Yes rapid mixing of the gas outside the tank, it will make a nice flame, but still wont cause an explosion inside or outside of the tank. (Also gas that is leaving the tank is no longer pressurized). Nor will H2 linger around long enough to fill an area with gas to blow up as it not only likes to expand but it also likes to rise like mad.
Now maybe if you are talking about a massive structual failure would you get enough gas outside at once to cause the kind of explosion you are thinking of but that is a very rare thing considering the maturity of high pressure storage systems and the thoroughness of the inspection and certifying agencies. I go out diving on a regular basis. Scuba tanks are 3000psi cylinders, the same pressure the hydrogen filling stations will be providing. Out of the half a million in use less than 10 rupture in any given year. (Usually it's some knuckle head that let water get in and corrode his gear and then not get the anual inspection done.
Speaking of highly pressurized gases exiting a small hole. Maybe you should be sure you're not talking out the wrong hole when you post something on slashdot if you get so easily insulted.
They need to hurry up and come out with a WiFi phone, as in like a cell phone not a cordless home phone, that can operate over one of the many IM services or through the free VOIP services like skype. In wireless laced cities like Seattle, my current home city, or in my own little wireless hotspot at home I can dump my Vonage and my Nextel phone for good. Nothing more than a broadband bill.
True, true you have a point, but at the same time one of the biggest problems in major cities is the health affects of smog, so at least we can clean up the air as the power generation plant would be outside the city. It also would make it easier to deal with the polution since it would be a single point source rather at every tailpipe on the road.
Of course the real goal is to find a better way to get energy in the first place, solar is looking better every year. In the past ten years they've doubled the output of your typical solar panel and doubled it again on the ultra expensive ones NASA uses on spacecraft. Of course until people start adding this to their homes or the government mandates that all new home have some sort of solar power built in, this is a long way off from solving our problems.
Ever seen a grain elevator explode, very cool and we are talking about flower here as in what you eat.
Put anything that'll burn (flower has a nice high surface area and is quite flamable try it the next time you go camping, but watch the eyebrows) in the right mix with oxygen and you get an explosion.
Err exactly how much oxygen would be in a tank of hydrogen....hmmmm....let me think....no don't tell me......aahhhh.....HOW ABOUT FREAKIN ZERO?....I told you not to tell me.
We did this experiment in high school and again in college to show how reaction occur at different rates using acetalyne a acetalyne cannon. When the cannon was partially filled with the gas and ignited it fired off more or less like you would expect a cannon to, with a loud bang, but when the cannon was topped off and had displaced all of the air inside it burned slowly only at the opening much like a can of Sterno would.
Unlike in Hollywood things full of flamable substances don't automatically explode upon contact with bullets or automobiles. This even holds true for a tank full of hydrogen. If it were to leak the hyrdrogen gas would dissapate very rapidly as it is even lighter than helium. Even if that leak were to ignite the tank still would not explode since there is no oxygen in the tank to ignite with the hydrogen.
The worst case senerio would be that the tank was corroded and then filled beyond it's holding capacity and then exploded due to pressure which would pretty much kill anyone within 10 or so meters from the shock wave, then to have it ignite which would create a very large explosion that would take out just about every window within a block or two but would still do very little harm beyond the immediate area.
You can work as long as they want you to in the military. 8-12 hours a day with weekends off are the norm . If you are deployed then it's 8-12 hours a day with maybe a weekend or two off a month.
Throw that into a combat situation and it's 24-7 till you drop. Of course there are plenty of rules such as you can't held entirely accountable for your actions after 16 hours straight, as was in the case of the pilots that were on stims to stay awake and did some friendly fire. Anything past 12 hours and someone high up has to make the call to ok you staying on the job. After 14 hours they have to either transport you home, you can't be allowed to drive, or provide you with food and a cot at work.
You want to talk about a long day at work. The new episode of Battle Star Galactica had the crew on duty for 6 1/2 days straight since the Cylons kept attacking every 33 minutes. Damn somebody make a run to Starbucks and get me a double mochoa. (pun intended)
Actually you are right on with the farmland. Quite a few farmers are discovering they make more per acre windfarming than they do with regular farming, if their land is in the right spot, and then on top of that they still can grow their crops between the rows of windmills.
Solar voltaic and water heating are the best for the quiet and out of sight crowd of suburbia
I love the US bashing on pollution. They love the per capital argument. Let's put this in whole argument in a more proper perspective here.
