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It got into the 50s today (~15°C for those who use metric), and I feel hot. I can certainly tolerate low temperatures but above about 70°F I prefer to just stay inside with the A/C on. Maybe I'm one of the few who is hoping the Gulf Stream shuts down so the temperatures in New York fall by 15...

I blame the movie stations like HBO on that for me personally but nevertheless I feel the same way. The problem is that commercial breaks have gotten more frequent and longer. Yes, commercials have also become a lot more irritating, especially those moronic car commercials where they try to...

The only problem with soldering all the leads together is if one fan goes bad it's a pain to disconnect it and replace it. If you have the room in the case you mght try putting phono plugs on all the fans, and then wiring one of those panels with several phono jacks so that you can plug each fan...

I feel exactly the same way. It's been literally decades since the major networks have had anything I consider worth watching. Sure, there may be an occasional good show, but given the penchant of the networks for cancelling the shows I like all the time I can't be bothered wading through the...

I too never understood the blind urge to procreate. When you think about it, it's really senseless. We can all have children, and then you'll have twice the number of people all living like crap, or most can not procreate, and everyone can live much better. I heard thanks to Mexico's...

Exactly. It's really annoyed me that environmentalists have fixated on global warming as the reason to stop burning fossil fuels. Honestly, I consider the pollution problem much more important. When 600,000 people die annually in the US alone from pollution-induced cancers, plus millions more...

There's a 10% or so slope a few miles from me. It's long enough that I have to slow to 10 or 11 mph in order to not be pooped out when I reach the top. Sadly, the downhill direction isn't enough fun to make up for the climb since the road ends at an intersection at the bottom of the hill. You...

Actually, I think anything much over the mid-50s is too hot. Winter is my favorite season by a mile. Summers? Well, I suppose it has to be warm some time so we can grow food but I generally hate summers with a purple passion. Heat, humidity, insects, polluted air, ozone alerts, etc. You can...

If it's any solace there is a growing environmental movement on the right, so the days of environmentally irresponsible Republicans might be numbered. I consider myself a right-wing conservative in most things but I'm also an avid environmentalist and a big supporter of public transportation...

It'll take more than that to get around. Here's my house: And here's one of my street: I measured the accumulations at about 20" so far. BTW, I got plenty of good exercise clearing the sidewalks. :mrgrn:

Sure, TV is one cause of the dumbing down of America but it's far from the only culprit. If you're selective about what you what TV can actually be a benefit. Problem is most people choose the path of least resistance and watch whatever crap is in at the moment. I'm often amazed when I have...

I'm the same way. Even where I live now is less than ideal since I need to take a bus to the subway. At least the bus is only a few blocks away. I would never live someplace where public transportation wasn't within easy walking distance (say 1 mile or less), or wasn't frequent enough to be...

That's about a 43 mph average speed, which is similar to what the electrified lines here offer. OK, so the problem definitely isn't that you don't have decent trains there. I guess that some areas are just too far from train stations to making commuting practical. We have that problem here as...

Since we're doing comparisons here's what I used to do when I commuted from my house to college in Princeton: walk to 164th Street bus stop (0.2 miles): 2 minutes Q65A bus from 164th Street stop to Forest Hills subway station (2.7 miles): 15 minutes E train to Penn Station (10 miles): 25...

You have to love marketing: All that means is you'll have less power per square mm of chip. If you have more area, you can still have more power than today's CPUs. Not that I mind, though. All these high-powered processors mean an assortment of nice, cheap, efficient heat sinks suited for my...

Sure. I'll PM you with my address. The cards might have expired by now, but I can just have the money transferred to a fresh card at a token booth. Crowding is a downside when train travel is popular. That's one reason we need the Second Avenue subway. The trains in Manhattan especially are...

That's the problem in a nutshell. The good news is that more people than ever are starting to ask for alternatives to the automobile. Eventually this will translate into increased subsidies and hopefully more public transit. NYC is hopefully finally going to build the long-talked about Second...

I heard the same thing. One reason ridership has remained higher despite the decrease is gas prices is because roads are saturated in many places. I think what happened was that in some instances people taking mass transit to save money found out that it was no slower than their usual commute...

Here is light rail data and heavy rail data by agency. Since commuter rail data is separate we can assume that heavy rail only includes subway. Bus data is also separate.

I agree that the data is pretty complex since it's straight from the source (American Public Transit Association) in undigested form. It's basically up to a others to present the data in more usable format. Truth is it would be nice to see some US statistics such as total public transit...

Here is a list by mass transit agency for the last quarter of 2004. Look in the column marked "Trips Thru Dec '04" for 2004 totals. Yes, the list is very long and complex, but at least it does separate urban and suburban transit. For example, in NYC there are separate statistics for the MTA...

I found a list of per capita boardings for US cities. Not exactly what you're looking for, but you can figure ridership if you know the population of each city. I also found a nice list of 155 systems from around the world. The site the list is on is very interesting. No ridership...

I think St. Louis also has a fairly decent system, and in Canada Montreal and Toronto both have nice systems. Admittedly, none compare to the MTA where you are literally within walking distance of a bus or subway nearly everywhere, they run 24 hours a day, and during most hours they come every...

OK, but this is a hobby from which you derive a lot of enjoyment. I spend money I'll never get back on my hobbies as well. I can say most people who spend similar sums each year on cars aren't driving enthusiasts. Rather, they do so because they have little choice since real low-cost cars...

OK, you have a business requiring car travel and that may well make the car pay for itself. The vast majority of people don't, and make a choice to live somewhere not subway-accessible. I agree gas doesn't cost enough but I don't base that conclusion on the fact that people spend a ridiculous...

