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I use those words because in many cases I've been there, done that, and for me personally it just wasn't possible. I tried living in a small town for those three semesters. The boredom and ensuing depression because of the sameness was more than I could handle. I was actually suicidal by the...

Higher resolution with a software solution really makes the most sense here. Part of the reason older people can't read small text on a screen is the pixelization. Lowering the screen resolution to make the test larger won't fix that. Rather, it makes it worse. In fact, with higher resolution...

First off, relocation is out of the question. I know myself well enough to know I couldn't stand living anywhere but a large city. I went to a college in NJ. After 3 semesters I stopped sleeping there and started commuting because I just couldn't take the boredom of being in a small town any...

Oh, I forgot to mention that one of my failed projects caused my friend who I was doing it with to lose about $20K. So besides not making either of us a dime, it cost him a pretty penny, and me about six months of my life. Think how guilty I'm feeling about that even though neither of us was at...

You're both right and wrong. Sure, most homeless have many social problems which I don't. There are a few who don't and just reached an unfortunate stage where they're unable to earn enough to support themselves for whatever reason. That would really be my problem. I have CTS so full-time work...

Not scared. I just wouldn't gain enough from it to make it worth the risk, probably still rather take a boat if it came down to it. Remember that I don't drive so that means I have no way of getting to a lot of airports. Besides, not much you can do in the way of world travel on my income. The...

Very astute, Dave. That's exactly what I was getting at, an ROI calculation. And it doesn't just apply to scientists. You can lump in musicians, actors, authors, etc. Even though I don't listen to music, very rarely read fiction, and rarely go to the cinema, I still feel all these groups need...

I actually rather like the idea. Once we get rid of copyrights the RIAA and MPAA will disappear. Hopefully all the money will go directly to the artists. I don't mind artists profiting directly off their work. What really annoys me are the bunch of parasites (executives, agents, lawyers) who...

Nice, at least on paper. Maybe this time around Samsung will actually deliver something close to schedule.

So long as we have a society of mostly morons, things like that will unfortunately be in demand. I guess that's really the heart of the problem. It doesn't take effort or brains to do something which appeals to the masses since they are both fickle and mostly illogical. It's a matter of...

I wish my 19" could do 2048x1536. The screen door effect of seeing the individual pixels annoys me. I'd probably still notice them even at 2048x1536, but that's as high as most video cards go. Where are the superresolution displays? What I would really like would be about 4000x3000 in a 21"...

I actually notice the extra tire drag while cycling over recently paved asphalt roads. It takes a few weeks for the asphalt to cure enough so that the tire drag becomes "normal". I do notice even less tire drag on the few local roads which are made of concrete. As a cyclist the main downside to...

Except that capitalism rarely works that way. A lot of success in our society has more to do with knowing the right people, or being in the right place at the right time. I know plenty of people who have busted their butts and are still poor. I personally had to take jobs at $5 an hour at times...

Article about the system. The things you mentioned drive up the cost of roads also. It's an across the board problem with public works projects which needs to be fixed. Mass transit has an additional factor going against it-a strong vested interest by many with influence to make sure it...

And that's pretty much how we arrived where we are. GM et al would buy up trolley (nowadays termed light rail) lines, not maintain them, cut service, etc. Eventually they would shut the line down due to the "poor ridership" which occurred on account of their neglect. They would replace it with...

Thank you, Tim. The numbers for the big dig in Boston are even more obscene. $14.6 billion for 7.5 miles of underground roads. Literally a money pit. All that money spent and the travel times you mentioned are worse than a typical express subway train. Regarding modern subway costs, here's...

This isn't a light rail system. And light rail systems often don't make money because it seems politicians purposely put them in places where they're doomed to failure just to say "we tried and it won't work so let's just keep everyone in their cars." BTW, no form of transportation makes money...

The total output of the locomotives was 25,000 HP, (about double normal) and they were running a much shorter trainset (3 cars instead of 8 or 10). Both things were necessary to reach the speed record. In regular service the locomotives develop 12,000 but only about 8,000 HP of that is needed to...

$20 million and up but that's not much more building a road (and maintenence is less). Speaking of roads, I remember the cost for Boston's big dig was obscene. And the DOT spent something like half a billion on a highway interchange in Texas IIRC. around $20 million 512 per set but two sets...

It may be old news to me as it happened in April but I'm still blown away by the videos. I thought it was kind of funny that they had to use a jet for the aerial shots. Remember that this is not a maglev. It's regular steel wheels on steel rails just like any subway. Same track guage in fact...

I wonder if there's one person who does the voices for all the female reporters. It certainly seems like it. And yes, the "reporter voice" is exceedingly annoying.

Yep, that's exactly how I feel. When I'm in a car with someone driving 75 mph on a long trip I feel bored just watching them drive. I couldn't imagine trying to hold that speed for the whole trip if I were the one driving. And it annoys the engineer in me that the law should require that I do...

Now see why I have no desire to drive? I probably wouldn't be as lucky as you, given that this is your first ticket in 7 years. If I had gotten a license, in all likelihood it would probably have been revoked by now, along with a good amount of jail time, and a nice pile of speeding tickets. I...

Funny but I was thinking the same thing.

The NYC subway opted for radar-based speedometers because they're more accurate and reliable than wheel-driven ones, so, yes, they can be very accurate.

Britney Spears is nouveau riche white trash. Always has been, always will be. Six months of her income and I'd be set for life. What a shame. I don't care to go any place so remote that I need a car to get there, so I'm not limiting my options at all. Besides, you can go a lot more places than...

I'm with you there. This is doubly true for me because I live in the largest city in US. Moving anywhere else would seem boring by comparison. Besides, if it doesn't have a subway or four seasons I wouldn't be interested. I just don't want to get into the expensive hassle of car ownership or...

