There is one severe issue with online voting. It doesn't occur in a controlled environment. As a result, it's possible to check what other person actually voted for.
In Straw-Man Voting Systems internet voting software, you're absolutely right!
Meanwhile, in the non-straw-man case, this is a well recognized problem with dozens of easy solutions which anyone spending 15 seconds thinking about the problem could solve. For example, Estonia lets people vote as many times as they want, either in person or on the computer, only the last one counts, and in-person always overrides electronic. So unless you're literally holding crowds hostage all day until the election is over, no, that's inapplicable. And if you're holding crowds hostage to control their voting preference, that's no difference from holding a crowd of opposing voters hostage and not letting them vote in any other system.
Another example solution is letting people cast "test votes" or "dummy votes" which look exactly like real votes, but aren't tallied. The user knows whether they're logged in to cast a test/dummy vote because they know what information they chose at the registrar's office when they registered, but not only does the "buyer" not see a difference, but there's no way that the user can even prove it to them if they wanted to. They can *say* "this is my real account", but the "buyer" has to take them on their word.
These are just two examples among many. Meanwhile, in traditional voting someone can just buy off / force a person to submit an absentee paper ballot for whoever they want, or have them snap a cell phone shot in the polling booth.
That was just an example. Let's pick another one - say, absentee voting? Does Norway allow that, and if so, how do they prevent vote buying with absentee votes?
It's like you didn't even read my post. Here, I'll just use blockquotes to respond.
You:
there is no way for him to check which number you actually wrote on the ballot
Me:
. And of course votes can be bought, sold, or pressured just as easily, especially nowadays in the age of cell phone cameras.
(I could also add "absentee voting", the old-fashioned way of vote buying)
You:
In a case of electronic voting from any PC terminal, all said boss needs to do is stand next to you as you vote.
Me:
most of the things people often present as intractable problems actually have a number of very reasonable solutions.
Me, elsewhere in greater specificity on this specific "intractable problem":
Approaches include things allowing voters to cast "test votes" or "dummy votes" that look just like regular votes, or letting voters vote as many times as they want but only counting the last one.
Is there anything else that my previous posts, or in fact spending about 15 seconds thinking about the problem, or taking the time to read about any actual implementations out there before commenting on the subject, can answer for you?
I searched for figures and found that for the 2000 election alone, municipalities alone are estimated to have spent $1B on voting (not counting the registration side). Yes, I don't think that's an insignificant sum. Yes, I think software could be way, way cheaper.
the central aspect about evoting is that it can drastically improve the technical capacity of governments to submit stuff for question.
Thank you - this is a key, often overlooked aspect. I find E-voting on regular elections to really be more of a "pilot stage" on the road to true democracy. Or, what I think is an important difference, toward true representative (liquid) direct democracy, wherein you can choose someone (or multiple people, for different types of issues) to vote for you (and they can forward delegate the votes onward if they choose), and you can change / override them at will. A delegate could be some estimeed professor of constitutional law, they could be be the head of some NGO that you support, it could be your cousin Chris who "tends to follow this stuff and seems to make sense when he talks about it", whoever you want.
The problem if you don't allow representatives of any kind then on low-turnout issues (some of which will be *very* low turnout), pressure groups can have undue influence. For example, if 90% of a town's residents are environmentally conscious but there's some obscure zoning bill that would allow a sensitive area to be turned into a chemical plant down the road, and the company called on all its employees to get out and vote for it, even though they only make up a tiny percentage of the population, they still stand a chance of getting the bill through because most people don't follow every little issue that comes up for a vote. By allowing for delegates, you never face this situation. But if someone feels betrayed by their representative, or goes through a political philolosophy change, or whatever, they can swap them out immediately, or override them on a particular issue.
And I've heard people complain about direct democracy saying that it's "mob rule" and would have negative views on minority rights. But *all* democracy has that problem. Which is why you don't leave the job of safeguarding rights to the public, you leave that to the courts. The court system is the balance to the tyrrany of the majority, and needs to be maintained as such.
1. Proof of vote is completely different from online voting. You can have online systems without proof of vote. You can have paper systems with proof of vote. 2. Proveable vote selling already exists. Very few polling places ban cell phones with cameras. 3. Systems can and in fact already do exist to allow a voter to prove to themselves that they voted for a particular candidate but not to others. Approaches include things allowing voters to cast "test votes" or "dummy votes" that look just like regular votes, or letting voters vote as many times as they want but only counting the last one.
