Don't do this for real, though. The internal clock runs off the regular battery and has a small internal battery for when you swap the regular battery. If you remove the battery and keep it removed every time, you're going to have to set your clock a lot.
The "credits at the beginning of movies" BS was foisted upon studios (and more importantly, the audiences) by the film actors' guild. It's stupid and annoying and caused a number of films to take twenty minutes of really boring opening sequence before getting around to actually starting.
If you go to a play, you don't get someone shouting all the mains' names during the opening act. You're lucky if everyone gets an individual bow during the curtain call. But you will get a program with bios of the important people and a list of everyone else. Which is just how it should be.
The credits should never have been part of the performance. With video games it's even easier. You don't have to worry about space, a PDF with thousands of names and a few bios won't take more than a few hundred kB. As long as the list is on the disk or in the manual, that should be sufficient. Anyone can look up the names if they want to, but no one is forced to watch page after page of "Key Grip's Page" scroll by if they don't want to.
Digital TV offers us additional options as well. Imagine stuffing an exhaustive list onto a data segment like closed captioning. Players could be made that record the list for perusal at any point during the show, and the list could be searchable. Heck, you could conceivably have a button that identifies all of the characters on the screen and their actors with a label just under their head. Such a list could be made far more complete than what you could send in a few minutes of scrolling with a font large enough to be read on a standard definition television.
People who complain about and call others stupid for not bending security policies to accommodate their own sloppiness and convenience have demonstrated a level of maturity consistent with the condescension heaped upon them.
What if it was caused, not by meteor or comet, nor by microscopic black hole, but by intergalactic plush bears who can shoot rainbow colored force beams out of their bellies?
Conservatives don't really like Guiliani, either. Though I imagine they'll probably vote for him because they think he's "electable." Which, ironically (in a thoroughly unironic sense), is precisely how Bush (43) came into office by the skin of Floridian teeth. It's also how Kerry planned to get in (from the other side of the aisle).
If people would stop trying to play the "who is everyone else going to vote for" game*, then we'd have a chance of getting someone in who at least a few people actually want. But the "first across the finish line" nature of American style elections makes that very difficult, and the constant drumbeat of carefully manipulated polling spewed forth by lazy journalists doesn't help.
*which for some reason invariably has included the "looks good on TV" expansion set since Kennedy/Nixon in '60.
I'm glad you've shaken off the shackles of party dependence, but please vote for an actual person who's actually eligible to serve as president. Even if it's your neighbor. (also, find a way to include your neighbor's address in case he's got a common name....) Fictional characters just make a mockery of the whole process.
Why? they're certainly better than the "print your face on any of these crappy gift items!" booths that are often in the malls. If you want to get rid of mall carts, there are quite a few sketchy things to ditch first.
I happen to think dippin dots are pretty cool, and not just from a "they're like small candies that turn into ice cream in your mouth." But also from a "how did they make this." My mind starts with a 30' wonka festooned air-chilled shot tower before I let reality set in.
To do a project this big, you need an architect with a vision, an engineer who can see reality, a builder who can build it right, and a U.N. peacemaker to keep them from killing each other.
So you need three imaginary people and an engineer?
Maybe in your town. In mine, it was really hard to argue with the pro-ban-ers because it was really hard to find a non-smoking establishment. Restaurants were okay, because they were often big enough that the non-smoking section was far enough from the smokers to work, but clubs and bars were awful and pubs and grills were a crap shoot.
I think part of the problem is that no one thought of posting advertisements loudly proclaiming their non-smoking-ness. Another was that, at least for bars, the non-smoking establishments were all speculative, and the speculators didn't spend very much money making them cool places to hang out.
If it *can* move unrelated already written data, that throughput is either hidden from the 100 MB/s bus speed or subtracts from it. Either way, the data rate is going to be higher than what you expect based on what you send to the disk. This affects the wear rate in new and exciting ways!
If you inject a certain substance in rats, and the develop cancer much more than equal rats injected with a placebo, you can say with fair confidence that the substance increases cancer-rates in rats.
Of course, there is the small issue of choosing the right placebo, dosage, and delivery mechanism. Consider the case of saccharin as an example.
Research is a time consuming process, and a big part of it is just characterizing and mitigating all of the things that can affect your experiment.
Ok, but what if the toll road, despite improving your commute by 30%, only gained you 3 minutes? Would it be worth it then?
'cause that's more like what paying $500 for a video card to play video games in their best settings is like. A $200 card will play those same games and it will play most games available when you buy it at the highest settings. The games a $500 card will run better are games that haven't been made yet: the cards are slightly future-proof. Of course, you can mitigate that by buying another $200 card when that new game you just have to play at the highest settings comes out, making your total outlay only $400 and in the end, you'll have a superior video card, even.
