Two of them would solve the 'turn to the side', but not help the 'keep in the same plain' gyroscopic effect. Turning would still be a bitch if they were mounted vertically, either way.
So if the flywheels were mounted flat, it would be okay, except you'd tend to loose traction when you went over the top of hills, which doesn't sound that amazingly safe to me. OTOH, like I said, there's not really a good reason for you to have a lot of stored energy at the top of a hill anyway.
And now I'm imagining someone driving fast, seeing a speed bump, and hitting the brakes right before they hit it, and when they do, their car attempts to hover with the rear wheels on the ground, and the front wheels four inches in the air. (After you finally force the nose up, that is.) And then, just when that's settled down, their rear wheels hit the bump.
While cars have different handling, none of them actually attempt to handle in apparent defiance of the laws of physics, even for a few moments. With flywheels, there's your car, with all the normal forces acting on, and this apparently random force that tries to make it keep going in a certain direction, sometimes, you never know when. I don't think that's safe at all, if you had a large enough flywheel to actually help the car.
As for gimbals...inside a car? Just how big a car are we talking about that we can put sphere that's at least three feet in diameter under the hood?;) I guess it might only have to turn as far as your wheels can, cars do not needs to move sideways, but still.
Yeah, it's the automation that's scary. It's not RFID per se.
Within ten years, we won't have any privacy from the government at all. They'll stick up cameras with facial recognization software, and either cameras or RFID on cars plates. They'll know where you are at all times.
Yes, it certainly was possible for police officers to know what every single person in the US looked like, and sit at every street corner taking notes, but that was obviously impractical. Even putting cameras everywhere wouldn't accomplish it. It takes computer backing to keep all that data.
And yes, police (and everyone else) have always been able to physically follow people. But they had to have some reason, simple because they could only follow one person.
Within a decade, they'll be able to follow everyone, all the time, and retroactively. They'll have computers that can pick out 'interesting' people, but they'll always be free to look up that annoying neighbor and see if they can find anything illegal he's doing, or has ever done. Or just immoral.
The laws either need to catch up with technology, or there are going to be rather large problems.
Your license plate already verifies your right to operate the car. It's your car 'license', that's why it's called a 'license plate'.
And I don't know what you people are talking about with insurance. Here in Georgia, we have our insurance in a database that the police have, keyed to the license number. I don't know RFID is supposed to accomplish. The police can already look up cars, you don't need any key other than 'license plate' if you're going to make the database.
The only thing I can see is, with RFID, they can have an automated scanner. Didn't we already decide, as a nation, we didn't want the police randomly checking if we were criminals? If we did want to do this, I have no idea why the hell we'd do it via our cars...let's just make everyone carry a little radio transceiver that sends the police a signal constantly. (I suggest using the cell phone network.) If the police need to arrest us, they can turn it on, and have it constantly repeat loudly 'This person is a criminal, this person is a criminal'. We can have hidden sensors along the streets that will trigger if you aren't carrying yours and send your picture to the police.
I mean, if we've decided 'automated checking of legality' is okay, why the fuck are we doing it for auto insurance? Let's catch murderers.
They already have hundreds of dollars equipment at many traffic corners, and all the high volume ones. If you look up, you can see them dangling from power lines overhead. They call them 'traffic lights'.
If you think they couldn't start using exactly the same resources, workers, and traffic control infrastructure to track RFID tags, once everyone got them, you are crazy. It just takes one policy decision 'All new and replaced traffic lights will also entail this RFID reader placed on the poles at the same time.'
Hybrid cars already have battery chargers. It's how they, duh, keep the battery charged. Come on, people, this isn't rocket science.
At some point, all the electrical output from the car (The regenerative brakes, the generator on the motor, etc.) go to some system that is in charge of keeping the batteries topped off with the excess power. All you have to do is input into that system with the right type of power.
Now, if the car company were to do this, they'd want circuit breakers in both directions, and you'd need an DC converter with a lot of amps, but we're not talking 3000, or even 60, dollars, we're talking about 15 dollars, and that includes a retracting power cord.
It's a frickin AC to DC convertor, people, they sell them at Radio Shack. The car already knows not to overcharge the batteries.