There's countless ways, with varying levels of likelihood depending on the details of the system. Party operatives can infiltrate the other party to get counted as voters. Vote counters could be paid off or blackmailed. Ballots can be disappeared before they get to the counters and the voters listed as not having voted. Premarked ballots can be made to arrive from voters who didn't actually vote. Machines can cast false votes. People can be tricked into choosing the wrong candidate. Recorded precinct totals can be changed. Recorded district totals can be changed. Absentee ballots can be "never received". Provisional ballots are even easier to disappear. Or you can just rule them invalid without ever having to explain yourself. Voters can be kept from the polls due to hundreds of tactics, including intimidation, limited voting hours, incorrectly listed voting hours, unexpectedly early closings, bad information about where the station is, inaccurate reporting as to where a person is registered to vote, and so forth. And of course votes can be bought, sold, or pressured just as easily, especially nowadays in the age of cell phone cameras.
Yes, I think it's disingenous to pretend that internet voting is the only system where there are challenges. And most of the things people often present as intractable problems actually have a number of very reasonable solutions.
Millions of people every day trust their entire life's savings to online banking and investing. Yet we can't choose a freaking school commissioner on the internet because that's insecure? Which do you think most people care more about?
So electronic voting is expensive but paper voting is cheap? Could you explain that logic?
The fewer people who go to polling stations, the fewer stations you need (at least in areas of at least moderate population density where driving distance would become a factor if there were fewer). There's an awfully lot of overhead behind polling stations, both before, during, and after the election.
The coal plants thing is really misunderstood. They're shuttering old, inefficient (25%-ish) coal plants and adding new high efficiency (40%-ish) gassification-based plants. In what world is that a bad thing, nearly halving your carbon for a given amount of electricity? Beyond that, the new plants are designed to ramp up and down rapidly. This means that while they'll operate as baseload plants in the beginning, they'll steadily switch over to being peaking plants as increasing renewables capacity gets added.
You don't have to eliminate *100%* of carbon emissions to solve the problem. Hitting 90% of them is good enough. Perfect is often the enemy of good.
Oh, and about the price? Yeah, Germany pays an average $0.35/kwh, versus $0.12 in the US. But they also have higher electricity taxes, pay 4x more for natural gas and have insolation levels similar to Alaska; you can't just compare countries' prices directly like that. I mean, I could compare Germany to Hawaii - Hawaii averages $0.38/kwh, gets 3-5 times more sun (plus has much greater per-capita resources on clean baseload like geo), has lower electricity taxes, and nonetheless emits more carbon per capita.
Of course, carbon taxes hurt your goods competitiveness internationally. Which is why I support CAT (the carbon equivalent of VAT), or more generally, PAT (Pollution-Added Tax). All goods get taxed on embodied pollution when they enter a PAT zone and refunded when they leave a PAT zone. Thus nobody gets a competitive leg up by gutting their environmental regulations. And it should be in compliance with existing WTO rules.
At the same time, there really are no valid arguments against properly funded nuclear power.
The main argument against "properly funded" (???) nuclear power comes from Wall Street, not K-Street. Politicians and nuclear fans in the general public have long been way more pro-nuclear than investors. The long nuclear pause in the US, and the complete running out of steam of the so-called "nuclear rennaissance", comes from a lack of people willing to invest in it, despite all of the taxpayer/ratepayer support they've been given over the years.
Now people here may argue that Wall Street energy analysts are idiots who don't know as much about the true cost of nuclear as they do, but do you all really expect me to buy that?
Those sort of analyses are over simplistic, though. For example, check what Iceland burns per capita. Crazy isn't it, right? Well not so crazy when you learn that of Iceland's three aluminum smelters, even the smallest uses more power than all of the homes and businesses combined.
You can't credit all consumption to the residential sector, and how much power the industrial sector will consume varies greatly depending on what kind of industries are present.
Terrorism is actually one of their selling points for Tel-Aviv. Since they're personal cars, and all of the cars are designed to self-brake in the event of a track outage, it's difficult to conceive of how a terrorist could do much more than blow themselves up and cause a minor traffic disruption. I guess if there was a crowd waiting for pods they could attack that...
$360 for every man, woman, and child courtesy of US taxpayers goes a long way. That's 5% of all government revenues. To scale it to US equivalents, its as if the US got 10 NASAs for free.
Neat link. The Morgantown solution sounds sort of like a halfway solution between busses and SkyTran. The individual cars are designed for holding a lot more people, and they always try to carry as many people as possible, not even dispatching a car to you unless five minutes go by without another person requesting the same destination. And during the day they basically operate as busses, stopping at all of the stops. And of course, because the mini-busses it uses are much heavier than the SkyTran personal cars approach, that means you need to build heavier tracks and viaducts to be able to support the weight.
