MP3 box sets? Instead of releasing a 5 CD box set, how 'bout selling a single CD with all the songs already encoded into MP3s? People are immediately going to rip the CDs anyway, just to keep from having to shuffle discs (unless they have a technology that's going the way of the 8-track: the Pioneer 6 CD changer).
Speakin' of the Pioneer 6 CD changer, why was this technology (or any other changer, for that matter) never widely adapted for computer use? I remember seeing one 6 CD changer for computers back in the day when CD-ROM first came out, but it was prohibitively expensive. Pioneer still makes CD changers, all the way up to 100 disc juke-box style changers, and have always had 5 DVD carousel style changers, and I have an RCA 3 DVD changer, but I was always a fan of the 6 CD removable cartridge style changer. Imagine how many MP3s you could fit on 6 DVDs that use this type of changer. And besides that, there are still no changers for computers. None. Zip Zero Zilch Nada. We're still stuck with shuffling discs for our mega-epic multiple disc games, unless we have the foresight to cram more than one CD/DVD drive into our computer cases.
Cerenkov effect. The Cerenkov electromagnetic radiation, usually bluish light, is emitted by a beam of high-energy charged particles passing through a transparent medium at a speed greater than the speed of light in that medium.
The effect is similar to that of a sonic boom when an object moves faster than the speed of sound, in this case the radiation is a shock wave set up in the electromagnetic field.
The blue glow is not caused by the chemical impurities, but can be enhanced by impurities. Anyone who has ever used a scintillation counter in a biology lab to do things like radiocarbon dating is putting this effect to good use. A little bit of toluene with an ultraviolet tracer (called "scintillation cocktail") is placed in a small glass bottle along with the specimen being "counted". The charged particles from decaying radionuclides (e.g. carbon-14) emit Cerenkov radiation, which is amplified by the ultraviolet tracer in the toluene, and the resulting flash of blue light is in turn picked up by a photomultiplier tube in the counter.
People who emit Cerenkov radiation make me nervous...
On April 26, 1986, Chernobyl became the first plant to split atoms, burn coal and burn hydrogen...all at the same time.
In addition to the graphite moderator was the zirconium cladding of the fuel rods. The uranium oxide in fuel rods is a ceramic like material, which is brittle, so it has to be encapsulated in a strong zirconium alloy metal to withstand the heat and pressure of a nuclear reactor. But if zirconium is heated too much, it will react with the water in the reactor, producing zirconium dioxide and liberating hydrogen gas. After the initial steam explosion that blew the reactor open, the hydrogen escaped and KABOOMSKI! There goes the roof of the reactor building. The people in Pripyat, a few miles away, saw the burning chunks of graphite being hurled in the air by more steam and hydrogen explosions, and thought it was just fireworks, but why at 1:30 in the morning??
This zirconium-water reaction also happened at Three Mile Island, contributing to fears of an explosion, but not enough hydrogen was generated to cause any damage, and was contained within the reactor itself. And besides that, all nuclear power plants in the U.S. have systems in place to deal with excess hydrogen, mostly by catalytically reacting it with oxygen in the air (instead of letting it collect to explode).
When I first submitted this story, I was tearing up my house looking for the driver CD for my old Sound Blaster Live card. For whatever reason, Creative didn't have Windows 98 drivers/software for the original version (the one I have, not the 5.1 version) available for download.
Anyway, on the subject of companies still using legacy hardware, nuke plants have to be the king of dinosaur computer users. No new nuke plants have been ordered since the Three Mile Island accident in the late 70's, and all the hardware they use (everything from pump motors to computers) have to go through so much regulatory red tape that it is cost prohibitive to upgrade, hence, the computers running the control systems are all geriatric 70's era mainframes that constantly have to be maintained. Most nukes were never meant to go over 50-75% of their rated generating capacity, but in today's energy hungry world, utilities try to squeeze out every bit of energy they can from them, pushing them to 105% rated capacity and beyond. And the NRC is okay with this given the age of their control systems??
By contrast, I recently visited a coal burning power plant that uses various Windows 2000 machines and Sun hardware running Solaris, all networked together with fiber and using modern off-the-shelf control system software. So much for the "modern" miracle of nuclear power.
