Damn skippy. If they are going to do this, they need to start -- start -- 3 to 5 years ahead by requiring ALL small motors to be built so that they can run on ethanol. And bear in mind that there are other problems with ethanol-laced fuel, the biggest one to my own experience being that it sucks water right out of the air and into your fuel tank. Alcohol is hydrophilic. Gasoline is hydrophobic. Put them together and you get the worst of both worlds -- a gas tank that builds up water in the bottom just sitting there in normally humid air.
Then there are the various parts in small motors that dissolve in ethanol.
Could this all be fixed? Sure, I imagine so. Not so sure about how the water issue can be fixed, but at least the engines can be designed not to break if you use ethanol either for timing reasons or because your fuel system turns into sludge while it operates. But they're not. So I'm left having to pay for no-E gasoline at a premium price from one of the few stations that carry it just to mow the lawn, run my chainsaw, run my boat, etc. This isn't just about cars.
You are right, unless the voter can visually verify THE ACTUAL PAPER that gets stored, the system can be hacked. And you are absolutely right that N boxes per state if not per precinct should be RANDOMLY (using e.g. actual dice, not electronic random number generators that could be tampered with) selected for quality control, opened, and checked for accuracy to within some very small tolerance. In the case where users are TOLD that their votes are not valid and they have the instant opportunity to correct to obtain a valid vote and then check it, tampering would involve tampering with the ballot box itself AND matching tampering with the machine, and that's a problem we always have, presumably controlled by honest and bipartisan representation in the polling officials.
I'd suggest not actually putting the paper in the hands of the voter, but letting them see it inside a glass screen right before it either spits it out or deposits it in the box, where they can SEE it go into the box, or do it over if it isn't valid or they accidentally voted for the wrong person somewhere.
I replied above, or I'd mod you up. I completely agree. Paper trail, consistent right down to the fingerprints of the voter (should it come to it) on the paper form is not orthogonal to electronic counting. I'd even throw in a REQUIREMENT that actual dice be used to select a random sample of machines from each state to be opened and audited whether or not there is any evidence of tampering. ANY machines that give the wrong total outside of very, very narrow tolerances (determined by the empirical study of ballots that are incorrectly filled in etc) should trigger a statewide, or at least precinct-wide audit.
This isn't about this election, by the way. It is about "elections". I honestly believe that the polling officials at most polls in America are honest and patriotic and take their job as the guardians of democracy very seriously. No American who values free and honest elections should oppose ensuring that the system of voting itself is difficult to tamper with and self-auditing. Penalties for gaming the system should be extremely severe, and any court-admissible evidence that a candidate or party has actively participated in suborning the process should be grounds for overturning the election and forcing either a do-over, this time with the open door closed, or if the candidate is involved and a court so determines, both loss of the election EVEN IF THEY WON and felony jail time so that they can never run for public office again.
Please. You can audit the software, and the networks, and the process of preparation. The problem is that software audits have ALREADY demonstrated that the machines can be hacked. There may well be direct evidence that they HAVE been hacked if one audits their internal firmware, and this could easily be done and wouldn't even be that expensive.
If one finds even a single machine that has been hacked, of course, chaos ensues. The founding fathers never anticipated this. The only fair thing to do would be to go back to the precincts and either hold an open re-vote or limit a re-vote to people who actually voted in the original, this time with paper ballots and a crowd of poll-watchers, but I don't think the constitution has any provision for this; at best the courts would have to order it in the absence of law or precedent. And "fair" isn't the standard "prescribed in the constitution" is.
But if there were clear evidence of tampering in these states -- really clear evidence -- if Republicans challenged both the clear evidence that Clinton won the popular election by a solid margin AND the clear evidence that the election in key "battleground" states was tampered with in favor of Trump (possibly with evidence of who did the tampering) then they'd be well advised to either concede the election in the electoral college (in exchange for keeping Trump actually out of jail) or at the very least, replace Trump with somebody centrist, that is to say NOT with Mike Pence. Maybe McCain. Even Ryan, although it isn't clear how centrist he really is. Or one of Trump's primary opponents that the Dems could live with. Otherwise they would face the mother of all backlashes in the next elections, forever.
Richer precincts are more likely to have e-voting machines. Richer precincts are also more likely to lean Republican. Therefore, precincts that have e-voting machines are more lean Republican.
It's odd that you would say this, given the almost perfect polarization between urban, educated, rich precincts that almost without exception voted for Clinton and the rural, comparatively poor, precincts that voted for Trump. It is also something that is easily controlled for. The problem is that they compared counties with SIMILAR populations and the ones with voting machines produced a 7% surplus for Trump. Fairly consistently. This is not only not expected, it is (given a consistent pattern over many such counties and precincts) almost impossible, statistically. Yes, correlation is not causality, but at some point the p-value of the null hypothesis of an unrigged election goes to zero, independent of glib explanations like this one.
Note well that the issue isn't that Trump won counties. It is that when one compares counties that are side by side and demographically similar, Trump won by an average of a 7% margin HIGHER only in those counties that used electronic voting machines. 7% is, frankly, an enormous factor given the large populations involved. But that isn't the problem. It is the p-factor. What is the probability that this PATTERN of events is due to random chance variations?
Here it is a no-brainer. The p-value for the null hypothesis "The election was fair" is basically zero, if there is a 7% marginal difference between electronic and non-electronic voting that is almost entirely biased in one direction. You don't even have to do a computation -- p has many zeros before the first 1, especially if the pattern persists over three different states, even more so if they are the CRITICAL states, even more so if they are states where polling before the election consistently got an entirely different result that would almost perfectly be explained by the 7% surplus.
What this is really saying is that there is almost no STATISTICAL doubt that the election was tampered with on a grand scale. The only remaining questions are: Who are the perpetrators (I personally doubt the RNC who honestly wouldn't dare, but somebody in Trump's campaign, a group of Trump-supporting hackers, or the Russians are all plausible alternatives, with IMO the Russians being way, way at the head of the line) and Did they leave behind any hard evidence of the exploits? It is going to be difficult to sell a statistical argument, no matter how compelling, to a population that doesn't even know what a p-value is, but any hard evidence at all of an exploit of even one machine would be enough to create constitutional chaos. Any evidence that tied the exploit to (fill in the blank) some specific group would lead to an overturn of the election, maybe even the election(s) (down into the Senate and House and state offices). Any evidence that ties in either the Russians or anyone at all in Trump's campaign will spark a large scale congressional investigation and, quite possibly, prosecution for treason of all involve in the one case, and a SERIOUS, GLOBAL escalation of tension in the other. You almost have to hope that it is an anonymous group just because of the danger to the world if it is the Russians and the damage to the country if it is any Republicans in or outside of Trump's campaign.
At the very least, the congressional investigation will open up Trump's true financial situation and start looking for hard evidence that he is controlled, financially or otherwise, by the Russians. For example, do they have evidence of him having sex with (fill in the unsavory blank)? Do they hold enough of his business debt that they can bankrupt him overnight? Is Melania his handler? His behavior towards the Russians has been "peculiar" throughout his campaign. This would explain a lot.
OK, lessee, 60 mph is 26.8 m/sec. To go from zero to 26.8 m/sec in 2.4 sec requires an acceleration of 26.8/2.4 = 11.17 m/sec^2. g = 9.81 m/sec^2, meaning that it has to accelerate at 1.14 g.
The only force that can accelerate it is the frictional force from its tires. The maximum force of static friction (under ordinary circumstances, like ordinary tires and ordinary roadway) is f_s = \mu_s mg, producing a maximum acceleration of a = \mu_s g, so \mu_s would have to be 1.14 in order for this to be possible. This is well above the maximum for ordinary tires. So in order for your Tesla to do anything but burn rubber, you'd have to invest in some pretty serious racing tires capable of exerting an acceleration force greater than the weight of the car.
You forgot to point out that referring to Pluto as a Dwarf planet is bound to make it feel bad. Don't blame me if it retaliates by knocking some comet out of the Oort cloud to come slam into the Earth in a few more decades. That'll show 'em who is a Dwarf and who isn't. Dwarf on this!
Anyway, tidal forces are indeed responsible for things like tidal locking of the moon (where the moon's slowing down was compensated by a change in its orbital distance and smaller effects on the axial rotation of the earth) but I don't see how it can tilt the rotational axis of a planet. Certainly the sun's tidal force at that distance is nowhere nearly strong enough, or is it?
I guess that together, they are! The moon and sun exert an AVERAGE TORQUE on the Earth, and it is large enough to cause the axis to precess! This effect is also very dependent on things like mass distribution -- ice ages rearrange substantial surface mass and can indeed alter the tensor moment of inertial and hence cause the axis of rotation itself to move relative to the not-terribly-solid earth, with interesting consequences, see:
especially: "The redistribution of ice-water on the surface of the Earth and the flow of mantle rocks causes changes in the gravitational field as well as changes to the distribution of the moment of inertia of the Earth. These changes to the moment of inertia result in a change in the angular velocity, axis, and wobble of the Earth's rotation.
The weight of the redistributed surface mass loaded the lithosphere, caused it to flex and also induced stress within the Earth. The presence of the glaciers generally suppressed the movement of faults below.[72][73][74] However, during deglaciation, the faults experience accelerated slip triggering earthquakes. Earthquakes triggered near the ice margin may in turn accelerate ice calving and may account for the Heinrich events.[75] As more ice is removed near the ice margin, more intraplate earthquakes are induced and this positive feedback may explain the fast collapse of ice sheets."
a) The moment of intertia is a tensor, not a scalar like you learned (maybe) in Intro physics. So lots of motions -- like a skater extending just ONE arm out well above her center of mass -- are going to alter the axis of rotation. This is why it is important to balance your tires -- to keep the 'natural' axis of rotation identical to the physical axis of your car's bearings.
b) A moon exerts a torque on the planet it orbits. If the moon isn't perfectly in the ecliptic plane with the sun or if there is any bobble, not just the magnitude of the angular momentum varies, but the direction too. This is why the Earth's axis precesses -- it is tilted relative to the average direction of these torques.
So maybe the physicists who published the article(s) and their referees aren't actually incompetent. Just sayin'...
....and, good luck reading my fully encrypted hard drive when you get it home. For that, you might need the $5 billion NSA complex. Or (as noted above) a $5 wrench and physical access to my person.
Which would work, very quickly actually. I don't keep anything on a computer drive, encrypted or not, that I wouldn't want my mother to read. Or the Feeb. Or Soviet Russia, where your disk reads you! Because seriously, if somebody REALLY REALLY wants to get into your disk, and you're not dead, they probably can. With 4096 bit encryption and a nice long pseudorandom key, maybe not. But only MAYBE, and over time, it is even probable that they will eventually be able to do so. I remember a time when 6 digit passwords were relatively safe. Then 7. At this point 8 in lower case ASCII is easily searchable by the NSA or anyone with teraflop resources, and teraflop resources aren't even that expensive, petaflops are out there. If one assumes 64 characters, it is still only order of 10^15 permutations, so a petaflop cluster could do it in minutes, a teraflop cluster in days, and that's if one chooses a GOOD password that is essentially random. At this point, I'm not sure that a 12 character password is secure against NSA-level exhaustive attacks, although with 10^22 possibilities it would start to take a while even with a petaflop -- say a couple or three years. Again, unless you use a truly random 12 character string, they can probably cut this down to months just by searching on the most probable strings first.
But if I were alive, and (say) my hard drive had the coordinates of a nuclear bomb planted somewhere in Manhattan, I'm guessing that they'd opt for the drugs and the wrench and a bit of electricity applied to the testicles to see if they couldn't get the key in minutes instead of weeks or months. Cheaper, faster, and who takes the Constitution seriously any more anyway?
By the way, am I the only one that remembers Thick Ethernet, aka 10BASE5, and its "vampire taps"?
Depends. Are you a solipsist, sir? Or a monist Hindu, and hence an avatar of the Mahavishnu and the only real being, the Brahman?
If not, I have a 10BASE5 transceiver in my office as a relic, just to remind me of the old days. I also have a pretty gold 8087 in a box, a QIC with Mastermind in APL on it (unreadable AFAIK at this point in the evolution of the Universe and I/O devices -- pretty annoyed by that as I could probably find an APL emulator for Linux at this point), a giant box of actual punchcards with actual Fortran IV in an actual program, and a large reel of computer tape of the sort that you see in old movies.
It is odd indeed to be typing this reply on a laptop with no visible network connection, no actual moving parts internal drive (just a 500 GB SSD, encrypted), no actual external peripherals but the screen and yeah, an obligatory USB mouse because mousepads suck mouse dick if one actually wants to type on the integrated keyboard. My cell phone is even more bizarre, with a tiny chip that is part of its hard storage that is 10^6 x the size of my first PC's memory (and small at that in modern terms) and an internal memory and processor that would have been categorized as a munition until a couple of decades ago.
Or, they could just take the data out of the phone, put it into a special OS shell that doesn't have the lockout feature, and rip through all 10000 four digit codes in the time wasted between keystrokes in this reply. Or they could look at the smudges on the screen, make an educated guess as to the numbers being pressed, and reduce the search space to the permutation of 4 or fewer digits.
The point is that 4 digits is very, very fundamentally insecure. Oh, it's probably fine to protect your data from a phone thief, but all they want to do is replace the SIM and resell the phone anyway.
Using a pass code is NOT protected by the fifth amendment. Nor is using encryption. A judge can require you to give up your pass code and/or your encryption key, and if you refuse, you can go to jail for contempt of court forever (until you reconsider and comply). Just like your DNA is not protected -- you can be compelled to give it up. Just like your writings in general are not protected. The only thing that is protected is your right not to be compelled to testify in a court room if your honest testimony MIGHT be incriminating, extended to your spouse who cannot be compelled to testify against you ditto. Although he or she can do it voluntarily.
With that said, sure, relying on fingerprints alone to secure a phone -- or any biometric measure -- is stupid. What the US is not permitted to do is use coercion beyond putting you in jail forever if you fail to cough up an encryption key, and if it is a GOOD key not even NSA is likely to be able to break it. If your phone contains evidence of a capital crime for which you would likely receive the death penalty, you might rationally prefer life in prison for contempt to giving up the key and facing near certain death.
Of course writers of fiction, conspiracy theorists, and even some pragmatists who are neither might believe that the US security organizations are willing to ignore the constitution and use torture or drugs to extract the keys of device believed to contain information about a major terrorist attack (say, a nuclear device deployed somewhere in the US and they'd really like to know where in time to prevent it).
Biometrics aren't terrible, but they should always be biometrics AND a sound means of protection of data, because biometrics presume ownership and inaccessibility of your own biometric parameters, and that is obviously false on the inaccessibility, quite possibly even after you are dead. A 24 character pass key on 4096-bit encryption might not suffice to protect data if somebody has attached electrodes to your testicles or burn off body parts with a welding torch an inch at a time, but at least if you die, access to the data dies with you.
4 digit phone codes are also obviously a waste of time in the first place. So are six digit codes. Or eight digit codes. Eight CHARACTER keys on strong encryption is a weak opener -- maybe the feeb can't crack that with in-house resources, but I wouldn't bet against the NSA, and in principle the feeb can call on the NSA in any circumstances that would warrant it.
Legend vs Myth vs History. However, remember that the OT was basically written, or rewritten, after the Babylonian captivity, and that (being a living document) it was rewritten every single time it was copied in manuscript. It is chock full of anachronisms, and actually, a lot of its "history" does NOT line up with archeology. There is considerable doubt that Moses was a real person, for example, and if he was, there is no record of him on the Egyptian side (where they kept good records). Here is one account that points to the utter lack of historical evidence for ANY "Exodus", and establishes the made-up conclusion that Moses was a conflation of two different people with completely different stories (made up because there isn't any real evidence outside of the contradictions of the Biblical accounts for either one). http://www.ancient-origins.net...
A better summary is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (see "historicity"). Moses was basically unmentioned until after the exile, and at that point appears to be a rewrite of an ancient Sumerian mythic figure, like (for that matter) the flood. But then, the Canaanites were basically Sumerians.
Tough on you that you got a tiny bit annoyed for pissing away 40 years in the desert...
The desert that a man on a crutch could cross in a couple of weeks, and that a healthy man could cross in a week on foot. God must have created a dimensional warp mid-desert that stretched its size out to, lessee, suppose we assume only ONE mile a day -- the distance one can crawl on hands and knees and still have time to spare to collect the morning manna and pitch the tents and all. 40 x 365 x 6 / 7 (can't crawl on the Sabbath) = 12514 miles, which is roughly half the circumference of the world at the equator. The distance from Cairo to Israel is what, 200 miles, and the "desert" in between is more like 100 of that (so 1 mph for a man on a crutch in two weeks with manna breaks is about right). Even if they came up from Khartoum and wandered Saudi Arabia north it is only maybe 500 miles.
But hey, the Bible also has Noah preserving all of the several million species that would be killed in a saltwater/freshwater flood that covered the top of Mt Everest in 40 days -- around 5 or 6 inches of rain A MINUTE, on every square meter of the Earth's surface pole to pole -- in a wooden boat the size of a Wal Mart, ventilated by a single window one square meter in size. Since that includes all of the ocean species that would be killed in the freshwater dilution AND all of the land species that would be killed in the saltwater irrigation, it pretty much means every species on Earth, animals and plants alike, and a lot of the microfauna as well. Then there is the thermodynamics involved, and the problem of where the water came from and where it all went since we can presume that God did NOT pour it through the holes in the solid sky from which he hung the little lights over the flat ground beneath or lose it by letting it run over the side of the world into the deep below (past the elephants).
Or maybe he did. After all, if you can dimensionally warp 100 miles into 100,000 miles and twist the night sky up so that tracking the sun East moves you in a drunkard's walk, performing an impossible toplogical trick of warping a spherical manifold into a flat plane with edges should be a piece of cake. I feel sorry for all of the people in the Americas, though, being all stretched out like that...
Yeah, I looked at the arithmetic and yeah, the arithmetic is sketchy (if 22% cells aren't already sketchy for that price). But yes, they do cover the doors, the rear, basically all non-transparent surfaces with cells. Other neglected things are what happens if you park under trees, in a forest of tall buildings, in parking garages. It's never going to be 7.5 m^2 x 0.22 x whatever you want to claim for mean daily integrated flux through a perpendicular surface (200 to 300 W/m^2 if I recall correctly).
It's also not clear how much of a "real car" they have in mind. Is it an ELF http://organictransit.com/ with solar cells on all surfaces? The ELF now looks more like a car with glossy hard sides than it used to, and they now seem to come with a 100W solar panel on the roof, allowing one to accumulate as much as a KW-H over a whole day. Since it comes with a 500+ W-H battery, it actually could fully recharge over a day in the sun. This gives it a range of around 15 to 18 miles no pedalling on flat ground. Obviously if you add battery, you can add range, but you probably can't fully recharge with only sun unless you add more panels.
The ELF is not vaporware -- I live in Durham and see these all the time on the roads (they cost $6000 to $9000 depending on how tricked out you get them). Adding solar capacity is actually pretty easy, as is adding battery capacity. One could probably accessorize to 30 miles a day and still manage a full recharge on its rated mileage of 34 mpkwh (add another 500 W-H battery and another 100 W panel with some sort of hinge that you can tilt up to horizontal-ish when you park). Actually, this isn't bad at all, and would probably do me just fine on my commute, leaves the money in my home town, and gives me the option of pedalling to get SOME exercise on the run without having to pedal up all the hills on muscle alone (hot and sweaty, at least, during the summer). Pedalling also extends the range, obviously.
The catch is that it isn't technically a car, and cannot go 45 to 50 mph on the one road I would HAVE to drive on that is 45 to 50 mph if you want to go WITH the traffic, and it is even more of a road obstacle than a bike if you are traveling under road speed. Which makes it still quite dangerous, although maybe a hair less so than a bike (at least one person I know of has been killed on the road I have to ride in on in the last year on a bike).
So, can one imagine taking the working ELF design, bumping its internal energy storage to 14.5 KW-H, bumping its solar capacity to (say) 400 to 600 W, (say, 2400 KW-H/day) increasing its top speed to street legal (say 55 mph for mostly in town driving), sticking with polycarbonate sides but increasing seating to four in more of a car-like configuration, and still maintaining at least 12 m/KWH, needed to get 30 m in a day's charge (with no pedals)?
It's not completely insane. Doubling speed increases power required by around a factor of 8 but takes only 1/2 the time to go the distance, so it needs 4 times as much energy IF one assumes energy is dominated at that point by quadratic drag. Well, we've quadrupled incoming power (relative to 30 miles/day), increased stored power by a much larger factor than necessary, so in principle if we haven't added TOO much weight or MUCH less efficient motors, we are at least in the ballpark. Can we do this by no more than doubling the high end cost? Again, maybe, hard to say. We'd save some by not having pedals and all the dual power source gearing, we'd spend it and more on the extra batteries, solar capacity, and the 4+x more powerful motor. But it might be doable. ELF might make it there on its own as it has the substantial advantage of building and selling actual vehicles right now that already work pretty well as in-town commuters, better/safer where the speed limit is 35 mph and under, not so well where it is 35 mph and over. If they are and remain profitable as they grow, they could end up bringing out higher end, closer
For windmills, you can use vertical axis windmills to avoid slaughtering birds.
Or, you can put cats in hamster-wheel cages that generate electricity. After all, cats kill somewhere between several hundred million and a billion birds a year, almost as many as transparent glass windows kill by enticing birds to bash in their own brains flying into them. According to at least one of the efforts to put names to causes of human-linked bird mortality. Turbines aren't really in the top ten causes. Windows is number one, with cats at number 2, high tension power lines, pesticides, cars, communication towers, and hunting all much higher in total mortality than wind turbines. So if you want to save birds, put some of those ugly little butterfly decals on your windows and don't wash them so often that they are perfectly transparent. Use your neighborhood cats for target practice. Avoid using electricity, don't use chlorinated hydrocarbons and anticholinesterases on your lawn and garden, try not to drive, and go hunting for the human hunters as well as the cat (and even dog) hunters. As many birds are killed every year as fishing by-catch (in nets and with hook and line) as are killed by turbines.
Just to get a little perspective. I have other reasons to dislike turbines as energy sources, one of them being that they are large and ugly and have a poor duty cycle in many locations and have high maintenance costs and take up a lot of room and... but there is no need to throw birds in as a good reason to be hatin'.
Outside of that, I agree. But see the article on New Atlas today -- it alleges that a car that at least charges itself on a daily basis with no external power supply at all is possible and should be commercially available next year, maybe, if the article isn't bullshit. I rather think that it is, but will reserve judgement for the time being.
I don't disagree with your math, but an article on NewAtlas TODAY extols a claim from a German company that they are going to build a car with 7.5 m^2 of 22% efficient polycrystalline solar cells covering its flattish surfaces, with a 14.5 kW-H internal battery, that will get at least 30 km/day from normal ambient (unobstructed, sure) sun. Their so-far rendered image of a car looks like a smallish four seater commuter car. They also CLAIM that they will sell this for $14 to $16K USD.
I'm skeptical -- but if the DO manage this, it would make a hell of a car for my in-town driving. Basically buy it and then use it without fuel for the rest of its useful life, because I don't drive 30 km/day on average, even including runs to stores as well as work. I'm not sure it would be a good "only car", but it would sure take the pressure off of my 4Runner (needed to pull a boat and for trips but overkill for daily commuting).
The point being that there may be "specialty cars" that can actually function as solar cars for limited length commutes. The ELF (made in Durham NOW, as opposed to dreaming-ware like the car in the new atlas article) could almost do it, if you could hook it up to a few square meters of panel this efficient, but it isn't really a "car", it is more of an electric enhanced tricycle with a tarp-like cover and a bit of storage. But for $6000, one could add the solar panels and a system to accumulate enough charge at home in a day to keep it charged for standard commutes, if it were really road safe (IMO it's not, quite).
Hmmm, 1/5th the cost already affordable by nearly any "kitchen pot" dictatorship around the world. And this isn't new technology -- rumor in the physics world has it that this is how Israel has been making its bombs for decades. So right, not quite in my kitchen with my pots, but in a small warehouse somewhere? Maybe, if I have a few million and access to uranium 238 (which is, one profoundly hopes, not THAT easy to arrange, actually). In a small production facility in (pick a place loosely controlled by your favorite world group that you really don't want to have nuclear devices)? Without question. It's just a matter of time, although frankly centrifuges are already more than sufficient to build uranium bombs with or to enrich fuel-grade uranium to where you can cook out plutonium. Plutonium is, no argument, hard to squeeze off in a bomb, but enriched Uranium is laughably easy.
Thorium is arguably more of a challenge. For one thing, making U233 involves the Pa chain and a breeder reactor that makes lots of gamma rays and neutrons, so it probably isn't a good candidate for basements unless one's basement has thick lead and concrete walls and one has a degree in nuclear engineering. OTOH, separating out U233 is just chemistry once you get there. So far, it has been easier and cheaper to stick to U235 and plutonium for reasons that are well described and discussed elsewhere:
but there is little doubt that one can make bombs from Thorium, and further, that the bombs you make are the nice, easy to manage Uranium bombs and not the nasty, prematurely detonating fizzling fissioning (unless you build them just right) plutonium bombs. You can store the bomb grade material without any particular precautions other than keeping it subcritical and our borders are totally porous (a nation's worth of heroin addicts agree!) so again, a terror group in any country that has access to e.g. Monazite sands -- India, Australia, Madagascar, Western North Carolina... can if they wish follow this alternative route to a Uranium bomb that doesn't even require a laser OR a centrifuge (although it does require building a breeder with a chemical separation step, plus some fuel grade material to get it started). Basement stuff? I was kidding -- or being sarcastic if you prefer -- because while no, one cannot do it in a literal garage, it is still a technology well within the reach of middle-tier proliferation risks who might have a comparatively hard time getting their hands on Uranium.
Best of all, nowadays they could trumpet to the world that they were fixing Global Warming by building thorium based nuclear self-sufficiency and all it takes in a MSR is to divert the breeder-enriched salts into a chemical extraction step and siphon off a steady supply of bomb-grade material. Material that you can even show that you NEED (in at least some capacity) to restart your reactor after fuelling or start a new one...
The point is -- to repeat myself -- that killing large numbers of people is easy enough to be nearly impossible to prevent if:
a) You don't care if you die yourself in the process;
b) You don't care who you kill, and are perfectly happy to take the lowest hanging fruit you can find if people take steps to protect one possible target (say, the super bowl). Are people going to be able to provide the same protection to every football, soccer, basketball game, forever? How about airports, train stations? How about high-profile, expensive, human filled skyscrapers in every city?
c) You have at least some money to put towards the project. To kill more than 100 people at a time will likely require some investment and a co
Yeah, now if WE were nefarious Dr. Evil types, WE would be able to fill full sized buses with the name of your favorite rental car company on the side right up to the pickup area of any major metropolitan area, loaded not with a single drum of witchbrew nitro but with dozens of them, with walls lined with preformed shrapnel on the terminal side and with a concrete wall on the other to direct the explosion (and likely with heavy heavy duty shocks:-). Then sure, we could remote pilot it into place in any terminal in the country with an Airplane-style inflatable driver on the front seat and detonate it on Thanksgiving weekend at peak travel hours. Even if there IS somebody literally sitting on a camera watching, they'd have to be monitoring EVERY large vehicle that EVER enters the main airport, and the only monitoring that would work worth a damn is something fully automated (transponders on every permitted vehicle?) and then you have to defend the automation!
OR, we could do pretty much the same thing with any of a number of small planes -- turn them into de facto cruise missiles and direct them straight at the containment vessel of a nuclear power plant, or better yet, at its spent fuel dump. Or turn a 21 foot power boat into an enormous remote control "torpedo" and take out a cruise ship. The most nefarious of WE could probably figure out the laser enrichment trick, beg borrow buy steal a few dozen tons of Uranium, enrich our own U235 in our basement, and build a REAL bomb and simply drop it in the middle of any random city, anywhere. Or, if Uranium is all locked down maybe we could buy up less-controlled Thorium and cook it down into bomb grade U233. Yes, these require a really big basement, but plenty of countries, all drug lords, and lots of billionaires all have "big basements". The drug lords already have fully debugged means of delivery that don't even require electronics!
All of these things are why Homeland Security people get ulcers. They aren't stupid, or at least some of them aren't stupid, and they probably have whole spreadsheets of identified pathways for bad people to do bad things (and activities that "might" serve as a signal for these bad things in preparation). And they know that all of this is really pissing into the wind -- just as 9/11 came out of the blue, the next attack will come out of the blue, and EVEN if it follows one of the identified scenarios, they ultimately rely as much on luck as anything else to detect it and successfully intervene. They just haven't been too lucky, recently. Too much dike -- a UNIVERSE of dike, all rotten and crumbling in the storm -- and not enough fingers.
Ultimately, one has to hope that smart people are too smart, usually, to want to mass-murder their neighbors. Admittedly, history doesn't provide a whole lot of support for this hope, but in the end, anybody who really IS smart, and patient, and who has the resources to invest in it (big tour bus sized buses aren't all that cheap, and it isn't that easy to buy the materials to make good explosives or to make GOOD chemical explosives, defined to be ones that blow up when you want them to instead of when you are halfway through making them and get crystallization of unstable nitrates on the lips of your reaction vessels) can probably figure out a bunch of ways to kill people hundreds to thousands at a time, especially if they don't care WHO they kill or WHEN it happens and can just target any old event where large numbers of people are concentrated in a comparatively small space.
There was a science fiction short story I remember reading (but I cannot remember who wrote it, or when) where somebody discovered a way of basically destroying the world using the moral equivalent of household cleaners from under the sink. The "recipe" was widely disbursed so suddenly everybody -- everybody -- knew how to kill every other person in the world (and themselves). The story explored whether suddenly every human alive would instantly become moral and treat everybody else as if they co
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Damn skippy. If they are going to do this, they need to start -- start -- 3 to 5 years ahead by requiring ALL small motors to be built so that they can run on ethanol. And bear in mind that there are other problems with ethanol-laced fuel, the biggest one to my own experience being that it sucks water right out of the air and into your fuel tank. Alcohol is hydrophilic. Gasoline is hydrophobic. Put them together and you get the worst of both worlds -- a gas tank that builds up water in the bottom just sitting there in normally humid air.
Then there are the various parts in small motors that dissolve in ethanol.
Could this all be fixed? Sure, I imagine so. Not so sure about how the water issue can be fixed, but at least the engines can be designed not to break if you use ethanol either for timing reasons or because your fuel system turns into sludge while it operates. But they're not. So I'm left having to pay for no-E gasoline at a premium price from one of the few stations that carry it just to mow the lawn, run my chainsaw, run my boat, etc. This isn't just about cars.
You can't fool me, AC. I've seen you post first before!
You are right, unless the voter can visually verify THE ACTUAL PAPER that gets stored, the system can be hacked. And you are absolutely right that N boxes per state if not per precinct should be RANDOMLY (using e.g. actual dice, not electronic random number generators that could be tampered with) selected for quality control, opened, and checked for accuracy to within some very small tolerance. In the case where users are TOLD that their votes are not valid and they have the instant opportunity to correct to obtain a valid vote and then check it, tampering would involve tampering with the ballot box itself AND matching tampering with the machine, and that's a problem we always have, presumably controlled by honest and bipartisan representation in the polling officials.
I'd suggest not actually putting the paper in the hands of the voter, but letting them see it inside a glass screen right before it either spits it out or deposits it in the box, where they can SEE it go into the box, or do it over if it isn't valid or they accidentally voted for the wrong person somewhere.
I replied above, or I'd mod you up. I completely agree. Paper trail, consistent right down to the fingerprints of the voter (should it come to it) on the paper form is not orthogonal to electronic counting. I'd even throw in a REQUIREMENT that actual dice be used to select a random sample of machines from each state to be opened and audited whether or not there is any evidence of tampering. ANY machines that give the wrong total outside of very, very narrow tolerances (determined by the empirical study of ballots that are incorrectly filled in etc) should trigger a statewide, or at least precinct-wide audit.
This isn't about this election, by the way. It is about "elections". I honestly believe that the polling officials at most polls in America are honest and patriotic and take their job as the guardians of democracy very seriously. No American who values free and honest elections should oppose ensuring that the system of voting itself is difficult to tamper with and self-auditing. Penalties for gaming the system should be extremely severe, and any court-admissible evidence that a candidate or party has actively participated in suborning the process should be grounds for overturning the election and forcing either a do-over, this time with the open door closed, or if the candidate is involved and a court so determines, both loss of the election EVEN IF THEY WON and felony jail time so that they can never run for public office again.
Please. You can audit the software, and the networks, and the process of preparation. The problem is that software audits have ALREADY demonstrated that the machines can be hacked. There may well be direct evidence that they HAVE been hacked if one audits their internal firmware, and this could easily be done and wouldn't even be that expensive.
If one finds even a single machine that has been hacked, of course, chaos ensues. The founding fathers never anticipated this. The only fair thing to do would be to go back to the precincts and either hold an open re-vote or limit a re-vote to people who actually voted in the original, this time with paper ballots and a crowd of poll-watchers, but I don't think the constitution has any provision for this; at best the courts would have to order it in the absence of law or precedent. And "fair" isn't the standard "prescribed in the constitution" is.
But if there were clear evidence of tampering in these states -- really clear evidence -- if Republicans challenged both the clear evidence that Clinton won the popular election by a solid margin AND the clear evidence that the election in key "battleground" states was tampered with in favor of Trump (possibly with evidence of who did the tampering) then they'd be well advised to either concede the election in the electoral college (in exchange for keeping Trump actually out of jail) or at the very least, replace Trump with somebody centrist, that is to say NOT with Mike Pence. Maybe McCain. Even Ryan, although it isn't clear how centrist he really is. Or one of Trump's primary opponents that the Dems could live with. Otherwise they would face the mother of all backlashes in the next elections, forever.
Richer precincts are more likely to have e-voting machines. Richer precincts are also more likely to lean Republican. Therefore, precincts that have e-voting machines are more lean Republican.
It's odd that you would say this, given the almost perfect polarization between urban, educated, rich precincts that almost without exception voted for Clinton and the rural, comparatively poor, precincts that voted for Trump. It is also something that is easily controlled for. The problem is that they compared counties with SIMILAR populations and the ones with voting machines produced a 7% surplus for Trump. Fairly consistently. This is not only not expected, it is (given a consistent pattern over many such counties and precincts) almost impossible, statistically. Yes, correlation is not causality, but at some point the p-value of the null hypothesis of an unrigged election goes to zero, independent of glib explanations like this one.
Note well that the issue isn't that Trump won counties. It is that when one compares counties that are side by side and demographically similar, Trump won by an average of a 7% margin HIGHER only in those counties that used electronic voting machines. 7% is, frankly, an enormous factor given the large populations involved. But that isn't the problem. It is the p-factor. What is the probability that this PATTERN of events is due to random chance variations?
Here it is a no-brainer. The p-value for the null hypothesis "The election was fair" is basically zero, if there is a 7% marginal difference between electronic and non-electronic voting that is almost entirely biased in one direction. You don't even have to do a computation -- p has many zeros before the first 1, especially if the pattern persists over three different states, even more so if they are the CRITICAL states, even more so if they are states where polling before the election consistently got an entirely different result that would almost perfectly be explained by the 7% surplus.
What this is really saying is that there is almost no STATISTICAL doubt that the election was tampered with on a grand scale. The only remaining questions are: Who are the perpetrators (I personally doubt the RNC who honestly wouldn't dare, but somebody in Trump's campaign, a group of Trump-supporting hackers, or the Russians are all plausible alternatives, with IMO the Russians being way, way at the head of the line) and Did they leave behind any hard evidence of the exploits? It is going to be difficult to sell a statistical argument, no matter how compelling, to a population that doesn't even know what a p-value is, but any hard evidence at all of an exploit of even one machine would be enough to create constitutional chaos. Any evidence that tied the exploit to (fill in the blank) some specific group would lead to an overturn of the election, maybe even the election(s) (down into the Senate and House and state offices). Any evidence that ties in either the Russians or anyone at all in Trump's campaign will spark a large scale congressional investigation and, quite possibly, prosecution for treason of all involve in the one case, and a SERIOUS, GLOBAL escalation of tension in the other. You almost have to hope that it is an anonymous group just because of the danger to the world if it is the Russians and the damage to the country if it is any Republicans in or outside of Trump's campaign.
At the very least, the congressional investigation will open up Trump's true financial situation and start looking for hard evidence that he is controlled, financially or otherwise, by the Russians. For example, do they have evidence of him having sex with (fill in the unsavory blank)? Do they hold enough of his business debt that they can bankrupt him overnight? Is Melania his handler? His behavior towards the Russians has been "peculiar" throughout his campaign. This would explain a lot.
OK, lessee, 60 mph is 26.8 m/sec. To go from zero to 26.8 m/sec in 2.4 sec requires an acceleration of 26.8/2.4 = 11.17 m/sec^2. g = 9.81 m/sec^2, meaning that it has to accelerate at 1.14 g.
The only force that can accelerate it is the frictional force from its tires. The maximum force of static friction (under ordinary circumstances, like ordinary tires and ordinary roadway) is f_s = \mu_s mg, producing a maximum acceleration of a = \mu_s g, so \mu_s would have to be 1.14 in order for this to be possible. This is well above the maximum for ordinary tires. So in order for your Tesla to do anything but burn rubber, you'd have to invest in some pretty serious racing tires capable of exerting an acceleration force greater than the weight of the car.
You forgot to point out that referring to Pluto as a Dwarf planet is bound to make it feel bad. Don't blame me if it retaliates by knocking some comet out of the Oort cloud to come slam into the Earth in a few more decades. That'll show 'em who is a Dwarf and who isn't. Dwarf on this!
Anyway, tidal forces are indeed responsible for things like tidal locking of the moon (where the moon's slowing down was compensated by a change in its orbital distance and smaller effects on the axial rotation of the earth) but I don't see how it can tilt the rotational axis of a planet. Certainly the sun's tidal force at that distance is nowhere nearly strong enough, or is it?
Sheesh!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I guess that together, they are! The moon and sun exert an AVERAGE TORQUE on the Earth, and it is large enough to cause the axis to precess! This effect is also very dependent on things like mass distribution -- ice ages rearrange substantial surface mass and can indeed alter the tensor moment of inertial and hence cause the axis of rotation itself to move relative to the not-terribly-solid earth, with interesting consequences, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
especially: "The redistribution of ice-water on the surface of the Earth and the flow of mantle rocks causes changes in the gravitational field as well as changes to the distribution of the moment of inertia of the Earth. These changes to the moment of inertia result in a change in the angular velocity, axis, and wobble of the Earth's rotation.
The weight of the redistributed surface mass loaded the lithosphere, caused it to flex and also induced stress within the Earth. The presence of the glaciers generally suppressed the movement of faults below.[72][73][74] However, during deglaciation, the faults experience accelerated slip triggering earthquakes. Earthquakes triggered near the ice margin may in turn accelerate ice calving and may account for the Heinrich events.[75] As more ice is removed near the ice margin, more intraplate earthquakes are induced and this positive feedback may explain the fast collapse of ice sheets."
rgb
Not to go into this in complete detail, but:
a) The moment of intertia is a tensor, not a scalar like you learned (maybe) in Intro physics. So lots of motions -- like a skater extending just ONE arm out well above her center of mass -- are going to alter the axis of rotation. This is why it is important to balance your tires -- to keep the 'natural' axis of rotation identical to the physical axis of your car's bearings.
b) A moon exerts a torque on the planet it orbits. If the moon isn't perfectly in the ecliptic plane with the sun or if there is any bobble, not just the magnitude of the angular momentum varies, but the direction too. This is why the Earth's axis precesses -- it is tilted relative to the average direction of these torques.
So maybe the physicists who published the article(s) and their referees aren't actually incompetent. Just sayin'...
rgb
....and, good luck reading my fully encrypted hard drive when you get it home. For that, you might need the $5 billion NSA complex. Or (as noted above) a $5 wrench and physical access to my person.
Which would work, very quickly actually. I don't keep anything on a computer drive, encrypted or not, that I wouldn't want my mother to read. Or the Feeb. Or Soviet Russia, where your disk reads you! Because seriously, if somebody REALLY REALLY wants to get into your disk, and you're not dead, they probably can. With 4096 bit encryption and a nice long pseudorandom key, maybe not. But only MAYBE, and over time, it is even probable that they will eventually be able to do so. I remember a time when 6 digit passwords were relatively safe. Then 7. At this point 8 in lower case ASCII is easily searchable by the NSA or anyone with teraflop resources, and teraflop resources aren't even that expensive, petaflops are out there. If one assumes 64 characters, it is still only order of 10^15 permutations, so a petaflop cluster could do it in minutes, a teraflop cluster in days, and that's if one chooses a GOOD password that is essentially random. At this point, I'm not sure that a 12 character password is secure against NSA-level exhaustive attacks, although with 10^22 possibilities it would start to take a while even with a petaflop -- say a couple or three years. Again, unless you use a truly random 12 character string, they can probably cut this down to months just by searching on the most probable strings first.
But if I were alive, and (say) my hard drive had the coordinates of a nuclear bomb planted somewhere in Manhattan, I'm guessing that they'd opt for the drugs and the wrench and a bit of electricity applied to the testicles to see if they couldn't get the key in minutes instead of weeks or months. Cheaper, faster, and who takes the Constitution seriously any more anyway?
rgb
By the way, am I the only one that remembers Thick Ethernet, aka 10BASE5, and its "vampire taps"?
Depends. Are you a solipsist, sir? Or a monist Hindu, and hence an avatar of the Mahavishnu and the only real being, the Brahman?
If not, I have a 10BASE5 transceiver in my office as a relic, just to remind me of the old days. I also have a pretty gold 8087 in a box, a QIC with Mastermind in APL on it (unreadable AFAIK at this point in the evolution of the Universe and I/O devices -- pretty annoyed by that as I could probably find an APL emulator for Linux at this point), a giant box of actual punchcards with actual Fortran IV in an actual program, and a large reel of computer tape of the sort that you see in old movies.
It is odd indeed to be typing this reply on a laptop with no visible network connection, no actual moving parts internal drive (just a 500 GB SSD, encrypted), no actual external peripherals but the screen and yeah, an obligatory USB mouse because mousepads suck mouse dick if one actually wants to type on the integrated keyboard. My cell phone is even more bizarre, with a tiny chip that is part of its hard storage that is 10^6 x the size of my first PC's memory (and small at that in modern terms) and an internal memory and processor that would have been categorized as a munition until a couple of decades ago.
I remember bitnet too.
Behavior modification is one of the hardest jobs in Security.
That's what the sucker rod is for...
rgb
Or, they could just take the data out of the phone, put it into a special OS shell that doesn't have the lockout feature, and rip through all 10000 four digit codes in the time wasted between keystrokes in this reply. Or they could look at the smudges on the screen, make an educated guess as to the numbers being pressed, and reduce the search space to the permutation of 4 or fewer digits.
The point is that 4 digits is very, very fundamentally insecure. Oh, it's probably fine to protect your data from a phone thief, but all they want to do is replace the SIM and resell the phone anyway.
Or, just stealing your fingers. They are removable, after all...
Using a pass code is NOT protected by the fifth amendment. Nor is using encryption. A judge can require you to give up your pass code and/or your encryption key, and if you refuse, you can go to jail for contempt of court forever (until you reconsider and comply). Just like your DNA is not protected -- you can be compelled to give it up. Just like your writings in general are not protected. The only thing that is protected is your right not to be compelled to testify in a court room if your honest testimony MIGHT be incriminating, extended to your spouse who cannot be compelled to testify against you ditto. Although he or she can do it voluntarily.
With that said, sure, relying on fingerprints alone to secure a phone -- or any biometric measure -- is stupid. What the US is not permitted to do is use coercion beyond putting you in jail forever if you fail to cough up an encryption key, and if it is a GOOD key not even NSA is likely to be able to break it. If your phone contains evidence of a capital crime for which you would likely receive the death penalty, you might rationally prefer life in prison for contempt to giving up the key and facing near certain death.
Of course writers of fiction, conspiracy theorists, and even some pragmatists who are neither might believe that the US security organizations are willing to ignore the constitution and use torture or drugs to extract the keys of device believed to contain information about a major terrorist attack (say, a nuclear device deployed somewhere in the US and they'd really like to know where in time to prevent it).
Biometrics aren't terrible, but they should always be biometrics AND a sound means of protection of data, because biometrics presume ownership and inaccessibility of your own biometric parameters, and that is obviously false on the inaccessibility, quite possibly even after you are dead. A 24 character pass key on 4096-bit encryption might not suffice to protect data if somebody has attached electrodes to your testicles or burn off body parts with a welding torch an inch at a time, but at least if you die, access to the data dies with you.
4 digit phone codes are also obviously a waste of time in the first place. So are six digit codes. Or eight digit codes. Eight CHARACTER keys on strong encryption is a weak opener -- maybe the feeb can't crack that with in-house resources, but I wouldn't bet against the NSA, and in principle the feeb can call on the NSA in any circumstances that would warrant it.
No, no, he bought them 78,359 Wal Mart gift certificates and 24,218 Itunes cards and a few hundred prepaid Visa cards. He paid his taxes after all!
Legend vs Myth vs History. However, remember that the OT was basically written, or rewritten, after the Babylonian captivity, and that (being a living document) it was rewritten every single time it was copied in manuscript. It is chock full of anachronisms, and actually, a lot of its "history" does NOT line up with archeology. There is considerable doubt that Moses was a real person, for example, and if he was, there is no record of him on the Egyptian side (where they kept good records). Here is one account that points to the utter lack of historical evidence for ANY "Exodus", and establishes the made-up conclusion that Moses was a conflation of two different people with completely different stories (made up because there isn't any real evidence outside of the contradictions of the Biblical accounts for either one). http://www.ancient-origins.net...
A better summary is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (see "historicity"). Moses was basically unmentioned until after the exile, and at that point appears to be a rewrite of an ancient Sumerian mythic figure, like (for that matter) the flood. But then, the Canaanites were basically Sumerians.
Tough on you that you got a tiny bit annoyed for pissing away 40 years in the desert...
The desert that a man on a crutch could cross in a couple of weeks, and that a healthy man could cross in a week on foot. God must have created a dimensional warp mid-desert that stretched its size out to, lessee, suppose we assume only ONE mile a day -- the distance one can crawl on hands and knees and still have time to spare to collect the morning manna and pitch the tents and all. 40 x 365 x 6 / 7 (can't crawl on the Sabbath) = 12514 miles, which is roughly half the circumference of the world at the equator. The distance from Cairo to Israel is what, 200 miles, and the "desert" in between is more like 100 of that (so 1 mph for a man on a crutch in two weeks with manna breaks is about right). Even if they came up from Khartoum and wandered Saudi Arabia north it is only maybe 500 miles.
But hey, the Bible also has Noah preserving all of the several million species that would be killed in a saltwater/freshwater flood that covered the top of Mt Everest in 40 days -- around 5 or 6 inches of rain A MINUTE, on every square meter of the Earth's surface pole to pole -- in a wooden boat the size of a Wal Mart, ventilated by a single window one square meter in size. Since that includes all of the ocean species that would be killed in the freshwater dilution AND all of the land species that would be killed in the saltwater irrigation, it pretty much means every species on Earth, animals and plants alike, and a lot of the microfauna as well. Then there is the thermodynamics involved, and the problem of where the water came from and where it all went since we can presume that God did NOT pour it through the holes in the solid sky from which he hung the little lights over the flat ground beneath or lose it by letting it run over the side of the world into the deep below (past the elephants).
Or maybe he did. After all, if you can dimensionally warp 100 miles into 100,000 miles and twist the night sky up so that tracking the sun East moves you in a drunkard's walk, performing an impossible toplogical trick of warping a spherical manifold into a flat plane with edges should be a piece of cake. I feel sorry for all of the people in the Americas, though, being all stretched out like that...
rgb
Yeah, I looked at the arithmetic and yeah, the arithmetic is sketchy (if 22% cells aren't already sketchy for that price). But yes, they do cover the doors, the rear, basically all non-transparent surfaces with cells. Other neglected things are what happens if you park under trees, in a forest of tall buildings, in parking garages. It's never going to be 7.5 m^2 x 0.22 x whatever you want to claim for mean daily integrated flux through a perpendicular surface (200 to 300 W/m^2 if I recall correctly).
It's also not clear how much of a "real car" they have in mind. Is it an ELF http://organictransit.com/ with solar cells on all surfaces? The ELF now looks more like a car with glossy hard sides than it used to, and they now seem to come with a 100W solar panel on the roof, allowing one to accumulate as much as a KW-H over a whole day. Since it comes with a 500+ W-H battery, it actually could fully recharge over a day in the sun. This gives it a range of around 15 to 18 miles no pedalling on flat ground. Obviously if you add battery, you can add range, but you probably can't fully recharge with only sun unless you add more panels.
The ELF is not vaporware -- I live in Durham and see these all the time on the roads (they cost $6000 to $9000 depending on how tricked out you get them). Adding solar capacity is actually pretty easy, as is adding battery capacity. One could probably accessorize to 30 miles a day and still manage a full recharge on its rated mileage of 34 mpkwh (add another 500 W-H battery and another 100 W panel with some sort of hinge that you can tilt up to horizontal-ish when you park). Actually, this isn't bad at all, and would probably do me just fine on my commute, leaves the money in my home town, and gives me the option of pedalling to get SOME exercise on the run without having to pedal up all the hills on muscle alone (hot and sweaty, at least, during the summer). Pedalling also extends the range, obviously.
The catch is that it isn't technically a car, and cannot go 45 to 50 mph on the one road I would HAVE to drive on that is 45 to 50 mph if you want to go WITH the traffic, and it is even more of a road obstacle than a bike if you are traveling under road speed. Which makes it still quite dangerous, although maybe a hair less so than a bike (at least one person I know of has been killed on the road I have to ride in on in the last year on a bike).
So, can one imagine taking the working ELF design, bumping its internal energy storage to 14.5 KW-H, bumping its solar capacity to (say) 400 to 600 W, (say, 2400 KW-H/day) increasing its top speed to street legal (say 55 mph for mostly in town driving), sticking with polycarbonate sides but increasing seating to four in more of a car-like configuration, and still maintaining at least 12 m/KWH, needed to get 30 m in a day's charge (with no pedals)?
It's not completely insane. Doubling speed increases power required by around a factor of 8 but takes only 1/2 the time to go the distance, so it needs 4 times as much energy IF one assumes energy is dominated at that point by quadratic drag. Well, we've quadrupled incoming power (relative to 30 miles/day), increased stored power by a much larger factor than necessary, so in principle if we haven't added TOO much weight or MUCH less efficient motors, we are at least in the ballpark. Can we do this by no more than doubling the high end cost? Again, maybe, hard to say. We'd save some by not having pedals and all the dual power source gearing, we'd spend it and more on the extra batteries, solar capacity, and the 4+x more powerful motor. But it might be doable. ELF might make it there on its own as it has the substantial advantage of building and selling actual vehicles right now that already work pretty well as in-town commuters, better/safer where the speed limit is 35 mph and under, not so well where it is 35 mph and over. If they are and remain profitable as they grow, they could end up bringing out higher end, closer
For windmills, you can use vertical axis windmills to avoid slaughtering birds.
Or, you can put cats in hamster-wheel cages that generate electricity. After all, cats kill somewhere between several hundred million and a billion birds a year, almost as many as transparent glass windows kill by enticing birds to bash in their own brains flying into them. According to at least one of the efforts to put names to causes of human-linked bird mortality. Turbines aren't really in the top ten causes. Windows is number one, with cats at number 2, high tension power lines, pesticides, cars, communication towers, and hunting all much higher in total mortality than wind turbines. So if you want to save birds, put some of those ugly little butterfly decals on your windows and don't wash them so often that they are perfectly transparent. Use your neighborhood cats for target practice. Avoid using electricity, don't use chlorinated hydrocarbons and anticholinesterases on your lawn and garden, try not to drive, and go hunting for the human hunters as well as the cat (and even dog) hunters. As many birds are killed every year as fishing by-catch (in nets and with hook and line) as are killed by turbines.
Just to get a little perspective. I have other reasons to dislike turbines as energy sources, one of them being that they are large and ugly and have a poor duty cycle in many locations and have high maintenance costs and take up a lot of room and... but there is no need to throw birds in as a good reason to be hatin'.
Outside of that, I agree. But see the article on New Atlas today -- it alleges that a car that at least charges itself on a daily basis with no external power supply at all is possible and should be commercially available next year, maybe, if the article isn't bullshit. I rather think that it is, but will reserve judgement for the time being.
I don't disagree with your math, but an article on NewAtlas TODAY extols a claim from a German company that they are going to build a car with 7.5 m^2 of 22% efficient polycrystalline solar cells covering its flattish surfaces, with a 14.5 kW-H internal battery, that will get at least 30 km/day from normal ambient (unobstructed, sure) sun. Their so-far rendered image of a car looks like a smallish four seater commuter car. They also CLAIM that they will sell this for $14 to $16K USD.
I'm skeptical -- but if the DO manage this, it would make a hell of a car for my in-town driving. Basically buy it and then use it without fuel for the rest of its useful life, because I don't drive 30 km/day on average, even including runs to stores as well as work. I'm not sure it would be a good "only car", but it would sure take the pressure off of my 4Runner (needed to pull a boat and for trips but overkill for daily commuting).
The point being that there may be "specialty cars" that can actually function as solar cars for limited length commutes. The ELF (made in Durham NOW, as opposed to dreaming-ware like the car in the new atlas article) could almost do it, if you could hook it up to a few square meters of panel this efficient, but it isn't really a "car", it is more of an electric enhanced tricycle with a tarp-like cover and a bit of storage. But for $6000, one could add the solar panels and a system to accumulate enough charge at home in a day to keep it charged for standard commutes, if it were really road safe (IMO it's not, quite).
rgb
You are an idiot or an ignorant.
Possibly both at the same time! Let's see:
http://newatlas.com/silex-lase...
Hmmm, 1/5th the cost already affordable by nearly any "kitchen pot" dictatorship around the world. And this isn't new technology -- rumor in the physics world has it that this is how Israel has been making its bombs for decades. So right, not quite in my kitchen with my pots, but in a small warehouse somewhere? Maybe, if I have a few million and access to uranium 238 (which is, one profoundly hopes, not THAT easy to arrange, actually). In a small production facility in (pick a place loosely controlled by your favorite world group that you really don't want to have nuclear devices)? Without question. It's just a matter of time, although frankly centrifuges are already more than sufficient to build uranium bombs with or to enrich fuel-grade uranium to where you can cook out plutonium. Plutonium is, no argument, hard to squeeze off in a bomb, but enriched Uranium is laughably easy.
Thorium is arguably more of a challenge. For one thing, making U233 involves the Pa chain and a breeder reactor that makes lots of gamma rays and neutrons, so it probably isn't a good candidate for basements unless one's basement has thick lead and concrete walls and one has a degree in nuclear engineering. OTOH, separating out U233 is just chemistry once you get there. So far, it has been easier and cheaper to stick to U235 and plutonium for reasons that are well described and discussed elsewhere:
https://whatisnuclear.com/arti...
but there is little doubt that one can make bombs from Thorium, and further, that the bombs you make are the nice, easy to manage Uranium bombs and not the nasty, prematurely detonating fizzling fissioning (unless you build them just right) plutonium bombs. You can store the bomb grade material without any particular precautions other than keeping it subcritical and our borders are totally porous (a nation's worth of heroin addicts agree!) so again, a terror group in any country that has access to e.g. Monazite sands -- India, Australia, Madagascar, Western North Carolina... can if they wish follow this alternative route to a Uranium bomb that doesn't even require a laser OR a centrifuge (although it does require building a breeder with a chemical separation step, plus some fuel grade material to get it started). Basement stuff? I was kidding -- or being sarcastic if you prefer -- because while no, one cannot do it in a literal garage, it is still a technology well within the reach of middle-tier proliferation risks who might have a comparatively hard time getting their hands on Uranium.
Best of all, nowadays they could trumpet to the world that they were fixing Global Warming by building thorium based nuclear self-sufficiency and all it takes in a MSR is to divert the breeder-enriched salts into a chemical extraction step and siphon off a steady supply of bomb-grade material. Material that you can even show that you NEED (in at least some capacity) to restart your reactor after fuelling or start a new one...
The point is -- to repeat myself -- that killing large numbers of people is easy enough to be nearly impossible to prevent if:
a) You don't care if you die yourself in the process;
b) You don't care who you kill, and are perfectly happy to take the lowest hanging fruit you can find if people take steps to protect one possible target (say, the super bowl). Are people going to be able to provide the same protection to every football, soccer, basketball game, forever? How about airports, train stations? How about high-profile, expensive, human filled skyscrapers in every city?
c) You have at least some money to put towards the project. To kill more than 100 people at a time will likely require some investment and a co
Yeah, now if WE were nefarious Dr. Evil types, WE would be able to fill full sized buses with the name of your favorite rental car company on the side right up to the pickup area of any major metropolitan area, loaded not with a single drum of witchbrew nitro but with dozens of them, with walls lined with preformed shrapnel on the terminal side and with a concrete wall on the other to direct the explosion (and likely with heavy heavy duty shocks:-). Then sure, we could remote pilot it into place in any terminal in the country with an Airplane-style inflatable driver on the front seat and detonate it on Thanksgiving weekend at peak travel hours. Even if there IS somebody literally sitting on a camera watching, they'd have to be monitoring EVERY large vehicle that EVER enters the main airport, and the only monitoring that would work worth a damn is something fully automated (transponders on every permitted vehicle?) and then you have to defend the automation!
OR, we could do pretty much the same thing with any of a number of small planes -- turn them into de facto cruise missiles and direct them straight at the containment vessel of a nuclear power plant, or better yet, at its spent fuel dump. Or turn a 21 foot power boat into an enormous remote control "torpedo" and take out a cruise ship. The most nefarious of WE could probably figure out the laser enrichment trick, beg borrow buy steal a few dozen tons of Uranium, enrich our own U235 in our basement, and build a REAL bomb and simply drop it in the middle of any random city, anywhere. Or, if Uranium is all locked down maybe we could buy up less-controlled Thorium and cook it down into bomb grade U233. Yes, these require a really big basement, but plenty of countries, all drug lords, and lots of billionaires all have "big basements". The drug lords already have fully debugged means of delivery that don't even require electronics!
All of these things are why Homeland Security people get ulcers. They aren't stupid, or at least some of them aren't stupid, and they probably have whole spreadsheets of identified pathways for bad people to do bad things (and activities that "might" serve as a signal for these bad things in preparation). And they know that all of this is really pissing into the wind -- just as 9/11 came out of the blue, the next attack will come out of the blue, and EVEN if it follows one of the identified scenarios, they ultimately rely as much on luck as anything else to detect it and successfully intervene. They just haven't been too lucky, recently. Too much dike -- a UNIVERSE of dike, all rotten and crumbling in the storm -- and not enough fingers.
Ultimately, one has to hope that smart people are too smart, usually, to want to mass-murder their neighbors. Admittedly, history doesn't provide a whole lot of support for this hope, but in the end, anybody who really IS smart, and patient, and who has the resources to invest in it (big tour bus sized buses aren't all that cheap, and it isn't that easy to buy the materials to make good explosives or to make GOOD chemical explosives, defined to be ones that blow up when you want them to instead of when you are halfway through making them and get crystallization of unstable nitrates on the lips of your reaction vessels) can probably figure out a bunch of ways to kill people hundreds to thousands at a time, especially if they don't care WHO they kill or WHEN it happens and can just target any old event where large numbers of people are concentrated in a comparatively small space.
There was a science fiction short story I remember reading (but I cannot remember who wrote it, or when) where somebody discovered a way of basically destroying the world using the moral equivalent of household cleaners from under the sink. The "recipe" was widely disbursed so suddenly everybody -- everybody -- knew how to kill every other person in the world (and themselves). The story explored whether suddenly every human alive would instantly become moral and treat everybody else as if they co