failure

i've always thought that all this 'hd'-stuff is just pointless. but it wasn't until i watched discovery on a wide-screen tv that i actually saw how pointless it is. it is a failure of technology to watch tv material originally recorded for ntsc and later broadcast in pal (which has more lines) on a wide-screen tv, and get top and bottom black bars.

reminder

The previous post reminded me to post this important reminder:
This blag exists with the sole purpose of providing more or less random bits for statistical analysis and other bit crunching, or when there is a need for various kinds of noise.
Using this blag in any other way is not intended by its creator, who is not responsible for your getting offended or for anything else.
As this eccentric friend puts it, ceci n'est pas un blog.

ph0nez

So Apple released their iPhone with lots of people gathered around the shop, many of them having sat there for days. Well, what can I say. I certainly would not pay $600, not even $400 for a phone. After destroying my old, poor-GUI, slow-boot, flimsy, but rather sexy Siemens AX72 by forecful throw, I now use a Nokia 1112, which is a phone. I use it to talk to people. Maybe send an SMS, set an alarm or play a Snake, because those are simple, handy things to have on a phone. I'd use a second-hand $100 handheld or even a regular laptop to swim the interwebs over 802.11 and use the phone to talk to someone at the same time. (It's interesting to notice how nobody knows what 802.3 is but in the meantime it's become fashionable to include science-techy-sounding numbers in product marketing and so everybody knows that 802.11b/g is wireless/wifi Internets. Though to be fair, g is better than b so it kind of makes sense to include that.) And I don't use GPRS et al., because I'm too snobbish to admit that it can be useful at times. Oh, by the way. Besides .mobi sounding so ... unnecessarily gay, typing it takes 10 key pressings on a standard 12-key keypad, as opposed to .wap for instance, which only takes 3. .mb also only takes 3, is a better abbreviation and is free at the time of this writing. I also got some rants for the idiot who put pqrs and wxyz together while leaving 1 empty. I've been long thinking of moving the space from 0 to 1 next to the .,! etc. (or the .,! next to the space depending on the phone model), and moving s and z to 0 while also leaving them on 7 an 9 for backward compatibility. Later.
Back to the iPhone. Objectively speaking - nice idea, if it weren't for its inability to host custom software, and its carrier lock-in. It also looks ugly for my taste, but that's just me. Too slim and too metrosexual. I don't like it. But it's OK if others like it.
So they launched it, people rushed to buy it and use its somewhat crippled features, insecure browser and so on, mkay, fine. Then someone hacked it to allow usage on any GSM carrier. The guy put a lot of effort into it and he finally managed to patch the firmware with the help of another guy. Interesting story and great job after all, a little messy but worth it. Great spirit, great guy. So obviously thousands of phones got cracked in the following weeks. So now it seems Apple is launching an update to un-crack the phones and prevent further cracking using this method. Regardless of wether that's true or not (it's certainly plausible and after all, who cares), it's become usual to see people commenting on the comment-forum with mostly nothing interesting to say. There are the 'freedom' guys who scream at Apple for doing such a thing and not letting them do whatever they please with their hardware, and there are the corporate fan-boys who reply that it's a good move and that they want the company to gain lots of ca$h and invest it in better products. Of course both camps are right and wrong at the same time, but right now I'm only going to argue against the crackers and crack users (LOL). Just for the sake of making a point, I run mostly free software on my PC and if I had more time I'd hack a Linux kernel into every device I could get my hands into. But I don't buy iPods and iPhones and proprietary systems while ranting at their makers. If I don't like a product for whatever reason and can't mod it to fit my desires, I shut up and don't buy it. Why the hell would I buy a CPU that doesn't let me run the code I want? But of course, it's sexy to have an iPhone mostly as a social statement AND use it however you please. Have your cake AND eat it. Get real. As Free Culture author Lawrence Lessing put it, in his admirably balanced fashion: company executives are required by law to maximize their companies' profits. So the only correct way to protest against a corporation's products being 'intentionally crippled' or otherwise 'wrong' is to not buy them, thus making it ineffective for the company to continue pursuing their current strategy, at least from the point of view of your dollars. But wait, you can't do that, because in many cases you've got no alternative maker for that product -- 'Am I to refrain from buying the product at all????!' . Well, tough luck! Having strong principles sometimes hurts/costs, and those who have them accept this. But most comment-forum commenters don't [have strong, consistent principles], and are there just to kill time and rant. [Note: I'm not only killing time and ranting but I'm also generating random bits per this blag's definition.] That being said, there's openmoko. Soon it's going to be a full-featured fancyphone with all the freedom in the world. How soon I don't know, but then I could tell you to buy it instead of the iPhone and stop whining. It's cheaper and it's free. Then, by virtue of causal market dynamics, maybe iPhones will become less restrictive too. I couldn't care less anyway. On the other hand I know why a friend's iPod keeps freezing. Because the Apple headquarters is situated on 1 Infinte Loop (,Cupertino, CA). What a badly-chosen name :) But in all fairness, the old Macs were real computers when x86 PCs were what we call coffee grinders.
In closing, I'd like to thank Google for pointing me to the Engadget article in question. Eventhough they supposedly support the .mobi that I despise, their AdSense is great (it delivers the only ads not worth adblocking), and their WebClips are even better.