Now, if you were going to do it, it might still cost more, because I'm betting a lot of that is computer controlled and it simply won't let you charge the batteries where there's nowhere the power could be coming from, as far as it knows.
The emmission controls are weaker for a reason. It's much better to have X amount of pollution at the power plant than on the city street. It's better to have twice the pollution at the power plant! Maybe even three times!
No one breathes the air at the exhaust of the power plant. Power plants are not in cities that suffer 'thermal inversions' where all the pollution gets trapped for days. Power plants do not vent in parking garages. You do not sit behind power plants at drive-throughs.
Another problem of large flywheels would be the gyroscopic effect.
Imagine slamming on your brakes and trying to swerve, but the damn car put all your forward motion into the flywheel and you can't turn the nose of the car.
This is assuming the flywheel is oriented when it spins front to back, or back to front. You couldn't have it laying flat, it would constantly pull you to the side when you braked. Also, it would possibly do very weird things when going over hills, but no one brakes then. At the bottom of hills, it'd push you into the ground.
You'd probably get the same pulling effect if it was left to right (Or right to left), also, and you'd have the same problem with turning.
You know the engineers are here, because they like to compare 'efficiencies'.
No one cares. Power is not priced based on how much of the original product that could have been turned into electricity was turned into electricity. It's based on, duh, how much it costs to make and get it to you.
In addition to cost, we should also look at 'pollution', which also is completely unrelated to efficiency, and isn't even scalar...it's a bunch of different things. Coal and nuclear result in total different byproducts that are handled in different ways.
And to further confuse the issue, some things don't pollute, like wind, solar, and hydroelectric, but they can have an effect on the nearby enviroment, by, for example, stopping fish movements. These effects tend to be extremely limited in range, but people need to know of them.
In additions, there are a relative dangers of different kinds of power productions. Coal mining accidents, for example.
In the real world, 'efficiency' is vaguely useful when you need to know the maximum amount of energy a new process can produce. That's about it. Gasoline engines might be more efficient than coal power plants, (I'm honestly confused as to why anyone would compare it just to coal, we're hydroelectric throughout most of Georgia.), but that doesn't have anything to do with anything.
That the hell are you talking about? Do people honestly think giant turbines optimized to operate at an exact speed under ideal conditions and monotored constantly somehow is less efficent than your car's engine, which is mainly designed to be fault tolerant and provide torque on demand?
If that was the case, power stations would be buying these cars, ripping them apart, and rigging the electrical output from them to sell, wouldn't they?
More to the point, if it was better to turn gas into electricity into our own house, we'd be doing it. Houses would come with generators!
And, before anyone mentions 'loss from power lines', let me mention 'costs of hauling all that gas to gas stations'.
You can make knives out of glass, too. Or diamonds, if you have money to blow.
To find those, they could just start x-raying everyone.
Of course, if you really want to sneak illegal things in, tape razor blades to the CD compartment of your laptop. Or hide them in a PC card. That will get around the x-ray machines.
But the point wasn't that you can sneak sharp things on, everyone knows that. It's that they have failed to even ban all sharp things.
Obsidian knife are presumably banned. Metal epoxy is not banned, and neither are CDs. There are many things you can use as a weapon you can walk in with them in your hand, which means under no circumstances can security catch someone going to hijack a plane with them.
So not only do they have a problem in practice, they have a rather large theoretical problem also. Enumberating 'possible weapons' is impossible, unless they want us to go in naked and in handcuffs.
Re:No matter how careful you are, you aren't enoug
on
ID Theft Made Easy
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't know why the hell anyone would complain about someone having their license plate number in addition to their credit card numbers.
Which, BTW, they do not. CC numbers are not stored after usage locally if you use an electronic means of verifying them. (As opposed to the carbon paper machine you sometimes see when the power is down.) The store cannot get to them. They are required to not store them as part of their contract with the CC company.
Now, the cashier could obviously write them down as you use them, but most of the time, the card barely leaves your hand. They don't have time to write anything down. And they could write it down completely independent of your license plate, I have no idea what the hell that has to do with anything.
If they actually had your CC numbers, they could easily copy your name at the same time and look up your address in the phone book and drive to your damn house and get your plate.
