Sure why not. But why stop there ? I'd say the NEA was a much bigger failure for all the money it sucks down. Kill off the rural electric agencies(that were obsolete in the 1940s) and every other worthless overspending govt agency. Keep killing off programs that do nothing but spend and keep people too worthless to be normal exmployes in jobs.
Hehe. The really scary MAME freaks do have legit collections. It's like a technician version of a redneck joke. If you have A copy of MAME that runs on a BeBox, and 14 stadups that don't run in their orginial box, you might be a nolife geek technician.
I have a friend like that. Has chickens living on his old standups out in the barn. He was pretty bad shape to start, until I passed on a 6 CD set of roms that I uh, found somewhere. yeah thats the ticket.
If someone every crowbars him away from trying every game rom in history, he probably could fire up the ROM burner, swat the chickens off one of the standups with a broom, yank out one of the boards, and pop in a new set of ROMs and be ready to go.
You would never pull off that surly eastern european peasant mob in the US. Best you could hope for would be a bunch of drunken irish rednecks, or drunken polish. Tell em the target you are after is trying to shut down their favorite hockey team.
As the Shi'ites world wide and in the US the clinic bombing fundies have proven time and time again, rational arguements and legalities mean nothing if you have enough fanatics willing to cause endless hell with the least provocation.
Anyone who knows much of anything about tech stocks knows that it's a classic pump and dump scam. Even the traders buying these stocks know it. But the ones who can play chicken with the stocks and sell at just the right moment will make out like bandits.
Those left behind at SCO might even extort enough payoffs to make it a few more years. Maybe enough time for them that the horse will sing again. I wouldn't bet any real money on it though.
The day may come though, that Linux will have enough extreme lunatics around that a company threatening it will be gambling with the possiblity that a couple of nuts with Tec 9s will be waiting for them and their families. Although a rock and molotov cocktail throwing mob would be much more classic, I suspect the message that business as usual is then a thing of the past would be sent.
Bummer. Chained to the hardware are ya ? Could be worse, you could be running some burroughs machine in some hole in the ground over at Wright Patterson.
I think Douglas Adams covered the problem well enough where in the book they lynch the creator of the improbability drive for being a smartass.
I suspect the same thing is likely to happen in real life. I was just waiting for those guy who got light propagating 300 times faster in a crystal to be mobbed by angry physics dorks.
Any sort of anti-gravity or gravity lensing demos will have to be done while the creators are in the deepest swiss nuke bunker because the aerospace engineers will be looking to kill them.
Unless you have anti-matter weaponry in place at every nuke base in the USA, Canada, europe, and on every nuke sub you can forget tea time.
Because short of that, there's really no way to overthrow the whole corrupt mess by force.
With luck in a few decades you might be able to do like the Hans did to the mongols. Become part of their system, and bog it down to the point that it doesn't go anywhere.
Or you might try turning the US into an isolationist state. Close the borders to any country that has any hint of terrorists or rebels. And then maintain that state for 40-50 years.
The craziest idea would be to support the would be Nazis in government. Let the fundies go crazy. Soon all the "fringe" elements like non fundies, atheists, budists, wiccans, will find the nation intollerable and boil off to other nations.
With all those "amoral" sorts gone the US can devolve into Heinlein's "If This Goes On" type of state. Maybe all those amoral sorts will go off and form the next free state.
Well, if you LOVED dexadrine, you'll cream your genes over methadrine! Available from friendly biker gangs and trailer park chemists NATION WIDE!
You'll be amazed how much focus you can achive. Friends will be astounded and amazed at what convoluted methods you'll apply to get you next 1/8th ounce supply.
Your PRODUCTIVITY can be astounding because you'll only have to sleep 4 hours every three days!
Hey, it worked for Elvis ! Look at all the masses he entertained during time that most people would have spend putting together a studio or a record company. Not Elvis! Nope, intsead The King squeezed himself dry to amuse his fans. You can do the same thing too!