dim prospects

Fluorescent lamps use a gas discharge to generate light, unlike incandescent bulbs that just heat up a filament. The discharge is initiated by a high-voltage pulse generated by the ballast coil in combination with the starter. The ballast coil also controls the power going into the discharge, because gas discharges have negative differential resistance and like to draw very large currents if allowed. Traditional fluorescent lamps also have filaments (yeah, incandescent filaments), which need to heat up to allow electron emission which facilitates the discharge. New 'compact' lamps don't have ballasts, starters or filaments, but rather a high-frequency driver circuit. What all this leads to is that fluorescent lights are not dimmable with the usual 'dimmer switches' that chop the first part of each period of the input voltage waveform to a larger or smaller extent according to the dim setting.
I was looking ways to dim fluorescent lights.
And I found this while googling (using Google Search to find info on the interwebs):

"
[damned be copy-paste-with-formatting]
I have heard that there is mercury in Compact fluorescent bulbs.
"

No shit, have you really? :)
Of course there's fucking mercury in all fluorescent lamps, and of course it's toxic :) You thought that just because of all the hype around fluorescents being more power efficient than incandescents (yeah, they really are), they would be environmentally-friendly too?

translation

Try translating "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak", from English to Russian and back, and obtaining the result, "The wine is strong, but the meat is rancid".
I could only agree.

crappy cgi

As I have stated previously, the world is full of horrible, shitty, or crappy CGI. Only few examples of decent cgi exist. One example of crappy cgi would be this marvel by NASA, who for the gazillion dollars they spend on launching space debris and killing shuttle crews, could really do better. One can notice in the full-sized image linked above how ugly the cracks look because they're made of triangles instead of splines. Because that's how all 3D accelerators and 3D softwarez work. Even if by the sampling theorem I accepted triangle-based rendering, by the same theorem they should have made the triangles' projections comparable in size to one fucking pixel not 30. While I'm at it, one can also see how the lack of anti-alias filtering creates too sharp a transition from crust to lava, which looks unnatural. I won't comment on the ejected dust, because that's been probably done in a hurry and besides, dust is difficult to render. I will comment on the fact that, when the image is scaled down and proper filtering is used in the process, the impact area actually looks OK. Cause the triangles are now small enough. However, if proper filtering isn't used in the process, as is currently the case with Firefox when scaling down the large version, it still looks crappy because of alias noise. There. It's fucking mathematics and it's why the first digital audio recordings were crap and it's why so much CGI is crap. Oh, and the stars are too big.

