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Probably spend hours in the library. Now what did we do before libraries? I'll guess that the alchemists/wizards of old would probably have been nerds had they been born 500 years later. At least on the bright side being a geek ( or nerd) these days doesn't have the same social stigma as being...

Actually, the drives were already in cable select. I've been using cable select exclusively for a few years now. Anyway, the guy just emailed me that a new cable he received from a friend's spare parts bin solved the problem. Turns out it was his 7-year old ratty cable all along. And here I...

Romney dropped out today so it looks like McCain will be the Republican nominee. McCain/Clinton or McCain/Obama this November. My guess is if Obama runs he wins. If Hillary runs McCain wins.

From what I understand they'll pay for all or part of it if they determine that you can't afford it. That's they really scary part-they'll look at your income and assets, and decide, not you. For someone like me with <$10,000 income but a decent amount of assets, they would likely tell me to pay...

I just read this about Hitlary. Disgusting. This is just what the already squeezed middle class needs now-another tax to pay for universal health care. The minute the government sends me a letter saying I have to be insured I'm looking for someplace else to live. Mandatory SS and Medicare is bad...

Of course that's the only way I'd support it as well. I've learned that you never, ever give politicians a new source of revenue unless you kill an old source first. Once they have it, they're reluctant to let it go.

Next time it happens I'll see what's going on with the clock rate. I'm reasonably certain the processor isn't throttling down or everything would be much slower. It's entirely possible the video card might be going into some sort of energy saving or safe mode for some arcane reason. The weird...

I did check the BIOS and UDMA is enabled. I'm starting to think more and more this may be just a case of a defective 80-pin cable. I'll ask my friend to try the delete and redetect thing also.

I checked that already. They are in DMA mode, just they stuck in mode 2. I'll tell my friend to disconnect the non-boot drive as Fushigi said to see what happens. AFAIK, both drives are mode 5 capable. The Samsung was bought a few months ago. The WD is older, but since the transfer rate graph...

Yesterday I helped a friend install XP and otherwise get a Dell Dimension 2400 system he inherited from a neighbor into useable condition. Surprisingly since it was a Dell, everything went fine. The only glitch was that the hard disks (Samsung 250 GB, WD 80GB) are stuck in UDMA-2 (33 MB/sec). I...

No, but that's a thought. I rebooted yesterday so it'll probably be a week or so before the problem reoccurs. I'll try that when it does. Same thing in lower resolutions. Besides, when I run MSTS in my native LCD resolution I can cut down the antialiasing while still getting a decent picture...

Thanks for the answers so far. I was really hoping someone had seen something like this once and had a fix. I'm guessing it's a driver problem of some sort but I haven't been able to pin it down. It's definitely not page file related-I have 3GB RAM and have completely disabled the page file...

Eat your heart out ;) I was ripping a DVD while running Train Simulator.

I've had this problem ever since I built my last machine. I'm not sure whether it also existed with my previous video card but it definitely exists with my present one (EVGA Geforce 6200). When the PC is freshly rebooted, I'll get decent frame rates in Train Simulator, often up to the maximum 60...

In a convoluted sort of way, this reminds me of Hollywood's idea of making a new movie by just remaking an old one.

The 4GB PNY Optima I bought a few months back at Staples tests at 20 MB/sec for large file reads, about what Stereodude is getting. I didn't do any tests for small files, but don't forget that with a flash drive, even reading lots of small files shouldn't be much of a hit on performance due to...

No, the income tax was a bad idea from day one which is why it was purposely made illegal under the original US Constitution. I could probably write pages on why the income tax has caused a myriad of problems since it was enacted, but you can just as easily probably dig up the information on...

Here's the thread Tannin is referring to. The links to the article no longer work.

I'd say I'm already well below the average American's meat consumption. I'll get a pair of whopper juniors maybe every 3 weeks on average. That's the extent of my hamburger and fries fix. Outside of that, the only meat I eat is occasional meatballs with pasta and sauce, or meat otherwise used as...

I agree that taxing interest and capital gains is patently stupid if think about it for a while. If you get 3% on your savings account but the prevailing inflation rate is 5%, then you already lost 2% before you pay any taxes. Now if you have to pay perhaps a marginal rate of 33% on your...

Actually, having everyone pay the same is patently as unfair as a lot of the other schemes. Even without getting into the ability to pay, a lot of people will be paying for services they simply will never use. From a strictly fair standpoint, the best system is one where the user pays for...

Electronics Model Railroading (just making structures and detailing trains as I don't have room for a layout) Cycling Computers Trainsimming Railfanning (mostly subways) Lighting (both general and flashlights) Refrigeration (peltier experiments and such) Very occasional coin...

New York is the undisputed pizza capital of the free world. Maybe I'll get a pie at the local pizzeria and ship it to Indiana so Merc can see what he's missing. The Sicilian style is especially good.

Getting back to the main topic, I'm honestly not real passionate about any of these candidates. I like Huckabee's sales tax proposal, but his appeal to the fundamentalist wing means I probably disagree with him on just about everything else. McCain and Guiliani are too obsessed with terrorism to...

Somehow I think the fact that he's shorter than his wife might have something to do with that: I know it's a superficial reason, but Americans tend to vote or not vote for people based on superficial reasons.

