I don't see how it could be a violation of copyright to fail to copy certain portions of a work, or even to only selectively play back portions of a work. Never mind that the program and the commercials are separate works.
At best, this could be a violation of the contract between Dish and its content providers and advertisers. Moot to the point of this thread: it is a civil matter that has jack to do with copyright.
No, because if this were true, then risk would not be risk.
It IS true, and here's why: As an investor, if you put all your eggs in one basket and that basket falls off a cliff, you are left with NOTHING and it's game over. But if your bet pays off then all you have is more money.
So, failure is crippling while success just enables you to make bigger bets. That means, if you're smart, that you diversify. Some of your money goes into low-variance bets that are all but guaranteed to pay off with a small return. And some of your money goes into high-variance bets; these have a much higher chance of going bust but will also pay off much bigger when they hit.
Money isn't divided up equally. Most investors have small bankrolls and can't stand any risk. These are people saving for retirement, etc.. Failure means they live out their days miserable and dependent on the state; success means they travel the world and have great end-of-life medical care. The only ones who can make the riskier bets are those who have their future taken care of and can gamble with the rest.
All of that means simply that there is much more competition for the low-variance bets. The riskier investments have less interest from investors, allowing investors to demand more return. It's as simple as that.
Because they lack the money to emigrate from the States.
A few months back I got a TracFone specifically for use as a pay-as-you-go phone. After an initial outlay of $70, I buy time for slightly less than a nickel per minute. It costs me 0.3 minutes to send or receive a text message, and time spent browsing the Web costs me one minute per minute of bandwidth use.
My average usage is coming in at just a hair over $16 per month. Next month, my outlay for usage will finally exceed my outlay for the phone itself.
There are reasonably priced pay-as-you-go options in the U.S. Also, you can use GMail / Google Voice and a pretty cheap Bluetooth headset to make free calls to any U.S. phone number while at home, through your computer and the Internet.
You're right about the photon's frame of reference, but causality is alive and well in relativity.
This is part of the problem with the math we try to use to describe the universe. We don't handle zeroes and infinities very well.
For example, something goes all batshit at the speed of light. If you try to apply the math of Relativity to something traveling at c, then you get a meaningless answer that there is no time. When you try to figure out what's beyond the event horizon of a black hole (where gravity's acceleration is greater than the speed of light), the answer comes up that there is no space, that the entire mass of thousands of stars would be contained in a single point that is infinitely smaller than the Planck length: a singularity. When you try to figure out the transition across the event horizon of a black hole, it seems that something falling into one will take forever to get there, while on the inside of the black hole everything that's in it was always in it.
Is anybody working on some math that take the weird out of it all?
I once owned a copy of a large paperback titled "The Ultimate Paper Airplane". It was actually a very interesting read. Between templates for paper airplanes, it told the tale of the Kline-Fogleman Airfoil. Basically, if you cut out a wedge from a wing or propeller, the airfoil becomes significantly more efficient. The book went into the physics of it.
Anyway, I don't know if that paper airplane is what you're looking for. But, wouldn't you know it, YouTube has a video of one being made and flown.
One of the Great Lies of the Free Market is that if everyone has an equal shot, everyone will prosper.
The point of a free market is that all participants compete on an even footing. The point of it is fairness. Free markets do not guarantee anyone success. A market system that guarantees a certain economic outcome is by definition not a free market.
Both Windows and Linux can manage most people's computer needs about equally well.
Yes, and a motorcycle can manage nearly anyone's transportation needs as well as an automobile. But, if one has a license to drive an automobile, that skill does not convey even enough knowledge about how to start the engine of the motorcycle, much less drive it.
I live in the suburbs of the suburbs of a major metropolitan area. My commute home from work is about 15 miles. On a good night, it takes 35 minutes. On a shitty one, it takes an hour.
So, when all the fucking traffic is going in one direction, why the fuck does it still have to slow down to ten miles an hour on a road where the speed limit is 55?
