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What you have to understand here is that (for years!) California legislators have been laboring under the delusion that the internal combustion engine will go the way of the dodo real soon now.

This is the reason for the ZEV mandate, and for the billions of dollars wasted by GM and Ford on unworkable electric cars. As late as 2001, the California government still thought that 10 percent of vehicles sold in 2003 would produce no emissions other than water... because, golly, they'd passed a law saying so!

Of course, here it is in 2004, and we still have no zero emissions vehicles other than the odd golf cart. Honda and Toyota were smart. They ignored the ZEV mandate and worked on hybrid gas-electric vehicles instead. Thus they reap the rewards while GM is demonized for following orders.

But the folks in Sacramento still haven't learned anything. They have created a 'ultra low emissions vehicle' category, a 'super low emissions vehicle' category. The idea is that, with the right legislation, they can gradually force car manufacturers to make their hybrid cars more and more efficient. The mechanism is to require a large fraction of new cars in successive years to go from LEV to ULEV to SULEV to PZEV categories, until finally (according to this master plan) there will be millions of cars sold in the ZEV category.

This is like breeding mice that eat less food in an attempt to create a mouse which doesn't need any food at all. It won't work. You can make more somewhat more efficient hybrid vehicles, but they'll still need fuel.

If they really want zero emissions vehicles, they should give up on passing all these laws requiring them, and spend money instead on basic research. We need the technology for good enough fuel cells or batteries. Once we have that, cars that don't need gas will appear automatically. But you can't make them just by passing laws that say "make an adequate car that doesn't use gas."

So, anyway, the CA legislature still fails to understand this, and they still imagine that ZEVs are just around the corner. And this makes them worry: the roads are paid for with the gas tax. But then who will pay for the roads when (in just a few years, remember) no one is buying gas anymore?

Thus they have cooked up this whole bizarre GPS car tax scheme. There have been mutterings about it for the last few years. I'd hoped that someone would have enough common sense to kill it off, but I guess it just fits in too well in the bizarre worldview which is endemic to Sacramento.

relying on double checking to catch errors is not an acceptable procedure. double checking should be an excersize which absolutely proves that the primary results were correct (there should NEVER be errors with properly designed evoting machines -- their function is outrageously simple). the second check must be more reliable than simply comparing the results stored on removable and non-removable memory (something is SERIOUSLY fucked up if the results are different and the manufacturer should face a major lawsuit). these machines must have a paper reciept, kept at the machine, printed in a human and machine readable format, which provides the voter immediate, direct confirmation of their vote. when the election is over the paper reciept is tallied by machine and compared to the results stored in machine's memory.

you're right, the article doesn't say anything about the voting machines, not even who made them (do you even have to go to journalism school anymore).

Jim March has a bunch of info on diebold machines, including that they run WinCE and ms access. anyone with some experience as a secretary could fire up access and change the numbers. yes, that's an over simplification but the results aren't digitally encrypted or signed. they are not tamper-proof.

this was the first popular mechanics article i read in years (they are usually short on the substance). it has a comparison of the diebold acuvote and the sequoia avc dge machines. the sequoia machine has a paper ballot option which only nevada is using (their voting systems had to clear the scrutiny of the nevada gaming control board's electronic services division). the pop sci article also brings up the fact that we have trusted, tamperproof, anonymous electronic systems with bar code reciepts -- the state lottery systems. but none of the e-voting manufacturers have a lottery pedigree.

relying on double checking to catch errors is not an acceptable procedure. double checking should be an excersize which absolutely proves that the primary results were correct (there should NEVER be errors with properly designed evoting machines -- their function is outrageously simple). the second check must be more reliable than simply comparing the results stored on removable and non-removable memory (something is SERIOUSLY fucked up if the results are different and the manufacturer should face a major lawsuit). these machines must have a paper reciept, kept at the machine, printed in a human and machine readable format, which provides the voter immediate, direct confirmation of their vote. when the election is over the paper reciept is tallied by machine and compared to the results stored in machine's memory.

you're right, the article doesn't say anything about the voting machines, not even who made them (do you even have to go to journalism school anymore).