But seriously though. Screw the hype. Never forget that you are tweeking. Its not medecine, it sure as hell isn't doing ANYTHING good for your health. You are trading your long term health for a bit more focus that might give you an edge. Maybe you can be done with it before you lose more than a few years of your lifespan. Or maybe you'll spend your whole life going from one chemical quick fix to the next.
I keep remembering the kid who had parents that had him on ritalin since he was 4. Kid had a heart attack at 13 and died. Guess all that focus didn't do much for his future.
Dexadrine isn't quite as dangerous as ritalin. You won't feel your heart trying to trash itself or any of the other side effects. In fact, heart attack risk is fairly minimal with the amphetamine, dexadrine, methadrine group. Stroke is what kills people most often from those.
I'm not exactly morally pure at heart though. I've done the gag of washing down 5 ephedra caps with the morning coffee every day for months at a time. Maybe another ephedra cap and the dregs of the coffee pot after a 12 hour day to be enegetic enough to drive home. Then 6-9 beers to chill out.
And of course before ephedra was mini thins. 5-7 a day to work two jobs. And before that PPA diet pills.
It's always one thing or another. Once you get a taste for it, forget about every totally stopping. You may go to something that is less crude or harmfull in the future, but there's always something. That's the trap. You don't use enough to feel sick when you come down. You just use a little more and more so you aren't tired and can stay focused. If you're lucky you'll hit the wall one day. That's hard to define really. It's something that makes you stop using. I've met a few people like that. For other people though, they'll keep on going until one day something goes pop in their head. Maybe sometime in their 50s, or maybe in the 60s. The lucky ones die from it. The not so lucky ones, oh well.
This would be a great way to slow down the maddening pace of technology. Pre-DRM computer hardware would no longer lose 50% of its value in 6 weeks. You would have an actual asset.
Meanwhile the lamers would have to replace their 3+ GHz cpu every time they slipped up and transfered the wrong files.
This will keep the hardware companies in business nicely.
It'll be like the viral Flash RAM exploits on peoples BIOS, but much much better.
The only trick is, you have to keep your files on good CD-Rs and out of the light because you can only get drives that last 3-4 years now. Unless perhaps you want to fill every AT case in the house with old hard drives and span em into a 250 Gb volume. Or keep a stack of pre-DRM 120 gig drives and use em for backups only.
But eventually, as 30-120 gig drives start dying, people will have to either scrounge around for pre ban drives, like people with semi-auto guns have to scrounge around for pre ban magazines. Or wimp out and buy a DRM drive that will probably puke on you from shoddy quality as often as it does from some script kiddie pinging the self destruct.
Of course there will probably tons of residual last tier hardware like fujitsu drives, FIC, ECS, and Jetway motherboards around for those who are trying to cling to the past. As well as new black market items smuggled in from non DRM countries. Just think of the future. Running on a Happy Sun 4 Tb drive, A Chang Pow Motherboard, And a Three Unvirtuose mouse sound card.
The no name black market hardware makers of Asia would probably build a shrine to RIAA.;)
They used to do something similar with a C band sattelite that beamed down fidonet traffic. you had 3 chances to get it right during the day. That was until they did fight o net once a day and usenet the rest of the day. Was a neat idea for its time.
Well now, the question is how many megawatts were you using ?;)
Most likely you guys weren't using more than a few hundred watts, or an antenna more than 100 feet off the ground.
But not everyone can be allowed to run a megawatt generating gas turbine to power the radio rig in their back yard, otherwise braces, metal rimmed glasses, and umbrellas would become unpopular very fast.
Broadcasters always have the edge over certin technical problems becase they can pump out megawatts, have 1-2 thousand feet towers, and afford the best techies money can buy.
There are in the US people who actually live so far out in the middle of nowhere that shortwave is the only option for radio unless they want to put up a huge antenna.
Its also a fairly widespread hobby. Starting cost can be as low as $10 for a garage sale world band radio up to several thousand for the latest in equipment.
