"...the city of Moroni did sink into the depths of the sea..." (3 Nephi 8:9 pg. 422).
If thats true, then how come there are so many Morons still around? Wouldn't they have all died when the city sank into the ocean? ( and good riddance i might add)
I highly doubt its more efficient than turbines. Turbines run at about 40-60 % eifficiency. Since these junctions are using low grade heat, their efficiency woud be significanly lower. However, they could be used to augment the efficiency of turbines. Put these at the condenser and you may be able to boost overall turbine efficiency by 10% which is significant.
The obvious results will be that the appearance of the moon will change. It will not take long for that to happen either.
The Angular Resolution of the human eye is roughtly 1 arcminute. The moon is about 200k miles away at any given time. Thus, the smallest point one could see on the moons surface with the naked eye would be a completely black circle 58 miles in diameter on a white background. Since the stuff youre digging up is going to be the same color as the moon, chances are, you wont notice any difference. Even on earth strip mines dont get to be 58 miles in diameter.
So microsoft admits that it only costs them $10 to make another CD, and basically you are giving them the money for nothing. The $89 or $189 are pure profit, after all, they dont have to do anything except give you an activation code.
It's sad that producers have such a low opinion of viewers these days, that they choose to dumb down otherwise
intentionally texdured and compled material.
As I write this, I just got finished watching "Jaywalking" on the Tonight show. It was the thanksgiving episode, and this time Jay pitted people on the street vs first graders on thanksgiving knowledge. People on the street didnt know that the pilgrims came over on the mayflower, in 1620, landed at plymouth rock or wore hats with buckles (actually they probably didnt wear hats with buckles, but for the sake of tradition) People also didnt know that the first thanksgiving was between the pigrims and the indians. My favorite line went something like this:
Jay: So who was at the first thanksgiving?
inDUHvidual:It was the Pilgrims and um, i guess the white guys
Jay: So the pilgrims sat down with the white guys
inDUHvidual: yeah
Jay: So who were the pilgrims if they werent white guys?
inDUHvidual: They were the indians
Granted, Jay does all his stints in southern califronia, but keep in mind that most TV shows are made there too, and these are the type of viewers that TV execs think populate the rest of the country.
move into the mountains of Colorado without
running water or electricity and carry a shotgun... you'll get PLENTY of privacy.
Tell that to the unabomber. He couldnt even mail out a letter without people banging on his door, and then transporting his house to a secured facility.
Where in the US are you living? If its in some hicksville in Alabama, where "the war of northern agression" never ended, then ill buy that. but go to any size american city, and you wont have people stare at you. Hell, go to New York or LA, you could probably walk down the street naked and no one would stare at you. Depending on which part of town you were in, you might not even get arrested for it.
Shanghai was far cleaner than LA or New York at twice the population!
One word: Automobile. Once all the nasty point source pollution problems are cleaned up or moved to where you, as a foriegner, cant see them, I would say most cities in china are much cleaner in the US, simply because they dont have alot of automobiles.Give the people of Shanghai 8 million cars, especially unregulated ones, and your pollution problems are back. Similarly, Eliminate all the cars from LA, and the air will be crystal clear year round. The sad part is, the more westernized china becomes, the more cars there will be, and the more and more polluted cities like Shanghai will become.
I read the article, and youre right about the math adding part. If its 1.1 or 1.7 or somewhere in between thats not the important part. read very closely. they are giving away windows XP and, get this, refurbished laptops. not new laptops, refurbished ones. Estimated dollar value of each $5-600. I dont know about you, but i dont know a used laptop in that price range that will run windows XP. Your point about the development costs of XP is valid, but only to a point. MS needs to sell y units of XP to break even, every unit sold after then is just the cost of duping and packaging. Out of the $100-300 MS gets from an XP sale, maybe $1-2 goes to actually producing it. Im sure they recouped the full cost of development already. Plus its an even sweeter deal for MS if windows is preinstalled. They dont have to make duplicate copies, the box makers do that, and some of them even throw in their own manuals. So everything is profit. Im quite certain that they have already recouped their initial development costs and are just rolling in dough now. This is a win-win scenario for MS. They look good, they dont have to pay any money, and the prosecuters get to say: See, we punished the big bad monopoly. I was unaware that punishments could be win-win. Usually they are win-lose or lose-lose. It would be like making Osama Bin Ladens punishement to be comunity service as a flight school instructor.