Jim March has a bunch of info on diebold machines, including that they run WinCE and ms access. anyone with some experience as a secretary could fire up access and change the numbers. yes, that's an over simplification but the results aren't digitally encrypted or signed. they are not tamper-proof.

this was the first popular mechanics article i read in years (they are usually short on the substance). it has a comparison of the diebold acuvote and the sequoia avc dge machines. the sequoia machine has a paper ballot option which only nevada is using (their voting systems had to clear the scrutiny of the nevada gaming control board's electronic services division). the pop sci article also brings up the fact that we have trusted, tamperproof, anonymous electronic systems with bar code reciepts -- the state lottery systems. but none of the e-voting manufacturers have a lottery pedigree.

The article said it can be programmed to recognize multiple users. So, I am assuming all members of the police force would be made users of all guns owned by the department.

And by the way... in NJ, the first state with an idiotic smart gun law, federal, state and local law enforcement officers and members of the armed forces and the National Guard serving in New Jersey are exempt from the law.

Funny, the technology isn't reliable enough for them to use, but it is for me. Nice!

Here's a good article on why this NJ law is ridiculous

Let's see: the Sun is at an 8000-year high for solar activity, Mars is emerging from its own Ice Age and its polar caps are disappearing, and the Earth's magnetic field strength is approaching nil before it reconstitutes with an opposite polarity. And we are to believe that human activity is somehow solely resposible for global warming?

The Rio Carbon "iPod Mini Slayer" has been available in black for over a year now; it was actually released months before the iPod mini albiet at 1.5GB.

It was one of the first "mini" players to offer everything the iPod offered and more ... in a small thin case to boot. With no iPod Mini in sight the player actually had no competition. So why didn't it sell?

Marketing. The early adopters had already bought their players so the only market left was the masses. The masses are easily influenced by style. Stylish ads, stylish interface, stylish software, stylish player.

Reviews of the black Rio Nitrus were luke-warm at best. Most people agreed that the player itself was stylish, but the interface was clunky, the software was garbage, and there were no stylish ads to say otherwise.

Lets face it, every player plays MP3 ... The masses don't really care whether or not the player has OGG support or lossless audio support. So when all things are equal the style factor kicks in.

This new Rio Carbon is a true testament to the success of Apples approach to marketing style. They have duplicated it right down to the box.

Unfortunately by doing so there is really no good reason for the masses to jump onboard. When mom or dad is buying an MP3 player for Christmas and they have to choose between the $249 5GB Rio Carbon or the $249 4GB iPod Mini which box do you think they will reach for?

Sure, here's some links for you.
Popular Science - That's where I first read about it, there was actually a test-drive in the early 90s or so but I couldn't find the article. The tester's opinion did stick with me though!
Edmunds
Gizmo Highway
GM's drive-by-wire and fuel cell concept vehicle
In fact there's a whole slew of articles out there - it's tough to pick which ones are the best.

Odds are it will eventually happen. If people can't adjust, car makers will simply introduce an electronic force-feedback system which mimics what you'd normally feel. Heck, it could have an on-off switch too, so if it was raining/snowing/etc you could turn on the force feedback to 'get a feel for the road' but during a normal sunny drive to the store the system could be off.

Iraq asked us to stay: Do you mean the Iraqi's or the U.S. installed interim government?

Saddam was a cruel, murderous dictator: Why don't we take out the other murderous regimes? The Turkish seem to be a good fit.Oh wait, we've been giving them millions in military aid during the last decade, and we've been trying to get them in the EU. Hardly the same treatment that Saddam received for his similar atrocities.

And, uh, you're use of the word "fact" is not very accurate. They're opinions, or just plain wrong. As I said, it was the interim government, not Iraq (that would imply strong majority support of the populace) that asked us to stay, and it's *your* opinion tht Saddam had to be taken out. So, that whole line there is laughable.

