aerius

It's called shoddy sensationalistic journalism, and you were sucked right in. There's exactly one nuclear facilities complex that's 12 miles from Baghdad, and that is Tuwaitha. It's a known storage depot, and has been since the first Gulf War in '91. Or maybe you can just read the Global Security article. It was sealed and inspected every year. 500 tons of yellowcake is not going to magically materialize there.

All cognacs are brandys, but not all brandys are cognacs.

I was leafing through some mags at the central library a few days ago when I saw a headphone review in one of the British mags. I had my camera with me so I snapped pictures of the more interesting reviews; these being the Ultrasone 750, Denon D5000, and Grado RS-2. Download, enjoy, have fun.

One option is using transformers to do the balanced to single-ended conversion, this keeps the full output voltage of the balanced outputs on the CD player and you have noise rejection all the way up to the transformer. Meaning if you stuck the tranformer right before in the inputs on the amp, you'd have almost all the benefits of a conventional balanced connection.

Fine. Prove it. I want cited statements that every single congressman & senator believed the intelligence. You said everyone, so you better come up with 535 on the record statements of "yes, Iraq had WMD's according to the intelligence we received".

Though to be honest I bought them because I could and I didn't find a use for them for quite some time.

I use them to support the hanging hooks for my bikes so I don't have to drill the hooks into the wall. The magnets stick to the steel support beams behind the drywall of my apartment, and the hooks are welded onto a piece of steel that's stuck onto the magnet. Then the bikes just hang off the hooks.

I have a couple that are about the size of a hockey puck. The magnets were wrapped with foam then stuck to the inside of a steel box, which is wrapped with more foam & bubblewrap and put into yet another steel box. Which then gets stuffed into cardboard box for shipping. The cardboard box was around an 8" to 10" cube.

Actually it isn't black until it's dunked in a tank of ferric chloride to bring out the contrast in the layers. Which is why stainless Damascus only goes to grey and not fully black. You just need to find the right steel alloy and dunk it into the right type of etchant and it'll go black.

Answer me a question then. If they aren't fighting in the mountains, then what the fuck is the 10th Mountain Division doing there? Sightseeing? Oh yeah, you mean those rusty 10 year old barrels which had traces of some indeterminant substance on them? Bzzt. Wrong. Try Eisenhower and the joint US/UK operation which deposed the Prime Minister of Iran and installed the Shah in his place. Which by the way was because of oil, Iran nationalized its oil shortly before this which majorly pissed off all the western oil companies. They lost their prime access, refused to negotiate with Iran, and made it into a security issue which forced the hands of the UK & US governments.

9/11!!! Do you hate America? It's all the Democrats' fault anyway since they got in the way of everything, and it's not like they could do any better. If it wasn't for Bush the whole world would be overrun with Arab terrorists and illegal immigrants. And socialists! And they'll take all our guns away and tax us to death! Yes, I've actually seen the above being written already on various right-leaning message boards. It would be hilarious if the country and the world hadn't been so fucked up by the party they support.

The problems are no longer confined to the US, unfortunately, Canada has also been infected with the crap that's going on south of the border. Arguably, most of the G20 has the same problems, though to varying degrees. No single country can fix this crap by itself, we, like it or not, all have to work together for a solution.

Exactly. The damage which has been done to America goes all the way back to the 1960's, though it's only been in the last 30 years or so, and particularly the last 10-15 that we've really begun to notice it. There is no way to fix that in one term, or even two. We can make a start and lay the groundwork, but that's about it. Funding programs is going to be nearly impossible as the current administration has rammed through around $3 trillion of new debt via the banking bailout programs and the projected deficit for next year is in the $2-3 trillion range, which is roughly equal to the entire federal budget. Undoing the bailout damage alone is going to take up an entire term of office. And everyone will be screaming for his head as he attempts to fix the mess, the bankers will hate it since he's clawing back the bailouts, and the people will hate him for making their investments and home prices fall back to historical norms. Everyone will be poorer, some will be a hell of a lot poorer. There are no easy fixes because every past administration has chosen to kick the can down the street and let the next sucker deal with it, except at some point that can hits a wall and you can't kick it down the street any further. If we haven't hit the wall yet, and I'd argue that we have, it will most certainly hit in the next 4 years. Hard choices will have to be made, as the America's problems can't be put off any longer.

Lundahl LL1620 amorphous core output transformers, LL1690 input transformers, and LL1660s amorphous core interstages.

