They are not going to do nothing that "fucking dumb" because no one would buy it. Any doubts that such a car would be more expensive and slow?
Most cars I know break down due to metal corrosion, engine part wear off, corroded seals, whatever. You could reduce metal corrosion issues by making the car out of titanium, stainless steel parts, but then a car would be much more expensive than it is now using ordinary steel. You could reduce wear by making everything run slower or using high-temperature alloys like they use in jet turbines (alloys which use tungsten, and other expensive metals).
The thing is much bigger than I expected. I would guess with a 2m radius and 4m height. It is quite fat, so I guess they are using spherical or ellipsoidal propellant tanks. The shape reminds me of the Kankoh Maru and the shell seems to be made of composites or plastic. I guess the blunt nose makes sense because the thing is suborbital and they do not have a wide cross range requirement like the Delta Clipper had.
I am not an expert, but the burn looked too clean, I guess it is a pressure fed mono propellant. Perhaps H2O2 (Hydrogen Peroxide) like someone else said. Much like what Carmack tried to do with Armadillo. I counted 3 x 3 = 9 thrust chambers in that setup.
The man requested someone with experience in cryogenic turbopumps. Even mentioned the RS-68 explicitly. So it seems to me he is going for a pump fed LOX/LH2 engine. It makes much more sense to me than the H2O2/Kerosene rumours I heard before. Why risk it all by going for an engine no one has built before? I mean the only rocket engine with that combo I remember is the one in the British Black Arrow rocket from the 70s. Beal killed himself by going with a risky H2O2/Kerosene combo and a filament wound shell.
A LOX/LH2 engine with a variable mixture ratio would do the trick. H2O2 is IMO overrated and finicky. LOX is cheaper than high purity H2O2 and has pretty good density. You have to go for LH2 if you wanna go orbital anyway for the ISP AFAIK (unless you use a lot of stages, which I guess is what they do not want).
You can also get more power efficiency for growing plants by using light more tuned to the frequencies the plant absorbs best. I know some Japanese lettuce growers use red LEDs for growing while they used fluorescent in the past.
Actually one can do better than that. Incandescent bulb heat is due to Joule resistance heating which is much lower efficiency than a heat pump if you want to use electricity to heat a house. A heat pump works using the same principle as a refrigerator. It can move heat from, say an underground water source, to inside your house or the other way around. A heat pump can be 3 or 4 times more efficient at heating a home than a Joule heater. People do not use heat pumps more because of installation costs.
If you decide to burn something for heat instead of using Joule heating you will also spend less money, since gas, coal or wood is cheaper per unit of energy output than electricity.
CFL are not all alike. I have seen Philips CFL lamps which are brighter while using less energy than the cheap no names you often see at a discount store. The Philips ones also seemed to emit on a larger part of the spectrum with a light yellowish tint closer to an incandescent, while the no name lamps were cold blue ones.
Regarding people getting along, I do not see how having 6 million, or 6 billion, or 60 billion would make a difference. I do not believe shrinking the population would solve the problem. Heck even married couples often do not get along. Dostoyevsky knew it: it is easy to love someone you do not know, but the more you know someone, the more flaws you find, to the point the most insignificant trifle detail can terminate a relationship.
Regarding consumption, that is the argument Thomas Malthus made in the XIXth century. His argument was that human population increased at geometric rate whereas the food supply grows at an arithmetic rate. According to Malthus this would mean each person would have less and less food until there would be mass starvation. It did not pan out. Turns out there is more food per person now than then, even after over a century of population growth. Why?
Julian Simon described it well: people eat animals and plants, which are themselves biological entities which also grow at a geometric rate. We only need space and energy for crops. If there is not enough soil, we can use hydroponics, start cultivating the ocean, genetically modify foodstuffs to boost output, the works. We use the Sun for energy usually, but people have been growing vegetables with artificial lighting for some time now.
Regarding clean water: given enough energy, you can purify all the drinking water you want from the ocean via distillation, reverse osmosis, etc.
Energy is the problem, basically. Thankfully we have a large fusion generator around that we call the Sun, plus some other stuff.
If we're stuck here, we have a whole mess of ugly problems to fix; the first two of which are energy generation and overpopulation.
There is no such thing as overpopulation. That is a myth. Heck, we have not used all the land area, have the technology to build taller structures, plus two thirds of the planet surface (ocean) are utterly unused.
