WHERE does Foster Steam Turbine Consultants pick up its
merchandise? And who are its customers?
According to its website, Foster sells 鈥渢he highest quality used gas
turbines, steam engines, power plants and generators鈥�
(www.usedturbines.com). The company鈥檚 鈥渆xtraordinary buy of the week鈥� is
indeed extraordinary: 鈥淥ne 1.2-Gigawatt Nuclear Power Plant, 70 per cent
complete, 90 per cent parts available. Never been run.鈥�
If you鈥檙e interested, this handy little item is on offer for a mere
$250 million. Cheap at half the price, Feedback reckons.
Advertisement
PERHAPS Foster will be selling ballistic missiles too before long.
According to Space News, the US may soon be the first country in the
world to entrust ballistic missiles to a private company. The scheme is an
attempt to circumvent a federal policy banning government organisations from
using launchers from outside the US. The problem is that the US is short of
small space launchers. Russia and the Ukraine, on the other hand, have plenty of
S-18 ballistic missiles which they are keen to dispose of by converting them
into space launchers.
The Air Force is trying to get round the problem by appealing to President
Clinton, but NASA is contemplating a more devious approach. It wants to
subcontract its launches to an American company, which in turn would buy the
hardware from the Russians.
Feedback wonders whether it is such a brilliant idea for a private company to
own a bunch of S-18s. What tactics would such a company employ against payment
defaulters?
PLAGIARISM may be the sincerest form of flattery, but please, dear readers,
don鈥檛 send Feedback any more copies of that list of product warnings currently
circulating on the Internet.
As it happens, 90 per cent of the items on the list were originally published
in this column. They were then gathered together in our Bizarre Tales from
New 杏吧原创 booklet, posted on our website, ripped off by someone and
recirculated on the Net without acknowledging the source. Kind readers who
didn鈥檛 see them first time round now regularly send them to us suggesting that
we publish them.
Ah well, that鈥檚 the Internet for you.
CAMPAIGNS against drugs have a habit of backfiring. First there were the
pale, wasted teenagers in British antiheroin advertisements whom young people
thought looked sexy and worthy of imitation. Then there were the pencils
distributed before Christmas by the Bureau for At-Risk Youth in the US.
The pencils carried the slogan: 鈥淭oo Cool To Do Drugs鈥�. But 10-year-old Kodu
Mosier of Ticonderoga Elementary School in northern New York noticed that when
the pencils were sharpened, the message first became 鈥淐ool To Do Drugs鈥�, then
simply 鈥淒o Drugs鈥�.
As a result of Kodu鈥檚 discovery, the bureau recalled the pencils and is now
working on a new batch which will bear the same message written in the opposite
direction.
PHILIPS has already made record companies very unhappy with a CD recorder
that copies music CDs, including ones that are already copied
(Feedback, 5 December).
Now the company鈥檚 engineers are upsetting Hollywood.
The movie moguls insist that DVD, the new digital video disc, must be
deliberately crippled by 鈥渞egional coding鈥�. This stops European players playing
discs of American films.
European film buffs hate regional coding because they want to buy DVDs as
soon as they are released in the US. Manufacturers and dealers hate it too,
because it turns customers off the idea of DVD.
So why do the Hollywood studios insist on it? The reason is they want to
continue releasing films to American cinemas ahead of other countries. Each film
print costs around $3000 and several thousand prints are needed to
blanket US cinemas. After a few months, some of these prints can be cleaned and
sent to other countries. This saves Hollywood a lot of dollars per film.
But if Hollywood staggers cinema releasing, it must also stagger the video
releases that follow.
The first DVD players used hardware chips to control regional coding. But
hackers found a way to bypass them. So, at Hollywood鈥檚 behest, the manufacturers
changed to software control. The code is set at the factory by a secret series
of keystrokes.
Now someone has leaked the combination used by two manufacturers, Philips and
JVC, and specialist magazine Home Cinema Choice has published them. So
anyone can now set these players to play any disc, anywhere in the world. They
are selling like hot cakes. More leaks of the codes for other players are
confidently expected.
The game is up. Hollywood will just have to stop staggering.
SPLENDID work by the US Agricultural Research Service (ARS). A recent press
release trumpets the virtues of Oatrim, a 鈥渇at replacer鈥� based on soluble oat
fibre that acts as a strong antioxidant when it鈥檚 consumed, helping to protect
fatty acids that are integral to cell membranes and many other body parts.
The headline for the press release says it all: 鈥淎RS Fat Replacer Shines
础驳补颈苍鈥�.
FINALLY, here鈥檚 another surprising bargain, this time from the Fisher
Scientific 1999 catalogue. On page 794, we are offered: 鈥淐atalogue No:
MOD-400-010R; Description: Giant functional brain.鈥�
At a mere 拢278, this is a lot cheaper than, for example, a Pentium II,
and it sounds as though it could do a lot more too. Time to upgrade again?