It does feature speculative technology -- specifically atomic bombs "salted" to make their fallout even more deadly and persistent -- that turned out to be even tamer than reality, as the proposed cobalt salting turned out to be less effective and radioactive than the uranium (depleted or natural in early bombs, more modern ones use partially or highly enriched uranium) actually used in the tampers and casing. The scenario, where so many of these bombs had gone off that the entire world was being overcome with lethal fallout, was also highly speculative (even the full release of all bombs in the arsenal wouldn't have that effect), and certainly the Atomic Bomb and it's descendants were the result of science. Both speculative fiction and, in my analysis, science fiction categorizations apply. It's like Crichton's Jurassic Park: clearly science fiction, but marketed as technothriller/mainstream fiction to pull in a larger market share.
And what will happen when someone blocks a truck to steal its contents? First off the thieves are going to need to identify the contents as valuable and resellable on the black market. That implies an inside job, as most trucks don't identify their contents, so an internal audit will probably show which employee is involved. As soon as an object is detected in the road, the truck itself will not just stop, but most likely immediately send and automated 911 call, notify the parent company of an unexpected stop, and start sending out for archive any camera footage of the area if it wasn't already. If the thieves can remove the desired contents without exposing a face or other recognizable feature, load it in their vehicle without it being identified, and escape before the authorities arrive. Admittedly, I'm thinking the less corrupt parts of the first world, in many areas of the world the authorities would be in on the plan, or so corrupt or poorly funded that they just aren't going to respond. Even on a remote area of the US highway system, though, you're talking less than half an hour for all but the most remote areas for response, and in those areas there's now probable cause to stop any vehicle large enough to have taken part in the theft that was seen in the area. For really valuable shipments, cash, gold, jewelry, guns, etc, you'd want an armed guard on board or escort, and of course for anything truly of interest to terrorists you'd definitely want appropriate security, but even for TVs or computers will take a while to move to a new transport. Still, I can see cargo-blocking becoming the new teenage cow-tipping.
True, but remember they're talking real mail letters, not email. In general: it takes 10 emails to have the same impact as one letter, ten letters to have as much impact as one phone call, ten phone calls to have the impact of 1 in-person talk, and 10 in-person-talks to have as much impact as a $10 donation. From there it just scales up with the donation amount.
This is one of the reasons I sometimes turn off ABS and other "traction" systems when driving on snow or ice. My sedan's sensors and algorithms clearly expect wet pavement, or at least some traction, or they don't let the tires turn, which means the car doesn't go if the snow/ice is too slick. Since I grew up driving in New England, I don't have a problem reverting to full manual drive, but I understand why some of the locals here in Virginia just abandon their cars when they stop moving, probably too afraid to turn off the supposed safety features and drive that way. If you've never driven in slippery conditions with the controls off, you probably won't understand how much more control you have in that situation with them off than on.
Actually, no. It works just fine, you can hot-forge it much like iron (really, I've done it, when its glowing it moves under a hammer much like iron does), machining it requires tungsten carbide tooling but most people use that anyway, and you don't have to worry about heat-treatment, the stuff will be just as hard as mild steel (RC52ish) no matter what you do to it. The real cost is creation: converting titianium dioxide to metallic titanium on a commercial basis is complex, takes a lot of energy, and results in a material that doesn't melt until it gets over 3000F, but must be alloyed (melted and mixed with other elements) to be usable. The cost of the raw material is almost irrelevant -- TiO2 is used in virtually every modern paint (to the extent that it's a standard test for forgery detection on art, unless you're compounding your own paint from linseed oil and powdered minerals, it's probably got titanium dioxide in it).
Oh, it's far worse than that. I wore an xkcd tshirt the other day, one with the "Stand Back, I'm going to try Science" cartoon on it, and was accosted by three different individuals who felt it necessary to make anti-science comments. This was at the Smithsonian air-and-space museum (Udvar-Hazy), so it's not like they were in a science-free zone. Not only do people not know science, a good percentage actively hate it and think it's evil.
It will take the blood of patriots, and a well watered tree of freedom, before this goes away, if ever. No law will deter the unlawful, and our spies ignore laws with impunity, no mirror will every shed light on the truly powerful individuals perverting the system to their favor. And, honestly, unless people's televisions and Internet get shut off, and food becomes scarce enough for hunger to be a concern of the common man, people will just go along with universal surveillance.
