There are many community theaters that show movies in between putting on plays and whatnot. There's one where I live that shows movies from about two months ago that are four dollars.
The number of people who go see "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo" would almost certainly not increase by any significant amount if the ticket price was drastically reduced. I'd bet that most people would not see that movie even if they were paid the ticket price instead.
I might not see it, but I'd buy a ticket. In fact, I'd buy out the entire theater.
Your friend is a complete moron. You can trivially do all that with a single code on the card.
Erm, except contact the person via the card, which is just flat-out impossible, as cards are not communication devices. If he meant 'look up the room from the card', than that is also trivial with a lookup code.
As he is completely wrong about the cards having that info on them to do 'those things', it's certainly possible he's wrong about the cards having any info on them at all.
I've never seen a magnetic strip system at a hotel that was even vaguely hooked to the billing system.
There probably are some that work together, but it would require the hotel to scrap their existing systems. So if the hotel got a billing system in 1995 and upgraded their locks in 1999, and then upgraded their billing in 2003...it's rather unlikely.
I always assumed they put a random number on them, and updated the locks to accept that random number. And when you check out, they reset the lock, but don't bother doing anything with your card until they give it out again.
a^2 + b^2 = c^2 is a theorem in the math universe or whatever you want to call the set of rules that is math.
It's already wrong in our real universe, assuming any curvature whatesoever. There quite a few math universes that try to explain a 3D universe, and the one where a^2 + b^2 = c^2 is called 'Euclidian' and does not actually explain ours.
Math is a set of rules. There are facts, there are accepted rules, there are theories, and there are even competing theories. Just like science.
However, it's not science, as it's not trying to describe the actual world, but a fictional 'math world', or, actually a set of different related worlds. Some with imaginary numbers, some with 50 dimensions, some where everything is transfinite, etc.
It's like talking about 'history' in LotR. You can do that, and you can do all sorts of analyse on it, and whatnot, but it is not actually real. Or 'sociology' on Klingons.
Some of these pretend worlds are helpful at explaining the real world. This is possibly a coincidence, or it's possible that one of these worlds is real.
However, right now, if a difference comes up between math and the real world, it is the real world that is 'incorrect'. (Well, it is scientists who are incorrectly using math to describle the real world, when that math does not actually do so.) The math is not incorrect, it is merely not the correct math to match the real universe.
Um, math isn't a 'theory'. Math is a set of self-contained and (hopefully) consistent rules.
There are theories in math, about the 'math universe' that math has created. However, math itself is not a theory, as it does not proport to predict anything except itself.
Now, scientific theories use this created universe to attempt to explain the world. However, if we discover a place in the universe where one pineapple plus one pineapple equals four pineapples and a goat, that doesn't make math 'unproven', because it never said that in the first place. It merely means that science can't use math anymore.(1)
Math says 'These are numbers, and if you do things with them you get these other numbers', and that's all it says. It doesn't say a damn thing about reality.
Geez, what are they teaching kids these days? What's next, 'language' as a theory? Maybe we can talk about the theory of 'typing' or 'hopscotch'. No wonder people are confused about what a theory is.
1) Incidentally, this has happened in quantum mechanics. Specifically, the math used there is non-communitive...p * q doesn't equal q * p. QM has to use matrix math.
Of course, now we're talking as if the jacket was operating as a giant battery, which drained into the person, and when they touched something, they sparked, it drained them, and the jacket started charging them again. Which means, yes, that the jacket could provide low amperage, and 'trickle-charge' the person...
And may be what the article was trying to imply, but is a very very silly concept. It would require a jacket that's electrically seperated into parts.
Static electricity normally is over the whole 'system', and I don't know of any way for a non-electrical system to impart 'part' of a charge, and when that drains provide another part. The only way that works is if the jacket is capable of holding a much much much higer charge than the person, in which case, yes, the resistence could limit it from discharging at a touch, assuming the touch was short enough.