Nope. There's a few things which determine how much current how much current you can put through a transformer; the wire size, the size of the core, and the number of turns of wire on the core. The first is obvious, the other two are related to the magnetic saturation of the transformer core, which if it happens will result in magic smoke and other bad things. On saturation, the transformer core material, in this case some kind of silicon steel alloy, has a magnetic flux density limit. Which means if you want to put more current throught the transformer you need a bigger core so it doesn't hit the limit. Bigger transformer, more power. Related to this is the number of turns of wire on the primary, there's a formula for calculating the magnetic field strength which involves ampere-turns, that is how many turns of wire around the core and how many amps of current in the wire. Pull too much current and the core saturates, and bad things happen. One thing to remember is that many power transformers run close to saturation at their rated max power, saves money on copper & iron that way. Going back to my previous example, let's say there's 100 turns of wire on the primary, so with 220V and 0.1A that's 10 ampere-turns, which then gets plugged into the formula for magnetic field strength, and from there they figure out the size of the core needed so it doesn't saturate, then add say, 20% just in case. So, let's plug it into a 110V outlet and try to pull 22VA out of it. You only have 11V on the secondary so you need to pull 2A there, and thus 0.2A at the primary. 100 turns on the primary, 0.2A, that's 20 ampere-turns, assuming the wire's good for it you've now blown the saturation limit of the core by a huge margin. The transformer gets real toasty, the output on the secondary is severely distorted, and eventually something will burn or blow up.

Let's say you have a transformer with a single 220V primary and 22V secondary, rated for 22VA when used in a 220V country, that is, 1A on the secondary and 0.1A on the primary to make nice easy numbers. Now if it were used in a 110V country, you still have the 0.1A and 1A limit on the primary & secondary, respectively, so the maximum power you can get out of it is 11VA. If having the rated output of the transformer cut in half isn't a problem, then go ahead and do it, but it's a bit of a waste since the transformer has to be oversized quite a bit. Ideally, you use something like this so you can change the connections around for different input & output voltages without affecting the power rating. Keeps things smaller & lighter.

Well, if one happens to be a fan of organ music or piano pieces played on the B

EQ doesn't correct for resonances unless we're talking about a crossover where the response is rolled off well before the driver's resonance point(s). Also, how do you know it's a resonance unless you've run a cumulative spectral decay plot on the headphone?

Nope, there's no way I'm investing long term in a rigged market where the rules change on a weekly basis. Scalp the short term gains, get the fuck out.

Yeah, it's a great buying opportunity for Put options, truly a once in a lifetime happening. Easiest money I've ever made in my life, give me another month of this market action and I could be retired and living it large by Christmas.

Below is the bailout bill which was narrowly rejected by Congress yesterday. Pay special note to Section 2, 6, and 8. Section 2 means Treasury can take over ANY bank at will, it gives them the power to nationalize the entire US banking system overnight if they choose to. Section 3 means they have a $700 billion revolving slush fund, they can cycle MBS and other crap papers through it as many times as they please, and run up a total bill in the trillions. Section 8 means once it's passed, no one can do jack and shit about it, not the government, not the courts, completely above the law. The bill is currently being revised and will be going in for a revote later this week. Sections 2, 6, and 8 remain essentially unchanged in the latest 110 page version of the bill I've seen. If it's passed, the US is well and truly fucked. The stock market will do a moonshot in the short term, then once the MBS papers start getting billed to Treasury the bonds market will lock up and dislocate. When that happens, all loans & credit lines are effectively gone and everything goes down the shitter. Oh, and the US government loses its AAA credit rating. Speaking of which, did you know that McDonald's has a lower risk of credit default than the US government as expressed in credit default spreads?

Because they refused to stand up and say "cut this shit out now!" until it was far too late. Where are the protests? Where are the mass angry phone calls to government reps? Americans as a whole were too damn busy watching NFL Football and American Idol to educate themselves on the shit that's going on, and more importantly, get off the lazy asses and do something about it. If you don't stand up for yourself, the bullies will punch you in the face and take your lunch money every single time. Make your voice heard. Take action. Act now while there's still some hope.

Yup, ECB overnight rate has blown out to 11%. You could probably get better rates from the mafia, except they break your kneecaps when you don't pay them back.

They have. Lots of people have had their cards frozen already, same thing with HELOCs. It gets even more fun. In the last week the yield curve on Treasuries has inverted. This means the banks' business model of borrowing short to lend long is now toast. If you thought the lending cutbacks to date were bad, what's coming up next will make it look like a picnic. We are entering the acceleration phase of the credit crunch.

Washington Mutual just got shut down by the FDIC and sold off to JP Morgan-Chase. JPM-C and Bank of America will be the last ones standing. All is proceeding as I have foreseen. As for EnAbl, it works. Damned if I know why but it does. The best way to describe it is like this; an untreated speaker is like listening to your rig during the day when it's kinda noisy and the power's rather crappy. With EnAbl it's like listening late at night when it's nice & quiet and the power grid is nice & clean.