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Slashback: Boeing, Fraud, Fundage 210

Posted by timothy from the hersheypark-coasters-rocked dept.
Slashback tonight with a larger passel than usual of updates, corrections, clarifications, etc. -- among them, Boeing's reaction to anti-gravity hype, the sad truth about one man's powerline data-delivery claims, and the steady climb of the Blender Fund's money meter.

Next they'll tell us they're not involved with Areas 51-63! Louis_Wu writes: "Space.com says that Boeing isn't really working on Anti-Gravity, regardless of previous news from the the BBC or Jane's Defence. It seems that the rumors spread because some people in Boeing were thinking of developing a relationship with the Russian scientist who did anti-grav research a few years ago, Dr. Evgeny Podkletnov.

Boeing spokesman:

'The recent report that we are [involved in anti-grav research] is based on a misinterpretation of information. For instance, GRASP is not a codename for a current project but rather an acronym for a presentation entitled "Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion," in which a Boeing engineer explains Podkletnov's theory and proposes that we should continue to monitor this work and perhaps even conduct some low-cost experiments to further assess its plausibility. No steps have been taken beyond this point by Boeing.'

Jane's also mentions theorized weapons 'capable of producing a beam of "gravity-like" energy that can exert an instantaneous force of 1,000g [1000 Gravities, not grams] on any object -- enough, in principle, to vaporise it, especially if the object is moving at high speed.'

Don't tell Einstein. :)"

And here's the part where I skip town. Planetes writes "The Florida Times Union (Jacksonville, FL) has an interesting article about a lab testing company that has discounted his claims about some technology previously discussed on /.

Personal favorite paragraph:

'Lawyers for the company, Intertek Testing Services, discounted almost every aspect of a three-page letter that appears to validate an invention that sends high-speed data over electrical power lines. The letter is addressed to Madison Priest, a St. Augustine man whose disputed communications technologies were the subject of a sweeping Times-Union investigation this year.'"

Not at all what he said. knorthern knight writes: "Crow tastes icky, but here goes. Since I submitted the original citing about the story in The Register, ISPAI have sent a polite note to me. Here it is ...

Subject: ISPAI Reaction on HT News Item dated 27th July '02

Dear Sir,

This is in reference to the front page news article by the Hindustan Times dtd: 27/07/02. Mr Amitabh Singhal, Secretary, ISPAI has denied having made any statements favoring blocking of sites by Indian ISPs.

In reply to Mr. Singhal's letter to Hindustan Times,(copy enclosed) the HT has released the following news clipping at today's news paper http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/printedition/01 0802/detECO07.shtml

This is for your informaton and necessary action please.

With regards,

Puneet Tiwari Sr. Executive -ISPAI"

Behind every horde of enemy attackers are the people who thought them up. Anonymous Coward writes "I've finally posted the game binaries and source code to the Indie Game Jam games. The Indie Game Jam is a yearly game design and programming event designed to encourage experimentation and innovation in the game industry. 14 professional game developers created 12 experimental and innovative games in 4 days! The source to the engine and all the game code is GPLed on SourceForge, so enjoy. Remember, they're experimental and a bit rough, not commercial quality games."

One Blender you can buy for forever. kabir writes "The Blender Fund is up around 65K Euro right now... so close, yet still so far! This would be a great time for anyone who was on the fence about donating (wondering if the fund would make it, etc.) to pitch in and help put us over the top." Here's our previous story about this effort to liberate the Blender source. Does anyone have a business which might see a donation here as a good long-term investment?
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Slashback: Boeing, Fraud, Fundage More

Slashback: Boeing, Fraud, Fundage

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  • I guess that means the new 787 won't be anti-grav after all. Damn.

  • Gravities? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Wrexen ( 151642 ) on Monday August 05, 2002 @07:08PM (#4015435) Homepage
    [1000 Gravities, not grams]

    For those of you not accustomed to metric, 1 Gravity is equivalent to 35 Pressures, 18 Forces, 340 Micro-lengths, 2 electromagnetisms, or 42 CowboyNeals.

    • Re:Gravities? (Score:1, Funny)

      by zaffir ( 546764 )
      or 42 CowboyNeals

      So that's like, what, 50 tons?
    • Funny, I always thought 1G was around 9.8 m/s2. It's been many a year since I did physics in college, but I can guess what is meant but the phrase "exerting 1000 G" is intended to convey - applying the one thousand times the energy inherent in that of gravity at the earth's surface.