If you can't solve the gross case of "get everyone outside the city as fast as fucking possible" then the problem of "do I have to wait one minute to make a left fucking turn" is, quite frankly, TRITE.
It turns out that we have only a vague idea as to where Earth got its water, and it will take a long time until we have any hint of this life-giving resource on worlds orbiting stars thousands of light-years away.
Where does this idea that water might be rare and special come from? Our own solar system is teeming with the stuff. It's on several planets, several moons, many comets, and there's probably a bunch of it locked up in asteroids as well. It's a simple compound of the most abundant element in the universe plus an element that is certainly not rare.
The default position should be to assume that our solar system is NOT unique. Other solar systems stars like our own will contain elements and compounds in similar proportions to our own, because they will have been formed from a similar quantity of a similar mixture of gasses and interstellar junk.
We've discovered many many planets orbiting nearby stars already, enough so that we can safely assume that planets are normal. It makes sense that water should also be pretty abundant as well.
I recently canceled with AT&T and converted to TracFone. I bought a Motorola phone outright for $90, which came with a "triple minutes for the life of the phone" deal. The triple minutes thing brings my per-minute cost down to $0.047 per minute. Text messages cost me 0.3 minutes of time, and browsing the web charges minutes during usage.
Over the three months I've had it, I've been paying a little less than $17 per month on average. Compared to what AT&T was charging me -- and I was on the cheapest voice and data plans -- the phone paid for itself before the second month was up.
The only change I made was to start using my computer to make voice calls when I'm at home -- and my bluetooth headset allows me to talk away from the computer once the call is connected.
The "customer retention" tool that took my cancellation call tried to tell me that TracFone coverage would be lacking. TracFone runs over AT&T's network.
So how the hell can a third party resell AT&T pay-as-you-go service for half of what AT&T itself charges for that same service? Somebody is really getting screwed. And it's not me, at least not any more.
I do that at a macroscopic scale and at room temperature on a daily basis. Quantum mechanics is a huge scam.
QM predicts and experiments have verified that when pairs of entangled photons are passed through polarizing filters, they correlate at a rate that is a function of the difference in angle between the filters. If you do the same experiment with pairs of non-entangled photons, the results never correlate.
Go wrap your head around that. Seriously, think about it. In order for that kind of correlation to happen, each member of the entangled pair must be connected in some way across time and space. You can't replicate that kind of experiment by flipping coins.
After you've understood the thing well enough, then try calling QM a huge scam.
There are a lot of incredibly smart people who make this kind of thing their life's work, and a random anonymous nobody like you has no right at all to disrespect them or the truths they are working to discover.
I had been using smartphones for over four years, until just recently. I had an iPhone for two years, and before that I used a Pocket PC that could do everything an iPhone could do except it didn't have such a slick interface. All that time, I had a basic voice package and a decent data plan.
Recently (tough economic times and all) I decided to really have a look at what I was paying for and what I was getting. I found out that more of my "rollover minutes" simply decayed after non-use than I ever actually used. I never used more than 20% of my "evening and weekend" minutes. I never used more than 10% of my Internet bandwidth cap.
Basically, I was paying $85 or so per month and letting most of the value of it go to waste.
So, I switched to pre-paid TracFone. I bought a decent Motorola that has a touchscreen and a decent collection of features. I lost GPS navigation, but that's ok because I have a GPS in my car now. Other than that, I can still talk, text, browse, play games, and anything else I could do before.
The phone came with a "triple minutes for life" deal. Basically, that means that so long as I use that same phone, I buy my pre-paid minutes at $0.047. If I browse the Web, it charges me for the time in minutes, instead of metering my bandwidth. Text messages are about 1.5 cents apiece to send and receive.
And all of it goes over AT&T's network. I have the same service provider as before. Same signal quality. Same Internet bandwidth.
Another thing I did was invest $30 in a decent headset for my computer. When I'm at home, I now use Google Voice to make outgoing phone calls. I get great sound quality and don't pay a penny for it. These are my new "evening and weekend" minutes...