Step into the way-back machine. Hearken back to the 80's when people had their Amigas and they wrote songs for MOD trackers in their free time, and distributed them via dial-up bulletin board services that were ubiquitous through the 80's to early 90's before web browsers were developed and the net became commercialized.
These MODs, containing a number of samples and a playback script similar in concept, but different in structure to MIDI files, were to music what Linux is to operating systems- an open sourced, freely downloadable form of music, for which the artist earned no royalties. The MOD format was originally created to make game sountrack music on early computers with limited resources (such as the Amiga with it's 512 KB of memory) but has grown into a format of its own, with many offshoots such as Screamtracker (.s3m), Impulse Tracker (.it), and Fast Tracker (.xm), just to name a few. The vast majority of module music is of the techno genre, although some rock, pop, and even classical has been produced by music coders.
A tale of two KLFs In the late eighties, there was a group called the KLF (Kopyright Liberation Front). They used to call themselves the JAMs (Justified Ancients of Mummu. Go read the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson to learn more about the JAMs.) The KLF had a knack for getting in trouble for unauthorized use of samples from other people's music. They were forced to destroy all copies of an album they released (the 1987 album, IIRC) to avoid lawsuits. Because of this, they came to view the entire music industry as agents of the Illuminati, a supersecret organization hell bent on controlling what the world sees and hears.
Later, an unrelated KLF emerged, called the Kosmic Loader Foundation. They used to make the music for "loaders", or short demo programs that came up when you launched cracked games. (Remember the wonderful world of demos and the demo scene?) Anyway, they changed their name to KFMF, or Kosmic Free Music Foundation. Whatever music they produced, you could download for free, no questions asked. Or you could purchase CDs with their music for a nominal fee. Of course, the idea for their tracked music was the same as for open-source software: If you modify a song or "rip" the samples, at least give credit where it's due.
Sadly, the KFMF no longer exists, and pretty much the entire demo scene has fallen by the wayside, but is still alive with tracked music at places like Nectarine Radio. Nowadays, there are myriads of tracked formats, and even the mainstream music programs such as Cakewalk and Reason have their legions of adherents who create and swap music files, but the idea remains the same: If music was open-sourced, free as in speech and free as in beer, nobody could control it, no RIAA, Illuminati, or whatever.
... a bootable Linux distro that has Freevo on it. Just insert CD, boot, and it's all ready to go, freeing up the entire hard drive for recording and time-shifting live TV.
Maaan. This is gonna take some brainular repairs. Lacking da good stuff, me reaches for the Nyquil and "Exit Stage Left" by Rush. Ahhhhh. Back to "normal".
Remember, surrealism changes the mind and everything that resembles it.
I once made a pocket version using turpentine and colored water. I used one of the small square bottles of turpentine that comes with Testors model paints. It was half full, so all I had to do was add enough colored water to fill it up. I used to carry it in my pocket everywhere I went, pulling it out during a dull moment (usually junior high math class) and tipping it back and forth.
As far as zinc-air: zinc is both way too heavy and way too expensive to be a viable vehicle fuel!
Aluminum is much lighter than zinc.
It's been said that if you throw away an aluminum can, it might as well be half full of gasoline, because that's how much energy it takes to smelt aluminum oxide (from bauxite ore).
With that in mind, there are companies that have been working on aluminum-air batteries that will release the energy from aluminum by converting it back into oxide through a fuel-cell like process. It consists of a sandwich of consumable aluminum plates for the anode, a salt solution, and non-consumable yet air permeable plates for the cathodes. As the anodes corrode away, replace them, and return the used plates to a recycle center to be "recharged" by re-smelting them into aluminum metal again. Smelting aluminum is a very energy consuming process (known as the Hall-Heroult reduction process), but it is essentially the aluminum-air battery in reverse (and in massive scale).
Some chemistry know-it-alls might want to put on their thinking caps and calculate how much energy it takes to hydrolize water into hydrogen and oxygen, and how much energy it takes to turn aluminum oxide into aluminum and oxygen, but then factor in the weight vs. power output of an aluminum-air battery and weight vs. power output of a fuel cell + hydrogen storage tank.
For those who just gotta do something now, here is a link that shows you how to roll your own aluminum air battery, and then you can hook a couple in series and get back to the topic of this thread and power some LEDs.
