Maybe also satirizing the way veal is produced... Except applying it to cute kittens instead of cows. Hey, the site might even be protesting animal cruelty by showing how offensive it'd be to treat kittens the same way people treat calves. Yeah, that's the ticket!
I've been thinking a lot in the wake of the California Energy Crisis, and one of the thoughts I've come up with is this:
Why can't one build power plants using gas turbines instead of boilers? I mean, the article said that the FastShip uses five turbines producing 250 MW each... In aggregate, that's 1.25 GW if you ran the output shafts to an electrical generator. After you get the power off the turbine, you can collect the combustion heat using a heat exchanger and use the steam from that to produce some additional power. And as the parent of this post said, with the proper baffles and muffling (the heat exchanger would probably help in this area), the noise pollution is as near zero as anything else. Gas turbines can probably be designed to run on just about any liquid or gas-phase fuel you'd care to mention from hydrogen to kerosene, so fluctuations in fuel cost wouldn't have nearly the catastrophic effect on operations. And gas turbines are probably much cleaner than a coal plant at the same level of power output.
The only question is, what am I missing? I haven't been able to talk to anyone who would know what the relative efficiencies of boilers and gas turbines are, so I have no clue what the economics are as far as fuel usage. I'm also not sure if, say, 2 GW (eight turbines in a plant) is anywhere near the type of capacity that current power plants operate at. Can anyone give me an evaluation on whether I'm in the right ballpark or not?
Am I the only one who smells a back-room deal between Intel and IBM? IBM decides to try putting rather innovative low-power chips by an upstart company... Then a while later, they announce that they're not going to use them after all. A while after that, Intel comes out with a low-power chip and IBM decides to use it for the same application that would have been filled by the new company's chip.
I'm very suspicious of this flow of events... Intel hears that IBM is thinking about using a chip by another possible competitor, sends a representative over to do some arm twisting, bribing, etc. etc... "Just wait long enough for us to get our low-power PIII out the door..."
Except that those servers may be impossible to find... I'm sure Verant sends nasty Cease and Decists every time they find one. And anyway, the Everquest client software license forbids you to connect to such servers. --Fesh
Maybe because getting through all the red tape, court proceedings and other crap just to get custody is too much work? It's a lot easier to just have your own. Do you think many couples would be allowed to have kids if you had to get a license to reproduce?
Remember Chex Quest? They turned Doom into a gigantic ad for Chex. It was good for a laugh, though. "Hmm. I wonder what type of zorcher I'm going to get next?" I swear, that's the only game (if you can call it that) I've ever seen that featured an electric spork as a weapon...
The credit card companies don't care about their customers, they don't even want to prosecute credit card fraud. We don't have any rights as consumers. We are just that, consumers, not human begings!
We consumers are not the CRA's customers. The banks and other people/organizations who make the decisions that affect our lives based on that information are their customers. We don't even register to them anymore than a patch of ground's ecology registers to a mining company. Because that's basically what we are, as far as they're concerned.
No stockholders to pull due diligence on you? Or other people who would stand to collect if you bankrupted?
--Fesh
Re:What IT Is And Isn't
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 1
You know, this is exactly what I was thinking... It'd be amazing if he's invented Niven's "stepping disks". And if you know what I'm talking about, you know how those affected city design.
However, it's probably wishful thinking. It's funny how a lot of my adolescent fantasies involved teleporters... Hrm. That was probably TMI.
Gelsinger was the guy who was Intel's lead public proponent of the Processor Serial Number. I saw his name come up numerous times when I was researching a paper on the privacy implications for an ethics class. Just so you know who we're dealing with here.
Er... Just to correct you there... Price goes up with demand. It goes down with supply If the manufacturers can't produce enough to meet the demand when switchover comes, the prices will go through the roof...
I tried to post this one last year... I first saw it on rec.aviation.military, where the author of the paper (Carlo Copp) often posts. He's got some other interesting ideas as well, such as using lasers for remote-sensing. Seeing as this is way late in the stream, I'm not going to bother to look up the links...
Hate to dissapoint you, but if you'd looked at the article, the guy in the letter says that the new SCSI standards already have such measures in place.
So how much money would NetZero get if a site put two different ads in the same pop-up? Would they have to pay twice?
*shivers in horror*
--Fesh
Re:Big business and online music.
on
Nazis on Napster
·
· Score: 1
What if the companies are defacto government agencies because they buy the laws? For your argument to sway me, you have to prevent all corporations from having any influence on any aspect of government.
Speaking of which... Is TMI still hanging on with that one coolant pump, or have they found some way to supplement it? Last I heard (admittedly several years ago) was that if that pump were to fail, TMI would complete the meltdown that has been held off for all these years.
Hmm. Maybe it's time to do some googling.
