This is what scares the living shit out of me 100 times more over then ANY nuclear reactor launch could ever do. People who say "Smart person A says this, it's what i believe too, so it's the only truth outthere and everyone else is WRONG!!!"

God save humanity...

I RTFA and I for the life of me can't figure out if it's a "The longer the uptime the worse the degrading...and a reboot will start the process over?" or "You will use this and it will get worse and worse untill the chip burns out..."

I hope to god it's the first one...If not this might beat the floating point error by a mile!

'This is routine maintenance, and it's mind-boggling that the manufacturers don't provide people with an easy way to open the case up and blow it out.'

Really? It seems pretty simple to me:

1. Build product.
2. Make product so that it's life is artifically gimped by not being able to do the easiest of things like 'blow it out'.
3. When product dies early, customer spends more money to replace originaly gimped product.
4. Rinse, repeat.

Seriously, they seem to build most 'consumer electronics' to die on a predetermined schedule. If they built them to last, then the companys would not get any extra money from multiple purchases...and well...they can't have that now can they.

"One customer recently found his hard drive had gone, but by the time he'd paid £50 for the recovery disc, paid for a new hard drive and paid for the labour of installing the device, it made more sense to buy a new machine.""

And that about sums up why the discs are going by by. Why recover when you can buy new!!

I'm not trying to troll or be mean spirited, but take it for me, any EQ mount that is in the price range you are looking for is going to drive you absolutely bonkers...at least in the 'motorized' category. You can get close to the upper price range on a manual EQ but it would only be good enough to piggyback a camera. I have been in the hobby (astrophotography) for about 10 years now and have lived through the pain of the cheaper mounts. Unfortunally, cheap mounts are only good for one thing...making you so fed up with them that you eventually get tired of trying and give up....and keep you from actually watching the shower since you will be constantly messing with the mount.

For what you seem to what to do from the summary above you could accomplish with the following :

1. Stick the camera on a normal tripod and aim where the meteors are originating from with the widest angle lens you have.
2. Take 10 sec shots after ten second shots with an ISO of at least 800, while adjusting for position every 10 or so minutes so that you keep the general area of the sky in view.
3. The next day, use an astrophoto stacking program RegiStax to 'stitch' together your images made the previous night.

You would be surprised how good the pictures will actually come out...and for the price of a $50 tripod.

Now, barring that you are dead set on an EQ mount for this, I have only one piece of advice. In the land of EQ mounts, the heavier the better (less shaking, better stepping motors). And the heavier it is, the more expensive it is. There is just no getting around it. I currently have this mount and it required a complete tear down, polishing, and rebuild before it was even capable of astrophotography...and that's at $600!!

And this comment:

1) climate is warming to a point of unnatural irreversible damage

is the reason people don't want to listen to the 'climate' scientists.

1) Unnatural - What the hell gives them the right to decide what is natural or unnatural? Thew world has been MUCH MUCH hotter and MUCH MUCH colder then it is today. So where do you draw the line between natural and unnatural?

2) Irreversible - Once again, see above...the planet has been on both ends of the spectrium and, if you look out a window today, it has reversed.

3) Damage - To apply the word damage means that something is out of norms. Consider the planet has been both hotter and colder then it is today...I say that no 'damage' has occurred...

Global warming and cooling is a natural cycle that our planet goes through; study after study shows that. The problem for us, is that our species evolved at this, roughly, current level. If it goes too far in either direction, we have two choices... Adapt or die! Every other animal or plant on this planet has to do this so why do we think we are special?

I can see it now....

Scientist: We developed Hyperdrive!!
George: Nope...I did...didn't you see my movie...geesh.

I think George is heading down the path of the Dark Side....

Actually...12 ports is the perfect number for a stereoscoptic cube. A single card that can do that has never been seen until today. We might finally be getting to the GPU power levels needed for a mostly realistic, true 3D environment, and all of that out of just a single machine instead of the many machines needed now. That my friends is progress!

I don't know if I should WOOOSH, Laugh, or Cry on this one...

This has bee done for year by amateurs. I have been following these people for atleast a couple of years: BEAR

They have some AWESOME video of their attempts.

I wonder why NASA is just now finding about about this stuff???

This is fine and all...except that the ISPs just move the test servers to high priority and make it look like everyone is getting their advertised speeds.

If they want a real test they should connect to 5 random test servers with daily changing IP addresses, scattered all over the country, and perferabably all on differnet networks( LV3, Sprint, etc...) while downloading a 100Mb bittorrent file, and then adding all the speeds together to come up with the actual throughput. That would atleast be a more true test of what the ISP's customers are actualy getting.

Thank god they left the 'THE' off the begining of it

Customer Service: What can I help you with today.

Customer: Your TWAT broke my computer!!

Customer Service: "FILL_IN_THE_BLANK"

Company X patents government.

Company X today has patented the business process know as 'government'. Governments are now required to give X dollars in license feeds per year to Company X in order to stay a sovereign country. Failure to pay fees will result in abandoning you right to sovereignty and becomming a subsideary of Company X. USPTO's response said that this will spur inovation and development of countries by helping them all work as one instead of all the different types there are today.


Comments:

Well....(Score: 5, Sad)
Aparently America has already forgot to pay the fees....lol, i kid,i kid....maybe ;)

I see alot of votes for #1 (SciFi trying to ignore science). Why does Science Fiction have to be based in the 'Current' known science?? I thought that was the whole reason for the 'Fiction' part????? Currently 'Warp Techonology' is not based in any real science(theory yes...but not on the level the show is showing), is that a reason to rip on all the Star Trek shows and such?
I throught science fiction was suppose to go beyond current science and let the current scientists try and see if it is possible?