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Bozo, The real solution is just to lessen the need to travel. Live closer to work, telecommute, buy locally grown food, etc. And electrics are more than ready for prime time. Much of the charging would be do overnight, when power plants actually have energy to spare. You don't need to...

Chewy, My last post is more an idea of what we could do if we built the right infrastructure, not what is. The present reality is that lots of people have few alternatives to driving, unfortunately. My question is why isn't the government doing everything in their power to change that in the...

Wasn't Congress just talking about eliminating the $2 billion in tax breaks it gives to the oil industry? A special tax break equals a subsidy, which in turn equals lower prices at the pump than would otherwise be. Given all the negatives associated with fossil fuel use, subsidizing it is...

Never mind just teenagers. For distances of about 5 miles or less, if you're not carrying much cargo, a bike isn't a bad way to get around. That's doubly true in large cities. I make as good or better time on most of my bike trips than you would by car. And I have at times gone 20 miles each...

There actually are some technical reasons to back up Merc's disdain for WD: "Western Digital's construction makes drives particularly vulnerable to shocks and pressure. Unlike other manufacturers, WD does not secure the hard drive axle with a separate screw to the drive cover. Because of this...

You discovered that also. I've been lusting after the Rohloff from the day I saw it. Stick that on a velomobile, along with the Schlumpf high-speed crankset with planetary gears, and you have a nice, super-wide range drivetrain with no derailleurs. Doing some math, I figured use the 2.5X...

Yeah, but then I wouldn't know exactly how much further or faster I'm going. :-D Speaking of further and faster, if money were no object, I would be riding one of these.

Yeah, you both noticed that big drop in elevation also. :-D Kind of funny when you think about it. I should show it to the NYCDOT. I think the real reason it occurred might have to do with the sudden change in antenna orientation and possibly the shock from hitting the ground. That might...

Actually, the GPS is pretty sucky as a speedometer which is why I also have a bike computer. The speed readings bounce around by about 1 mph even if you maintain a steady speed. I'm mainly using the GPS to record my rides. I'm interested, for example, in my average speeds over the same roads...

I literally don't even remember the last time I puked, that's how long it's been. And I don't remember the exact date that I last fell off my bike for any reason at all except that it was before 9/11. Yep, going on at least 10 years with no "hit the ground" bike accidents whatsoever. Two...

If cell phones no longer work I'll consider that a positive effect.

Speaking of systems going a long time, didn't Greg know someone who was still using something like an 8086 (and this was only a few years ago IIRC)?

Yep-still in service after all these years, and still fast enough for most of my day-to-day needs. This is the longest run I've ever had on the same system. And I've been using a 200 GB Maxtor as the boot drive from day 1. The drive already had I think 2 years on it when I installed it in...

I've been using the same system since June 2006. Thus far, I've never had anything except a CPU fail in all the machines I've owned. I tend to think my usage patterns are why. The biggest source of stress for electronic components is being turned on and off. Besides creating current surges...

http://cgi.ebay.com/2-PC-Li-Ion-3-0V-200mAh-Button-Cell-LIR2477-New-BuySAFE-/300552377991?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item45fa515687

AARP's stance against retesting elderly drivers is that it's "prejudicial". Instead, they might support periodic retesting of ALL drivers. This wouldn't be a bad idea in my opinion, but practically speaking it would be a nightmare. It's a shame more people aren't honest enough with themselves...

5 years today since my father passed away. Doesn't seem that long ago.

Unfortunately, it's basically going to come down to the same situation as Chernobyl-anyone involved in the cleanup/containment is going to go in knowing they're not going to survive long. IIRC a few thousand workers sacrificed themselves in this way ( 100,000 according to wikipedia )...

Intrinsically Safe Nuclear Reactor Designs On other news, the workers left the site, apparently because of high radiation levels. This is inching closer to a 7 than a 6 at this point.

Those pictures are haunting. Entire settlements wiped clean as if they've never existed. This just drives home the point that Earth does what it wants and we're all just tenants here.

The French are indeed experts on nuclear power, with nuclear plants generating 78% of the electricity produced in France. What the French and Japanese did was standardize on certain components to make nuclear power more cost effective. The US has a history of one-off designs. This is one...

I agree, SD. Watching the news coverage on CNN and elsewhere, it's almost like they're hoping for a meltdown, sprouting things like previous nuclear accidents have always gotten worse before they've gotten better. My educated guess here is we've had partial meltdown. I'd say the rods melted...

If this had been further south and hit Tokyo full force it would have been an unprecendented disaster. I'm amazed how far the tsunamis spread. There was even some flooding in NJ two nights ago (saw it on the news, I guessed it was related to the quake but they didn't say). This all drives...

I finally found a great, free, third party defragger called MyDefrag. Current version is 4.3.1. The program is completely customizable via scripts. It has several default scripts for both data disks and system disks which do a great job. I managed to defragment some volumes where Windows...

I tried but unfortunately my M/B is so old that any SATA drives can't be seen in native DOS mode.

