I wish I knew. I think it's very inefficient, using more city water than the amount of ground water it displaces, but I'm not sure. It's also not very fast. Really, though, the only times it's gone off (that I know of, anyway) have been a few times when I've purposely set it off for a bit while fiddling around with the floaty switch for the main pump.

The whole reason I went for such an exotic backup is that I got stung twice in rapid succession by a combination of 1) *old* gummed up main pump seizing up + 2) marine backup battery exhausting itself + 3) *bad* newly-installed floaty switch. The circumstances were even weirder in that the first flooding incident wasn't even ground water coming up - it was water-heater water going down into my basement after the heater's thermostat, being old and encrusted, reported falsely low, causing the heater to overheat, causing the pressure release valve to give way; unfortunately, its associated outlet pipe wasn't man enough for the deluge, so the water found another way to make gravity happy and went around and out into the basement. The bad floaty switch and dead backup battery came a few weeks later, and I was so paranoid about batteries after that, I felt better plunking down the several hundred dollars for the non-battery option.

In my case, 'sewer' = 'hose heading downhill to pond in backyard,' so there's not much risk there. In general, yes, there are situations where this kind of backup pump is recommended, and situations where it isn't. My main point was that there are options qualitatively different from 'yet another different kind of battery-reliant system with basically the same shortcomings as the rest of 'em.'

Been there, done sorta that with the sump pump backup battery. You may want to consider something even more different. I have a city-water siphon pump backup. No battery needed. As long as my water supply is working, I have sump pump backup. Sure, it's not terrifically efficient, and wastes city water if it gets used - but that's cheap compared to the cleanup effort and property loss potential if my basement flooded again.

Bingo! On reading the phrase "synthetic stone DVD" I immediately pictured a Flintstone-esque bird with a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very sharp beak, carefully etching tiny pits into a disc on a Flintstone-esque lathe or machine assembly.

Har! Actually, when I first read the headline, I pictured in my mind a *human* tooth growing in the mouse's mouth, rather than a normal mouse tooth, and imagined one mouse-lip snarled up over this huge, outsized growth. Unfortunately, today I'm not clever enough to come up with the perfect Far Side-like caption for that picture.

I'm currently reading the excruciatingly detailed "Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design" edited by Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross,...

Dembski continually misrepresents what the general scientific consensus is on the details of evolutionary theory, emphasizes trivialities and irrelevant ideas in order to attempt to discredit parts of the current theory, and never deals with the idea that his philosophical arguments have come nowhere close to beating David Hume's rationale establishing the needlessness of a creator. It's no surprise that he takes advantage of a ready-made little army of propagandists to help him in his intellectually dishonest quest.

That's nowhere near 2000 words, so you'll have to copy and paste it 15 times or so in order to qualify for full credit,... but since I'm not teaching a class and you're not my students, you'll have to do it just for kicks.

... but my favorite mouse ever was just a branded plain-ol' two button, roller-ball mouse. Branded with the underrated 90's Nickelodeon cartoon character Cat-Dog. A Cat-Dog Mouse.

Yah, like the businesses that blast classical music to keep teenagers from loitering around their parking lots at night,...

I'm thinking Celine Dion. Drive me batshit, at least. Couldn't be too pleasant for the bats, either.

Right enough in principle, but my first thought in response is, "yeah, like deer have evolved the behavior of not running out in front of cars." Compared to the actual number of bats, the evolutionary pressure exerted on tiny localized populations of them by not-very-numerous wind turbines is probably negligible.

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/15989.shtml ...sez a 2000 Chevy Impala (6-cyl, 4sp automatic) gets around 21 mpg. If you're making a bald assertion that you can get 50 mpg+ out of that car, seriously, dude, you gotta provide some data, or expect people to just flatly disbelieve you.

If the measure of success the game company values most is sales, and therefore the game designs that are emulated most closely in subsequent generations are the ones that sold the best, then these kinds of features (that 'reel in more suckers' by playing on psychological predilections) will evolve whether or not the game designers are conscious that they're using OCD triggers. Just, as the phrase goes, sayin'.

I took it to mean 'feel' - and I agree. Many keyboard have lousy, ugly feel, not conducive to fast, steady typing. Mushy, indistinct, distracting.

Coincidentally, I just found an IBM Model F clicky keyboard last week (for all of two dollars and fifty cents), and had hoped to be able to use it, but it turns out that it's almost certainly not an AT-type (so a simple adaptor won't help), maybe not even an XT-type (so even an only slightly expensive adaptor/converter will help), and the connector isn't even really a DIN5, but some weirdo variant on that with the pins spaced out further. There's basically no hope of being able to use it on a current machine, and it was probably custom built for some kind of dedicated terminal back in 1980-bloody-5. Which is a shame, 'cos the typing feel of it is just spiffy.

Pics here: http://tinyurl.com/c2kban

>How does that usually work out for you?

Usually, not *interestingly* enough to keep me going. I get bored by the lack of self-reflection and examination, of analytical-ness, that usually results, and I get distracted by something more immediately compelling. I don't really care to force, or even suggest, that any given person change or lose their own faith - it just doesn't much matter to me - but I *am* occasionally interested in at least making sure they understand the elucidated process by which I've come to my total lack of faith, which understanding is almost totally lacking in true believers.

The understanding of that process is a nice complement to scientific-method thinking and the philosophy inherent in *politics* of having to determine what course of action to apply in general across populations. Which, at the risk of flogging a dead and decaying horse, is the dividing line between personal faith (anyone whose individual one I don't have standing to care about) vs. civil authority's imposition of a prescribed faith or direct extensions thereof onto the populace at large (which I damn well DO care about).

Pretty similar experience here. I've come up with some interesting responses when I follow up with the line of thought of, "Okay, suppose your religious doctrine was different in only one way: No promise of an eternal afterlife in heaven. All the other things were exactly the same - everything Jesus said was good was still good, all the stuff about treating other people as you wish to be treated, loving your neighbor, every rule that prohibited something he said was bad, was still a rule. All the stories that illustrate various kinds of behavior were still the same. Etc., etc., etc. Just, no heavenly reward in the end. Would you still believe it?"

Depending on the answer there, you may be able to follow up with, why is a set of [stuff] LESS believable when it lacks [the one biggest, most preposterous, most unprovable single item among that stuff]?

No time to RTFA, but were any of the kids polled members of high school bands, or musicians on their own? As a drummer for 25+ years, I know the first thing I noticed about poorly encoded MP3s was how crappy the cymbals sounded. And I knew that primarily on account of knowing exactly how a real, live cymbal really sounds, in person, with the naked ear. Having been in a high school band, I know that the experience changed my own understanding of how all the instruments should really sound, as contrasted starkly against how they sound on many recordings, even pre-MP3 era.