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Comment Re:For 3rd party batteries, I've had good luck wit (Score 1) 131

I just checked, and the laptop battery I bought last December for our Toshiba is an Anker, with a higher mAh rating than the OEM battery. It's still working great with a decently long battery life, so consider that yet another recommendation. I didn't know anything about the brand at the time - I bought it because it offered longer life than OEM, and it was highly rated on Amazon.

As for cell phones, I bought a couple EC Technologies batteries for our Samsung cell phones one year ago that are still going strong. I get two full days of life from a charge with moderate usage on my Exhibit 4G.

Comment Re:Mandatory panic! (Score 1) 421

wouldnt you escalate things if you were being accused of something ridiculous?

I'm imagining a scene where a typical 16-year old boy, having written an obviously nonsensical, nonthreatening comment, is corralled in the principal's office. There are a couple of stern, serious police officers staring him straight in the face, asking in all seriousness about shooting his neighbor's dinosaur. How could he possibly react EXCEPT for an irate "are you f-ing kidding me?!?" I'm not sure that I, with 20 years of life experience on this kid, could react very differently.

Do it - imaging yourself, sitting in a chair surrounded by a bunch of stern authority figures, some in uniform, asking you: "why did you want to shoot your neighbor's dinosaur?"

Sure, maybe he was unruly towards the officers, which is never a good strategy, but some people are provoked to anger by (accurately) perceived lunacy on the part of people who should know better, which would include teachers, principals, and officers of the law.

Of course, I wasn't there - perhaps he actually did something criminal, but I haven't seen it mentioned yet.

Comment Re:$230 (Score 1) 611

Regular expressions make everything slightly better :
javascript:window.location=String(window.location).replace(/\/watch\?(.*)v=(.*)/,"/v/$2&$1");
Now works even if v is not the first argument, and add a pointless & at the end of the url if it is.

FWIW, I originally had a regular expression to try to extract the video id parameter (something like v=([\w\d-]{11})), but it didn't properly preserve other parameters. Yours is better! I was going to say you needed to change the first & to a ?, but apparently youtube doesn't care. Also the last ampersand doesn't matter, but in case someone is as needlessly pedantic as I am, here's the version that makes them all pretty, which passed all my test cases:

javascript:window.location=String(window.location).replace(/\/watch\?(.*)v=(.*)/,"/v/$2&$1").replace(/&$/,"").replace(/&/,"?");

The way these can all fail is if youtube introduces a different URL parameter that ends in the letter "v".

Comment Re:$230 (Score 4, Informative) 611

Totally with you. FWIW, YouTube offered to let me "monetize" my videos - I assume by showing annoying ads - but I've declined because I hate YouTube ads so much, and also because it'd probably net me a whopping $0.05/year.

Anyway, I created a toolbar bookmark in all my browsers with the following in the URL field:
javascript:window.location=String(window.location).replace("watch?v=","v/");
If you click it while watching a video on YouTube, it causes the video to fill your browser window (for better resizing control, also to get [nearly] full-screen Flash in Linux), but also has the unintended but welcome side effect that it skips the preroll adds. Obviously this won't work if the "v" parameter in the URL doesn't come first, but that's rare enough that doing it by hand isn't a nuisance.

Comment Re:10+ Easily (Score 3, Funny) 260

1 "Smart" TV (not too smart IMHO)

I've got a "smart" tv too, but it's not smart enough to count to 10 without skipping numbers. Volume control is hdmi-cec to a reciever, start from zero going up 1 increment at a time it's like 1,2,4,5,6,8,10 but the receiver can keep track of #'s...Goes like that all the way up.. by the time the receiver is at 30ish, the tv thinks it's at 50 something...

Looks like your TV uses Imperial volume, like your receiver, but is displaying metric units.

Comment Re:Duration??? (Score 1) 162

For a three month mission, this rover is performing fantastically beyond expectations.

Save it, nobody's buying it. Spirit and Opportunity set a higher bar than that.

Hey, Spirit and Opportunity went beyond expectations... way better than Hope and Change, that failed almost instantly.

Well, the leading alternative was Smith and Wesson, but voters weren't quite ready to pull that trigger.

Comment Re:Is there an counter to this? (Score 1) 251

I didn't see anyone else post this info, but in the doc displayed in TFA, right there on page 11 of the S4 Quality Program manual under the section titled "Transition to Offer is not Applicable in the Following Scenarios" is the bullet point:
-Customer volunteers a "Do not sell to me" statement

So there're your magic words. Just finish your initial statement with "...and don't sell to me."

Space

Historians Rediscover Einstein's Forgotten Model of the Universe 35

KentuckyFC writes In 1931, after a 3- month visit to the U.S., Einstein penned a little known paper that attempted to show how his theory of general relativity could account for some of the latest scientific evidence. In particular, Einstein had met Edwin Hubble during his trip and so was aware of the latter's data indicating that the universe must be expanding. The resulting model is of a universe that expands and then contracts with a singularity at each end. In other words, Einstein was studying a universe that starts with a big bang and ends in a big crunch. What's extraordinary about the paper is that Einstein misspells Hubble's name throughout and makes a number of numerical errors in his calculations. That's probably because he wrote the paper in only 4 days, say the historians who have translated it into English for the time. This model was ultimately superseded by the Einstein-de Sitter model published the following year which improves on this in various ways and has since become the workhorse of modern cosmology.

Comment Re:This is going to end so well for them! (Score 2) 147

I could see it working out for some people - I get around 5 Mbps at home over 4G, and if my typical home data usage per month were low enough that the corresponding mobile data plan cost less than wired home internet, it could very well be cheaper. I imagine this would be true for many people who use the web lightly, and don't stream much video.

Comcast cable internet here is >$60/mo, and equivalent DSL is near that (although slower plans are much less), and T-Mobile's data plans range from $10 for 2GB (what I have) to $60 for 13GB of LTE data (after your data cap the speed is throttled, but you still get data). It wouldn't work for me, but for someone who used the internet mostly for surfing, facebook, etc., but not much video; it could pay off.

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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