From what I've seen on TV coverage, they showed the source of the black smoke. Looked to me like a refinery or something with the safety flare-off stacks burning. I live in the heart of petrochemical alley down along the southern Mississippi River, and believe me, whenever there is a widespread power failure, they all do the same thing.
There are many stages to the processes that turn oil into gasoline, plastics, and other petrochemical products. Whenever there is an upset to the process, such as a power failure, complex systems (on backup power, of course) are designed to shut down the plant in a controlled manner to prevent a catastrophe, and many times that involves venting unprocessed flammables to safety flare-offs to be burned off.
About 7 years ago, a transformer failed at a major substation over by where I live, plunging a large area into darkness. Within seconds, a series of loud explosions were heard at a nearby plastics plant. People living in the area were panicking because they thought that the plant blew up, but the TV and radio newscasters calmly explained (to those who could recieve the broadcasts) that it was part of the safety shutdown procedure, that the loud booms were caused by safety pop-off valves and what looked like burning Iraqi oil wells was the safety flare-off stacks burning.
Microsoft however recognizes the essential fact that what they are selling is not a tangible product, but the service of a piece of software.
The fact that I can go into Wal-Mart and pick up Microsoft software packaged on a disk inside of a box, carry it to the register, pay for it, then take it home, makes it seem like a tangible product to me and everyone else.
Then again, another service, phone service that comes in the form of prepaid phone cards can also be bought off a rack, purchased and carried home as a tangible product. The fundamental difference? Phone cards have a limited number of minutes and once they're gone, throw away the card and buy a new one or "refill" the old one.
I think renting software has already been tried, but people can hack the expiration date of the software.
I think the profits for software and entertainment ought to come out of the insanely high price of a broadband connection, then having the broadband connection would allow us to download anything we want no matter what it is and grant us the license to use it as we see fit.
Step 5) It's there, you just didn't name it: This will continue until either the population has dwindled to a sufficiently small group (which is unlikely given the then-newly-encouraged birthrate), or complex and corrupt power-systems will develop, which can contain the selfish class. Tyranical Dictatorships are the only systems that can contain anarchy. It is only given enough time and prosperity that benevolant systems can prevail. This is what Discordians call Aftermath.
Then a cataclysm happens, whether natural or man-made, which starts the cycle all over again.
Anybody who has ever been to Japan or Korea and has eaten their ramen noodles knows what I mean. The stuff they pass off in American grocery stores for $.20 a bag just ain't the same.
...it is introducing new C02 that hasn't been around for millenia, a serious shock to the global balance.
A volcano introduces more "new" CO2 to the atmosphere than an entire year's worth of CO2 production from all the world's fossil fueled engines of transportation and industry combined. To nature, man's output of CO2 appears as a slight increase in volcanic activity. Where we are making the serious shock to the global balance is by cutting down the forests that would normally sink the extra CO2.
IANAU (I Am Not A Ukranian), nor do I play one on TV, but from what I understand, The Ukranians call it "Chornobyl". "Chernoblis" is wormwood. "Chornobyl" means "black water". The plant is built along the Prypiat River, which was once called "Black Water River".
If you are an instrument and controls engineer at a refinery, you are both. You would install pressure and temperature sensors on tanks, boilers and pipelines, install speed controls on big honking pump motors, then wire them all to networked terminals running industrial software such as Labview or Wonderware using an industry specific LAN such as HART or Foundation Fieldbus.
something to the effect of "Now you can hold your breath until 2.6 is released"?
They would need "horse sense" or better
on
The Coming Air Age
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· Score: 2
A number of people think personal helicopters and air cars would be easier for humans to fly if they had autopilots to take care of pitch, yaw, etc., and a sort of collision avoidance system, therefore giving the aircraft some sort of "horse sense".
But the horse sense would have to be good enough to avoid ground objects too, such as trees, buildings, power lines, radio towers and the ubiquitous cell phone network antennas. But more importantly, they would need a law abiding horse sense that would automatically avoid no-fly zones such as over nuke plants, refineries, prisons (imagine a sky car aided prison break), or anywhere else you have to stop at a guard shack before going inside.