Of course, considering how much charge a person can hold, to be unable to drain into him it would require some ungodly ammount of charge. We're way part normal static here, past 'hair standing on end' even.
That still doesn't explain what the article was talking about, however, as the best way to neutralize the jacket would be for the guy to hold onto something grounded for five seconds or whatever.
Pick any big company's mail solution (aside from Microsoft's), and you'll find something that's more managable, more scalable, better documented, and more featureful than anything the open source world can offer.
Oh, yes, Oracle's and IBM's mail servers are much better, because they have all sorts of groupware features. By the same logic, an airplane is the best car.
What is the best mail server? Not the best groupware server that can do mail, document management, workflow stuff, voice, content retention policies, etc. If I was asking you that, I would have said 'groupware server'.
Alternately, you can demonstrate that their mail handling is better than any FOSS, sans consideration of extra features that 99% of mail servers do not need.
Linux was a hobby OS and used only in small-time hosting operations before the big companies got involved.
And the reason it was used was...why? Why, because it was the best solution, duh. Saying it was a 'hobby OS' is just meaningless gibberish. It was perfectly functional well before any company started contributing code, and most code contributions by companies have been completely self-contained, things like filesystems and drivers designed to improve compability with the stuff.
The core systems are worked on by individuals exactly how they always have. The improvements from 2.0 to 2.6 have been made by the same people as always. Stuff like XFS and JFS is nice, but it's not what made Linux into what it is.
Apache only took off early because it was the upgrade path from NCSA httpd, which was the original standard. From there, many companies have been providing support through the ASF.
Oh no, you're not pull that crap on me. Anyone else could fall for it, but I used early competitors to Apache. Like Quarterdeck's web server and various MS offerings. Complete junk. And MS is the only company that has any plausible alternative to Apache at this point, and they have only 20% of the market.
And trying to attribute the selection of a web server to momentum is idiotic. People do not exchange documents that other web servers have to read. People write stuff themselves for their own web server. Yes, once they've got a lot of code, it's hard to change, but the original selection of a platform was made without any consideration of what people they talk with are using, unlike the selection of, oh, Microsoft Office.
Of course, some of IIS's 20% is momentum because they are a MS shop. But not in the other direction.
These days, ASP.NET and JSF look to be taking over, but Apple Webobjects has been around for some time. These are giant fully-tested and documented frameworks.
Yeah, let's all use ASP.NET, so Microsoft can fuck us over when they decide to move to ASP.SUPERDUPER. I'm sorry, but any company that would just write off the installed base of ASP code doesn't deserve mention in this discussion. No one can trust them as a development platform.
And Apple Webobjects is the greatest invention since bread, but it's not doing the same thing as PHP. (Which, incidentally, is also completely documented, despite what you appear to think.) PHP is a programming language. Webobjects is, as you say, a framework. Comparing PHP and Webobjects like trying to compare Perl and.NET, or C++ and POSIX.
However, you can compare the languages that Webobjects uses with PHP, and Webobjects fails simply because embedding its code in web pages is so cumbersome. Using WOD for, oh, a simple login is incredibly annoying.
Yes, if you're building applications, you might want Webobjects, and you'd certainly want it if you were ever stepping outside the HTML into Java. But very few people build 'applications' in PHP anyway.
As for JSP, you're insane if you think that's better than PHP in any way. Yes, it can hook into Java servlets. And now PHP can also, although admittedly that's still not as smooth as it should be. That pretty much negates the sole reason to use JSP over PHP.
Are you stupid or something? My point was that open source are the best in that field, and both the products you mentioned are open source. (Well, qmail has a very crappy license, and probably fails the 'open source' test, but it's close.)
Arguing by demonstrating points the parent was making. That's certainly an...interesting method of debate.
Anyone who thinks the amount of unsupported dead pages with OSS projects on them has anything to do with the quanity and usability of OSS is a moron.
Here's a quick question: How many dead blogs are there? A hell of a lot. Does this mean reading blogs is illogical? Um, no, not for that reason.