      Only problem is, that's not that much energy. Gravity is a very weak force, IIRC (again, many years since I studied this stuff for a grade).

      --
      Evan (no reference here)

      • Re:Gravities? (Score:3, Informative)

        by halftrack ( 454203 )
        Wow, back down. 1G is not 9.8 m/s. Although in a gravitational field of 1G things would accellerate at 9.8 m/s. 9.8 m/s is earths mass accelleration or whatever it is called in my not native language English.
        • Although in a gravitational field of 1G things would accellerate at 9.8 m/s


          Actually, if you want to get technical, 1G only accelerates masses at 9.81 m/s2 at 1 earth radius... and slower at distances farther away.
          • Okay, let's get it straight here... The accepted value for "standard acceleration of gravity" is 9.80665 m/s^2 - exactly. There's no "plus or minus" or "uncertainty".

            That's it. No magic. 1G *always* accelerates mass at 9.81 m/s^2 (rounded). If the acceleration is something else, whatever is being accelerated isn't experiencing a net force of 1G.

            The value is pinned. It isn't variable over the earth's surface in accordance to the proximity to more dense matter in the earth. Yes its value was chosen to be pretty much the force you feel on the surface of the earth.

        • Re:Gravities? (Score:5, Informative)

          by global_diffusion ( 540737 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2002 @12:19AM (#4016416) Homepage
          1G is not 9.8 m/s. Although in a gravitational field of 1G things would accellerate at 9.8 m/s. 9.8 m/s is earths mass accelleration ....

          To clear some things up, 1G is not even in m/s^2 units. 'g' a.k.a. "little g" is ~9.8m/s^2 (so that mass*g is a force, kg*m/s^2), but 'G', a.k.a. "big G", is, ~6.67*10^-11 m^3/kg/s^2 (in mks).

          The confusion is that 'g' is the acceleration due to gravity close to the earth, while 'G' is the universal gravitational constant. It is a constant that is used to derive little 'g'. The relationship can be explaied in a couple of steps.
          1. The gravitational force between two objects is
            F=G*m1*m2/r^2
            m1 = mass of object 1,
            m2 = mass of object 2
            r = distance separating objects 1 and 2
          2. put m1 = mass of earth, M
            m2 = mass of random object, such as a super-ball, m
            r = radius of Earth, R
          3. F is now = G*M*m/R^2
          4. This form of the equation now has two constant-ish variables that are closely tied to eachother (M and R), one constant (G), and one independant variable (m). Let's tie up all the constants into one variable and call it 'g'. That is,
            g = G*M/R^2
          5. We now have F = mg for objects close to the surface of the earth.
          Here we can see that 'g' is just an easy generalization for calculations and not anything defining about the universe. Hope that helps. The use of the same letter but differing in capitalization can lead to confusion and silly misunderstandings.
      • If it isn't already, 1G ought to be standardized at 10.0 m/s2, to simplify calculations. Of course, that would mean Earth's gravity was .98 of a standard G, but I thought we dumped geocentrism a few centuries back.

        (And you can look at it either as a unit of acceleration -- how it's usually used -- or as a field strength indicator -- 1 G exerts a force of 10 newtons on a 1 kg mass.)
        • Awww, can't we just adjust the size of the meter so that 1G ends up being 10.0 m/s^2?
          • Or just increase the mass of the Earth a smidge? (1 smidge = .02G)
            • I'm pretty sure the average citizen of the U.S. is doing its part to reach the increased mass goal. It's time we started feeding McDonalds, Taco Bell and KFC to all the other nations!

        • If it isn't already, 1G ought to be standardized at 10.0 m/s2, to simplify calculations.
          Good Idea. You should try to submit your idea to this USian commitee that already had such tremendous success [cecm.sfu.ca] standardizing PI at an easier to handle number.

          Ah. I love Americans.

          and check this [snopes.com]

      • 1 G is 9.8 m/s/s, and yes, you can exert a force per mass of 1000G This works out to be something like 2.3427 calories per gram-metre.

        Gravity may be pretty weak, but the earth is pretty big :)

        BTW 1 gravity = 1 force, eg 1 lb * gravity = 1 lb force.
      • In fact gravity is so weak that I just jumped out of the fortieth floor and landed on my feet quite nicely.
        • In fact gravity is so weak that I just jumped out of the fortieth floor and landed on my feet quite nicely.

