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I'm probably not above the minimal age you mention, but I cringe at the sight of that "needle" f****** up a perfectly good record 
It reminded me of this classic[^] though 
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Have you ever thought of why a wooden thorn would scratch a record while a diamond needle would not?
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Because, you know, stuff 
My guess is that the diamond needle is small enough to fit in the records ditch(?), but light enough not to scratch it.
Or something.
Or maybe you're just playing the wrong record[^] 
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very low pressure, yes. but just as important, diamond has very low friction.
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Thanks almost exclusively to its position on the Mohs scale.
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Oh really? I hadn't realized that. Neat.
I'd always thought the greater contributor to the slipperiness of PTFE was it's chemical inertness. I mean, steel is both quite reactive and quite hard, being around 80% as hard as PTFE, but a whole heap more reactive. Teflon is only about 25% harder than steel but is many times more slippery.
Don't suppose you've any idea where I can read more about the mechanism of the PTFE's slipperiness do you?
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My response was supposed to be sarcastic. I'm sorry if it wasn't coming through properly.
Pure PTFE has a hardness of 60 Shore D, a bit higher with filler materials. Steel has a hardness ranging from 52 - 65 Rockwell C, where the sheet steel in a can has the lower number and a steel file is around 63 Rockwell C. A high quality chefs knife has about 58 Rockwell C.
But note that it completely different scales that doesn't even compare. 60 Shore D is approximately somewhere between a rubber tyre and nylon in hardness. Steel is many magnitudes harder.
Anyway, friction is pretty complex. There is not one reason for it and it's very many years since I studied it.
At Quora there's a discussion with many links explaining the many reasons behind friction. It's a good place to begin.
What causes friction? - Quora[^].
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My mom used to say to us, when we done wrong: "You done it twice in your life young man, first and last!!!"...
That what I told my boss after trying to initiate code review...
True story: one code review too many | CommitStrip[^]
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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Wow, energetic woman, your mother 
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All I wanted is to update VS2015 and get Tools for Windows 10 Universal Apps, but VS installer complained that there are pending Windows updates and I need to restart my computer. Fair enough, I'll restart it, but then Windows found new updates and start installing them. So I wait for them too.
I finally managed to update VS2015, only to be notified that I need to update it again. Ok, I'll start installer again... ...aaand there are 3GB to download and install. Well, that will take a while, better fire up Steam and waste some time while waiting for process to complete. Would you like to guess what happened next? Yes, freaking Steam started updating itself... ಠ_ಠ
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Back in the day, when we had dialup instead of broadband (think 56,000 bits per second if you were lucky, children, not 40,000,000 bytes per second) a game came out called "Half Life". And the magazines (think "paper website before flash animations", children) said it was good. Nay, "brilliant" and "wonderful" were used.
So I bought it.
So I installed it from its CD.
So I ran it.
And it was Steam powered.
And Steam wanted to update itself first.
And this took 45 minutes, of which I had to pay per minute.
And the connection failed after 30 minutes.
So I swore. And I tried again. And again. And again, until I had spent more on the phone bill than I had on the game.
And I never did play "Half Life", until I bought an XBox 360, and a second hand copy. And it was good. Buggy as heck, but damn good.
And it was 10 years before I bought another Steam game... And nothing has changed, except my connection is faster and more reliable...
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I once tried to install something from steam, same experience, I wonder if they have improved in the last 5 years.
I put steam in the same category as symantec, mcafee, blotus and and ... who had the baloons as their logo.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Mycroft Holmes wrote: who had the baloons as their logo
Corel?
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Aah yes, Dial Up, before broad band, when PC's were used something other than watching videos of Pandas Sneezing... I have found a box marked Half Life (& another marked Opposing Force) I don't remember it being Steam or if it was not needing to update Steam. And Low it was good,
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"Half Life" was not only the game's title, but also the time needed to download its updates over dial-up.
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If we're talking about half-life of 238U, then yes it's.
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Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia found dead at Texas ranch[^]![Rose | [Rose]](https://codeproject.freetls.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/rose.gif)
Sad as this news may be, there is another consequence to consider: As I understand, this means that President Obama gets to appoint the next SC judge. Where the judges on the right were in a 5-4 majority, they will now be in a 4-5 minority. This may have a significant impact on rulings of the Supreme Court in the foreseeable future.
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
modified 13-Feb-16 19:51pm.
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Actually, that's not quite accurate. Obama gets to *nominate* a candidate to replace him. The US Senate has to confirm the nominee to become a sitting justice.