At first i was going to blast you for being a troll, but then i realized that you may be right despite yourself. There is quite a bit of "fossil" fuel out in space, but its not petroleum. In fact i would wager your friend never mentioned the P word, and im absolutely certain that NASA didnt. you see, Natural gas is a so called "fossil" fuel, and natural gas is almost 100%, you guessed it, Methane. And Methane is one of the more common compunds in the solar system, since the four hydrogens and one carbon can get together all by themselves without any interference by life. In fact the first atmosphere of earth is thought to have been methane instead of oxygen and nitrogen. So your friend is right, there are fossil fuels out there, specifically in comets and cometary remnants, but dont expect oil. And dont expect to get rich mining it either, currently we have more methane than we know what to do with, it bubbbles up with oil, and most drilling rigs, at least in the ocean, burn it off, since its too expensive to capture and ship.
Damn, $1000 a lb? what the hell are you launching on? And please, tell NASA about it. They've had a stated goal for their next generation launch vehicle of $1000 a lb. Right now it costs about $10,000 a lb to launch on the space shuttle, or about $3-4000 a lb to launch on an unmanned rocket.
And although that still sounds expensive, it usually turns out that what is launched costs 5-10x
more than that to develop and build; so launch costs aren't the issue.
This figure is true regardless of what it costs to launch something. If it costs a dollar to launch something into orbit, it will cost about $10 to produce the thing being launched. The problem is engineering and volume. Say you have a satellite to produce. Its going to cost you $50 Million to launch it and if it broke down on orbit, it would take another launch to replace it. Youre going to be much more willing to spend alot of time and money to make darn sure the satellite will work for 10-15 years than if it cost $500 to launch it. If it cost $500 to launch a satellite, you wouldnt need to worry about station keeping, you wouldnt need to worry about rad hard hardware, you wouldnt need to worry about fault tolerent software. If it breaks, just throw another one up there. The cost of launch and the cost of satellites are linked. Launch costs cannot go down much further with current technology, any more than propeller planes can break the sound barrier. You are limited by the rocket equation. V=-g0*Isp*ln(r) where r is the ratio between the payload mass and the initial mass of the rocket. The best Isp rocket engine we can muster right now is 433 seconds. Until we can beat that and still have enough thrust to get off the ground, the current situation wil remain. We need a propulsion breakthrough, plain and simple.
Going to the bathroom in space is not as easy as it may at first appear. For example, the first astronauts, when they had to perform, um, Number 2 Had the advanced technology of the sticky lipped bag. It was essentially a plastic bag with sticky lips. Here are the instructions for use:
1:Open bag, remove toilet paper.
2: Stick bag on your ass.
3: Since gravity is important in fecal seperation, you have to use centripetal force to seperate the feces. Rotate your behind in a circular fashion to create the centripetal force and seperate the feces.
4: Remove bag and seal lips.
5: Due to the danger of bacterial growth and gas emmissions (there is a danger the bacteria will release so much gas the bag will explode) A Germicidal tablet has been included in the bag. Crush the tablet with your fingers, through the bag, then work into the fecal material thoughroly to ensure good contact with all bacteria.
6, stow the bag in a place where it wont float around the cabin.
Compared to that procedure, a million dollar toilet is worth it. Especially considering it had to be designed from scratch, since normal toilets would just spew water and whater was in the water all over the place. And you thought space was glamourous.
At first I thought this too, light travels at a constant speed, so wouldnt light years be universal everywhere? The key is Years. A year is a year only on earth, it is an earth specific. If it was the distance light travels in 10^12 vibrations of a cesium atom or something, then it would be universally constant. Presumably a year on K-PAX is different than earth, so a K-PAXian light year would be a different distance.
I'm sure its in the DCMA somewhere. Thats why we invented it, remember?
microsoft didnt invent the DMCA, that would have actually required INNOVATION. The music and movie industries invented it, MS is just embracing and extending.
besides, if we cant put together a base on the moon, what could possibly make anyone think we could do it on
mars? Replace moon with antarctica and mars with florida. Where would it be easier to set up a colony? The moon is like NYC, if you can make it there, youll make it anywhere. Principally because there is nothing on the moon. Its a big hunk of rock thats broiled in sunlight for 14 days then plunged into darkness for 14 days. All of its natural resources are chemically bound in the very rock. These resources, like oxygen, would require massive amounts of heating to extract. Hydrogen, except for a few places at the poles, is nonexistant. Mars on the other hand, while being a bit farther away, is a much more hospitible place. It is florida compared to the moon. It has an atmosphere. Its atmosphere is capable of protecting you from some cosmic rays and most solar radiation. It has water all over the place, possibly even liquid water. You can grow plants with a simple greenhouse aparatus, and the atmosphere is breatheable to plants. Go to www.marssociety.com and read some of zubrins books. Heinleins quote was actually "Low earth orbit is halfway to anywhere". The moon is a harsh mistress.