Wait.. what is your objection? That corn prices are too cheap, thereby discouraging Mexican farmers? or that corn prices are too expensive thereby encouraging Mexican corn production to divert to ethanol production?
I ran the Prey demo with AMD Athlon 3000+ (under-clocked even, to keep heat down. I bought a poor case or something), ATI Radeon 9600 XT and 1 gB of ram.
I'm pretty sure I ran it at close to max as well. Dunno if Prey was just well designed or we've reached a sort of plateau in requirements growth.
It's not memory. It's overcharging, which causes hydrogen venting and permanently degrades capacity. NiCds will develop a memory, but in applications so specific that it is very difficult to reproduce. You have to have a charge/discharge cycle that is extremely consistent. The kind of consistency you get from a satellite passing in and out of the earth's shadow. You're not going to get the consistency needed for an irregular application like using cordless power tools.
Batteries will also degrade over time. They have a known cycle life, and it gets worse for the higher capacity chemistries. At 80% DoD, NiCDs will take like 10,000 cycles to reach 50% capacity. Li-ions will take about 500 cycles. NiMH are somewhere between. Improving cycle life is the subject of ongoing research.
Your power tools probably combine poor charging circuitry with high depth of discharge (to reduce the weight). For instance, I have a Black & Decker 12v drill that I don't think even has any charging circuitry, just a note to not leave it plugged in more than 12 hours (and, I guess, pray that the wall wart is C/10...). It doesn't cut off either, it just runs down to the point that the motor doesn't have enough torque to overcome friction.
If you want it to last longer, I would recommend getting at least 2x as many batteries as you're currently using and swapping them out more frequently. Also, get rid of the rapid-charger and trickle charge at about one tenth the rated capacity. (i.e. 1500 mA-h: charge for 10 hours at 150 mA) You can prevent memory by irregular use. You can solve a problem specific to NiCd by using the occasional deep discharge, but other chemistries neither have memories nor benefit as much as NiCd from a deep cycle. Also most cells can be damaged by deep discharging which outweighs any benefit you might've gotten.
To be fair that was some kind of failure going on there. Whether that failure was an ordinary market failure (i.e. business just all cater to smokers for some weird reason) or legislative, (i.e. without the laws banning smoking businesses didn't have the right to disallow patrons from engaging in it).
Personally, I suspect partially the latter case, and the law should've been to allow businesses banning smoking to have the full force of the law behind them (i.e. businesses can use police to enforce their smoking ban and are protected from being sued for it). But it certainly is the case that before the ban (in the states that have the ban) there weren't that many non-smoking establishments.
I have tried xpdf. It was just good enough to make me go through the hassle of downloading and installing acrobat reader from a tarball. Now that Acrobat Reader is in the major repositories, it's even easier.
The whole UI is confusing and overly spartan. For example, there's no reason the sliders need to be so quirky. I think it's a holdover from when graphical displays were rare, but click-scroll down, ctrl-click (or was it shift-click? I can never get these right) scroll up is a pretty stupid way of handling scroll bars anymore.
I quite agree. For example, union shop General Motors' cars are almost always of far superior quality and reliability compared to worker oppressing Toyota's cars in comparable categories. They might cost a little more, but you know you're getting quality and helping to fund someone's retirement.
Because it's patronizing and manipulative. AIDS, specifically, is a very easy disease to avoid. We know how it spreads. It can be quarantined with words for goodness sake. All that needs to be done is to not do something.
But advocating mass circumcision is like saying, "We know that our little brown brothers can't be expected to refrain from fornicating with everyone they meet. They simply don't have the self control or the capacity to understand the risk. Let's just cut them up a bit, and that'll either reduce their mating opportunities or the infection channel through some unknown mechanism whose possibility I just made up right here."
Advocating circumcision to reduce AIDS risk is like advocating gastric bypass to reduce obesity risk. They're both invasive surgeries (although one could be done outpatient), and the both technically have some numbers to support their efficacy, but they gloss over some underlying assumptions whose implications are staggering.
"but platinum (for your fuel cells) is not exactly going to get cheaper in quantity."
Agree all other points, but fuel cell cars won't need a catalytic converter to control emissions. I wouldn't anticipate the price of platinum to vary much unless you need more platinum for a fuel cell as you do for the already mandatory emissions control devices.
Re:So its "Dark Angel" before Max escaped Manticor
on
Joss Whedon Back on TV
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· Score: 1
Meh. Dark Angel was good for about 3/4ths of one season. Then it turned into a buffy/hercules/xena esque MonsterOfTheWeek bubblegum serial. I wasn't sad that it was canceled, but I was sad that it had to be.