--Fesh
Re:Use encryption needlessly, constantly! [MUCH MO
on
The Encryption Wars
·
· Score: 1
Any change has to happen transparently. She has to send the letter to joe@foo.com, the public key for joe@foo.com needs to be automatically looked up in one or more global databases, and it needs to be encrypted and sent. All without her even noticing. If joe@foo.com hasn't registered a public key then it should tell her the mail is insecure and to tell the other user to register a public key. The other user should also get a warning. Probably at the start of the email.
Why ask a central server? Modify sendmail to include a key generator and database and put together an encrypting/decrypting email client that interfaces tightly and securely with the new sendmail. The email client queries keys.foo.com (the sendmail database) for joe's public key and encrypts the message accordingly. The fun part is that the public key is created and assigned when joe's account is created on the mailserver. From then on, the encryption process is transparent.
All this requires is a little marketing at the ISP level... Anything I'm missing here?
I just had a really sad thought... There's this system of government out there somewhere which holds that a person's posessions belong to "The People" (read: the government). Private use is allowed, but private ownership is not. This system happens to be called Communism.
Now if Capitalism is the opposite of Communism, why are the two starting to sound so damn similar? What is the difference to the individual between the goverment owning everything and a oligarchy of corporations owning everything? Hello???
This bothers me immensely, and I've never been the "The only good Commie is a dead Commie" type. I have friends who think that Capitalism is the best system there is and Communism is a horrible menace to be fought to the very last right-thinking American. I'm starting to think we desperately need a new way of doing things, because it dosen't look like Capitalism is much of an improvement over Communism from where I'm standing.
Slashdot Mirror
--Fesh
Why can't one build power plants using gas turbines instead of boilers? I mean, the article said that the FastShip uses five turbines producing 250 MW each... In aggregate, that's 1.25 GW if you ran the output shafts to an electrical generator. After you get the power off the turbine, you can collect the combustion heat using a heat exchanger and use the steam from that to produce some additional power. And as the parent of this post said, with the proper baffles and muffling (the heat exchanger would probably help in this area), the noise pollution is as near zero as anything else. Gas turbines can probably be designed to run on just about any liquid or gas-phase fuel you'd care to mention from hydrogen to kerosene, so fluctuations in fuel cost wouldn't have nearly the catastrophic effect on operations. And gas turbines are probably much cleaner than a coal plant at the same level of power output.
The only question is, what am I missing? I haven't been able to talk to anyone who would know what the relative efficiencies of boilers and gas turbines are, so I have no clue what the economics are as far as fuel usage. I'm also not sure if, say, 2 GW (eight turbines in a plant) is anywhere near the type of capacity that current power plants operate at. Can anyone give me an evaluation on whether I'm in the right ballpark or not?
--Fesh
I'm very suspicious of this flow of events... Intel hears that IBM is thinking about using a chip by another possible competitor, sends a representative over to do some arm twisting, bribing, etc. etc... "Just wait long enough for us to get our low-power PIII out the door..."
Pheeeew. That's got quite a stench to it.
--Fesh
--Fesh
Except that those servers may be impossible to find... I'm sure Verant sends nasty Cease and Decists every time they find one. And anyway, the Everquest client software license forbids you to connect to such servers.
--Fesh
--Fesh
--Fesh
--Fesh
--Fesh
We consumers are not the CRA's customers. The banks and other people/organizations who make the decisions that affect our lives based on that information are their customers. We don't even register to them anymore than a patch of ground's ecology registers to a mining company. Because that's basically what we are, as far as they're concerned.
--Fesh
Corporations lack consciences? Nah. That can't be it...
--Fesh
--Fesh
However, it's probably wishful thinking. It's funny how a lot of my adolescent fantasies involved teleporters... Hrm. That was probably TMI.
--Fesh
--Fesh
Damn. You beat me to it. Mod this up, folks...
--Fesh
--Fesh
--Fesh
--Fesh
--Fesh
*shivers in horror*
--Fesh
--Fesh
Hmm. Maybe it's time to do some googling.
--Fesh
Why ask a central server? Modify sendmail to include a key generator and database and put together an encrypting/decrypting email client that interfaces tightly and securely with the new sendmail. The email client queries keys.foo.com (the sendmail database) for joe's public key and encrypts the message accordingly. The fun part is that the public key is created and assigned when joe's account is created on the mailserver. From then on, the encryption process is transparent.
All this requires is a little marketing at the ISP level... Anything I'm missing here?
--Fesh
"Why? Because WeSaySo!"
--Fesh
Now if Capitalism is the opposite of Communism, why are the two starting to sound so damn similar? What is the difference to the individual between the goverment owning everything and a oligarchy of corporations owning everything? Hello???
This bothers me immensely, and I've never been the "The only good Commie is a dead Commie" type. I have friends who think that Capitalism is the best system there is and Communism is a horrible menace to be fought to the very last right-thinking American. I'm starting to think we desperately need a new way of doing things, because it dosen't look like Capitalism is much of an improvement over Communism from where I'm standing.
--Fesh