I paid $90 for the phone, and I charged it up with a little under 1300 minutes at a price of $60. That was 2.5 months ago. I still have 430 minutes remaining. That basically means I'm using my phone for a hair under $16.50 per month now. That's a savings of about $70 per month. The cheaper service has already paid for the phone. Anybody want to buy a used iPhone 3GS?
If you use the hell out of your smartphone, you might be getting your money's worth. But if you're a more "casual" smartphone user, then you're getting seriously ripped off.
was on a guitar forum when someone posted the question about bands with mediocre guitarists. One responder (not me) commented something along the lines of "John Flansburgh of TMBG qualifies... and I'd still rather listen to them than anything by Yngwie Malmsteen."
Hmm. I don't quite get that. I've always considered him to be a very underrated guitarist. He's incredibly versatile and amazingly subtle. But what he's really got is the gift of finding a great hook. There are plenty of amazingly skilled guitarists out there. But most of them aren't part of my mind's internal soundtrack. John Flansburgh's stuff is. So is Peter Buck's. And Ed Robertson.
Most people don't know who any of those guys are, but those are some of the best guitarists in the business today.
According to Wikipedia, Flans once stated Factory Showroom was his favorite TMBG album. Clearly they thought it was some of their best work. However, they parted with their label afterwards, and one of the reasons was a feeling that the label failed to adequately promote the album.
I think Factory Showroom is their best work to date. There are parts of every single album before and since that I love, but for Factory Showroom I know every lyric of every song by heart.
I bought the CD when it was released. It wasn't long before I recorded a WAV of the line "HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO LET YOU KNOW THEY WAY I FEEL ABOUT YOU" from Exquisite Dead Guy, and made it my Windows startup sound.:) That was back before XP.
there is a bit of irony in protesting against corporate greed while blogging about it on the most expensive and fashionable laptops
How is it ironic? Apple provides quality products at a price point many are willing to meet. Also, I don't recall them ever having been in the news for screwing over their workforce. Plus, they haven't screwed up the global economy by committing real estate fraud on a global scale. As far as I know, they are not heavily subsidized by the government. And, you tend to associate Apple with Silicon Valley instead of Wall Street. The protest is "Occupy Wall Street", not "Occupy Silicon Valley".
Protesting against "corporate greed" does not require putting all corporations together in one group.
I mean, if neutrinos can cycle into a fourth variety (the "sterile neutrino") that goes faster than light for some reason ("taking a shortcut through the bulk?"), then why did the neutrinos from the supernova arrive at about the same time as the photons? This question can be adapted for any other explanation that I've thought of for neutrinos actually moving faster than light.
What if they oscillate into some form that is slightly faster than light? They'd be traveling slightly slower than light part of the time, faster than light part of the time, and their average speed might be exactly the speed of light. The amount of time spent on the other side of the lightspeed barrier would never be enough to be exploited to violate causality. But, the oscillations would cause some curious results that might sometimes show some neutrinos exceeding the speed of light.
The universe would give us hints of tachyons while at the same time not vanishing in a puff of logic, and would also demonstrate a means by which something that has mass could travel at light speed.
Not that I'm saying this is what's going on. I don't have the background; I follow what I can of these things as a hobby. It's just fun to think about.
I get by rather well on a stupid phone with pay as you go
I imagine that for many, contract voice and data plans are very good. I, however, got sick of them after having a PocketPC for two years and then an iPhone for two years. I finally realized that 90% of my already small amount of data usage was just twiddling my thumbs, and that 90% of my actual phone usage was in a place where I was in front of a computer.
So I got a pay-as-you-go phone for under $100. It has a touchscreen, camera, mp3 player, etc. along with a Web browser that just uses pay-as-you-go minutes instead of counting bytes. It uses AT&T's network, so it has the same coverage as my iPhone did. When I'm gonna be on a long call, I just put the cellphone down, put on a headset, and talk through my computer on Google Voice for free.