Well, if you assume we never reprocess old reactor fuel rods, never exploit breeder reactors, never explore thorium reactors, and never do any more prospecting, he's more or less right. Sadly for him, none of this is true, so we have thousands of years on naturally occurring uranium just from the ocean (contains about 3mg per cubic meter of uranium), a huge number of on-land prospecting claims that have never been investigated, an unknown number of classified resources still undisclosed after the Cold War, and research ongoing into breeders, thorium, and other higher-efficiency nuclear reactors ongoing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... has a good analysis of current beliefs about uranium reserves and extraction.
Unfortunately, because unenumerated rights are unbounded, the assumption is that if Congress passes a law against something, the President ratifies it, and the Supreme Court doesn't strike it down, then that wasn't actually a right, even if the knot of pretzel-logic required to pass Constitutional muster is nigh Gordian.
For real fun, wait until the drones start coming in stealth models. Imagine how destabilizing it will be when nobody knows, for sure, if there’s an assassin drone, or when the big boys get upset, a nuclear-enabled stealth drone overhead. Imagine how the White House would react if they though a stealthed drone was over DC. Imagine Moscow reacting to even a non-nuclear stealthed drone falling onto Red Square.
Because while burger flipping, they guy with an associates degree can apply to more, better jobs and have a higher chance of landing it than without. Because community college isn't and will not be mandatory, unlike elementary and high school, and shows initiative and, assuming he got the degree, dedication and a certain amount of ability. Because with an associates degree, and a decent GPA, most state college systems will ignore bad high school grades and accept the burger flipper when he decides to move on. Because, when all's said and done, if even our burger flippers are getting associates degrees, there will be a wider pool of talent available when jobs do, inevitably, open up, which is better for us, the burger flippers, and our society.
Yep, you need some sort of carbon source to reduce iron ore down to iron, specifically something that will produce carbon monoxide, and it has to be at an elevated temperature or the iron won't reduce. There's no reason, however, why you have to use coal. Charcoal works, and I've done short-stack refining using just magnetite sand, charcoal, and a bit of glass as flux. Substantial amounts iron in India is reduced from ore via natural gas if Wikipedia is to be believed on this subject. On the more exotic and theoretical side, my research on possible refining methods that might work on Mars shows that even carbon dioxide can be cracked down to carbon monoxide using standard catalysts and sunlight, no burning of anything required, and just heat to reduce the iron in the presence of CO.
The direcly linked fukushima article is very low on numbers (do journalists think people are allergic to them or something?), but it links to the actual scientific article.
Sadly, yes, studies have shown that every time you include an equation, mathematics, or scary looking numbers in an article, you loose a percentage of the readers. Editors for popular articles (which Nature, desipte it's prestige as a science journal, is at heart) know this, and edit accordingly.
So, having read the links, it sounds like they want to replace a layer 3 protocol with a layer 4 protocol. This won't work -- you'll still need unique identifiers for source and destination that's machine-translatable for routing, that's aggregatable to avoid routing table bloat, and which interfaces nicely with both layer 2 for transport and layers 4-7 for functionality. Sure, this sounds like a good replacement for the rather awkward DNS lookup and non-intuitive URL syntax, but as a replacement for TCP/IP v4/v6 it is lacking in the necessary functionality.
So, how long do you think it will be before Kessler syndrome finishes the job all these anti-satellite weapons and tests start? As one professor back in college (the class was 'War in the Nuclear Age') pointed out, you could take out all of geosync orbit with a large bag of sand if you got it going in the opposite direction from Earth's spin. LEO and MEO are both crowded enough that we could get a spontaneous Kessler syndrome even if we don't keep blowing the satellites up there into shrapnel. I suppose we can start replacing the critical satellites in inch-thick titanium, but when every launch requires a heavy lift launch vehicle we're going to lose a lot of satellite functionality.
According to rymskviða , Thor dressed as a woman in order to reclaim Mjölnir from the Frost Giants. Perhaps this change is just for a retelling of that tale.
I'm pretty sure removing the arcades back in the 90s and oughties was a deliberate strategy by the Malls to remove the unwanted guests -- teens and tweens. They certainly villianized that demographic in other ways, often enacting policies to discourage that demographic from hanging out in the food court, loitering in the mezzanines, sitting quietly on the benches . . . having an arcade just attracted them like flies to roadkill, so they had to go. Since the demographic was viewed as not having much to spend, particularly at the big-box anchor stores, and what they did mostly going to the arcade, food court, music store, and maybe an alternative clothing store, out they went.
