The Lights of America ballasts are fine, though the color of the lamps themselves are horrid. But for setting up a cheaply blacklit room, there's nothing quite like a $6 ballast and a $6 tube. I helped a fledgling rave promoter get their equipment together on a small budget -- they allocated $50 to blacklights, and I managed to get the entire room covered for that cost (found a supplier that would take the white bulbs back for $2 credit, so got 5 blacklights for $50). I also gave them a laser show unit on "indefinite loan", which meant they paid nothing out of pocket (I already had the unit built) but I got VIP'd in every single week until the city of Pomona passed a shitload of anti-rave ordinances. After that, they just paid me $50 outright to let them keep it because they thought it was cool. I didn't mind, I'd already built improved prototypes by then, and they cost about $30 to make even without any efficiencies of scale.
The cheap fluoros are also decent if you wrap them with stage lighting gels. It's not like they get hot, so the gels can be rolled into tubes and placed directly over the bare bulbs. The gels eventually fade at the ends where the filaments are (I'd imagine from escaped UV) but even this doesn't really affect the color of the output. If you have a sudden need for bad white light, just remove the gel.
Mal-2
Re:Space colonies don't solve population crises
on
Apollo 12 at 35
·
· Score: 1
Are you proposing we just stuff 10 million people in airplanes and send them off without food, equipment, or machinery? These craft aren't coming back -- planes fly repeatedly and each trip counts separately. If each airplane was good for exactly one trip, there's no way there would be enough resources to fly 10 million, and that ignores the fact that it's much harder to escape a gravity well than it is to fly around within it (by lift or ballistics). Also, if you expect your colonists to survive, they're going to need materials (unless the planet is already settled and sustainable) to keep themselves alive until they can become self-sustaining. Granted they could cannibalize the ship for some things, but not everything.
Mal-2
Space colonies don't solve population crises
on
Apollo 12 at 35
·
· Score: 1
Space colonies aren't going to solve the population crunch any time soon, if ever. Assuming your claim of population doubling every 40 years is accurate, and a start value of 6 billion, you'd have to send 10 million people off into space EVERY YEAR to keep the population constant. This doesn't even consider the fact that by the time we have technology to colonize, the population isn't going to be 6 billion...
That's not to say the project isn't worthwhile (I agree that it is), but you can't use population control to justify it. It just won't accomplish much of anything there.
> Some interesting things could happen too. Could the car run erands without me?
Maybe, but in that case it would be more of a robot than vehicle.
> Could the car could take itself to the mechanic for an oil change or maintenance? Could it refuel itself while I'm working?
Yes, and yes! It could also drop you off at your door then go park itself a mile away if necessary.
> If I order a pizza, could the car pick it up?
Why? I think it's safe to assume the pizza shop will have a delivery shuttle of its own, since they already do (it just has a driver).
> Could it pick up a kid from school, take him to the dentist, & return him without a parent taking time off from work?
Of course! Just authorize the kid to go to these places -- if you feel he/she is responsible enough to be out alone, then allowing him/her to command the autopilot is not a large step.
I just hope these autocars still have bicycle racks. It would really be a shame if kids stopped riding bicycles -- they're fun, useful, and good exercise, even if they're no longer necessary for transportation. They might still be useful in places without roads as well. I found it quite worthwhile to pack a bicycle in my car for college, since I could wheel across campus without having to find a new place to park, then just carry it up and stash it in the back of the class when I got to the other end. Even if I'd had to use the parking lot roads to do this (I didn't, lots of people just rode the footpaths slowly), it still would have beat driving around campus at 5 mph and having to parking shark every two hours.
If this means you can take off a half hour early and just finish your work on the road, is that really such a bad thing? Sure there will be people who want to abuse the system -- there always are. Fuckwits exist in EVERY system. Find ways to reduce the harm they inflict, rather than scrapping the whole system and its benefits.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to have a fleet on call at all times, that can come and pick you up within a matter of minutes, deliver you to your destination, and head for the nearest (or emptiest) depot to wait for the next call? It would alleviate parking issues in many crowded cities, and might even allow existing businesses to spread out into the space they currently reserve for large paved surfaces.
The depots could be simple parking structures just as we have now, but the autonomous cars could shuffle themselves around as needed so they can respond to calls quickly. If the depot near you dispatches its last car, it automatically requests that a couple be sent over from heavily populated stations.
