At 1:34 AM 7/20/96, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:

jim bell wrote: ...

...

I've had a substantially better idea. Hang carbon-fiber bundles from the ceiling, which are charged to about 10,000 volts when an intrusion is detected. They'll glom onto anything conductive within their range, and anyone with the bad fortune to be breaking into the house at that moment _might_ live to regret it. (resistors could be added to limit the current to non-fatal but exceedingly painful levels.

It the voltage is 10000 volts, it is always fatal, right? And if you set good enough resistors, then the voltage for the human body itself would be much less than 10000V -- most of the voltage will be taken by resistors themselves.

Right?

Right! 10,000 volts is always fatal. In fact, I died many times during my high school days, playing with 20,000 volt neon sign transformers, 100,000 volt Tesla coils, and (gasp) 250,000 volt Van de Graaf generators. (By the way, the neon sign transformer was actually pretty dangerous, and my handling of it was careless, I now see. Be careful when you convert one of these into a Jacob's Ladder, or use it for plasma studies.) However, maybe the a.c. nature of some of these voltage sources revived me on the "reverse" cycle. (The V.D.G. is not a.c....so this blows this theory.) --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."