No! Don't let them collaborate! They are dangerous enough as individuals let alone in packs! The seemingly innocuous green paper disguises are just to put you off guard of their sinister intents.

http://i.walmartimages.com/i/p/00/03/89/00/04/0003890004205_500X500.jpg

4. A small orange that comes in a can.

Ive long suspected that my traitorous canned oranges were plotting against me, skulking about the pantry in their RF shielded little can-bunkers, using their knowledge of citrus-based automotive control technology.

I returned my last Netgear and LinkSys units. It was the cheap Monoprice one that worked right out of the box. I have no bad experiences with *any* of their stuff. In general I find that the name brands are so furiously writing crap front ends and bloated install utilities so that complete morons can use them, they forgot to make the even slightly advanced features (i.e. gateway only mode) work properly. I prefer unbranded goods that dont need a DVD full of garbage to install them ("Uncheck this box if you *dont* want to link your router to your Facebook account, submit traffic reports to Netgear, and receive our twice daily newsletter").

Stock Android Nexus 5 direct from Google. Half the price, great phone, no crapware (OK you can argue some of stock Google is crapware. But its not the *crappy* crapware Samsung and the carriers install).

No. The pressure on your body is equal, since youre mostly made of uncompressable water so you dont get crushed by 100 psi at rec depths. All pressures stay pretty balanced except for the 1000PSI in your tank. Thats why more gasses are required for breathing at deeper levels. 2x at 2 atmospheres, 3x at 3 atmospheres. You still inhale maybe a liter but its a compressed liter that would be 3 liters on the surface. Thats why you NEVER hold your breath during an ascent, you 'splode. And it works the other way too, you have to keep filling your buoyancy vest as you descend to compensate for the compression from depth reducing buoyancy, and releasing as you ascend. There is no "less" pressure area or differential for the filter to make use of.

I suppose you could say breathing supplies a differential, but its surprisingly low PSI and no where near the energy required to push the necessary volume of water through. You could contrive some energy harvesting thingy with thanks and turbines that you constantly hyperventilate into, but youre right back to a massive rebreather, except you have to breathe like crazy to power it enough to get basically the output water volume fo a jet boat..

The dives Ive seen rebreathers used on were the Great Blue Hole and Terneffe Reef in Belize. If you dive, they should both be on your bucket list! And, they are both dives that taunt you with the bottom rows of the recreational dive limits. I spent 7 minutes at 145 feet, where my dive computer gave up beeping warnings at me and just sulked for the remainder of the dive. It was a great opportunity to experience nitrogen narcosis in a fairly well supervised trip. This page here shows the dive profiles; escorted trips dive the south grotto which pushes the 110' limit just getting there. Rebreathers give you a lot more flexibility to explore, with better bottom times.

A problem using Triton here is all the water is anaerobic, there is no oxygen and thus no sea life below the thermocline, and nothing for the Triton or LikeAFish to extract. Conditions like that can happen unexpectedly anywhere on medium depth dives. Thermoclines shift and below them there is little interaction with oxygenated surface water. So Triton et al would presumably just shut down suddenly and without warning or any reserve even during shallow dives. Not good. Carrying a pony bottle would be mandatory.

Thanks for the link on other dissolved gasses. Nitrogen is available then at ~150% by volume of oxygen. Lets make some assumptions: Troton could use the same membrane for both oxygen and nitrogen; that they both extract 50% efficiency. You need 12L to get a breath of O2 but 40L to get the nitrogen. At 15 bpm we're up to 600 lpm to process. at surface pressure. At 60 foot depth thats 3 atmospheres, so 1800 liters per minute! A sump pump at 1/4 HP does about 80 lpm at no head/pressure, so 5 HP if the triton needs no pressure for the membrane, which I guess is does (reverse osmosis needs about 50psi) so we are probably close to 20HP to run it. Thats a gas-burning outboard motor, not a pair of Duracell AA's and a few CC's of motor.

You and I between us have almost assuredly done more real work on the Triton than the clown that "invented" it; a college sophomore with no engineering background except a working knowledge of Solidworks and access to a 3D printer, and a single escorted rec dive to his credit.

Like-a-fish seems interesting enough, but both that and the unobtanium ignore the basic fact that there is a *hell* of a lot more to breathing underwater than finding the oxygen. You need a large quantity of inert gasses at the correct mixture and relative pressure to carry the oxygen and maintain 'normal' respiration. You either carry it in a tank, or reuse it with a rebreather along with a CO2 scrubber. Anyone thats used a rebreather will testify they are heavy, complex, and relatively dangerous compared to a simple tank. An oxygen supply for the rebreather is the easy part. Any number of superoxide compounds work great. Heck an oxygen candle works fine under water. But whats to be gained by not using a simple oxygen tank?

The like-a-fish thingy tacitly implies this by claiming it has applications in underwater habitats. Yep I can see that. But scuba? No, never, not even close.

(I dove with someone using a rebreather once. When he regained consciousness, I swore I'd never ever trust my life to one.)

((If the Triton thing ever could be built to push 200 lpm with a battery and compressor that small, it would revolutionize underwater propulsion. The savings in swimming energy alone would reduce respiration so dramatically during a dive there wouldnt be much need for the oxygen extraction in the first place!))

