bah, posting to cancel a mistaken mod. Sorry about that.

While I am personally against the idea, as well, I don't think you should close your mind off so quickly or you might have the blinds drawn on other meaningful course of action if a window of opportunity presents itself!

You read the article???

No wonder why you are hiding as an A.C.!

It's all fun and games until someone get's hurt, and then it's freakin' hilarious!

Back in the late '80s, my uncle gave me a first aid kit that came from a Mercedes Benz vehicle in Germany. All the basic necessities, plus a big stick of sidewalk chalk. His statement was that, given autobahn speeds, the chalk could come in more handy than the bandages.

If you have a high efficiency PFC, a UPS of the proper design is a must. A good PFC power supply only does its job properly when fed a reasonable approximation of a sine wave.

On-line (double conversion) UPS units output a sine wave at all times, but are inefficient and usually very expensive.

A stand-by UPS may or may not have a switching time fast enough for a PFC power supply, and will almost never supply a reasonable approximation of a sine wave when running on battery (I don't recall ever seeing a design that did, anyway). Cheap as chips, so to speak, but you buy a UPS to keep you running through a brown-out or black-out, and everything works just fine EXCEPT the computer you were trying to keep running. They will keep running non-PFC power supplies, though, no problem at all.

A line-interactive has close to the efficiency of stand-by UPS, but with the benefit of always having the inverter/converter always connected to the output, so the response time should never be slower than what a good PFC power supply requires, and depending on the converter logic can output a good sine wave approximation. Unfortunately, many UPS units output what might be generously referred to as a "stepped sine wave" which is frequently closer to a square wave than a sine wave, so your cheap as chips power supply computers keep running fine, but your nice, shiny PFC power supply computers shut down.

Unfortunately, I live in China where lots of line interactive units that output reasonable sine waves are made, but the only way to buy them appears to be quantity 500+. I have yet to find a unit sold at retail in Zhongguancun (Beijing), Taobao, or 360buy that gives a good sine wave output without being an on-line unit. And, no, APC units- stand-by or line-interactive- do not produce a good enough sine wave for my FSP AU-400 (80+ Gold, happily reliable on Beijing wall power now for almost a year after my OCZ 500 caught fire... twice, fun story!) to keep it from shutting down, though I respect that this power supply may be more finicky than most. Cyberpower makes a nice unit (eg CP1500PFCLCD), but I can't get a 220V unit imported to China for anything close to a reasonable price, and carrying a 110V unit back from the USA with me would require using an external transformer defeating much of the value of having a line-interactive.

I got asked today to go visit an HR person with my admin (not because I was in trouble, but my admin wanted my opinion on whether the HR person was being an intentionally underhanded, conniving, sneaky, power mad bitch or it was all in my admin's mind). Spent 15 minutes with them jabbering away at each other, and had no way to answer her question at the end. Not because I couldn't necessarily determine it for myself, but because the obviously dust caked CPU heat sink/fan obviously had a bad bearing and it was driving me up the freaking wall. It was all I could do not to shove them both out of the way, rip open the machine, and huff and puff until I had ripped the fan out to replace it (don't you carry a spare fan or two in your backpack- just in case? I keep a spare cheap ass optical with me for when I run across dinosaurs who have never had their ball mouse [stutter, jump, slam] replaced, too) and blew the dust out of the heat sink so the fan need to spin at 4 bajillion RPMs to keep the CPU from overheating.

I'm not Aspy, I am OCPD. Suck it.

Soju can be made with many things, just as vodka is. Some retain their taste more than others and can be found in strengths as high as any moonshine. I brought some back from one trip that was 60% ABV, found it completely undrinkable, but gave it to some Korean guys I knew who immediately became my bestest buddies until the alcohol ran out. I found it rather disturbing when I noticed that the alcohol was dissolving the Styrofoam cups they were drinking out of! To say the least, like with erguotou in China, at that level it is an acquired taste which few people that don't grow up with it will develop.