If the US was one guy (ratio of US pop vs world) in his backyard cooking (his polution) a hotdog for lunch on his very nice stainless steel BBQ (the envy of the entire neighboorhood)...
The rest of the 1st world nations would be 2 or 3 guys hanging out grilling with one very similar...
The rest of the world would be in the next backyard over. Twenty or so guys hanging out bbq over a few barrels in which they are burning car tires. Of course they've invited another twenty or so people over for diner later that night.
A large portion of the "3rd world" is rapidly becoming the "1st" world, but unlike them we are slowly but surely dealing with our polution and population problems.
The bird slaughter is not a total myth, but it has more to do with the support wires rather than what most people assume the blades. (The new windmill towers don't use guy wires anymore.) Of course we have millions of miles of power and phone lines out there already doing the same thing every day.
Personally I love the technology, I live just down the road from Tehachapi pass in California and get a kick out of seeing the ever growing number and size of the windmills they put out there. The new ones are monsters!
I'd like to see a bigger push in requiring all new homes, especially here in CA, to have one of the following to offset the ever growing energy needs and to help desentralize the power grid and to protect from terrorism and the large companies looking to squeeze us with their schemes.
A 80-400watt windmill very small easy to use. (Less than $1500)
or
100watts of solar panels (Less than $1000)
or
enough solar water heating units to supply two people with their daily hot water needs. (Less than $3000)
Any of these can be had for less than $3000 and would have an enormous impact when multiplied by the total number of houses built every year. As the prices drop and capacity goes up then they could scale up the requirements. Eventually all we would need large power facilities for is night time use.
Well if my comment smacked of an American cold war straw-man, yours then stinks of well, the general drivel I would expect from the typical anti-American mind set one would find in a college student or other academic that leaches of the very system they hate.:P
I don't recall once waving the flag once and saying God bless America, so why are you even bring it up? The whole point was a product that is free can exist quite nicely in a Capitalistic economic system and is the ultimate goal of said system.
You got your ice cream analogies backwards. Mom doesn't have to buy as much ice cream since one kid can't eat it which frees up resourches to purchase something else for the lactose intolerant child. That is Capitalism.
Under Communism the lactos intolerant child would still get the ice cream since that is what the state deemed the best for the majority of it's citizens and how dare he expect special treatment. Or in another case if there wasn't enough ice cream for both children to get their share then neither would get any and those higher up in government (aka Mom) would keep it for themselves (privilage of position).
Yes Marx said basically "employ him according to his abilities and pay him based on his needs" This never occurred in Communist Russia. Position, power, and social networking was where the real compensation occurred in Communist Russia, which of course reinforced social classes and made them nearly exclusive. The closest they came to the above quotation was various health, education, and public works such as the rail system were free for all to use. Of course there were still special versions of all the above that were reserved for higher ranking members of government and the Party
A funny point, I'll go ahead and make the leap and assume that you loath the US military as well, is that the US military is probably the only functioning Communistic entity in the world that mirrors most of Marx's ideals for a communist society. Housing, health care, child care, education, work schedules, pay allowances, and social services are very dependent on the needs of the individual. For example a married enlisted with children gets a house, child care, extra services on base, education for the children, and extra pay allowances, while a single enlisted get's to live in a dorm room about the size of the smallest bedrooms in the other enlisted 2-4 bedroom house and gets no extra compensation what so ever. On top of that the one with the family may work in the chow hall flipping burgers while the single enlisted works on 100 million dollar aircraft yet their pay is the same at the same rank. On top of that let's say the first enlisted's child or wife has a special needs health issue. They will go out of their way to put the family at a base that facilitates them getting that treatment even if that means putting them somewhere that doesn't have a need for that particular person's technical expertise. Speaking of rank everyone plays by the same rules in gaining said rank the exception being those rare occassions where people are step promoted by the commander.
Kind of ironic, don't you think?
Oh yeah I almost forgot
God Bless America, Woohoo, W're number one, Four more years! Everyone else blows goats!
I say put them in jail according to two things, how long it takes to read their entire spam and multiply it by how many they've sent. Of course this will put some of these spamers in prison for the better part of the next century with the shear volume of garbage they dump on the net daily.
The FCC ruling is not about taxes, but regulation. It would require some action on the part of Congress before some sort of tax is levied.
