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Yep. Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe. We'll certainly have more of it than we know what to do with once we start helium-3 mining on the moon and later in Jupiter's upper atmosphere.

A third alternative which may well be feasible by the time you might be in a position to build this would be a vacuum. For now, no materials strong enough exist to build a lightweight structure of that size capable of containing a vacuum without imploding but in a few decades who knows...

Join the club. Quite a few of the regulars here were born after or during the time I was in high school. Damn, I feel old...

I second staying with XP. Lack of OS support really doesn't matter once an OS becomes less popular. Most of the MS updates for XP are security updates. Now that Windows 7 and 8 are more popular hackers will focus on them, not XP. As for RAM, probably not much point going past 3 GB. XP and any...

I met Howell in 2004 IIRC. I've known apairofpcs since then also, and we've met in person many times. No snow last night but many potholes as usual. The good news is NYC is installing LED street lights everywhere by the end of 2017 so they'll be much easier to see.

Thanks for the birthday wishes, everyone! :D

Here's a nice primer of the different types of lithium-ion chemistries: http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/types_of_lithium_ion I'm personally a AA/AAA person myself. This is not only because these batteries are safe, but also because they are readily available. I only resort to...

I love this kind of out of the box thinking. If I ever hit it big financially I'll join you planning such a thing. Mine might be even more "out there" because I want to be able to reach very high altitudes. That might require a HUGE gas bag the size of a supertanker. Or perhaps a hybrid design...

I only have a few lights which use li-ion, and only one which takes 18650s. I use the "safer" IMR LiMn2O4 in that light. It's unprotected, but since this is a single cell direct drive light it's physically impossible to either overdischarge the cell or drive it into reverse polarity. For my...

My screen size ( 1600x1200 ) isn't there, either.

Either that, or Dave hates phone calls as much as I do. I'm fine giving my email as contact info since I can respond more or less on my own schedule. The "I want attention now" aspect of phone contact is one reason I avoid giving out my phone number except to people I know won't call me often...

Yes. You need to measure the DC current going to the LED string with a multimeter. In order to do that you need to open the wire going to the LEDs somewhere. You can also measure the voltage of the power supply, although this isn't that critical. The main thing is the current. Most LED ballasts...

The specs for those LED tapes say they use 12 volts and 2 amps. As you probably know, LEDs are constant current devices so we should focus on the current draw at 12 volts (it may well be 2 amps but I would measure it to be sure). Once you establish the drive current, there are LED ballasts which...

Maybe Merc could send him some Western Digital hard drives.

It's good to see some data on this, especially the part about wear-out failures. Now I wonder how many hours of running starting and stopping a drive is equivalent to? I tend to let my main desktop run 24/7, mostly on the theory that repeatedly turning it on and off is bad for the electronics...

I use a different methodology. If it's heavily advertised it may or may not be crap but it's probably grossly overpriced (i.e. most Apple products). If it's stupidly cheap it's almost certainly crap but very occasionally you'll get great products at bargain basement prices. If you want quality...

Same here. 4500K to 5000K is a good neutral tint for me. I really don't want anything warmer than that in a flashlight (or any other type of light for that matter). I love the high-CRI Nichia 219s in 4500K (5000K would be better but it doesn't seem to be available).

My 240GB Intel 330 has only 2.05 TB of writes of it after a bit over a year in service. It's looking like it'll last at least 100 years at that rate. I wonder if flash memory cells also degrade with time?

I actually like the singing suggestion but I hope nobody is within hearing distance. :oops: I already sometimes run my cadence up, and I'm on the tops 95% of the time because riding on the drops kills my hands and my back. I'll try your idea of upping the effort past my norms the next few rides...

It's normal for BP to increase slightly as you get older, and it shouldn't affect your health. Too many doctors go by readings and want 70 year olds to have the same BP as 20 year olds, then put them on pills if their BP is only a little high. And don't feel bad. I just took mine about 15...

Same situation here. $42 quadrillion in cash, and the reserves just started going down. From what I can determine, one star has enough production for roughly 2.88 billion dealers. At the rate my dealers are going up, I'll need to add one star every 30 minutes or so. And yes, these numbers are...

Actually, I was only able to hire about 10,000 master dealers before my hands hurt. And then I installed an autoclicker. Now I'm up to 4.2 billion dealers and hiring about 1.5 million per second. Yeah, there's no way you can physically play this game well without an autoclicker, even if you...

Just got the second page of upgrades and increased the maximum number of dealers to 999.9 trillion. YES! I should have have stupidly large amount of cash soon.

I think the last achievement is for playing one week so there's not much you can do other than continue to play. You're actually doing better than me now. I have over $3.6 quadrillion in cash, mostly because I stopped buying after I bought a black hole and star, but I'm stuck at only 500 million...

Yeah, you're right. It pauses in Chrome also if you switch tabs. That's OK though since I have two monitors. I'm letting it run on the second monitor in its own window. So far I made over $316 trillion.

