Oh, and I pay more like $0.10/kWh in Washington state, not your $0.30/kWh.
Lucky you. Here, in PG&E land, the baseline is just enough to power one refrigerator and one night light. After that you are quickly pushed into the territory of 30 cents/kWh.
To be fair, PG&E does offer E-9 rate for EVs. But there is a catch, of course - they will rape you during the day, look at how much they want for any energy that you may need in summer+daytime. Take note on when the "peak time" ends - at 9 pm. Your water heater, your electric oven/range, your lights, your TV and radio, your computers will be all powered with the expensive energy ($0.28/kWh.) You can of course cook at midnight and take shower at 2am, but most families would strenuously object to that.
Myself, I'm installing a fairly large PV system, it should go online around Christmas. I expect to sell the spare energy into the grid. If at some point in the future an EV becomes financially interesting - and able to climb the hills that we have here - then I probably can charge it from the solar panels. But for the moment I'm sufficiently happy with a Prius.
Two cases like this a year and they are making a damn fine living.
The trouble is that they don't have "two cases like that" every year. Just like in every business, they have most of their cases just paying for the lights and rent of the office. Only now and then there is something big. Besides, there are very many lawyers in this country, and it's probably easier for any one of them to win a lottery than to get a big case. From an external POV the probability that a lawyer gets a case is 1. From any one lawyer's POV the same probability is 1e-6 (at best.)
A six figure education doesn't begin to explain rates like this.
These rates are explained by many factors; education is one of them, but hardly the main one. Lawyers operate in a pretty free marketplace because there are many qualified lawyers in any city or state. So they charge all they can get away with. The fee hopefully covers the expenses - including expenses on cases that they didn't win.
It must seriously fall apart at higher speed if you need to put in a bypass at 70+.
Probably the motor/generator combination is not capable of delivering the power that is needed at those speeds. The power demand grows exponentially with speed. The motor is wound with a wire of a certain AWG, and it can only consume (or deliver) so many Amperes before it goes up in flames. The semiconductors that feed power to it also have a maximum rating, and it is probably thermally limited as well.
You simply don't do something like this, unless you really need to.
If the car can't exceed 70 mph then nobody will buy it. Such a car would be simply unsafe. 70-72 is common on CA freeways that are normally 65; it is legal on I-5 in CA and the limit is even higher in other places (as it was discussed earlier.)
Most importantly, if the car can't exceed 70 mph then it probably needs minutes, and a favorable wind, to accelerate from 65 to 70. Add hills to the mix and you get a problem. You do need sometimes a pretty decent power to be agile on an uphill road. If you can't do it on electric alone (from just a battery, or also from the generator) then you need a mechanical link of the ICE to the wheels, just like other hybrids do. Of course when other hybrids do it they are designed for this; in the Volt it might be an afterthought; that would explain the mixed messages about the Volt's design.
Sorry, but if Timken isn't diversified enough to survive the bankruptcy of ONE of their customers then Timken has the problem, not me.
It's their problem because their workers aren't willing to work for $1 per day (as their Chinese counterparts do.) That would allow them to drop prices and sell on the international market because then they could compete with Chinese factories. But as things are, their products are too expensive, and so they have only a couple of customers who buy from them for reasons that have little to do with the free market.
If Timken bankrupted, they'd reorganized and so on and so on down until you get a workforce and income realignment and can move on.
It's against the US law to realign the workers' salaries down to the Chinese level, even if you had any workers who accept such a great deal. You can reorganize until you are blue in the face, but unless you scrap all your existing machines and buy only robotic manufacturing lines you can't do it. And since you are bankrupt you aren't going to buy anything; the only possible outcome of such reorganization would be the fire sale of all assets, likely for the price of scrap metal.
Different types of bankruptcies yield different results.
That is true. Sometimes a company needs the excuse of a bankruptcy to dump unfavorable contracts, impossible obligations and to postpone payments on some debts. In this case, however, by and large they are against the wall. The problem is that they are operating in a rich country. It is expensive to hire workers, buy stuff and pay taxes in a rich country. Your competition is in a poor country, and you can't compete with them on price. There is very little you can do, short of customs tariffs, WTO complaints and all that follows.
If you think the government isn't already dependent upon suppliers outside of the US, then I would suggest you're the fool.
