DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Do mp3 users belong in jail? Is your TiVo illegal? How about your DVD burner?

Should Hollywood campaign donors have their way, the answers would be “yes.”

Two great sites will tell you all you want to know — enough to make you drive to southern California (or maybe Japan) and kick some serious copyright-holding ass.

• savebetamax.org
• savethe[iPod].org

The SaveBetamax team is organizing a national call-in day on Tuesday, September 14. Sign up now and they’ll send you an email with your congressperson’s phone number. All you have to do is make one phone call.

The personal computer, the recordable CD, the TiVo, the iPod, and the Internet itself are innovations that came about because technological innovators didn’t have to ask copyright holders for permission before marketing a new product.

The Induce Act will reverse this trend. Any advertising that hints at infringing uses of a product could make the product illegal. Any device that doesn’t include crippling copy-protection measures could cost its creator millions in damages. Companies in the United States will no longer be able to produce the most innovative entertainment and information technologies, since every new development will, in practice, have to be approved by Hollywood and the RIAA.

We Rhine countries make our potato fritters without flour and call them then stop potato pancake.
But our potato pancakes are also not sticky then so and fad.
For lack of flour we need also fewer eggs - on 500 gram 1 egg hands potatoes.

One takes:

• 500 gram of potatoes
• 1 bulb
• 1 egg
• Oel/Schweineschmalz

The potatoes rub and the water out thoroughly squeeze. Eggs and the finely gewuerfelte bulb unteruehren, then the mass in oil or Schweineschmalz out-roast.

(Found poetry courtesy Google’s translator)

In January we put a timer-based cutoff switch on our well pump, to prevent the pump from running (and consuming expensive electricity) during peak hours, noon - 6:00PM.

In April, we set our clocks forward by 1 hour. Well, most of them. Not the one in the wellhouse. Doh!

I discovered this at 2:00 PM today. The pump timer was pretty sure it was 1:00 PM. This means it has been shutting off our well pump not from noon to 6:00, but 1:00 PM - 7:00 PM.

Fortunately we don’t use much water between noon and 1:00 PM, so the pump (which works on demand) would have had little reason to run at that time. But on those oddball days it was running… ouch. Our well pump consumes nearly 2 kW of electricity and is therefore almost capable of zeroing out the PV array’s output. Between noon and 6:00, that’s expensive power, not in the sense that we would be paying for it so much as in the sense that every watt we use cannot be sold back to the utility.

Seen in the NYT review of Thomas Keller’s Per Se restaurant:

Lobster is easy; potato salad is hard. And a restaurant that turns a summer picnic staple into a meal-stopping, sigh-inducing dish — and makes that dish a legitimate course in a $135 tasting menu — cannot be denied. Per Se is wondrous.

Proving that food writers, perhaps alone among journalists in an election year able to provide balanced coverage, restaurant reviewer Frank Bruni also raves about the calf brains.

On September 7th, the fuel-cell vehicle Hysun 3000 will start its record ride from Berlin to [Barcelona] on only one hydrogen filling.

The vehicle is an enclosed recumbant tricycle with half the air resistance of a small passenger car (or, probably, 1/6th of a typical American passenger truck). The manufacturer claims it will achieve a record 0.23 liters of fuel per 100 kilometers — or about 1022 miles per gallon.

Check the tour diary for updates. Note that the dates are written as DD.MM.YYYY — the tour takes 15 days, not 15 months.

Any mention of hydrogen-powered vehicles must be tempered by a measured dose of reality: most hydrogen is created from natural gas, which is no more renewable a resource than oil. Is it a coincidence that President Bush’s headline-making FreedomCAR program includes among its partners five of the biggest oil companies in the world? [scratch chin here]

(A hearty tip of my personal Proton Exchange Membrane to Bim for the link.)