The only place truly free of trolls is a corporate internal social media website that is moderated and any despariging remark is subject to displinary action up to and including termination.

Want to get fired? Simply ask about the workplace diversication and why nobody speaks Spanish except housekeeping. Instant termination. Only seen that discussion on the board once. All parties except those warning others that is a taboo subject are gone.

The problem of no trolls is sensitive issues are never addressed. Does your place of employment include all races in engineering? Does your janitorial staff speak only one second languange? Don't ask why. It is troll bait. In a company monitored socail media it is a quick trip out the door.

Please do not start a flame war on the taboo topic. Only discuss on topic troll free discussion boards. Thanks.

Other taboo subjects include Is there a creator of the universe, is there genetic differences in race or gender in intellect, problem solving, politics, age, sexual preference, is all man created equal?

Again do not discuss the taboo topics. Please. They erupt into flamewars.

I still look over parking lots to find cars with rust, peeling paint, etc as when I buy a car, I don't want it to look like a 10 year old junker in 5 years. I don't like the trend but some forigen cars are haveing American car paint jobs with peeling clear coat and badly oxidized paint. My 12 year old Toyota has better paint and is not garrage parked.

The media had a hayday trying to cover an event in deep coverup. What they reported revealed volumes.

They reported the Hydrogen Explosion. This was the first indicator to the public a major event happened. What the media does not know.

1 The fuel pellets are held in rods made of Zirconium. This is because it is transparant to the reaction and does not slow the reaction so it can be controlled by control rods.

2 Zirconium is flamable, even in water. It burns even better in water than in air. It breaks down water to use the Oxygen.

3 There was a LOT of hydrogen produced in a short time to fill the containment building with an explosive Hydrogen air mix. There are other ways to generate Hydrogen, but not in huge quanities.

When the Hydrogen explosion removed the containment, they were quick to point out this was not a Russian style steam explosion, but a Hydrogen explosion. I suspected at that time, they had burned the fuel rod structures in water. I suspected the fuel pellets were quite hot too.

I bought a communications module for it. I bought it to save screenshots. See the problem? The software package can remotely save and recall settings for automated testing, do FFT, etc. I don't need that. Would not like to have to by the Rolls to use a spare tire for my econnobox. Would you pay $400 for an app to save a screenshot from your scope that should have been shipped with the communications module? No thanks. I don't do automated testing. Not needed.

Not realated to the scope, I bought a MP3 player. The software to transfer songs to it is NOT and add on package 4X the price of the player.

Most people with Gmail accounts are not familiar with the "Last Activity" on the lower right. Clicking "Details" will bring up a list of the recent IP addresses that accessed the account. Unless someone logs in and changes your password, you can monitor for unauthorised account access by checking the location and address of recent logins. I monitor my account. Some people would have no clue someone is regularly logging in to capture info. It even shows when two are logged in at the same time. Try it. Log in at work, and lock the screen. Go home and log in again. It will show the two as logged in.

I would have been happy with a basic image capture from RS-232, but to get the funciton, you had to buy the software package at 4X the cost of the hardware module. I did not need all the other fancy functions in the software. It was a nice package but for electronics troubleshooting, I didn't need the functionality for the price. For the price of the software, I could buy some very nice Fluke DVMs instead.

This is unfortunately an old practice that has been going on for decades.

I bought a US made digital scope over a decade ago the TDS220. With it I bought the communications module providing serial RS232, Parallel centronics, and HPGIB interfaces. With it I could connect an HP Laser printer, or Epson Dot Matrix printer and produce hard copies with a limited library of printers. Ths goal was to print to my PC. Then I found out that capibility was bundled in an expensive software package which was extra. Due to my low volume, I could not justify the expense, so to post documentation online, I used an HP 1100 laser printer and a Cannon flatbed scanner.

Tecktronics did not offer a simple driver just to capture the image on a PC.

Needless to say, that was the last Tektronics scope I purchased. Any future purchases would include a built in USB interface, with nessarry software as part of the TCO when shopping. I won't be burned twice by the batteries not included sales games.

As a scope, the scope works fine as long as you don't want a screenshot directly transferred to a PC. For what I paid to obtain the communications module without any communicaitons software was a huge letdown. The printer module was only a little cheaper. Without the software, that is all this module can be used for. Let the buyer beware.

If you want to buy Made in America, the Americans need to knock off selling cripple ware. It is a bad model and is a huge customer turn off.

This works with very high framerate video. Normal video has way too low of a frame rate to capture vibrations in the (phone company defined) band of 300 HZ to 3000 HZ. At normal vidoe rates of about 24-50 FPS, the sample rate is below the lower fundemental frequency of voice.

If you don't want to set up and maintain Asterisk in house, there are many SIP servers with Free SIP accounts. Many include free voice mail. One example includes ippi.com. If the solution is in the US, Google Talk with Gmail works and includes video like Skype, but can be tied to Google Voice so clients can get a free phone number and place free calls to phones (voice only), SMS, and voice to text email for missed calls. If residents can log into their own Gmail account, this may be a solution.