But I want my back yard to be a no-fly zone, too. I don't want someone to land in my back yard and steal my gas grill. And I'm sure businesses with fenced in outdoor storage wouldn't want to be descended upon by flying thieves, either. This would require designated landing lots and air car guidance systems that will only land at other designated landing lots. They needn't be all that big, in fact existing parking lots would do nicely. My street has maybe 30 houses, and maybe about 60 cars. They could land a flying car in the parking lot of the local gas station, gas up, then drive it the rest of the way home on the street. That way cities will not have to be planned around them. Until these requirements are met, I don't think there will ever be sky cars.
The problem I have with the airplane theory, however, is that the instant that the water is ejected from the plane it will break up into thousands upon thousands of tiny drops which will instantly freeze at that altitude. A large mass of water would not freeze instantly due to its large heat capacity, yet at the same time it will not remain together due to the various forces yanking it apart (esp. friction).
One news report that I saw not too long ago was that an ice block smashed through the roof of a house, and investigators on the scene said it came from an airplane. Indeed, it was the same color of blue as the disinfectant in the airplane toilet flushing water. IIRC, they said that the holding tank had a slow leak, and the water made its way to the exterior of the fuselage (sucked through a hole from a popped rivet, perhaps) where it was broken up into a spray by the air rushing past. The spray collected and instantly froze directly behind the leak on the cold aluminum skin where one of the tail fins joined to the fuselage, collecting and forming a sizeable ball of blue ice. (Heating due to friction would have been negligeable here.) As the plane approached for a landing, slowing down and descending into a warmer layer of air, the aluminum skin conducted just enough heat to cause the blob of ice to separate from the surface and fall, crashing through the roof. Into the bathroom of the house. Imagine the odds.
I've always wanted to see a futuristic version of Survivor where they're placed in a postapocalyptic environment (think Mad Max, Waterworld, etc.) where they have to build the same sort of contraptions as Junkyard Wars, all the while battling for food and clean water, fending off pirates and thieves, and whoever doesn't make it off the island or outside the perimeter before their machines break down loses.
Hey, I still got mine. And 2 C-64s. And my VIC-20. And the burned out power supplies for the above. Come to think of it, every computer I've ever had I still got, including the peripherals, along with other people's huddled masses of wretched refuse. Occasionally, I go out and salvage a part or 2 to get another computer working, or donate parts to my workplace (the cheap bastards are still using 10 year old 386 computers until they break down, then try to repair them.)
Must be, I was a hyper child growing up in the 70's and I took ritalin up until the early 80's. Nowadays, I gots ta have my coffee in the morning, even though it has no effect on keeping me awake. I take a coffee break at work usually around 10 in the morning. I don't know why I even bother, because by 10:30 I fall asleep in my chair and damn near fall out of it. I've tried ritalin again recently, and sure, it does keep me awake, but then I would fall asleep rather suddenly instead of slowly dropping off like when I drink coffee. And I like to drink iced tea before going to bed, Mad River Oblong tea being one of my favorites. Except I have to get up and pee at 2 AM. But sleep aids usually have the opposite effect on me, they keep me awake.
Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy
on
Spy Fly
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· Score: 4, Interesting
A long time ago they had a series of kid's science fiction books about a kid inventor named Danny Dunn, and one book, Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy was about a robotic dragonfly that could fly around and spy on people. He flew it with a helmet and gloves that foretold of modern virtual reality, because he could feel in his gloves whatever the dragonfly landed on. He ended up destroying it in fears the technology would land in the wrong hands and be used for sinister (Orwellian?) purposes. Anybody else remember reading this one?
Roadrunner is owned by AOLTW, which is a member of the RIAA.
Yessiree, folks, the parent of a record company also owns the wire connected to the side of your house, so therefore, you're paying for music whether you download it through that piece of wire or you buy it stamped onto a piece of plastic sold by the same company, right? I think those who are on any ISP owned by a member of RIAA or MPAA ought to be entitled to download all the music they want, because they're getting paid for it, anyway. In the meantime, I'm hoping and dreaming that the big media conglomerates will collapse as spectacularly as Enron and Worldcom did.
Slashdot Mirror
MP3 box sets? Instead of releasing a 5 CD box set, how 'bout selling a single CD with all the songs already encoded into MP3s? People are immediately going to rip the CDs anyway, just to keep from having to shuffle discs (unless they have a technology that's going the way of the 8-track: the Pioneer 6 CD changer).