In addition, this system would mean that you could use public transit for the majority of any long commute, but not have to walk at either end of the trip, or worry about parking your car. There would be an autocab waiting for you when you step off the train, since traffic prediction is already pretty solid. If for some reason there isn't one waiting, you call one just like you called one to come pick you up at home.
Certainly some people would own their own autocabs, just as people own their own aircraft today. But most people wouldn't need to, as long as they knew one would be available for them 24/7.
> If your withholding taxes go down won't you be able to afford another quarter for that delivered pizza?
No, because the driver won't find the money (after expenses) to be worth the effort. So your pizza won't GET delivered, unless you like cold food delivered as part of a very large batch. The driver is probably already cheating on insurance (not reporting as a commercial vehicle), if he actually had to play by the rules as they are NOW he'd quit. This isn't going to help.
It's like adding an outboard motor to the handbasket to Hell. It could slow things down or (given enough power) even work its way upstream, but more likely it'll just be used to get to the destination even faster.
A.wmv file that you can't fast-forward, with an URL at the end that you can visit for free, legal stuff. People would download them like crazy, and if they're only 30 seconds or so, there would be little point to trying to bypass them anyhow. A quiz question about the commercial would help make sure someone actually watched it, especially if everyone gets a different question.
"Watch our commercial, get two free songs." It could work. People aren't going to retain the files, meaning the advertisers would have to host them and have plenty of bandwidth, but that's hardly insurmountable.
Laser-triggered lightning discharge and it's done by *GASP* non-Americans! Guess we have to vaporize Malaysia as soon as their chip fabs get too old to be useful...
> 4 less years of stem cell research that could revolutionize medicine, because it's immoral to use embryos, even as thousands of embryos are thrown away all over the country as we speak at In Vitro Fertilization clinics.
Which is why I am so glad to see the California measure to promote stem cell research was (last I checked) overwhelmingly favored. My girlfriend asked how *I* could possibly be in favor of taxes and government handouts, and I said "Do you have any idea what those patents will be worth?" I figure that this particular operation will run a net positive, even if it IS administered by the state of California. THAT is why I supported it, though I have no problem with the cause itself.
Mal-2
Does hibernation slow or stop aging?
on
Hibernating to Mars
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It would suck to be stuck in a spaceship for three years, sure. But it would also suck to fall asleep and wake up three years later -- and three years older, with absolutely nothing to show for it. Sure, external sources of damage would be nearly eliminated, so you wouldn't be three years shorter of telomeres. Also, being in one place for the duration means hard radiation shielding is much more practical than trying to hard shield the entire ship.
If someone did set up a scalpel ship, you wouldn't want it anchored. Ships that aren't moving get tossed around a whole lot more than ones that are. You'd want it moving fast enough to make the stabilizers effective, but not so fast that wind and currents toss you around when you encounter them. You'd also want it to move in one continuous direction for long stretches, not go in circles where the bearing of the wind and currents would be changing constantly.
A ship that's dead in the water is not a comfortable place to be, even if you've got your sea legs.
...used in those machines you find in front of the grocery store that sell drinking water for 25 cents a gallon. (Or 15 cents at ours, used to be 25.) Carbon filtration, reverse osmosis, UV, more carbon filtration. It tastes exactly like the stuff we used to get delivered at 10 times the cost -- $7.50 per 5 gallons vs. 75 cents per 5 gallons.
The technology is not new. What may be new is allowing people to get a system smaller than your average refrigerator.
On the contrary, it's more like feeling safe driving at highway speeds knowing you can survive if you (or the guy next to you) fuck up. Without seat belts, air bags, collapsing steering columns, etc., the only way to have this confidence would be to drive no more than 15 mph at any time.
Oh wait, I live in Los Angeles. People DO drive 15 mph. Never mind...
Ah but it IS cheaper over time, unless you have a car stereo capable of playing CD-RWs. I know mine won't.
I drive about 5, maybe 6 hours a day as a courier, and I have certainly taken interest in hooking an MP3 player into the car, rather than fumbling with CDs every 80 minutes. Not only that, but I stop a lot, and my CD player doesn't pick up where it left off, but returns to the beginning of the track. When stops are only a mile or two apart, this means the same song gets played 3/4 of the way through and repeated, unless I want to manually seek through it (which I usually do, but it's very annoying) or just skip to the next track.
