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Comment after reading Cringely's rant on fax via VoIP... (Score 1) 221

After reading Cringely's rant on faximile via VoIP (which exposed that he had extremely little knowledge of the underlying technical issues in the subject), I don't bother wasting my time reading anything from him that requires engineering and technical proficiency in a specialized field to intelligently discuss.

Comment Re:Story available... (Score 1) 433

[...]The Republican party has cratered so badly, and is teetering so close to Fascism, everyone looks good by comparison, even the Democrats.[...]

Do you even know what that word means? It doesn't seem like you do due to how you use it. A comment like this getting +5 is why I think /. suffers from a bad case of group-think, and makes me want to build a new site with a moderation system that works against such.

Comment it's not green (Score 2, Insightful) 404

TFA calls it a "green energy project". The type of people who think this is green energy are the complete f-ing morons that side track the rest of us from real viable energy advancements.

Further more, the TFA claims this will "lower the energy consumption of the market". At the inefficiency of this (which is already limited to being no more efficient than a car is itself), it will actually increase the energy consumption of the market.

Comment buy the name in the other TLD(s) (Score 1) 800

I had a similar situation. In my situation I was able to purchase the .net version of the domain name. The squatter with the .com version then contacted me trying to sell it to me. I sent a nasty note back that I would not deal with a fucking squatter. I think I also sent a note to their upstream for UCE.

Soon after that the squatter dropped the name and I picked it up. I'd paid for 'domain name back order' at my registrar, so it cost me a little more than normal, but not much more and the fucking squatter didn't get any of that extra cost.

Comment Re:Power factor compensators (Score 1) 859

Oops... I didn't have enough coffee in me when I read the post I was replying to. My post was replying to the notion that you can correct the power factor of a CFL with an inductor/cap, not that you can make it appear to draw no power to the metering device. (Which is also not true.)

Comment Re:Power factor compensators (Score 2, Informative) 859

It is in fact, you can make a fluro light appear to your meter to use zero power (with the right inductor/cap combo).

No, you can't.

There are two different types of power factor. One is related to the phase of the current being shifted from the phase of the voltage, the other is related to the shape of the wave if you plot the current.

The first type, which is the type that most people are familiar with, can be corrected with inductors or capacitors. This is often done for induction motors.

The second type of bad power factor is often due to rectifiers feeding a capacitor... your basic AC to DC conversion. The current only flows when the voltage on the AC side exceeds the voltage on the DC side. Thus, you get spikes of current centered around the peaks of the AC voltage. The phase is correct, but the current waveform is not sinusoidal. This cannot be simply corrected by inductors or capacitors.

As a side note, this is the bad power factor that many computer power supplies suffer from.

More complex switching supplies can overcome this issue. I've usually seen it referred to as a "power factor corrected" supply. They cost more because there are more parts in it. Thus, you don't see them in cheap CFLs.

IAAEE (I am an Electrical Engineer)

Comment a double screwing, I can't have it anyway (Score 1) 355

It looks like I'm one of the people getting a double screwing from this. I can get the content (because I'm on Verizon, and they have a 'powered by Verizon' badge on the site, so obviously Verizon is paying for this content in some way), but I can't get the content because their player plugin is only for Windoze and Mac. And I don't want the content.
Data Storage

Submission + - Crime caused by publicized data about convicts? (latimes.com) 1

nem75 writes: "What has been highly discussed when the Megan's Law database of sex offenders was introduced seems to have come true in Lakeport, CA. The L.A. times reports about Michael A. Dodele, a convicted rapist, found murdered in a Lakeport trailer park. He moved there after having been released from prison just 35 days before. A 29-year-old construction worker has been arrested who explains that he attacked the suspect to protect his son from child molestation, after he found out on the internet about Dodele being a sex offender convicted of crimes involving minors. Only thing is, the public entry for Dodele in the database was wrong — though he was found guilty of committing crimes against adult women, he was in fact no child molester. Dodele's entry in Megan's Law DB has been removed recently."

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