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Don't do this for real, though. The internal clock runs off the regular battery and has a small internal battery for when you swap the regular battery. If you remove the battery and keep it removed every time, you're going to have to set your clock a lot.
That's like.. a single small wind turbine. A plant that size wouldn't even power a single hospital.
The "credits at the beginning of movies" BS was foisted upon studios (and more importantly, the audiences) by the film actors' guild. It's stupid and annoying and caused a number of films to take twenty minutes of really boring opening sequence before getting around to actually starting.
If you go to a play, you don't get someone shouting all the mains' names during the opening act. You're lucky if everyone gets an individual bow during the curtain call. But you will get a program with bios of the important people and a list of everyone else. Which is just how it should be.
The credits should never have been part of the performance. With video games it's even easier. You don't have to worry about space, a PDF with thousands of names and a few bios won't take more than a few hundred kB. As long as the list is on the disk or in the manual, that should be sufficient. Anyone can look up the names if they want to, but no one is forced to watch page after page of "Key Grip's Page" scroll by if they don't want to.
Digital TV offers us additional options as well. Imagine stuffing an exhaustive list onto a data segment like closed captioning. Players could be made that record the list for perusal at any point during the show, and the list could be searchable. Heck, you could conceivably have a button that identifies all of the characters on the screen and their actors with a label just under their head. Such a list could be made far more complete than what you could send in a few minutes of scrolling with a font large enough to be read on a standard definition television.
Well, only if you use unsigned binary signing.
People who complain about and call others stupid for not bending security policies to accommodate their own sloppiness and convenience have demonstrated a level of maturity consistent with the condescension heaped upon them.
What if it was caused, not by meteor or comet, nor by microscopic black hole, but by intergalactic plush bears who can shoot rainbow colored force beams out of their bellies?
Conservatives don't really like Guiliani, either. Though I imagine they'll probably vote for him because they think he's "electable." Which, ironically (in a thoroughly unironic sense), is precisely how Bush (43) came into office by the skin of Floridian teeth. It's also how Kerry planned to get in (from the other side of the aisle).
If people would stop trying to play the "who is everyone else going to vote for" game*, then we'd have a chance of getting someone in who at least a few people actually want. But the "first across the finish line" nature of American style elections makes that very difficult, and the constant drumbeat of carefully manipulated polling spewed forth by lazy journalists doesn't help.
*which for some reason invariably has included the "looks good on TV" expansion set since Kennedy/Nixon in '60.
I'm glad you've shaken off the shackles of party dependence, but please vote for an actual person who's actually eligible to serve as president. Even if it's your neighbor. (also, find a way to include your neighbor's address in case he's got a common name....) Fictional characters just make a mockery of the whole process.
They suspended you for 3 days for breaking the bylaws of an after-school club?? That's messed up.
Why? they're certainly better than the "print your face on any of these crappy gift items!" booths that are often in the malls. If you want to get rid of mall carts, there are quite a few sketchy things to ditch first.
I happen to think dippin dots are pretty cool, and not just from a "they're like small candies that turn into ice cream in your mouth." But also from a "how did they make this." My mind starts with a 30' wonka festooned air-chilled shot tower before I let reality set in.
So you need three imaginary people and an engineer?
Maybe in your town. In mine, it was really hard to argue with the pro-ban-ers because it was really hard to find a non-smoking establishment. Restaurants were okay, because they were often big enough that the non-smoking section was far enough from the smokers to work, but clubs and bars were awful and pubs and grills were a crap shoot.
I think part of the problem is that no one thought of posting advertisements loudly proclaiming their non-smoking-ness. Another was that, at least for bars, the non-smoking establishments were all speculative, and the speculators didn't spend very much money making them cool places to hang out.
If it *can* move unrelated already written data, that throughput is either hidden from the 100 MB/s bus speed or subtracts from it. Either way, the data rate is going to be higher than what you expect based on what you send to the disk. This affects the wear rate in new and exciting ways!
If you inject a certain substance in rats, and the develop cancer much more than equal rats injected with a placebo, you can say with fair confidence that the substance increases cancer-rates in rats.
Of course, there is the small issue of choosing the right placebo, dosage, and delivery mechanism. Consider the case of saccharin as an example.
Research is a time consuming process, and a big part of it is just characterizing and mitigating all of the things that can affect your experiment.
Ok, but what if the toll road, despite improving your commute by 30%, only gained you 3 minutes? Would it be worth it then?
'cause that's more like what paying $500 for a video card to play video games in their best settings is like. A $200 card will play those same games and it will play most games available when you buy it at the highest settings. The games a $500 card will run better are games that haven't been made yet: the cards are slightly future-proof. Of course, you can mitigate that by buying another $200 card when that new game you just have to play at the highest settings comes out, making your total outlay only $400 and in the end, you'll have a superior video card, even.