I agree that energy is a problem. One that possibly could be solved by using space solar power. Regardless of that I believe, in a decade or two, even terrestrial solar power will be cheap enough. Meanwhile wind power usage is ramping up and we still have nuclear fission and loads of coal. The problem is not as much that there are no solutions but that there are no cheap solutions. Replacing our entire transportation infrastructure would be expensive. But I believe it could be done in a generation. Heck how many 20 year old cars do you see on the road?
Transportation energy usage can be reduced by putting people closer together, telecommuting, using electric rail. There is technology available today to reduce energy consumption for lighting (fluorescent), heating (heat pumps) and transportation (hybrids). With more to come such as LED lighting. Heck, as I am typing this I look at an LCD screen.
There will always be problems to solve here. It is no excuse to stop doing other things, like space exploration. We do not need FTL if cryogenics or medicine advance enough to increase longevity. We do not need FTL to colonize our own solar system either. IMO we are not doing it yet because even the most inhospitable places on Earth are more pleasant than the cold vacuum of space.
Actually, there are small amounts of natural Plutonium, due to supernova explosions or natural fission reactors.
I guess the problem is it is pretty hard to find new elements if you do not actually know what you are searching for. Natural Plutonium was only discovered after man-made Plutonium was made in large quantities and well characterized. Heck, Aluminium was only manufactured in quantity in the XIXth century.
The push for cures will never come from pharma. The push will come from the patient, government and insurer side.
An insurer is interested in curing people. If everyone was healthy, they wouldn't have to spend a dime treating them. A pharma company wants to have profit, and this means living patients which regularly consume their products.
I believe the Apple Macintosh was in a different market. As a teen I remember looking at an Apple marketing brochure and being impressed by the specs. Then I noticed it came with a monochrome screen (crap for games) and I couldn't change the monitor because it was bolted into the main unit. None of the computer shops I knew would stock Apple machines. Not to mention the price. There were models with color, but they were priced way out of my league.
I ended up buying a Commodore Amiga instead. That was the most viable commodity platform for gaming and multimedia at the time for me, not the Apple Macintosh. The Amiga had The Video Toaster, Lightwave 3D, Deluxe Paint, Bars and Pipes (used by Danny Elfman to make music), Scala (video titling). The Macintosh mostly had a niche in the photography and publishing businesses due to products such as Adobe Photoshop and Quark XPress.
Most people at the time were using Metrowerks Codewarrior. I do not remember Apple bundling a C/C++ compiler at the MacOS Classic times.
It is true that rhetoric can divert attention for a time. But I believe it only takes a person so far. Eventually everyone gets on the act and merely starts ignoring said person. Take Windows security. Microsoft kept telling everyone that Windows is not that unsafe versus other platforms. I do not know anyone who believes it. The King is naked. Windows stability is even more interesting. Windows got such a bad rep that even today, when they have an operating system (Windows XP) which is based on Windows NT much more stable than their old shit, many people still expect Windows to blue screen as a regular occurrence.
No. People use Windows because it had first mover advantage. Windows is an operating system running on commodity hardware, which comes bundled with said commodity hardware. It has a vast catalog of software running on it. Including applications and services which have become defacto standards such as Microsoft Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Exchange. It is also the most viable commodity PC platform for gaming and multimedia because of its driver, API and app support. You can get World of Warcraft, Neverwinter Nights 2, Medieval Total War, Oblivion. Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat. Lightwave, 3D Studio. That is the reality. Microsoft may try to spin things as if it was something different, as if people used Windows for its low support costs, but that pack of lies should not make us blind enough to see the truth for what it is.
Developers, developers, developers... Microsoft basically gives away its development tools to students. Microsoft Visual Studio is actually a pretty decent development environment. Shame the Windows APIs are an utter mess and brain damaged to the extreme. Hence.NET. I believe that in order for an operating system to overthrow Windows, it must have lower barriers for entry due to less brain damaged APIs and simpler programming. NeXT could have been the thing if the hardware wasn't so bloody expensive and hard to get. Not to mention they were stuck on an Objective C mindset while C++ was gaining ground.
Linux already has the free GNU toolset. PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby. It will soon have a wholly free Java toolset from Eclipse to the JDK. To me the largest weakness in Linux is the multimedia support. I am not surprised by the lack of multimedia apps and games for Linux. Try getting two Linux programs to use the soundcard without one locking the other up. Try getting 3D graphics to work properly.