best of xkcd

I'm a big fan of xkcd. (Of course.)
I'm not going to describe now how deep xkcd sometimes is and how funny it is other times, you have to read it all to feel this.
Linking only to certain strips certainly destroys the flow and kills the completeness and some of the feelings that come with it, but anyway, here are some of my favorites (notice the alt-text):
blown apart
snapple
kepler
fourier
elefino
schrodinger
malaria
hobby
useless
super bowl
five thirty, aka fuck the cosine
classhole
su doku
curse levels
iambic pentameter
national language
paths
escher
jacket
parallel universe
computational linguistics
balloon
centrifugal force
dPain over dt - is k positive, is k_2 large?
fans
science fair
pointers
delicious
sandwich
grownups
hamster ball
beliefs
commented
angular momentum
donald knuth
string theory
movie seating
nash
matrix xform
IPoD
penises
right-hand rule
xmas gps
candy button paper
xkcd
regex
letting go
romantic drama eqn
e to the pi minus pi
philosophy
random number
valentine's day
lisp
open source
color codes
resonance
kitty
captcha
kite
pregnancy test & single coat hanger
keyboards
dream girl
scientist
nub
floor tiles
factoring the time
hypotheticals
chess
cd tray fight
escalators
highway engineer pranks
slide
necklace
certainty
tcmp
powers of one
fixed width
projection
NP-complete
elevator
dignified
goto
rtfm
bookstore
lisp cycles
names
commitment
loud sex

wonders

I got pissed off today when I saw some newspaper publish a list of "seven wonders of Romania", built from the votes that people cast on its website. Besides there being lots more interesting stuff in Romania, like the Communist-built People's House, one of the largest buildings in the world, this whole thing is stupid. It's supposed to be inspired by this idea, but at least that one has worldwide coverage. So, let's start a harsh analysis of all that's wrong with these so-called "wonders", after which I will present my own view of what this world's wonders are.

Chapter 1. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

1.1. Great Piramid of Giza. Cool, impressive, durable. Appropriately called 'Great.' Questionable in utility, though certainly of great social impact. Built by workers using ramps, not by extraterrestrials, not by God. Wonderfully precise construction and alignment.

1.2. Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Kind of cool, unfortunately they don't exist. There is some controversy over them actually having existed in the past, but anyway, Babylonians were cool. Kind of. As cool as they could afford to be in those ancient times.

1.3. Statue of Zeus at Olympia. Also impressive, also busted.

1.4. Temple of Artemis. Busted.

1.5. Mausoleum of Maussollos. Busted by God by means of an earthquake, trashed by European Crusaders later.

1.6. Colossus of Rhodes. Busted, God, quake.

1.7. Lighthouse of Alexandria. See above.

So the Great Pyramid clearly wins, given the fact that all other six have been destroyed, mostly by nature. So what does this mean? Well, I guess there are earthquakes in Egypt just as there are in the rest of the world, not to mention eroding sand storms. But the Pyramids were simply better engineered than all the other stuff. So this brings me to my point: dude, why call them wonders when they didn't even manage to survive a few millenia? I mean, sure, they were elaborate and cultural and shit, but the pyramids, in their exterior simplicity, as well as their huge scale, simply rule. Besides, all these seven Wonders are so Europe-centric. Well, Europe and some few thousand miles below. This is absolutely wrong. There's no mention of Indian temples, no mention of Chinese stuff, and certainly no mention of South American shrines.
So in this sense, the New Seven Wonders of the World might be seen as a correct initiative. So, here's:

Chapter 2. The New Seven Wonders of the World.

2.1. Chichen Itza. See Great Pyramid, the same also applies here. Too bad they killed people there. There's culture for you. Sure, you can have great mathematics, great astronomy, great engineering, great poetry even. But that doesn't help at all if you kill people and more than 90% of your population is illiterate slaves. (Was that the case? I don't know, it's just for the sake of discussion. But they did sacrifice people.)