As far as letting this issue reside at the lowest levels do you really want some local smuck city board making regulations and taxes on what is really a global utility. Those idiots can't even leave well enough alone about what color you can paint your house or where you can park your car on your own property much less figure out something like VOIP
Besides the FCC or any other government body really isn't going to be able to regulate VOIP since it's vapor, it'll just move around regulations as long as the internet exists. The only thing they have any real say in is how it can connect to the POTS system and how companies can use it to provide a for fee service to the public. For fee commincation services are not going to last much longer anyway unless you are talking about things like bandwidth or maybe remote access such as sat-phone service.
Nothing is stopping them, they already do except maybe an unwillingness to give up their private networks, and the fear that one day the consumer might wise up and realize that other than bandwidth all a customer needs is a little hardware and some freeware to make it work. How are they then going to get people to pay every month for things that practically cost nothing for them to provide?
There isn't a single example were heavily regualted monopolies have given us anything that can be truly considered positive beyond a narrow definition over the short term.
Over price over regulated phone service, electric, and heating fuel (NG, propane, etc) gas industries are perfect example. Just imagine where we would be today if the government had just butted out, with maybe the exception of safety standards.
Communism isn't bad, it just doesn't work on a large scale. Your typical family unit or small village is very communistic in nature and works quite well.
Also in a communistic society resources are not evenly distributed either, they just exchange money with position which tends to be more exclusive keeps people locked into a social class.
Well techincally all resources are finite, even if you extend the boundaries beyond planet earth, but it's still not a question of how evenly resources are distributed, just the efficiency. Paying crack whores welfare money to keep them and their kids from starving is an example of an even-distribution of resources, but it's not very efficient unless of course there is a need for crack whores:)
As far as it being a zero-sum game, you can't measure it at an instant, since every system is zero sum in a single frame. Trends over time show it to be otherwise. Now with the whole deregulation we currently have legally sanctioned monopolies in the media and communcation industry. Copywrit in the case of media and FCC regulation in case of communication. You are right VOIP does a nice run around of the whole process by the use of clever technology and even though it seems that the broadband carriers are going to become the "new monopoly" they too are non-exclusive and will continue to become more so in the future.
Don't believe me, take my last place of residency as an example. Rapid City (Rapid Shitty) SD. Your only choices for ISP's were crap, crapy, or crappiest (AOL) and no broadand was in sight. The local power company looking to take advantage of their right-of-ways and to expand their business as began running fibre to everyone's home. The telco's responded by refusing to sell them anymore hard line access to retard their growth and prevent them from entering their market. The power company's solution was to find a communication company that would sell them the bandwidth they needed out side of the monopoly area they were in and expand their network into those areas so the rest could be connected. Because of this the telcos, the cable companies, and a host of smaller local broad band services are avialable in the area. They didn't want to be left out of the market. (The power company's deal is still one of the best.) Most monopolies today are created by artificial environments by the very regulation that is put in place to supposedly protect us. The current situation is a mess created by all the regulation created for the cable and phone industries.
Luckily technology evolves faster these days than the government can regulate it, so we should see plenty of new innovations that push even the hardware ever closer to the goal noble of "free".
When did you start playing HL? Obviously it wasn't at launch in 1998.
The game was an absolute pain in the ass. It took a beast of a computer to run it. My $1600 computer at the time couldn't run it very well. P2 233 32mb ram, no 3d card, you get the idea. After upgrading to 64mb of ram a 333mhz and a vodoo 1 card did I finally enjoy the HL gaming experience.
No plug and play drivers existed and you had to wait for a patch from both the video card manufacture and valve before it would support the various video modes. DirectX what the hell was that?!
Forget about it if you didn't have an IT/computer guru buddy if you wanted to play it online/LAN
It's amazing how popular a game can become when just a few short years later that it can absolutely scream on the most minimal of inexpensive hardware along with some good content (MODS TEAM FORTRESS and later Counter Strike) and newbee friendly driver support.
Let's not forget the game was well into the double-digit patches by then and was about as bug free as a game could get.
Are you kidding? You obviously didn't play Half Life at launch. It had a steep requirement at the time. I spent about $1600 to get a computer and it could barely run it. I also have to chuckle at your "fluidly" comment. Getting the video to work was frustating as all hell since you had to wait for a driver/patch release from both the game and the card manufacture before the game would even run in the various graphics modes. There where no plug in play drivers at the time so if you didn't have an IT/computer enthusist buddy you weren't going to be playing it in much beyond software mode and you were certainly not going to be playing on a LAN or online.