While I have no doubt that the rocketplanes test was a complete success, I do have some issues with its ultimate goal of low cost reusable orbital operations. Two 400lb rockets just arent going to cut it. Figure the plane wieghs in at 10 tons fully loaded, thats 20000 lbs of fuel, rocket and pilot, and wings. Wings are good for getting you up off the ground, which this demonstrated, but they really become a liability above say mach 3-4 and they are obviously completely useless once in space. Keep in mind that they only got up to about 160knots or maybe 200mph. Orbital velocity is 14000 mph. you need alot more oomph than 800 lbs of thrust to put you into a stable orbit.
Say, did you feel the same for the many innocent people killed in Iraq by americans? Did you feel the same for the Vietnamese who were killed/raped/tortured by your soldiers? Did you recently think about the situation in Palestina?
Are you really proud that some assholes took everything from a bunch of redskins and called it america? Great achievement, really!
1: We were at and to some extent still are, at war with Iraq. In war, people die, some innocent, some not. Im sure the Iraqi people felt the same way about our killing them as we would feel about their killing us. And if they dont feel the same, then shame on them. In times like this we are more than a country, we are a family, and yesterday quite a few members of that family died. When that ahppens you mourn, and you wish to seek vengance on those who perpetrated the act. Its the same in any country, in any city, in any family, on earth. Thats a part of being human, when one of your own dies, you feel bad.
As for teaching the US a lesson, Youre right, this did teach the US a lesson, but perhaps not the one that the terrorists were seeking. They wanted to prove that the US was weak, immoral, and when pressed would waffle. They wanted to prove that americans could not stomach large amounts of casualties in the support of the ideals we believe in. The lesson that was taught, however, is the value of those ideals, and how in the course of defending what we believe in, people die, sometimes in large numbers, but to give in to thos terrorists, to restrict freedom in the name of security, is to become exactly the same as the terrorists themselves.
Heres a tribute to those affected by the tragedies. Note that in the picture, despite the obvious catastrophe, the US flag is still flying. http://www.wam.umd.edu/~stecher/
Fire suppression systems are designed specifically to prevent a small to medium size fire from becoming a large fire. i dont care what kind of system you are talking about, from a fire extinguisher to a halon system, you put out fires when theyre small with fire suppression systems. If they get big, thats why we have fire departments. Regardless YOU CANT PUT OUT A JET FUEL FIRE WITH WATER! Putting water on a jet fuel fire is like putting water on a grease fire, you just spread it around, and dont put it out. The WTC had a sprinkler system im sure, and im sure they also had tanks of water on the roof in case the mains werent working for some reason. But when the plane went through each building, it most likely shattered the mains leading to the roof and all the fire suppression equipment. Even if the mains had remained intact, you couldnt have put out the jet fuel with the water. Granted, after the jet fuel burns out, you might have done it, but by that time, you have an immense fire over several floors, and you cant put it out with simple sprinklers, even if you had the water, theres just too much heat. There is no way, short of making the building half out of ice, and half out of steel, that you could have prevented the collapse after the fire started with so much jet fuel.
Although the original poster didnt know what he was talking about, he might have been on to something. if you use aluminum powder, in an oxygen free environment of course, and used the laser to create small droplets of molten aluminum, you could probably make something in the same fashion as they do now with plastic. The obstacles to development woudl be placing the powdered aluminum on the previous layer, and preventing explosions of powdered aluminum and oxygen. And of course the material properties of such constructed aluminum might be different than regular aluminum, but that would need to be tested after a machine was built.
Ok, they clearly say in the writup that they are referring to *STATIC* electricity. The stuff coming out of your wall is not static electricity. Granted, its made of the same stuff, but wall socket electricity has a much higher amperage than static electricity does. You can shock yourself with 10000V of static electricity just by rubing some slippers across a carpet, but since the amperage is only a few hundred thousandths of an amp the total power is low, and really the total power of a shock is where all the danger is. The warning "Danger, High Voltage" is a misnomer it should really be "Danger, High Power" Electric circuits, however, are much more sensitive to even low power electric shocks, thusly 200V and a few microamps can fry a circuit, while you dont even feel it.