The government knows that, and some people in the government want to reduce this dependency. But most don't care, as it appears.
I know a dozen people with trucks and SUVs, none of them work on a "job site". Every one of them have a desk job.
If you own a house and do *any* work on it or near it you need a truck. Look at the lengths of PVC pipes, EMT conduits or wood at Home Depot - they are mostly 10' and as such won't fit into a passenger car. So your sprinkler pipe is leaking, what to do now? You can pay $300 to a contractor, or you can fix it yourself with a $3 pipe and a dab of $5 blue PVC glue. Today it's the water pipe, tomorrow it's the fence post, next week it's something else... you can rent a truck, but it takes too much time (and money) if you need it often enough. You can buy a used truck and drive it only when needed; the insurance won't cost you that much considering the "pleasure use" classification (you have another car to drive to work.)
If you lose an electric motor it spins freely, not locks up
It all depends on the failure mode. If the motor becomes a generator (there is a short inside the motor, or outside of it) then it may act as a major brake (and it does so during the regenerative braking, just as intended.) So your life depends on a few MOSFETs in the engine's high voltage, high current, liquid-cooled driver. I have seen enough blown MOSFETs to be a bit concerned about that.
Besides, there are mechanical failures too, where the motor physically locks up. This happened to a gasoline motor in a moped that I owned when I was much younger. It overheated and locked up, as simple as that. But a single motor, especially connected through a transmission, is not likely to drive you into a ditch (or, for more fun, into the oncoming traffic.) A seized motor of one of wheels will probably do so before you can react.
The real win for series plug-in hybrids is that energy from your power company is a fair bit cheaper than energy from your engine crankshaft
But is it? An average modern car gives you 30 mpg. You use 1.5 gallons and drive 45 miles, this costs you today about $4.50. The Volt will eat 200Wh/mile, or 9 kW*h. Assuming 50% efficiency of the charge-discharge cycle you need to pay your electric company for about 18 kW*h, which for many consumers (at PG&E E1 rate) will cost $5.40 (assuming that you exceed the base load, which you certainly will with an EV, many times over.) You may be able to get a better rate at night time, but still the costs are comparable - the electric energy is not 10x cheaper or something like that.
You can run the ICE->Generator at the most efficient point of the power band constantly.
Li-Ion batteries take only so many charge/drain cycles; fewer than NiMH, as I understand. One usage model is to charge at night, drain during the day and spend one or at most two charge cycles per day. This way the battery should be good for a year or two. But if you put it into a serial hybrid and charge it every 20-30 minutes and then drain it, the battery may die within a month of such abuse. It would be impossible in practice to drive the car so that the battery doesn't need to be involved.
Not to discredit the tech in the prius, but changing how the car "feels" when driven would go a long way
I was driving some Nissan car for a couple of days, and then a Prius. Nissan starts aggressively and then, at speed, can't accelerate. Prius starts at low power, but at speed accelerates aggressively. All in all, I couldn't really get used to Nissan, it was jumping like a goat most of the time, until I learned the timing between gears shifting and the power being delivered. But Prius is smooth as silk - there are no gears to switch.
Unless every company you ever bought had meticulously maintained financial and inventory records for every item placed in service over the life of the asset base (7-10 years, in general) AND your accounting staff got everything accurately entered into your systems during the acquisition
It doesn't matter how meticulously the acquired company maintained their records. You are expected to inspect all that during the acquisition. On the day of acquisition all these assets (and problems) become yours. If you have a good system to keep track of all that then you are fine; if not, it doesn't matter if you acquired something or not - your own, original assets are already mismanaged.
what software licenses were on that card (some cell phone network hardware is designed to allow only a certain proportion of the maximum physical capability of the card to be used
Yes, guess what - you have to keep track of that.
you will have a mess that none of your CPA and MBA-having managerial staff will know how to fix
Of course, and for a good reason. All you need to prevent that is to keep records. Equipment doesn't show up out of nowhere, and it shouldn't be just thrown into a dumpster. If you simply record what was done then someone else, somewhere, will be able to trace the movement of hardware and software. You can run a simple script every night that checks consistency of records and notifies responsible parties about equipment on the move and other loose ends. If the employees (middle managers, not janitors!) can't perform such a simple task then perhaps you need a new set of middle managers.
Your servers aren't likely to move around so much that it becomes a burden. But if you have some really mobile assets, like demo setups or expensive tools or diagnostic equipment in hospitals, all you need is to enforce the "check out / check in" system. Need this signal generator? You can borrow it, just sign here (or swipe your access card.) Now you are responsible for it, and you will be reminded about these assets every day until you return them. It's hard to forget to return something if your inbox is full of those reminders...
Uhhh...in a lot of states the government DOES force you insure your car.
Perhaps you are thinking of the mandatory liability insurance. That insurance is not insuring your car, it insures *you* - specifically, your liability to others in case of an accident that you caused. That insurance won't pay for repairs to your car; it will pay for repairs to other people's cars, if necessary.
The only relevant case I can think of is when you don't own the car; then the owner, be it the bank or the rental agency, may insist on you insuring their car.
a drug dealer, or a gangbanger, or a political assassin, or a member of a far-Right Christian militia, or just some jackass who believes that the Second Amendment says he gets to carry an AR-15, so by god he's going to carry an AR-15.
Drug dealers or gangbangers aren't carrying rifles; they do have handguns, but they can't shoot them straight anyway, so hitting an insulator at 10 yards, at 30-40 degrees of elevation, is probably beyond their ability. Political assassins are so rare that they shouldn't be even considered; when they shoot they usually hit their target - not some wires overhead.
But what you say about militia (not just Christian - there is Islamic militia too) and fanatics of 2nd Amendment - that is something I agree with. They own guns not as tools, but as objects of worship, as something that stands on its own. And when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail... especially in a rural setting, where people casually carry and use firearms with no questions asked. Hunters and target shooters are the most sane people in this crowd because they know exactly what they use firearms for. A large mass of gun owners owns guns "for protection" - sometimes against a real threat, but more frequently against an imaginary threat. That AR-15, for example, is minimally useful for hunting - it's semi-auto, and you don't want to litter the field with ejected brass (and it's good for reloading too.) AR-15, even if just a semi-auto, is a tool of a soldier. I don't own one, and I don't need one (it's not accurate enough for my varminting anyway; I believe in extreme accuracy, and many of my rifles are made by Weatherby.)
I personally think that a lot of those distorted opinions about firearms come from many attempts to suppress and regulate firearm ownership and use. Look at Heck Finn, for example. He used a firearm casually, without a second thought - because guns were common, necessary and useful tools, something that you hunt with and keep yourself fed. But if you undermine the security of gun ownership then immediately you get people who start fighting back, and then the society polarizes. Anti-gun and pro-gun people appear where previously people haven't given any attention to the matter. These groups then start creating arguments in favor of their positions, and they force fence-sitters to lean toward one group or the other. This certainly doesn't help, especially when some of those arguments (on either side) are contrived or plain ridiculous. There is less and less room for an intelligent discussion, it gets washed out by emotions, soundbites and dogmas. It becomes very hard to debate the matter from a rational point of view.
The GP should understand that in most countries, other than the USA, "a man with a gun" == "hunter" with very few exceptions. In the USA, however, "a man with a gun" is a hunter only in 10% of cases; the other 90% are target shooters and gun enthusiasts and simply rednecks. The latter account for those shot up road signs and wires. No true hunter would even consider shooting at an insulator; but a redneck with a gun might. They go to the field to shoot at anything that moves, and failing at that they turn to easier targets. The hunting season just brings more of them to the fields.
Anything involving buying some gear, sweating, and an element of luck, seems to be considered a sport
You just defined most of human occupations. Even getting laid:-)
As for "teams of equals" we have hunters/poachers vs game wardens and the law enforcement complex as the refs
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. Game wardens are rare as hen's teeth, and LEOs don't ever show up in a forest or on a ranch. You can hunt every weekend for a year (there are animals that are legal to hunt all year round) and never see any of them.
But if you're a hunter who's doing it to feed your family or protect your family from dangerous predators, you are very possibly a fine person. Since I live on the U.S. mainland, there are very few of those hunters, which is probably why I haven't had the pleasure to have met any.
I wonder how would you classify me then? I hunt sage rats (Belding's ground squirrels) that damage fields and hurt cattle. Farmers and ranchers on the CA/OR border welcome hunters (and so do those in the Central CA.) These varmints are not edible by humans, but eagles, vultures and other *protected* species have their fill. If you wonder, I'm using lead-free ammo where required. By hunting those varmints I help the rancher to stay in business, and protect his cows from breaking their legs in burrows. Is that somehow evil?
And if your item is significantly heavy, for example, you are having a 500 pound lawnmower delivered, or say a really really big rock, it can have some increase in the gas consumption of the truck.
You can be sure that if I'm buying a 500 pound item I'm not picking it up in my car:-) It's coming on a truck with a lift gate or a forklift.
Is this based on an actual occurrence? Or is this typical rural dweller's prejudice about what a "city slicker" must be like.
If I may answer this: I live outside of the city, and *all* my neighbors own and periodically shoot firearms. We have deer, coyotes, foxes, rabbits, squirrels and probably more than meets the eye. Some of those varmints may be unwanted. This is not a concern, and nobody calls the sheriff when gun fire is heard. The distance between homes is so large (half a mile at least) that the sound is pretty faint anyway.
On the other hand, it is illegal to discharge firearms in the city, so if that happens then the "city slickers" there have a pretty good reason to call 911 - they are simply reporting a violation. People are packed so densely in the city that a guy can shoot a bullet through several houses.
The muzzle rise of.223 doesn't let you see the results of your shot through the scope. A.22LR or.17HMR has no such problem; either one is much quieter and cheaper. New.223 rounds being around 45 cents each, and reload will cost you half of that. I do take a.223 to the field now and then, but not as a main weapon.
Never seen a.22 accomplish that with anything bigger than a squirrel.
Even on squirrels it's not a humane kill. The bullet has very little energy; the animal gets nailed (literally) but doesn't instantly die because there is no hydrostatic shock. Unless you manage to hit that 0.5" circle on the neck, the squirrel will run away (in pain) and will die only many hours later. Compare to.17HMR - it often launches the squirrel into the air, and once hit it doesn't run anywhere, it just drops in place, already dead.
A hit from a.223, of course, will launch both halves of the squirrel into the air. There is no debate that the squirrel doesn't even hear the shot that kills it. I like.223, but I take most of the squirrels with a sub-MOA.17HMR. I carry enough ammo in my pocket (usually 200-300 rounds) to walk around the field for a couple of hours. Try that with.223:-) you'd need a backpack.
The GP should record some LP, at 24 bits per sample, at 96 kSa/s, in stereo. It wouldn't be too unusual, especially if he picks a well known music. Classical music will be particularly good here. A typical opera, in.WAV, will be about 4 GB, and there will be at least 8 lower bits that are yours to play with (they are noise from the turntable.)
* A big "random" file on your hard drive is really obvious
Have software on the laptop that routinely generates large, random files. For example, MSVC produces.pdb files, but you don't need them to run the code.
Maybe it's not as random as you hope it is (there's some pattern that occurs in your encrypted data)
Yes, block ciphers can do this to you. Just XOR the AES output with a PRNG output.
* A big "random" partition is less obvious than a "random" file
But it's a dead giveaway because unused partitions are very uncommon, you have to create them intentionally. Uncommon things are bad for deniability.
If you really want to transport some material across the checkpoint, store your encrypted data in free blocks of your C: drive as a bunch of PAR2 volumes. Nobody will ever question you about the contents of the free space.
They continue to exist through treaties and the goodwill of others.
s/goodwill/gain vs. pain/
Just look at Iraq and Afghanistan, they got attacked and invaded after 9/11 despite all the treaties and goodwill. These countries had hardly any military by that time, and no aviation. The political gain of the "short, victorious war" was just high enough to do it.
There are many contemporary examples of poaching (of fish) done in waters of Japan, for example. Japanese Coast Guard goes after the violators, and keeps the practice down. But without an organized response to such violations poachers from all other countries will be trawling your waters, taking your fish and selling it.
Here is another example for you. The USA is losing territory to Mexican bandits, just because it is unwilling to defend it. The border is still where it always was, but it means little.
You should claim only what you are able and willing to defend.
A small band of refugees, living thousands of miles away, is not likely to police "a patch of the ocean" even if the UN grants them such a right. Normally sea borders are drawn around land.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and I pay more like $0.10/kWh in Washington state, not your $0.30/kWh.
Lucky you. Here, in PG&E land, the baseline is just enough to power one refrigerator and one night light. After that you are quickly pushed into the territory of 30 cents/kWh.
To be fair, PG&E does offer E-9 rate for EVs. But there is a catch, of course - they will rape you during the day, look at how much they want for any energy that you may need in summer+daytime. Take note on when the "peak time" ends - at 9 pm. Your water heater, your electric oven/range, your lights, your TV and radio, your computers will be all powered with the expensive energy ($0.28/kWh.) You can of course cook at midnight and take shower at 2am, but most families would strenuously object to that.
Myself, I'm installing a fairly large PV system, it should go online around Christmas. I expect to sell the spare energy into the grid. If at some point in the future an EV becomes financially interesting - and able to climb the hills that we have here - then I probably can charge it from the solar panels. But for the moment I'm sufficiently happy with a Prius.
Two cases like this a year and they are making a damn fine living.
The trouble is that they don't have "two cases like that" every year. Just like in every business, they have most of their cases just paying for the lights and rent of the office. Only now and then there is something big. Besides, there are very many lawyers in this country, and it's probably easier for any one of them to win a lottery than to get a big case. From an external POV the probability that a lawyer gets a case is 1. From any one lawyer's POV the same probability is 1e-6 (at best.)
A six figure education doesn't begin to explain rates like this.
These rates are explained by many factors; education is one of them, but hardly the main one. Lawyers operate in a pretty free marketplace because there are many qualified lawyers in any city or state. So they charge all they can get away with. The fee hopefully covers the expenses - including expenses on cases that they didn't win.
It must seriously fall apart at higher speed if you need to put in a bypass at 70+.
Probably the motor/generator combination is not capable of delivering the power that is needed at those speeds. The power demand grows exponentially with speed. The motor is wound with a wire of a certain AWG, and it can only consume (or deliver) so many Amperes before it goes up in flames. The semiconductors that feed power to it also have a maximum rating, and it is probably thermally limited as well.
You simply don't do something like this, unless you really need to.
If the car can't exceed 70 mph then nobody will buy it. Such a car would be simply unsafe. 70-72 is common on CA freeways that are normally 65; it is legal on I-5 in CA and the limit is even higher in other places (as it was discussed earlier.)
Most importantly, if the car can't exceed 70 mph then it probably needs minutes, and a favorable wind, to accelerate from 65 to 70. Add hills to the mix and you get a problem. You do need sometimes a pretty decent power to be agile on an uphill road. If you can't do it on electric alone (from just a battery, or also from the generator) then you need a mechanical link of the ICE to the wheels, just like other hybrids do. Of course when other hybrids do it they are designed for this; in the Volt it might be an afterthought; that would explain the mixed messages about the Volt's design.
Sorry, but if Timken isn't diversified enough to survive the bankruptcy of ONE of their customers then Timken has the problem, not me.
It's their problem because their workers aren't willing to work for $1 per day (as their Chinese counterparts do.) That would allow them to drop prices and sell on the international market because then they could compete with Chinese factories. But as things are, their products are too expensive, and so they have only a couple of customers who buy from them for reasons that have little to do with the free market.
If Timken bankrupted, they'd reorganized and so on and so on down until you get a workforce and income realignment and can move on.
It's against the US law to realign the workers' salaries down to the Chinese level, even if you had any workers who accept such a great deal. You can reorganize until you are blue in the face, but unless you scrap all your existing machines and buy only robotic manufacturing lines you can't do it. And since you are bankrupt you aren't going to buy anything; the only possible outcome of such reorganization would be the fire sale of all assets, likely for the price of scrap metal.
Different types of bankruptcies yield different results.
That is true. Sometimes a company needs the excuse of a bankruptcy to dump unfavorable contracts, impossible obligations and to postpone payments on some debts. In this case, however, by and large they are against the wall. The problem is that they are operating in a rich country. It is expensive to hire workers, buy stuff and pay taxes in a rich country. Your competition is in a poor country, and you can't compete with them on price. There is very little you can do, short of customs tariffs, WTO complaints and all that follows.
If you think the government isn't already dependent upon suppliers outside of the US, then I would suggest you're the fool.
The government knows that, and some people in the government want to reduce this dependency. But most don't care, as it appears.
I know a dozen people with trucks and SUVs, none of them work on a "job site". Every one of them have a desk job.
If you own a house and do *any* work on it or near it you need a truck. Look at the lengths of PVC pipes, EMT conduits or wood at Home Depot - they are mostly 10' and as such won't fit into a passenger car. So your sprinkler pipe is leaking, what to do now? You can pay $300 to a contractor, or you can fix it yourself with a $3 pipe and a dab of $5 blue PVC glue. Today it's the water pipe, tomorrow it's the fence post, next week it's something else... you can rent a truck, but it takes too much time (and money) if you need it often enough. You can buy a used truck and drive it only when needed; the insurance won't cost you that much considering the "pleasure use" classification (you have another car to drive to work.)
If you lose an electric motor it spins freely, not locks up
It all depends on the failure mode. If the motor becomes a generator (there is a short inside the motor, or outside of it) then it may act as a major brake (and it does so during the regenerative braking, just as intended.) So your life depends on a few MOSFETs in the engine's high voltage, high current, liquid-cooled driver. I have seen enough blown MOSFETs to be a bit concerned about that.
Besides, there are mechanical failures too, where the motor physically locks up. This happened to a gasoline motor in a moped that I owned when I was much younger. It overheated and locked up, as simple as that. But a single motor, especially connected through a transmission, is not likely to drive you into a ditch (or, for more fun, into the oncoming traffic.) A seized motor of one of wheels will probably do so before you can react.
The real win for series plug-in hybrids is that energy from your power company is a fair bit cheaper than energy from your engine crankshaft
But is it? An average modern car gives you 30 mpg. You use 1.5 gallons and drive 45 miles, this costs you today about $4.50. The Volt will eat 200Wh/mile, or 9 kW*h. Assuming 50% efficiency of the charge-discharge cycle you need to pay your electric company for about 18 kW*h, which for many consumers (at PG&E E1 rate) will cost $5.40 (assuming that you exceed the base load, which you certainly will with an EV, many times over.) You may be able to get a better rate at night time, but still the costs are comparable - the electric energy is not 10x cheaper or something like that.
You can run the ICE->Generator at the most efficient point of the power band constantly.
Li-Ion batteries take only so many charge/drain cycles; fewer than NiMH, as I understand. One usage model is to charge at night, drain during the day and spend one or at most two charge cycles per day. This way the battery should be good for a year or two. But if you put it into a serial hybrid and charge it every 20-30 minutes and then drain it, the battery may die within a month of such abuse. It would be impossible in practice to drive the car so that the battery doesn't need to be involved.
Toyota is rather tight lipped about how that all works exactly for them
Really?
Not to discredit the tech in the prius, but changing how the car "feels" when driven would go a long way
I was driving some Nissan car for a couple of days, and then a Prius. Nissan starts aggressively and then, at speed, can't accelerate. Prius starts at low power, but at speed accelerates aggressively. All in all, I couldn't really get used to Nissan, it was jumping like a goat most of the time, until I learned the timing between gears shifting and the power being delivered. But Prius is smooth as silk - there are no gears to switch.
Unless every company you ever bought had meticulously maintained financial and inventory records for every item placed in service over the life of the asset base (7-10 years, in general) AND your accounting staff got everything accurately entered into your systems during the acquisition
It doesn't matter how meticulously the acquired company maintained their records. You are expected to inspect all that during the acquisition. On the day of acquisition all these assets (and problems) become yours. If you have a good system to keep track of all that then you are fine; if not, it doesn't matter if you acquired something or not - your own, original assets are already mismanaged.
what software licenses were on that card (some cell phone network hardware is designed to allow only a certain proportion of the maximum physical capability of the card to be used
Yes, guess what - you have to keep track of that.
you will have a mess that none of your CPA and MBA-having managerial staff will know how to fix
Of course, and for a good reason. All you need to prevent that is to keep records. Equipment doesn't show up out of nowhere, and it shouldn't be just thrown into a dumpster. If you simply record what was done then someone else, somewhere, will be able to trace the movement of hardware and software. You can run a simple script every night that checks consistency of records and notifies responsible parties about equipment on the move and other loose ends. If the employees (middle managers, not janitors!) can't perform such a simple task then perhaps you need a new set of middle managers.
Your servers aren't likely to move around so much that it becomes a burden. But if you have some really mobile assets, like demo setups or expensive tools or diagnostic equipment in hospitals, all you need is to enforce the "check out / check in" system. Need this signal generator? You can borrow it, just sign here (or swipe your access card.) Now you are responsible for it, and you will be reminded about these assets every day until you return them. It's hard to forget to return something if your inbox is full of those reminders...
Uhhh...in a lot of states the government DOES force you insure your car.
Perhaps you are thinking of the mandatory liability insurance. That insurance is not insuring your car, it insures *you* - specifically, your liability to others in case of an accident that you caused. That insurance won't pay for repairs to your car; it will pay for repairs to other people's cars, if necessary.
The only relevant case I can think of is when you don't own the car; then the owner, be it the bank or the rental agency, may insist on you insuring their car.
Both are valid words, but they mean different things.
It would be a lot more complicated to have a system without a central server.
You can always encrypt your data with a decent cipher and upload onto Freenet.
a drug dealer, or a gangbanger, or a political assassin, or a member of a far-Right Christian militia, or just some jackass who believes that the Second Amendment says he gets to carry an AR-15, so by god he's going to carry an AR-15.
Drug dealers or gangbangers aren't carrying rifles; they do have handguns, but they can't shoot them straight anyway, so hitting an insulator at 10 yards, at 30-40 degrees of elevation, is probably beyond their ability. Political assassins are so rare that they shouldn't be even considered; when they shoot they usually hit their target - not some wires overhead.
But what you say about militia (not just Christian - there is Islamic militia too) and fanatics of 2nd Amendment - that is something I agree with. They own guns not as tools, but as objects of worship, as something that stands on its own. And when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail... especially in a rural setting, where people casually carry and use firearms with no questions asked. Hunters and target shooters are the most sane people in this crowd because they know exactly what they use firearms for. A large mass of gun owners owns guns "for protection" - sometimes against a real threat, but more frequently against an imaginary threat. That AR-15, for example, is minimally useful for hunting - it's semi-auto, and you don't want to litter the field with ejected brass (and it's good for reloading too.) AR-15, even if just a semi-auto, is a tool of a soldier. I don't own one, and I don't need one (it's not accurate enough for my varminting anyway; I believe in extreme accuracy, and many of my rifles are made by Weatherby.)
I personally think that a lot of those distorted opinions about firearms come from many attempts to suppress and regulate firearm ownership and use. Look at Heck Finn, for example. He used a firearm casually, without a second thought - because guns were common, necessary and useful tools, something that you hunt with and keep yourself fed. But if you undermine the security of gun ownership then immediately you get people who start fighting back, and then the society polarizes. Anti-gun and pro-gun people appear where previously people haven't given any attention to the matter. These groups then start creating arguments in favor of their positions, and they force fence-sitters to lean toward one group or the other. This certainly doesn't help, especially when some of those arguments (on either side) are contrived or plain ridiculous. There is less and less room for an intelligent discussion, it gets washed out by emotions, soundbites and dogmas. It becomes very hard to debate the matter from a rational point of view.
The GP should understand that in most countries, other than the USA, "a man with a gun" == "hunter" with very few exceptions. In the USA, however, "a man with a gun" is a hunter only in 10% of cases; the other 90% are target shooters and gun enthusiasts and simply rednecks. The latter account for those shot up road signs and wires. No true hunter would even consider shooting at an insulator; but a redneck with a gun might. They go to the field to shoot at anything that moves, and failing at that they turn to easier targets. The hunting season just brings more of them to the fields.
Anything involving buying some gear, sweating, and an element of luck, seems to be considered a sport
You just defined most of human occupations. Even getting laid :-)
As for "teams of equals" we have hunters/poachers vs game wardens and the law enforcement complex as the refs
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. Game wardens are rare as hen's teeth, and LEOs don't ever show up in a forest or on a ranch. You can hunt every weekend for a year (there are animals that are legal to hunt all year round) and never see any of them.
But if you're a hunter who's doing it to feed your family or protect your family from dangerous predators, you are very possibly a fine person. Since I live on the U.S. mainland, there are very few of those hunters, which is probably why I haven't had the pleasure to have met any.
I wonder how would you classify me then? I hunt sage rats (Belding's ground squirrels) that damage fields and hurt cattle. Farmers and ranchers on the CA/OR border welcome hunters (and so do those in the Central CA.) These varmints are not edible by humans, but eagles, vultures and other *protected* species have their fill. If you wonder, I'm using lead-free ammo where required. By hunting those varmints I help the rancher to stay in business, and protect his cows from breaking their legs in burrows. Is that somehow evil?
And if your item is significantly heavy, for example, you are having a 500 pound lawnmower delivered, or say a really really big rock, it can have some increase in the gas consumption of the truck.
You can be sure that if I'm buying a 500 pound item I'm not picking it up in my car :-) It's coming on a truck with a lift gate or a forklift.
Is this based on an actual occurrence? Or is this typical rural dweller's prejudice about what a "city slicker" must be like.
If I may answer this: I live outside of the city, and *all* my neighbors own and periodically shoot firearms. We have deer, coyotes, foxes, rabbits, squirrels and probably more than meets the eye. Some of those varmints may be unwanted. This is not a concern, and nobody calls the sheriff when gun fire is heard. The distance between homes is so large (half a mile at least) that the sound is pretty faint anyway.
On the other hand, it is illegal to discharge firearms in the city, so if that happens then the "city slickers" there have a pretty good reason to call 911 - they are simply reporting a violation. People are packed so densely in the city that a guy can shoot a bullet through several houses.
The muzzle rise of .223 doesn't let you see the results of your shot through the scope. A .22LR or .17HMR has no such problem; either one is much quieter and cheaper. New .223 rounds being around 45 cents each, and reload will cost you half of that. I do take a .223 to the field now and then, but not as a main weapon.
Never seen a .22 accomplish that with anything bigger than a squirrel.
Even on squirrels it's not a humane kill. The bullet has very little energy; the animal gets nailed (literally) but doesn't instantly die because there is no hydrostatic shock. Unless you manage to hit that 0.5" circle on the neck, the squirrel will run away (in pain) and will die only many hours later. Compare to .17HMR - it often launches the squirrel into the air, and once hit it doesn't run anywhere, it just drops in place, already dead.
A hit from a .223, of course, will launch both halves of the squirrel into the air. There is no debate that the squirrel doesn't even hear the shot that kills it. I like .223, but I take most of the squirrels with a sub-MOA .17HMR. I carry enough ammo in my pocket (usually 200-300 rounds) to walk around the field for a couple of hours. Try that with .223 :-) you'd need a backpack.
How about this one?
You never want to be a smartass with border guards. Especially if you have something to hide.
When they discover you aren't a scientist
The GP should record some LP, at 24 bits per sample, at 96 kSa/s, in stereo. It wouldn't be too unusual, especially if he picks a well known music. Classical music will be particularly good here. A typical opera, in .WAV, will be about 4 GB, and there will be at least 8 lower bits that are yours to play with (they are noise from the turntable.)
* A big "random" file on your hard drive is really obvious
Have software on the laptop that routinely generates large, random files. For example, MSVC produces .pdb files, but you don't need them to run the code.
Maybe it's not as random as you hope it is (there's some pattern that occurs in your encrypted data)
Yes, block ciphers can do this to you. Just XOR the AES output with a PRNG output.
* A big "random" partition is less obvious than a "random" file
But it's a dead giveaway because unused partitions are very uncommon, you have to create them intentionally. Uncommon things are bad for deniability.
If you really want to transport some material across the checkpoint, store your encrypted data in free blocks of your C: drive as a bunch of PAR2 volumes. Nobody will ever question you about the contents of the free space.
They continue to exist through treaties and the goodwill of others.
s/goodwill/gain vs. pain/
Just look at Iraq and Afghanistan, they got attacked and invaded after 9/11 despite all the treaties and goodwill. These countries had hardly any military by that time, and no aviation. The political gain of the "short, victorious war" was just high enough to do it.
There are many contemporary examples of poaching (of fish) done in waters of Japan, for example. Japanese Coast Guard goes after the violators, and keeps the practice down. But without an organized response to such violations poachers from all other countries will be trawling your waters, taking your fish and selling it.
Here is another example for you. The USA is losing territory to Mexican bandits, just because it is unwilling to defend it. The border is still where it always was, but it means little.
You should claim only what you are able and willing to defend.
A small band of refugees, living thousands of miles away, is not likely to police "a patch of the ocean" even if the UN grants them such a right. Normally sea borders are drawn around land.