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A lot of the reason for the gridlock (and the rise of things like the arch-conservative Tea Party and religious right) has to do with the present system of government giving too much voice to sparsely populated rural states. There were reasons this was done back when the republic was founded to...

The odd thing is the superdelegates should really consider switching sides at this point. Most general election polls show Bernie doing better than Hillary against Trump. At this point either will beat him, but 6 months is an eternity in an election year. And if some new scandal with Hillary...

It looks like you and others did make a difference. Bernie is still a longshot but if he keeps racking up wins the superdelegates may switch sides.

Ouch. I looked at some data. You've doubled your population since 1967. By comparison the US population has increased by a bit over 50% since then. It's even worse when you consider the US has abundant natural resources compared to Oz. BTW, provided you're selective about who you let in, and...

My guess is OLED will be available in smaller sizes first. I personally have nothing against large monitors but for me a 40" monitor would need to be 8K for me to be happy with the pixel pitch. The Dell monitor you linked to has the same pixel pitch as my 20" 1600x1200 monitor, and DO clearly...

Of course. Intel is just like a lot of other American companies. There's no shortage of skilled American workers, just a shortage of ones willing to work for low wages. I guess now they have no more use for their $7 an hour H-1B programmers.

I'm personally holding out for 4K OLED. Any technology which inherently emits light has to be better than any type of backlit LCD. A 4K OLED monitor in about 24" size would be perfect for my needs.

Of course there are loads of applications which require lots of computing power. I tend to think those aren't necessarily major drivers of advancing the state-of-the-art because those applications are often served by supercomputers consisting of lots of off-the-shelf CPUs. I'm not sure there's...

That's an excellent point. I've noted at this stage SSDs are offering "good enough" storage at a low enough price point for 90% of the population to be satisfied. Although mechanical drives are still larger and less expensive per GB by an order of magnitude, most people are not screaming for...

Given how expensive each new die shrink is, my guess is eventually you'll have everyone making semiconductors sharing a fab, perhaps even sharing IP. It's getting to the point where no single company can bankroll everything. As for R&D, I really think we've reached a point of diminishing...

You'll be hearing about Big College for sure when the student loan debt bomb explodes, which is likely to happen very soon.

Yes, exactly. From the link: Overall, at the very least, we`ll have to get used to being a country of lower average levels of achievement. For whatever reasons, Mexican culture and human accomplishment don`t go together.

That's exactly the problem with Hillary-no surprises and therefore a continuation of the status quo which we can all see isn't working out very well. While I don't necessarily agree with SD that government always creates problems, it has in fact created a lot of problems which otherwise wouldn't...

There's the real estate bubble also which is driven by a combination of low mortgage rates plus lack of places to invest. Lots of people with money put it into real estate, especially in places like NYC, driving prices through the roof. It'll be disaster when that bubble finally bursts...

Not banned but I think at this point nearly everyone here knows everyone else's views on a variety of political topics. No point repeating the same things for the umpteenth time. My take on this year's presidential race is that it's scary both front runners have been compared to Hitler. I'm not...

There's always scaling in three dimensions after that like they're already doing with flash memory. It won't get you higher clock speeds, but it'll get you more parallelism and more transistors on a chip. I think at this point we may need a new CPU architecture to move forward, perhaps...

Intel has no real competition in the areas it serves at this point. They're probably letting AMD stay alive just to avoid the red tape that would come from being a monopoly. When you've already cornered a large market segment, you can't really grow much. The only way to increase profits is to...

In an interesting development consistent with this thread's original theme, Cree has released the XP-G3. Datasheet. Note the S5 bin (172 lumens @ 350mA and 85°C). And this isn't vaporware. These parts are actually available. Efficiency of the top bin would be 180 lm/W @ 85°C and 190 lm/W @ 25°C...

The landing reminds me of those old sci-fi movies from the 1950s where the rocketship lands on its tail on some alien planet. Next, they need to build a flying saucer. :) That would be less of a problem keeping up when landing.

Makes sense to me. Along the lines of forcing the market, I'm not aware of Tesla actively meeting with legislators with the idea of creating captive markets for EVs. For example, if large cities like New York decided to convert city owned or regulated fleets (i.e. taxis, buses, garbage trucks)...

Licensing Tesla IP might actually be the better route for them. They could continue to do what they're relatively good at, namely produce relatively low volumes catering to niche markets, and let the big boys make EVs for the masses. They won't have much competition in their niche, plus they'll...

Yes. Once the major automakers take electric cars seriously, meaning that such cars comprise the majority of their production, Tesla will be screwed by simple economies of scale. You can't hand assemble battery packs made from thousands of 18650 size cells and be competitive when EVs hit...

It depends whether you need high or low thrust. If you're getting to LEO, you need high thrust, and nuclear rockets deliver roughly twice the specific impulse of chemical ones. Once you're out of Earth's gravity well, you use much lower thrust but a nuclear rocket can supply that thrust for...

That was my initial thought but then I'm thinking LED drivers often end up horribly inefficient at very low drive currents. And the LED themselves lose efficiency below a certain drive current, typically around 5% of rated current. Because of these factors, if you try to extend battery life 60...

I'm fine when the movies stick to facts, not hysteria. The China Syndrome was mostly hysteria. Gasland was a somewhat better mix of facts, albeit with some over the top stuff as well. Remember most of the people making these types of movies have an agenda. As such, they'll play fast and loose...