It's just at the time the game was written it would run on a PII 233 32mb ram and a 1-4mb video card in 1998. It's little wonder that the game came into it's own when you could get it to absolutely scream with a $25 video card 64mb of ram and a 500mhz processor that and of course Team Fortress and Counter Strike mods.
Half Life was obviously well into the double-digit patches by the time you began to play it if all you remember is happy happy thoughts.
Most people are confused with what Capitalism and Communism are. Capitalism is not about making money, that just happens to be a by product of what it's real intent is, an "efficient" distribution of scarce resources. Communism on the other hand was supposed to be the "fair" distribution of scarce resources, which for all practial purposes is impossible. There is no such thing in life that is ever truly fair nor can it be, beyond age five when mom would measure out exactly the same ammount of ice cream to shut you and your whiny sibling up about who got more, which is why Communism failed.
The problem today is many things have become so easy to reproduce or to provide that they are essentially free, of course the companies involved don't like that and try to create artificial scarceness of resources in order to preserve old business models. Most electronic communications and digital media are perfect examples.
I find this to be funny since it is exactly this intentional lack of innovation that has landed every communist nation in the economic toilet.
Companies and individuals can still easily make money with commodities that are free or nearly so, it's all a question of coming up with a different business model to repackage it in a new way or to simply include it within another product and no longer use it as a primary product.
Of course we are talking about people here and true Capitalism is just as harsh as Natural Selection so you are going to see many in government and industry resist technological change for the disruption of lives, jobs, and income that it inevitably causes. They forget though it's not a zero sum game and in the end there will be more to go around for everyone.
Free is the ultimate expression of innovation and innovation in turn is central to what makes Capitalism so effective.
Not all is lost, I share my stuff with several friends so it's possible to get most of it back with a simple drop of a portable harddrive in the mail. Orginally the failed hard drive they were one was the back up for another drives, but my collections of various things over flowed onto that one too. As it stands I have three 120gb drives, the 74gb raptor, and the now defunct 160gb packed to the gills with movies, TV shows, MP3, pictures you name it. I'm looking at picking up 4 200-250gb drives to build up a media server after December and move everything off to that. I'll use my computer for back up of the must save stuff and a third hard drive to triple back up my unique stuff like my digital photos, which currently reside on two seperate hard drives, on three DVD's in a fire safe as well as on a photo site online.
I learned my lesson after loosing my first years worth of digital photos after a hard drive crash.
We wonder that as well. Personally I think we need to bring back the whole "punch them in the face when they are being stupid" method of child rearing. It would stop this nonsense cold by age 12.
My "hard core" hick cousin, he's 19 knows everything. We'll see how "hard" he is when he meets some of the real city kids when he joins the Army next week.
It's like "look dude you're white and a hick to boot"
"Naw dauwg I'm hard core from the street East syide"
"No dude you live off of Rural Route 5 with your parents. The nearest house is two miles away, you're a red neck, get over it"
"Man don't make me get my gat and pop a cap in yo asss"
"That isn't a gat dude, it's a camoflauge painted hunting shotgun, and you keep it in the gun rack in your window"
"Don't be dissin my ride yo"
"Blue neon lights you bought from Walmart don't change the fact that it's a beater pickup truck.
"What ever dauwg"
That is true, you might be think of a pair of SATA, such as the WD Raptor, drives together in a RAID as approaching the performance of a SCSI drive, but individually nope no how no way.
It would be nice to see more hours out of the SATA drives, after all the big huff about the warrenty reduction by Maxtor and WD I picked up one of their "3 year" drives, it still shit the bed after 6 months. Yeah! 2 years worth of pr0n, Enterprise and Red Dwarf episodes gone. Guess you'll still have to role the dice on dependability.
Slashdot Mirror
Now maybe if you are talking about a massive structual failure would you get enough gas outside at once to cause the kind of explosion you are thinking of but that is a very rare thing considering the maturity of high pressure storage systems and the thoroughness of the inspection and certifying agencies. I go out diving on a regular basis. Scuba tanks are 3000psi cylinders, the same pressure the hydrogen filling stations will be providing. Out of the half a million in use less than 10 rupture in any given year. (Usually it's some knuckle head that let water get in and corrode his gear and then not get the anual inspection done.
