need the juice. When your power fails, an auto-switch kicks you off the grid and over to the inverter powered by the batteries for the duration of your blackout. The tricks here is getting the alternator to spin fast enough to charge the batteries at a reasonable rate, and figuring out exactly how much battery you need (duration of blackouts) to run a big enough inverter. That is, figure out how much power you can live with and get an inverter rated at 1.5X that amount. If you stick with off the shelf parts, you should be able to do this fairly cheaply and easily, and keep reliability up there.