Dr. Meth. This is a flash-based game where the goal is to make as much money as possible selling, you guessed it, meth. Very funny animations and very addictive. It runs in the background while you do other things, and also auto saves.

Try removing the hinge pins and sanding them with progressively finer sandpaper until you get something resembling a smooth, matte finish. I find a lot of hinge squeaks are caused by hinge pins rusting or corroding. When you're done sanding, put a layer of some type of grease or heavy oil to...

If I had the time and a significant other to join me, I'd like to bike across the US. I wouldn't be in any big hurry, either. If I cover 40 or 50 miles a day that's good enough. Two months to get cross country, probably a lifetime of memories.

My own personal feelings on this is that I generally don't find much interesting on any long trip which involves passing through rural or suburban areas. To me they all look pretty much the same. As such, I just want to pass through them as fast as possible. 90 mph in a car is good. 200 mph in a...

Umm, the problem here isn't that these people can't upgrade to a more modern machine. Heck, I have better machines I'm not using which I can give them. Rather, it's that they don't want to. I'm serious. In one case, I know someone still using a 386 and Windows 3.1, and struggling just to read...

It sounds like his son's tarantula would probably eat the cat if it got into its cage.

Don't feel bad. I know some people who are still on 56K. In NYC. Either they can't get anything else, or the machines they're using can't be upgraded to use anything faster than 56K (i.e. no ethernet cards which fit in ISA slots)

I'm surprised here given the size and low population density. Are the limits strictly enforced? Here in the US you can generally go 10 mph over the limit without worrying about a ticket. At least you have the good sense to have "no limit" zones out in the open country. The distances in a lot of...

There's no good analogy to Australia in terms of population density in the US other than remote midwestern states like Montana or Nebraska. You have same number of people in the entire continent of Australia as you do in the NYC metro area. It's no surprise that most forms of public transit...

That's actually part of my point. Even people who love EVs admit they aren't suitable for all trips. However, if they're suitable for the vast majority of trips, it makes more sense to just rent a gas car when you need more range. And that's the situation where much of the US population...

I just ended up losing a long post I started typing in response to Coug's rant. I'm too busy to bother retyping it, but look at this link. BTW, a lot of traffic on intercity highways is freight and business travelers, so crowded highways don't mean a lot of people are driving long distances. The...

The point of fast-charge stations is to mitigate the range issues. For what it's worth, the vast majority of car trips are well within the range of present batteries. Batteries with greater range would be a welcome development, but in the end we could use electric cars for 99% of trips right...

Electric cars are in a state of rapid flux, similar to LEDs a few years back. I suspect in a few years time when you're ready to make the purchase the options and issues you mention will be completely different. For one thing, better batteries may well increase range substantially. There will...

I also want to add that I personally think we should have a lot more stay-at-home moms (or dads). I think having one parent around, not being shuttled into day care, adds a lot to a child's development. I tend to think the reason we have so many dysfunctional, maladjusted, insecure adults these...

It depends on a lot of things, including how many children you have. My and my two siblings were close in age, my mom got pretty much zero help from my father with housework, and we didn't have a lot of modern appliances which make life easier like dishwashers. I remember my mom being busy all...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVYArjS-Ee0

She's probably used to the typical "guy" apartment with dirty laundry everywhere, a layer of grime in the kitchen, beer and spoiled food in the fridge, and several piles of dried up vomit next to the bed from the last few hangovers.

Still using the same Maytag we've had since 1973. We've had to replace the belts a few times, the timer twice, and the water pump once. I guess the Maytag repairman really is lonely. ;)

I meant Happy Birthday Mark! That's what I get for posting half asleep. :oops:

:b-day: Happy Birth Mark! :beer:

There's really no way to get around this conundrum other than to selectively breed a more intelligent populace. If you think about it, throughout history there have always been specialists. The average person went to the blacksmith when his horse needed shoes, to the candlestick maker to get...

That's exactly the problem. What you say is nice in theory if there really is a place for everyone to secure their own future. The hard fact is there won't be. Indeed, many of the jobs lost to the recession just aren't coming back. They were either outsourced or eliminated by automation. Riots...

I've written about this elsewhere. Right now, society is on the verge of facing a huge problem which hardly anyone acknowledges even exists. Automation is poised to drastically decrease the number of manhours needed for society to function. It's also poised to make many people totally...

33% seems about right because you're only eliminating some of the aerodynamic drag part of the equation here. At highway speeds aero drag is probably about 1.5 to 3 times tire drag. On the flip side, for a bicycle aero drag at high speeds is well over 90% of total drag, so it's easy to see how...

If it was a steel wheel I would say yes but with aluminum I have my doubts. Not all aluminum alloys can be hammered back into shape like steel (i.e. cold forged). It might result in loss of strength, microcracks, etc. If it were a bike wheel I might chance trying to hammer it back given the much...