Speaking of highly pressurized gases exiting a small hole. Maybe you should be sure you're not talking out the wrong hole when you post something on slashdot if you get so easily insulted.
Yes you are quite correct. Other wise the gas company would explode every time you tried to fire up the stove to make some breakfast.
I say good riddence.
Did you know at one point their charter covered the care and disposal of orphans of the human variety too?
Of course the real goal is to find a better way to get energy in the first place, solar is looking better every year. In the past ten years they've doubled the output of your typical solar panel and doubled it again on the ultra expensive ones NASA uses on spacecraft. Of course until people start adding this to their homes or the government mandates that all new home have some sort of solar power built in, this is a long way off from solving our problems.
Put anything that'll burn (flower has a nice high surface area and is quite flamable try it the next time you go camping, but watch the eyebrows) in the right mix with oxygen and you get an explosion.
We did this experiment in high school and again in college to show how reaction occur at different rates using acetalyne a acetalyne cannon. When the cannon was partially filled with the gas and ignited it fired off more or less like you would expect a cannon to, with a loud bang, but when the cannon was topped off and had displaced all of the air inside it burned slowly only at the opening much like a can of Sterno would.
Unlike in Hollywood things full of flamable substances don't automatically explode upon contact with bullets or automobiles. This even holds true for a tank full of hydrogen. If it were to leak the hyrdrogen gas would dissapate very rapidly as it is even lighter than helium. Even if that leak were to ignite the tank still would not explode since there is no oxygen in the tank to ignite with the hydrogen.
The worst case senerio would be that the tank was corroded and then filled beyond it's holding capacity and then exploded due to pressure which would pretty much kill anyone within 10 or so meters from the shock wave, then to have it ignite which would create a very large explosion that would take out just about every window within a block or two but would still do very little harm beyond the immediate area.
Throw that into a combat situation and it's 24-7 till you drop. Of course there are plenty of rules such as you can't held entirely accountable for your actions after 16 hours straight, as was in the case of the pilots that were on stims to stay awake and did some friendly fire. Anything past 12 hours and someone high up has to make the call to ok you staying on the job. After 14 hours they have to either transport you home, you can't be allowed to drive, or provide you with food and a cot at work.
You want to talk about a long day at work. The new episode of Battle Star Galactica had the crew on duty for 6 1/2 days straight since the Cylons kept attacking every 33 minutes. Damn somebody make a run to Starbucks and get me a double mochoa. (pun intended)
Solar voltaic and water heating are the best for the quiet and out of sight crowd of suburbia
It finally was pretty cool, fast, and had the features I wanted, now it's going byby!
YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! DAMN YOU! GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!!
If the US was one guy (ratio of US pop vs world) in his backyard cooking (his polution) a hotdog for lunch on his very nice stainless steel BBQ (the envy of the entire neighboorhood)...
The rest of the 1st world nations would be 2 or 3 guys hanging out grilling with one very similar...
The rest of the world would be in the next backyard over. Twenty or so guys hanging out bbq over a few barrels in which they are burning car tires. Of course they've invited another twenty or so people over for diner later that night.
A large portion of the "3rd world" is rapidly becoming the "1st" world, but unlike them we are slowly but surely dealing with our polution and population problems.
Personally I love the technology, I live just down the road from Tehachapi pass in California and get a kick out of seeing the ever growing number and size of the windmills they put out there. The new ones are monsters!
I'd like to see a bigger push in requiring all new homes, especially here in CA, to have one of the following to offset the ever growing energy needs and to help desentralize the power grid and to protect from terrorism and the large companies looking to squeeze us with their schemes.
A 80-400watt windmill very small easy to use. (Less than $1500)
or
100watts of solar panels (Less than $1000)
or
enough solar water heating units to supply two people with their daily hot water needs. (Less than $3000)
Any of these can be had for less than $3000 and would have an enormous impact when multiplied by the total number of houses built every year. As the prices drop and capacity goes up then they could scale up the requirements. Eventually all we would need large power facilities for is night time use.
I don't recall once waving the flag once and saying God bless America, so why are you even bring it up? The whole point was a product that is free can exist quite nicely in a Capitalistic economic system and is the ultimate goal of said system.
You got your ice cream analogies backwards. Mom doesn't have to buy as much ice cream since one kid can't eat it which frees up resourches to purchase something else for the lactose intolerant child. That is Capitalism.
