I agree that biodiesel has more energy density than ethanol.
Perhaps you are thinking of the McGyan Process that continuously converts various lipid feedstocks such as old cooking oil, tallow, or algae into biodiesel. The process also requires alcohol as a feedstock. It does not process cellulose waste.
Most ethanol to cellulose processes require the cellulose to be first broken down by acid. There are also catalysts for converting cellulose under development in the lab, but the wood waste, switch grass, or whatever source of cellulose they are trying requires a lot of grinding and pulping before they can get started.
The Zymetis process for cellulostic ethanol appears that it could make a good complement to the McGyan process for biodiesel.
...Because you can't handle the truth, that's why! (Jack Nicolson mode off)
(Seriously) Biodiesel is an ester, which means it has a lipid (oily) part and an alcohol part. The algae or jatropha supply the lipid, the alcohol is still required.
Ask anyone who has made their own biodiesel - although they use old french-fry oil, they are also mixing it with methanol (if you want to do the reaction at room temp, the ethanol reaction requires heat) and lye.
This is dejavu all over again - Donovan had a song about this in 1973 called "the Intergalactic Laxative". Have a listen to it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u846w66zTQ
Disrespect for authority should not be an impediment for being a Navy Aviator, at least it was not for Rudy, my Cubano college buddy. A few weeks after graduation he found himself at Navy Aviation Officers' Training School in Beeville, Texas ( "Beeville?" said my dad who is from Texas, "Have you seen Beeville? There's people who live in Texas nearby who blink and don't see Beeville!") The first thing out of Rudy's mouth upon seeing the first officer in uniform was: "Let's just cut all the crap and show me my plane."
When I was an undergrad taking lower division Newtonian Physics my prof assigned a problem set along the lines of:
"Superman: the man of steel. Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound: 1) Calculate Superman's kinetic energy to go faster than the bullet 2) Determine the amount of work Superman would do pushing against the locomotive to make it go backwards 1 km on a level track 3) Compute the impulse generated by Superman to leap a tall building
Most of the class did OK, I got all the answers in the ballpark, but one student had answers that were an order of magnitude greater than anybody elses'. When the prof asked the student why his answers were so high, he replied "Well, it seems as if I used a higher mass than anybody else - you DID say that Superman was the man of steel, didn't you?"
The high cost of polysilicon has been an obstacle to cheap solar cells for years - mostly because polysilicon is commonly produced by the "Siemens process", which is a batch process where silane gas is converted to pure silicon from the heat of tungsten filaments, on which it deposits. Once the filiament is adequately encrusted with polysilicon, the deposits are scraped off and used.
There have been a number of attempts at a continuous process to produce polysilicon. I worked at one, J.C. Schumacher, over 25 years ago. The process never has been scaled up to full commercial production; Dr. Schumacher is still looking for an investor to take him there.
There is at least one other company with a fluidized bed continuous process to make polysilicon.
One approach that I thought that had a good chance of hitting the big time is the spheral solar process that Texas Instruments developed, and sold off in 1995. This process did not require pure silicon to produced chemically. It took 99% pure metallurgical grade silicon beads, heat treated them so that the impurites moved to the surface, then ground off the surface with the impurities to make silicon crystal balls pure enough for solar use.
Any of these processes might be viable if the right market conditions exist. And any of these processes use a heck of a lot less energy than the traditional Siemens process.
Perhaps Slashdotters would like to read Jef Raskin's take on the history of the Macintosh. You can read it here.
He may be opinionated, but he seems willing to back his assertions with facts. From what I know of Jef from his books and web site, I would be more inclined to take his account seriously than that of Steve Jobs or the sycophant news media.
On the other hand, although I do not have any first hand experience with Steve Jobs, I have heard numerous accounts about him from people who have worked for him, (including Bob Peratori, Apple employee #10, and Ken Hodor, former NeXT Hardware Design Manager) and they all mention Jobs' ability to discard the truth when he want to persuade people into doing what he wants.
There are a lot of nerdy attactions in the San Francisco Bay Area, so you may want to go there.
Possibly the attraction of the greatest interest to the astronomically inclined in the SF Bay Area is the Lick Observatory, and in the summer months they allow the public to look through their 36" refracting and 40" reflecting telescopes.
The following was related to me by my co-worker Eric, who was the first American employed at Apple Japan:
Shortly after Eric arrived in Japan in the early 80's, he accompanied Steve Jobs on a visit to Canon. Cannon recently introduced a desktop copier which intrigued Steve Jobs. At the meeting Steve Jobs challenged the Canon execs and engineers to design a smaller laser printer the same way they were able to shrink the size of a copier.