The OSS sound API sucked. ALSA sucks. OpenGL support is feeble. Why does not every Linux distro come with something like OpenAL? Why must users have to painstakingly compile and install it themselves? Why must users have to install closed source and buggy graphics drivers? Certainly some of these problems are difficult to solve, since there are barriers from the hardware manufacturers. However there is plenty of room for improvement even despite that. The sound situation being a good example. Why is there no standard Linux media API? MPlayer comes with its own, VLC another, there is FFMPEG, then there is GStreamer and whatever the KDE people use. WTF!
The problem with being a good liar, is that eventually you start believing what you say. Then you act as if it was true and you end up destroying yourself. Being a compulsive liar is a dangerous thing to be. Dismissing the real reasons Windows is at the position it is today as if it was merely due to rhetoric is doing a disservice to yourself.
Sun opensourcing Solaris made sod all difference because we already had a viable open source operating system which ran on commodity platforms. Linux. Linux has what some management people call the first mover advantage. Solaris would have to be an order of magnitude better than Linux to displace it and it is not. Open sourcing Solaris was too little, too late. Hate it or love it, Linux is the one with the most apps, drivers, not to mention easier to get and well known of the two.
You are belittling the community. Yet I believe Sun is open sourcing Java precisely because the open source alternatives were, for a change, getting close to being Java 5.0 compatible. See the implementation status of GNU Classpath and Apache Harmony if you do not take my word for it. The fact is, the community has the resources to not only make one reimplementation of Java, but several concurrently.
I believe you are seeing the movement for Indian independence through rose-tinted glasses. There were violent protests in India at the time as well. There was also plenty of Hindu vs Muslim violence which culminated in the Pakistan-Indian split. It manifests itself to this day in Kashmir. That civil war has not even ended yet.
The Irish Republican Army also used violence and terrorism to make Ireland independent. To the point of accepting guns from Germany during WWI.
DIKU has a non-commercial, gotta e-mail the authors license, with an obnoxious author on the main intro screen name clause. But the source code is available and most people just ignore some of the license terms. Most people keep the author names in the intro screen out of respect though. The most bandied around example of license infringement is probably Medievia. They basically pissed on the license by making a commercial MUD out of it and ripping out the author credits.
DIKU is however an awesome hack'n'slash engine which provides for hours of fun, as I can attest.
I agree with all your picks. I will add some of my bargain experiences:
I have had 2 Samsung monitors and they so far have served me well. I also like Cherry keyboards, they are pretty plain but sturdy, never had one break on me and I type pretty hard. I currently use a Logitech mouse after having trouble with a Microsoft Intellimouse which cost twice as much and got broken after the warranty expired.
I also prefer Western Digital as you do, none of my Western Digital disks have failed and they are usually pretty fast. I have had a Seagate hard disk which failed on me. One thing about Seagate though: they swapped my broken hard disk for a new one and did not bat an eyelid. Top points for Seagate customer service from me.
I do not buy sound or network cards anymore. The onboard versions are fine if you get a decent motherboard and chipset.
We used to buy prosumer Sony Hi8 camcorders and VCRs. Got two camcorders and one VCR. We had so many problems with them, versus our older VHS equipment manufactured by Matsushita, that we switched to Panasonic DV camcorders. Never had a problem yet.
Later I made the mistake of buying a Sony DVD recorder. The thing malfunctioned just after the warranty expired. Now I buy NEC recorders.
I should have learned by now, but I got some Sony earbuds. The thing disintegrated in a couple of months. First it was the cables, which started peeling off, then the earbud rubbers disintegrated.
Born in Moscow, Russia, Vicca began fashion modeling at the age of 14, while studying physics, mathematics, and fencing at a school for the academically gifted. She eventually learned four languages and become a member of Mensa. After winning the Miss Teen Moscow pageant, she left Moscow, initially for a Siberian college to study optical electronics, but quickly chose the life of a professional model, and later European porn actress, in Budapest.
It's funny, actually. Slashdot, supposed home to left wing techno hippies, has far more preemptive 'the hippies won't allow it' posts than actual hippies-complaining-about-nuclear-energy posts.
You said it yourself. Home to techno hippies, not luddites.
Slashdot Mirror
They are not going to do nothing that "fucking dumb" because no one would buy it. Any doubts that such a car would be more expensive and slow?
Most cars I know break down due to metal corrosion, engine part wear off, corroded seals, whatever. You could reduce metal corrosion issues by making the car out of titanium, stainless steel parts, but then a car would be much more expensive than it is now using ordinary steel. You could reduce wear by making everything run slower or using high-temperature alloys like they use in jet turbines (alloys which use tungsten, and other expensive metals).
