Some Crushing News

Colonial or Ranch?

I read a lot of trade journals.  I often get the urge to crush my cellphone (and other items, but let's not discuss that).  How convenient, then, to find in a trade journal, a crusher!  Although it is designed to rid organizations of those pesky and insecure hard drives, it can easily be used for my BlackBerry Storm, whose need for crushing is being felt more strongly as the months pass without the software upgrade that will render it less frustrating. 

I was intrigued to read about one feature of the drive crusher.  Apparently, it will destroy a drive regardless of its size, type, or format.  I infer from this that it will render unreadable (and perhaps unrecognizable) not just common Windows hard drives, but also those formatted with Linux, and even Apple drives, despite the splendid robustness the Apple contingent would have us believe they possess.  Is this not American ingenuity at its best?

The Department of Energy would like to announce its new, 2-megaton nuclear warhead, the W-2010, now with Isotopes!  It will destroy not just Colonial-style houses, but Ranch and Italianate.  We haven't tested it yet on bungalows, but we're pretty confident.

I see this product as a business opportunity.  If I had a chain of retail establishments, I'd consider furnishing them with drive crushers.  Semi-seriously, I would then embark on a whispering campaign about how some computer viruses are capable of reading drives that have been erased and even stealing data from those in obsolete computers.  (The first part is actually true, but I don't think they can read a drive that's in the basement and not connected to electricity.)  More seriously, pretty much everyone has a computer or several that they're afraid to discard for security reasons.  Junk computers are often worth a few bucks, if for no other reason than their gold and other expensive alloys can be recovered.  If a recycler had one of these crushers, he could offer to recycle complete machines and crush the hard drive in front of the owner to prove it was safe.  More old computers would end up in good hands, the crusher owner could make some money, and closets and basements would be available again for storing emergency rations.  Maybe I should be doing Security Engineered Machinery's marketing.

The Factor Mirror Drive

These being the days of odd science, I thought I'd follow up on my space drive idea of late 2007.  The concept was to use mirrors to amplify the acceleration obtainable by using a photon drive.  In effect, the photons would give up their energy to increase the speed of the space ship by using multiple reflections from mirrors that are separating from each other as the ship accelerates.  In the original article, I suggested using a big mirror on the moon.  But you can carry mirrors with you!  When the moon is out of range, just use your stack of very, very thin mirrors and aim your drive laser at them.  Of course they will be smaller, but you'll have thousands or even millions of them.  While each is much lighter than your spacecraft, you will be able to accelerate them to extremely high velocity, hopefully much higher than the ion exhaust of experimental drives that are being used now.  As the first mirror goes out of range of efficient reflection, just eject another, and so forth.  The lifetime of ion drives is limited by wear and ablation caused by the high velocity exhaust.  Any damage to the mirrors caused by the laser is irrelevant since it is quickly discarded, and perhaps a greater velocity can be obtained as well.

Special Advertising Section Please buy this lovely blue Corvette ZR1!  Now, with Collector's Kit

NP:   "Pressed Rat and Warthog" Cream

TotD Another "I have no idea."  But I do endorse the sentiment, at least with respect to the depicted object.

Yesterday  |  Tomorrow