I only assumed you listened to Hannity, O'Rielly or Limbaugh since they are the *main* purveyors of such ridiculous trash as you've been spewing. Hardly hypocritical to make an assumption. I never claimed that you were wrong for making one. Lookup hypocrite.

I just find it odd that even before the war started, we were building an oil pipeline through Kuwait up to Iraq. Don't you find that odd?

Another oil pipeline, suited for the U.S. More.

Hey, at least you do believe oil played a roll. There's hope for you yet.

Anyway, I'm not irked. I'm laughing at your expense. I find your attempts at logic enjoyably bad, and your "knowledge" of the world so sorely lacking that it is on the verge of hilarity. So, please don't stop.

Speaking of fusion. Here's an article in popular mechanics about cold fusion's rebirth as a cheap way to make nuclear weapons. Link.
Kind of sad and ironic that, according to this article, that Cold Fusion means plentiful energy but also plentiful nukes.

The crew of the ISS basically spends almost all their time doing the work they need to do in order to stay alive. In terms of science, the ISS is a complete waste.

That being said; It's more correct to say that the *current* ISS crew spends all of their time doing said work. Adding 2 scientists on top of the 2 engineers already there would not double the work, in fact they add little to the total work. In fact, that's how the ISS is (was) supposed to be eventually crewed, just like a research vessel. (That is to say a science crew who does nothing but science, and support crew who does the day-to-day grunt work.)

a scaled-down International Space Station with fewer astronauts and less science
Less than zero?

The huge successes are the uncrewed probes, like Cassini and the Mars rovers. Budget cuts to the ISS are good news for space science, because that means more might be left over for projects that actually do science.

even the Book of Fairy Tales And Floating Axes

Fairy tales? Do you mean like when God struck down the fairies living in Sodom and Gomorrah?

say that no man has seen the face of gawd, right?

Even if you accept that no man still living has seen the face of the Christian God, we've come pretty blessed close to reconstructing what He could have looked like when He spawned on the "EARTH" map, got crucified, respawned on the third day, and rose to heaven.

The appearance of a line of light stretching the length of an inaccessible area of Kuwait has stumped both military and petroleum industry experts. The images were spotted by Hank Brandli, a retired Air Force meteorological officer, who picked them up from a nonclassified military weather satellite. Civilian oil industry experts tell POPULAR MECHANICS that the location of the lights, which extend to the Iraqi border, does not correspond with known pipelines. A spokesman for U.S. Central Command, which had a presence in the region from fall 2002 through (at the time of this writing) fall 2003, said it was unaware of any pipeline construction. Brandli, an expert on satellite image analysis, thinks it is a major pipeline project. "Maybe all they're doing is building a highway. But I think we're pumping oil out of Iraq to pay for this war."

-Lucas

Jules Verne suggested this a while ago.

While this amorphous steel is quite an achievement (I do not mean to slight this work), amorphous metals have been around since at least the 60's. A commercial example of this is the amorphous metal golf club head , which has been on the market for a number of years.

No, amorphous metals are not transparent. So even if we could make amorphous aluminum, you could not see through it. If you want to see through aluminum, you must still combine it with with oxygen to form alumina (or sapphire).

shows up The Unity and Gravity of an elemental Architecture in the first page.

Linking this guy with reference to gravity (if only the word) doesn't seem to be a co-incidence. May be Google's brain's evolving.

an article interesting from '98
RUTAN'S WEIRDEST PLANE YET

It's appropriate to view this attempt win the X Prize with a full perspective of who Scaled Composites are, and where they came from.

Burt Rutan has been thinking outside the box, from the halcyon days of the Vari-Eze & Long-Eze to the innovative Ares and the 'appear-to-thumb-your-nose-at-physics' Boomerang.

His company; Scaled Composites, have not only survived the drastic slump of the light aircraft market in the 80's and 90' but made innovation their tradition - no small feat.