Its pretty fun being able to hear programs from austalia, india, or wherever someone can muster a few kilowatts to bounce a signal off the ionosphere.
Re:What would they rather have?
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
A lot of shopping malls around the US had microturbines installed on their roofs so they would have backup power. If you had one of these on sight, you could turn that natural gas into electrical power, and dump it onto the grid. When you were done with that well, you could haul it off to another sight.
Re:What would they rather have?
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
You poor poor confused halfwit. Coal is not the only thing in the ground. Coal sits right next to a fision reactor called the earths crust. Theres also all sorts of lead, thorium, and uranium isotopes mixed in with it all.
This is why you get all sorts of wonderfull things when you live in coal country like radon seeping out of the ground.
Re:What would they rather have?
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
Biomass is easy enough. Several farms and meat packing plants have simple biomass reactors.
It basicly requires a pit to dump to animial crap, and airtight black tarp over it, some tires thrown on top to provide some back pressure, a water line into the crap pile to keep the microbes moist, and a gas pipeline out, and a drying canister of two to remove moisture and contaminants.
Every so often you run out of crap, and have to heap it back up in there and get the reaction get going again. Horribly complex.
Re:Dear "environmentalist" NIMBYs everywhere,
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
If you want something neat, you can make a small scale wind power generator that will do 200-300 watts and be no more intrusive than those decorative windmills people have in their gardens. You could probably put one up on an old CB radio mast with little trouble.
Just hook that thing up to a some old low CCW 12 volt car batteries(plates are thicker, so they last longer) and let it charge em up all day.
In the midwest $120 will buy 10 junk yard car batteries, and some EDTA to help get out any sulfation in the batteries. Hook that up to one big inverter, or a dozen little ones, and you've got yourself one monster UPS.
Re:Long term care or wind farms
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
Went to an alternative energy expo out in Iowa last summer. And one of the more advanced items was wind power.
These things take a lot of skill and money to get going. But if you live in some totally remote part of nowhere that has a lot of wind, they are just the perfect thing.
And when these wind farms start getting shut down, you'll find these things being put to use where they really count.
For a large scale project in Hawaii what you really need is strong OTEC development. You have the really deep ocean needed for good strong thermal differential, and it's also close to shore in many places.
You could also probably do geothermal, but it's not really something that they've developed too well.
OTEC is nothing more than refrigeration technology modified to concentrate the heat differential, and generate power.
For some reason people always get nervous around things that shoot sparks, and leak battery acid and hydrogen.
If you want something to really freak you out, go work around farm machinery. Now that's the ultimate thing to make you nervous. Along with farmers operating it who are missing fingers, or segments of fingers.
They talked about this with the home EKG device. a few volts in the right place can stop your heart if you are sickly enough.
But on the other hand, they had bad luck frying people with thousands of volts DC back when they were experimenting with how to kill people with electricity.
From personal experience, linking 5 9 volt batteries end to end and touching them to your tongue is enough to really get your attention.
Technicians also have to worry about high capacity 30 volt DC or higher capacitors, since getting zapped by one is far worse than any buzz from line current.
It's all relative. But as a rule, anything over 30 volts DC gets painfull.
12 volts is nothing really unless you just dipped yourself in salt, or have metal splinters in your hands(not unusual for a mechanic).
They use 70 volt systems in the USA for audio systems(muzac, PA systems, etc) and 100 volt systems in europe. These do not require certified electricians to install in a house or business.
Electricians liceneses only apply to wiring in buildings and structures.
I'm sure some nerldy lawyer wanna be can tell you what all is covered. But the basics are, if its high current(10 amps+) line voltage range stuff, permanent wiring, an electrician has to handle it.
There's also industrial electronics, which are non-electrician items many times. Panel wiring, controller boxes of various sorts, CNC wiring and circuits.
This does not necessarily exempt one from doing things more or less by various guidelines no matter what credentials you have. It still has to be such that it does not catch fire, shoot sparks, glow red hot, or generate lots of RF noise.