I've considered breaking everything up into one minute or less "tracks" so that at least I'll pick up reasonably close to where I left off, but then that means skipping through dozens of tracks if I want to pull up a particular song. It would also require re-burning 60 or so car discs, though some of them need to be reburned anyhow. The loading mechanism doesn't like cheap CD-Rs with no top coating and eventually wears pinholes through the metal, and even better quality discs get scratched on the data side. Needless to say, there are NO original pressed discs in the car. If a disc stops playing correctly, it gets thrown in the back seat till I get around to replacing it.
All my audio routes through an amplifier under the seat, so I wouldn't particularly need an FM transmitter, just a way to switch between inputs. I still need to listen to the radio for news and traffic (and currently, baseball) throughout the day. So I looked at the cost and it seems the break-even point on a $60 flash MP3 player is probably 6 months to a year, in terms of CD-Rs not burned. But I would have to pick and choose, rather than having 50 to choose from at any time. If I can't figure out what I want before I leave the house, too bad, I can't listen to it. I could always fall back to the CDs in the car just as easily as turning back to the radio, but that would kinda defeat the purpose.
It seems to me a Discman-like player that will play CD-Rs full of MP3s is a better value, as it solves the disc swap and capacity problems nicely, yet still allows me to make a permanent addition to the car library at any time. The discs also won't get scratched by a slotloading mechanism. But any "loose" hardware in a car makes for a theft target, and I don't have time to be stashing gear every time I stop, so it would have to be mostly concealed all the time. I don't think the CD-type MP3 players remember where to pick up in a track either.
So it seems like a hard drive based player is the way to go, but then the ROI time is even longer, and it's an even shinier theft magnet. Granted, something iPod size is pretty easy to stash away in a second or two, but that's still annoying when it has to be done 20 times a day. I don't have to worry about my $100 head unit that eats CDs -- if someone wants it bad enough to risk getting caught (I'm not gone very long), then they can have it. There's nothing else of value in the car except for the amplifier and speakers which would take far longer to get to. Certainly the car itself is not of much value, with both the A/C and power steering being non-functional, and various nicks and scrapes throughout the body. If someone takes it for parts, they'd better just need doors or a left front fender, that's about all that's intact.
A hard drive based MP3 head unit is not under consideration since that would just be a non-concealable theft magnet, unless the guts are somewhere other than in the dashboard. If it's totally invisible and operated by remote, that would probably be fine.
What would you fellow geeks suggest as a solution to the problem?
Why use interior space to store this stuff at all (ok maybe IMAX film needs protection, but poop does not) when they could strap it to the OUTSIDE of the station? They'd have to balance it somewhat better than they do with it inside (any mass would be further from the plane of rotation and could make the station wobbly), but why does it have to be stored in precious living space? Strap it all together or put it in bags, and tack them outside. It's still there if you need it, and it's not floating in orbit to worry about later.
I can just imagine the request list for the next supply ship -- "toilet paper, plastic garbage bags, and duct tape. Lots and lots of duct tape."
I believe you are right, considering the conference itself is/. worthy. Therefore, the accident related to the conference is also newsworthy, even had there been no fatalities. However, the mention of RMS and his peripheral involvement is quite relevant, because it makes the point that Hans and the others were only in that car because they were helping out a friend (who we just happen to recognize). They weren't just hopping down to the liquor store to pick up beer and cigarettes. That makes this a tragedy in the true sense (trying to do something good got him killed), rather than simply a misadventure.
My proposal is to have a USB "attach to your privates or somesuch" device that gives you nasty shocks when you foul up or when someone wrongs you. Or instantly deducts 5 dollars from your bank account if you're not into being zapped.
A player like that is just going to attach the shock device to the dog anyhow.
There are no equivalent-spec motherboards for P3 and P4, they use entirely different chipsets. Plus, P4s are memory bandwidth starved with SDR DRAM and P3s are not, so saddling them both with a 133 MHz tested 440BX chipset isn't a fair test anyhow.
Also remember that back in the early P4 days, they were all SDR or RAMBUS. A 1.5 GHz P4 on a DDR motherboard (even single channel) is going to be significantly faster than the same chip on an SDR motherboard. It'll be similar to (and much cheaper than) a RAMBUS motherboard. But in those early days, who was gonna shell out the big bucks for RAMBUS memory and board, and then stick a 1.5 GHz chip in it?