Before you go ahead and invest in gold you might want to have a look at this post. The recent run on gold looks quite similar to what happened in 1976-1980. It was followed by a drop, and then 20 years where the price did absolutely nothing. We might be in for a repeat.

World's largest pool. This thing would probably take me four minutes to lap on my bike, and I don't exactly ride slow. It's basically an artificial lake, for lack of a better description.

And I give into my cravings for food more often as I should also. However, there's a huge difference between that and what we're talking about here. If I feel like having a bag of Doritos I can go out and buy it by myself. In fact, I had a bag last night, and some cookies also. Eating one bag...

Well, what else would you suggest? We've told people about condoms, birth control pills, probably a hundred other means of avoiding pregnancy, yet we still have large numbers of unwanted births. None of those other methods really get to the heart of the matter. For that matter, abortion is just...

Personally my views are that one shouldn't get pregnant by accident. In the absence of all else abstinence is a 100% effective even if less than attractive proposition. Getting a vasectomy isn't a bad idea either if you don't see children in your future, but still don't want to practice...

This book has some additional info on the subject.

No, they're sold for somewhat over bullion value or I'd be all over them. I pulled these figures off Google: iron: no idea of the amount of refined metal in existence but ~1 billion tons are produced annually copper: 338 million metric tons (amount produced since 1950) gold: 145,000...

The US bullion coins always have a face value way less than metal value. I suppose it's a way to keep from having to pay more for the coin than the metal in it is worth. I would guess a bunch of economists sat down and said the likelihood of platinum every falling under $100 an ounce was...

~$900 an ounce is what gold has been doing lately. Yes, a safe of sorts wouldn't be a bad idea. Even better is to somehow hide the safe by building it into a wall or crawlway. You can also get into gold buying gold funds, although I don't know how that compares to actually buying the metal...

Believe me Doug, I'm seriously considering buying either gold eagles, or even the genuine $20 gold pieces minted before 1933. I tried to talk my Dad into doing it when gold was $300 an ounce but he wasn't one to spend a lot of money at one time. I wish now I had bought some gold back then...

Same here. The coming bankruptcy of the federal government has been a topic of conversation for me for quite some time. After all, we owe ten trillion dollars. We just added an expensive prescription drug benefit to Medicare. We'll spend over a trillion dollars on the Iraq fiasco before all is...

Only thought that occurred to me during the entire video was how the hell can you feel something should be made illegal, and then not even be able to think of an appropriate punishment for it, as was the case with many of these people? Another disturbing thing was the number of times the word...

Absolutely. I was hooked from the first episode. It isn't the Disney cartoon like saga you might think it is, either. There are no scripts, and the producers just let nature run its course, even if that means some of the main characters go off to that big burrow in the sky.

I think what Merc is trying to say is that the medical sector should be run as a non-profit entity. Sure, the doctors and everyone else will continue to be paid a fair, market rate salary for what they do, same as today. What would be different is you won't have shareholders and rich CEOs to pay...

This really isn't about the stock market. In fact, the focus on the DJIA is really what hurt us. So long as the market was rising, which it was for a long time, people assumed the economy was hunky dory when it wasn't. The stock market can be made to rise or fall by the actions of a few large...

Regarding China, they're doing their own version of selling the family jewels for a night on the town. The price for their recent shift to being the world's workshop is enormous environmental damage and a looming public health crisis. Already cancer rates are on the rise due to the horrible...

The markets in the Far East and Austrailia tanked yesterday (that's early AM today US hours). The US markets open at 9 after being closed yesterday for Martin Luther King day. Look for a black Tuesday. Really black as in black hole black. The markets will lose over 10% before the day is out. I...

The Roman Empire fell, the world went on. We're certainly approaching the end of the easy credit, living beyond your means way of life. People are going to have to do what I've been doing my whole life-paying my credit card bills in full each month. And actually only replacing things when they...

That's exactly why the space program hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. When I was younger, I actually wanted to be an astronaut. Yes, me. The same person who adamantly refuses to step on an airliner today. I would have gone without a moments hestitation to Mars, or the moons of Jupiter...

Anyone here actually watch Meerkat Manor? I'll admit I got hooked. It's basically a soap opera where the main characters are 1 foot tall and furry.

The concept of health insurance is really what ruined the medical industry. We should go back to the user pays model which once existed. Once we do, medical costs will drop dramatically. Right now hospitals can pad their bills and the patient won't care since they're not paying. Try that if...

I almost went ballastic when I read about the "relief" package. Why should people who lived within their means bail out idiots who used every dime of equity in their homes to buy big-screen TVs, vacations, pools, game consoles, and other mostly unnecessary consumer crap that they couldn't...

I don't know how useful this will be, but there's an open source project to hack the firmware on certain Canon cameras called CHDK.

That's exactly the point. I think more people would support these programs if they actually worked as claimed. Case in point was LBJs $4 trillion (last I checked) "War on Poverty". It turns out the major beneficiaries of years of welfare/Medicaid spending were the service providers, especially...

It's probably not a bad idea for government to do some things to level the playing field a bit. For example, everyone should have access to decent education and transportation, whether or not they can afford tuition, or buy a car. So public education and public transit are good things to spend...