The exceptions to this are in auto electronics. Where you have glow plugs(diesels), HEI Ignition systems(tons of RF), spark plugs(catch fire and shoot sparks), starters(RF, sparks, red hot), and a number of other things that would be considered very bad things inside a building.
But anyway, forget having to be an electrician on a vehicle. They violate many normal rules when it comes to household and building wiring. They also require much higher standards for fireproofing, corrosion resistance, being subject to moisture, vibration, and constant mechanical shock.
Mechanics and car stereo monkeys(helps to have long thin arms and fingers when doing wiring) have their own guidelines, and have to use a set of rules very different from those used by anyone else. Boat and marine electronics are even worse. Then comes naval and military aviation electronics as the ultimate in pain in the ass stuff.
As a side note, never let an electrician, or electrical engineer work on your car electronics. If you insist on finding out why, make sure your will states who gets your computer junk before proceding.
There was a wall street journal article on the use of corn based products for everything these days. The reason is because its cheap. $3 a bushel is a few cents a pound.
If you can use all the surplus for anything new, its a great situation.
Corn starches and sugars are the easiest parts to use. From there you get biodegradeable plastics, sugar for colas, and all sorts of premade goods, and with a little fermentation, a fuel addative or something to spice up you cola in the from of 190 proof ethanol(sold as everclear).
Theres also corn oils, and the proteins, I don't know quite what they do with the proteins yet.
If you are alergic to all component molecules of corn you might as well just pack it up, and leave the planet.
Corn based plastics are easily over a decade old. Bio degradable plastics with starch links (corn starch probably) are everywhere.
A more popular corn based item is the biodegradable packing peanut. Put one on your tongue and it will melt. Tastes like corn and plastic.
Your girlfriend, if she doesn't already know, should find out what in the corn she is alergic to, the pollen, the protein components, or the starch and sugar components.
You can work from there an tracking down what is lethal. Til then, don't let her dive into vats of biodegradable packing peanuts unless you have a horse syringe full of adrenaline ready.
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This one most likely broke up because it was too close to the ground. The thing is designed to fly in almost no atmosphere.
Sure why not. But why stop there ? I'd say the NEA was a much bigger failure for all the money it sucks down. Kill off the rural electric agencies(that were obsolete in the 1940s) and every other worthless overspending govt agency. Keep killing off programs that do nothing but spend and keep people too worthless to be normal exmployes in jobs.
Hehe. The really scary MAME freaks do have legit collections. It's like a technician version of a redneck joke. If you have A copy of MAME that runs on a BeBox, and 14 stadups that don't run in their orginial box, you might be a nolife geek technician. I have a friend like that. Has chickens living on his old standups out in the barn. He was pretty bad shape to start, until I passed on a 6 CD set of roms that I uh, found somewhere. yeah thats the ticket. If someone every crowbars him away from trying every game rom in history, he probably could fire up the ROM burner, swat the chickens off one of the standups with a broom, yank out one of the boards, and pop in a new set of ROMs and be ready to go.
You would never pull off that surly eastern european peasant mob in the US. Best you could hope for would be a bunch of drunken irish rednecks, or drunken polish. Tell em the target you are after is trying to shut down their favorite hockey team.
As the Shi'ites world wide and in the US the clinic bombing fundies have proven time and time again, rational arguements and legalities mean nothing if you have enough fanatics willing to cause endless hell with the least provocation.
Anyone who knows much of anything about tech stocks knows that it's a classic pump and dump scam. Even the traders buying these stocks know it. But the ones who can play chicken with the stocks and sell at just the right moment will make out like bandits.
Those left behind at SCO might even extort enough payoffs to make it a few more years. Maybe enough time for them that the horse will sing again. I wouldn't bet any real money on it though.
The day may come though, that Linux will have enough extreme lunatics around that a company threatening it will be gambling with the possiblity that a couple of nuts with Tec 9s will be waiting for them and their families. Although a rock and molotov cocktail throwing mob would be much more classic, I suspect the message that business as usual is then a thing of the past would be sent.