Slashdot Mirror
The Lights of America ballasts are fine, though the color of the lamps themselves are horrid. But for setting up a cheaply blacklit room, there's nothing quite like a $6 ballast and a $6 tube. I helped a fledgling rave promoter get their equipment together on a small budget -- they allocated $50 to blacklights, and I managed to get the entire room covered for that cost (found a supplier that would take the white bulbs back for $2 credit, so got 5 blacklights for $50). I also gave them a laser show unit on "indefinite loan", which meant they paid nothing out of pocket (I already had the unit built) but I got VIP'd in every single week until the city of Pomona passed a shitload of anti-rave ordinances. After that, they just paid me $50 outright to let them keep it because they thought it was cool. I didn't mind, I'd already built improved prototypes by then, and they cost about $30 to make even without any efficiencies of scale.
The cheap fluoros are also decent if you wrap them with stage lighting gels. It's not like they get hot, so the gels can be rolled into tubes and placed directly over the bare bulbs. The gels eventually fade at the ends where the filaments are (I'd imagine from escaped UV) but even this doesn't really affect the color of the output. If you have a sudden need for bad white light, just remove the gel.
Mal-2
Are you proposing we just stuff 10 million people in airplanes and send them off without food, equipment, or machinery? These craft aren't coming back -- planes fly repeatedly and each trip counts separately. If each airplane was good for exactly one trip, there's no way there would be enough resources to fly 10 million, and that ignores the fact that it's much harder to escape a gravity well than it is to fly around within it (by lift or ballistics). Also, if you expect your colonists to survive, they're going to need materials (unless the planet is already settled and sustainable) to keep themselves alive until they can become self-sustaining. Granted they could cannibalize the ship for some things, but not everything.
Mal-2
Space colonies aren't going to solve the population crunch any time soon, if ever. Assuming your claim of population doubling every 40 years is accurate, and a start value of 6 billion, you'd have to send 10 million people off into space EVERY YEAR to keep the population constant. This doesn't even consider the fact that by the time we have technology to colonize, the population isn't going to be 6 billion...
That's not to say the project isn't worthwhile (I agree that it is), but you can't use population control to justify it. It just won't accomplish much of anything there.
Mal-2
> Some interesting things could happen too. Could the car run erands without me?
Maybe, but in that case it would be more of a robot than vehicle.
> Could the car could take itself to the mechanic for an oil change or maintenance? Could it refuel itself while I'm working?
Yes, and yes! It could also drop you off at your door then go park itself a mile away if necessary.
> If I order a pizza, could the car pick it up?
Why? I think it's safe to assume the pizza shop will have a delivery shuttle of its own, since they already do (it just has a driver).
> Could it pick up a kid from school, take him to the dentist, & return him without a parent taking time off from work?
Of course! Just authorize the kid to go to these places -- if you feel he/she is responsible enough to be out alone, then allowing him/her to command the autopilot is not a large step.
I just hope these autocars still have bicycle racks. It would really be a shame if kids stopped riding bicycles -- they're fun, useful, and good exercise, even if they're no longer necessary for transportation. They might still be useful in places without roads as well. I found it quite worthwhile to pack a bicycle in my car for college, since I could wheel across campus without having to find a new place to park, then just carry it up and stash it in the back of the class when I got to the other end. Even if I'd had to use the parking lot roads to do this (I didn't, lots of people just rode the footpaths slowly), it still would have beat driving around campus at 5 mph and having to parking shark every two hours.
Mal-2
If this means you can take off a half hour early and just finish your work on the road, is that really such a bad thing? Sure there will be people who want to abuse the system -- there always are. Fuckwits exist in EVERY system. Find ways to reduce the harm they inflict, rather than scrapping the whole system and its benefits.
Mal-2
Wouldn't it be more efficient to have a fleet on call at all times, that can come and pick you up within a matter of minutes, deliver you to your destination, and head for the nearest (or emptiest) depot to wait for the next call? It would alleviate parking issues in many crowded cities, and might even allow existing businesses to spread out into the space they currently reserve for large paved surfaces.
The depots could be simple parking structures just as we have now, but the autonomous cars could shuffle themselves around as needed so they can respond to calls quickly. If the depot near you dispatches its last car, it automatically requests that a couple be sent over from heavily populated stations.
In addition, this system would mean that you could use public transit for the majority of any long commute, but not have to walk at either end of the trip, or worry about parking your car. There would be an autocab waiting for you when you step off the train, since traffic prediction is already pretty solid. If for some reason there isn't one waiting, you call one just like you called one to come pick you up at home.
Certainly some people would own their own autocabs, just as people own their own aircraft today. But most people wouldn't need to, as long as they knew one would be available for them 24/7.
Mal-2
> If your withholding taxes go down won't you be able to afford another quarter for that delivered pizza?