Now I'm paying $70/month less and wondering why I ever allowed myself to get roped in to those contracts in the first place.
Eh, I've been hearing about potential "miracle bacteria" for decades now. To me this is just another load of over-hyped bullshit that we we won't hear about ever again, much like the crazy Thorium Car guy last month.
But, might as well: TFA did indicate it could potentially convert any plant-based material, newspaper being but one example.
Hey, why don't we turn this into a fantasy thread about how this could be good for marijuana legalization, 'cause you could harvest the sweet sweet buds and throw the rest into the vat to make fuel?
Initial reports said that the driver, David Secker, was apparently using his knees to steer the car, an accusation he tried to refute in court.
Back in the late eighties, before all these fancy gadgets came into being, I had (to my eternal amazement) the luck to witness a woman driving 75 mph on 285 west of Atlanta in bumper-to-bumper traffic reading a book. We're talking five lanes full of writhing idiots jockeying for position in a rush-hour race to get there first. That road was (and definitely still is) a horror story in progress. It was only a couple months before that I saw a car wrecked on the median, propped sideways on the concrete median divider, its engine block a good 150 feet down the road. Seriously, they just flat could not stop rush hour traffic to clean up the car, and I suppose an ambulance had taken the corpse(s) away previously. They'd have to wait for a break in the traffic at about 2 AM to get the car and its engine out of there.
A book, for you youngins, is a stack of paper bound together with static text on each piece; when reading one, you are confronted with one to two thousand words at a time, and the words are all longhand. So, for the guy dealing with a couple hundred or so characters of text messages while yakking on the phone -- heh.
My bullshit detector is beeping silently in the background...
As is mine. Looking at both articles, and googling a bit, I keep running across a statement to the effect that when the Thorium is heated, its molecules become so dense that it produces heat surges. Then they go on to talk about the amount of energy that could be extracted from Thorium in a fission reaction.
These articles also mention that it is believed that the internal heat of the Earth is due largely in part to the presence of uranium and thorium in the mantle. I can buy that; if you have a lot of diffuse radioactive stuff in an immense mass, practically all of the energy from its slow natural radioactive decay would be captured, warming the material. Small quantities of things that are dangerously radioactive also tend to give off heat from the decay.
It's my understanding that when you heat things, they expand, and become less dense. If they can't expand, they undergo a lot of pressure. So is it plausible that if you confined some Thorium so it couldn't expand when heated, the pressures generated inside the material during extreme heating could somehow cause a fission reaction, or accelerate radioactive decay?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how it could be a violation of copyright to fail to copy certain portions of a work, or even to only selectively play back portions of a work. Never mind that the program and the commercials are separate works.
At best, this could be a violation of the contract between Dish and its content providers and advertisers. Moot to the point of this thread: it is a civil matter that has jack to do with copyright.
It IS true, and here's why: As an investor, if you put all your eggs in one basket and that basket falls off a cliff, you are left with NOTHING and it's game over. But if your bet pays off then all you have is more money.
So, failure is crippling while success just enables you to make bigger bets. That means, if you're smart, that you diversify. Some of your money goes into low-variance bets that are all but guaranteed to pay off with a small return. And some of your money goes into high-variance bets; these have a much higher chance of going bust but will also pay off much bigger when they hit.
Money isn't divided up equally. Most investors have small bankrolls and can't stand any risk. These are people saving for retirement, etc.. Failure means they live out their days miserable and dependent on the state; success means they travel the world and have great end-of-life medical care. The only ones who can make the riskier bets are those who have their future taken care of and can gamble with the rest.
All of that means simply that there is much more competition for the low-variance bets. The riskier investments have less interest from investors, allowing investors to demand more return. It's as simple as that.
A few months back I got a TracFone specifically for use as a pay-as-you-go phone. After an initial outlay of $70, I buy time for slightly less than a nickel per minute. It costs me 0.3 minutes to send or receive a text message, and time spent browsing the Web costs me one minute per minute of bandwidth use.