Eh, more like 2m radius and 6m height. Sorry about the thinko. :-)
The thing is much bigger than I expected. I would guess with a 2m radius and 4m height. It is quite fat, so I guess they are using spherical or ellipsoidal propellant tanks. The shape reminds me of the Kankoh Maru and the shell seems to be made of composites or plastic. I guess the blunt nose makes sense because the thing is suborbital and they do not have a wide cross range requirement like the Delta Clipper had.
I am not an expert, but the burn looked too clean, I guess it is a pressure fed mono propellant. Perhaps H2O2 (Hydrogen Peroxide) like someone else said. Much like what Carmack tried to do with Armadillo. I counted 3 x 3 = 9 thrust chambers in that setup.
The man requested someone with experience in cryogenic turbopumps. Even mentioned the RS-68 explicitly. So it seems to me he is going for a pump fed LOX/LH2 engine. It makes much more sense to me than the H2O2/Kerosene rumours I heard before. Why risk it all by going for an engine no one has built before? I mean the only rocket engine with that combo I remember is the one in the British Black Arrow rocket from the 70s. Beal killed himself by going with a risky H2O2/Kerosene combo and a filament wound shell.
A LOX/LH2 engine with a variable mixture ratio would do the trick. H2O2 is IMO overrated and finicky. LOX is cheaper than high purity H2O2 and has pretty good density. You have to go for LH2 if you wanna go orbital anyway for the ISP AFAIK (unless you use a lot of stages, which I guess is what they do not want).
You can also get more power efficiency for growing plants by using light more tuned to the frequencies the plant absorbs best. I know some Japanese lettuce growers use red LEDs for growing while they used fluorescent in the past.
That is lettuce though. I have no clue about pot.
Do you have double-paned windows?
Actually one can do better than that. Incandescent bulb heat is due to Joule resistance heating which is much lower efficiency than a heat pump if you want to use electricity to heat a house. A heat pump works using the same principle as a refrigerator. It can move heat from, say an underground water source, to inside your house or the other way around. A heat pump can be 3 or 4 times more efficient at heating a home than a Joule heater. People do not use heat pumps more because of installation costs.
If you decide to burn something for heat instead of using Joule heating you will also spend less money, since gas, coal or wood is cheaper per unit of energy output than electricity.
CFL are not all alike. I have seen Philips CFL lamps which are brighter while using less energy than the cheap no names you often see at a discount store. The Philips ones also seemed to emit on a larger part of the spectrum with a light yellowish tint closer to an incandescent, while the no name lamps were cold blue ones.
FFDShow support Ogg Theora via libavcodec.
I use the CCCP pack. Seems fine here.
Regarding people getting along, I do not see how having 6 million, or 6 billion, or 60 billion would make a difference. I do not believe shrinking the population would solve the problem. Heck even married couples often do not get along. Dostoyevsky knew it: it is easy to love someone you do not know, but the more you know someone, the more flaws you find, to the point the most insignificant trifle detail can terminate a relationship.
Regarding consumption, that is the argument Thomas Malthus made in the XIXth century. His argument was that human population increased at geometric rate whereas the food supply grows at an arithmetic rate. According to Malthus this would mean each person would have less and less food until there would be mass starvation. It did not pan out. Turns out there is more food per person now than then, even after over a century of population growth. Why?
Julian Simon described it well: people eat animals and plants, which are themselves biological entities which also grow at a geometric rate. We only need space and energy for crops. If there is not enough soil, we can use hydroponics, start cultivating the ocean, genetically modify foodstuffs to boost output, the works. We use the Sun for energy usually, but people have been growing vegetables with artificial lighting for some time now.
Regarding clean water: given enough energy, you can purify all the drinking water you want from the ocean via distillation, reverse osmosis, etc.
Energy is the problem, basically. Thankfully we have a large fusion generator around that we call the Sun, plus some other stuff.
Compressed Folders is overly complex to use. I use 7-Zip. The funny thing is: its open source software under the GNU LGPL.
Free software strikes again...
If we're stuck here, we have a whole mess of ugly problems to fix; the first two of which are energy generation and overpopulation.
There is no such thing as overpopulation. That is a myth. Heck, we have not used all the land area, have the technology to build taller structures, plus two thirds of the planet surface (ocean) are utterly unused.