Bummer. Chained to the hardware are ya ? Could be worse, you could be running some burroughs machine in some hole in the ground over at Wright Patterson.
I think Douglas Adams covered the problem well enough where in the book they lynch the creator of the improbability drive for being a smartass. I suspect the same thing is likely to happen in real life. I was just waiting for those guy who got light propagating 300 times faster in a crystal to be mobbed by angry physics dorks. Any sort of anti-gravity or gravity lensing demos will have to be done while the creators are in the deepest swiss nuke bunker because the aerospace engineers will be looking to kill them.
You forgot to mention what size of jackboots and arm band you take.
Unless you have anti-matter weaponry in place at every nuke base in the USA, Canada, europe, and on every nuke sub you can forget tea time. Because short of that, there's really no way to overthrow the whole corrupt mess by force. With luck in a few decades you might be able to do like the Hans did to the mongols. Become part of their system, and bog it down to the point that it doesn't go anywhere. Or you might try turning the US into an isolationist state. Close the borders to any country that has any hint of terrorists or rebels. And then maintain that state for 40-50 years. The craziest idea would be to support the would be Nazis in government. Let the fundies go crazy. Soon all the "fringe" elements like non fundies, atheists, budists, wiccans, will find the nation intollerable and boil off to other nations. With all those "amoral" sorts gone the US can devolve into Heinlein's "If This Goes On" type of state. Maybe all those amoral sorts will go off and form the next free state.
You have to pay your idiot taxes in Canada so they can tell you how "FREE" you are all the time.
Well, if you LOVED dexadrine, you'll cream your genes over methadrine! Available from friendly biker gangs and trailer park chemists NATION WIDE!
You'll be amazed how much focus you can achive. Friends will be astounded and amazed at what convoluted methods you'll apply to get you next 1/8th ounce supply.
Your PRODUCTIVITY can be astounding because you'll only have to sleep 4 hours every three days!
Hey, it worked for Elvis ! Look at all the masses he entertained during time that most people would have spend putting together a studio or a record company. Not Elvis! Nope, intsead The King squeezed himself dry to amuse his fans. You can do the same thing too!
But seriously though. Screw the hype. Never forget that you are tweeking. Its not medecine, it sure as hell isn't doing ANYTHING good for your health. You are trading your long term health for a bit more focus that might give you an edge. Maybe you can be done with it before you lose more than a few years of your lifespan. Or maybe you'll spend your whole life going from one chemical quick fix to the next.
I keep remembering the kid who had parents that had him on ritalin since he was 4. Kid had a heart attack at 13 and died. Guess all that focus didn't do much for his future.
Dexadrine isn't quite as dangerous as ritalin. You won't feel your heart trying to trash itself or any of the other side effects. In fact, heart attack risk is fairly minimal with the amphetamine, dexadrine, methadrine group. Stroke is what kills people most often from those.
I'm not exactly morally pure at heart though. I've done the gag of washing down 5 ephedra caps with the morning coffee every day for months at a time. Maybe another ephedra cap and the dregs of the coffee pot after a 12 hour day to be enegetic enough to drive home. Then 6-9 beers to chill out.
And of course before ephedra was mini thins. 5-7 a day to work two jobs. And before that PPA diet pills.
It's always one thing or another. Once you get a taste for it, forget about every totally stopping. You may go to something that is less crude or harmfull in the future, but there's always something. That's the trap. You don't use enough to feel sick when you come down. You just use a little more and more so you aren't tired and can stay focused. If you're lucky you'll hit the wall one day. That's hard to define really. It's something that makes you stop using. I've met a few people like that.
For other people though, they'll keep on going until one day something goes pop in their head. Maybe sometime in their 50s, or maybe in the 60s.
The lucky ones die from it. The not so lucky ones, oh well.
This would be a great way to slow down the maddening pace of technology. Pre-DRM computer hardware would no longer lose 50% of its value in 6 weeks. You would have an actual asset.