Yes, except that then you coulld say, start up a local internet co/op in your neighborhood/apartment/housing project. Offer service for 30 bucks a month and if you get enough takers (approx 17 subscribers) you can afford a REAL T1 line to the net. With only 20 or so subscribers, chances are good that when you load up a webpage youre the only one doing so at that time. As long as no one is hosting linux distros, youre golden (and of course you can have a clause in your service contract to charge for thruput). Everyone gets cheap high speed internet access, and you get to make some money on the side.
Slashdot Mirror
If thats true, then how come there are so many Morons still around? Wouldn't they have all died when the city sank into the ocean? ( and good riddance i might add)
I highly doubt its more efficient than turbines. Turbines run at about 40-60 % eifficiency. Since these junctions are using low grade heat, their efficiency woud be significanly lower. However, they could be used to augment the efficiency of turbines. Put these at the condenser and you may be able to boost overall turbine efficiency by 10% which is significant.
The Angular Resolution of the human eye is roughtly 1 arcminute. The moon is about 200k miles away at any given time. Thus, the smallest point one could see on the moons surface with the naked eye would be a completely black circle 58 miles in diameter on a white background. Since the stuff youre digging up is going to be the same color as the moon, chances are, you wont notice any difference. Even on earth strip mines dont get to be 58 miles in diameter.
So microsoft admits that it only costs them $10 to make another CD, and basically you are giving them the money for nothing. The $89 or $189 are pure profit, after all, they dont have to do anything except give you an activation code.
intentionally texdured and compled material.
As I write this, I just got finished watching "Jaywalking" on the Tonight show. It was the thanksgiving episode, and this time Jay pitted people on the street vs first graders on thanksgiving knowledge. People on the street didnt know that the pilgrims came over on the mayflower, in 1620, landed at plymouth rock or wore hats with buckles (actually they probably didnt wear hats with buckles, but for the sake of tradition) People also didnt know that the first thanksgiving was between the pigrims and the indians. My favorite line went something like this:
Jay: So who was at the first thanksgiving?
inDUHvidual:It was the Pilgrims and um, i guess the white guys
Jay: So the pilgrims sat down with the white guys
inDUHvidual: yeah
Jay: So who were the pilgrims if they werent white guys?
inDUHvidual: They were the indians
Granted, Jay does all his stints in southern califronia, but keep in mind that most TV shows are made there too, and these are the type of viewers that TV execs think populate the rest of the country.
running water or electricity and carry a shotgun... you'll get PLENTY of privacy.
Tell that to the unabomber. He couldnt even mail out a letter without people banging on his door, and then transporting his house to a secured facility.
Where in the US are you living? If its in some hicksville in Alabama, where "the war of northern agression" never ended, then ill buy that. but go to any size american city, and you wont have people stare at you. Hell, go to New York or LA, you could probably walk down the street naked and no one would stare at you. Depending on which part of town you were in, you might not even get arrested for it.
One word: Automobile. Once all the nasty point source pollution problems are cleaned up or moved to where you, as a foriegner, cant see them, I would say most cities in china are much cleaner in the US, simply because they dont have alot of automobiles.Give the people of Shanghai 8 million cars, especially unregulated ones, and your pollution problems are back. Similarly, Eliminate all the cars from LA, and the air will be crystal clear year round. The sad part is, the more westernized china becomes, the more cars there will be, and the more and more polluted cities like Shanghai will become.
just click no whenever you get this window popping up, an youll have no problem.
I read the article, and youre right about the math adding part. If its 1.1 or 1.7 or somewhere in between thats not the important part. read very closely. they are giving away windows XP and, get this, refurbished laptops. not new laptops, refurbished ones. Estimated dollar value of each $5-600. I dont know about you, but i dont know a used laptop in that price range that will run windows XP. Your point about the development costs of XP is valid, but only to a point. MS needs to sell y units of XP to break even, every unit sold after then is just the cost of duping and packaging. Out of the $100-300 MS gets from an XP sale, maybe $1-2 goes to actually producing it. Im sure they recouped the full cost of development already. Plus its an even sweeter deal for MS if windows is preinstalled. They dont have to make duplicate copies, the box makers do that, and some of them even throw in their own manuals. So everything is profit. Im quite certain that they have already recouped their initial development costs and are just rolling in dough now. This is a win-win scenario for MS. They look good, they dont have to pay any money, and the prosecuters get to say: See, we punished the big bad monopoly. I was unaware that punishments could be win-win. Usually they are win-lose or lose-lose. It would be like making Osama Bin Ladens punishement to be comunity service as a flight school instructor.
