moar funny pictures

This past week I was looking through the choices at Live365 and after a quick web search, rediscovered Shoutcast and the Winamp software. That led me to Sky.fm which has a good selection of great stations. I also found that KDFC has an MP3 stream. When I lived in the Bay area of San Francisco a couple of years ago, I was constantly listening to KDFC and I am quite happy I can listen in again, even though I now live a couple thousand miles away from the Bay

Another good station I found is Atlantic Sound Factory which plays a good mix from the 1970′s to today.

Hopefully internet radio doesn’t get squashed by the new royalty demands. I only see this mentioned on some sites, so I don’t know if it will affect only US based stations or not.

As I was writing this post, I found yet another service called Jango which puts a new twist on the theme. It allows you to select the artists you like and then it starts playing a song immediately. It allows rating each song so that it will either play that song more frequently or not at all, thereby customizing your playlist. It will play the songs you choose a lot, and songs recommended by Jango a little.

As it plays your songs, it also displays icons of other users who also have chosen that song. You can click on these icons and listen to other user’s playlists. It’s pretty cool, but I find it takes up more bandwidth than using Winamp, they must be using a higher bitrate on Jango.

There is a page on the site welcoming joint venture partners with marketing, fund raising or manufacturing expertise, so it sounds like another situation where someone with a good idea needs money to really launch it.

“The Melbourne Market Authority has offered Engineair a grant to develop and build a prototype for a new carrier driven by a compressed air motor. The air drives the air motor without any combustion or exhaust gases, which makes this a zero-pollution mobility concept ideal for enclosed areas such as the market or factories and warehouses.”

The second site is that of ZevCat Inc., a distributor in California who plans to bring the MDI built car to the U.S. They suggest a retail price of between $15,000 and $20,000 with a cost per mile for operation of $.02 (2 cents) compared to $.08 for operating a gasoline powered car. That translates to $0.50 per gallon for air compared to $2.00 per gallon for gasoline.

Looking at the Future Events page, nothing was planned for 2007 so it was a quiet year for ZevCat. Perhaps it will be a while before this car will be accepted in North America? I am sure there are plenty of buyers here, let’s hope it doesn’t get bogged down in regulations and other red tape.

If they were available, I would certainly buy the min-van version. How about you?

Just as he is to give up his journey, he sees a great teacher on the other side of the river. The monk yells over to the teacher, “Oh Master, can you tell me how to get to the other side of this river?”

The teacher ponders for a moment, looks up and down the river and yells back, “You are already on the other side.”

The basic premise is that one of the tragic flaws of Capitalism is that it has no regard for nature. Mr. Barnes proposes that we build a commons sector to counter-balance the corporate sector. He suggests that the price of nature is zero. While it is true that there are costs to extracting or acquiring resources, there are no costs of the resource itself.

The commons consists of nature, community and culture. It lacks property rights and institutions to protect it. Hence it’s being steadily enclosed and consumed by profit-maximizing corporations.

The commons sector is a set of institutions that protect and manage pieces of the commons. Its algorithms are: (1) preserve the asset; (2) share benefits and/or income equally; and (3) set the price of nature by supply and demand. At the moment this sector is quite small. Our task for the 21st century is to expand and strengthen it.

Read more and purchase or download the book here.

~Abraham Lincoln, assassinated president of the United States

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world, no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”

~Woodrow Wilson

“All of the perplexities, confusion, and distress in America arises, not from the defects of the Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.”

~John Adams, Founding Father of the American Constitution

“Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce…and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.”

~James A. Garfield, assassinated president of the United States

After a short introduction, this one gives a fairly brief synopsis: Ten Planks Translated

This one offers slightly more commentary, but is also quite brief: Are Americans Practicing Communism?

I am not opposed to every aspect of communism. Pure capitalism certainly has its faults as well.

A good video on the problems of Corporatism is called The Corporation. The basic premise of the film is that the rise of the Corporation in terms of power and influence is eroding our humanity. To put it simply, a corporation values profit over people. Even when there are good people in a corporation, it can still make decisions that negatively affect other people, the environment or animals, because they have to produce profit for shareholders as its raison d’etre (reason to be).

I think the best path is a balance between community and individual freedom and initiative.

The article says the cost to fill the tank with 340 liters of air would cost $2 and the car can go up to 68 mph with a range of 125 miles. That’s pretty good compared to the ZENN (Zero Emission, No Noise) electric car which can only go 25 mph and has a range of 30-40 miles per charge. Check out the ZENN site here. The ZENN cars will certainly have to do better than that to be anything more than a neighbourhood runabout.

Well, since the Air Car will initially be available in India, perhaps they could put Indians on stationary bikes and generate the power needed to compress air? It would be a clean, green and quite healthy hobby wouldn’t it? Perhaps they could attach batteries to bicycles and feed the generated power into a grid which could then be used to compress air. Lots of possibilities here.

The article on the Air Car can be found on the Popular Science website.

Looking around further, I found a French website with the not surprising address of www.theaircar.com that has a rather informative site. It says the cars should be in production by the summer of 2008.

Some of the features I found interesting are:

• Before compression, the air must be filtered to get rid of any impurities that could damage the engine. This represents a true revolution in automobiles – it is the first time that a car has produced minus pollution, i.e. it elimates and reduces existing pollution rather than emitting dirt and harmful gases. With this system the air that comes out of the car is cleaner than the air that went in.
• Consumption is less than one Euro per 100Km (Approx 0.75 Euro, according to use, i.e. about a tenth that of a petrol car). This makes it an attractive prospect for any driver, professional or not.
• As no combustion takes place, there is no pollution. Its mileage is about double that of the most advanced electric car (200 – 300 Km or 10 hours of driving), a factor which makes a perfect choice in cities where the 80% of motorists drive at less than 60Km.
• The temperature of the clean air expelled by the exhaust pipe is between 0 – 15 degrees below zero, which makes it suitable for use by the internal air conditioning system with no need for gases or loss of power.
• Due to the absence of combustion and, consequently, of residues, changing the oil (1 litre of vegetable oil) is necessary only every 50,000 Km.

My question is what is the point of using corporate images for communicating with each other? I could see it being used for planting seeds in the mass mind, but I don’t see how coffee cups with graphics on them would be useful in communicating with other members of the Illuminati. Any thoughts?

For a boatload of Illuminati links, check out this site. Enjoy!