;)
Meanwhile the lamers would have to replace their 3+ GHz cpu every time they slipped up and transfered the wrong files.
This will keep the hardware companies in business nicely.
It'll be like the viral Flash RAM exploits on peoples BIOS, but much much better.
The only trick is, you have to keep your files on good CD-Rs and out of the light because you can only get drives that last 3-4 years now. Unless perhaps you want to fill every AT case in the house with old hard drives and span em into a 250 Gb volume. Or keep a stack of pre-DRM 120 gig drives and use em for backups only.
But eventually, as 30-120 gig drives start dying, people will have to either scrounge around for pre ban drives, like people with semi-auto guns have to scrounge around for pre ban magazines. Or wimp out and buy a DRM drive that will probably puke on you from shoddy quality as often as it does from some script kiddie pinging the self destruct.
Of course there will probably tons of residual last tier hardware like fujitsu drives, FIC, ECS, and Jetway motherboards around for those who are trying to cling to the past. As well as new black market items smuggled in from non DRM countries. Just think of the future. Running on a Happy Sun 4 Tb drive, A Chang Pow Motherboard, And a Three Unvirtuose mouse sound card.
The no name black market hardware makers of Asia would probably build a shrine to RIAA.
They used to do something similar with a C band sattelite that beamed down fidonet traffic. you had 3 chances to get it right during the day. That was until they did fight o net once a day and usenet the rest of the day. Was a neat idea for its time.
Well now, the question is how many megawatts were you using ? ;)
Most likely you guys weren't using more than a few hundred watts, or an antenna more than 100 feet off the ground.
But not everyone can be allowed to run a megawatt generating gas turbine to power the radio rig in their back yard, otherwise braces, metal rimmed glasses, and umbrellas would become unpopular very fast.
Broadcasters always have the edge over certin technical problems becase they can pump out megawatts, have 1-2 thousand feet towers, and afford the best techies money can buy.
There are in the US people who actually live so far out in the middle of nowhere that shortwave is the only option for radio unless they want to put up a huge antenna.
Its also a fairly widespread hobby. Starting cost can be as low as $10 for a garage sale world band radio up to several thousand for the latest in equipment.
Its pretty fun being able to hear programs from austalia, india, or wherever someone can muster a few kilowatts to bounce a signal off the ionosphere.
A lot of shopping malls around the US had microturbines installed on their roofs so they would have backup power. If you had one of these on sight, you could turn that natural gas into electrical power, and dump it onto the grid. When you were done with that well, you could haul it off to another sight.
You poor poor confused halfwit. Coal is not the only thing in the ground. Coal sits right next to a fision reactor called the earths crust. Theres also all sorts of lead, thorium, and uranium isotopes mixed in with it all. This is why you get all sorts of wonderfull things when you live in coal country like radon seeping out of the ground.
Biomass is easy enough. Several farms and meat packing plants have simple biomass reactors.
It basicly requires a pit to dump to animial crap, and airtight black tarp over it, some tires thrown on top to provide some back pressure, a water line into the crap pile to keep the microbes moist, and a gas pipeline out, and a drying canister of two to remove moisture and contaminants.
Every so often you run out of crap, and have to heap it back up in there and get the reaction get going again. Horribly complex.
If you want something neat, you can make a small scale wind power generator that will do 200-300 watts and be no more intrusive than those decorative windmills people have in their gardens. You could probably put one up on an old CB radio mast with little trouble. Just hook that thing up to a some old low CCW 12 volt car batteries(plates are thicker, so they last longer) and let it charge em up all day. In the midwest $120 will buy 10 junk yard car batteries, and some EDTA to help get out any sulfation in the batteries. Hook that up to one big inverter, or a dozen little ones, and you've got yourself one monster UPS.
Went to an alternative energy expo out in Iowa last summer. And one of the more advanced items was wind power.
These things take a lot of skill and money to get going. But if you live in some totally remote part of nowhere that has a lot of wind, they are just the perfect thing.