Not that I'm entirely sure how license plates relate to identity theft, unless you're worried about people buying insurance for your car. I've written my license plates down like five times in my entire life for other people, and it was always for a parking permit or buying insurance. License plates are not secret information, and no one uses to them to keep track of who is who, they use them to keep track of what car is allowed to be where, and they do that by actually looking at the plates.
And gas stations don't 'write down' your license plate unless they don't have video cameras aimed at cars, anyway. That's the only thing they care about, that they can track you if you drive off, and the plates are the easiest way to find that out.
Frankly, I'd rather be on tape that gets erased every 12 hours through reuse and is in a locked backroom that only managers can get to than have my number written down where every goober at the front has access to it and be social-engineered into giving it out.
There are exactly two circumstances that tape will get looked at: the request of law enforment, and if I drive off without paying. I don't do the second, and as for the first...well, I don't like it, but that's the way the world is, and it's not just gas stations. Outside gas stations cameras tend to be aimed where they can pick up license plates, though, and not people's faces, although those areas obviously overlap a bit.
As Bruce pointed out way back, you can take fucking metal epoxy through security. (He did not say 'fucking', but I think he was thinking it.;) )
And you can make a knife using metal epoxy and a piece of posterboard. Fold the posterboard in half, pour in the epoxy, hold two minutes (presumably in the restroom), boom, knife. Hopefully not epoxied to your hand. Alternately, use the folds of one of those innumerable pamplets they have at the airport.
Granted, it has a non-straight blade and no handle, but is very sharp, and you could certainly hold it to someone's throat.
Of course, I think he's failed to notice you can make a knife from a CD by snapping it in half, if you don't mind flying shards of plastic going everywhere. Wear eyeglasses for that one.
Trying to keep the class of 'sharp objects you can use to hurt people' from existing on an airplane is idiotic. We've got hundreds of thousands of years experience with sharp objects, often with using them against other people.
This is what you call a Catch-22. If Bruce isn't qualified to be in that working group, the TSA has made yet another screwup. If he is, than people have to listen to him.;)
Anyway, something like 90% of physical security has a computer security analogy. In other words, if you are a computer security expert, you know 90% of physical security, and can see if it's good or bad, or at least if it's bad in certain ways.
That last 10% could kill him if he was building a physical security systems, because, for example, he probably doesn't know what you should make a bank vault floor out of. (Of course, he probably knows he should be using something specific and knows he doesn't know what it is.) But he's perfectly able to see failures of security in the other 90%, because they would be failures in computer security also.
They have to keep their profit up, or their stock will collapse and everyone who works there will be worth about 4% the amount they were the day before.
Linus doesn't even represent all work done on the Linux kernel. There's plenty of subsystems he's never even touched.
He's basically just management and quality control at this point. He says 'You wanna be in charge of this driver, boom, you're in charge of this driver.'
and 'No, that code sucks, do it again.' and 'That idea seems good...when are you going to code it?'.
Slashdot Mirror
So if the flywheels were mounted flat, it would be okay, except you'd tend to loose traction when you went over the top of hills, which doesn't sound that amazingly safe to me. OTOH, like I said, there's not really a good reason for you to have a lot of stored energy at the top of a hill anyway.
And now I'm imagining someone driving fast, seeing a speed bump, and hitting the brakes right before they hit it, and when they do, their car attempts to hover with the rear wheels on the ground, and the front wheels four inches in the air. (After you finally force the nose up, that is.) And then, just when that's settled down, their rear wheels hit the bump.
While cars have different handling, none of them actually attempt to handle in apparent defiance of the laws of physics, even for a few moments. With flywheels, there's your car, with all the normal forces acting on, and this apparently random force that tries to make it keep going in a certain direction, sometimes, you never know when. I don't think that's safe at all, if you had a large enough flywheel to actually help the car.
As for gimbals...inside a car? Just how big a car are we talking about that we can put sphere that's at least three feet in diameter under the hood? ;) I guess it might only have to turn as far as your wheels can, cars do not needs to move sideways, but still.
Things aren't 'were' in the future, they're 'will be'.
This is why you blank all the cop's cars first.
Within ten years, we won't have any privacy from the government at all. They'll stick up cameras with facial recognization software, and either cameras or RFID on cars plates. They'll know where you are at all times.