Mitch McConnell (and a huge chorus of senior Republicans) has already said that he thinks that the Senate shouldn't confirm anyone this year until a new President is elected. Of course, that's because he knows Obama will not pick a conservative, so it's in the Republicans best interest to stonewall. Naturally, if the current President was a Republican, McConnell wouldn't waste any time at all getting the nominee confirmed.
Political bias aside, the stance that they should leave the Supreme Court without a justice for over a year is a pretty absurd proposition, and hasn't been done in a very long time. Modern politics in America at work.
If they do stonewall (which is almost certain), then that means a lot of contentious and far reaching rulings will be 4-4, effectively bringing a lot of important American law to a halt, as well as wasting HUGE amount of money since similar cases will need to work their way up to the SCOTUS again to decide on the very same issue once a justice is appointed.
modified 13-Feb-16 20:24pm.
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All true... but the entertainment value of the situation (the politics not the man's death) is priceless.
Let the games begin!
There are two types of people in this world: those that pronounce GIF with a soft G, and those who do not deserve to speak words, ever.
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Thanks for clarifying!
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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Gjeltema wrote: Modern politics in America
Here's what it looks like to the average European:
We have the evil Empire (Republicans) vs. the Democrats.
The Republicans appoint an idiot as presidential nominee (Bush, Bush, Trump, then there was that vice-president Palin...) who say the most absurd things. We Europeans have a few good laughs from them every time!
Then there's the Democrats nominee who says a lot of good things (better healthcare, gun control, job stability).
Yet it's always an exciting competition and the Democrats always stand a good chance of winning (and often do).
Europeans conclude that Americans must be complete idiots.
And then you invade some country that you can't pinpoint on a map.
That's probably not entirely accurate, I do realize you've had some good Republican presidents in the past.
I'm also pretty sure not all Americans are complete idiots, some of them are missing parts 
But here's what I really don't get (seriously).
America is supposed to be the "melting pot" of cultures, yet you only have two "mainly white" political parties!
Compare that to the Netherlands where we have around 15 parties (and we have 17-18 million people, go figure)!
Ours is the other end of the extreme...
Disclaimer:
This post contains a lot of satire and caricature. I do not wish to offend anyone by such crude generalizations.
If you feel offended in any way I don't apologize because you're clearly an idiot.
Unless you're Bush, Trump, or Palin. In that case you should feel pretty offended, but you're still an idiot.
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Sander Rossel wrote: We have the evil Empire (Republicans) vs. the Democrats.
You're half right. There are two evil empires (Republicans and Democrats), neither of whom represent more than a fraction of the population. Neither party has fielded a good candidate in several elections, and the current crop of idiots? Well, voting for the lesser evil is at an all time high (or low, depending on POV) in the next presidential election.
Sander Rossel wrote: Compare that to the Netherlands where we have around 15 parties (and we have 17-18 million people, go figure)!
I wish we had more political parties. With only two real parties, they are polarized at both ends of the idiot spectrum. If we had more parties? It would be far harder to differentiate between them and we *might* accidentally get some rational candidates ...
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Gjeltema wrote: a lot of contentious and far reaching rulings will be 4-4
That's a very lazy characterisation of how the Supreme Court works. Had Scalia's chair been empty throughout 2015 there would have been just 2 ties in a total of 15 decisions from January to July, for example. Although everybody gets terribly exercised about the presumed political bias of Supreme Court candidates the evidence suggests that is not nearly as important in practice as anyone imagines.
I am not a number. I am a ... no, wait!
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My statement is very specific and not, in fact, lazy as you contend.
The majority of contentious rulings that the Supreme Court issues will be 4-4. I challenge you to show otherwise.
The vast majority of SCOTUS rulings are 9-0 or 8-1 or 7-2, agreed, but they also cover rather mundane topics that are not particularly contentious amongst the vast majority of Americans, such as minutiae on bankruptcy law (holy crap they rule a lot on this topic), other esoteric financial topics, disputes with Native American tribes, and other things that typically don't get reported on.
As part of my job, I read all of the SCOTUS's rulings (I don't deny that I skim some  ), so I'm quite aware that most rulings are not 5-4. But very few really large impact ones that are politically controversial aren't.
Take a guess how the court is going to rule on Obama's immigration order, or Whole Woman's Health v. Lakey where they'll decide about Texas' abortion law, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin the affirmative action case, and Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association which is about teacher's unions possibly being forced to become opt-in for dues. I'm seeing some 4-4's on most of these if the Senate doesn't confirm a new justice.
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