I'm looking at solar for my house, not just to lower/remove electric bills, but to also get some backup power as my house tends to be cut off from the grid at least a couple of times a year. I figure some solar, a small battery farm, and an inverter will see me through most such outages.
So the secret courts will issue broad secret warrants with attached gag orders saying that for National Security purposes all cell phones will be tracked and the tracking information made available to certain government agencies. Achievement Unlocked! Problem Solved!
No - the pyramids are still there, but the contents were cleaned out ages ago. The entire history of humanity shows that we aren't very good at hiding, protecting, or forgetting things that are valuable, beautiful, or otherwise useful to other people. All the pyramids were broken into an looted. Building pyramid tombs were abandoned because they couldn't be protected, and the pharaohs started being buried in underground tombs in the Valley of Kings. Those, too, were rediscovered and looted. Tutankhamen's tomb was such a big deal because it was one of the few was succcessfully lost/forgotten, and thus not raided.
On the contrary, Tutankhamen's tomb was broken into before the modern era, though sealed back up again, and was quite thoroughly raided in the early 20th century, admittedly by archeologists using the best accepted practices of the time. I've heard modern archeologists and Egyptologists complain bitterly at all the lost opportunities because the tomb was discovered before current best practices were standard.
Problem is that there is pretty much no possible way Cisco can put the toothpaste back in the tube. They have no simple way to prove to potential customers that their gear hasn't been hacked or compromised in some way. The actions (real or perceived) of the NSA have basically screwed a number of US companies in overseas markets where security is any sort of a concern.
Basically even the perception that the NSA may have compromised the equipment is enough to keep people from buying Cisco. Of course then the question becomes who do you trust? The Chinese make a lot of gear but they are probably trusted even less than the Americans if anything. Unless the gear is manufactured domestically under supervision it's unclear how you ensure that no one has introduced undesirable code/hardware.
I suspect Cisco's shareholders will insist they move production out of the US, and start doing final assembly of devices locally for their biggest foreign markets. The US will lose more jobs, costs will go up due to inefficiencies, and the NSA will start trying to get into the code (if they're not already.) If this sort of thing goes on, they may stop being a US-based company entirely, and move corporate offices, development, etc off-shore to avoid the stigma.
Come to think of it, I bet it would take less than a hundred nukes aimed at a carefully selected list of choke points in the transport infrastructure to doom everyone in North America to starvation. The same thing goes for Europe and (to some extent) Russia. Even a very limited nuclear war could probably be incredibly lethal if both sides were aiming to kill/incapacitate the other side's population.
Nonsense, all it would take is 4 or 5 EMP (200 - 400 miles up) bursts, each taking out a large chunk of the electrical grid and killing anything with a microprocessor for a radius of 500 to 1000 miles (depends on size of nuke, strength of the Earth's magnetic field, height, and probably stuff still considered Top Secret to avoid civilian panic.) One on each coast of the US, a couple to fill in the gaps and take out Alaska and Hawaii, and the US is done -- no food, no fuel, no electricity, famine virtually guaranteed unless the government is a lot more prepared than it seems to be. And, yes, such EMP bursts are in every first-strike plan, as it's the quickest way to disrupt enemy communications.
Fact is, guns don't do a fraction of the harm of automobiles. Yet we don't see the left calling for banning autos....
To legally use an automobile in most of the US, you need a state-issued license that has training and testing requirements, a state-tracked title to the car, a state-tracked registration for the car, clearly viewable identification tags, and usually safety gear (seatbelt, airbags, crumple zones, etc), insurance and a key. To legally use a gun in most locations, you need a gun and ammo. All these requirements were legislated into existence by "leftist" politicians over the loud protests by the right, usually claiming that they would destroy the automotive industry.
Unlike a nuclear weapon, meteors don't go boom at a planned optimal height to cause damage, and release their energy in stages. The Chelyabinsk meteor, for example, is estimated to have had the equivalent of a 500 kiloton nuke in terms of energy when it first entered. It weighed an estimated 12,000–13,000 metric tonnes and was moving at about 30km/s before it hit atmosphere, but the largest piece recovered was only some 654 kg, and most smaller pieces of the meteor hit the earth at terminal velocity after breaking up some 23km above the surface. Wikipedia says that some ~90 kilotons of energy equivalent was lost as heat as it entered, the rest in a series of 3 explosions as it broke up, the largest initial blast mostly being absorbed by the atmosphere.