With electrolisis and a fuel cell, only the gas carried contaminates could possibly contaminate the drinking water. For quanity and qualityproduced, I'll take the solar solution. The distances traveled and the amount produced are both quite small. In the solar solution, the volume would be much greater and due to the recombining of gasses, much less likely to transport pathagens.

Charged particles are not magnetic. The electric current caused by the electric current creates a magnetic field. Basic electrical magnetic property. There is a magnetic field because there is an electric current traveling through the atmosphere which does impose an electric charge on suspended insulated objects in addition to the induced electric current in conductors on and in the ground.

The amount of induced current is directly related to the rate of flux change producing an AC current provided one end of the conductor is grounded. At the low currents and large area of very long lines, this AC component is relatively low in relation to the DC current brought in at the poles seperated by our earth's magnetic field. A static magnetic field does not induce a current. A steady DC current does build high currents in long suspended conductors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Even high voltage transmission lines are now protected by adding a resistor to the center tap of a 3 phase transformer to ground to limit induced current. The transformers already MUST have a ground refrence already due to the DC charging of the lines that would happen if there were no ground. This is why transmission lines never use Delta transformer to Delta transformer. One or both ends of a transmission line have a substation with a Y connection with the center tap grounded.

I know of one BPA line that is Delta to Delta, but in addition to this there is a 3 phase Y transformer to nowhere that only porvides the required ground for the line.

Grounding both ends with a low impedance ground is good for lightning strike protection, but bad in a geomagnetic storm. Ungrounded is bad for line charging and lightning protection. UTP network cable is ungrounded at both ends and are subject to high voltage charging in short lengths.
http://www.solarsystemcentral....

The elevated lines between buildings are rarely protected from a build up of a static charge as routers and bridges were not built with this in mind. On the physical layer, both ends of the wire are terminated into an isolation transformer with no discharge path to ground. This is an installation design fault against the guy that designed the installation. Lightning protection is often a gas discharge tube for a lower breakdown voltage. A high current discharge through a protection device can produce a relatively high ESD pulse through the transformer into the tranciever chip resulting in corrupt data to failures. A link between buildings must include a bleed discharge path to prevent the build up of voltage on the wire, or a shielded wire with grounded shield should be used.

Engineers design systems. A good technician can make them work.

Time to apply science to the problem. What is known, what values are involved, and what breaks down.

Long distance transmission lines have two problems when there is a relatively high atmospheric current. They are long conductors feeding transformers that are not designed to shunt large components of DC resulting in core saturation and high current. This is measurable. The first effect noticed was by the railroad when telegraph relays activated and sometimes burned out.

The voltage induced current has two components. 1 Some current was due to the current directly into the long wire. 2 Some current was due to ground potential changing due to high current in the ground.

How to protect? For ground potential issues, simple pairs of wires provide high common mode rejection. This is common with telephone circuits as protection from induced hum and noise from a noisy electrical environment. Overvoltage protection in the form of lightning arresters is the second protection. Most phone loops are relatively short reducing the ground voltage gradient problem to non existant levels. Long distance hops are by Microwave Relay or Fiber Optic, both providing protection from ground gradients and long pick up paths.

Shrink the scale to inside a home by comparison. All internal house wireing is orders of magnatude shorter than transmission lines, CATV, and phone lines. Small DC capible antennas result in very low current if exposed. The home is generally protected by gutters on the eves, mildly conductive building materials such as wood, brick, etc that are not insulated to very low leakage at high voltages such as the insulatin on transmission lines. Net result is the very small currents are shunted by the building itself. Go up on the roof during a geo storm and see if you have any static electricity issues. Probably not.

For homeowners, this is a non issue due to the lack of an effective gathering surface properly insulated to collect enough current to cause any damage. The collector is too small and the leakage path to ground is too high.

I was stuck on Comcast when I upgraded from Dialup. Due to the games with non working services, I jumped ship as soon as Qwest offered DSL. Skype, VOIP via SIP, Google Voice/Talk, etc all working fine. I feel for those without the option. Comcast has been trying to win me back, but I'll take the slower DSL speed for everything working properly anyday.

Many of the earlier SB cards were known for a fixed clock, regardless of what the software was set for. This limited clock rate was the issue of many complaints of those looking for full 20-20K without artifacts. Once this reputation was cast, the line was considered as consumer grade and not better. Same applied to bit depth. The driver would accept many settings beyond the 16 bit DAC. Other cards had higher clocks and bits, and testing for the card performance showed the true limits.

Link below shows some of the real testing on this card beyond just golden ears. Look at the frequency output of noise and note what is NOT reproduced. Then scroll down a look at the extended frequency response of the cards in the test. SB hit a wall way before the competition.

http://www.clarisonus.com/Rese...