IMHO, they deserve to succeed with this attempt of Spaceship One.

This might work too as it's not supposed to affect the people in any way! (Directly, that is.)

God bless America!

Whether or not Popular Mechanics is right or not remains to be seen. Either way, the Groom Dry Lake Bed testing ground currently known as Area 51 has attracted too many visitors, and as such is likely to be or have been phased out of existance in the short term.

Well. you're half right. Area 51 was the government's super secret research facility. They tested things like the SR-71 and the Stealth Fighter out there. But in recent years due to conspiracy theorists and radiation contamination (Department of Energy had begun to make public previously classified data documenting the effects of Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) nuclear-bomb testing at the Yucca Flats test site. This data showed that long-lived radioactive residues from nearby nuclear bomb tests regularly rained down on Area 51), the base has become less useful. Rumor has it that they built a new base in Utah, but I haven't seen anything to back it up.

Article about where the new base is.
Supposedly... it's in Utah at the White Sands Missile Launch complex.

Thank you Mario but our princess is in another castle.

I also remember some former workers at the base suing the government for getting sick from working there. Ok - found the article

Area 51 is real and is used everyday. There are planes that take off everyday from McCarran Airport in Las Vegas bringing employees to Groom Lake.

"Another area of interest is the EG&G terminal on the Northwest corner of McCarran International Airport. Every weekday morning, about 500 people arrive at the guarded terminal with one destination, Groom Lake. When I was in Las Vegas observing the activity of the EG&G terminal, I counted six EG&G owned 737-200s. The aircraft are easily identifiable; they are white with a red strip running the total length of the plane. They fly out to Groom Lake about every half hour in the morning but things slow down in the afternoon with about two to three aircraft always sitting outside. Starting in the late afternoon (I noticed one coming in at 2:30 PM), the 737s start coming back to Las Vegas. At about 6:00, all of the aircraft (6 of which I counted, there could be more) were back to the EG&G facility for the night. Below are the photos that I took when I was out to Groom Lake and observing the EG&G terminal." From sr-71.org, and a picture here.

Also for the "new" Area 51, Popular Mechanics had an article a long time ago that is located here.

Most people don't seem to be aware of the fact that coal power plants are more radioactive than nuclear power plants.

It is also now possible to design nuclear power plants so that they fail safe, unlike the poorly designed plant at Chernobyl.

Safety-driven memes are difficult to counter, but once we run out of options perhaps we'll do what we must.

Also, it would take very little to no modification to get a petrol car to run on grain alcohol.

More promising is using alcohol in fuel cells rather than gaseous hydrogen. Alcohol is not as good at combustion as gasoline, but it has more hydrogen and less carbon. If you use a Direct Methano Fuel Cell like the one that powered Daimler Chrysler's NECAR 5 on it's recent cross-country trek, you get roughly the same mileage on alcohol that you get on gasoline, but with a liquid fuel from a renewable source. Add it to the mileage improvements suggested by the mechanical changes from General Motor's AUTOnomy project, and automotive fuel cells become a viable option.

Like this?

In a brief but intense firefight, Thomas hit one of the attackers with a single shot from his M4 carbine at a distance he estimates was 100 to 110 yards. He hit the man in the buttocks, a wound that typically is not fatal. But this round appeared to kill the assailant instantly.
"It entered his butt and completely destroyed everything in the lower left section of his stomach ... everything was torn apart," Thomas said. Thomas, a security consultant with a private company contracted by the government, recorded the first known enemy kill using a new -- and controversial -- bullet. The bullet is so controversial that if Thomas, a former SEAL, had been on active duty, he would have been court-martialed for using it. The ammunition is "nonstandard" and hasn't passed the military's approval process.
"The way I explain what happened to people who weren't there is ... this stuff was like hitting somebody with a miniature explosive round," he said, even though the ammo does not have an explosive tip. "Nobody believed that this guy died from a butt shot." The bullet Thomas fired was an armor-piercing, limited-penetration round manufactured by RBCD of San Antonio.