Speakin' of the Pioneer 6 CD changer, why was this technology (or any other changer, for that matter) never widely adapted for computer use? I remember seeing one 6 CD changer for computers back in the day when CD-ROM first came out, but it was prohibitively expensive. Pioneer still makes CD changers, all the way up to 100 disc juke-box style changers, and have always had 5 DVD carousel style changers, and I have an RCA 3 DVD changer, but I was always a fan of the 6 CD removable cartridge style changer. Imagine how many MP3s you could fit on 6 DVDs that use this type of changer. And besides that, there are still no changers for computers. None. Zip Zero Zilch Nada. We're still stuck with shuffling discs for our mega-epic multiple disc games, unless we have the foresight to cram more than one CD/DVD drive into our computer cases.
Cerenkov effect. The Cerenkov electromagnetic radiation, usually bluish light, is emitted by a beam of high-energy charged particles passing through a transparent medium at a speed greater than the speed of light in that medium.
The effect is similar to that of a sonic boom when an object moves faster than the speed of sound, in this case the radiation is a shock wave set up in the electromagnetic field.
The blue glow is not caused by the chemical impurities, but can be enhanced by impurities. Anyone who has ever used a scintillation counter in a biology lab to do things like radiocarbon dating is putting this effect to good use. A little bit of toluene with an ultraviolet tracer (called "scintillation cocktail") is placed in a small glass bottle along with the specimen being "counted". The charged particles from decaying radionuclides (e.g. carbon-14) emit Cerenkov radiation, which is amplified by the ultraviolet tracer in the toluene, and the resulting flash of blue light is in turn picked up by a photomultiplier tube in the counter.
People who emit Cerenkov radiation make me nervous...
On April 26, 1986, Chernobyl became the first plant to split atoms, burn coal and burn hydrogen ...all at the same time.
In addition to the graphite moderator was the zirconium cladding of the fuel rods. The uranium oxide in fuel rods is a ceramic like material, which is brittle, so it has to be encapsulated in a strong zirconium alloy metal to withstand the heat and pressure of a nuclear reactor. But if zirconium is heated too much, it will react with the water in the reactor, producing zirconium dioxide and liberating hydrogen gas. After the initial steam explosion that blew the reactor open, the hydrogen escaped and KABOOMSKI! There goes the roof of the reactor building. The people in Pripyat, a few miles away, saw the burning chunks of graphite being hurled in the air by more steam and hydrogen explosions, and thought it was just fireworks, but why at 1:30 in the morning??
This zirconium-water reaction also happened at Three Mile Island, contributing to fears of an explosion, but not enough hydrogen was generated to cause any damage, and was contained within the reactor itself. And besides that, all nuclear power plants in the U.S. have systems in place to deal with excess hydrogen, mostly by catalytically reacting it with oxygen in the air (instead of letting it collect to explode).
RBMK- Russian Big Mega-ton Kaboom
When I first submitted this story, I was tearing up my house looking for the driver CD for my old Sound Blaster Live card. For whatever reason, Creative didn't have Windows 98 drivers/software for the original version (the one I have, not the 5.1 version) available for download.
Anyway, on the subject of companies still using legacy hardware, nuke plants have to be the king of dinosaur computer users. No new nuke plants have been ordered since the Three Mile Island accident in the late 70's, and all the hardware they use (everything from pump motors to computers) have to go through so much regulatory red tape that it is cost prohibitive to upgrade, hence, the computers running the control systems are all geriatric 70's era mainframes that constantly have to be maintained. Most nukes were never meant to go over 50-75% of their rated generating capacity, but in today's energy hungry world, utilities try to squeeze out every bit of energy they can from them, pushing them to 105% rated capacity and beyond. And the NRC is okay with this given the age of their control systems??
By contrast, I recently visited a coal burning power plant that uses various Windows 2000 machines and Sun hardware running Solaris, all networked together with fiber and using modern off-the-shelf control system software. So much for the "modern" miracle of nuclear power.
Step into the way-back machine. Hearken back to the 80's when people had their Amigas and they wrote songs for MOD trackers in their free time, and distributed them via dial-up bulletin board services that were ubiquitous through the 80's to early 90's before web browsers were developed and the net became commercialized.