The specs say it uses 5 watts maximum ( see manual, page 48 ). I would imagine it uses a lot less if the unit is turned off but left plugged in. Even at 5 watts, it would take at least a few days to drain a car battery. I'm surprised you can't enter addresses from a PC. My Legend HCx lets me...

Seriously, when you were out of work, you should have considered telling the bank you were having trouble meeting your mortgage payments even if you weren't. You might have had your loan modified to more favorable terms. You know the old saying-if you can't beat the system, you may as well...

:beer: Happy Birthday, Doug! :b-day:

Actually, I really don't go to those types of sites. There's still a remote chance of picking up a virus which could attack my drives even staying on legitimate sites.

If you want to place a monetary value on the "lost" space, it would be about 12.5 cents since I paid $99.99 for the drive. Certainly not worthwhile from a money perspective. In fact, I would imagine just using NTFS compression for my backup folders I would gain many times the lost space...

I'm anal about stuff like that. It's small in terms of percentage, yes. But I also remember the days when 2.5GB equalled a few good-sized hard drives. It also annoys me on another level-namely sloppy bookkeeping on the part of Windows. I might understand reserving some amount of space on a...

Regarding the wire gauge for the power LEDs, probably 18 gauge is fine. The controlling factor is more having the wire physically strong enough to pull through the attic without breaking. I'd say 18 gauge is good enough for that. 22 or even 24 gauge would handle the current just fine, but...

Well, no direct solutions to this but I hit upon an indirect one - use exFAT. Windows doesn't mysteriously mark space as in use when it isn't with exFAT. From what I'm gathering the only downsides are no built-in compression ( I wasn't planning to compress any folders anyhow ), and possibly...

Yes, you would need an independent wire for each LED, but you could mount the control board inside the chandelier. The ten wires would run to the control board. The only thing which needs to run outside the chandelier is the pair of wires supplying power. Everything inside the chandelier is...

Not a problem. You could just run a pair of wires from the low-voltage flicker control board to wherever you have the power supply. Total wires coming from the chandelier for both flicker and illumination would be four-all low-voltage.

You could do that. Perhaps put another set of LEDs next to the high-powered primary ones, and wire those to a small flicker control board which is placed inside the chandelier. You could probably also fit the power supply for this ( small 120 VAC to 5VDC or 12 VDC converter ) inside the...

Umm, yeah. The only issue with hollow tubes as opposed to solid rods is worse heat dissipation. I probably need to experiment a bit here to see how warm the LED would get. A tube with 1/8" walls might be good. We can mount the LED on a circular piece of aluminum ( or even a copper penny ) on...

No, shouldn't be an issue. The LED ballast is sending DC to the LEDs. There aren't an RF or other issues with DC. You can probably put the ballast a mile away from the chandelier without any problems. The only issue is for the wires to be heavy enough to carry the current without heating...

I'm surprised how bright the bottles look even with the sun lighting the room. BTW, I found a nice dimming ballast for this project which will make our lives worlds easier: http://www.newark.com/roal-electroni...ver/dp/69R7347 It works on a standard lamp dimmer. A little pricey but well worth...

I just saw this thread but it seems mubs beat me to it with the probable answer. Yes, what you describe seems to be exactly the case here. If you can open it up you might be able to correct the problem ( assuming you can find where the "neutral" wire is connected to the body). On another...

On a power output per kg of body weight measure humans are pretty pathethic as animals go. A leopard or cheetah running at full speed is likely developing upwards of 10 kW and weighs roughly the same as a human. Even a common housecat can run at up to 30 mph. More on human power output...

This actually applies to both humans and electric motors. An electric motor can typically output several times its continuous output for a very short time, and lesser multiples for longer durations. As for humans, I've more or less figured out my own output levels based on my speeds and the...

Thanks guys for the birthday wishes! Amazing how time flies. It seems it wasn't all that long ago I was 20 and now I'm two short of the big 5-0.

Ouch! $100K for a watch? I'd want it to take me backwards or forwards through time for that price.

That's exactly the problem. None of the technology roadmaps I've seen can get us much past 10 TB drives. And nearly all of them will increase the cost per drive, even though cost per GB will still drop due to increased areal density. Also, we're already experiencing reliability problems from...

The biggest difference between mechanical hard disks and mechanical watches is the fact that watches are fairly low-tech. One person and the right tools can grind gears, make springs, pretty much do the whole operation. The raw materials for this have many other uses, and will always be...

It actually does stop using that last 1/8%. I just found this out when the 150 GB NTFS partition on my boot drive was full. Chkdsk still said I had about 190MB free but Windows refused to write to the disk.

Yes, I know the proper spelling. I was just making a joke since I always see "brakes" mispelled as "breaks" all over the Internet. It's actually one of my pet peeves.

Bicycling under the influence is not explicitly illegal in New York. However, a drunk cyclist can be charged with reckless endangerment or public intoxication, just as a pedestrian can. All that said, I'm not sure I would bike drunk given how it affects both coordination and judgement. The...

Here's some interesting info on the subject TRIM is a brand-new ATA command that the OS will issue to the SSD when a certain request is made, such as Delete, Format or Discard. What it does is rather simple, but it's immensely helpful. When you either delete a file, or format the entire SSD...