In those days a laser printer was about the size of a washing machine or a large business copy machine. The only laser printers available were floor models only; nothing you could put on a desktop.
One year later Steve Jobs was invited back to Canon in Japan to see the results of his challenge. Eric went with Steve, a female translator who worked for Apple Japan, and a Japanese manager working for Apple. Steve Jobs and Eric were the only Americans there at the meeting, and only the Apple employees spoke English; none of the Canon people did. All communication from Steve Jobs to the Canon people were done via the translator.
When they got to Canon, a roomful of proud, beaming Canon engineers and managers presented Steve Jobs with their 'minaturized' laser printer - no longer the size of an American washing machine, just perhaps the size of a Japanese washing machine. Just the same it was not the desktop model that Steve Jobs envisioned.
When the interpreter relayed the question from the Canon folks asking what he thought of the their new laser printer, she really squirmed when Jobs said "Tell them it is a piece of shit!"
There is more to IPSO, the net OS that runs on the Nokia 330, than just a hardened freeBSD. The networking protocols are coded deep into the kernel, and have been highly optimized. To run a vanilla Linux on the box means that net routing will just become another application to the OS, along with the corresponding hit to performance.
The text of 'Unix System Administration Handbook' is OK, but it takes the prize for having the CHEEZIEST illustrations in a technical book. I don't know who Tyler Stevens is, but the cartoons gives one the impression they were done by somebody's airhead girlfiend. Cranberry Bogs indeed!!!
"What else could you want?" - More PCI slots for starters. Upon hearing the announcement of the Apple rackmount system I had my fingers crossed, hoping that I would not have to continue to use a Magma PCI expansion chassis to use all the DSP Farm PCI cards I want to with my Digidesign digital recording studio system. Ask anyone who uses Digidesign pro audio equipment - they have been begging Apple for years to give them a system with more than 4 PCI expansion slots.
While on the subject of adding the expansion slots, why not make them based on a crossbar architecture like the HyperTransport system rather than the 'party line telephone' architecture of plain vanilla PCI bus. Having a system with better disk throughput is a start, however.
Reminds me of a problem set in Physics 4A
on
Comic Book Physics
·
· Score: 2, Funny
When I was a freshman at the U of California we had a problem set assigned to our freshman physics class (classical mechanics) that was something along these lines:
"Superman: Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Calculate reasonable estimates of the kinetic energy, power, and impulse, respectively, of these feats; show your work."
As we got back our graded papers the professor remarked that we all pretty were much in the ballpark with our calculations, but one student's numbers were considerably greater. That's when the student said, "Well I used a greater mass than everybody else did since I remembered that Superman is the Man of Steel." He got full credit.
Wow! - Having so many taps on one subscriber line would stick out like a sore thumb on TDR.
In my experience with cable company, the only customer that tried putting too many taps on one line was a motel owner that ran his own cable from his house next door and tried to service his 12 motel rooms with cable TV.
The cable company only found out when one of the motel guests called them after complaining to the motel staff about bad TV reception. Since the motel was not on the list of the cable company's customers, something sounded fishy. The program that motel guest was trying to watch was not broadcast on the air.
The tech who went out to the hotel found a rat's nest of cables poorly spliced and distributed without splitters. And a single co-ax going out the back and over a wall towards a house. The records showed that this house did have cable service and the subscriber was none other than the hotel owner.
In this case, as with most tappers we caught, it was someone reporting a problem rather than TDR that revealed the culprit.
Yes - but the cable company does not drive around the neighborhood with some kind of scanner. They use an instrument called a Time-Domain Reflectrometer to do a thing called, not suprisingly, Time-Domain Reflectrometry.
How it works is somewhat like this - the TDR instrument must be connected to the cable line feed end. The instrument launches an electrical pulse over the cable then listens for 'echoes' - kind of like a radar. If it hits a tap in the line, hits a load, or hits an open (unconnected) cable, an echo is produced which is detected by the unit. They can measure the echos and see how many feet down the line is the tap.
"Do they actually do this?" Yes again, but it is not as easy as they would like you to believe. Theoretically, this instrument can detect almost anything that is attached to the cable. In practice, it is a lot harder to catch tappers since the technician doing TDR on the line must distinguish between what is supposed to be on the lines and what is not. He almost has to 'map' the reflections and then come back later and see if the TDR 'profile' has changed to detect a tapper.
