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Comment Re:Autobahn (Score 4, Informative) 992

Going a safe speed is the most important thing, I applaud you for that, but there are a couple of other relevant facts:
1) Impeding the flow of traffic is illegal.
2) Driving in the passing lane without passing is also illegal.
3) Your speedometer may not match those of other drivers. They may be "going the speed limit" as well.

I've heard this argument many times, and people need to remember there are more laws than the speed limit that govern how you should drive, especially what lane you should be in. Respecting the posted speed limit is good, but so is respecting all those signs that say "slow traffic keep right." If your aim is to follow the law, follow ALL of them. And probably don't assume people going faster are jerks. Speedometers can vary quite a bit. See Car and Driver's feature on the topic.

Comment Re:Autobahn (Score 1) 992

A vehicle at 85mph will use about 40% more fuel than one at 70mph. That means it costs more, it uses up a finite fossil fuel faster, and causes more pollution and CO2.

In both the car's I've owned, this is not the case. Other factors, especially gearing (controlling where in the power band the engine is running) have a huge effect. My current car (Pontiac G6) gets about the same mileage at 80 MPH as it does at 70 MPH. My previous car (Pontiac Grand Am) got better mileage at 85 than at 70. Yes, you're burning more fuel per unit of time, but depending on horsepower curve, your fuel per unit of distance may actually be the same or lower since you're covering more ground in that time.

Because of aerodynamics, the wind resistance curve will at some point always win out and drive that efficiency curve downward, but you can't universally assume the peak of that curve is below 85.

Both cars I had were mechanically fully capable of 90 MPH+ cruising speeds, as long as the driver were able. The reason that high speeds are dangerous in the US is because (as stated elsewhere in this thread) drivers here are not very good at it. I've long thought a country of this size would benefit from a high-speed toll road with special licensing and vehicle requirements. It would work fine as long as lane discipline and safe following distance were enforced, like on the Autobahn.

Things like staying in the left lane without passing, driving too slowly, making unsafe lane changes, inattentive driving, etc. are already illegal and enforceable in most if not all jurisdictions, and I wish cops started paying equal attention to these drivers that create problems and not just speeders.

Comment Re:Keurig - wasteful, limited coffee choices (Score 1) 584

We have one of the higher-end Keurigs that my mother-in-law picked up at a garage sale for $5. We bought the filter accessory, and can now use whatever ground coffee at whatever strength we like with no extra "Keurig tax" and no waste (less even than traditional drip with disposable filters). It's the best way to use one of these machines.

We do have a stock of K-Cups on hand but rarely use them.

Comment Re:No.. (Score 1) 496

Ah yes, the "good old days" of using memmaker and trying to figure out how in the heck I'm going configure my boot disk to get X-Wing CD to run when it required 585KB of base memory and my CD-ROM drive's manufacturer driver took 40KB. Thank God for that Oak Technology driver I found somewhere that only used 18KB and seemed to work with every drive!

Kids these days, they don't know how easy they've got it!

Comment Re:No.. (Score 1) 496

Yes, exactly. Thanks for clarifying. I should also have been more clear that I meant that Direct3D is the only part of DirectX that competes with OpenGL directly.

I remember when MS announced the whole DirectX concept, and I never thought it would work - I had thought the overhead of the Windows OS was too much of a resource hog compared to DOS to get reliable performance in games. But the ease of writing to one API, versus having to code your game to support all the different hardware on the market, won out among developers.

Comment Re:No.. (Score 4, Informative) 496

Did we ever need direct X? Any reason why direct X couldnt be an open standard? Were they too self centred to just work on opengl?

Don't forget the origin of DirectX: Microsoft wanted to encourage game developers to embrace Windows 95 at a time when Win 3.11 had been seen as a business-application-only platform, with DOS preferred for games. DirectX was developed as a collection of APIs for games running in Windows 95 that handled input, graphics, music, sound, networking, etc. Only Direct3D, which initially shipped with DirectX 2.0, is directly competing with OpenGL.

I don't think there was a similar comprehensive API available for the PC market at the time DirectX was released. My copy of Need for Speed SE actually runs on either DOS 6.22 or Win95 w/ DirectX.

Comment Re:Biohazard suits.. (Score 1) 243

... don't know the official name of the ... guy who dumps fuel in the race cars ....

If it were the space program, he'd be the Propellant Installation Engineer.
If he were in a union he'd be a Flammable Fluids Expert.
In the military, he'd be a Motorcraft Refueling Technician.
But this is auto racing we're talking about, so we just call him the Fueler.

Comment Re:News Corp making a play for Rovio? (Score 4, Funny) 188

... or "BMW 3-Series tied to Nazi death camps" ... or "Nuclear testing tied to Fukushima disaster" ... or "President Obama tied to Florida cannibal"

It's almost like a game, find the most outrageous thing you can tie to the most popular innocent sounding thing, using the most superficial of reasons.

"Killer Physics: Gyroscopic Effect Tied to All Motorcycle Fatalities!"

I'm not even all that creative, I'm sure others can do better.

Comment Re:770,000 parsecs? (Score 2) 217

The way George Lucas explained it is, hyperspace is the same speed for everyone, but travelling through hyperspace requires complicated navigational computations to avoid gravity wells, and the Millennium Falcon's computer was so powerful that it could quickly compute a more complex, shorter route through space than the average smuggler's ship. Han was a hacker/overclocker, you see, as well as a mechanic. There are a couple references in the movies to "calculating the jump to lightspeed" and whatnot. Lucas claims of course he knew that parsecs were distance; this is how he always meant it from the beginning.

DISCLAIMER: I'm not defending Lucas' explanation, although his explanation is plausible, I always thought the term was just misused. I don't buy that he meant it that way from the start, although it adds an interesting element to that method of FTL travel.

Comment Re:Headphones do improve concentration (Score 3, Informative) 405

I wear headphones (and usually listen to music when I'm wearing them) to quiet the conversations and noisy distractions, including the ever-present white noise generator, which is designed to drown out the conversations and noisy distractions caused by our open floor plan (no cubicle walls, to facilitate communication), but is so loud that conversations are difficult unless you speak loudly.

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