Slashdot Mirror
It does feature speculative technology -- specifically atomic bombs "salted" to make their fallout even more deadly and persistent -- that turned out to be even tamer than reality, as the proposed cobalt salting turned out to be less effective and radioactive than the uranium (depleted or natural in early bombs, more modern ones use partially or highly enriched uranium) actually used in the tampers and casing. The scenario, where so many of these bombs had gone off that the entire world was being overcome with lethal fallout, was also highly speculative (even the full release of all bombs in the arsenal wouldn't have that effect), and certainly the Atomic Bomb and it's descendants were the result of science. Both speculative fiction and, in my analysis, science fiction categorizations apply. It's like Crichton's Jurassic Park: clearly science fiction, but marketed as technothriller/mainstream fiction to pull in a larger market share.
And what will happen when someone blocks a truck to steal its contents? First off the thieves are going to need to identify the contents as valuable and resellable on the black market. That implies an inside job, as most trucks don't identify their contents, so an internal audit will probably show which employee is involved. As soon as an object is detected in the road, the truck itself will not just stop, but most likely immediately send and automated 911 call, notify the parent company of an unexpected stop, and start sending out for archive any camera footage of the area if it wasn't already. If the thieves can remove the desired contents without exposing a face or other recognizable feature, load it in their vehicle without it being identified, and escape before the authorities arrive. Admittedly, I'm thinking the less corrupt parts of the first world, in many areas of the world the authorities would be in on the plan, or so corrupt or poorly funded that they just aren't going to respond. Even on a remote area of the US highway system, though, you're talking less than half an hour for all but the most remote areas for response, and in those areas there's now probable cause to stop any vehicle large enough to have taken part in the theft that was seen in the area. For really valuable shipments, cash, gold, jewelry, guns, etc, you'd want an armed guard on board or escort, and of course for anything truly of interest to terrorists you'd definitely want appropriate security, but even for TVs or computers will take a while to move to a new transport. Still, I can see cargo-blocking becoming the new teenage cow-tipping.
True, but remember they're talking real mail letters, not email. In general: it takes 10 emails to have the same impact as one letter, ten letters to have as much impact as one phone call, ten phone calls to have the impact of 1 in-person talk, and 10 in-person-talks to have as much impact as a $10 donation. From there it just scales up with the donation amount.
This is one of the reasons I sometimes turn off ABS and other "traction" systems when driving on snow or ice. My sedan's sensors and algorithms clearly expect wet pavement, or at least some traction, or they don't let the tires turn, which means the car doesn't go if the snow/ice is too slick. Since I grew up driving in New England, I don't have a problem reverting to full manual drive, but I understand why some of the locals here in Virginia just abandon their cars when they stop moving, probably too afraid to turn off the supposed safety features and drive that way. If you've never driven in slippery conditions with the controls off, you probably won't understand how much more control you have in that situation with them off than on.
Bravo, sir, bravo. Your pastiche brought me to literal tears. Pun intended.
Actually, no. It works just fine, you can hot-forge it much like iron (really, I've done it, when its glowing it moves under a hammer much like iron does), machining it requires tungsten carbide tooling but most people use that anyway, and you don't have to worry about heat-treatment, the stuff will be just as hard as mild steel (RC52ish) no matter what you do to it. The real cost is creation: converting titianium dioxide to metallic titanium on a commercial basis is complex, takes a lot of energy, and results in a material that doesn't melt until it gets over 3000F, but must be alloyed (melted and mixed with other elements) to be usable. The cost of the raw material is almost irrelevant -- TiO2 is used in virtually every modern paint (to the extent that it's a standard test for forgery detection on art, unless you're compounding your own paint from linseed oil and powdered minerals, it's probably got titanium dioxide in it).
Oh, it's far worse than that. I wore an xkcd tshirt the other day, one with the "Stand Back, I'm going to try Science" cartoon on it, and was accosted by three different individuals who felt it necessary to make anti-science comments. This was at the Smithsonian air-and-space museum (Udvar-Hazy), so it's not like they were in a science-free zone. Not only do people not know science, a good percentage actively hate it and think it's evil.
It will take the blood of patriots, and a well watered tree of freedom, before this goes away, if ever. No law will deter the unlawful, and our spies ignore laws with impunity, no mirror will every shed light on the truly powerful individuals perverting the system to their favor. And, honestly, unless people's televisions and Internet get shut off, and food becomes scarce enough for hunger to be a concern of the common man, people will just go along with universal surveillance.
