Phi for All

I'm not sure what's happening there lately but you should check out http://www.deathtocreationism.com.

Pentcho, please use a translation program. All posts and articles at SFN must be submitted in English.

Please use a translation program. All posts and articles at SFN must be submitted in English.

I cannot tell a lie... I have no idea why you think my opinion of your avatar is important.

Without all the extraneous phone parts, could this be made to fit into a small plastic box (with a hinged lid for replacing the batteries) with double sided tape on the back to stick it to a door, cabinet or window? If it's cheap enough you won't need to worry about hiding it from intruders.

I have an idea for this. Distributorships can be sold so you can set up an electrician with the devices and let them do all the pitching and installation. Design patents are stupid and a utility patent is tough to get and costly but I don't think you need either if you're willing to let it go if it takes off and someone else grabs a patent. I think the idea is to make as much as you can on your own and if you can duplicate your efforts through others (distributors) then you can make less per unit but sell more units. The key is getting the costs down and figuring out how to make it as cheap and easily installed as possible.

I still say you should find out how cheaply this system can be made. Using only the necessary parts from a cell phone and a simple way to wire it up for a few of the most obvious uses (doors' date=' cabinets & windows), you could research how quickly you could get the parts and put them together (the [b']X[/b] factor), then do some cheap single page leaflets to businesses and residences (with a brief accounting of how it's been proven successful). State on the leaflet to allow X days for delievery. This way it costs you only the paper, ink, sweat and time if there are no orders. Fulfill any order you get and if there aren't enough to make it worth your time, forget it. If you start selling a dozen or more a day you might want to set up an account with a shipper like UPS. Btw, if you really are interested in making a go of this yourself, I would contact the local newspaper and tell a reporter when it's available. A story about "LOCAL HERO SHARES CRIMEBUSTER DEVICE" could help sell a lot of units....

You can speak of them but no formulae, please. Those of you who know how to do it will understand. Those who don't will be in the dark, but they will still have their fingers.

This might be a low-voltage transformer you're talking about. It normally takes 110 volts AC on the primary end and steps it down, or transforms it, to 24 volts on the secondary end. Your furnace has one to run the low-voltage thermostat. But... If you hook up some D cell batteries to the secondary end it will step up the voltage pretty outrageously. You could probably get up to 40,000 volts with just a few Ds. It's amost all voltage, very little amps so it's not lethal or anything. We used to hook a wire to one of the secondary leads and the bottom of the batteries (3-4 taped together end to end), and have someone grab both the primary leads, one in each hand. No one believes a few D cell batteries are going to give much of a shock. Then you touch the top of the batteries to the other secondary lead. Nothing happens until you break that circuit again, but when you do it throws that voltage back through the transformer and give the person a pretty hefty jolt. I never tried throwing a spark but I bet it would.

NEVER question YT2095 when it comes to exploding things. http://www.ag.ohio-state.edu/~twig/other/html/063096.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2903_firework.html

You mentioned an intermittent fan? What determines when the fan runs, temperature or timer? Also, you could have some flow problems if your iron pipes aren't 4" like the vent piping. I'm going to move this to engineering so you'll get more suitable responses.

Where does your iron piping lead to? Are you heating water in it? Where does the fan blow the warmed air to? I would also recommend checking all door and window seals. Open your dishwasher and oven promptly after you use them to let that heat dissipate into the kitchen (dryer too). Change your furnace filters at least every month during winter. Reverse your ceiling fans so warm air is recirculated more efficiently. Buy an insulation wrap for your hot water heater if you don't already have one. I know someone who used an old stand mirror in his back yard to bring sunshine to parts of his yard where the sun couldn't reach, and I wonder if you could do something like this to angle more sunlight into your windows. You'd have to make sure as the day progresses that you're not fading any furniture or pictures.

AFAIK, beyond what RyanJ said, a prompt is just the computer talking to you. Among other things, a prompt may ask for a password, it may warn that you're leaving a secure area, or it could tell you it can't find what you're looking for. In MS-DOS it's just an internal command that can do many things but I don't believe storing all input is one of them It has nothing to do with logging all information the computer has ever had typed into it. Your friend is having you on. And Happy Birthday, vrus!