At first i was going to blast you for being a troll, but then i realized that you may be right despite yourself. There is quite a bit of "fossil" fuel out in space, but its not petroleum. In fact i would wager your friend never mentioned the P word, and im absolutely certain that NASA didnt. you see, Natural gas is a so called "fossil" fuel, and natural gas is almost 100%, you guessed it, Methane. And Methane is one of the more common compunds in the solar system, since the four hydrogens and one carbon can get together all by themselves without any interference by life. In fact the first atmosphere of earth is thought to have been methane instead of oxygen and nitrogen. So your friend is right, there are fossil fuels out there, specifically in comets and cometary remnants, but dont expect oil. And dont expect to get rich mining it either, currently we have more methane than we know what to do with, it bubbbles up with oil, and most drilling rigs, at least in the ocean, burn it off, since its too expensive to capture and ship.
And although that still sounds expensive, it usually turns out that what is launched costs 5-10x
more than that to develop and build; so launch costs aren't the issue.
This figure is true regardless of what it costs to launch something. If it costs a dollar to launch something into orbit, it will cost about $10 to produce the thing being launched. The problem is engineering and volume. Say you have a satellite to produce. Its going to cost you $50 Million to launch it and if it broke down on orbit, it would take another launch to replace it. Youre going to be much more willing to spend alot of time and money to make darn sure the satellite will work for 10-15 years than if it cost $500 to launch it. If it cost $500 to launch a satellite, you wouldnt need to worry about station keeping, you wouldnt need to worry about rad hard hardware, you wouldnt need to worry about fault tolerent software. If it breaks, just throw another one up there. The cost of launch and the cost of satellites are linked. Launch costs cannot go down much further with current technology, any more than propeller planes can break the sound barrier. You are limited by the rocket equation. V=-g0*Isp*ln(r) where r is the ratio between the payload mass and the initial mass of the rocket. The best Isp rocket engine we can muster right now is 433 seconds. Until we can beat that and still have enough thrust to get off the ground, the current situation wil remain. We need a propulsion breakthrough, plain and simple.
1:Open bag, remove toilet paper.
2: Stick bag on your ass.
3: Since gravity is important in fecal seperation, you have to use centripetal force to seperate the feces. Rotate your behind in a circular fashion to create the centripetal force and seperate the feces.
4: Remove bag and seal lips.
5: Due to the danger of bacterial growth and gas emmissions (there is a danger the bacteria will release so much gas the bag will explode) A Germicidal tablet has been included in the bag. Crush the tablet with your fingers, through the bag, then work into the fecal material thoughroly to ensure good contact with all bacteria.
6, stow the bag in a place where it wont float around the cabin.
Compared to that procedure, a million dollar toilet is worth it. Especially considering it had to be designed from scratch, since normal toilets would just spew water and whater was in the water all over the place. And you thought space was glamourous.
At first I thought this too, light travels at a constant speed, so wouldnt light years be universal everywhere? The key is Years. A year is a year only on earth, it is an earth specific. If it was the distance light travels in 10^12 vibrations of a cesium atom or something, then it would be universally constant. Presumably a year on K-PAX is different than earth, so a K-PAXian light year would be a different distance.
Like oh, say, Slashdot.ORG
microsoft didnt invent the DMCA, that would have actually required INNOVATION. The music and movie industries invented it, MS is just embracing and extending.
besides, if we cant put together a base on the moon, what could possibly make anyone think we could do it on
mars? Replace moon with antarctica and mars with florida. Where would it be easier to set up a colony? The moon is like NYC, if you can make it there, youll make it anywhere. Principally because there is nothing on the moon. Its a big hunk of rock thats broiled in sunlight for 14 days then plunged into darkness for 14 days. All of its natural resources are chemically bound in the very rock. These resources, like oxygen, would require massive amounts of heating to extract. Hydrogen, except for a few places at the poles, is nonexistant. Mars on the other hand, while being a bit farther away, is a much more hospitible place. It is florida compared to the moon. It has an atmosphere. Its atmosphere is capable of protecting you from some cosmic rays and most solar radiation. It has water all over the place, possibly even liquid water. You can grow plants with a simple greenhouse aparatus, and the atmosphere is breatheable to plants. Go to www.marssociety.com and read some of zubrins books. Heinleins quote was actually "Low earth orbit is halfway to anywhere". The moon is a harsh mistress.