Well, if you assume we never reprocess old reactor fuel rods, never exploit breeder reactors, never explore thorium reactors, and never do any more prospecting, he's more or less right. Sadly for him, none of this is true, so we have thousands of years on naturally occurring uranium just from the ocean (contains about 3mg per cubic meter of uranium), a huge number of on-land prospecting claims that have never been investigated, an unknown number of classified resources still undisclosed after the Cold War, and research ongoing into breeders, thorium, and other higher-efficiency nuclear reactors ongoing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... has a good analysis of current beliefs about uranium reserves and extraction.
Unfortunately, because unenumerated rights are unbounded, the assumption is that if Congress passes a law against something, the President ratifies it, and the Supreme Court doesn't strike it down, then that wasn't actually a right, even if the knot of pretzel-logic required to pass Constitutional muster is nigh Gordian.
For real fun, wait until the drones start coming in stealth models. Imagine how destabilizing it will be when nobody knows, for sure, if there’s an assassin drone, or when the big boys get upset, a nuclear-enabled stealth drone overhead. Imagine how the White House would react if they though a stealthed drone was over DC. Imagine Moscow reacting to even a non-nuclear stealthed drone falling onto Red Square.
Because while burger flipping, they guy with an associates degree can apply to more, better jobs and have a higher chance of landing it than without. Because community college isn't and will not be mandatory, unlike elementary and high school, and shows initiative and, assuming he got the degree, dedication and a certain amount of ability. Because with an associates degree, and a decent GPA, most state college systems will ignore bad high school grades and accept the burger flipper when he decides to move on. Because, when all's said and done, if even our burger flippers are getting associates degrees, there will be a wider pool of talent available when jobs do, inevitably, open up, which is better for us, the burger flippers, and our society.
Yep, you need some sort of carbon source to reduce iron ore down to iron, specifically something that will produce carbon monoxide, and it has to be at an elevated temperature or the iron won't reduce. There's no reason, however, why you have to use coal. Charcoal works, and I've done short-stack refining using just magnetite sand, charcoal, and a bit of glass as flux. Substantial amounts iron in India is reduced from ore via natural gas if Wikipedia is to be believed on this subject. On the more exotic and theoretical side, my research on possible refining methods that might work on Mars shows that even carbon dioxide can be cracked down to carbon monoxide using standard catalysts and sunlight, no burning of anything required, and just heat to reduce the iron in the presence of CO.
The direcly linked fukushima article is very low on numbers (do journalists think people are allergic to them or something?), but it links to the actual scientific article.
Sadly, yes, studies have shown that every time you include an equation, mathematics, or scary looking numbers in an article, you loose a percentage of the readers. Editors for popular articles (which Nature, desipte it's prestige as a science journal, is at heart) know this, and edit accordingly.
So, having read the links, it sounds like they want to replace a layer 3 protocol with a layer 4 protocol. This won't work -- you'll still need unique identifiers for source and destination that's machine-translatable for routing, that's aggregatable to avoid routing table bloat, and which interfaces nicely with both layer 2 for transport and layers 4-7 for functionality. Sure, this sounds like a good replacement for the rather awkward DNS lookup and non-intuitive URL syntax, but as a replacement for TCP/IP v4/v6 it is lacking in the necessary functionality.
So, how long do you think it will be before Kessler syndrome finishes the job all these anti-satellite weapons and tests start? As one professor back in college (the class was 'War in the Nuclear Age') pointed out, you could take out all of geosync orbit with a large bag of sand if you got it going in the opposite direction from Earth's spin. LEO and MEO are both crowded enough that we could get a spontaneous Kessler syndrome even if we don't keep blowing the satellites up there into shrapnel. I suppose we can start replacing the critical satellites in inch-thick titanium, but when every launch requires a heavy lift launch vehicle we're going to lose a lot of satellite functionality.
According to rymskviða , Thor dressed as a woman in order to reclaim Mjölnir from the Frost Giants. Perhaps this change is just for a retelling of that tale.
I'm pretty sure removing the arcades back in the 90s and oughties was a deliberate strategy by the Malls to remove the unwanted guests -- teens and tweens. They certainly villianized that demographic in other ways, often enacting policies to discourage that demographic from hanging out in the food court, loitering in the mezzanines, sitting quietly on the benches . . . having an arcade just attracted them like flies to roadkill, so they had to go. Since the demographic was viewed as not having much to spend, particularly at the big-box anchor stores, and what they did mostly going to the arcade, food court, music store, and maybe an alternative clothing store, out they went.