So now, instead of a "beowulf cluster of...," are we going to start seeing weapons/ammo tech here at slashdot and the question will be "I'd like to see a MetalStorm cluster of THOSE!"???

No offense, but you have no idea what you're talking about.

If I were to trust anyone to build an "out of this world aircraft", it would be Burt Rutan. Burt has designed some of the most exotic, and popular, experimental homebuilts ever. (Ever hear of a VariViggen, VariEze, Quickie, Defiant, or Long-EZ?) When I went to Oshkosh a few years ago, I saw hundreds of Vari-Ezes and Long-EZs. He has built aircraft that has broken records, such as Voyager the first aircraft to fly around the world without refueling and the Boomerang a completely asymmetrical aircraft! (BTW, even though the link is to a computer generated pic, I saw the actual one closeup, firsthand at Oshkosh... talk about a COOL aircraft!)

The man is a legend in the experimental aircraft world... and probably more knowledgable about real-world flight characteristics than anyone! He has introduced dozens of successful, cutting-edge aircraft designs that are currently flown by hundreds, if not thousands, of pilots.

Your claim that "experts" should only get involved reminds me of the closing scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. "Which experts?"... "TOP experts"...

This man IS the expert!

Pictures of the WaterCar and a few others here.

BUT WHAT IS THE PRICE?

From the Jan '04 issue of Popular Mechanics:

"March is taking orders for the WaterCar on his Web site, www.watercar.com. The price is about $150,000. March's future plans call for a lower-priced SUV version in the $80,000 to $100,000 range."

While clearly not as cool as a Camaro, Popular Science has a bunch of other amphibious vehicles. The Terra Wind it mentions is here. Slashdot away!

Popular mechanics a few months back. Old news.

The plan was to construct a simple network of small mining robots that ran on tracks that they themselves laid down. Minerals mined would initially go to the construction of more tracks, track-riding robots, micro-smelters, and power sources (solar or otherwise). In this way, you could construct a self-sufficient mining operation with minimal initial investment that would grow at an almost exponential rate, given sufficient local resources. Land on an asteroid, send minerals and metals out of it a year or two later - avoid the gravity well entirely.

At the time, though, it was just an idea and we didn't have the tech to pull it off. You need some relatively sophisticated AI decision techniques to deal with the nitty-gritty details of such an operation, as we're finding from even such comparatively simple things as the mars rovers today, and it's hard to reproduce the robot-critters on the spot. It's for reasons like the first, though, that I originally got interested in CS and majored in it, and I think we're getting close. Depending on this Hubble work and similar projects, robotics may have finally caught up too.

Instead of worrying about how to get the materials into orbit to build in space, we should start using what's already there. Here's to hoping.

However, his current daily driver is a McLaren-Mercedes SLR. He seems to like it quite a bit too.

http://popularmechanics.com/automotive/sub_coll_le no/2003/11/driving_the_future/print.phtml

You should read up on IFF , Safe Passage Corridors, Army procedure and their uses together.

Some people here on Slashdot just think it's as simple as a trigger-happy autonomous system. Think about what these systems (Patriot, ABL) have to do and realize that it's not easy.

You should read up on IFF , Safe Passage Corridors, Army procedure and their uses together.

Some people here on Slashdot just think it's as simple as a trigger-happy autonomous system. Think about what these systems (Patriot, ABL) have to do and realize that it's not easy.

Not being able to run SPEC tests, we turned to BLAST and HMMer, which are DNA and genome-sequence matching tests, as well as to Bibble, a batch image-processing application. The problem is that these tests do not run on Windows XP. In frustration, after running the SPEC tests on the HP xw6000 workstation, we installed Linux on the HP, which allowed us to run the new tests. And we were surprised. The G5 was 59.5 percent faster than the HP at processing 85 high-resolution color photographs totaling 684.6MB of data. In the HMMer tests (61.3MB of data), Apple was 67 percent faster than the PC and under BLAST (32.8MB), Apple was 85.9 percent faster. These results are in line with those now published on Apple's Web site.

