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In the legislative chambers of course. Judging by some of the laws being passed, it looks like they're already smoking some strong stuff. :drinka:

I'll agree the latest push to take ALL salt out of restaurant is misguided. However, there's nothing good about smoking, transfats, or for that matter high-fructose corn syrup. I'm glad we've gotten rid of transfats. I hope we do the same with HFCS, and any other junk currently in food which...

Ouch! I feel a little better now. I spent ~$7000 on dental work from 1993-1995, didn't see a dentist again until last year, and then spent close to $4000. End result though is 29 teeth still remaining, 2 of the three pulled ones are wisdom teeth, the other is a second molar. 15 teeth ( all...

Possibly the first instance of Twitter actually being useful for something besides massaging people's egos: Back on Madison Avenue, Austin Horse quickly realized his bike was gone and immediately took out his cellphone and posted to Twitter (“STOLEN BIKE! My orange gangsta just got stolen 28th...

That makes three of us. All the eneloop AAs I bought cost me $2.50 or less per cell. That's cheap enough in my book. I wouldn't even want the Eneloop Lites unless they cost like a buck each.

That's another thing I neglected to mention. In general power plants will upgrade as time goes on in terms of both efficiency and emissions. ICE cars on the other hand generally get worse once they leave the factory. That goes double these days when many are struggling just to pay for fuel...

And foreclosing doesn't do you much good when the house is worth less than the mortgage on it.

I found a whole site dedicated to using GPUs for general purpose computing: http://gpgpu.org/ Unfortunately, it doesn't look like anyone has developed a driver of some sort which can reroute floating point operations from any application from the CPU to the GPU.

To save you a bit of time, here is a link about the power grid. About halfway down the page: Transmission and distribution losses in the USA were estimated at 7.2% in 1995. In general, losses are estimated from the discrepancy between energy produced (as reported by power plants) and energy...

I'm wondering about that myself. I though PATA was dead for all intents and purposes.

Not only that, but a CUDA supported GPU isn't even available for the AGP 4X/8X slot on my M/B. Looks like I'm out of luck then. :(

I'm using Circuitmaker 6.0 student version. It's not longer supported or updated by the original programmer, so no chance of the code being updated to take advantage of GPUs. Like I said first post, I'm more curious for academic reasons if I can get this and a few other computation intensive...

I've read about some programs greatly increasing calculation speed by using the GPU for floating point calculations. Is there any software or drivers which could make a computer do that with any program? I'm just curious because lately I've been doing a lot of circuit simulation, and I'm...

The appeal is that unlike a lot of the lame shows/movies we see nowadays, you can't predict the outcome ten minutes into the show. It's that element of unpredictably, with the occasionally dark horse nobody thought stood a chance winning it all, which makes sports more appealing then most...

I can't stand NBC's coverage, either. Too many commercials, too many inane human interest stories, and the worst part is mixing up events as if the viewers are all on Ritalin. I'd like to be able to watch, say, bobsledding, at such and such time ( preferably live ), without seeing 10 minutes...

In 2008 when that was written LEDs weren't cost effective relative to the alternatives. Now the answer is it depends. LED street lighting is starting to get there, with smaller lighting needs actually being cost competitive in terms of total cost of ownership. The claim of "greater...

I appreciate the sentiment, and agree that I'd rather see people like those here reproduce, as it might improve the human race instead of heading the other way as we seem to be doing. That being said, for me personally the point is moot regardless of whether I desire children or not. Point of...

Everything I've read on the subject tells me CA desperately needs both the HSR and much more public transit. It isn't to improve traffic. Rather, it's to keep everything from grinding to a halt ten or twenty years from now. I forgot by what percentage CA is expected to grow in that time...

First off, Doug is right about the Prius. The electric motor and battery are just a black box designed to increase mpg by recapturing some kinetic energy when the car is stopped. Second, I agree that hybrids aren't really a great idea. They give slightly better fuel economy in exchange for...

Our system is pretty similar except the local property taxes are assessed based on property value, rather than income, and pay for the bulk of education ( along with other things such as garbage collection, public transit, roads, etc. ). That's mainly the reason they're so high. While state...

It's like anything else in life-if the good outweighs the bad, then it's worth it overall. I'd say the biggest issues with living here are the high housing costs ( only an issue if you're in the market, my mom's house is long paid for ), and the air quality. Oh, and the poor drivers. They...

My mom's paying over $2000 a year for her 2006 300C. She gets the good driver discount and hardly uses it. If she drove more than about 10K miles a year she would pay more. My brother is paying about $1000 a year just for basic liability on his 1993 Mark VIII. If I got my license, as a new...

Very interesting read, especially the comments. The big problem with living in a place where you depend upon a car to get around is price volatility. If gas suddenly spikes from $1.50 to $6 per gallon you really have no choice but to pay it. When you depend upon walking, biking, or public...

Thanks Tea and Doug! I glad to be the light of everyone's lives around here. :idea: Or at least not one of the dimmer bulbs on the string. :bglaugh: Oh, and Tea, plenty of decent LED internal lights for cars these days. Just try and find something using power LEDs as those are much more...

The S2 bins are coming any day now, any day..... :wink: Seriously, it didn't take Cree as long as you think to go from R2 to R5. They could have rolled out better bins in their XR-E series long before the XP-G came out, but they decided to end that product line. It took a while to design and...