I'm looking at solar for my house, not just to lower/remove electric bills, but to also get some backup power as my house tends to be cut off from the grid at least a couple of times a year. I figure some solar, a small battery farm, and an inverter will see me through most such outages.
So the secret courts will issue broad secret warrants with attached gag orders saying that for National Security purposes all cell phones will be tracked and the tracking information made available to certain government agencies. Achievement Unlocked! Problem Solved!
No - the pyramids are still there, but the contents were cleaned out ages ago. The entire history of humanity shows that we aren't very good at hiding, protecting, or forgetting things that are valuable, beautiful, or otherwise useful to other people. All the pyramids were broken into an looted. Building pyramid tombs were abandoned because they couldn't be protected, and the pharaohs started being buried in underground tombs in the Valley of Kings. Those, too, were rediscovered and looted. Tutankhamen's tomb was such a big deal because it was one of the few was succcessfully lost/forgotten, and thus not raided.
On the contrary, Tutankhamen's tomb was broken into before the modern era, though sealed back up again, and was quite thoroughly raided in the early 20th century, admittedly by archeologists using the best accepted practices of the time. I've heard modern archeologists and Egyptologists complain bitterly at all the lost opportunities because the tomb was discovered before current best practices were standard.
Problem is that there is pretty much no possible way Cisco can put the toothpaste back in the tube. They have no simple way to prove to potential customers that their gear hasn't been hacked or compromised in some way. The actions (real or perceived) of the NSA have basically screwed a number of US companies in overseas markets where security is any sort of a concern.
Basically even the perception that the NSA may have compromised the equipment is enough to keep people from buying Cisco. Of course then the question becomes who do you trust? The Chinese make a lot of gear but they are probably trusted even less than the Americans if anything. Unless the gear is manufactured domestically under supervision it's unclear how you ensure that no one has introduced undesirable code/hardware.
I suspect Cisco's shareholders will insist they move production out of the US, and start doing final assembly of devices locally for their biggest foreign markets. The US will lose more jobs, costs will go up due to inefficiencies, and the NSA will start trying to get into the code (if they're not already.) If this sort of thing goes on, they may stop being a US-based company entirely, and move corporate offices, development, etc off-shore to avoid the stigma.
Come to think of it, I bet it would take less than a hundred nukes aimed at a carefully selected list of choke points in the transport infrastructure to doom everyone in North America to starvation. The same thing goes for Europe and (to some extent) Russia. Even a very limited nuclear war could probably be incredibly lethal if both sides were aiming to kill/incapacitate the other side's population.
Nonsense, all it would take is 4 or 5 EMP (200 - 400 miles up) bursts, each taking out a large chunk of the electrical grid and killing anything with a microprocessor for a radius of 500 to 1000 miles (depends on size of nuke, strength of the Earth's magnetic field, height, and probably stuff still considered Top Secret to avoid civilian panic.) One on each coast of the US, a couple to fill in the gaps and take out Alaska and Hawaii, and the US is done -- no food, no fuel, no electricity, famine virtually guaranteed unless the government is a lot more prepared than it seems to be. And, yes, such EMP bursts are in every first-strike plan, as it's the quickest way to disrupt enemy communications.
Fact is, guns don't do a fraction of the harm of automobiles. Yet we don't see the left calling for banning autos....
To legally use an automobile in most of the US, you need a state-issued license that has training and testing requirements, a state-tracked title to the car, a state-tracked registration for the car, clearly viewable identification tags, and usually safety gear (seatbelt, airbags, crumple zones, etc), insurance and a key. To legally use a gun in most locations, you need a gun and ammo. All these requirements were legislated into existence by "leftist" politicians over the loud protests by the right, usually claiming that they would destroy the automotive industry.
Unlike a nuclear weapon, meteors don't go boom at a planned optimal height to cause damage, and release their energy in stages. The Chelyabinsk meteor, for example, is estimated to have had the equivalent of a 500 kiloton nuke in terms of energy when it first entered. It weighed an estimated 12,000–13,000 metric tonnes and was moving at about 30km/s before it hit atmosphere, but the largest piece recovered was only some 654 kg, and most smaller pieces of the meteor hit the earth at terminal velocity after breaking up some 23km above the surface. Wikipedia says that some ~90 kilotons of energy equivalent was lost as heat as it entered, the rest in a series of 3 explosions as it broke up, the largest initial blast mostly being absorbed by the atmosphere.