I agree that energy is a problem. One that possibly could be solved by using space solar power. Regardless of that I believe, in a decade or two, even terrestrial solar power will be cheap enough. Meanwhile wind power usage is ramping up and we still have nuclear fission and loads of coal. The problem is not as much that there are no solutions but that there are no cheap solutions. Replacing our entire transportation infrastructure would be expensive. But I believe it could be done in a generation. Heck how many 20 year old cars do you see on the road?
Transportation energy usage can be reduced by putting people closer together, telecommuting, using electric rail. There is technology available today to reduce energy consumption for lighting (fluorescent), heating (heat pumps) and transportation (hybrids). With more to come such as LED lighting. Heck, as I am typing this I look at an LCD screen.
There will always be problems to solve here. It is no excuse to stop doing other things, like space exploration. We do not need FTL if cryogenics or medicine advance enough to increase longevity. We do not need FTL to colonize our own solar system either. IMO we are not doing it yet because even the most inhospitable places on Earth are more pleasant than the cold vacuum of space.
Actually, there are small amounts of natural Plutonium, due to supernova explosions or natural fission reactors.
I guess the problem is it is pretty hard to find new elements if you do not actually know what you are searching for. Natural Plutonium was only discovered after man-made Plutonium was made in large quantities and well characterized. Heck, Aluminium was only manufactured in quantity in the XIXth century.
The push for cures will never come from pharma. The push will come from the patient, government and insurer side.
An insurer is interested in curing people. If everyone was healthy, they wouldn't have to spend a dime treating them. A pharma company wants to have profit, and this means living patients which regularly consume their products.
I believe the Apple Macintosh was in a different market. As a teen I remember looking at an Apple marketing brochure and being impressed by the specs. Then I noticed it came with a monochrome screen (crap for games) and I couldn't change the monitor because it was bolted into the main unit. None of the computer shops I knew would stock Apple machines. Not to mention the price. There were models with color, but they were priced way out of my league.
I ended up buying a Commodore Amiga instead. That was the most viable commodity platform for gaming and multimedia at the time for me, not the Apple Macintosh. The Amiga had The Video Toaster, Lightwave 3D, Deluxe Paint, Bars and Pipes (used by Danny Elfman to make music), Scala (video titling). The Macintosh mostly had a niche in the photography and publishing businesses due to products such as Adobe Photoshop and Quark XPress.
Most people at the time were using Metrowerks Codewarrior. I do not remember Apple bundling a C/C++ compiler at the MacOS Classic times.
It is true that rhetoric can divert attention for a time. But I believe it only takes a person so far. Eventually everyone gets on the act and merely starts ignoring said person. Take Windows security. Microsoft kept telling everyone that Windows is not that unsafe versus other platforms. I do not know anyone who believes it. The King is naked. Windows stability is even more interesting. Windows got such a bad rep that even today, when they have an operating system (Windows XP) which is based on Windows NT much more stable than their old shit, many people still expect Windows to blue screen as a regular occurrence.
No. People use Windows because it had first mover advantage. Windows is an operating system running on commodity hardware, which comes bundled with said commodity hardware. It has a vast catalog of software running on it. Including applications and services which have become defacto standards such as Microsoft Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Exchange. It is also the most viable commodity PC platform for gaming and multimedia because of its driver, API and app support. You can get World of Warcraft, Neverwinter Nights 2, Medieval Total War, Oblivion. Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat. Lightwave, 3D Studio. That is the reality. Microsoft may try to spin things as if it was something different, as if people used Windows for its low support costs, but that pack of lies should not make us blind enough to see the truth for what it is.
Developers, developers, developers... Microsoft basically gives away its development tools to students. Microsoft Visual Studio is actually a pretty decent development environment. Shame the Windows APIs are an utter mess and brain damaged to the extreme. Hence .NET. I believe that in order for an operating system to overthrow Windows, it must have lower barriers for entry due to less brain damaged APIs and simpler programming. NeXT could have been the thing if the hardware wasn't so bloody expensive and hard to get. Not to mention they were stuck on an Objective C mindset while C++ was gaining ground.
Linux already has the free GNU toolset. PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby. It will soon have a wholly free Java toolset from Eclipse to the JDK. To me the largest weakness in Linux is the multimedia support. I am not surprised by the lack of multimedia apps and games for Linux. Try getting two Linux programs to use the soundcard without one locking the other up. Try getting 3D graphics to work properly.