Blame GM et al for that. The US had a much better public transit system before GM bought up trolley lines for the express purpose of replacing them with buses (and eventually nothing). Also, the suburbanization of America at the same time didn't help either. It's a lot easier to build viable...

Your $1500 a year difference is not an insignificant amount to many people. Given that many households are already living on borrowed money, any increase in fuel prices means less spending elsewhere which in turn hurts the economy. I'll also add that from my perspective spending $1500 total a...

LEDs need to have junction temperatures less than 100°C. This means the heat sink they're mounted to needs to be way cooler than that, probably 60°C tops, preferably way less. In short, there's no part of an LED that can get hot enough to start a fire. The LED would be dead long before then...

Compact fluorescents last 6,000 to 10,000 hours. Typical T8 or T12 linear fluorescents last a bit longer-from about 15,000 hours up to about 35,000. Present-day power LEDs with silicon encapsulant maintain 70% of their initial brightness after operating for 50,000 hours. Future ones may well...

The early fluorescents, meaning the linear ones found in most offices and the kitchens of some homes, had poor color rendering plus flicker from the magnetic ballasts. Later fluorescents overcame these difficulties but nevertheless many people did and do continue to associate fluorescent with...

That really brings us to another problem with present society-namely that people are getting lazier (and/or maybe more distracted) so that they do just the minimum needed to get by. I rarely see anyone taking the time to learn a new skill unless they absolutely need it. As a result, we have a...

Thanks for posting that, mubs. I saw it a few days ago and was going to add it to the thread. 113 lumens per watt is well into HID territory. We are way ahead of where we thought we would be now. Remember that less than three years ago 60 lumens per watt existed only in the lab and 20 to 25...

It's actually more common in the suburbs here than the city, but yes we do unfortunately have that. Unlike preschool which might be beneficial academically if something useful was actually taught, as far as I know these are mostly babysitting services where those in charge just give the kids...

On top of that you increasingly have taxpayer-funded day care masquerading as pre-kindergarten. The schools should get entirely out of the babysitting business. If you can't be home with your children until they start school don't have them. If you can't be home when your kids get home from...

Is there anything a Mac does that much better than a PC? Seriously, I don't understand why people even buy Macs or use them nowadays. Basically, you're paying more for a machine which is slower and which requires expensive proprietary everything when something breaks. On top of that, 90% of...

So the problem was noise emanating from the power supply. :wink:

Because most of them are teachers. The education field seems to be the last stronghold of Apples. I'm guessing teachers originally embraced Apples because due to their relative rarity they felt there was a certain elitism using them. As we all know, teachers love anything that makes them...

Here's a few things I found: Page 8 (part in bold should be one sentence): The DOWNLOAD Window will open up and show you what is, and has been downloaded. When it is done. It will say so. You can close this window down now or at any time without affecting your download. Page 17 (spelling)...

Yeah, I know that, and it uses cold-cathode fluorescent tubes to backlight it. BTW, I think the problem might be related to the tubes wearing out and changing characteristics. That can cause noise where none existed before. I wonder how many hours of use the display has had? The tubes should...

RFI from the cold cathode tube driver circuit no doubt. Bypass capacitors in a few key places on both the display and speaker circuit boards might help. Too bad I'm 3000 miles away or I could help with that. You might try moving the power and signal wires for your speakers as far away from...

I heard it reaches that (gearing limited) terminal speed of 104 mph long before the end of the ¼ mile. I don't believe they're using all that powerful of an electric motor so they had to make a compromise with the gearing. They probably adjusted the gearing so that the tractive effort comes...

This one is even better. It literally blows away the Ferrari 360 and Porsche Carrera GT while requiring no special skills from the driver. Just floor it and away you go. Frankly, it makes the two gas cars in the video look like the inefficient, expensive, overly complicated, primitive noise...

I'm with you on that, Merc. If I ever travel far, I'll just take the time to take Amtrak, or go by boat if overseas (you can get no-frills berths on those cargo freighters fairly cheaply). I don't think if I had to invent a way to torture people I could come up with anything better than air...

Yep, that about sums them up. They also have a penchant for using ridiculously small street signs and having exit signs on expressways 50 feet from the exit (with no previous signs warning of the upcoming exit). And let's not forget the entrance ramps before the exit ramps which NJ is famous...

At normal household AC frequencies of 50 or 60 Hz I believe this is correct but as frequency increases the current can't penetrate the body internally as well. This so-called "skin effect" is relevant even to high-frequency transformer design. At a few MHz the current basically flows only on...

Very interesting and complete. The only thing they missed was the fluxing of the boards before the wave-soldering process. BTW, my friend in the taximeter shop has a mini assembly setup. Just loading thru-hole parts on premade boards and flow-soldering, but nonetheless similar in principle...

Yep, that's pretty much how it works-you have a MOSFET switch which turns on and off at upwards of 50 KHz (to keep the switching inaudible and also to use smaller size active elements). The resulting output looks like a square wave equal in amplitude to nearly the original raw DC voltage but...

May I ask how much RAM this machine has? As we all know Win98 has problems with over 512 MB, although with a line in the 386enh section of your system.ini file (i.e. maxfilecache=512000) it can be made to work with up to 1 GB. I heard over 1GB will sometimes work on some systems. Over 1.5GB...

By definition pee-powered batteries also offer ultra-quick recharge. 8) I wonder if these can be scaled up to power something like an electric car? I can imagine the entire family taking turns peeing in the "fuel" tank before a long trip, and drinking lots of fluids along the way to keep...

The brakes can easily hold the plane even under full throttle. As a matter of course airliners use the brakes to hold the plane as they spin up the engines before takeoff. I only flew once in my life and noticed this right away. Once the engines are up to speed (maximum thrust), they release...