What matters is if used software get abandoned. A hell of a lot of it is abandoned before it is even usable, much less before it has a userbase. This is not important in the least. It clogs up google and wastes disk space, and that's it.
I'd like someone to name a serious OSS project with actual users that just vanished. Where the devs quit and no one else picked it up.
Just one. Come on.
About the closest you'll get is when one program won and another lost, or with versioning. (Apache 1.3 vs. 2.0, for example.) The devs will basically decide the new thing is better, and move to it.
Almost always, the new thing will quickly be able to do everything the old one could. It migh suck if you've got custom hacks on the old one, but that's exactly why you should return changes.
People will try to convince you that people can make money with OSS.
This is completely moot. OSS exists, period. People write it, period. This will continue to be true barring laws to the contrary, and I suspect even then.
Talking about where people can make money at it or not is like a world where gold suddenly falls from the sky, and people sit around talking about if the 'free gold' is going to succeed or not, because damned if they can see any way that people will make money at it.
Just because something doesn't make economical sense doesn't mean it can't happen, or it won't effect an industry. Things can happen that can destroy an industry for no apparent reason at all.
Now, this isn't to say I think the software industry is endangered. However, there is no logical reason to think it isn't, and there's no logical reason to think that if it is, OSS will just magically go away.
While it's nice fable to believe, industries do not magically transition to other things, keeping all their income and employees intact. Yes, if people buy cars instead of horse-drawn carriages, the buggy-whip industry can try to transition to seatbelts. However, if someone invents magical self-relicating teeth-cleaning nanobots and sets them free, the toothbrush industry is screwed.
It's interesting how PHP is 'complete junk', yet you have not named any closed-source software that's better.
The only thing that's even vaguely in the same category and better is Cold Fusion, but if you think the system requirements are anywhere near the same you are insane.
Oh, and I like how you admit that Linux (at least as a server) and Apache are both better than any alternatives for what they do, yet assert that it's a commerical organization that have made them this way. That is just flat-out wrong, and a trivial knowledge of the timeline of those projects would have shown that.
And here's a fun question for you: What's the best mail server? (Mail servers that must operate behind other mail servers to be on the public internet do not count.)
Now what's the best software firewall? (And it's trivially provable that the Linux firewall didn't come from a company supporting Linux...it didn't even come from Linux at all, it's from the BSDs.)
The proper way to handle critique is to not respond anything, ignore the rubbish and improve on the real issues, then silently let the results speak for themselves.
Until, of course, you find yourself being forbidden to develop OSS by law.
Or did you not read the article?
Re:a car that brakes when...
on
VW Goes USB
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· Score: 1
How about the cooling system? I've had that fail on a few cars, and not only did that cause rather serious problems, the car took its own sweet time about bothering to inform me of it, too.
How about the lights? Why isn't there something that tell us if we try to send current through a light and it doesn't complete the circuit?
Of course, they fail to detect when a damn spark plug isn't firing, so asking them to detect when a light isn't working is absurd.
Cars absolutely refuse to communicate with us for some reason. They have some idiot lights that come on when something is really wrong, and they sometimes have a few gauges that aren't that useful and we have to check all the time.
I shouldn't have to read a gauge and realize if it's showing 12 volts when the car's running, my alternator is broken, despite that being within the 'allowable area'. The car should know it's supposed to have 15-16 volts when the engine is on, and 12 when it's not, and tell me if, and only if, it's different, at which point it should tell me enough that I can diagnose the problem if I know stuff about cars, and at least figure out the severity if I don't.
Re:a car that brakes when...
on
VW Goes USB
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· Score: 1
I know quite a lot about cars. You, OTOH, are apparently an idiot who didn't get that I said power steering and brakes fail if your engine dies, which they do, because they rely on the engine to provide pressure. The power assist fails. Normal brakes and steering still function fine, however, it is hard to stop the car or steer with them.