These MODs, containing a number of samples and a playback script similar in concept, but different in structure to MIDI files, were to music what Linux is to operating systems- an open sourced, freely downloadable form of music, for which the artist earned no royalties. The MOD format was originally created to make game sountrack music on early computers with limited resources (such as the Amiga with it's 512 KB of memory) but has grown into a format of its own, with many offshoots such as Screamtracker (.s3m), Impulse Tracker (.it), and Fast Tracker (.xm), just to name a few. The vast majority of module music is of the techno genre, although some rock, pop, and even classical has been produced by music coders.
A tale of two KLFs
In the late eighties, there was a group called the KLF (Kopyright Liberation Front). They used to call themselves the JAMs (Justified Ancients of Mummu. Go read the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson to learn more about the JAMs.) The KLF had a knack for getting in trouble for unauthorized use of samples from other people's music. They were forced to destroy all copies of an album they released (the 1987 album, IIRC) to avoid lawsuits. Because of this, they came to view the entire music industry as agents of the Illuminati, a supersecret organization hell bent on controlling what the world sees and hears.
Later, an unrelated KLF emerged, called the Kosmic Loader Foundation. They used to make the music for "loaders", or short demo programs that came up when you launched cracked games. (Remember the wonderful world of demos and the demo scene?) Anyway, they changed their name to KFMF, or Kosmic Free Music Foundation. Whatever music they produced, you could download for free, no questions asked. Or you could purchase CDs with their music for a nominal fee. Of course, the idea for their tracked music was the same as for open-source software: If you modify a song or "rip" the samples, at least give credit where it's due.
Sadly, the KFMF no longer exists, and pretty much the entire demo scene has fallen by the wayside, but is still alive with tracked music at places like Nectarine Radio. Nowadays, there are myriads of tracked formats, and even the mainstream music programs such as Cakewalk and Reason have their legions of adherents who create and swap music files, but the idea remains the same: If music was open-sourced, free as in speech and free as in beer, nobody could control it, no RIAA, Illuminati, or whatever.
... a bootable Linux distro that has Freevo on it. Just insert CD, boot, and it's all ready to go, freeing up the entire hard drive for recording and time-shifting live TV.
Maaan. This is gonna take some brainular repairs. Lacking da good stuff, me reaches for the Nyquil and "Exit Stage Left" by Rush. Ahhhhh. Back to "normal".
Remember, surrealism changes the mind and everything that resembles it.
I once made a pocket version using turpentine and colored water. I used one of the small square bottles of turpentine that comes with Testors model paints. It was half full, so all I had to do was add enough colored water to fill it up. I used to carry it in my pocket everywhere I went, pulling it out during a dull moment (usually junior high math class) and tipping it back and forth.
As far as zinc-air: zinc is both way too heavy and way too expensive to be a viable vehicle fuel!
Aluminum is much lighter than zinc.
It's been said that if you throw away an aluminum can, it might as well be half full of gasoline, because that's how much energy it takes to smelt aluminum oxide (from bauxite ore).
With that in mind, there are companies that have been working on aluminum-air batteries that will release the energy from aluminum by converting it back into oxide through a fuel-cell like process. It consists of a sandwich of consumable aluminum plates for the anode, a salt solution, and non-consumable yet air permeable plates for the cathodes. As the anodes corrode away, replace them, and return the used plates to a recycle center to be "recharged" by re-smelting them into aluminum metal again. Smelting aluminum is a very energy consuming process (known as the Hall-Heroult reduction process), but it is essentially the aluminum-air battery in reverse (and in massive scale).
Some chemistry know-it-alls might want to put on their thinking caps and calculate how much energy it takes to hydrolize water into hydrogen and oxygen, and how much energy it takes to turn aluminum oxide into aluminum and oxygen, but then factor in the weight vs. power output of an aluminum-air battery and weight vs. power output of a fuel cell + hydrogen storage tank.
For those who just gotta do something now, here is a link that shows you how to roll your own aluminum air battery, and then you can hook a couple in series and get back to the topic of this thread and power some LEDs.
Woodworking with Rednecks... How many of those dying trees get harvested for timber?