And when these wind farms start getting shut down, you'll find these things being put to use where they really count.
For a large scale project in Hawaii what you really need is strong OTEC development. You have the really deep ocean needed for good strong thermal differential, and it's also close to shore in many places.
You could also probably do geothermal, but it's not really something that they've developed too well.
OTEC is nothing more than refrigeration technology modified to concentrate the heat differential, and generate power.
For some reason people always get nervous around things that shoot sparks, and leak battery acid and hydrogen. If you want something to really freak you out, go work around farm machinery. Now that's the ultimate thing to make you nervous. Along with farmers operating it who are missing fingers, or segments of fingers.
They talked about this with the home EKG device. a few volts in the right place can stop your heart if you are sickly enough. But on the other hand, they had bad luck frying people with thousands of volts DC back when they were experimenting with how to kill people with electricity. From personal experience, linking 5 9 volt batteries end to end and touching them to your tongue is enough to really get your attention. Technicians also have to worry about high capacity 30 volt DC or higher capacitors, since getting zapped by one is far worse than any buzz from line current. It's all relative. But as a rule, anything over 30 volts DC gets painfull. 12 volts is nothing really unless you just dipped yourself in salt, or have metal splinters in your hands(not unusual for a mechanic).
They use 70 volt systems in the USA for audio systems(muzac, PA systems, etc) and 100 volt systems in europe. These do not require certified electricians to install in a house or business.
Electricians liceneses only apply to wiring in buildings and structures.
I'm sure some nerldy lawyer wanna be can tell you what all is covered. But the basics are, if its high current(10 amps+) line voltage range stuff, permanent wiring, an electrician has to handle it.
There's also industrial electronics, which are non-electrician items many times. Panel wiring, controller boxes of various sorts, CNC wiring and circuits.
This does not necessarily exempt one from doing things more or less by various guidelines no matter what credentials you have. It still has to be such that it does not catch fire, shoot sparks, glow red hot, or generate lots of RF noise.
The exceptions to this are in auto electronics. Where you have glow plugs(diesels), HEI Ignition systems(tons of RF), spark plugs(catch fire and shoot sparks), starters(RF, sparks, red hot), and a number of other things that would be considered very bad things inside a building.
But anyway, forget having to be an electrician on a vehicle. They violate many normal rules when it comes to household and building wiring. They also require much higher standards for fireproofing, corrosion resistance, being subject to moisture, vibration, and constant mechanical shock.
Mechanics and car stereo monkeys(helps to have long thin arms and fingers when doing wiring) have their own guidelines, and have to use a set of rules very different from those used by anyone else. Boat and marine electronics are even worse. Then comes naval and military aviation electronics as the ultimate in pain in the ass stuff.
As a side note, never let an electrician, or electrical engineer work on your car electronics. If you insist on finding out why, make sure your will states who gets your computer junk before proceding.
There was a wall street journal article on the use of corn based products for everything these days. The reason is because its cheap. $3 a bushel is a few cents a pound.
If you can use all the surplus for anything new, its a great situation.
Corn starches and sugars are the easiest parts to use. From there you get biodegradeable plastics, sugar for colas, and all sorts of premade goods, and with a little fermentation, a fuel addative or something to spice up you cola in the from of 190 proof ethanol(sold as everclear)
Theres also corn oils, and the proteins, I don't know quite what they do with the proteins yet.
If you are alergic to all component molecules of corn you might as well just pack it up, and leave the planet. Corn based plastics are easily over a decade old. Bio degradable plastics with starch links (corn starch probably) are everywhere. A more popular corn based item is the biodegradable packing peanut. Put one on your tongue and it will melt. Tastes like corn and plastic. Your girlfriend, if she doesn't already know, should find out what in the corn she is alergic to, the pollen, the protein components, or the starch and sugar components. You can work from there an tracking down what is lethal. Til then, don't let her dive into vats of biodegradable packing peanuts unless you have a horse syringe full of adrenaline ready.