          I meant in comparison to the other forces in the universe (electromagnetic, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force and trek technobabble).

          --
          Evan (no reference worth guessing)

    • Gravity is a force, it's not mesured seperately like 'pressue' or 'length'.
  • Imagine a condom that could increase the gravity whenever the budding young geek started to think about the HS cheerleading captain. Press a button on his PDA and a 802.11b signal activates the gravity enhancing condom. I could of used on of those.
    • I'm gonna lose some karma for this, but I don't think most geeks are hung enough to need this. Who's gonna notice the excited geek sitting in class. If a geek is big than hell he should be proud and it might be the only way that some girls notice him.

  • Smoking Crack at Jane's (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CaptainCarrot ( 84625 ) on Monday August 05, 2002 @07:21PM (#4015473)
    Jane's also mentions theorized weapons 'capable of producing a beam of "gravity-like" energy that can exert an instantaneous force of 1,000g [1000 Gravities, not grams] on any object -- enough, in principle, to vaporise it, especially if the object is moving at high speed.'

    If it can vaporize the target, it's also able to vaporize the weapon that's emitting the beam. Newton's Third Law of Motion [k12.il.us] hasn't been repealed as far as I know.

    • Actually, it depends.

      If the weapon sending the beam is enormous (say 100 times the size of the target), it can withstand the "equal and opposite" force generated by object it's acting on.

      Furthermore, if it's in space, it might just be sent to a higher orbit around the earth.

      • Furthermore, if it's in space, it might just be sent to a higher orbit around the earth.

        Orbital Sniper [happypenguin.org]

        Make people little red stains from a few miles up.

      • let's assume graviry is mass, so shooting 'gravity' is shooting mass, you still need a counterforce to stop the gun from leaving earths orbit.

        Probably this is solved if you fire an equally strong shot in the opposite direction (most likely not in the direction of earth). You might hit the moon or some other plantes on the way, but what the heck ;)

        • whuh? (Score:5, Funny)

          by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Monday August 05, 2002 @08:36PM (#4015726) Homepage Journal
          let's assume graviry is mass, so shooting 'gravity' is shooting mass...

          Yes, and while we're at it, lets assume that light is force, pressure is density, and that current is pizza.

          from what I know, the devices work by reflecting (and, I guess in this case) amplifying earth's gravity.

    • Re:Smoking Crack at Jane's (Score:5, Insightful)

      by QuantumFTL ( 197300 ) on Monday August 05, 2002 @07:44PM (#4015557)
      It was good of you to notice this rather important issue, however you are only partially correct... Imagine a situation where this gravity-like force is not evenly distributed, in fact the force vectors are such that they have a high magnitude, but are pointing in different directions in different places so that when summed up together, they add to zero (or near zero). This is a very common occurance in situations where forces between two objects are applied via waves (and different areas of the object may be at different phases of the wave, and thus have different vectors).

      Don't be so quick to assume that this weapon is simply a pushing or pulling effect... it could be a symmetrical sheering force (part of the target is, say, pulled up, and part is pulled down, ripping it apart) or something similar.

      How the hell they generate a gravity-like force, however, is completely beyond me. No problem with Newton though. Perhaps it's electromagnetic yet affects nonconductors?

      (Also, if you did have a "poking" type weapon, it may be possible to couple the gravitational force to a plasma inside the weapon that will be accellerated out of the back, absorbing whatever momentum the attack generated).

      DISCLAIMER: I am not a physicist (yet) but I'm studying to become one.
    • I was thinking about the samg thing, but probably there are theoretical ways to do something like that.
      Think about radiating cancer. If you would use one beam, all the tissue 'in the line of fire' gets fried, so they use several beams that focus on one point. I can imagine the same thing for 'gravitational guns'.

      That solves one problem. Now for an other.
      1000 g. That is 1000 times the power of earth's gravitation. So how far stretches this gravitational field? The moon is influenced by the earths one g gravitation. And vice versa, we have tides because of the much weaker gravitation of the moon.
      My guess is that if you generate a 1000 g gravitational field anywhere on earth, the earth probably will collapse or is torn apart.

      Has anyone other or more theories on this?
      • Theories my a__. Let's just try building one. Now let's see, what do we need?