From what I've seen on TV coverage, they showed the source of the black smoke. Looked to me like a refinery or something with the safety flare-off stacks burning. I live in the heart of petrochemical alley down along the southern Mississippi River, and believe me, whenever there is a widespread power failure, they all do the same thing.
There are many stages to the processes that turn oil into gasoline, plastics, and other petrochemical products. Whenever there is an upset to the process, such as a power failure, complex systems (on backup power, of course) are designed to shut down the plant in a controlled manner to prevent a catastrophe, and many times that involves venting unprocessed flammables to safety flare-offs to be burned off.
About 7 years ago, a transformer failed at a major substation over by where I live, plunging a large area into darkness. Within seconds, a series of loud explosions were heard at a nearby plastics plant. People living in the area were panicking because they thought that the plant blew up, but the TV and radio newscasters calmly explained (to those who could recieve the broadcasts) that it was part of the safety shutdown procedure, that the loud booms were caused by safety pop-off valves and what looked like burning Iraqi oil wells was the safety flare-off stacks burning.
Microsoft however recognizes the essential fact that what they are selling is not a tangible product, but the service of a piece of software.
The fact that I can go into Wal-Mart and pick up Microsoft software packaged on a disk inside of a box, carry it to the register, pay for it, then take it home, makes it seem like a tangible product to me and everyone else.
Then again, another service, phone service that comes in the form of prepaid phone cards can also be bought off a rack, purchased and carried home as a tangible product. The fundamental difference? Phone cards have a limited number of minutes and once they're gone, throw away the card and buy a new one or "refill" the old one.
I think renting software has already been tried, but people can hack the expiration date of the software.
I think the profits for software and entertainment ought to come out of the insanely high price of a broadband connection, then having the broadband connection would allow us to download anything we want no matter what it is and grant us the license to use it as we see fit.
You got 'em right, but named 'em wrong and even left out a step. Every good Discordian knows there are 5 stages to a civilization's rise and fall.
What you wrote = Discordian equivalent
Step 1) Shock/Fear = Chaos
Step 2) Hysteria = Confusion
Step 3) Anarchy = Discord
Step 4) Pragmatism = Bureaucracy
Step 5) It's there, you just didn't name it:
This will continue until either the population has dwindled to a sufficiently small group (which is unlikely given the then-newly-encouraged birthrate), or complex and corrupt power-systems will develop, which can contain the selfish class. Tyranical Dictatorships are the only systems that can contain anarchy. It is only given enough time and prosperity that benevolant systems can prevail. This is what Discordians call Aftermath.
Then a cataclysm happens, whether natural or man-made, which starts the cycle all over again.
Anybody who has ever been to Japan or Korea and has eaten their ramen noodles knows what I mean. The stuff they pass off in American grocery stores for $.20 a bag just ain't the same.
...it is introducing new C02 that hasn't been around for millenia, a serious shock to the global balance.
A volcano introduces more "new" CO2 to the atmosphere than an entire year's worth of CO2 production from all the world's fossil fueled engines of transportation and industry combined. To nature, man's output of CO2 appears as a slight increase in volcanic activity. Where we are making the serious shock to the global balance is by cutting down the forests that would normally sink the extra CO2.
IANAU (I Am Not A Ukranian), nor do I play one on TV, but from what I understand, The Ukranians call it "Chornobyl". "Chernoblis" is wormwood. "Chornobyl" means "black water". The plant is built along the Prypiat River, which was once called "Black Water River".
If you are an instrument and controls engineer at a refinery, you are both. You would install pressure and temperature sensors on tanks, boilers and pipelines, install speed controls on big honking pump motors, then wire them all to networked terminals running industrial software such as Labview or Wonderware using an industry specific LAN such as HART or Foundation Fieldbus.
something to the effect of "Now you can hold your breath until 2.6 is released"?
A number of people think personal helicopters and air cars would be easier for humans to fly if they had autopilots to take care of pitch, yaw, etc., and a sort of collision avoidance system, therefore giving the aircraft some sort of "horse sense".
But the horse sense would have to be good enough to avoid ground objects too, such as trees, buildings, power lines, radio towers and the ubiquitous cell phone network antennas. But more importantly, they would need a law abiding horse sense that would automatically avoid no-fly zones such as over nuke plants, refineries, prisons (imagine a sky car aided prison break), or anywhere else you have to stop at a guard shack before going inside.