Modern day soju has commonly been made from sweet potatoes and then saccharin added to make it even sweeter (more than a few military personnel would find out antifreeze had been added to kick up the sweetness even higher, resulting in horrible headaches if they were lucky, blindness or death if they weren't). This makes it work very well in cocktails where the sweetness blends in. Koreans generally just mix it with fruit juice or lemonade if with someone who doesn't like the taste, or drink it straight with someone who does or when eating food, at least in my experience. For something with less of an overt taste and with no sweetness added, try Iichiko shochu from Japan- made from barley, served with a twist of lemon, quite nice and dry, so to speak, but significantly pricier than a similar amount of Jinro.

Soju also comes in a variety of strengths, with Jinro adding water to the 21 or 22% version mostly popular in Korea to bring it down to 19.5% or 20% (some places do allow higher, this was first done for California, IIRC) allowing it to be sold at beer and wine-only licensed establishments in the USA. The establishments love it because they can charge a premium for it as a call-brand, the customers can buy more because they don't get drunk as easily, and the soju is cheap (perhaps not compared to Gilbeys, granted, but a lot cheaper than Absolut or Finlandia).

I am not a beer drinker, but I do have a penchant for tequila (nothing with Cuervo in the name as a rule except for shots, in a plastic bottle, or mescal- basically start at El Jimador and work your way up). I used to carry one or two bottle of tequila with me on my frequent trips to Asia (PRC/Korea/Japan/HK/Taiwan/Singapore) so that when local coworkers would complain that I wouldn't drink with them (I would drink vodka when they were drinking beer, so I wasn't drinking with them- at least in Korea we would drink soju together, but my Japanese coworkers generally wouldn't drink shochu except with meals), I would pull out one (or both, if there were more than 4 of us) of the bottles and tell them this was the night that we would drink together.

They usually discovered before the end of the night that beer, even good beer, is just alcohol on training wheels ;-). What amazed me was the women who would keep up with no problem while the men were headed off to the subway.

Your mom's sailboat has a basement?

Heh, I can't remember what I paid for my first CD burner, but my first hard drive cost me $2000 (after my 33% discount as an employee- we were royally screwing our industrial customers) for all 20 MB of 5.25" full-height SCSI noisy-as-hell goodness. But it probably wouldn't work post-Office Spacing.

Yes, good point. I remember we were told we were working towards and expected to get ABET certification beyond just our computer science designation (the head of my department was an evaluation team member for the CAC at the time, though obviously not for reviewing our program), but I never found out the result (though obviously it must have been negative). Doesn't matter all that much now, post-2005 my department no longer exists and most of the college of engineering along with it. Don't worry, Sandy-sufferers, FEMA learned so many best-practices as a result of Katrina that they will have you fixed up in a jiff... errr.... what??? Ummm, never mind.

Serious question here, not intentionally related to the topic at hand.
99.999% are born, live and die etc suggests that this is all because of Israel and the fact that people Palestinians can't travel freely into Israel proper. But when I look at a map, I see that the Gaza strip shares a border with Egypt. Why is Egypt not considered a bad actor here if free movement is the basis of discussion, too? Does Egypt not consider Palestinians acceptable for immigration?

Funny, the head of my department said my degree was in Software Engineering in 1988. Then I got a job doing computer engineering and didn't write a meaningful program (though I did fix a lot of programs for CS majors who didn't understand the underlying systems implementations well enough) again until about 1997, so perhaps you have a point.

I live outside the USA, I can not go to a USA emergency room for free care (or paid care, for that matter). Buying insurance in the USA that would cover me in China is cost prohibitive (effectively it is a 365 day travel policy at a cost roughly 10x the most expensive general policy insurance you might have encountered), my employer (not a USA company) doesn't provide me anything that the health care law in the USA recognizes as meaningful insurance. I am therefore subject to the non-insured tax unless I surrender my USA citizenship, as far as I can tell.

Exactly how does this make sense?