Under Communism the lactos intolerant child would still get the ice cream since that is what the state deemed the best for the majority of it's citizens and how dare he expect special treatment. Or in another case if there wasn't enough ice cream for both children to get their share then neither would get any and those higher up in government (aka Mom) would keep it for themselves (privilage of position).
Yes Marx said basically "employ him according to his abilities and pay him based on his needs" This never occurred in Communist Russia. Position, power, and social networking was where the real compensation occurred in Communist Russia, which of course reinforced social classes and made them nearly exclusive. The closest they came to the above quotation was various health, education, and public works such as the rail system were free for all to use. Of course there were still special versions of all the above that were reserved for higher ranking members of government and the Party
A funny point, I'll go ahead and make the leap and assume that you loath the US military as well, is that the US military is probably the only functioning Communistic entity in the world that mirrors most of Marx's ideals for a communist society. Housing, health care, child care, education, work schedules, pay allowances, and social services are very dependent on the needs of the individual. For example a married enlisted with children gets a house, child care, extra services on base, education for the children, and extra pay allowances, while a single enlisted get's to live in a dorm room about the size of the smallest bedrooms in the other enlisted 2-4 bedroom house and gets no extra compensation what so ever. On top of that the one with the family may work in the chow hall flipping burgers while the single enlisted works on 100 million dollar aircraft yet their pay is the same at the same rank. On top of that let's say the first enlisted's child or wife has a special needs health issue. They will go out of their way to put the family at a base that facilitates them getting that treatment even if that means putting them somewhere that doesn't have a need for that particular person's technical expertise. Speaking of rank everyone plays by the same rules in gaining said rank the exception being those rare occassions where people are step promoted by the commander.
Kind of ironic, don't you think?
Oh yeah I almost forgot
God Bless America, Woohoo, W're number one, Four more years! Everyone else blows goats!
I say put them in jail according to two things, how long it takes to read their entire spam and multiply it by how many they've sent. Of course this will put some of these spamers in prison for the better part of the next century with the shear volume of garbage they dump on the net daily.
As far as letting this issue reside at the lowest levels do you really want some local smuck city board making regulations and taxes on what is really a global utility. Those idiots can't even leave well enough alone about what color you can paint your house or where you can park your car on your own property much less figure out something like VOIP
Besides the FCC or any other government body really isn't going to be able to regulate VOIP since it's vapor, it'll just move around regulations as long as the internet exists. The only thing they have any real say in is how it can connect to the POTS system and how companies can use it to provide a for fee service to the public. For fee commincation services are not going to last much longer anyway unless you are talking about things like bandwidth or maybe remote access such as sat-phone service.
Nothing is stopping them, they already do except maybe an unwillingness to give up their private networks, and the fear that one day the consumer might wise up and realize that other than bandwidth all a customer needs is a little hardware and some freeware to make it work. How are they then going to get people to pay every month for things that practically cost nothing for them to provide?
Over price over regulated phone service, electric, and heating fuel (NG, propane, etc) gas industries are perfect example. Just imagine where we would be today if the government had just butted out, with maybe the exception of safety standards.
Also in a communistic society resources are not evenly distributed either, they just exchange money with position which tends to be more exclusive keeps people locked into a social class.
Well techincally all resources are finite, even if you extend the boundaries beyond planet earth, but it's still not a question of how evenly resources are distributed, just the efficiency. Paying crack whores welfare money to keep them and their kids from starving is an example of an even-distribution of resources, but it's not very efficient unless of course there is a need for crack whores :)
As far as it being a zero-sum game, you can't measure it at an instant, since every system is zero sum in a single frame. Trends over time show it to be otherwise. Now with the whole deregulation we currently have legally sanctioned monopolies in the media and communcation industry. Copywrit in the case of media and FCC regulation in case of communication. You are right VOIP does a nice run around of the whole process by the use of clever technology and even though it seems that the broadband carriers are going to become the "new monopoly" they too are non-exclusive and will continue to become more so in the future.