Wait.. what is your objection? That corn prices are too cheap, thereby discouraging Mexican farmers? or that corn prices are too expensive thereby encouraging Mexican corn production to divert to ethanol production?
I ran the Prey demo with AMD Athlon 3000+ (under-clocked even, to keep heat down. I bought a poor case or something), ATI Radeon 9600 XT and 1 gB of ram.
I'm pretty sure I ran it at close to max as well. Dunno if Prey was just well designed or we've reached a sort of plateau in requirements growth.
How was the full game BTW?
watts per time is accelerating power. watts for time is energy, which is what the electric company sells you.
It's not memory. It's overcharging, which causes hydrogen venting and permanently degrades capacity. NiCds will develop a memory, but in applications so specific that it is very difficult to reproduce. You have to have a charge/discharge cycle that is extremely consistent. The kind of consistency you get from a satellite passing in and out of the earth's shadow. You're not going to get the consistency needed for an irregular application like using cordless power tools.
Batteries will also degrade over time. They have a known cycle life, and it gets worse for the higher capacity chemistries. At 80% DoD, NiCDs will take like 10,000 cycles to reach 50% capacity. Li-ions will take about 500 cycles. NiMH are somewhere between. Improving cycle life is the subject of ongoing research.
Your power tools probably combine poor charging circuitry with high depth of discharge (to reduce the weight). For instance, I have a Black & Decker 12v drill that I don't think even has any charging circuitry, just a note to not leave it plugged in more than 12 hours (and, I guess, pray that the wall wart is C/10...). It doesn't cut off either, it just runs down to the point that the motor doesn't have enough torque to overcome friction.
If you want it to last longer, I would recommend getting at least 2x as many batteries as you're currently using and swapping them out more frequently. Also, get rid of the rapid-charger and trickle charge at about one tenth the rated capacity. (i.e. 1500 mA-h: charge for 10 hours at 150 mA) You can prevent memory by irregular use. You can solve a problem specific to NiCd by using the occasional deep discharge, but other chemistries neither have memories nor benefit as much as NiCd from a deep cycle. Also most cells can be damaged by deep discharging which outweighs any benefit you might've gotten.
To be fair that was some kind of failure going on there. Whether that failure was an ordinary market failure (i.e. business just all cater to smokers for some weird reason) or legislative, (i.e. without the laws banning smoking businesses didn't have the right to disallow patrons from engaging in it).
Personally, I suspect partially the latter case, and the law should've been to allow businesses banning smoking to have the full force of the law behind them (i.e. businesses can use police to enforce their smoking ban and are protected from being sued for it). But it certainly is the case that before the ban (in the states that have the ban) there weren't that many non-smoking establishments.
I have tried xpdf. It was just good enough to make me go through the hassle of downloading and installing acrobat reader from a tarball. Now that Acrobat Reader is in the major repositories, it's even easier.
The whole UI is confusing and overly spartan. For example, there's no reason the sliders need to be so quirky. I think it's a holdover from when graphical displays were rare, but click-scroll down, ctrl-click (or was it shift-click? I can never get these right) scroll up is a pretty stupid way of handling scroll bars anymore.
I quite agree. For example, union shop General Motors' cars are almost always of far superior quality and reliability compared to worker oppressing Toyota's cars in comparable categories. They might cost a little more, but you know you're getting quality and helping to fund someone's retirement.
Now that is ironic. Although I disagree that Times is a better font for screen reading. It's all squishdy and pointy.
Because it's patronizing and manipulative. AIDS, specifically, is a very easy disease to avoid. We know how it spreads. It can be quarantined with words for goodness sake. All that needs to be done is to not do something.
But advocating mass circumcision is like saying, "We know that our little brown brothers can't be expected to refrain from fornicating with everyone they meet. They simply don't have the self control or the capacity to understand the risk. Let's just cut them up a bit, and that'll either reduce their mating opportunities or the infection channel through some unknown mechanism whose possibility I just made up right here."
Advocating circumcision to reduce AIDS risk is like advocating gastric bypass to reduce obesity risk. They're both invasive surgeries (although one could be done outpatient), and the both technically have some numbers to support their efficacy, but they gloss over some underlying assumptions whose implications are staggering.
"but platinum (for your fuel cells) is not exactly going to get cheaper in quantity."
Agree all other points, but fuel cell cars won't need a catalytic converter to control emissions. I wouldn't anticipate the price of platinum to vary much unless you need more platinum for a fuel cell as you do for the already mandatory emissions control devices.
Meh. Dark Angel was good for about 3/4ths of one season. Then it turned into a buffy/hercules/xena esque MonsterOfTheWeek bubblegum serial. I wasn't sad that it was canceled, but I was sad that it had to be.