R2 bin is 114 to 122 lumens at 350 mA. Typical Vf at 350 mA is ~3.0 volts, so that comes to 108 to 116 lumens per watt. In other words, Cree's new lab sample is nearly twice as efficient, so expect your lights to get twice as birght ( or have twice the run time at the same brightness )...

I'm not saying the article I linked to isn't biased. It's pretty obvious that the author has mixed feelings about the subject. He really can't decide if ambition is overall good or bad in today's society, although he acknowledges that it was in the past beneficial as a survival trait. I just...

I was thinking entirely in terms of publicly-owned companies with shareholders here, which is what just about all firms who can afford these types of luxuries are. Completely different animal. A boss in a private company can do whatever he/she wants because in essence they're using their own...

Related: Ambition: Why Some People Are Most Likely To Succeed

See here, pages 10 - 12. The limit is a simple function of the spectrum needed to give a certain CRI and the eye's sensitivity to the wavelengths in that spectrum. The maximum possible efficiency for any light source is 683 lumens per watt, and that's for monochromatic 555 nm green. Once you...

The researchers said that, in practical terms, the same business meeting could reach different decisions when held at a fancy resort as opposed to in a modest conference room. I happen to agree with this part of the article, but more from a practical standpoint. It likely creates resentment...

Apparently the recession is causing drivers to slow down Interesting that they only gave average speeds. The median and 95th percentile speeds are what I would find much more interesting. It only takes a relatively small percentage of people doing 45 mph to really bring down the average, but...

That's definitely good news. It seems like SSD prices haven't moved down in quite a while. I'd like to take the plunge on SSDs myself, but for now they're too pricey for my tastes. I'm hoping they get to ~$100 for 250 GB in the not too distant future. Last I checked on Newegg, they were...

Well, given that you hate where you live, and could be laid off in the not too distant future, the choice seems pretty clear to me. Granted, relocation is hard even in the best case, but I'd imagine not liking your present location at least gives a positive spin to the idea. When I was out of...

Possibly the most brain-dead idea I've ever seen Yes, I know it says it's for indoor training, but I'm sure you'll get some jackass using it on the road so he/she can catch up on reading while riding to classes.

Yes, I have a BSE from Princeton University, Class of 1985 Unfortunately, out of college I was unable to get that all important "first job" in my field which gets your foot in the door, and eventually leads to the types of promotions you're referring to. I sent out a ton of resumes, didn't...

No medical insurance here. I don't even have money to have the condition medically verified by a doctor, never mind having surgery. In fact, I haven't been to a doctor since 1980. Putting aside that my faith in the medical establishment is close to zero based on my parent's experience, I just...

Carpal tunnel syndrome? That's what I have anyway. It's worse in the right hand, and unfortunately it's bad enough in both hands that I'm occupationally limited to averaging ~10-15 hours per week of work.

In other words, it's a hobby for you. I'm the same way with rechargeables. I probably have way more than I'll ever use, and way more chargers than I need just for the battery-powered devices I have. However, I enjoy playing around with rechargeable cells for its own sake. It all started when...

If he listens to the limits you set, then there's no need for corporal punishment, or at least that's the point I think the article is trying to make. Lucky you. When I used to work with my neighbor's kiddie entertainment business, I found the under 5 year olds the worst to deal with. They...

Young children who are smacked 'go on to be more successful' Teenagers in the survey who had been smacked only between the ages of two and six performed best on all the positive measures. Those who had been smacked between seven and 11 fared worse on negative behaviour but were more likely to...

You shouldn't blindly follow the lead of anyone, of course, no matter what credentials they have. But that's not my main point. The main point is that unless a person is educated to think critically, then they're really not able to accurately assess who might be right, and who is obviously...

What to buy for the person who has everything They're even throwing in free shipping. ;)

The author is being optimistic that if we actually change how we educate people, we might not continue to have the masses believing every pundit out there. There was actually a time when schools taught kids to think critically. I even vaguely remember one of my teachers talking about how...

It seems I'm not the only one to have complained about the growing phenomenom of uneducated "experts". Some of my favorite lines from the article: "Over the last ten years, we’ve been inundated by a constantly growing stream of punditry and in a quest to give every view its time in the sun and...

Interesting info, although 4000 yen ( ~$40 US ) still might not be some people's idea of "low-priced" (although I think it's pretty reasonable for a screw-base LED lamp ). Also, nice to see that some LED screw-base lamps are exceeding CFL efficiency. Here's another lamp from Toshiba...

I actually loved playing around with that utility. Some drives were better at squeezing in more space than others. I remember I could squeeze in roughly 2 MB in some cases as the utility allowed you to use mixed sector sizes, and as many tracks as the drive could support ( some drives could do...

Yep, I agree 100%. Udaman was banned mostly because he pissed off a few of the long-time members by challenging their long-held ( but not necessarily correct ) ideas. They called it trolling, just as they did when I received my 3-day ban. I've since learned not to get into a fight over there...

Banning over there seems pretty arbitrary if you ask me. There are a few posters there who have crossed the lines multiple times, and yet they've never been banned. It seems once you're a benefactor you gain some sort of immunity from banning. Besides udaman, one of my friends was permanently...

I tend to think long term we'll be putting SSD modules into slots on the motherboard same as we're already doing with RAM. A serial interface, even one of 6 Gb/sec, is going to limit you compared to a massively parallel on-board interface accessing 64 or 128 bits at a time.