My average usage is coming in at just a hair over $16 per month. Next month, my outlay for usage will finally exceed my outlay for the phone itself.
There are reasonably priced pay-as-you-go options in the U.S. Also, you can use GMail / Google Voice and a pretty cheap Bluetooth headset to make free calls to any U.S. phone number while at home, through your computer and the Internet.
This is part of the problem with the math we try to use to describe the universe. We don't handle zeroes and infinities very well.
For example, something goes all batshit at the speed of light. If you try to apply the math of Relativity to something traveling at c, then you get a meaningless answer that there is no time. When you try to figure out what's beyond the event horizon of a black hole (where gravity's acceleration is greater than the speed of light), the answer comes up that there is no space, that the entire mass of thousands of stars would be contained in a single point that is infinitely smaller than the Planck length: a singularity. When you try to figure out the transition across the event horizon of a black hole, it seems that something falling into one will take forever to get there, while on the inside of the black hole everything that's in it was always in it.
Is anybody working on some math that take the weird out of it all?
Entanglement implies correlation, but correlation does not imply entanglement.
Determinism is one way to explain so-called spooky action at a distance without using hidden variables or violation of causality.
One of my top three episodes is the one with the water heater rockets. Another is the one where the moribund cement truck gets vaporized.
I once owned a copy of a large paperback titled "The Ultimate Paper Airplane". It was actually a very interesting read. Between templates for paper airplanes, it told the tale of the Kline-Fogleman Airfoil. Basically, if you cut out a wedge from a wing or propeller, the airfoil becomes significantly more efficient. The book went into the physics of it.
Anyway, I don't know if that paper airplane is what you're looking for. But, wouldn't you know it, YouTube has a video of one being made and flown.
The point of a free market is that all participants compete on an even footing. The point of it is fairness. Free markets do not guarantee anyone success. A market system that guarantees a certain economic outcome is by definition not a free market.
Yes, and a motorcycle can manage nearly anyone's transportation needs as well as an automobile. But, if one has a license to drive an automobile, that skill does not convey even enough knowledge about how to start the engine of the motorcycle, much less drive it.
I live in the suburbs of the suburbs of a major metropolitan area. My commute home from work is about 15 miles. On a good night, it takes 35 minutes. On a shitty one, it takes an hour.
So, when all the fucking traffic is going in one direction, why the fuck does it still have to slow down to ten miles an hour on a road where the speed limit is 55?
If you can't solve the gross case of "get everyone outside the city as fast as fucking possible" then the problem of "do I have to wait one minute to make a left fucking turn" is, quite frankly, TRITE.
With that attitude, I wouldn't want you on any development team I'm on, nor would any manager I've ever worked with in my entire career.
Where does this idea that water might be rare and special come from? Our own solar system is teeming with the stuff. It's on several planets, several moons, many comets, and there's probably a bunch of it locked up in asteroids as well. It's a simple compound of the most abundant element in the universe plus an element that is certainly not rare.
The default position should be to assume that our solar system is NOT unique. Other solar systems stars like our own will contain elements and compounds in similar proportions to our own, because they will have been formed from a similar quantity of a similar mixture of gasses and interstellar junk.
We've discovered many many planets orbiting nearby stars already, enough so that we can safely assume that planets are normal. It makes sense that water should also be pretty abundant as well.
I recently canceled with AT&T and converted to TracFone. I bought a Motorola phone outright for $90, which came with a "triple minutes for the life of the phone" deal. The triple minutes thing brings my per-minute cost down to $0.047 per minute. Text messages cost me 0.3 minutes of time, and browsing the web charges minutes during usage.
Over the three months I've had it, I've been paying a little less than $17 per month on average. Compared to what AT&T was charging me -- and I was on the cheapest voice and data plans -- the phone paid for itself before the second month was up.
The only change I made was to start using my computer to make voice calls when I'm at home -- and my bluetooth headset allows me to talk away from the computer once the call is connected.
The "customer retention" tool that took my cancellation call tried to tell me that TracFone coverage would be lacking. TracFone runs over AT&T's network.