        As soon as someone leaks info and tells me the DoD or Darpa or Area51 or George Bush (no wait ...) is working on a gravity weapon of mass destruction I am most definitly moving from earth to, say, the other end of the galaxy.
      • g is just a mesure of force. 1000g is just 9800 newtons. I could probably generate that much force with my car.
        • I just love to see you generate 1000 g with your car.
          g-force isn't equal to 9.8 Newton
          1g pulls with 9.8 newtons on 1 kg of mass.
          even is you can generate 9800N with your car, you'll never be able to generate 1000g with it.
        • That's 9800 Newtons per kilogram. I'd love to see your car do that.
          • Yes, I suppose you're right. Still though, I think I could produce that much force if I had a good lead in. If I hit something and managed to accelerate it to 100mph in .004 seconds I would have done it.
      • Drop a PDA or cellphone onto concrete from shoulder-height and you will subject it to over 2000 g's , yet the earth and moon are not knocked out of orbit.

        The important point you are overlooking is that this fictional weapon generates a gravity RAY not a gravity FIELD. Much the way a 60w laser would cut through most anything that the small focused beam hit, even a long way off but not effecting stuff right next to it, while a 60w lightbulb would warm up everything very close to it.
    • Duh, it will just move backwards in time. The microwave radiation, combined with the gravitons and graviolies from the supernova will blast you through time itself!!
    • hum, do high-power lasers vaporize themselves? no, but the target is pretty much fried.
    • Yes, in much the same way that a .50BMG, which is capable of vaporizing a gopher, vaporizes when fired at one.

      . . . wait, that's not right . .

      -Peter
  • If I got one of these graviton ray guns, could I get my site, http://flame.dnsart.com/ [dnsart.com] /.ed? I can see it now:
    Programmer killed in moronic advertising stunt involving gravitron ray beam

    And then people can reply with 300 comments of:
    It's a graviton beam you moron.

    But that won't be enough to take my server down. Nothing can harm a linux box, especially at 256 kilobits/second!
    • I've seen anti-gravity aircraft out here in Utah- yup. Seen'um fly right into the "cloaked" anti-gravity hovering military base. True true.

      Why else is most of the state "goverment no-fly zone"?

      Greetz Jase... whatever your nik is...

  • The games. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TheOnlyCoolTim ( 264997 ) <tim.bolbrock@ver ... t minus caffeine> on Monday August 05, 2002 @07:30PM (#4015510)
    Unfortunately, to play almost all of the games you have to own/warez a copy of Doom 2.

    Too bad, some of them looked like they'd be fun to waste away a few hours.

    Tim
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • As far as I knew, the source to the Doom 2 engine (and Quake 1, and Quake 2) was open sourced by ID many, many years ago. Only the art (.wad) files are commercial.
    • Man, who doesn't have a copy of Doom 2? Somewhere in my pile of, uh, stuff, I've got copies of Doom, Doom 2, Ultimate Doom, Final Doom, Simpsons Doom, Aliens Doom, Crack of Doom, Doom's in the House, Doom-Doom, Killer Doom, Doom Redux, Doom and Robin, Doom: The Final Chapter, Doom X, Doomed Again, Doomenator... well, you get the idea.

      For a few years there, it was pretty much all Doom. A little side-tracking for Descent and Duke Nukem, but other than that, from about 93 to 96, I was 'Doomed', so to speak. My relationships were doomed. My pay raises were doomed. Going out with friends was doomed. Movies were doomed to not get any money from me. The only ones who weren't doomed were the hardware manufacturers. Everyone else... yeah, doomed.

      Got it all out of my system. Haven't touched a first-person shooter in years. Of course, the little rugrat is turning 4 in a couple of weeks and he wants a new bike and a gaming system. Oh man, the wife's gonna hate us spending hours on the couch. Quality time, sweetie. Quality time.

  • Lets go Redhat (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MADCOWbeserk ( 515545 ) on Monday August 05, 2002 @07:32PM (#4015518)
    The Blender Fund is up around 65K Euro right now... so close, yet still so far! This would be a great time for anyone who was on the fence about donating (wondering if the fund would make it, etc.) to pitch in and help put us over the top."

    Of all the stupid things Redhat has bought or funded over the last few years, why can't they step in and front some cash and open up blender. At least blender is useful and the investment to buy it is dirt cheap. Finally the community has pretty much proven that it will actively develop the project. Perhaps this can be part of a Linux's new MM distribution.

    Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it? HS
    • "Of all the stupid things Redhat has bought or funded over the last few years, why can't they step in and front some cash and open up blender. "

      I don't think that's good idea. I think Redhat would be better off making an 'artist' distro that comes with Gimp, Killustrator, and eventually a version of Gimp that works like After Effects. Basically, they'd make one big distro that has all the tools us 3D Arists need. If they do that, then they make Redhat far more enticing as a graphic-workstation platform. That would give Newtek more reason to port Lightwave (which kicks Blender's butt up and down the court) over to Linux.

      That'd be a hell of a deal. "Buy Lightwave, get RedHat Artist's edition for only $100 more. No need to spend $500 each on Photoshop and After Effects, and no need to have a Windows license!"
    • Still 100,000 euro is dirt cheap, even for poor Redhat. If redhat gets a few big support clients for shops running it, it will pay for itself.
    • why can't they step in and front some cash and open up blender.

      because they don't need to - the fund has been going for just a few weeks, they are up to 68K right now, 100K is absolutely no problem. and hey, I just kicked in my $75, screw RedHat, we don't need them for this. :)

    • Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it? HS

      Perhaps if it was a bean and cheese burrito. Not even He could withstand the power of the hot cheese plasma.
      • Ahh, but God's power is immeasurable. He is more powerful even than the hottest cheese plasma. However, God can do anything he chooses. What if He choose to create some creation more powerful than Himself? Could He do it? Of course. But isn't He the most powerful thing in existance?

        This line of logical thinking actually can lead to either St. Anselm's "proof" of the existance of God or a "proof" of the non-existance of God. Actually, it either prooves nothing, or if you take those statements to be true, you can proove anything.

        Basically,

        1. For all x, G > x.
        2. There exists some y such that y > G.

        How do these two statements resolve? They don't. True equals false, black equals white, anything and everything becomes provably true and provably false at the same time. But this is high school logic bullshit. If you want to use math or logic to get people to believe in God, explain to them the Church-Turing thesis or that relationship between the roots of the Reimann Zeta function and quantum physics or discuss incomputable functions.

        Before people flame me for believing in God, let it be known that I am an athiest. I know, however, that there is beauty and order in the universe. I have seen the proof in mathematics and physics and computer theory. I have an appreciation for beauty, and distaste for arrogance.

        • If you have another second to waste on Slashdot, would you mind writing a short laymans explanation of the significance of these two items with regard to the conception of "god". From what I glean from Godel's incompleteness theorem, it seems to indicate there may indeed be things that are "unknowable" or at least "unable to be derived from any given set of knowledge". As I understand it, calculus itself was one of these "non-derived" fields...something that just sprang from Newton's head, but was not "derived from" any other mathematics. I am a weak atheist, empirical agnostic, and Godel's incompleteness theorem to me means that there may be "truths" in this universe that are not obtainable by mere reasoning/rational thought alone, which leaves a tiny niche for the possibility of some notion of "god" or at least something "supernatural". So then, how does the Church-Turing thesis or Reimann Zeta function (sorry, I'm not a mathematician, I have no idea what this is :( ) apply?
        • My favorite god-argument is the one which says that god can't be all good, all knowing and all powerful (omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipotent). It's rather fun. I enjoy that because I am not a thiest either.
  • Hey, take antigravity stuff, it would have negative wheight (wheight!=mass). Now think of antimatter, possibly with negative mass, also could have antigravity properties. That would rock! Except that you wouldn't be quite able to walk in a antimatter ship or whatever.

    --
    If you find yourself struggling with loneliness, you're not alone. And yet you are alone...
    • Particles have the same mass as their corresponding antiparticle.

    • Disregarding the fact that you're wrong, the idea is still interesting. In todays world, however, negative mass would somehow find its way into fastfood so that the dangerously obese would weigh a scant 10 kg or so. Hell, some of them would take off after a particularly large meal - new reason to sue McDonalds, perhaps?

      "I swear, your Honor, I just had 6 BigMacs with fries and when I left the joint, I took off and was subjected to a traumatic view of the inner city - I demand compensation!".

  • Um, just do what Q does - "Change the gravitational constant of the universe." *duh*
    • Silly Q! The constant is simply there to make up for the units that we are using. You could pick units such that there was no need for G if you wanted.