But I want my back yard to be a no-fly zone, too. I don't want someone to land in my back yard and steal my gas grill. And I'm sure businesses with fenced in outdoor storage wouldn't want to be descended upon by flying thieves, either. This would require designated landing lots and air car guidance systems that will only land at other designated landing lots. They needn't be all that big, in fact existing parking lots would do nicely. My street has maybe 30 houses, and maybe about 60 cars. They could land a flying car in the parking lot of the local gas station, gas up, then drive it the rest of the way home on the street. That way cities will not have to be planned around them. Until these requirements are met, I don't think there will ever be sky cars.
The problem I have with the airplane theory, however, is that the instant that the water is ejected from the plane it will break up into thousands upon thousands of tiny drops which will instantly freeze at that altitude. A large mass of water would not freeze instantly due to its large heat capacity, yet at the same time it will not remain together due to the various forces yanking it apart (esp. friction).
One news report that I saw not too long ago was that an ice block smashed through the roof of a house, and investigators on the scene said it came from an airplane. Indeed, it was the same color of blue as the disinfectant in the airplane toilet flushing water. IIRC, they said that the holding tank had a slow leak, and the water made its way to the exterior of the fuselage (sucked through a hole from a popped rivet, perhaps) where it was broken up into a spray by the air rushing past. The spray collected and instantly froze directly behind the leak on the cold aluminum skin where one of the tail fins joined to the fuselage, collecting and forming a sizeable ball of blue ice. (Heating due to friction would have been negligeable here.) As the plane approached for a landing, slowing down and descending into a warmer layer of air, the aluminum skin conducted just enough heat to cause the blob of ice to separate from the surface and fall, crashing through the roof. Into the bathroom of the house. Imagine the odds.
I've always wanted to see a futuristic version of Survivor where they're placed in a postapocalyptic environment (think Mad Max, Waterworld, etc.) where they have to build the same sort of contraptions as Junkyard Wars, all the while battling for food and clean water, fending off pirates and thieves, and whoever doesn't make it off the island or outside the perimeter before their machines break down loses.
Hey, I still got mine. And 2 C-64s. And my VIC-20. And the burned out power supplies for the above. Come to think of it, every computer I've ever had I still got, including the peripherals, along with other people's huddled masses of wretched refuse. Occasionally, I go out and salvage a part or 2 to get another computer working, or donate parts to my workplace (the cheap bastards are still using 10 year old 386 computers until they break down, then try to repair them.)
Must be, I was a hyper child growing up in the 70's and I took ritalin up until the early 80's. Nowadays, I gots ta have my coffee in the morning, even though it has no effect on keeping me awake. I take a coffee break at work usually around 10 in the morning. I don't know why I even bother, because by 10:30 I fall asleep in my chair and damn near fall out of it. I've tried ritalin again recently, and sure, it does keep me awake, but then I would fall asleep rather suddenly instead of slowly dropping off like when I drink coffee. And I like to drink iced tea before going to bed, Mad River Oblong tea being one of my favorites. Except I have to get up and pee at 2 AM. But sleep aids usually have the opposite effect on me, they keep me awake.
A long time ago they had a series of kid's science fiction books about a kid inventor named Danny Dunn, and one book, Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy was about a robotic dragonfly that could fly around and spy on people. He flew it with a helmet and gloves that foretold of modern virtual reality, because he could feel in his gloves whatever the dragonfly landed on. He ended up destroying it in fears the technology would land in the wrong hands and be used for sinister (Orwellian?) purposes. Anybody else remember reading this one?
Roadrunner is owned by AOLTW, which is a member of the RIAA.
Yessiree, folks, the parent of a record company also owns the wire connected to the side of your house, so therefore, you're paying for music whether you download it through that piece of wire or you buy it stamped onto a piece of plastic sold by the same company, right? I think those who are on any ISP owned by a member of RIAA or MPAA ought to be entitled to download all the music they want, because they're getting paid for it, anyway. In the meantime, I'm hoping and dreaming that the big media conglomerates will collapse as spectacularly as Enron and Worldcom did.