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While on the subject of buying drives from Newegg, is there any good reason for me not to consider the Seagate Barracuda ST315005N4A1AS-RK 1.5TB? It's been ages since I've purchased a hard drive. 1.5TB seems like the sweet spot right now in terms of price per GB ( and also in line with how...

The only possible modes of failure are loss of vacuum in the tube, or loss of magnetic field. Both are exceedingly unlikely. In fact, given the volume of the tube, it would take literally hours or longer to lose the vacuum even from a large leak, so plenty of time to get to the next station...

It's under much higher pressures than LPG, and also needs to be kept at close to absolute zero. Like I said, using it in vehicles just makes no sense at all. Current electric vehicles have sufficient range for 99% of trips. If there's ever enough demand for it, you'll see fast recharge...

All I can think to say for now is WOW! Seriously, I knew this concept was the future, but I honestly didn't expect to see a system built for at least another 50 years. If China can pull off a successful demo, then this idea can pretty much obsolete air travel. I'm obviously going to be...

Here on earth hydrogen isn't a naturally-occurring fuel. It's a very volatile element which instantly combines with other elements. It's simply an energy storage medium which uses about 3 times the energy to produce it as is returned when using it in a fuel cell ( and I'm not counting the...

Join the club. I've found every time I've done anything at home it takes twice as long as I anticipated. Usually it's because something ends up being short or long by an inch or less. Three years ago I put a new ceiling in the finished basement and also added a bunch of outlets plus several...

Don't overlook the possibility that the metal enclosure could be acting as a speaker. I actually had that problem while trying to quiet down a PC. Everything was isolated, but the sound waves propagating through the air caused the case to vibrate. A thin sheet of polyurethane foam glued to...

Yeah, that's not overly uncommon here in NYC, either, especially on rainy days. Totally disgusting, even when temps are in the 50s or 60s F. 100% RH and 80+F, ugh. Might as well be in a sauna.

I'm dying right now in NYC. About three weeks so far of unrelenting heat and humidity. It's really the humidity which makes these kinds of temperatures unbearable, and it doesn't get much better at night. I just came back from an 80 minute ride soaking wet. :x

Regarding R134A retrofits, it's interesting to note that even R134A is scheduled to be phased out in the EU, and the US will likely follow suit. IMO then if you keep your car long enough, you'll be running into the same problems with an R134A retrofit as you're already running into with R12...

You'll hate NYC summers then, Lunar. The RH rarely seems to get under 50%, with 70% and over being normal. That makes things sticky and uncomfortable even if temperatures are only 20°C, which they rarely are in the summers. We hit 102°F ( 39°C ) last Tuesday. I think RH was around 40%...

I feel sorry for whoever is moving into the building your company vacated. Sorting out that mess of cables sure sounds like fun!

I used to go through brake pads like crazy until I started riding more defensively. Now I can pretty much anticipate the situation. I can often roll up to red lights just as they flip to green, for example, without hitting the brake. Or plan a path around obstacles a block or two in advance...

The only time I've ever been able to slide the front tire is on glare ice. I guess it would slide on very deep sand also, but I've never encountered much more than a sprinkling of sand. The main danger with the front brake might be if you hit it hard enough to cause the rear wheel to lift...

I did get stronger compared to 2 months ago, but generally after riding a lot for about two months I reach a plateau. After that, any further increases in strength are relatively small, and over a longer period of time. I was at roughly the same point 3 years ago, riding about 300 miles a...

Eww! Nasty! :puke-r: :errr: :puke-l:

The tires started out about 2 mph slower than air tires. Within I'd say the first 100 miles this quickly improved to the point where they were only about 1-1.5 mph slower. Ever since it's getting slightly better, to the point where now I'd say the difference is practically unmeasureable ( 1/2...

I wrote all about airless tires on CPF. Here's the thread. If you want to skip to the part where I actually did an evaluation, here is the post. It may or may not make sense for you to get them. It ultimately depends upon how much you'll be riding, and also how many flats you get. For me...

12 miles is actually pretty decent considering the weather and the fact that you just started riding. When it's like this, if I do 20 miles it's a lot. A lot of my rides this past week have been in the 15 mile range although I do try to ride almost every day ( I've done over 700 miles since...

Sorry to hear that. :( Honestly, the more I read about the state of things the more scared I get. Too many well-qualified, educated people I've known have hit the unemployment lines. Well, I hope you find something else reasonably soon.

The majority of my "rounding" was indeed done at home, much to the chagrin of my teachers. It seemed to annoy them no end that I really didn't have much interest in the "extracurricular" activities at school. To them, this meant I wasn't well rounded. Colleges basically had the same attitude...

If you use heat pipes for the mast, then your sail/mast idea would work very well. Heat pipes conduct heat hundreds of times better than copper. They would get the heat from the LED source to the sail with minimal temperature rise. Once up in the attic, the sail could be arbitrarily large to...

For longest life you should aim for a junction temperature of 60°C or less. How hot the heat sink should be to maintain that depends upon which LEDs you use, and what current you run them at. For example, the XM LED has a junction-to-case thermal resistance of 2°C/W. If you run them at 2...

What I might do in that case is mount the LED on a piece of aluminium plate, mount the aluminium plate flush with the ceiling, and then paint it to match. The paint probably wouldn't act as much of an insulator. The problem would be getting paint to stick well to the aluminium. Another...

You could run wiring to 120VAC code and just use it for low voltage by connecting to a transformer or power supply. Romex will work just fine for that actually. Not hard at all. I have a driver that can do it with about 8 parts ( and a few more if you want a dimming control ). Actually, what...