2.2. Christ the Redeemer. No comment.

2.3. Great Wall of China. Impressive, useful, great effort, good results, quite durable. Too bad so many people died building it, but those were tough times. Visible from space, just as many other buildings are. Invisible from the Moon.

2.4. Machu Picchu. Cool, ignored until relatively recently by Western historians, just as all of ancient South America, see Chichen Itza.

2.5. Petra, Jordan. Wh'ever. Call me uncultured.

2.6. Roman Colosseum. Oh yeah! :) Quite unimpressive I might say, having visited it. Very famous of course, objectively quite fine architecturally, and of course very durable. The fact that it's a wreck is due to repeated theft, not its construction. So yes, it has its merits. Its purpose however makes me point you to the comments on 2.1. Of course, me being Romanian and thus of Latin descent, I must say I'm quite ashamed of my ancestors. I don't care about their philosophers and poets, in fact Asian philosophy and poetry kicks Europe's butt with indescribable force and depth. I care about the Romans violently conquering everything and amusing themselves with organized bloodshed. I despise the Roman Empire and its heritage.

2.7. Taj Mahal. Correct.

2.8. The Great Pyramid, again :) Yes, I know that makes 8 not seven. Honorary Candidate.

This is already better than the classic Seven Wonders, but misses a point. These are all ancient! I mean sure, they're great, or at least 5 of them are, and of course, newer buildings such as the Eiffel tower were included in the polls. The truth is, modern humans are driven by Capitalism and thus by utility, rather than the desire to build something Great, Really Great, like the Taj Mahal or the Great Wall. There's no point now in employing so many resources. I mean, one really can't compare the Eiffel tower with those ancient Wonders that were build with much lower technology, and that's because it's... small :) Sure, it's nice, it's important, it was pioneering, but it's small. So, these 7-8 wonders are wonderful and even greater than more recent buildings, but they're still ancient. Their relevance today is only historical. Here is my list of modern wonders that really count, stuff that has been shaping our lives since its discovery. Stuff that's been building modern culture.

Chapter 3. The Real Wonders.

3.1. The Flushing Toilet (of course) and Hygene in general. Not invented, but nonetheless made popular, by a guy ironically named Thomas Crapper.

3.2. Medicine. The discovery of bacteria, which is life not mentioned among that created by God in seven days. The discovery of antibiotics, anesthetics, et cetera et cetera et cetera. This did absolutely nothing but double our average life expectancy.

3.3. Freedom of, and from, religion. Freedom of speech and thought. And democracy in general. Imperfect as it all might be, at least it exists in theory, and in practice in some form or another.

3.4. The Integrated Circuit, first imagined by others, but designed to be economically manufacturable by Robert Noyce on Jean Hoerni's planar process. Saying that the influence of the IC on modern society is enormous would be a gross understatement. Every electronic device, computer systems included, the Internet, banking, wtf, the whole economy and all our comfort depends on high-performance integrated circuits.

3.5. The Internet. I can now talk to people on the other side of the globe and share ideas, and I can learn a lot of stuff that others care to publish. In view of this, Free Software and Free Documentation share the award.

3.6. Nothing. Everything stated above is simply much too great to place near anything else. Science. Let's say Science in general. It's been already mentioned 3 times though :)

3.7. No. I can't think of anything comparable in greatness or relevance to hygene, medicine, freedom, the IC, or the Internet and its associated freedoms.

There. Think about how the Rhodes Colossus and the others make your life so much better than ancient Romans' and shut up.