TDR is blocked by the line amplifiers they use to boost the signal on the cable lines. It has been almost 20 years since I did any work on cable systems, but at that time it was a real pain to shimmy up a pole, undo the cable from the amplifier and then run the TDR. This disrupted the service for the customers on the branch we were testing, and most of the 'tappers' we caught were in reality people whose cables became disconnected from the set-top boxes or got cut while digging in the garden. They all did not know why their reception suddenly became so poor!!
In the end we limited TDR to analyzing lines that had signal problems, and we generally depended on disgruntled neighbors to find people stealing signal. The TDR could help us find taps, but in a couple cases the tappers were real smart and used a high impedance amplifier piggybacked on our line, which would not show up on TDR. This approach does not produce a nice clean signal one would get from a properly split and terminated cable, but it got the job done.
There was talk of some super TDR system that could be run on the whole system from the head end, but I have not seen or heard of one in use. Remember I am describing the state of the art circa 1982, and much has surely changed, so that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
As for vans driving around picking up signals - the last I heard of such a thing was from the late '70s when HBO was broadcast over microwave, and various small cable companies and hotels would pick up the signal and distribute it over their systems. One could get downconverter kits and plans to make a box that would let you pick up HBO without a subscription. The box you could mount on your antenna mast had a local oscillator that produced a signal that would downconvert the HBO microwave signal to channel 2 VHF.
The trucks had radio direction finders that homed in on the local oscillator frequency from the downconverter boxes. I had a friend who had one set up and he actually got caught, and received a summons in the mail to appear in court.
He actually showed up in court without an attorney. He was asked to verify where he lived and evidence was produced against him that a certain frequency was radiating from his property, one which could be used to illegaly downconvert HBO. My friend got his turn to testify and much to the suprise of the prosecuting attorney, he produced an Extra class ham radio license. He then submitted a page from the ARRL Handbook showing the RF spectrum priveleges given to different classes of Amateur licenses. The frequency in question was in the broadcast privileges for his class of license! He then said that in this case the evidence against him was circumstantial. He admitted that he was "performing experiments in those range of frequencies" and went on to add that he was soon going to broadcast regularly at that frequency. Case dismissed.
Here is a way to get the attention of Be(a)st Buy's management and show them why crippled product is unprofitable:
For those of us with credit cards that have some available credit ( decreasing numbers of us, I'm aware ), go into your nearest Best Buy and do the following:
Pick up an e-machines or other cheap PC. Better yet, look to see if they have a system that is promoted as some kind of 'music system'. Pick up a Rio or some other portable MP3 Player. Pick up a CD player that is based on a PC CD Drive, or a DVD player with CD play capability that uses a PC CD drive inside, such as an Apex DVD player. Pick up the crippled Celine Dion CD. Slap down the plastic and take your purchases home.
At home, open all the boxes, crack the styrofoam padding in the boxes, shed the plastic bags, dogear the instruction manuals, thow away the twist ties, knot the cables, and burn the warranty cards. Then pack everything back into the box. The wrong way.
Next go back to the Best Buy and take everything to the customer service desk. Explain that everything you bought is broken. If a tech wants you to show him, put in the Celiene Dion CD and show him it crashes. Act like a technical dope and do not accept any explanations of why this one CD won't work. Insist on getting a new everything. Complain to the service person. Complain to the sales personnel. Complain to the manager.
Repeat. Repeat again. Then after the third try take everything back and insist that you want your money back, credit it all back to your credit card. If worse comes to worse, you can contact your credit card company within 60 days and dispute any charges Best Buy makes.
What Best Buy is left with is a pile of opened merchandise that they have to discard or sell at a loss. Also they will have a bunch of irritated employees. Will they re-order the new Celine Dion crippleware CD? If they make the connection between the hassle you gave them and the crippleware product, I think not. Pretty soon they will get the idea that crippleware = returns = lost revenue and the stores will quit ordering it.
Slashdot Mirror
"decomposing zombie clawing its' way up out of the ground" ....
.... Darl of the Dead?
I agree that biodiesel has more energy density than ethanol.
Perhaps you are thinking of the McGyan Process that continuously converts various lipid feedstocks such as old cooking oil, tallow, or algae into biodiesel. The process also requires alcohol as a feedstock. It does not process cellulose waste.
Most ethanol to cellulose processes require the cellulose to be first broken down by acid. There are also catalysts for converting cellulose under development in the lab, but the wood waste, switch grass, or whatever source of cellulose they are trying requires a lot of grinding and pulping before they can get started.