So how the hell can a third party resell AT&T pay-as-you-go service for half of what AT&T itself charges for that same service? Somebody is really getting screwed. And it's not me, at least not any more.
QM predicts and experiments have verified that when pairs of entangled photons are passed through polarizing filters, they correlate at a rate that is a function of the difference in angle between the filters. If you do the same experiment with pairs of non-entangled photons, the results never correlate.
Go wrap your head around that. Seriously, think about it. In order for that kind of correlation to happen, each member of the entangled pair must be connected in some way across time and space. You can't replicate that kind of experiment by flipping coins.
After you've understood the thing well enough, then try calling QM a huge scam.
There are a lot of incredibly smart people who make this kind of thing their life's work, and a random anonymous nobody like you has no right at all to disrespect them or the truths they are working to discover.
I had been using smartphones for over four years, until just recently. I had an iPhone for two years, and before that I used a Pocket PC that could do everything an iPhone could do except it didn't have such a slick interface. All that time, I had a basic voice package and a decent data plan.
Recently (tough economic times and all) I decided to really have a look at what I was paying for and what I was getting. I found out that more of my "rollover minutes" simply decayed after non-use than I ever actually used. I never used more than 20% of my "evening and weekend" minutes. I never used more than 10% of my Internet bandwidth cap.
Basically, I was paying $85 or so per month and letting most of the value of it go to waste.
So, I switched to pre-paid TracFone. I bought a decent Motorola that has a touchscreen and a decent collection of features. I lost GPS navigation, but that's ok because I have a GPS in my car now. Other than that, I can still talk, text, browse, play games, and anything else I could do before.
The phone came with a "triple minutes for life" deal. Basically, that means that so long as I use that same phone, I buy my pre-paid minutes at $0.047. If I browse the Web, it charges me for the time in minutes, instead of metering my bandwidth. Text messages are about 1.5 cents apiece to send and receive.
And all of it goes over AT&T's network. I have the same service provider as before. Same signal quality. Same Internet bandwidth.
Another thing I did was invest $30 in a decent headset for my computer. When I'm at home, I now use Google Voice to make outgoing phone calls. I get great sound quality and don't pay a penny for it. These are my new "evening and weekend" minutes...
I paid $90 for the phone, and I charged it up with a little under 1300 minutes at a price of $60. That was 2.5 months ago. I still have 430 minutes remaining. That basically means I'm using my phone for a hair under $16.50 per month now. That's a savings of about $70 per month. The cheaper service has already paid for the phone. Anybody want to buy a used iPhone 3GS?
If you use the hell out of your smartphone, you might be getting your money's worth. But if you're a more "casual" smartphone user, then you're getting seriously ripped off.
I understood that six degrees was supposed to be the maximum, not the average.
Hmm. I don't quite get that. I've always considered him to be a very underrated guitarist. He's incredibly versatile and amazingly subtle. But what he's really got is the gift of finding a great hook. There are plenty of amazingly skilled guitarists out there. But most of them aren't part of my mind's internal soundtrack. John Flansburgh's stuff is. So is Peter Buck's. And Ed Robertson.
Most people don't know who any of those guys are, but those are some of the best guitarists in the business today.
According to Wikipedia, Flans once stated Factory Showroom was his favorite TMBG album. Clearly they thought it was some of their best work. However, they parted with their label afterwards, and one of the reasons was a feeling that the label failed to adequately promote the album.
:) That was back before XP.
I think Factory Showroom is their best work to date. There are parts of every single album before and since that I love, but for Factory Showroom I know every lyric of every song by heart.
I bought the CD when it was released. It wasn't long before I recorded a WAV of the line "HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO LET YOU KNOW THEY WAY I FEEL ABOUT YOU" from Exquisite Dead Guy, and made it my Windows startup sound.