Don't believe me, take my last place of residency as an example. Rapid City (Rapid Shitty) SD. Your only choices for ISP's were crap, crapy, or crappiest (AOL) and no broadand was in sight. The local power company looking to take advantage of their right-of-ways and to expand their business as began running fibre to everyone's home. The telco's responded by refusing to sell them anymore hard line access to retard their growth and prevent them from entering their market. The power company's solution was to find a communication company that would sell them the bandwidth they needed out side of the monopoly area they were in and expand their network into those areas so the rest could be connected. Because of this the telcos, the cable companies, and a host of smaller local broad band services are avialable in the area. They didn't want to be left out of the market. (The power company's deal is still one of the best.) Most monopolies today are created by artificial environments by the very regulation that is put in place to supposedly protect us. The current situation is a mess created by all the regulation created for the cable and phone industries.
Luckily technology evolves faster these days than the government can regulate it, so we should see plenty of new innovations that push even the hardware ever closer to the goal noble of "free".
oops double posted
The game was an absolute pain in the ass. It took a beast of a computer to run it. My $1600 computer at the time couldn't run it very well. P2 233 32mb ram, no 3d card, you get the idea. After upgrading to 64mb of ram a 333mhz and a vodoo 1 card did I finally enjoy the HL gaming experience.
No plug and play drivers existed and you had to wait for a patch from both the video card manufacture and valve before it would support the various video modes. DirectX what the hell was that?!
Forget about it if you didn't have an IT/computer guru buddy if you wanted to play it online/LAN
It's amazing how popular a game can become when just a few short years later that it can absolutely scream on the most minimal of inexpensive hardware along with some good content (MODS TEAM FORTRESS and later Counter Strike) and newbee friendly driver support.
Let's not forget the game was well into the double-digit patches by then and was about as bug free as a game could get.
It's just at the time the game was written it would run on a PII 233 32mb ram and a 1-4mb video card in 1998. It's little wonder that the game came into it's own when you could get it to absolutely scream with a $25 video card 64mb of ram and a 500mhz processor that and of course Team Fortress and Counter Strike mods.
Half Life was obviously well into the double-digit patches by the time you began to play it if all you remember is happy happy thoughts.
The problem today is many things have become so easy to reproduce or to provide that they are essentially free, of course the companies involved don't like that and try to create artificial scarceness of resources in order to preserve old business models. Most electronic communications and digital media are perfect examples.
I find this to be funny since it is exactly this intentional lack of innovation that has landed every communist nation in the economic toilet.
Companies and individuals can still easily make money with commodities that are free or nearly so, it's all a question of coming up with a different business model to repackage it in a new way or to simply include it within another product and no longer use it as a primary product.
Of course we are talking about people here and true Capitalism is just as harsh as Natural Selection so you are going to see many in government and industry resist technological change for the disruption of lives, jobs, and income that it inevitably causes. They forget though it's not a zero sum game and in the end there will be more to go around for everyone.
Free is the ultimate expression of innovation and innovation in turn is central to what makes Capitalism so effective.
Not all is lost, I share my stuff with several friends so it's possible to get most of it back with a simple drop of a portable harddrive in the mail. Orginally the failed hard drive they were one was the back up for another drives, but my collections of various things over flowed onto that one too. As it stands I have three 120gb drives, the 74gb raptor, and the now defunct 160gb packed to the gills with movies, TV shows, MP3, pictures you name it. I'm looking at picking up 4 200-250gb drives to build up a media server after December and move everything off to that. I'll use my computer for back up of the must save stuff and a third hard drive to triple back up my unique stuff like my digital photos, which currently reside on two seperate hard drives, on three DVD's in a fire safe as well as on a photo site online.
I learned my lesson after loosing my first years worth of digital photos after a hard drive crash.
My "hard core" hick cousin, he's 19 knows everything. We'll see how "hard" he is when he meets some of the real city kids when he joins the Army next week.
It's like "look dude you're white and a hick to boot"
"Naw dauwg I'm hard core from the street East syide"
"No dude you live off of Rural Route 5 with your parents. The nearest house is two miles away, you're a red neck, get over it"
"Man don't make me get my gat and pop a cap in yo asss"
"That isn't a gat dude, it's a camoflauge painted hunting shotgun, and you keep it in the gun rack in your window"
"Don't be dissin my ride yo"
"Blue neon lights you bought from Walmart don't change the fact that it's a beater pickup truck.
"What ever dauwg"
It would be nice to see more hours out of the SATA drives, after all the big huff about the warrenty reduction by Maxtor and WD I picked up one of their "3 year" drives, it still shit the bed after 6 months. Yeah! 2 years worth of pr0n, Enterprise and Red Dwarf episodes gone. Guess you'll still have to role the dice on dependability.