Cree will be releasing the XM LED this fall. Assuming that it's priced similar to their other emitters, it should drastically reduce the number of emitters ( and cost ) needed for a given output. Driven at 2 amps, about a dozen of these could light an average-sized room well. It also bears...

Interesting. The way I think SSD is eventually heading is towards dedicated M/B slots similar to RAM. In fact, I mentioned as much on storagereview.com years ago ( too lazy to look for the post ). This development seems to support that. And I'm having trouble even wrapping my head around 600...

Well, you're probably right that she was too young to do this, although I'm honestly of two minds here. On the one hand, yes, parents should protect their children against adult things which they are incapable of dealing with. On the other hand, children must be allowed to make mistakes, and...

Here's how I look at it. There is a very small subset of the population willing and able to engage in the sort of things which like this which might require an extensive rescue effort. In the grand scheme of things, on a per person basis, sending needed help isn't bankrupting anyone. Besides...

If I were in the same situation as Merc was, it would have taken all my self-control to not to use that kid for a little bonus lesson. "Hey class, we're going to have an impromptu physics demonstration on the concepts of acceleration and momentum. First we accelerate Mr. Wiseguy up to a good...

The bottom line in the USA is no insurance, no medical care. Those who are poor are covered by Medicaid, those who are old are covered by Medicare. Some are covered through their jobs. The rest buy insurance on their own if they can ( last I heard that cost anywhere from $800 to $2000 per...

How long you can sustain a given g-force depends upon orientation. You can sustain 14g for a while with full immersion. The chart plots g-force versus g minutes. It looks like it's possible to accelerate at 14 g while immersed just long enough to reach orbital velocity ( 17,500 mph ). That...

We need oil for now BUT the part which annoys me is our needs may have been WAY less had we started systematically getting off the stuff after the first oil crisis in the 1970s. Cars got more efficient for a while which was good. And GM made an attempt at an electric car in the early 1990s (...

I agree. The more I read about this the madder I get. Sadly, in the end BP will likely end up paying for a fraction of the damage they caused, the area around the Gulf of Mexico will be messed up for generations, and then we'll all wait until the next screw-up occurs. Only next time it might...

No, like I said, absolutely no money to travel. Going into Manhattan is about all I can manage as far as trips these days. Also, no time for it. I'm not one for flying ( uncomfortable, risky, basically a totally uncivilized way of traveling ), so a trip to the Far East would mean three days...

Yep. That would be what BP calls a "junk shot". :mrgrn:

Nope, never been there at all. I just don't have the money or desire to travel. What you say is certainly true, but I have heard of company heads and politicians offing themselves in the past. Those times are probably mostly past though. Nowadays from what I've read Japan is getting to be...

I'm anti anything which isn't sustainable for the long haul. The very idea that everyone, including the lower income brackets, should own a home is what created both the real estate bubble ( and the subsequent crash ) and a lot of exurban sprawl. If enough people living in suburbs are willing...

In theory you may be right except for the fact this doesn't work in practice due to the strange way many suburbs are zoned. You'll have a residential area, and the nearest commercial area might be 3 miles away, despite the fact that there is nothing but empty land in between the residential and...

It's not only acceptable, but often expected, for a public official who massively screws up to take his/her life for the sake of honor. If BP, for example, were a Japanese company the President would probably have killed himself already. As much as I hate to say it, this concept has a certain...

No, we'll probably need sustained prices over $5 a gallon for that to happen. Also, I should point out the problem isn't one of gas prices, it's one of infrastructure. Much of the infrastructure supporting suburbia was built a few decades ago, at much less in real dollars than it would cost to...

Well, I'm actually seeing something like that. You'll have many ( most ? ) people either in cities or relatively dense suburbs, with those in other areas needing to be pretty much self-sufficient as far as providing their own power, growing their own food, etc. Either way is actually...

It's actually worse than that And more to the point Note the date on the first article-well before any of this happened, and IMO the last half of the article is way too optimistic. The mortgage crisis simply accelerated an underlying trend. The exurbs are dying, while cities are mostly...

This is what happens when you treat people like worker ants: “Foxconn’s production line system is designed so well that no worker will rest even one second during work; they make sure you’re always busy for every second,” says Li Qiang, executive director of the China Labor Watch, a New...

I'm curious as to why monitors haven't increased pixel count so that they display at 300 dpi or better. We're still stuck at ~100 dpi when today's PCs can easily handle displays with much higher resolution. The goal should be to have the pixel size roughly equal to the eye's resolution at the...

Interesting. This explains why I've spent more hours than I care to think helping improve MS Train Simulator, and then basically gave away whatever I learned. Same thing for a bunch of others involved. None of us cared about money. In fact, there really wasn't money involved because nobody...

The reason Americans typically have large refrigerators has to do with yet another inefficiency-sprawled out living. Many people shop for groceries at big box stores perhaps once or twice a month. As a result, they need the space to store a large amount of perishables. Back in the days when...

Unless of course you get the replacement LED for free like I did. :mrgrn: I tested a bunch of LED bulbs for someone on CPF and got to keep them. Most weren't that great ( i.e. they used 5 mm indicator LEDs which are prone to fading ). A few are decent. The one I stuck in the fridge uses...

Probably closer to 3:1 for typical household refrigerators. Also, the room is a closed system, so the net amount of heat added is only whatever the compressor uses. For example, if a 100 watt compressor moves 300 watts of heat, yes, you will have 400 watts total coming out the back ( or...

Yes, probably Samsung and WD will release their own 3 TB drives in a relatively timely fashion after Seagate. What really excites me more than the increase in maximum capacity is the fact that this development should decrease prices of 1 to 2 TB drives. A 1.5 TB drive will now be two-platter...