P.S. :D :D Just as I was proof-reading this post, a senile old lady was speaking on TV on "The Critical Eye" claiming that God built the Great Pyramid and Stonehenge :) Dude, we build skyscrapers and tunnels and hydroelectric dams and launch rockets and send ships outside the solar system, but our ancestors couldn't have moved some blocks of stone to build some pyramids and a stone circle. That's not only stupid, but insulting to humanity as well.

autumn

Autumn is finally here! No more burning rays, no more heat waves. Just mild sunshine, grey skies, cool wind, soothing rain. Dawn comes later each day. Nature slows down. Trees go to sleep, grass dies, bugs die, everything dies. The death of the leaves is beautiful. Everything is more interesting in autumn, because it's changing so fast. So life is boring, but birth and death are nice. Seeing nature come to life in spring is nice. Feeling warmth after a cold winter is nice. Seeing nature die in autumn is nice. Even winter is nice because it's so unusual and tough and smells fine. It's so quiet and void of life, one can only hear the wind howl. All these moments, images, feelings are a good incentive for meditation and self-analysis, be it deep or shallow, pretentious or casual. Summer on the other hand, sucks. I fucking hate summer. Nothing interesting ever happens in summer, except the occasional thunderstorm, and it's much, much too hot. I wish I had a house in Norway or Iceland or maybe Scotland, where I would spend all the stupid summers. Fuck whoever tilted the Earth's axis! :)

quantify

Three times much equals much. I wonder how many times much equals very much.