How is it ironic? Apple provides quality products at a price point many are willing to meet. Also, I don't recall them ever having been in the news for screwing over their workforce. Plus, they haven't screwed up the global economy by committing real estate fraud on a global scale. As far as I know, they are not heavily subsidized by the government. And, you tend to associate Apple with Silicon Valley instead of Wall Street. The protest is "Occupy Wall Street", not "Occupy Silicon Valley".
Protesting against "corporate greed" does not require putting all corporations together in one group.
What if they oscillate into some form that is slightly faster than light? They'd be traveling slightly slower than light part of the time, faster than light part of the time, and their average speed might be exactly the speed of light. The amount of time spent on the other side of the lightspeed barrier would never be enough to be exploited to violate causality. But, the oscillations would cause some curious results that might sometimes show some neutrinos exceeding the speed of light.
The universe would give us hints of tachyons while at the same time not vanishing in a puff of logic, and would also demonstrate a means by which something that has mass could travel at light speed.
Not that I'm saying this is what's going on. I don't have the background; I follow what I can of these things as a hobby. It's just fun to think about.
I imagine that for many, contract voice and data plans are very good. I, however, got sick of them after having a PocketPC for two years and then an iPhone for two years. I finally realized that 90% of my already small amount of data usage was just twiddling my thumbs, and that 90% of my actual phone usage was in a place where I was in front of a computer.
So I got a pay-as-you-go phone for under $100. It has a touchscreen, camera, mp3 player, etc. along with a Web browser that just uses pay-as-you-go minutes instead of counting bytes. It uses AT&T's network, so it has the same coverage as my iPhone did. When I'm gonna be on a long call, I just put the cellphone down, put on a headset, and talk through my computer on Google Voice for free.
Now I'm paying $70/month less and wondering why I ever allowed myself to get roped in to those contracts in the first place.
What color is it?
Eh, I've been hearing about potential "miracle bacteria" for decades now. To me this is just another load of over-hyped bullshit that we we won't hear about ever again, much like the crazy Thorium Car guy last month.
But, might as well: TFA did indicate it could potentially convert any plant-based material, newspaper being but one example.
Hey, why don't we turn this into a fantasy thread about how this could be good for marijuana legalization, 'cause you could harvest the sweet sweet buds and throw the rest into the vat to make fuel?
Back in the late eighties, before all these fancy gadgets came into being, I had (to my eternal amazement) the luck to witness a woman driving 75 mph on 285 west of Atlanta in bumper-to-bumper traffic reading a book. We're talking five lanes full of writhing idiots jockeying for position in a rush-hour race to get there first. That road was (and definitely still is) a horror story in progress. It was only a couple months before that I saw a car wrecked on the median, propped sideways on the concrete median divider, its engine block a good 150 feet down the road. Seriously, they just flat could not stop rush hour traffic to clean up the car, and I suppose an ambulance had taken the corpse(s) away previously. They'd have to wait for a break in the traffic at about 2 AM to get the car and its engine out of there.
A book, for you youngins, is a stack of paper bound together with static text on each piece; when reading one, you are confronted with one to two thousand words at a time, and the words are all longhand. So, for the guy dealing with a couple hundred or so characters of text messages while yakking on the phone -- heh.
There truly is nothing new under the sun.
As is mine. Looking at both articles, and googling a bit, I keep running across a statement to the effect that when the Thorium is heated, its molecules become so dense that it produces heat surges. Then they go on to talk about the amount of energy that could be extracted from Thorium in a fission reaction.
These articles also mention that it is believed that the internal heat of the Earth is due largely in part to the presence of uranium and thorium in the mantle. I can buy that; if you have a lot of diffuse radioactive stuff in an immense mass, practically all of the energy from its slow natural radioactive decay would be captured, warming the material. Small quantities of things that are dangerously radioactive also tend to give off heat from the decay.
It's my understanding that when you heat things, they expand, and become less dense. If they can't expand, they undergo a lot of pressure. So is it plausible that if you confined some Thorium so it couldn't expand when heated, the pressures generated inside the material during extreme heating could somehow cause a fission reaction, or accelerate radioactive decay?