Cooool! How do you put field current into the, um, rotor? (carriage, I guess)? I guess metal wheels would work.

>>I just want to know how CLU sent a page.

Yes I was wondering too. When I saw the commercials with Alan getting a page "from a number that had been disconnected for 20 years" I thought nothing of it. It seemed obvious that the programs (or Flynn inside the computer) just hacked into the pager system over the internet and sent a page with a number they faked up (actually, now that I think about it you could always type any number you wanted when paging, real or not).

But The Grid was not connected to the internet or anything else, so how did CLU page Alan?

Um, but I was already talking about first class mail. The post office generally tells you that first class mail will get delivered in "about 2 weeks, probably". In reality it usually only takes a day or two, but they won't commit to that so nobody sending anything urgent is going to use first class mail anyway. And thus, nobody would care if the first class mail only came once a week. And many (like me) would actually prefer it only delivered once a week.

Ah but why does the postal service "need to make this trip anyway"? If you cut out all the bulk stuff, they would probably only need to send a truck once a week. It would be way more convenient for me to only have to go out to my mail box once a week, and nobody is going to send anything urgent via regular mail (they always suggest it could take about 2 weeks anyway, and they don't guaranty even that).

The only reason we need daily USPS service is because our box would be overflowing with all the crap mail we don't want anyway, which is only sent because it is so preposterously cheep. Raise the rates, all the stupid crap mail everyone hates goes away, you can slash your operating expenses to almost 1/6 of what they currently are, and I only have to walk over to the mailbox once a week. Its pretty much win all around, except for postal workers.

Most modern natural gas turbines are "combustion turbines", which means they don't generate steam to turn the turbine*. Instead they use the hot exhaust to directly turn the turbines. The modern designs I have worked with generally have a "duel fuel" option, allowing them to run off of diesel fuel as well. They can also run off of syngas, which is basically the same as natural gas (but synthetic not natural), which is made from coal. And I know of one that was modified to run off of hydrogen (it was at a refinery that produced hydrogen as a by-product of refining).

Combustion turbines can burn basically anything that is a gas or can be atomized, it is a question of tweaking there combustion settings, comparable to making a car run off alcohol or whatever.

*Most combustion turbines I've work with are "combined cycle" which means they've added a Heat Recovery Steam Generator (HRSG) to boil water from the exhaust of the combustion turbine. The steam is then used to turn a steam turbine generator to produce even more power.

For your "average Jose", no immigration is not legal. An unskilled laborer with no family already here legally (parents, siblings, adult children, or spouse/fiance) can not get a green card, period.

Well, I'm about 40 miles east of L.A. (in Rancho Cucamonga), and I can say that while I have tasted worse tap water, the tap water here still is unpleasant to drink because of the taste of chlorine. I've traveled extensively in my life, having been first a military brat, then in the military myself, and now in a field service job where I travel a lot for work, and I have never tasted tap water that didn't taste bad from at least the chlorine.

Seriously, I know it can be much, much worse, but chlorine already tastes really bad by itself.