No, because the driver won't find the money (after expenses) to be worth the effort. So your pizza won't GET delivered, unless you like cold food delivered as part of a very large batch. The driver is probably already cheating on insurance (not reporting as a commercial vehicle), if he actually had to play by the rules as they are NOW he'd quit. This isn't going to help.
Mal-2
It's like adding an outboard motor to the handbasket to Hell. It could slow things down or (given enough power) even work its way upstream, but more likely it'll just be used to get to the destination even faster.
Mal-2
A .wmv file that you can't fast-forward, with an URL at the end that you can visit for free, legal stuff. People would download them like crazy, and if they're only 30 seconds or so, there would be little point to trying to bypass them anyhow. A quiz question about the commercial would help make sure someone actually watched it, especially if everyone gets a different question.
"Watch our commercial, get two free songs." It could work. People aren't going to retain the files, meaning the advertisers would have to host them and have plenty of bandwidth, but that's hardly insurmountable.
Mal-2
Laser-triggered lightning discharge and it's done by *GASP* non-Americans! Guess we have to vaporize Malaysia as soon as their chip fabs get too old to be useful...
Mal-2
It's not a laser, it's a Dark Sucker, although a very well collimated and controlled one.
Mal-2
If you don't have at least one power failure every two weeks, then there is no way Xcel Energy is going to be confused for a Microsoft product...
Mal-2
> 4 less years of stem cell research that could revolutionize medicine, because it's immoral to use embryos, even as thousands of embryos are thrown away all over the country as we speak at In Vitro Fertilization clinics.
Which is why I am so glad to see the California measure to promote stem cell research was (last I checked) overwhelmingly favored. My girlfriend asked how *I* could possibly be in favor of taxes and government handouts, and I said "Do you have any idea what those patents will be worth?" I figure that this particular operation will run a net positive, even if it IS administered by the state of California. THAT is why I supported it, though I have no problem with the cause itself.
Mal-2
It would suck to be stuck in a spaceship for three years, sure. But it would also suck to fall asleep and wake up three years later -- and three years older, with absolutely nothing to show for it. Sure, external sources of damage would be nearly eliminated, so you wouldn't be three years shorter of telomeres. Also, being in one place for the duration means hard radiation shielding is much more practical than trying to hard shield the entire ship.
Mal-2
The Lorne Chronicles.
This guy's idea of parallel parking is to fishtail a car into a spot sideways. You want him to be in the same risk class as you? Thought not.
Mal-2
If someone did set up a scalpel ship, you wouldn't want it anchored. Ships that aren't moving get tossed around a whole lot more than ones that are. You'd want it moving fast enough to make the stabilizers effective, but not so fast that wind and currents toss you around when you encounter them. You'd also want it to move in one continuous direction for long stretches, not go in circles where the bearing of the wind and currents would be changing constantly.
A ship that's dead in the water is not a comfortable place to be, even if you've got your sea legs.
Mal-2
...used in those machines you find in front of the grocery store that sell drinking water for 25 cents a gallon. (Or 15 cents at ours, used to be 25.) Carbon filtration, reverse osmosis, UV, more carbon filtration. It tastes exactly like the stuff we used to get delivered at 10 times the cost -- $7.50 per 5 gallons vs. 75 cents per 5 gallons.
The technology is not new. What may be new is allowing people to get a system smaller than your average refrigerator.
Mal-2
Please report to the nearest re-education centre immediately. Or not.
Mal-2
On the contrary, it's more like feeling safe driving at highway speeds knowing you can survive if you (or the guy next to you) fuck up. Without seat belts, air bags, collapsing steering columns, etc., the only way to have this confidence would be to drive no more than 15 mph at any time.
Oh wait, I live in Los Angeles. People DO drive 15 mph. Never mind...
Mal-2
Ah but it IS cheaper over time, unless you have a car stereo capable of playing CD-RWs. I know mine won't.
I drive about 5, maybe 6 hours a day as a courier, and I have certainly taken interest in hooking an MP3 player into the car, rather than fumbling with CDs every 80 minutes. Not only that, but I stop a lot, and my CD player doesn't pick up where it left off, but returns to the beginning of the track. When stops are only a mile or two apart, this means the same song gets played 3/4 of the way through and repeated, unless I want to manually seek through it (which I usually do, but it's very annoying) or just skip to the next track.