I agree with Douglas, there should be no problem. There is enough insulation between the two compartments to maintain two seperate temps. After all, when it was working the bottom of the freezer got a frost buildup despite being a few inches from the warmer fridge section, didn't it? Btw, you could have a dead rat in the compressor. Have you had any bad smells in the house lately? :D

You're back! I'm glad. Your back? How sad. Get well soon and enjoy the time off your feet.

He seems serious but that doesn't make him right. He has a lot of experimentation and observation to do, but it sounds like he is at least challenging some people to think more creatively.

I quite agree. One can only hope that the truly intelligent ones will be able to see negative peer pressure for what it is. Perhaps we need an anti-dumb campaign similar to the anti-drug campaigns which point out that misery loves company. Is it that way in the UK as well? In the US I put much of the blame on our obsession with sports and the athletes who make mega-millions for playing games half the year. It's hard to teach children that working smart AND hard is best when their sports heroes gain fame and fortune while getting away with drug abuse, assault and even murder.

Not being a big TV watcher, I didn't discover West Wing until late in its second season. By then I felt I'd lost too much of the storyline to be able to pick it up but the few episodes I caught were excellent! You can imagine my joy when I took my daughter trick-or-treating this Halloween at my brother's house and he handed me the first two seasons on DVD! We're still in a Firefly phase but will start watching when we finish the last of Firefly (again). I'll definitely tape Sunday's episode of West Wing. Thanks!

I don't see this as a racial thing. I see it as a small segment of the student population who have found a good excuse not to try too hard. There are other students who claim they don't try hard because they'll be considered nerds. And still others who claim they don't get good grades in Theater class because they'll be considered gay. Poor excuses being used as a crutch, imo. As far as hanging around with white kids and not using slang, well that's just reading your audience. Kids talk differently to their parents and other authority figures than they do to their peeps. And they talk differently to kids outside their inner circle of best buds too. It's not acting white or anything else, it's just basic communication. If you don't want to have to repeat yourself or explain your terminology every ten seconds, you use language your audience can understand.

Yellow handled are for straight cuts, right or left-handed and they'll do nicely. YT gave me an idea. If the insulation isn't too thick, pick a section of duct and give it a good thump. The idea is that if the dead weasel body is right there you'll hear it thump back as it falls. This is a very low-tech method but may help you locate it fairly quickly. If that yields no results, I'd try the webcam in the piping. Got something small on wheels you can strap the cam and a flashlight to? Custom Lego car, maybe?

I know it's a PitA, but you can get into the duct work without having to take it apart. Borrow or buy a pair of "tin snips" (sheet metal cutters, red-handled for right-handers, green-handled for left-handers), some duct tape, some sheet metal panning (usually a 3' square of sheet metal) then get in the crawlspace with the snips, tape, panning, a hammer, and a straight-bladed screwdriver. Pick a place in the ductwork under the room where the chupacabra smells worst, hold the screwdriver with the tip at a 45 degree angle to the bottom of the duct (edge on, not flat) and smack the blade of the screwdriver with the hammer to punch a hole in the duct big enough to get the tip of the snips into. Cut a big enough hole to stick your head and shoulders through and find the offender (watch out for the edges of that hole, sheet metal burrs are sharp). When you're done, cut a big enough piece of panning to cover the hole and seal it up with duct tape. When your folks sell the house they can charge more because you now have a custom duct-cleaning access port.

Is your basement finished or do you have access to the ducts and piping? It's not a big deal to remove the tape and the 2-3 screws that hold the pipes--the sheet metal tubes that lead from your ducts--to the boots (the metal fitting your vents drop into). Undo the screws from the boot and the pipe should slide back toward the duct until it's clear of the boot, then pull it off (usually the pipe is only screwed into the boot) and dump it in a trash bag (a rat will go plop). If your pipes aren't accesible, or the rat is in the ducts, well, then you're humped.

I'm completely with you on this one. Hypocrisy has been rampant lately but you have to draw the line somewhere. In some ways, I think people are crying foul to get every edge they can. It's not a bad tactic, asking for 10 and settling for 5 because 5 was what you wanted in the first place. When it's obvious that someone is crying conspiracy wolf that's different. I dislike it when right or left is trying to gather straws so they can claim the camel's back is broken.