As much as I hate say it, in a race between him and Hitlery he's the better choice. I actually can get behind some of his ideas on dealing with terrorists as well. What we've done hasn't been all that effective.

Not sure what this has to do with I wrote. Cars are tools. In some places, mostly rural areas, they're the right tool for the job. In others like cities they're not. The fact they're used to the extent they are, even in places where they're a horrible fit, like NYC, is precisely because we...

Emphasis mine. Yes, we're giving electric car subsidies but this is mainly to level the playing field between electric cars and gas cars. Gas cars have massive direct and indirect subsidies. Some figures I've heard thrown around are up to $5 per gallon to account for externalities and costs...

Because maybe it's 2016 and time to dump the idea of throw-away rockets which has existed since the beginning of space travel over 50 years ago? If computers followed the same model, we would still be using vacuum tubes. Actually, scratch that. We would still be using mechanical relays. While...

Well, the fact there's a bunch of orders at least proves there's a huge latent demand for mid-priced electric cars, even with gas at $2 per gallon. Can't say if they'll be able to scale up production in time. If they can, then they'll make a killing until the big three decide to get into the EV...

A tool like this is a much better way to reflow the card. I've been happily using one for the last year to both repair boards and build new ones. It looks like he killed the SSD with excessive heat. Then again, there may have been a component failure which caused it to stop working in the first...

Doesn't Tesla sell direct to customers? Since you said you were interested in a Tesla anyway for your next car, that seems to be yet another compelling reason to buy one. I hate haggling myself. When I quote people prices, I almost always quote exactly the price I want. At times I've had people...

Kind of resembles my thoughts on the subject. I haven't been more than 400 miles from where I was born. I'm not that keen on ever breaking that record. I might like to eventually do a bit of train travel but that precludes having the time, money, and someone I enjoy traveling with. Right now I...

I'm just mildly interested but it's totally irrelevant to me as well. I'm not planning on taking out loans any time now or in the foreseeable future.

831 for me last few months. I have four credit cards but never run a balance from month to month. I also tend to only use a small portion of my credit. I still have an outstanding student loan but as far as I know they ceased collection efforts after I sent them a few nasty letters. Apparently...

Either that or someone forget to put a 1 in the price per GB: $0.125. This may actually be the case because ~$500 for a 2TB SSD isn't a great price breakthrough. The Samsung 2TB, which is arguably a MUCH better drive, can now be had for around $650. It'll likely drop to close to $500 by the time...

This is starting to get really interesting. SSDs are headed towards a factor of four of HDDs in terms of price, and are way ahead in terms of capacity per unit volume. How much longer will spinning disks be around at this rate?

This is exactly why I hate homeowners associations. I'm glad they largely don't exist in NYC. I've heard in some places you actually have to get permission from the homeowner's association to do something like paint your home anything but the original color scheme, or to maybe have shrubs where...

That doesn't seem low enough to cause flickering. My guess is there are occasional brief sags well below that which might be causing the flickering you're seeing. Unfortunately, as Dave and Lunar already said, you would need a data logger to catch those.

Sometimes it is because the undervoltage may cause parts to operate outside their specs. More often than not though it's more annoying than damaging. Try to look for LED bulbs which are speced for 85 VAC minimum. If they still flicker, then it's time to get your landlord or electrical company to...

Actually, I do know why. Part of it was riding 225 miles in December. Another part was just being busy. When I'm not busy, I sometimes tend to eat more out of boredom. But mainly I find if I ride 3000 to 4000 miles a year my weight will eventually stabilize at 165 or 170 after a few years and I...

Mind you that's just for January. Based on my earnings since I've started this consulting gig I earn roughly about the same as David. For as long as it lasts, anyway. Same here. I'm at least 20 pounds more than Merc, although I lost some weight over the last two months.

The cooling requirements for that are going to be a pain. Of course, if you have a water-cooled setup then no problem.

Probably about 5 weeks of my after tax earnings based on the really busy January I've had. Of course, chances of these hours keeping up all year are close to nil.

My guess is this chip wouldn't be of much value for anything but servers. My understanding is most desktop applications don't benefit much from more than 4 cores. 4 faster cores would do better than 16 slower ones. And it's hideously expensive besides.

Some bulbs have lower minimum voltage specifications than others. And there's manufacturing variation even among the same bulb type. That said, it seems there are LED driver ICs which deal with 85 VAC to 265 VAC ( https://www.spansion.com/downloads/AD405-00011-E.pdf ). That would give LED bulbs...

I definitely sounds like an undervoltage issue. Some LED bulbs work fine down to 75 or 80 VAC, others might start to flicker at 100 VAC. Unless you can get your landlord to fix the mains power issue, which should be done anyway for a whole host of reasons having nothing to do with LED bulbs, I...

Actually the ground pins aren't redundant. They have all those ground pins because these CPUs at full throttle suck a few tens of amps from the CPU power supply. If you have a few less paths to ground, ripple increases, and the CPU might either be unstable, or fail to work at all. That said...

Meanwhile I'm sure the average line workers at IBM were told they had to share the pain. Of course, if the company does well again they won't be sharing in the gain. I'd love to know how anybody on a board of directors could do such a boneheaded move like rewarding for failure. If a CEO receives...

I do the same thing with LED bulbs. I aim them towards the ceiling to effectively diffuse them. LED fluorescent tube replacements give a nice, diffuse light but of course you need 4 foot T8 or T12 fixtures to mount them in (and the fixtures usually need to be rewired to feed 120VAC directly to...