90 liters of water per minute, at 100% efficiency, at the surface where oxygen is most abundant. So, at 50% efficiency, at 30 feet, yes probably 400 lpm. Minimum 1/4 HP pump and probably more like 4 HP just to handle O2 extraction. From a battery about the size of your cell phone battery? But thats just one of a hundred things wrong with the idea. Its complete BS.

Yes. But. Retail price is usually not representative of manufacturing costs. For commodity materials retail price is just whatever the heck the retailer thinks they can get away with. Spending more rarely guarantees you're getting a better bulb. Even buying a name brand doesnt mean it wasnt made by the same Malaysian dirt-floor manufacturer. Until buyers get educated as to what constitutes a good CFL, and retailers start to see buyers not basing their decisions on cost only or name only then this behavior will continue and CFL's will continue to be crap. More than an incandescent ban, we could use labeling requirements on CFL's as to guaranteed life, lux (not lumens), efficiency, heat, spectral distribution, hazardous material content, EMI, cold start time, and audible noise.

As I said above, you may be right on floods. These look good. Maybe off-topic but I was informed by several Chinese suppliers that many dont want to make LED strips because they are so cost-competitive that even they cant make much money on them, and are trying to advance products with higher margins like floods and A19 replacement bulbs. I assume that this will be the eventual outcome for all lighting, floods, A19's and so on, As that happens I'll gladly phase in more and more LED solutions where they are appropriate. But generally (VERY generally) what Lowes and Costco is pushing is what they can make higher margins on, and those are (very generally) not products that match MY price/performance goals. Capitalism is working fine to roll out LED advances, and incandescent bans seems to be not much of a factor except possibly allowing or promoting temporary over-charging by manufacturers and retailers.

I may stand corrected on that point. These look good and at a much lower price than Ive seen. Clearly LED solutions are coming down in price for many specialty applications. LED floods do have generally poorer dispersion patterns but I did say 'floods' rather than 'spots'. But I'll buy a few of these and try them out. Thanks for the link.

Appreciate your comment, but dont out-geek me. I design LED lighting, I make my own LED strip lights with custom extrusions and power supplies, source direct all over the world. I know LED lighting. I have a full (and expensive) set of color and brightness measurement tools. When I say my incandescent are better in some cases Im not just blowing anecdotal smoke, its because I have gob-smacks of data that I obtained at considerable effort, instead of taking any lying data sheets word for it.

My bath vanity fixtures were EXPENSIVE. Not some bare-bulb crap from a box store. Yes I can make a reasonably good LED strip version if I invest in machining and casting the specialty glasses, marble and metals, and rebuild the wall board and repaint to cover the mounting changes. But, at the end of the day, a bank of 40W GE Reveals have a very good color balance that works for me, and I replace a few a year at less than a dollar. A LED strip solution, either purchased stock or made custom to match the decor, would have a payback of well over 20 years based on the absolutely minimal power savings.

LED strips on the other hand, at least stock ones, use dropping resistors so they run at 12V-14V in series groups of 3 LED's. The 14V is so they are tolerant in automotive applications or with crap power supplies, which make them operate sub-optimally at 12V. Those piss away a LOT of power as heat, in exchange for the ease of installation. Any efficient use of standard strips requires replacing all the resistors with jumpers, and overdriving the LED's with, say, a 10% duty PWM circuit. Easy enough, but again, its work and money to hit claimed power efficiencies, and I havent seen anyone (except me) bother, and Ive looked hard for a supplier that makes the effort.

No. Thank you. I want my cheap GE Reveals over the vanity. On the other hand, I just rebuilt our walk-in pantry. All custom oak and custom aluminum. There are LED's everywhere. Custom undercabinet strips, custom overheads, custom controllers. Stock power supplies, but from Digikey not GE Lighting which rapes you on cost and quality is still crap. Again, because I tore all GE equipment down and analyzed the design and measure the performance. I used LED's here for the form factor, and for the superior uniformity of light output, not for some paltry cost savings.

If you or anyone else has put this much effort into engineering lighting, I would love to talk with you directly and compare notes, and we'll both learn something. But these technical discussion usually reach an impasse, when proponents of strict draconian laws conclude that "well, for YOU they may not make sense, but all the stupid people will be better off", and I dont hold with that philosophy. Im all for educating the stupid people, not for punishing the smart ones.

Oh, and Ive heard plenty of lies about CFL's. Life span claims are laughable, and the energy wasted on heat (probably in the name of cheap manufacturing) is idiotic.

They both make sense in different applications. I have vanity lights that take 6 bulbs. They are on only briefly, when shaving or my wife putting on makeup. Color balance is important, as is the instant-on, and they arent on long enough to matter a whit about energy use. Incandescent beats CFL and LED there. I use CFL's anywhere lights are left on for any period of time. And LED's where they are hard to change and color matters. For outdoor floods I use one CFL and one halogen, because they literally take 10 minutes to get anywhere near full bright when its 5 below outside. LED floodlights are crazy-stupid expensive.

If people are too stupid to select the proper bulb technology, I dont think sweeping laws that ignore intended use are the answer to that stupidity. At least I stocked up; four cases of every incandescent I use. Hopefully that sees me through until LED's get better color rendition and come down in price a bit more.

FTFY