Talking 'bout lacking hardware...

Well this is a bit off topic - and maybe I try should for a separate article - but it is *really old* news - but it does relate to the region from *25 to 500 miles above sea level* and the parent to this mentioned the aurora which it studies - so here a link to HAARP.

Check this out. Go to Yardcare.com. If you read the text under how to restore your lawn you'll notice refrences to pictures and charts but you don't see any.

Now go to This Popular Mechanics Article and notice the text is verbatim, only this time with the proper pictures and charts.

Which one is the origional site? Hmm...not to hard too figure out. I wasn't sure if I should have emailed PM or not, either way I think its rather rude and unbecoming of the web.

since any form of alien life might present a danger to society, it is not unlikely that the discovery of alien (inteligent) life will not make it to the news. from the article:

Instead of getting a handshake from the head of NASA, it will be handcuffed by an FBI agent dressed in a Biosafety Level 4 suit. Instead of sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House, the alien will be whisked away to the Department of Agriculture's Animal Disease Center on Plum Island, off the coast of New York's Long Island. Here it will be poked and probed by doctors from the National Institutes of Health. A Department of Energy (DOE) Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST) will tow away its spacecraft.

not sure if that's true for the soview government and some presumed hard-bitten microbe on venus, though.

You want Area 6413.

EMP weapons test.

http://popularmechanics.com/science/military/2001/ 9/e-bomb/print.phtml

WHAT??!?! According to this article flying a MiG21 costs about 500 gallons of jet fuel for 15 minutes. Double that for a F18 your at 4000 gallons an hour; about 10 000$ an hour. You can do a lot more than take off and land in an hour.

So unless you're ex-military, you'd have yourself a $9 million lawn ornament.

Perhaps, but it seems there are some vets out there with money. Here's an interesting article about the Czech-built L39 Albatros (among others) being flown as a civilian sport jet.

You don't need to be a superpower to experiment in this area. The University of Queensland here in Oz has the HyShot program which, despite a few teething problems, is producing world class results. The US has yet to see any results from its X-43 series. It will be interesting to see if India can live up to its own hype. Good luck to them.

I wasn't even aware that T3 brought anything new to special effects stage.

That's a naive statement on the state of VFX. Not particularly directed at you but a large number of people just go by the looks without knowing what goes on behind the scenes.

T3 was the subject of several SIGGRAPH (the most important conference and organization related to computer graphics) sketches and even one SIGGRAPH paper (one of the highest honors in CG research):

Smoke Simulation for Large Scale Phenomena
Big Bangs
Melting a Terminatrix
The Machines of T3
'T3' -- BETWEEN THE LAYERS
Fight the Future
Terminator 3 Evolves Historic Effect
TechTV Segements on T3 and Pirates of the Caribbean Online
T3: Man vs. Machine
Building a Believable Blockbuster

Not saying that the others weren't outstanding and innovative as well. Thye same point can be made about all the other bakeoff finalists.

Rutans previous Boomerang twin was controlled by a PowerBook.

I did a quick Google on the first time humans passed the "sound barrier" in 1947. 50 years later, every school kid knows^W should know Chuck Yeager's name.

50 years from now, will the class of 2060 recognize the name "Brian Binnie"? If this works out, they darn well should... especially if he's the one who gets to fly the craft "for real", twice in two weeks.

* 1903: Orville & Wilbur Wright achieve controlled, manned flight (but birds fly on a regular basis)

* 1947: Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in a military aircraft (but ordinary people fly on a regular basis)

* 2003: Brian Binnie breaks the sound barrier in a home-built spacecraft prototype (but ordinary people fly faster than sound on a regular basis)

* 2050: What's the next big advance when ordinary people fly to space on a regular basis?

I was sure rooting for the local boys (& girl), but I don't see how they can catch up to Scaled Composites' entry.

Nuclear Flying Saucer.