Agreed. Giga-anything means one billion or 1,000,000,000. The operating systems have had it wrong for years, and are the ones who should change how they report disk capacity. It all started when software designers started called 1024 bytes a kilobyte because 1024 was close enough to 1000 that...

I remember getting down to 140 after my first semester in college because the food wasn't palatable. That's a BMI of around 20 for my height, and yes, I did look anorexic. I could see my ribs. For me 160 to 165 is ideal, perhaps 170 now that I have more muscle mass. A guy I knew in high school...

5' 9.5" 195-205 lbs My BMI usually hovers right near the line between being overweight and obese but a lot of the weight is due to muscle mass in my legs from years of cycling. That's why computing BMI on the basis of weight and height is a poor method. In truth I am overweight, no denying it...

Actually the loss figures are closer to 20% to 25%, depending upon the fixture. The best T5 linear fixtures using aluminum mirrors only lose about 5% of the light. Don't forget that unless you have a bare CFL hanging from the ceiling there will be fixture losses there also. Let's just say that...

Actually it's around 5800K. Due to the filtering of the atmosphere it appears as roughly 5500K when directly overhead, or as low as about 2500K just before sunset/sunrise. Average appearance is probably around 5000K. The sun appears yellow simply because the sky is blue. It's all a matter of...

Funny but I also see a collector's market for old light bulbs. Obviously nobody who intends to use it will pay $100 for a light bulb. The only reason people still use incandescents is because the initial purchase price is less than the other options. Once they're no longer made the price will...

Basically, that's my take on Apple stuff as well. Sure, very nice industrial design, cool factor, etc. but the price and proprietary everything are the big show stopper. Yes, it looks better, perhaps is made better, but not worth the extra $ for most people. As Merc said, if you want...

Sorry to bump such an old thread but I recently tried version 0.72 available here. My main reason for trying this was because EMM in cmd hasn't been working for some time (I think it happened after I upgraded my video card). My DOS-based PCB CAD program sometimes needs EMM when working on a...

Let's see, 30 hours of constant output runtime on 3AAAs equals about 0.135 watts (assuming that the AAAs are 1200 mAh and average 1.25V). Even if we assume decent LEDs (80 lm/W) and 100% conversion (i.e. no regulator losses), that's at best 10.8 lumens. In practice I'd say it's closer to 5. No...

I think it's bad simply because linear fluorescent is 50% more efficient than CFLs. Besides that, the tubes last anywhere from 3 to 5 times as long, depending upon brand. And when the tube goes bad you just throw away the tube, not the tube along with the entire ballast as with CFLs. It's not...

Actually, isn't that Lumileds you're thinking of? ;) They're the ones who hyped their K2 for months before it was available. When it finally was, it turned out to be a bust. Cree usually delivers production product within 18 months after it first appears in the lab. Same here. SLC are also more...

Interesting. Despite it's present wide-spread use, flash RAM is by no means necessarily the path to the future. Perhaps MRAM or something like this will be used instead. I don't see anything inherent in this technology which necessarily requires a spinning disk, though. I tend to think for...

You're thinking of one specific, rather narrow example of where CFLs don't work particularly well, and forgetting the majority of times where they work just fine. Motion detector lights are not a big consumer of energy overall. They go on for a few minutes, then may be off for hours. Why sweat...

Samsung Electronics revealed that they have made a prototype 64 Gb NAND flash chip using a 30 nm process. Production is expected to start in 2009. The new process promises to improve cost efficiency as well as increase capacity to 8 GB on a single chip. I remember back when 8 GB represented...

That seems like a lot of damage given that you were only at running speed. About 20 years ago I went down after hitting a pothole at 37 mph but didn't suffer near that many injuries. I think I had some road rash on both my knees and one elbow. I was back on the bike next day. It more or less...

I agree here 100%. The auto industry is more entrenched than any other industry in history, period, even the railways of the early 1900s (and the robber barons who ran those were notoriously resistant to innovation). Along those lines of thought, GE seems to be showing little interest in LEDs...

That's really the main value I see in this. The concept of buying carbon credits seems like a shell game to me, but at least getting people to think about this stuff is an important first step in getting them to take action. In truth, I'd also like to see some estimates of the cancer deaths a...

Considering that flash RAM cell dimensions are shrinking by a factor of two each year (meaning four times the storage on the same chip), that may come sooner than you think. Today 16GB flash drives are at roughly the same price point as 500 GB hard drives. In 2010, or 3 years time, those same...

It works with the Win98 system files also. I guess making the drive bootable required a complete reformat rather than just using the sys command. While I'm at it I might as well put a bunch of diagnostic tools on the drive since there's plenty of space left, even with all my digicam pictures...

Well, I tried the procedure here and it worked with a single FAT32 partition. The HP USB Flash Drive Format Tool used the Windows ME system files. Maybe the Win98 system files just don't work for whatever arcane reason? I don't care either way. So long as I can boot into some sort of DOS it's...

I'm just interested in booting to DOS for now. XP doesn't have an MS-DOS mode like '98, and I have a few programs I still use which don't work correctly under XP's DOS emulation. In the future I may also want to set up a flash drive to emulate the XP install CD, or perhaps as an emergency boot...

I finally bought my first USB thumb drive. I've been wanting one for a while, but the prices for a given capacity point were too high for my tastes. Staples had a nice 4GB drive on sale for $29.99 last week. This seemed reasonable, so I bought it. Anyway, I figured it might be useful to make...

Interesting. I remember mentioning a few years ago while discussing NVRAM either here, or at SR, that future PCs would probably have slots for NVRAM. This would either completely replace separate hard drives, or at least supplement them. Seems this will actually happen. Half a gigabyte per...