Hi everyone,

    I sent out an invitation to everyone in my address book, for the Pickens Plan.  I've had a couple of people join, and a couple ask me what it's about.  So, I thought I'd put it here, and ask anyone who reads this if they have other ideas...

    In short, the Picken's Plan is creating a network of Wind-generated power plants throughout the Great Plains.  This electricity will replace the 22% of our current electricity that comes from Natural Gas.  The Natural Gas, will then be used to fuel automobiles.  This should reduce our demand on oil (foreign oil specifically) by about 38%.

    The entire plan is meant to be a bridge until we can find sources of renewable energy (hydrogen, electricity, water, etc) to fuel our cars. 

    Personally, I think we'll end up with a combination of Wind, Solar, and Geothermal or Hydroelectric power plants.  By creating this, we could potentially reduce the use of coal, as well as replace the Natural Gas. 

    As for our vehicles, we need to push Congress, auto manufacturers, and the other components manufacturers to find better ways for powering our cars.  Hydrogen is used in Greenland and Iceland.  Pure Ethanol is used in South America.  Hybrids are a good start, but they're not enough.  We need all-electric cars. 

    We need to find ways to recharge the batteries in a quick time.  If we can get them charged in less than an hour, people will be more apt to buy them.  Also, we need to find ways to increase their range.  Right now, electric vehicles (EV) are good for short-range trips.  To work, and school; or shopping for groceries in your local town.  We need to get their range out farther.

    Another source of charging could be something from a Role-playing game that I used to play (Gamma World).  They used "Broadcast electricity" to power everything from lights, to stoves, to weapons.  In the real-world, broadcast electricity could be used to keep our vehicles powered while we're driving down the road.  This could be accomplished through induction (a large scale version of the Magma Charger which uses induction paddles to create a transformer in the car's charger). 

    Anyhow, if anyone has better ideas (or can improve on the ideas that I put up), please comment or e-mail me with them....  Together, we can all make a difference.

Have a great day:)
Patrick.

Hi everyone,

This isn't a rant about copyright or copy-left or anything like that. But, it is one reason why they will fail to get everyone, and will not stop the flow of dowloaded music and movies.

First of all, they cannot stop every site that hosts the files or .torrent files.  As much as they may want to believe that they can, it's impossible.  All they can do is take down the sites that they know about.  But, when they take one down, another or more than one pop up to take it's place. 

Napster was first... They took it down in a very public way.  KaZaa, Morpheus, Xupiter, and a host of others showed up to take it's place...  They took them down, and now bittorrent sites (which were originally and still intended to host Linux distributions and other "legal" works) popped up.  They can't take down bittorrents, but they can go after their search engines.  AS they take them down, more come up.

The other main reason why they'll fail is this.  There are way too many people who have wireless Internet connections, and don't  know how to secure them. Along those lines, you have "hot spots" which have completely open wireless.  And even those who don't have "open" wireless don't monitor what their users are doing. 

So, mom and dad may not have KaZaa, but their neighbor may.  But it won't be the neighbor who gets popped and sued.  Same thing goes for the coffee shop down the road.  They're the ones who will be sued (not the user who tapped in).

Just driving through a small town in Nebraska, I can't say how many "open" wireless connections I've found.  And I'm not even a "war driver."  I don't have the fancy or rudimentary antennas.  All I'm running with is the built-in Atheros wireless that my laptop came with.

If I know who it is that has the "open" wireless, I've talked to them about securing it.  But, if I don't know, I'm surely not going to go door to door and say "Hey, if you have wireless, I want to thank you for letting me update my laptop while I was driving by.  Now secure it so no one else can." 

If you don't think that the neighbor could or would use your wireless to steal music, just remember.  There is no honor amongst thieves.  They're stealing music... Do you really think that they'll say "Oh it's ok to steal music from the record companies, but by God, I can't steal wireless from my neighbor."????

Part of this falls on the ISP's but part of it falls on places like Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Staples, and Circuit City (just to name a few).  They are selling these routers and modems, and they're NOT properly explaining the need for security.  So, if you provide a wireless access point (whether you be the ISP with a modem or a store with a router), it's YOUR responsibility to make sure the end-user knows to secure their network.

Have a great weekend everyone.:)
Patrick.