The Zymetis process for cellulostic ethanol appears that it could make a good complement to the McGyan process for biodiesel.
...Because you can't handle the truth, that's why! (Jack Nicolson mode off)
(Seriously) Biodiesel is an ester, which means it has a lipid (oily) part and an alcohol part. The algae or jatropha supply the lipid, the alcohol is still required.
Ask anyone who has made their own biodiesel - although they use old french-fry oil, they are also mixing it with methanol (if you want to do the reaction at room temp, the ethanol reaction requires heat) and lye.
This is dejavu all over again - Donovan had a song about this in 1973 called "the Intergalactic Laxative". Have a listen to it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u846w66zTQ
DA:
Disrespect for authority should not be an impediment for being a Navy Aviator, at least it was not for Rudy, my Cubano college buddy. A few weeks after graduation he found himself at Navy Aviation Officers' Training School in Beeville, Texas ( "Beeville?" said my dad who is from Texas, "Have you seen Beeville? There's people who live in Texas nearby who blink and don't see Beeville!") The first thing out of Rudy's mouth upon seeing the first officer in uniform was: "Let's just cut all the crap and show me my plane."
50 pushups.
When I was an undergrad taking lower division Newtonian Physics my prof assigned a problem set along the lines of:
"Superman: the man of steel. Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound:
1) Calculate Superman's kinetic energy to go faster than the bullet
2) Determine the amount of work Superman would do pushing against the locomotive to make it go backwards 1 km on a level track
3) Compute the impulse generated by Superman to leap a tall building
Most of the class did OK, I got all the answers in the ballpark, but one student had answers that were an order of magnitude greater than anybody elses'. When the prof asked the student why his answers were so high, he replied "Well, it seems as if I used a higher mass than anybody else - you DID say that Superman was the man of steel, didn't you?"
He got full credit.
They will; you'll just have to wait for the Duplicate Post first.
The high cost of polysilicon has been an obstacle to cheap solar cells for years - mostly because polysilicon is commonly produced by the "Siemens process", which is a batch process where silane gas is converted to pure silicon from the heat of tungsten filaments, on which it deposits. Once the filiament is adequately encrusted with polysilicon, the deposits are scraped off and used.
There have been a number of attempts at a continuous process to produce polysilicon. I worked at one, J.C. Schumacher, over 25 years ago. The process never has been scaled up to full commercial production; Dr. Schumacher is still looking for an investor to take him there.
There is at least one other company with a fluidized bed continuous process to make polysilicon.
One approach that I thought that had a good chance of hitting the big time is the spheral solar process that Texas Instruments developed, and sold off in 1995. This process did not require pure silicon to produced chemically. It took 99% pure metallurgical grade silicon beads, heat treated them so that the impurites moved to the surface, then ground off the surface with the impurities to make silicon crystal balls pure enough for solar use.
Any of these processes might be viable if the right market conditions exist. And any of these processes use a heck of a lot less energy than the traditional Siemens process.
For an amusing account of the trouble someone had when trying to pay for food at Taco Bell with a US$ 2.00 note, check this link:
t -Taco-Bell.html
http://www.digiserve.com/eescape/closet/silly/2-a
Sounds like that physicist was trying to describe my daughter's pony 'Blimpie'; which pound for pound has to be the fattest horse on the planet.
Hmmm....
..... Hobbit?
Bare feet.. New Zealand... Stropping about...
Sir, are you, by any chance, a
Perhaps Slashdotters would like to read Jef Raskin's take on the history of the Macintosh. You can read it here.
He may be opinionated, but he seems willing to back his assertions with facts. From what I know of Jef from his books and web site, I would be more inclined to take his account seriously than that of Steve Jobs or the sycophant news media.
On the other hand, although I do not have any first hand experience with Steve Jobs, I have heard numerous accounts about him from people who have worked for him, (including Bob Peratori, Apple employee #10, and Ken Hodor, former NeXT Hardware Design Manager) and they all mention Jobs' ability to discard the truth when he want to persuade people into doing what he wants.
Proverbs 18:17
There are a lot of nerdy attactions in the San Francisco Bay Area, so you may want to go there.
Possibly the attraction of the greatest interest to the astronomically inclined in the SF Bay Area is the Lick Observatory, and in the summer months they allow the public to look through their 36" refracting and 40" reflecting telescopes.
Details here.