And nothing you said gives the slightest explanation of why there couldn't be an emergency electrical pump to cut in and provide hydralic pressure for power steering and brakes for another thirty seconds. Or, hell, for operating the car while in neutral without starting it at all.
Re:a car that brakes when...
on
VW Goes USB
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That's nothing.
I want a car where all primary functions are on their own completely independant systems.
For example, why on earth do power steering and brakes fail if the engine does? Within the last decade, they've made amazing advances in the field of hydrolics, and now they can build a pump that operates solely on electricity. That's right, folks, no more will you have to buy gasoline for your water pump at your well!
No, seriously. Cars have almost no failsafes. One or two in the brake system, but that's about it.
I have an 92 (?) Pontiac Sunbird, and used to use a tape adapter for line in. Sadly, the tape player shorted out one day. (And kept my damn tape adapter.)
I went on the net, found a wiring diagram of the input, and built a box. (From an old parallel printer buffer box, of all things.) Not only do I have two RCA plugs for line-in, I have a switch that closes the 'tape in player' contact, which switch the radio from radio to 'tape'.
And I ripped the board out of a car DC adapter thingy to provide 4.5 volts out, which is what what most portable CD players want, and stuck that in there. That wasn't just for fun, it ensures the CD player goes on and off with the radio. (And with the switch, too.) So I can't accidently leave it on, and the adapter doesn't waste any power happen merely because it's plugged, even without it powering anything.
Sadly, I appear to have misplaced the little plug at the end of it for my Walkman, and Radio Shack inexplicably want 3 dollars for something that 10 of them come with a 12 dollar adapter. I guess I'll just buy another adapter and take the plug from it.
It really wasn't that complicated, even a complete incompetant at wiring like me could do it. While many cars do not have 'line-in', they usually have something at the right level to accept a line in, just no plugs for it.
The trick, of course, would be getting an adapter to plug in. I was in luck as I had a fried tape deck to cut the plug off of.
And you might have to make a choice between an already existing tape deck input and a line-in, or do rather a lot more wiring than I did so you can switch back and forth.
Even if he did manage to get some insanely high voltage by magic, while it would indeed arch and melt stuff, it would only do it once.
He'd walk too close to a lamp or an electrical outlet, arc a foot of electricity, melting nearby plastic, catching random things on fire, at least tripping a breaker and probably frying the electrical system of the office and certainly killing himself, but then he's stop. And not just because he'd be dead, he'd have no power left.
You can't 'keep' giving off enough electricty to melt plastic unless you're carrying around a power line main or something. It's like talking about someone soaked in gasoline who's now a human flamethrower...it doesn't work that way. He might catch on fire, he might create an explosion under the right conditions, but he's not going to walk around shooting off little jets of fire.
Is it too late to point out that electrical storage systems being 'low in amps' is sheer nonsense? Amps only mean anything with the movement of electricity.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many community theaters that show movies in between putting on plays and whatnot. There's one where I live that shows movies from about two months ago that are four dollars.
I might not see it, but I'd buy a ticket. In fact, I'd buy out the entire theater.
Erm, except contact the person via the card, which is just flat-out impossible, as cards are not communication devices. If he meant 'look up the room from the card', than that is also trivial with a lookup code.
As he is completely wrong about the cards having that info on them to do 'those things', it's certainly possible he's wrong about the cards having any info on them at all.
I've never seen a magnetic strip system at a hotel that was even vaguely hooked to the billing system.
There probably are some that work together, but it would require the hotel to scrap their existing systems. So if the hotel got a billing system in 1995 and upgraded their locks in 1999, and then upgraded their billing in 2003...it's rather unlikely.
I always assumed they put a random number on them, and updated the locks to accept that random number. And when you check out, they reset the lock, but don't bother doing anything with your card until they give it out again.
It's already wrong in our real universe, assuming any curvature whatesoever. There quite a few math universes that try to explain a 3D universe, and the one where a^2 + b^2 = c^2 is called 'Euclidian' and does not actually explain ours.