The OSS sound API sucked. ALSA sucks. OpenGL support is feeble. Why does not every Linux distro come with something like OpenAL? Why must users have to painstakingly compile and install it themselves? Why must users have to install closed source and buggy graphics drivers? Certainly some of these problems are difficult to solve, since there are barriers from the hardware manufacturers. However there is plenty of room for improvement even despite that. The sound situation being a good example. Why is there no standard Linux media API? MPlayer comes with its own, VLC another, there is FFMPEG, then there is GStreamer and whatever the KDE people use. WTF!
The problem with being a good liar, is that eventually you start believing what you say. Then you act as if it was true and you end up destroying yourself. Being a compulsive liar is a dangerous thing to be. Dismissing the real reasons Windows is at the position it is today as if it was merely due to rhetoric is doing a disservice to yourself.
Sun opensourcing Solaris made sod all difference because we already had a viable open source operating system which ran on commodity platforms. Linux. Linux has what some management people call the first mover advantage. Solaris would have to be an order of magnitude better than Linux to displace it and it is not. Open sourcing Solaris was too little, too late. Hate it or love it, Linux is the one with the most apps, drivers, not to mention easier to get and well known of the two.
You are belittling the community. Yet I believe Sun is open sourcing Java precisely because the open source alternatives were, for a change, getting close to being Java 5.0 compatible. See the implementation status of GNU Classpath and Apache Harmony if you do not take my word for it. The fact is, the community has the resources to not only make one reimplementation of Java, but several concurrently.
I agree. The linked article is a bunch of empty rhetoric. Heck I am pro-FSF and I loathed it.
I expect something better from Stallman. You cannot convince people by rhetoric alone. We need tangible facts.
I believe you are seeing the movement for Indian independence through rose-tinted glasses. There were violent protests in India at the time as well. There was also plenty of Hindu vs Muslim violence which culminated in the Pakistan-Indian split. It manifests itself to this day in Kashmir. That civil war has not even ended yet.
The Irish Republican Army also used violence and terrorism to make Ireland independent. To the point of accepting guns from Germany during WWI.
DIKU has a non-commercial, gotta e-mail the authors license, with an obnoxious author on the main intro screen name clause. But the source code is available and most people just ignore some of the license terms. Most people keep the author names in the intro screen out of respect though. The most bandied around example of license infringement is probably Medievia. They basically pissed on the license by making a commercial MUD out of it and ripping out the author credits.
DIKU is however an awesome hack'n'slash engine which provides for hours of fun, as I can attest.
I agree with all your picks. I will add some of my bargain experiences:
I have had 2 Samsung monitors and they so far have served me well. I also like Cherry keyboards, they are pretty plain but sturdy, never had one break on me and I type pretty hard. I currently use a Logitech mouse after having trouble with a Microsoft Intellimouse which cost twice as much and got broken after the warranty expired.
I also prefer Western Digital as you do, none of my Western Digital disks have failed and they are usually pretty fast. I have had a Seagate hard disk which failed on me. One thing about Seagate though: they swapped my broken hard disk for a new one and did not bat an eyelid. Top points for Seagate customer service from me.
I do not buy sound or network cards anymore. The onboard versions are fine if you get a decent motherboard and chipset.
We used to buy prosumer Sony Hi8 camcorders and VCRs. Got two camcorders and one VCR. We had so many problems with them, versus our older VHS equipment manufactured by Matsushita, that we switched to Panasonic DV camcorders. Never had a problem yet.
Later I made the mistake of buying a Sony DVD recorder. The thing malfunctioned just after the warranty expired. Now I buy NEC recorders.
I should have learned by now, but I got some Sony earbuds. The thing disintegrated in a couple of months. First it was the cables, which started peeling off, then the earbud rubbers disintegrated.
I submit to you the inventor of the modern dishwasher: Josephine Cochrane.
How about Vicca?
Born in Moscow, Russia, Vicca began fashion modeling at the age of 14, while studying physics, mathematics, and fencing at a school for the academically gifted. She eventually learned four languages and become a member of Mensa. After winning the Miss Teen Moscow pageant, she left Moscow, initially for a Siberian college to study optical electronics, but quickly chose the life of a professional model, and later European porn actress, in Budapest.
It's funny, actually. Slashdot, supposed home to left wing techno hippies, has far more preemptive 'the hippies won't allow it' posts than actual hippies-complaining-about-nuclear-energy posts.
You said it yourself. Home to techno hippies, not luddites.