The following was related to me by my co-worker Eric, who was the first American employed at Apple Japan:
Shortly after Eric arrived in Japan in the early 80's, he accompanied Steve Jobs on a visit to Canon. Cannon recently introduced a desktop copier which intrigued Steve Jobs. At the meeting Steve Jobs challenged the Canon execs and engineers to design a smaller laser printer the same way they were able to shrink the size of a copier.
In those days a laser printer was about the size of a washing machine or a large business copy machine. The only laser printers available were floor models only; nothing you could put on a desktop.
One year later Steve Jobs was invited back to Canon in Japan to see the results of his challenge. Eric went with Steve, a female translator who worked for Apple Japan, and a Japanese manager working for Apple. Steve Jobs and Eric were the only Americans there at the meeting, and only the Apple employees spoke English; none of the Canon people did. All communication from Steve Jobs to the Canon people were done via the translator.
When they got to Canon, a roomful of proud, beaming Canon engineers and managers presented Steve Jobs with their 'minaturized' laser printer - no longer the size of an American washing machine, just perhaps the size of a Japanese washing machine. Just the same it was not the desktop model that Steve Jobs envisioned.
When the interpreter relayed the question from the Canon folks asking what he thought of the their new laser printer, she really squirmed when Jobs said "Tell them it is a piece of shit!"
There is more to IPSO, the net OS that runs on the Nokia 330, than just a hardened freeBSD. The networking protocols are coded deep into the kernel, and have been highly optimized. To run a vanilla Linux on the box means that net routing will just become another application to the OS, along with the corresponding hit to performance.
The text of 'Unix System Administration Handbook' is OK, but it takes the prize for having the CHEEZIEST illustrations in a technical book. I don't know who Tyler Stevens is, but the cartoons gives one the impression they were done by somebody's airhead girlfiend. Cranberry Bogs indeed!!!
Pay real money for something that deteriorates over time? This sounds to much like my Windows PC setup....
Drag 'n Drop one's own programs together? Been there, done that, in 1994 no less. NeXTStep Developer.
"What else could you want?" - More PCI slots for starters. Upon hearing the announcement of the Apple rackmount system I had my fingers crossed, hoping that I would not have to continue to use a Magma PCI expansion chassis to use all the DSP Farm PCI cards I want to with my Digidesign digital recording studio system. Ask anyone who uses Digidesign pro audio equipment - they have been begging Apple for years to give them a system with more than 4 PCI expansion slots.
While on the subject of adding the expansion slots, why not make them based on a crossbar architecture like the HyperTransport system rather than the 'party line telephone' architecture of plain vanilla PCI bus. Having a system with better disk throughput is a start, however.
When I was a freshman at the U of California we had a problem set assigned to our freshman physics class (classical mechanics) that was something along these lines:
"Superman: Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Calculate reasonable estimates of the kinetic energy, power, and impulse, respectively, of these feats; show your work."
As we got back our graded papers the professor remarked that we all pretty were much in the ballpark with our calculations, but one student's numbers were considerably greater. That's when the student said, "Well I used a greater mass than everybody else did since I remembered that Superman is the Man of Steel." He got full credit.
Wow! - Having so many taps on one subscriber line would stick out like a sore thumb on TDR.
In my experience with cable company, the only customer that tried putting too many taps on one line was a motel owner that ran his own cable from his house next door and tried to service his 12 motel rooms with cable TV.
The cable company only found out when one of the motel guests called them after complaining to the motel staff about bad TV reception. Since the motel was not on the list of the cable company's customers, something sounded fishy. The program that motel guest was trying to watch was not broadcast on the air.
The tech who went out to the hotel found a rat's nest of cables poorly spliced and distributed without splitters. And a single co-ax going out the back and over a wall towards a house. The records showed that this house did have cable service and the subscriber was none other than the hotel owner.
In this case, as with most tappers we caught, it was someone reporting a problem rather than TDR that revealed the culprit.
"Does anyone know if this works?"
Yes - but the cable company does not drive around the neighborhood with some kind of scanner. They use an instrument called a Time-Domain Reflectrometer to do a thing called, not suprisingly, Time-Domain Reflectrometry.
How it works is somewhat like this - the TDR instrument must be connected to the cable line feed end. The instrument launches an electrical pulse over the cable then listens for 'echoes' - kind of like a radar. If it hits a tap in the line, hits a load, or hits an open (unconnected) cable, an echo is produced which is detected by the unit. They can measure the echos and see how many feet down the line is the tap.
