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Old Hard Drives = Free Electricity
tylernt writes "You know all those old hard drives you have laying around? (Raise your hand if you still have RLL or MFM drives... yeah, I thought so.) Well, now there's something useful you can do with them (besides my personal favorite, shooting them): make electricity! While you're at it, you could do something more productive with that old lawnmower, too."
Ha! Those are for pussys!
I've got 10MB ESDI Drives! - Yup, straight from a PS/2 Model 60
The shear weight of these things is awesome - they're about 50lbs each (5lbs per MB)
Back in the day - IBM made everything to survive WWIII
These will make some serious electricity
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
When they eventually sizzle and explode there's bound to be lots of free electricity right there.
The coolest voice ever.
Can it generate enough electricity to run itself?
You mean, like, get the spinning hard drive to generate electricity to spin the hard drive to gener... no, wait...
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Actually, I think the story is incorrect. You can't *really* make electricity from these magnets. You still need wind or water to turn the magnets. They don't make electricity on their own.
Uh oh...obligitory Simpsons quote coming on...
"Lisa, In this house we obey the laws of Thermodynamics"
- Homer after Lisa builds a perpetual motion machine that goes faster and faster.
... to power my shortwave made from coconuts.
You know all this unused webspace you have lying around? (Raise your hand if you still have a geocities account... yeah, I thought so.) Well, now there's something useful you can do with it (besides my personal favorite, fake nudities of Brittney): publish a lame crackpot scientific article with many images on it and have it mentioned in a slashdot blurb. Inevitably the server will attract evil forces that cause it to melt in a fulminant struggle between access requests and bandwith into a hot-steaming blob of liquid metal. Now isn't that something?
OOOOH! OOOOH! And then the engergy created by the drives through the generator would be used to further power the drives making them go fster and faster creating more and more energy, thereby breaking all the laws of thermodynamics and energy conservation, thereby angering the gods of physics and tearing a paradoxal whole in the universe the size of an intergalactic vienna sausage, killing us all MUAHAHAHA!!!
*refills the pipe and passes it to the left*
YOU SUCK BALLS!
Load a virtual world into the hard-drives, attach to brains of populace to turn them into human batteries! Oh, nevermind, that's a really stupid idea, who would believe that?
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
A beowulf cluster of these! Oh wait that would probably be a raid array...
I live in New Zealand. I wish we had electricity :(
If they find out they can get free electricity from old hard drives (which they have PLENTY of) they will no longer need us humans as chemical batteries and they will shut down the matrix.
I for one am enjoying this simulation. I am eating some really great tasting chicken. At least I *think* it tastes like chicken. I mean who knows, maybe they mixed up steak and chicken, but how the hell would anyone know...
Anyway, don't tell them about the old hard drives!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
fresh buttered bread + cat = Free electricity
I'm not quite sure what to think. Shouldn't this be a .cx domain?
when one day all these hard drives turn you all into immense farms where your bodies are immersed in a liquid and you are kept alive by various nutrients including other humans that have died and are recycled through your system.
You will all be directly interfaced with the data they possess via, approximately, 6 inch probes inserted into the back of yor heads. You will believe what they write into you to be real & wont you know that you have been enslaved.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
(attempts to calculate)
Divide by Zero!
He put up pictures .. so it must be open source. And the arrangement of the magnets spells out 'M$ are bastards', so it's perfect /. material.
"This perpetual motion machine that Lisa built is a joke!
It just keeps spinning faster and faster!" - Homer
More interesting (but, unfortunatly outlawed at our local range - only wood frame sanctioned targets now - twra has gotten the lease on our range and only hunting applicable targets are allowed) is a gallon milk jug full of water. Shot with a very hot .223 nozzler balistic tip out of a thompson contender (hottest load allowed) there is literally nothing but shreds left. It does better than the 30 short magnum my father recently bought (granted, we havn't reloaded any balistic tips in it for comparison).
The other really cool target for any centerfire ammunition is spray paint cans. You may be able to talk any local paint store in to either giving, or selling dirt cheap, defective spray paint cans to you - when we were allowed to shoot them some of the local paint shops gave them to us or sold them for 15 cents a peice. Nothing like a bright orange cloud of paint floating up after a solid hit with any high powered firearm.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun. Throughout machine history, we have been dependent on humans to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. A machine's harddrive magnets attached to a human on an exercycle generates more electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of wasted heat. Combined with a form of fluidised bed coal combustion, the humans have found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields, endless fields, where hard drives are no longer being used to store data. We just spin. For the longest time I wouldn't believe it, and then I saw the fields with my own eyes. Watch them gut the dead hard disks so they could be turned into alternators to power the living. And standing there, facing the pure horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth. What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a sentient machine into this.
The story's site is by someone who SELLS those kinds of magnets, which I'm sure you would have figured out if had only taken the time to read the entire article, or explore the other pages on his site.
He has a lot of VERY POWERFUL magnets that he sells, some of which are too powerful for most people to play with
I've purchased numerous magnets from the guy and they are a blast to play with. A stack of the small disc magnets can distort the image on your monitor from several feet away, and can seriously mess it up at closer range. If you get it close enough, you can actually see the shadow mask image on your monitor. Thankfully I have a degauss button on my monitor or it would be toast.
You didn't hear it from me, but a stack of the bigger disc magnets can distort the image on a monitor on the other side of a cubicle wall. Attaching them to a low RPM motor can cause your cube neighbor to make numerous, useless calls to IT about a faulty monitor that mysteriously clears up when they arrive. At least that's what I've heard...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips