Power to maintain 1 g is dependent on the mass of the ship in its own frame of reference; the mass gained by the ship in outside frames doesn't slow it down, doesn't affect the physics of the thrust. The relativistic mass gained by the ship is real, but is perceived by the crew only as it affects their interactions with objects outside their frame of reference. The sandwich in the mess may mass a small mountain on earth, but for the FOR of the ship it's just a sandwich. If that sandwich hits an asteroid, well, then that mass will count as a mountain. The mass, just to be more didactic, is proportionate to the kinetic energy of the ship -- the energy of acceleration is converted to mass, tho the effect isn't pronounced until you are crowding c. Another weird fact: the ship flattens out, squishes, if it could be seen by an outside observer. Also not noticeable in the FOR of the ship.
If the ship is carrying its own fuel, and is consuming it as it accelerates, actually the power needed to accelerate at 1 g drops as the ship grows lighter.
The energy required to accelerate at 1 g might increase if the interstellar vacuum isn't all that empty. Colliding with a 186,000 mile tall column of atoms every second could be considered drag, not to mention a ship killer. That's a lot of friction, a cosmic lot of friction, and it has to be diverted or absorbed somehow.
1. Zero point energy, somehow employed as a drive. 2. Extrauniversal energy, employed as a drive. 3. Extradimensional energy, from this universe, employed as a drive. 4. Fusion engine ramjet with hydrogen scoops, most of the hydrogen fuel gathered on the way. 5. Photon rocket (covert mass to energy, direct it as thrust at speed c, the highest specific impulse possible). The only one we actually could build, so far, that has the fuel capacity to accelerate at 1 g for a year, then decelerate for a year at 1 g. And the ship would start out as mostly fuel, even so.
Yes, I know. I wrote an extensive post on the effects of accelerating to speed c minus epsilon a few months back, as well as the relativistic effects of faster-than-light speeds and mass.
You may accelerate continuously at 1 g forever and never reach c, yes. More mass, more kinetic energy, more relative time dilation. Really long accelerations would be useful for, say, intergalactic travel where you'd want to knock down the travel time of hundreds of millions of years to a few years ship time, as duration is perceived by the crew.
I was just typing it up fast. Few people understand star travel mechanics, so I wasn't going for textbook completeness. I, having read my Time for the Stars and Tau Zero at an impressionable age, had the subject spot welded into my brain.
Tiny errors aiming at 4 light years out will give you a big miss on the other end. And we're talking tiny. At speed c minus a whisker of your choice, the stars fore shift violet and the field of view distorts to a point -- the stars aft likewise shift red and distort to a point. And the sensors are frying in high energy x-rays. The problem, you see, isn't aiming when you are accelerating. It's the *deceleration* that's the navigation problem. You spend a year running up to c, then flip tail-to-fore and decelerate at 1 g for a year. For that, you need to know exactly where your're pointing, exactly know your speed relative to the destination. If you are off in your aim, you can miss by light-months. If you can't gauge speed, you can stop light-months short or past your destination. The problem lessens as you slow down, but the bulk of the errors would occur near the midpoint of the journey.
Except that all those fears are ungrounded. Crime per capita is way down. People are being terrified because it sells commercials for news programs and gets prosecutors elected to office. Kids of the last generation grew up convinced that black junkie killers were haunting their lives, about to jump out of their closets and force them to use crack. Legions of pedo monsters haunt the internet, except that they don't. America is armed to the teeth, waiting for the lower classes to revolt and take their stuff and attack their women. Look at what the cops did on the bridge to Gretna in New Orleans when the city tried to leave after Katrina. All the bullets flying into downtown NOLA, the gunfire the pants-shitting reporters were so afraid of, were coming from the cops on the bridge firing over the heads of people because they were convinced the criminal lower classes were better dead than coming into their town.
But we are the safest people in the history of the planet. What we are also is the most cowardly. And ignorant of both facts.
Not just them. It's just a physical fact. Acclerate for 1 G for a year and you reach speed c. How one does that is another matter; how to shield yourself from hitting a "penny" at that speed and turning into plasma is another. Light, infrared and radio waves hit head-on would violet-shift into x-rays and cosmic rays, so you have to shield for that as well. And then there's the matter of navigating when you can't see out.
That's Republican logic. Just ignore the facts and manufacture a reality. Deny and assert. Repeat until reporters' heads explode.
The man just said that the evidence accepted by the court was false. No matter what the judge said in small claims court, he was not guilty of posting the web pages in question. The liar in contention here, tho, is a douchebag. Since justice has, is, and will be for sale to the highest bidder in the social compact we accept, the defendant can never win.
Always the same: the religionists decry any intellectual anathema as "hate" or "bashing", then proceed to hate and bash our skulls in.
Religion is the only mind game we play that demands that no one, NO ONE debates the central tenets, or ELSE. This would be because without that special, violent, protection, they would rapidly shrivel and die, as their kids grew up learning that the story about how a man was given a the middle east because he beat a fairy in a wrestling contest was, let's say, not real. They want no challenges, because deep in their little baseball bat-carrying souls, they know that they believe in nonsense. They are always a hair's width away from realizing that they are worshiping meteorites, zombie fishermen, multi-armed statues, and some tablets that some horny nineteenth century con artist claimed to have seen that told him to have as many 16 year old wives as he could carry away. Let's not even start on L. Ron Hubbard, the man who conned himself...
There's plenty wrong with those people. Their "science" is a book of collected stone and bronze age fiction of a people who claimed they were given a piece of land in the middle east because their ancestor won a wrestling match with a fairy. They are delusional, and given that they are trained in delusion, easily led into insane wars. Witness Iraq. A war against Satan (Islam) in their view. They also are a danger because they impede environmental disaster mitigation, because they believe a man in a robe is coming to destroy the world any year now, real soon, and, therefore, this world doesn't matter. These people are dangerous to your health and the survival of any progeny you may fancy making. They don't deserve respect, they deserve to be challenged and marginalized, removed from the decision making process that we are now engaging in to save the world, to put it bluntly. Given their head, they will kill us all.
whoa whoa whoa -- Pangaea? They are saying that the continents drifted apart from Pangaea in the last six thousand years! The earth of Genesis had one continent, Pangaea! This is getting better and better.
I'm more worried about the institution of a "you-can't-leave" list, which was floating around, very quietly, on the margins of the US government last fall. If we wait too long, anyone who pisses off the "Mayberry Machiavellis" may be barred from leaving the US. Before you laugh, remember the kidnapped foreign nationals, the torture camps, the looting of our treasury, the new construction of detention camps on US soil by Halliburton right this moment. There is no limit once you declare human rights to be a quaint relic of a past, once you declare that the world in in a Forever War against a cloudy and indistinct omnipresent evil (linked to Satan if you listen to Bush's religious base).
The US once led the world in industrial output. Then we decided that we would move industry overseas, and our primary output would be capital manipulation. Now, we've decided that we'll neither make things or manipulate capital, but instead sue people who actually make things, move capital, invent things, or make entertainment. Parasites on the world.
The next step for the top 5 percenters is to just sit in a chair and demand people give them stuff because they deserve it for being them. What do we need them for? Disband their corporations for national security reasons. No further reason is necessary once you invoke that, and really, it's true. These pigs are a threat to national and world security. They are choking human progress. They are the highwaymen with nice two thousand dollar suits. We don't need them.
And cars are slated to go to 42 volts soon, tho why I don't know because the LED headlights won't really need it.
So the trick would be to keep the load small, so that you don't have to run a lot of current. A few dozen watts, maybe? Just enough to see by. Run a radio. Stuff you need when the power goes out in a storm.
One could space several batteries through the house, to keep the runs from power pack to the appliances short. And any number of other tricks, sure. But as you say, there is a voltage drop.
Maybe that breakthrough in deducing the true nature of superconductors announced last week will lead to room temp lossless wiring, but yeah, that's something for another decade. Thanks to all.
I don't think two year olds listen to much television. However, if a two year old says "fuck", I would tell the camera to slowly pan to the parents. And how exactly did this become a discussion of the corruption of babies? I thought it was about the dissolution of the moral fiber of Our Children Whom We Must Protect who are at least able to speak. This is a bloody waste of time. Less than two years until we wipe these regulatory agencies clean of the Christianists and put some industry, I dunno, regulators in office.
Besides which, fuck and shit and all those words have been common English usage for over a thousand years. It's only been about a century and half since the Victorians decided legs were limbs and people never defecated. Enough. I'm tired of toeing Victoria's line. The bitch is dead, we don't have to be afraid anymore. The words only have power because hysteric lexiphobes insist that they do. And the biggest "moralists" always turn out to be the biggest wankers anyway, so I really don't care what the Guardians of Nice Mannerisms have to say anyway. They'll be in the docket for child molestation soon enough.
Re:Why we stayed clear of the GPL
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: 1
A lot of talk about the law, but none about the ethics. Programmers understand the purpose of the various licenses, and certainly understand that the source and the hardware are to be accessible by the user if they use the GPLed software. It's not a question of law, but of ethics. The law can be twisted into a moebius strip, but the ethical question is easily answered. To use the software is to agree to let it be freely modified by the user. The terms differ from license to license, but there is no ambiguity about the intent of the free software movement.
Re:Can someone please explain to me...
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: 1
RMS wants freedom for the user. Period. If they don't want to play, they can make their own software. We built this sandbox for everyone. If they don't like freedom for their users, they are free to leave. No one is forcing them to use the software. They used it because it was free as in beer, but don't like the free as in speech aspect. It's a package deal. If they use the GPLed software, the users get to modify the software. Repeat point with hammer.
The entire point of using open sourced software is that the user has access to the code. To use the GPLed software, freely, and then lock up the code is unethical. And to then, stunningly, claim that the terms of the agreement violates the manufacturer's freedom is just playing games with words. The manufacturer used free software and then unfreed it, then claims that their freedom is violated if they are held to the agreement they made. It's either free to access or it is not. They are more than free to develop their own operating system and software to replace the GPLed stuff. Or they can license it from Microsoft, which I can only think would be more than happy to help out their competitor.
Or, we could stop starving the Corps of Engineers for funds and just build the damned levees properly. Bring in the Dutch to teach them how. Bush's people gave them less than half of what they wanted just to spot repair the walls and pumps. And that STILL is only for cat 3 storms. Of course, what we didn't have was flooding per se; we had a storm surge up a manmade channel dredged for shipping that took out the levees like the wrath of God. It's like the Republicans of Louisiana want New Orleans to die. And having been in Louisiana, I know for a fact how much they hate that Yankee liberal northern African American coddling big city. They want that town DEAD, or at least Caucasian and Republican. And considering the reception the politicians got from the old Congress, those good ol' boys pretty much told them to go fuck themselves and die, on the record. New Orleans was leveed up decades ago. What actually caused the flooding was the dredging of channels and draining of wetlands south of NOLA to provide shipping lanes for oil tankers and related equipment. And of course, the fact that since we "fixed" the Mississipi since the 1870's, silt no longer flows downriver to build up the delta, so the Gulf keeps creeping closer and closer. NOLA didn't do this to itself, it was done to it to get oil. And let's not forget: Louisiana gets no -- NO -- share of the oil revenue from the drilling in it's own waters. It sucks up all the costs and garners none of the profits, unlike Texas. Why? Crooked oil companies bought some laws. Louisiana should be rich -- yet is starving by being cheated. And who cares about the legendary corruption. Just give the damned revenues to the Corps of Engineers and their school systems, at least.
We spend over a billion a day in Iraq and Afghanistan. We borrow three billion a day so we don't have to pay taxes this year. New Orleans needs maybe three billion to waterproof itself, Louisiana needs tens of billions to rebuild all the wetlands that were and are being destroyed, destruction that caused the Gulf to come say hi to the city. A few days of spending to repair decades of intentional neglect. The lack of interest is criminal. If this had been Galena or Highland Park in Illinois there would have been billions granted to fix the river. The cause of the neglect is rich and not-so rich white people just telling the poor to go to hell.
Tiny LED light powered by very small battery powered by a pretty small solar cell built into the door should highlight the keyhole in the dark nicely. And last a damned long time.
12 volt wiring system paralleling the 120 volt
on
Pimping Out a New House
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'd say the best add-on is a 12 volt wiring system running through the house, with wall outlets at strategic points. Not replacing the 120 volt service, but adding the option as a parallel system.
Why? 12 volts is the standard for solar powered photovoltaic lighting systems. With LEDs coming down in price and cranking up the lumens, a solar cell system with a 12 volt battery system can light your home at least enough to see by -- and it would be free, free, free as long as the sun shines. Hell, you can use Sears DieHards as your battery bank. Considering the efficiency of LED's maybe just one, if all you're doing is keylighting. Consider it a bulletproof backup to the grid.
Of course, PCs run on 12 volt power supplies. I don't know how that would work out, but just mentioning it. There are 12 volt laptop adapters out there. And I'd think it would be child's play to adapt the outlets to USB power plugs, stepping them down to 5 volts. The painful part is that there are so damned many 12 volt plugs to choose from. The simplest is the cigarette lighter plug (actually sized for a cigar, if you ever noticed).
There are a lot of car accessories that run on 12 volts systems, and a lot of camping gear as well.
Best part is that it's difficult to be electrocuted with a 12 volts and low amps.
The "intelligence" failure was in the White House and it's coterie of civilian hit men sent to the Pentagon and the CIA. They simply chose crap, dismissed data they were told was garbage and ignored contrary facts presented to them. Analysts were quitting on principle; I remember them being interviewed in 1992. The PNACers used a hack, Tenet, to put a stamp on their fabricated package of dog poo. Then, after the lies hit the fan, they BLAMED THE INTEL THEY WERE TOLD WAS CRAP. Retch and repeat. And since the Niger documents were a known forgery even then, when do we ask the question: who commissioned the forgeries?
How many seconds until some company sells webshooter cannon to the police to quell all those dangerous peace protesters? I'm guessing two years of seconds.
The purpose of every new technology, the foremost purpose, is to shut up all those people who keep pointing out how stupid the majority are.
Slashdot Mirror
businesses are creatures of the government, and are subject to laws made by the government.
Power to maintain 1 g is dependent on the mass of the ship in its own frame of reference; the mass gained by the ship in outside frames doesn't slow it down, doesn't affect the physics of the thrust. The relativistic mass gained by the ship is real, but is perceived by the crew only as it affects their interactions with objects outside their frame of reference. The sandwich in the mess may mass a small mountain on earth, but for the FOR of the ship it's just a sandwich. If that sandwich hits an asteroid, well, then that mass will count as a mountain. The mass, just to be more didactic, is proportionate to the kinetic energy of the ship -- the energy of acceleration is converted to mass, tho the effect isn't pronounced until you are crowding c. Another weird fact: the ship flattens out, squishes, if it could be seen by an outside observer. Also not noticeable in the FOR of the ship.
If the ship is carrying its own fuel, and is consuming it as it accelerates, actually the power needed to accelerate at 1 g drops as the ship grows lighter.
The energy required to accelerate at 1 g might increase if the interstellar vacuum isn't all that empty. Colliding with a 186,000 mile tall column of atoms every second could be considered drag, not to mention a ship killer. That's a lot of friction, a cosmic lot of friction, and it has to be diverted or absorbed somehow.
1. Zero point energy, somehow employed as a drive.
2. Extrauniversal energy, employed as a drive.
3. Extradimensional energy, from this universe, employed as a drive.
4. Fusion engine ramjet with hydrogen scoops, most of the hydrogen fuel gathered on the way.
5. Photon rocket (covert mass to energy, direct it as thrust at speed c, the highest specific impulse possible). The only one we actually could build, so far, that has the fuel capacity to accelerate at 1 g for a year, then decelerate for a year at 1 g. And the ship would start out as mostly fuel, even so.
Yes, I know. I wrote an extensive post on the effects of accelerating to speed c minus epsilon a few months back, as well as the relativistic effects of faster-than-light speeds and mass.
You may accelerate continuously at 1 g forever and never reach c, yes. More mass, more kinetic energy, more relative time dilation. Really long accelerations would be useful for, say, intergalactic travel where you'd want to knock down the travel time of hundreds of millions of years to a few years ship time, as duration is perceived by the crew.
I was just typing it up fast. Few people understand star travel mechanics, so I wasn't going for textbook completeness. I, having read my Time for the Stars and Tau Zero at an impressionable age, had the subject spot welded into my brain.
Tiny errors aiming at 4 light years out will give you a big miss on the other end. And we're talking tiny. At speed c minus a whisker of your choice, the stars fore shift violet and the field of view distorts to a point -- the stars aft likewise shift red and distort to a point. And the sensors are frying in high energy x-rays. The problem, you see, isn't aiming when you are accelerating. It's the *deceleration* that's the navigation problem. You spend a year running up to c, then flip tail-to-fore and decelerate at 1 g for a year. For that, you need to know exactly where your're pointing, exactly know your speed relative to the destination. If you are off in your aim, you can miss by light-months. If you can't gauge speed, you can stop light-months short or past your destination. The problem lessens as you slow down, but the bulk of the errors would occur near the midpoint of the journey.
Except that all those fears are ungrounded. Crime per capita is way down. People are being terrified because it sells commercials for news programs and gets prosecutors elected to office. Kids of the last generation grew up convinced that black junkie killers were haunting their lives, about to jump out of their closets and force them to use crack. Legions of pedo monsters haunt the internet, except that they don't. America is armed to the teeth, waiting for the lower classes to revolt and take their stuff and attack their women. Look at what the cops did on the bridge to Gretna in New Orleans when the city tried to leave after Katrina. All the bullets flying into downtown NOLA, the gunfire the pants-shitting reporters were so afraid of, were coming from the cops on the bridge firing over the heads of people because they were convinced the criminal lower classes were better dead than coming into their town.
But we are the safest people in the history of the planet. What we are also is the most cowardly. And ignorant of both facts.
Not just them. It's just a physical fact. Acclerate for 1 G for a year and you reach speed c. How one does that is another matter; how to shield yourself from hitting a "penny" at that speed and turning into plasma is another. Light, infrared and radio waves hit head-on would violet-shift into x-rays and cosmic rays, so you have to shield for that as well. And then there's the matter of navigating when you can't see out.
That's Republican logic. Just ignore the facts and manufacture a reality. Deny and assert. Repeat until reporters' heads explode.
The man just said that the evidence accepted by the court was false. No matter what the judge said in small claims court, he was not guilty of posting the web pages in question. The liar in contention here, tho, is a douchebag. Since justice has, is, and will be for sale to the highest bidder in the social compact we accept, the defendant can never win.
Always the same: the religionists decry any intellectual anathema as "hate" or "bashing", then proceed to hate and bash our skulls in.
Religion is the only mind game we play that demands that no one, NO ONE debates the central tenets, or ELSE. This would be because without that special, violent, protection, they would rapidly shrivel and die, as their kids grew up learning that the story about how a man was given a the middle east because he beat a fairy in a wrestling contest was, let's say, not real. They want no challenges, because deep in their little baseball bat-carrying souls, they know that they believe in nonsense. They are always a hair's width away from realizing that they are worshiping meteorites, zombie fishermen, multi-armed statues, and some tablets that some horny nineteenth century con artist claimed to have seen that told him to have as many 16 year old wives as he could carry away. Let's not even start on L. Ron Hubbard, the man who conned himself...
There's plenty wrong with those people. Their "science" is a book of collected stone and bronze age fiction of a people who claimed they were given a piece of land in the middle east because their ancestor won a wrestling match with a fairy. They are delusional, and given that they are trained in delusion, easily led into insane wars. Witness Iraq. A war against Satan (Islam) in their view. They also are a danger because they impede environmental disaster mitigation, because they believe a man in a robe is coming to destroy the world any year now, real soon, and, therefore, this world doesn't matter. These people are dangerous to your health and the survival of any progeny you may fancy making. They don't deserve respect, they deserve to be challenged and marginalized, removed from the decision making process that we are now engaging in to save the world, to put it bluntly. Given their head, they will kill us all.
whoa whoa whoa -- Pangaea? They are saying that the continents drifted apart from Pangaea in the last six thousand years! The earth of Genesis had one continent, Pangaea! This is getting better and better.
I'm more worried about the institution of a "you-can't-leave" list, which was floating around, very quietly, on the margins of the US government last fall. If we wait too long, anyone who pisses off the "Mayberry Machiavellis" may be barred from leaving the US. Before you laugh, remember the kidnapped foreign nationals, the torture camps, the looting of our treasury, the new construction of detention camps on US soil by Halliburton right this moment. There is no limit once you declare human rights to be a quaint relic of a past, once you declare that the world in in a Forever War against a cloudy and indistinct omnipresent evil (linked to Satan if you listen to Bush's religious base).
The US once led the world in industrial output.
Then we decided that we would move industry overseas, and our primary output would be capital manipulation.
Now, we've decided that we'll neither make things or manipulate capital, but instead sue people who actually make things, move capital, invent things, or make entertainment. Parasites on the world.
The next step for the top 5 percenters is to just sit in a chair and demand people give them stuff because they deserve it for being them. What do we need them for? Disband their corporations for national security reasons. No further reason is necessary once you invoke that, and really, it's true. These pigs are a threat to national and world security. They are choking human progress. They are the highwaymen with nice two thousand dollar suits. We don't need them.
And cars are slated to go to 42 volts soon, tho why I don't know because the LED headlights won't really need it.
So the trick would be to keep the load small, so that you don't have to run a lot of current. A few dozen watts, maybe? Just enough to see by. Run a radio. Stuff you need when the power goes out in a storm.
One could space several batteries through the house, to keep the runs from power pack to the appliances short. And any number of other tricks, sure. But as you say, there is a voltage drop.
Maybe that breakthrough in deducing the true nature of superconductors announced last week will lead to room temp lossless wiring, but yeah, that's something for another decade. Thanks to all.
I don't think two year olds listen to much television. However, if a two year old says "fuck", I would tell the camera to slowly pan to the parents. And how exactly did this become a discussion of the corruption of babies? I thought it was about the dissolution of the moral fiber of Our Children Whom We Must Protect who are at least able to speak. This is a bloody waste of time. Less than two years until we wipe these regulatory agencies clean of the Christianists and put some industry, I dunno, regulators in office.
Besides which, fuck and shit and all those words have been common English usage for over a thousand years. It's only been about a century and half since the Victorians decided legs were limbs and people never defecated. Enough. I'm tired of toeing Victoria's line. The bitch is dead, we don't have to be afraid anymore. The words only have power because hysteric lexiphobes insist that they do. And the biggest "moralists" always turn out to be the biggest wankers anyway, so I really don't care what the Guardians of Nice Mannerisms have to say anyway. They'll be in the docket for child molestation soon enough.
A lot of talk about the law, but none about the ethics. Programmers understand the purpose of the various licenses, and certainly understand that the source and the hardware are to be accessible by the user if they use the GPLed software. It's not a question of law, but of ethics. The law can be twisted into a moebius strip, but the ethical question is easily answered. To use the software is to agree to let it be freely modified by the user. The terms differ from license to license, but there is no ambiguity about the intent of the free software movement.
RMS wants freedom for the user. Period. If they don't want to play, they can make their own software. We built this sandbox for everyone. If they don't like freedom for their users, they are free to leave. No one is forcing them to use the software. They used it because it was free as in beer, but don't like the free as in speech aspect. It's a package deal. If they use the GPLed software, the users get to modify the software. Repeat point with hammer.
Even more important than the law is the ethics.
The entire point of using open sourced software is that the user has access to the code. To use the GPLed software, freely, and then lock up the code is unethical. And to then, stunningly, claim that the terms of the agreement violates the manufacturer's freedom is just playing games with words. The manufacturer used free software and then unfreed it, then claims that their freedom is violated if they are held to the agreement they made. It's either free to access or it is not. They are more than free to develop their own operating system and software to replace the GPLed stuff. Or they can license it from Microsoft, which I can only think would be more than happy to help out their competitor.
black is white, up is down...
Install a standing urinal for him.
Or, we could stop starving the Corps of Engineers for funds and just build the damned levees properly. Bring in the Dutch to teach them how. Bush's people gave them less than half of what they wanted just to spot repair the walls and pumps. And that STILL is only for cat 3 storms. Of course, what we didn't have was flooding per se; we had a storm surge up a manmade channel dredged for shipping that took out the levees like the wrath of God. It's like the Republicans of Louisiana want New Orleans to die. And having been in Louisiana, I know for a fact how much they hate that Yankee liberal northern African American coddling big city. They want that town DEAD, or at least Caucasian and Republican. And considering the reception the politicians got from the old Congress, those good ol' boys pretty much told them to go fuck themselves and die, on the record. New Orleans was leveed up decades ago. What actually caused the flooding was the dredging of channels and draining of wetlands south of NOLA to provide shipping lanes for oil tankers and related equipment. And of course, the fact that since we "fixed" the Mississipi since the 1870's, silt no longer flows downriver to build up the delta, so the Gulf keeps creeping closer and closer. NOLA didn't do this to itself, it was done to it to get oil. And let's not forget: Louisiana gets no -- NO -- share of the oil revenue from the drilling in it's own waters. It sucks up all the costs and garners none of the profits, unlike Texas. Why? Crooked oil companies bought some laws. Louisiana should be rich -- yet is starving by being cheated. And who cares about the legendary corruption. Just give the damned revenues to the Corps of Engineers and their school systems, at least.
We spend over a billion a day in Iraq and Afghanistan. We borrow three billion a day so we don't have to pay taxes this year. New Orleans needs maybe three billion to waterproof itself, Louisiana needs tens of billions to rebuild all the wetlands that were and are being destroyed, destruction that caused the Gulf to come say hi to the city. A few days of spending to repair decades of intentional neglect. The lack of interest is criminal. If this had been Galena or Highland Park in Illinois there would have been billions granted to fix the river. The cause of the neglect is rich and not-so rich white people just telling the poor to go to hell.
Tiny LED light powered by very small battery powered by a pretty small solar cell built into the door should highlight the keyhole in the dark nicely. And last a damned long time.
I'd say the best add-on is a 12 volt wiring system running through the house, with wall outlets at strategic points. Not replacing the 120 volt service, but adding the option as a parallel system.
Why? 12 volts is the standard for solar powered photovoltaic lighting systems. With LEDs coming down in price and cranking up the lumens, a solar cell system with a 12 volt battery system can light your home at least enough to see by -- and it would be free, free, free as long as the sun shines. Hell, you can use Sears DieHards as your battery bank. Considering the efficiency of LED's maybe just one, if all you're doing is keylighting. Consider it a bulletproof backup to the grid.
Of course, PCs run on 12 volt power supplies. I don't know how that would work out, but just mentioning it. There are 12 volt laptop adapters out there. And I'd think it would be child's play to adapt the outlets to USB power plugs, stepping them down to 5 volts. The painful part is that there are so damned many 12 volt plugs to choose from. The simplest is the cigarette lighter plug (actually sized for a cigar, if you ever noticed).
There are a lot of car accessories that run on 12 volts systems, and a lot of camping gear as well.
Best part is that it's difficult to be electrocuted with a 12 volts and low amps.
The "intelligence" failure was in the White House and it's coterie of civilian hit men sent to the Pentagon and the CIA. They simply chose crap, dismissed data they were told was garbage and ignored contrary facts presented to them. Analysts were quitting on principle; I remember them being interviewed in 1992. The PNACers used a hack, Tenet, to put a stamp on their fabricated package of dog poo. Then, after the lies hit the fan, they BLAMED THE INTEL THEY WERE TOLD WAS CRAP. Retch and repeat. And since the Niger documents were a known forgery even then, when do we ask the question: who commissioned the forgeries?
How many seconds until some company sells webshooter cannon to the police to quell all those dangerous peace protesters? I'm guessing two years of seconds.
The purpose of every new technology, the foremost purpose, is to shut up all those people who keep pointing out how stupid the majority are.