Yes, it certainly was possible for police officers to know what every single person in the US looked like, and sit at every street corner taking notes, but that was obviously impractical. Even putting cameras everywhere wouldn't accomplish it. It takes computer backing to keep all that data.
And yes, police (and everyone else) have always been able to physically follow people. But they had to have some reason, simple because they could only follow one person.
Within a decade, they'll be able to follow everyone, all the time, and retroactively. They'll have computers that can pick out 'interesting' people, but they'll always be free to look up that annoying neighbor and see if they can find anything illegal he's doing, or has ever done. Or just immoral.
The laws either need to catch up with technology, or there are going to be rather large problems.
And I don't know what you people are talking about with insurance. Here in Georgia, we have our insurance in a database that the police have, keyed to the license number. I don't know RFID is supposed to accomplish. The police can already look up cars, you don't need any key other than 'license plate' if you're going to make the database.
The only thing I can see is, with RFID, they can have an automated scanner. Didn't we already decide, as a nation, we didn't want the police randomly checking if we were criminals? If we did want to do this, I have no idea why the hell we'd do it via our cars...let's just make everyone carry a little radio transceiver that sends the police a signal constantly. (I suggest using the cell phone network.) If the police need to arrest us, they can turn it on, and have it constantly repeat loudly 'This person is a criminal, this person is a criminal'. We can have hidden sensors along the streets that will trigger if you aren't carrying yours and send your picture to the police.
I mean, if we've decided 'automated checking of legality' is okay, why the fuck are we doing it for auto insurance? Let's catch murderers.
If you think they couldn't start using exactly the same resources, workers, and traffic control infrastructure to track RFID tags, once everyone got them, you are crazy. It just takes one policy decision 'All new and replaced traffic lights will also entail this RFID reader placed on the poles at the same time.'
At some point, all the electrical output from the car (The regenerative brakes, the generator on the motor, etc.) go to some system that is in charge of keeping the batteries topped off with the excess power. All you have to do is input into that system with the right type of power.
Now, if the car company were to do this, they'd want circuit breakers in both directions, and you'd need an DC converter with a lot of amps, but we're not talking 3000, or even 60, dollars, we're talking about 15 dollars, and that includes a retracting power cord.
It's a frickin AC to DC convertor, people, they sell them at Radio Shack. The car already knows not to overcharge the batteries.
Now, if you were going to do it, it might still cost more, because I'm betting a lot of that is computer controlled and it simply won't let you charge the batteries where there's nowhere the power could be coming from, as far as it knows.
No one breathes the air at the exhaust of the power plant. Power plants are not in cities that suffer 'thermal inversions' where all the pollution gets trapped for days. Power plants do not vent in parking garages. You do not sit behind power plants at drive-throughs.
Imagine slamming on your brakes and trying to swerve, but the damn car put all your forward motion into the flywheel and you can't turn the nose of the car.
This is assuming the flywheel is oriented when it spins front to back, or back to front. You couldn't have it laying flat, it would constantly pull you to the side when you braked. Also, it would possibly do very weird things when going over hills, but no one brakes then. At the bottom of hills, it'd push you into the ground.
You'd probably get the same pulling effect if it was left to right (Or right to left), also, and you'd have the same problem with turning.
No one cares. Power is not priced based on how much of the original product that could have been turned into electricity was turned into electricity. It's based on, duh, how much it costs to make and get it to you.
In addition to cost, we should also look at 'pollution', which also is completely unrelated to efficiency, and isn't even scalar...it's a bunch of different things. Coal and nuclear result in total different byproducts that are handled in different ways.
And to further confuse the issue, some things don't pollute, like wind, solar, and hydroelectric, but they can have an effect on the nearby enviroment, by, for example, stopping fish movements. These effects tend to be extremely limited in range, but people need to know of them.
In additions, there are a relative dangers of different kinds of power productions. Coal mining accidents, for example.
In the real world, 'efficiency' is vaguely useful when you need to know the maximum amount of energy a new process can produce. That's about it. Gasoline engines might be more efficient than coal power plants, (I'm honestly confused as to why anyone would compare it just to coal, we're hydroelectric throughout most of Georgia.), but that doesn't have anything to do with anything.
If that was the case, power stations would be buying these cars, ripping them apart, and rigging the electrical output from them to sell, wouldn't they?