  • Funny stuff... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by hackwrench ( 573697 )
    I like the part where the Space article just assumes that "Artificial gravity on spaceships and rockets levitating themselves into orbit will remain the stuff of science fiction for some time to come..." just because Boeing isn't working on the concept

    Tractators! Tractators! [google.com]
  • Has anyone else noticed that the ads on hindustantimes.com are not only all in English, but also appear to be in US Dollars, and more significantly, from US companies?

    It would seem that the Indian Internet is already partially, if indirectly, funded from international sources.
  • After they got many billions of dollars in corporate welfare [nwsource.com] for converting and "leasing" 767's to the military as refueling planes the military doesn't want or need. Your tax dollars at work.

  • shameless gravitics plug (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Chris Y Taylor ( 455585 ) on Monday August 05, 2002 @08:54PM (#4015798) Homepage
    The Space.com's article quotes Boeing's press release as stating:

    GRASP is not a codename for a current project but rather an acronym for a presentation entitled "Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion," in which a Boeing engineer explains Podkletnov's theory and proposes that we should continue to monitor this work and perhaps even conduct some low-cost experiments.

    I suspect that this internal Boeing presentation was the result of my presenation of a paper by Dr. Modanese and myself entitled "EVALUATION OF AN IMPULSE GRAVITY GENERATOR BASED BEAMED PROPULSION CONCEPT" (http://www.gravity-society.org/abstract_AIAA.htm) at the 38th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference earlier this year. I don't know who all attended my talk, but there were Boeing guys all over the conference, so I wouldn't be surprised if I had a few in the audience. Copies of the paper are available from the AIAA. Dr. Modanese may post a copy it on the internet at www.gravity-society.org soon. The ESA also released a report on the implications of Dr. Podkletnov's research for aerospace called "Gravity control and possible influence on space propulsion: a
    scientific study" that may have contribued to Boeing's internal GRASP presentation. I don't know where you can get a copy of the ESA's study.

    Chris Y Taylor

  • Whoa!! I own Boeing stock!! (Score:4, Funny)

    by SPYvSPY ( 166790 ) on Monday August 05, 2002 @09:46PM (#4016016) Homepage
    As a shareholder in BA, thanks a fucking lot for putting
    "Boeing" and "Fraud" together in the headline. Especially these days...sheesh...
  • Jane's also mentions theorized weapons 'capable of producing a beam of "gravity-like" energy that can exert an instantaneous force of 1,000g [1000 Gravities, not grams] on any object -- enough, in principle, to vaporise it, especially if the object is moving at high speed.'

    HOLY SHIT.

    Anyone here seen the anime "Martian Successor Nadesico?" I can just see it now "GRAVITY BLAST IKIMASU!!!"

    As quoted from: http://omoikane.cyril.com/comp/dict.html [cyril.com]
    Gravity Blast:

    Using the power of transpositioning, they are concentrated streams of graviton particles that does much damange to conventional matter.
    Maybe anime is a few years ahead of science? Maybe we'll be jacking cables into our heads and connecting with our computers?

  • Corporate Partnerships for Blender? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Cryptnotic ( 154382 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2002 @02:05AM (#4016621)
    There is a thing called "listener supported public radio" and "viewer supported public television". The stations get some of their money from taxes, but more than half of the money comes from "subscribers". Anyone can listen or watch for free, but viewers are encouraged not to be "freeloaders".

    Anyway, one trend here in Los Angeles that has been rather popular is sponsorships by retail establishments. A public, listener-supported radio station in Santa Monica called KCRW gives members a "Membership Benefits" card. Coffee shops, record stores, book stores, resturants, and other types of stores give discounts (usually 10% off) to card-carrying KCRW subscribers. The "KCRW Membership Benefits card" is the incentive and/or justification for people to send in money.

    Basically, this idea might work to help raise money for Blender. If an online shop such as ThinkGeek.com were to offer Blender subscribers 10% off any merchandise for one year, many more people would join. ThinkGeek.com would gain customers and free advertising. It would be a win-win situation for both the subscribers and the stores in question. If other online vendors were to offer discounts or other incentives, donating money to Blender would make even more sense. It is not inconceivable that with enough sponsors, a $50 subscription could pay for itself in discounts offered by sponsoring companies.

  • ...is a 'passel' ? I looked it up on dict.org, but I couldn't find a definition.
    • Passel -- a large quantity or number.

      The American Heritage lists the words as "regional," which may be a polite way to call it slang. It doesn't say which "region," but it's probably American. I know it's used here in the Southeast.

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