"Do they actually do this?" Yes again, but it is not as easy as they would like you to believe.
Theoretically, this instrument can detect almost anything that is attached to the cable. In practice, it is a lot harder to catch tappers since the technician doing TDR on the line must distinguish between what is supposed to be on the lines and what is not. He almost has to 'map' the reflections and then come back later and see if the TDR 'profile' has changed to detect a tapper.
TDR is blocked by the line amplifiers they use to boost the signal on the cable lines. It has been almost 20 years since I did any work on cable systems, but at that time it was a real pain to shimmy up a pole, undo the cable from the amplifier and then run the TDR. This disrupted the service for the customers on the branch we were testing, and most of the 'tappers' we caught were in reality people whose cables became disconnected from the set-top boxes or got cut while digging in the garden. They all did not know why their reception suddenly became so poor!!
In the end we limited TDR to analyzing lines that had signal problems, and we generally depended on disgruntled neighbors to find people stealing signal. The TDR could help us find taps, but in a couple cases the tappers were real smart and used a high impedance amplifier piggybacked on our line, which would not show up on TDR. This approach does not produce a nice clean signal one would get from a properly split and terminated cable, but it got the job done.
There was talk of some super TDR system that could be run on the whole system from the head end, but I have not seen or heard of one in use. Remember I am describing the state of the art circa 1982, and much has surely changed, so that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
As for vans driving around picking up signals - the last I heard of such a thing was from the late '70s when HBO was broadcast over microwave, and various small cable companies and hotels would pick up the signal and distribute it over their systems. One could get downconverter kits and plans to make a box that would let you pick up HBO without a subscription. The box you could mount on your antenna mast had a local oscillator that produced a signal that would downconvert the HBO microwave signal to channel 2 VHF.
The trucks had radio direction finders that homed in on the local oscillator frequency from the downconverter boxes. I had a friend who had one set up and he actually got caught, and received a summons in the mail to appear in court.
He actually showed up in court without an attorney. He was asked to verify where he lived and evidence was produced against him that a certain frequency was radiating from his property, one which could be used to illegaly downconvert HBO. My friend got his turn to testify and much to the suprise of the prosecuting attorney, he produced an Extra class ham radio license. He then submitted a page from the ARRL Handbook showing the RF spectrum priveleges given to different classes of Amateur licenses. The frequency in question was in the broadcast privileges for his class of license! He then said that in this case the evidence against him was circumstantial. He admitted that he was "performing experiments in those range of frequencies" and went on to add that he was soon going to broadcast regularly at that frequency.
Case dismissed.
Here is a way to get the attention of Be(a)st Buy's management and show them why crippled product is unprofitable:
.
For those of us with credit cards that have some available credit ( decreasing numbers of us, I'm aware ), go into your nearest Best Buy and do the following:
Pick up an e-machines or other cheap PC. Better yet, look to see if they have a system that is promoted as some kind of 'music system'. Pick up a Rio or some other portable MP3 Player. Pick up a CD player that is based on a PC CD Drive, or a DVD player with CD play capability that uses a PC CD drive inside, such as an Apex DVD player. Pick up the crippled Celine Dion CD. Slap down the plastic and take your purchases home.
At home, open all the boxes, crack the styrofoam padding in the boxes, shed the plastic bags, dogear the instruction manuals, thow away the twist ties, knot the cables, and burn the warranty cards. Then pack everything back into the box. The wrong way.
Next go back to the Best Buy and take everything to the customer service desk. Explain that everything you bought is broken. If a tech wants you to show him, put in the Celiene Dion CD and show him it crashes. Act like a technical dope and do not accept any explanations of why this one CD won't work. Insist on getting a new everything. Complain to the service person. Complain to the sales personnel. Complain to the manager.
Repeat. Repeat again. Then after the third try take everything back and insist that you want your money back, credit it all back to your credit card. If worse comes to worse, you can contact your credit card company within 60 days and dispute any charges Best Buy makes
What Best Buy is left with is a pile of opened merchandise that they have to discard or sell at a loss. Also they will have a bunch of irritated employees. Will they re-order the new Celine Dion crippleware CD? If they make the connection between the hassle you gave them and the crippleware product, I think not. Pretty soon they will get the idea that crippleware = returns = lost revenue and the stores will quit ordering it.
Have fun.
At Yahoo Japan with Linux and the much sought - after PHKL feature!!!
Although the Casio Crusoe laptop is new here, they have had it in Japan for a while. Hell - they even have a Hello Kitty version.