Math is a set of rules. There are facts, there are accepted rules, there are theories, and there are even competing theories. Just like science.
However, it's not science, as it's not trying to describe the actual world, but a fictional 'math world', or, actually a set of different related worlds. Some with imaginary numbers, some with 50 dimensions, some where everything is transfinite, etc.
It's like talking about 'history' in LotR. You can do that, and you can do all sorts of analyse on it, and whatnot, but it is not actually real. Or 'sociology' on Klingons.
Some of these pretend worlds are helpful at explaining the real world. This is possibly a coincidence, or it's possible that one of these worlds is real.
However, right now, if a difference comes up between math and the real world, it is the real world that is 'incorrect'. (Well, it is scientists who are incorrectly using math to describle the real world, when that math does not actually do so.) The math is not incorrect, it is merely not the correct math to match the real universe.
I'm stealing this for my .sig
There are theories in math, about the 'math universe' that math has created. However, math itself is not a theory, as it does not proport to predict anything except itself.
Now, scientific theories use this created universe to attempt to explain the world. However, if we discover a place in the universe where one pineapple plus one pineapple equals four pineapples and a goat, that doesn't make math 'unproven', because it never said that in the first place. It merely means that science can't use math anymore.(1)
Math says 'These are numbers, and if you do things with them you get these other numbers', and that's all it says. It doesn't say a damn thing about reality.
Geez, what are they teaching kids these days? What's next, 'language' as a theory? Maybe we can talk about the theory of 'typing' or 'hopscotch'. No wonder people are confused about what a theory is.
1) Incidentally, this has happened in quantum mechanics. Specifically, the math used there is non-communitive...p * q doesn't equal q * p. QM has to use matrix math.
Of course, now we're talking as if the jacket was operating as a giant battery, which drained into the person, and when they touched something, they sparked, it drained them, and the jacket started charging them again. Which means, yes, that the jacket could provide low amperage, and 'trickle-charge' the person...
And may be what the article was trying to imply, but is a very very silly concept. It would require a jacket that's electrically seperated into parts.
Static electricity normally is over the whole 'system', and I don't know of any way for a non-electrical system to impart 'part' of a charge, and when that drains provide another part. The only way that works is if the jacket is capable of holding a much much much higer charge than the person, in which case, yes, the resistence could limit it from discharging at a touch, assuming the touch was short enough.
Of course, considering how much charge a person can hold, to be unable to drain into him it would require some ungodly ammount of charge. We're way part normal static here, past 'hair standing on end' even.
That still doesn't explain what the article was talking about, however, as the best way to neutralize the jacket would be for the guy to hold onto something grounded for five seconds or whatever.
Oh, yes, Oracle's and IBM's mail servers are much better, because they have all sorts of groupware features. By the same logic, an airplane is the best car.
What is the best mail server? Not the best groupware server that can do mail, document management, workflow stuff, voice, content retention policies, etc. If I was asking you that, I would have said 'groupware server'.
Alternately, you can demonstrate that their mail handling is better than any FOSS, sans consideration of extra features that 99% of mail servers do not need.
Linux was a hobby OS and used only in small-time hosting operations before the big companies got involved.
And the reason it was used was...why? Why, because it was the best solution, duh. Saying it was a 'hobby OS' is just meaningless gibberish. It was perfectly functional well before any company started contributing code, and most code contributions by companies have been completely self-contained, things like filesystems and drivers designed to improve compability with the stuff.
The core systems are worked on by individuals exactly how they always have. The improvements from 2.0 to 2.6 have been made by the same people as always. Stuff like XFS and JFS is nice, but it's not what made Linux into what it is.
Apache only took off early because it was the upgrade path from NCSA httpd, which was the original standard. From there, many companies have been providing support through the ASF.
Oh no, you're not pull that crap on me. Anyone else could fall for it, but I used early competitors to Apache. Like Quarterdeck's web server and various MS offerings. Complete junk. And MS is the only company that has any plausible alternative to Apache at this point, and they have only 20% of the market.