grandiose bullshit medley

This is going to be a masterpiece of crap.
It all started today around 4:30 am when I was watching Zone Reality. I'm starting to like channels like Zone Reality more and more each day, in contrast to some channels I grew up with like Discovery. I learned English mostly by watching TV. Cartoon Network and Discovery. Now that cartoons are translated and spoken in Romanian, I don't watch them anymore. I can't imagine a bigger step to dumbing down the infant population than translating cartoons to Romanian and dubbing them over. I --- learned --- English --- from --- cartoons - you-fucking-idiots. But of course, it's cooler to learn it from multi-k$ courses. It's not cool when a high-school student argues with his teacher over the existance of the word "informatics". On the other hand, English words are penetrating common Romanian in a very annoying fashion. I mean, we have native words for 'job', 'rating', 'poll', to 'apply' for something, and so on. But no, we don't use them anymore. 'Cause it's not k00l, you know, not modern, not trendy. But people that have some kind of authority and influence with the masses don't concentrate on this. No, they dub over Western cartoons so that in the end we don't know how to speak neither proper Romanian, nor proper English. We're losing both our culture, and a proper coverage of Western culture. We're defacing our own language AND getting less and less proficient with international languages such as English. Which I learned from cartoons and perfected with the help of some good teachers. And why all this? So that some incompetent translators and lousy actors can get paid for it. Ok, maybe they're not all incompetent and lousy, but when someone says "about 10 miles" and you translate "about 16.1 kilometers", you can be called anything but competent. (For example.) Happens everytime with movies. At least they are only subtitled, for the moment. There are bigger xenophobes out there who dub even these over. How stupid need you be to dub a movie over? Are your viewers so illiterate / incapable of distributed attention to just read the subtitles? Sheesh. On the up side, my cable company now broadcasts cartoons in two languages and my tv tuner can decode both. So now I can watch cartoons like they were created. With all the untranslateable language puns and twists in place. But most TVs don't have that feature, so the vast majority of children are deprived of the benefit of learning the most important international language, the language of the Internet, in a natural fashion. Instead, they hear their parents 'apply' for a 'job' that will bring them some more 'cash', without understanding where those damned words come from. It's a double-fucking-paradox. It seems that everything was better when I was younger and that everything is getting worse by the minute. I learned a lot of stuff from Discovery as a child. Now I only see cars, muscle cars, hot rods, cars, some more cars, a little more cars, then some remote-controlled cars, and cars. And the 104th re-run of How It's Made episode 5 on both Discovery and Discovery Science at the same time. Oh, and Romanian commercials featuring female voices with over-emphasized bass and either skinny or dumbly-monotonous male voices. No wonder people download shows over the Internet. Oh well. At least I got to see a documentary about Death Row on Zone Reality. To be fair, I've seen similar ones on both Discovery and National Geographic. Bottom line is, in the U.S., the most 'democratic' and 'free' country in the world, more than 100 people were sentenced to death and then acquited following appeal, in the last 30 years. Well. Either some of those are criminals that were wrongly acquited and are now living among us^H^Hthem, or some of them were wrongly convicted in the first place, or some of the other thousands that had their sentence carried out were wrongly murdered by the state. Or all 3 choices. Why the fuck do I wear a Texas t-shirt? Because they have a town called Corpus Christi there? Fuck. No, because my mom gave it to me and it's nice, but hell. Dude. The State murders people. Probably. I have no direct evidence, I can't tell that for sure. But most probably, the state kills innocent people. What the fuck. That's wrong, dude! The death penalty should be abolished. And prison security increased, and more resources put into re-habilitation programs. But hell, what do I know. I know nothing. The state doesn't really care that much about the security of its citizens, or the rehabilitation of criminals, or the killing of innocent people. It cares about its image. It needs people to still find it acceptable and respect its authority so that the economy works as a whole and some_kind_of_average(people, mood) equals "everyone's happy". But the people that are unlucky enough not to afford good a good defence attorney, or who are otherwise unlucky, don't really count. Nor do the people that work at NASA doing leading-edge research, that are required to allow severe intrusion of their privacy for 'national security' reasons. Oh well. Maybe they will succeed with their lawsuit. But why the hell am I defending NASA? I mean, they blew up two shuttles and killed two crews even if they were warned about the severe problems they were having. I'm not defending them, in fact screw them, I'm defending human rights. Fuck it, not only does the Church / do the Churches try to control every aspect of everyone's sex life, now the state is questioning people about it. By the way, there's nothing in the U.S. constitution that prohibits the state from controlling its citizens' sexual behavior. Or so I understood, I'm no expert. All in all, until a few years ago it was illegal in many U.S. states for two people to engage in 'sodomy', 'actions against nature' or other vague words meant to refer anal or oral sex. In some cases it was between homosexual men, in other cases it extended to heterosexual couples as well. Around 2000-something these laws were finally overturned in some supreme court. Dude! In the third millenium and the 21st century (which BTW if you don't count years from zero and you don't because there were no computers and addressable memory then, starts in 2001 and not in 2000 like everyone said), people can't have anal sex in the United States of America. Cool. Read Wikipedia, then check with more 'reliable' sources if you don't believe me. Well. At least there's free speech. Kind of. For now. For instance, I don't know if I can dump all this putrid bullshit on a server located here. I probably can, because I hate inciting to racism, violence, underage sex or stuff like that and therefore I don't do that. On the other hand, I hate the Church(es) for example. They passed some law here that don't allow you to