I've considered breaking everything up into one minute or less "tracks" so that at least I'll pick up reasonably close to where I left off, but then that means skipping through dozens of tracks if I want to pull up a particular song. It would also require re-burning 60 or so car discs, though some of them need to be reburned anyhow. The loading mechanism doesn't like cheap CD-Rs with no top coating and eventually wears pinholes through the metal, and even better quality discs get scratched on the data side. Needless to say, there are NO original pressed discs in the car. If a disc stops playing correctly, it gets thrown in the back seat till I get around to replacing it.
All my audio routes through an amplifier under the seat, so I wouldn't particularly need an FM transmitter, just a way to switch between inputs. I still need to listen to the radio for news and traffic (and currently, baseball) throughout the day. So I looked at the cost and it seems the break-even point on a $60 flash MP3 player is probably 6 months to a year, in terms of CD-Rs not burned. But I would have to pick and choose, rather than having 50 to choose from at any time. If I can't figure out what I want before I leave the house, too bad, I can't listen to it. I could always fall back to the CDs in the car just as easily as turning back to the radio, but that would kinda defeat the purpose.
It seems to me a Discman-like player that will play CD-Rs full of MP3s is a better value, as it solves the disc swap and capacity problems nicely, yet still allows me to make a permanent addition to the car library at any time. The discs also won't get scratched by a slotloading mechanism. But any "loose" hardware in a car makes for a theft target, and I don't have time to be stashing gear every time I stop, so it would have to be mostly concealed all the time. I don't think the CD-type MP3 players remember where to pick up in a track either.
So it seems like a hard drive based player is the way to go, but then the ROI time is even longer, and it's an even shinier theft magnet. Granted, something iPod size is pretty easy to stash away in a second or two, but that's still annoying when it has to be done 20 times a day. I don't have to worry about my $100 head unit that eats CDs -- if someone wants it bad enough to risk getting caught (I'm not gone very long), then they can have it. There's nothing else of value in the car except for the amplifier and speakers which would take far longer to get to. Certainly the car itself is not of much value, with both the A/C and power steering being non-functional, and various nicks and scrapes throughout the body. If someone takes it for parts, they'd better just need doors or a left front fender, that's about all that's intact.
A hard drive based MP3 head unit is not under consideration since that would just be a non-concealable theft magnet, unless the guts are somewhere other than in the dashboard. If it's totally invisible and operated by remote, that would probably be fine.
What would you fellow geeks suggest as a solution to the problem?
Mal-2
Why use interior space to store this stuff at all (ok maybe IMAX film needs protection, but poop does not) when they could strap it to the OUTSIDE of the station? They'd have to balance it somewhat better than they do with it inside (any mass would be further from the plane of rotation and could make the station wobbly), but why does it have to be stored in precious living space? Strap it all together or put it in bags, and tack them outside. It's still there if you need it, and it's not floating in orbit to worry about later.
I can just imagine the request list for the next supply ship -- "toilet paper, plastic garbage bags, and duct tape. Lots and lots of duct tape."
Mal-2
I believe you are right, considering the conference itself is /. worthy. Therefore, the accident related to the conference is also newsworthy, even had there been no fatalities. However, the mention of RMS and his peripheral involvement is quite relevant, because it makes the point that Hans and the others were only in that car because they were helping out a friend (who we just happen to recognize). They weren't just hopping down to the liquor store to pick up beer and cigarettes. That makes this a tragedy in the true sense (trying to do something good got him killed), rather than simply a misadventure.
Mal-2
A little bit of Fuzzy Math action for you. Rather cute, even if silly.
Mal-2
My proposal is to have a USB "attach to your privates or somesuch" device that gives you nasty shocks when you foul up or when someone wrongs you. Or instantly deducts 5 dollars from your bank account if you're not into being zapped.
A player like that is just going to attach the shock device to the dog anyhow.
Mal-2
There are no equivalent-spec motherboards for P3 and P4, they use entirely different chipsets. Plus, P4s are memory bandwidth starved with SDR DRAM and P3s are not, so saddling them both with a 133 MHz tested 440BX chipset isn't a fair test anyhow.
Also remember that back in the early P4 days, they were all SDR or RAMBUS. A 1.5 GHz P4 on a DDR motherboard (even single channel) is going to be significantly faster than the same chip on an SDR motherboard. It'll be similar to (and much cheaper than) a RAMBUS motherboard. But in those early days, who was gonna shell out the big bucks for RAMBUS memory and board, and then stick a 1.5 GHz chip in it?
Mal-2