And trying to attribute the selection of a web server to momentum is idiotic. People do not exchange documents that other web servers have to read. People write stuff themselves for their own web server. Yes, once they've got a lot of code, it's hard to change, but the original selection of a platform was made without any consideration of what people they talk with are using, unlike the selection of, oh, Microsoft Office.
Of course, some of IIS's 20% is momentum because they are a MS shop. But not in the other direction.
These days, ASP.NET and JSF look to be taking over, but Apple Webobjects has been around for some time. These are giant fully-tested and documented frameworks.
Yeah, let's all use ASP.NET, so Microsoft can fuck us over when they decide to move to ASP.SUPERDUPER. I'm sorry, but any company that would just write off the installed base of ASP code doesn't deserve mention in this discussion. No one can trust them as a development platform.
And Apple Webobjects is the greatest invention since bread, but it's not doing the same thing as PHP. (Which, incidentally, is also completely documented, despite what you appear to think.) PHP is a programming language. Webobjects is, as you say, a framework. Comparing PHP and Webobjects like trying to compare Perl and .NET, or C++ and POSIX.
However, you can compare the languages that Webobjects uses with PHP, and Webobjects fails simply because embedding its code in web pages is so cumbersome. Using WOD for, oh, a simple login is incredibly annoying.
Yes, if you're building applications, you might want Webobjects, and you'd certainly want it if you were ever stepping outside the HTML into Java. But very few people build 'applications' in PHP anyway.
As for JSP, you're insane if you think that's better than PHP in any way. Yes, it can hook into Java servlets. And now PHP can also, although admittedly that's still not as smooth as it should be. That pretty much negates the sole reason to use JSP over PHP.
Arguing by demonstrating points the parent was making. That's certainly an...interesting method of debate.
Erm, if it's patented, than that's exactly a reason it could be released...no one could copy it anyway!
Here's a quick question: How many dead blogs are there? A hell of a lot. Does this mean reading blogs is illogical? Um, no, not for that reason.
What matters is if used software get abandoned. A hell of a lot of it is abandoned before it is even usable, much less before it has a userbase. This is not important in the least. It clogs up google and wastes disk space, and that's it.
I'd like someone to name a serious OSS project with actual users that just vanished. Where the devs quit and no one else picked it up.
Just one. Come on.
About the closest you'll get is when one program won and another lost, or with versioning. (Apache 1.3 vs. 2.0, for example.) The devs will basically decide the new thing is better, and move to it.
Almost always, the new thing will quickly be able to do everything the old one could. It migh suck if you've got custom hacks on the old one, but that's exactly why you should return changes.
OSS has fans. These fans sometimes have stupid sites.
However, the actual places you get OSS are usually quite professional.
This is completely moot. OSS exists, period. People write it, period. This will continue to be true barring laws to the contrary, and I suspect even then.
Talking about where people can make money at it or not is like a world where gold suddenly falls from the sky, and people sit around talking about if the 'free gold' is going to succeed or not, because damned if they can see any way that people will make money at it.
Just because something doesn't make economical sense doesn't mean it can't happen, or it won't effect an industry. Things can happen that can destroy an industry for no apparent reason at all.
Now, this isn't to say I think the software industry is endangered. However, there is no logical reason to think it isn't, and there's no logical reason to think that if it is, OSS will just magically go away.
While it's nice fable to believe, industries do not magically transition to other things, keeping all their income and employees intact. Yes, if people buy cars instead of horse-drawn carriages, the buggy-whip industry can try to transition to seatbelts. However, if someone invents magical self-relicating teeth-cleaning nanobots and sets them free, the toothbrush industry is screwed.
The only thing that's even vaguely in the same category and better is Cold Fusion, but if you think the system requirements are anywhere near the same you are insane.
Oh, and I like how you admit that Linux (at least as a server) and Apache are both better than any alternatives for what they do, yet assert that it's a commerical organization that have made them this way. That is just flat-out wrong, and a trivial knowledge of the timeline of those projects would have shown that.