offend religions/churches/whatever anymore. There are laws like that in many 'civilized' places around the world, and ultimately, they're probably good. But I still hate religion and the churches that enforce it because, apart from their distorted vision on physics and biology, they are constantly trying to control people's sex lives. Dude! In Christianity I think it all starts from Mary. She supposedly gave birth to the Son of God without prior sexual intercourse with a male, which is of course the natural way of creating children. No, the Holy Spirit couldn't have entered a body created from human flesh through normal, God-created sex. It had to enter an unfertilized egg and fertilize it. Dude. Why? Because the Church says that sex is impure. It's dirty and it's a sin. By making Mary a virgin and also making her the mother of the Son of God in the stroies, the Church has a really strong argument against sex. I so fucking hate that. Ok, I fucking understand that when there were no doctors and no condoms, sexually transmitted diseases mandated that people have as few sex partners as possible in order to limit transmission. You couldn't teach people that, so the saints / enlightened dudes / whatever told it to them in a form they respected. And there are a lot of social reasons for which the religious dogmas and norms around the world are the way they are. So yes, religion has always had its good parts. And it still has. And we need a certain degree of stability in society. But it's the twenty-fucking-first century now and times have changed and some traditions need to die and religion needs an upgrade! Free Love! But no, I'm telling total bullshit here. A lot of dudes are trying to bring their own 'upgraded' religion and mostly all they've come up with is crap. No. Things are good just the way they are. Let them evolve. No. We are surrounded by crap. But hopefully I can say all this. I don't know. If it's not allowed, I don't care, I can delete it. I can even apologize. My mind will still be free. Hopefully. I could then probably disperse this stuff over some underground networks, but I'm afraid few people care about this so then I won't. I heard the news this morning: Chinese authorities launched some kind of 'virtual cops' that look like policemen and are embedded/overlaid in web pages and are clickable. With more and more computer scientists and hackers in the U.S. refraining from publishing cryptographic research for fear of the DMCA (even its name sounds horribly stupid), and with the possibility of limiting the cryptographic strength of Internet communication between private users by law, how much til the formerly free world becomes an Orwellian nightmare akin to a living dead machine with money instead of blood and brain-numbed human beings instead of cells? Will I need to go deep into the mountains to teach my children technology, for fear of being traced by Big Brother? I certainly hope not. I mean, scientists and hackers are doing reasearch in order to discover better protection algorithms, while crackers are cracking the weak algorithms unhindered and gaining profit from it. The former are prohibited by the DMCA to work on certain systems and topics, while the latter do it anyway because they don't go public, they don't write their names on scientific papers and publish them, they work underground. You could hypothetically define a "protection bit" and set it to "one" in a music file and write some software that doesn't allow you to copy it. No encryption no nothing. If someone writes a new software that simply ignores that bit, that's illegal. If someone publishes the location of that bit in the file so that anyone can set it to zero again and use the original software to copy the files, that's illegal. Well, actually it's probably not. That's an extreme example just to get the idea. There need to be "reasonable measures" in place, but they don't have to be strong or secure in any way. There's justice for you, sawing off its left hand and right foot. Oh, and just to complete the puzzle of the world falling apart around me, let's check this out. Some blokes at MIT made a system that transmits energy without wires. Oh wow. Now I can power my laptop without plugging in the power cord, I can get power wirelessly. Woooooooow. And it's called "WiTricity" Wooow that's so Coool. Big fucking stale bucket of crap. It's old technology, in fact it's more than a hundred years old and it was invented by TESLA, the same guy who invented the method used everywhere in the world to carry electrical energy from the power plant to the consumers! And it's based on the work of a lot of guys that did physics and maths and philosophy a hell of a fucking lot of years ago when people still thought that God was angry when lightning streaked across the sky. But Tesla was just a madman born a few hundred miles from where I live who did some weird stuff in his lab. He's not MIT, he doesn't do overrated Media and AI (childish people and stupid robots) and he doesn't market WiTricity. No, he's just smart and plays with resonant circuits. It took more than 100 years after the brilliant mad genius patented the stuff to "imagine a future in which wireless power is feasible". Hey, let me tell you something. There is no wired/wireful electricity. Electricity is fields. It lives in space-time. It needs no wires. It's wireless by nature. 'Electrical' energy flows around the wires, not through them. They just guide it by means of mobile electrical charges. So take your WiTricity and you know what to do with it. At radio frequency of course. To their merit, they acknowledge the technology and concepts as being old, but with no significant past interest. Well, that's the problem. We're so profit- and instant-results-driven that we forget what progress is. And that's why, when all my high-school friends were going to MIT and other famous schools in the States to learn science and engineering and lots of humanities, I stayed at the Bucharest Polytechnic drinking beer in The Jack till morning, hacking hardware and coding software. And speaking English on the 'net. Because that's what the Net is all about. Fuck internationalization, double-fuck i18n, if it's Global it has to be English. I hate it when I google something technical like hacking the Linux kernel and the top two hits are in Japanese. Or German, or Russian, or Polish, or Czech, or Portugese, or Romanian so that nobody gets offended. Of course, I'm wrong, I know. I should disable non-English results. I can't afford to do that, what if I miss something? I also know I'm a hypocrite, for I also discuss in Romanian on Romanian forums, but that's somehow wrong too. It's knowledge lost to a minority, globally speaking. The Net should be global, international, thus English.