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Comment Re:Time to refit your house (Score 1) 450

... Not all that many will have an extra 30 amp circuit, and none have a 75 amp circuit anywhere.

You must not live in the "heat pump belt". My house - a whopping 1200 Ft^2, built 1990 - has a 200A service entry ... with a 90A feed - to the heat pump. Unlike central air-cond, that load is present pretty much year round.

Being an electrical type, in possession of a clamp on ammeter with analog out and a DAQ system, I did some measurements some time back. Long story short: I could handle (install another circuit) for that 75A load and charge that car. But I'd need to choose which to do without: Heat/Cool, hot water or cooking with the conventional oven. Peak usage is ~140A. And let us not delve into inrush currents ...

Another item which has received little or no consideration: Power Factor. Currently, utilities "eat" the wasted power from residential service with a PF of 0.7 - 0.8 lag. Wonder how those chargers work? Hopefully not variable-reactance XFMR (worst from a PF vantage). Or phase controlled (SCR / triac - not much better). Or inverter-chopper (can be PF friendly)? Anyone know?

Comment Re:Open the pod bay doors (Score 0, Flamebait) 401

...

You also to pass a reasonability test... first off PODS storage is *not* actually called or branded as such, they are an acronym for Portable On Demand Storage (a side business of Public Storage iirc)..

Just an FYI, when commencing an argument, check your facts. This: http://www.pods.com/ doesn't just sorta-kinda negate what you claim - it blows it clean away. Also, so does the container that sits in a neighbor's driveway down the street with foot-high letters P O D S that I can see from a couple of hundred feet away. Not to mention - but I will anyway - the various ones seen being transported and delivered all over the place.

Now you know why I (for one) find your argument, um, unpersuasive.

Comment Re:Relativity Says It can be. (Score 1) 1027

No it doesn't. The Earth is rotating and this may be demonstrated by experiment, ergo it cannot be said to be at rest. You can argue that one inertial frame of reference is as good as any other, but the Earth is not an inertial frame.

Ah but it is - in it's own locality within spacetime. That was one of two concepts the the Gravity Probe B experiment was all about:
Overview: http://einstein.stanford.edu/
Frame dragging: http://einstein.stanford.edu/MISSION/mission1.html#two_effects

"E si pur mouve" - true. More so in light of the above experiment - even if Galileo never said it ;)

Comment Re:This is wrong. (Score 2, Informative) 635

...There is nothing wrong with grabbing a map and a compass and going out on a hike, but with the advancement in tools to help us navigate more effectivily, who really wants to take an old school map with them....

Hi, long time hiker and caver here (+40 years at it) and the answer to your question is:

Anyone who wishes to avoid Nature's capital punishment for the crime of being stupid in her domain.

I have a GPS ... and I always take a compass and waterproof USGS topo for the quad(s) I'll be in. Batteries and 'tronics can fail. They can be lost, as can the maps and compass. So be smart and have a backup. And keep the two sets of nav aids separated in your gear.

Comment Re:Happy birthday (Score 1) 225

Regarding the WPA fail, I believe the GP was refering to Ubuntu 6.10 - Edgy Eft. Wireless + WPA was problematic. One had to deal with WPA supplicant and / or GNOME's nm-applet to get wireless up and running. I say "and / or" because I never did figure out which was the magic bullet ;)

I swore off Windows in 2006. I tried many distros, including Debian. Ubuntu was the least troublesome to get working. This coming from a guy who has tinkered - and worked - with Linux since there was a Linux to tinker with. No babe in the woods here, I cut my teeth on the Unix Timesharing System Version 3 (and 4).

Sometimes the point is to build the best-est & baddest box in your part of the woods. Geek cred does have a certain utility (Debian). Other times we just need a functional machine for our work (Ubuntu).

But I will say this: Once (if ever) the economy comes back to the point where I can part with a few grand for my best-est & baddest build-to-tinker-n-tweak box - it will be running Debian.

Comment Re:Not using Cisco ACLs (Score 1) 305

...

Another great tool is "ip verify source vlan dhcp-snooping " which can be used to block traffic from IPs/macs that did not obtain their IP from the DHCP server. This nicely prevents users from statically assigning addresses and/or spoofing their mac address.

The first - locking IP addys - is always true. The second is not when the physical port can be accessed.

Comment Re:bad article is bad (Score 1) 305

... Reminds me of a quote one of my high school teachers was fond of: "Life is hard. But life is really hard if you're stupid."

Good teacher, following the sage words of the great Western philosopher Hondo*:
"Life is tough. It's tougher when you're stupid."

* aka John Wayne ;)

Comment Re:Opinions are a crime now? (Score 1) 637

You stopped your list a bit short. After doing your 1-2-3 they arrive at:

4. He's a potential material witness.

They won't know, indeed cannot know precisely how material his information is until he is questioned, hence the detainment.

All legal and proper (in the US). Been that way here since 1789, do try to keep up.

Comment Re:So far, I'm not impressed (Score 1) 145

... It sure isn't obvious that the force that keeps you from falling through the ground to the center of the Earth is electromagnetic ...

The hell it isn't, and the nature of this force can be readily demonstrated with simple and commonly had objects:
Battery
Wire
Incadescent lamp
Pair of magnets
Compass (the navigational kind)

I'll skip the details one how one uses the above to demonstrate that opposite charges / polarity attract and like repels as most readers of /. are smart enough to figure it out. But those simple demonstrations with a grade school level description of the atom makes it obvious.

And with not a single calculation or equation being used :)

No one is suggesting that after studying materials like this that someone is qualified to do PhD level work. The value in material like this in it's utility in combating the woo-woo purveyors out there.

Comment Re:Why not just use a Linux distribution? (Score 2, Interesting) 177

... do people really still use an OS that stopped being developed a decade ago?

Yep. Even older: The last DOS (MSDOS 4.01, running on a ancient Compaq) install I had to maintain was retired last July. This in a ~ 26bil (US) Fortune 500 company. It operated a testing apparatus. Lack of slow enough hardware (not kidding) to replace that Compaq was why it was retired.

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