And here's a fun question for you: What's the best mail server? (Mail servers that must operate behind other mail servers to be on the public internet do not count.)
Now what's the best software firewall? (And it's trivially provable that the Linux firewall didn't come from a company supporting Linux...it didn't even come from Linux at all, it's from the BSDs.)
Until, of course, you find yourself being forbidden to develop OSS by law.
Or did you not read the article?
How about the lights? Why isn't there something that tell us if we try to send current through a light and it doesn't complete the circuit?
Of course, they fail to detect when a damn spark plug isn't firing, so asking them to detect when a light isn't working is absurd.
Cars absolutely refuse to communicate with us for some reason. They have some idiot lights that come on when something is really wrong, and they sometimes have a few gauges that aren't that useful and we have to check all the time.
I shouldn't have to read a gauge and realize if it's showing 12 volts when the car's running, my alternator is broken, despite that being within the 'allowable area'. The car should know it's supposed to have 15-16 volts when the engine is on, and 12 when it's not, and tell me if, and only if, it's different, at which point it should tell me enough that I can diagnose the problem if I know stuff about cars, and at least figure out the severity if I don't.
And nothing you said gives the slightest explanation of why there couldn't be an emergency electrical pump to cut in and provide hydralic pressure for power steering and brakes for another thirty seconds. Or, hell, for operating the car while in neutral without starting it at all.
I want a car where all primary functions are on their own completely independant systems.
For example, why on earth do power steering and brakes fail if the engine does? Within the last decade, they've made amazing advances in the field of hydrolics, and now they can build a pump that operates solely on electricity. That's right, folks, no more will you have to buy gasoline for your water pump at your well!
No, seriously. Cars have almost no failsafes. One or two in the brake system, but that's about it.
I went on the net, found a wiring diagram of the input, and built a box. (From an old parallel printer buffer box, of all things.) Not only do I have two RCA plugs for line-in, I have a switch that closes the 'tape in player' contact, which switch the radio from radio to 'tape'.
And I ripped the board out of a car DC adapter thingy to provide 4.5 volts out, which is what what most portable CD players want, and stuck that in there. That wasn't just for fun, it ensures the CD player goes on and off with the radio. (And with the switch, too.) So I can't accidently leave it on, and the adapter doesn't waste any power happen merely because it's plugged, even without it powering anything.
Sadly, I appear to have misplaced the little plug at the end of it for my Walkman, and Radio Shack inexplicably want 3 dollars for something that 10 of them come with a 12 dollar adapter. I guess I'll just buy another adapter and take the plug from it.
It really wasn't that complicated, even a complete incompetant at wiring like me could do it. While many cars do not have 'line-in', they usually have something at the right level to accept a line in, just no plugs for it.
The trick, of course, would be getting an adapter to plug in. I was in luck as I had a fried tape deck to cut the plug off of.
And you might have to make a choice between an already existing tape deck input and a line-in, or do rather a lot more wiring than I did so you can switch back and forth.
Bah, any idiot can do that run in two parsecs.
He'd walk too close to a lamp or an electrical outlet, arc a foot of electricity, melting nearby plastic, catching random things on fire, at least tripping a breaker and probably frying the electrical system of the office and certainly killing himself, but then he's stop. And not just because he'd be dead, he'd have no power left.
You can't 'keep' giving off enough electricty to melt plastic unless you're carrying around a power line main or something. It's like talking about someone soaked in gasoline who's now a human flamethrower...it doesn't work that way. He might catch on fire, he might create an explosion under the right conditions, but he's not going to walk around shooting off little jets of fire.
Is it too late to point out that electrical storage systems being 'low in amps' is sheer nonsense? Amps only mean anything with the movement of electricity.
However, as there are women here, you could just ask them.
I'm reminded of the time on Star Trek where Kirk makes a captain's log that starts with 'unknown to us...'