Sextupling is what the internet is all about!
While I have no doubt that the rocketplanes test was a complete success, I do have some issues with its ultimate goal of low cost reusable orbital operations. Two 400lb rockets just arent going to cut it. Figure the plane wieghs in at 10 tons fully loaded, thats 20000 lbs of fuel, rocket and pilot, and wings. Wings are good for getting you up off the ground, which this demonstrated, but they really become a liability above say mach 3-4 and they are obviously completely useless once in space. Keep in mind that they only got up to about 160knots or maybe 200mph. Orbital velocity is 14000 mph. you need alot more oomph than 800 lbs of thrust to put you into a stable orbit.
Are you really proud that some assholes took everything from a bunch of redskins and called it america? Great achievement, really!
1: We were at and to some extent still are, at war with Iraq. In war, people die, some innocent, some not. Im sure the Iraqi people felt the same way about our killing them as we would feel about their killing us. And if they dont feel the same, then shame on them. In times like this we are more than a country, we are a family, and yesterday quite a few members of that family died. When that ahppens you mourn, and you wish to seek vengance on those who perpetrated the act. Its the same in any country, in any city, in any family, on earth. Thats a part of being human, when one of your own dies, you feel bad.
As for teaching the US a lesson, Youre right, this did teach the US a lesson, but perhaps not the one that the terrorists were seeking. They wanted to prove that the US was weak, immoral, and when pressed would waffle. They wanted to prove that americans could not stomach large amounts of casualties in the support of the ideals we believe in. The lesson that was taught, however, is the value of those ideals, and how in the course of defending what we believe in, people die, sometimes in large numbers, but to give in to thos terrorists, to restrict freedom in the name of security, is to become exactly the same as the terrorists themselves.
Heres a tribute to those affected by the tragedies. Note that in the picture, despite the obvious catastrophe, the US flag is still flying. http://www.wam.umd.edu/~stecher/
Fire suppression systems are designed specifically to prevent a small to medium size fire from becoming a large fire. i dont care what kind of system you are talking about, from a fire extinguisher to a halon system, you put out fires when theyre small with fire suppression systems. If they get big, thats why we have fire departments. Regardless YOU CANT PUT OUT A JET FUEL FIRE WITH WATER! Putting water on a jet fuel fire is like putting water on a grease fire, you just spread it around, and dont put it out. The WTC had a sprinkler system im sure, and im sure they also had tanks of water on the roof in case the mains werent working for some reason. But when the plane went through each building, it most likely shattered the mains leading to the roof and all the fire suppression equipment. Even if the mains had remained intact, you couldnt have put out the jet fuel with the water. Granted, after the jet fuel burns out, you might have done it, but by that time, you have an immense fire over several floors, and you cant put it out with simple sprinklers, even if you had the water, theres just too much heat. There is no way, short of making the building half out of ice, and half out of steel, that you could have prevented the collapse after the fire started with so much jet fuel.
Although the original poster didnt know what he was talking about, he might have been on to something. if you use aluminum powder, in an oxygen free environment of course, and used the laser to create small droplets of molten aluminum, you could probably make something in the same fashion as they do now with plastic. The obstacles to development woudl be placing the powdered aluminum on the previous layer, and preventing explosions of powdered aluminum and oxygen. And of course the material properties of such constructed aluminum might be different than regular aluminum, but that would need to be tested after a machine was built.
Ok, they clearly say in the writup that they are referring to *STATIC* electricity. The stuff coming out of your wall is not static electricity. Granted, its made of the same stuff, but wall socket electricity has a much higher amperage than static electricity does. You can shock yourself with 10000V of static electricity just by rubing some slippers across a carpet, but since the amperage is only a few hundred thousandths of an amp the total power is low, and really the total power of a shock is where all the danger is. The warning "Danger, High Voltage" is a misnomer it should really be "Danger, High Power" Electric circuits, however, are much more sensitive to even low power electric shocks, thusly 200V and a few microamps can fry a circuit, while you dont even feel it.
Yes, except that then you coulld say, start up a local internet co/op in your neighborhood/apartment/housing project. Offer service for 30 bucks a month and if you get enough takers (approx 17 subscribers) you can afford a REAL T1 line to the net. With only 20 or so subscribers, chances are good that when you load up a webpage youre the only one doing so at that time. As long as no one is hosting linux distros, youre golden (and of course you can have a clause in your service contract to charge for thruput). Everyone gets cheap high speed internet access, and you get to make some money on the side.