More to the point, if it was better to turn gas into electricity into our own house, we'd be doing it. Houses would come with generators!
And, before anyone mentions 'loss from power lines', let me mention 'costs of hauling all that gas to gas stations'.
Mod parent down!
To find those, they could just start x-raying everyone.
Of course, if you really want to sneak illegal things in, tape razor blades to the CD compartment of your laptop. Or hide them in a PC card. That will get around the x-ray machines.
But the point wasn't that you can sneak sharp things on, everyone knows that. It's that they have failed to even ban all sharp things.
Obsidian knife are presumably banned. Metal epoxy is not banned, and neither are CDs. There are many things you can use as a weapon you can walk in with them in your hand, which means under no circumstances can security catch someone going to hijack a plane with them.
So not only do they have a problem in practice, they have a rather large theoretical problem also. Enumberating 'possible weapons' is impossible, unless they want us to go in naked and in handcuffs.
We know how old Spock's human mother was, so he can't be that old.
It's certainly not a mugging.
It's trivial to filter fake addresses. It's impossible to filter real ones.
A few?
Which, BTW, they do not. CC numbers are not stored after usage locally if you use an electronic means of verifying them. (As opposed to the carbon paper machine you sometimes see when the power is down.) The store cannot get to them. They are required to not store them as part of their contract with the CC company.
Now, the cashier could obviously write them down as you use them, but most of the time, the card barely leaves your hand. They don't have time to write anything down. And they could write it down completely independent of your license plate, I have no idea what the hell that has to do with anything.
If they actually had your CC numbers, they could easily copy your name at the same time and look up your address in the phone book and drive to your damn house and get your plate.
Not that I'm entirely sure how license plates relate to identity theft, unless you're worried about people buying insurance for your car. I've written my license plates down like five times in my entire life for other people, and it was always for a parking permit or buying insurance. License plates are not secret information, and no one uses to them to keep track of who is who, they use them to keep track of what car is allowed to be where, and they do that by actually looking at the plates.
And gas stations don't 'write down' your license plate unless they don't have video cameras aimed at cars, anyway. That's the only thing they care about, that they can track you if you drive off, and the plates are the easiest way to find that out.
Frankly, I'd rather be on tape that gets erased every 12 hours through reuse and is in a locked backroom that only managers can get to than have my number written down where every goober at the front has access to it and be social-engineered into giving it out.
There are exactly two circumstances that tape will get looked at: the request of law enforment, and if I drive off without paying. I don't do the second, and as for the first...well, I don't like it, but that's the way the world is, and it's not just gas stations. Outside gas stations cameras tend to be aimed where they can pick up license plates, though, and not people's faces, although those areas obviously overlap a bit.
What, exactly, are you expecting them to lie about next? The existence of the moon? Gravity? Who won Survivor?
The Inuits.
And you can make a knife using metal epoxy and a piece of posterboard. Fold the posterboard in half, pour in the epoxy, hold two minutes (presumably in the restroom), boom, knife. Hopefully not epoxied to your hand. Alternately, use the folds of one of those innumerable pamplets they have at the airport.
Granted, it has a non-straight blade and no handle, but is very sharp, and you could certainly hold it to someone's throat.
Of course, I think he's failed to notice you can make a knife from a CD by snapping it in half, if you don't mind flying shards of plastic going everywhere. Wear eyeglasses for that one.
Trying to keep the class of 'sharp objects you can use to hurt people' from existing on an airplane is idiotic. We've got hundreds of thousands of years experience with sharp objects, often with using them against other people.
The important thing is to figure out what they're lying about.
Anyway, something like 90% of physical security has a computer security analogy. In other words, if you are a computer security expert, you know 90% of physical security, and can see if it's good or bad, or at least if it's bad in certain ways.
That last 10% could kill him if he was building a physical security systems, because, for example, he probably doesn't know what you should make a bank vault floor out of. (Of course, he probably knows he should be using something specific and knows he doesn't know what it is.) But he's perfectly able to see failures of security in the other 90%, because they would be failures in computer security also.
That's a reason, not an excuse.
He's basically just management and quality control at this point. He says 'You wanna be in charge of this driver, boom, you're in charge of this driver.' and 'No, that code sucks, do it again.' and 'That idea seems good...when are you going to code it?'.