Still, it's a partial solution. And its important as you point out, the more cars you make, the more you need to maintain. So SkyTran is going to have to put a lot of effort into ensuring that they're easy to maintain and have a significant stock of spares on-hand to rotate in as broken cars rotate out. And of course it'll be critical to be able to get broken cars out of the system ASAP. They say that the track is designed to be modular to quickly swap out in case of damage and that all vehicles maintain enough energy to get to a station in the event that something becomes impassable. I guess we'll see how that works out. I had pretty much thought that this project was abandoned, given that I hadn't heard any news on their Tel Aviv pilot in quite a while.
BTW, I thought SkyTran had abandoned maglev. Yet the article is saying it's maglev. Strange...
One thing I like about the SkyTran concept in particular is also something I liked about Hyperloop: reduced columnar loading. Versus having actual trains running elevated, you have many, much smaller individual loads. It's closer to having a low, constant load then a periodic, very high load like you get with trains. The less the peak load, the smaller, lighter, and cheaper you can build the columns and track.
I see they've dumped their old, aerodynamic-disaster "fully egg-shaped" cars that was all over their old promotional materials in favor of ones with streamlining that works in the real-world (egg-shaped front, rear taper). Good to see.
SkyTran seems to address well one of the three main complaints about public transport (the "It doesn't go straight from where you are to where you want to go" aspect, meaning you have to wait for the right line, go on pointless detours, sometimes to exchanges, etc). It doesn't however seem to offer a solution to the other two (the lack of terminals being present both directly at the start of your destination and the end of your destination, rather than having to walk for blocks or more on each end of the journey; and, inability to store things in your vehicle / take large objects with you). Still, it's a start. Combined with a small and/or foldable piece of personal transport tech, one could take a number of big steps in the direction of making it as convenient as personal vehicle ownership.
I really don't know enough about this case to know whether the guy has a leg to stand on or not. I mean, sometimes blatantly false stuff is added on Wikipedia - remember the John Seigenthaler incident way back when? Of course, even that had its backlash.;)
The predominant theory at present is that it's somewhere in the ballpark of 20km. Some argue for only a few kilometers, but that's a minority view. And it's even worse when you're at the bottom, the sea is expected to be about 100km deep.
How do you communicate through 20km of ice plus up to 100km of water?The total absorption in question here is just massive. Earthquake-strength sonar? ELF waves with a dozens-of-kilometers-long antenna? Cycling your nuclear reactor on and off and having a super-sensitive neutrino detector on the surface? Whatever method you use, your bandwidth will be ridiculously small - maybe 1 bit per second, give or take a couple orders of magnitude.
I really think any practical approach will require having either a cable or series of repeaters along the entry hole, and requiring the submersible to return to the entry hole to transmit data back up to the surface.
We have extremely expensive and extremely brittle glass that has a high hardness.
Wrong on all parts except for the last one. Look, you clearly know nothing about glass, so stop pretending to be an expert and talking down to everyone. There are scratch resistant coatings that cost as little as a couple dollars per square foot, and you can apply them to whatever glass you want, not "extremely expensive and extremely brittle glass". You're literally just making properties up out of thin air for glass.
Optics don't magically direct more sunlight!
Uh, by the definition of optics, they're structures that direct light.
Are you saying your LED-lit crosswalks are inset into the ground?
I don't know what the other poster is familiar with, but I'm familiar with the LED "Smart Crosswalks" - google it. Yes, you can see them fine in the day.
Oh, god, Thunderf00t, thats who your videos are from? Yeah, I've ran into that guy before, he's a moron.
Once the glass breaks, it's stays broken.
Which can be said about any road surface. What point are you trying to make? Are you trying to claim that glass will break easy under pressure? News flash, the glass glazing on some skyscrapers actually holds up their own collective weight. Glass has superb compressive strength. It's very poor in dealing with flexural loads, which is why you have to have panels that can flex between individual panes. And gee, remind me again, what's the proposal here for the road? Oh, yeah - panels.
Debris will scratch the glass making it more translucent rather than transparent reducing its effectiveness.
Which is why you use a scratch-resistant coating like is used on countertops, bar code readers, and thousands of other glass products; they're not even that expensive, for a basic level of protection (if you want to get all the way to something like gorilla glass, that's rather pricey, but also totally unnecessary). Why did you not even consider anti-scratch coatings? And FYI, just like greenhouses continue to work when scratched, so do scratched solar panels. It's not the end of the world.
To prevent scratching, your surface simply has to be harder than what's rubbing against it. Few materials in the natural world are harder than quartz (Mohs hardness 7), so a Mohs hardness 7.5 coating is sufficient. It's not like people are going to be scratching rubies against the road.
And lastly, just like it's far easier to mount panels on a flat surface on the ground than some pre-existing home where you have to worry about structural integrity, leaks, etc, it's also far easier to maintain them on the ground.
Roadways don't track the sun
Neither do rooftops. Only a small fraction of PV installations are on heliostats, they're mainly used for solar thermal. The cheaper PV gets, the less sense heliostats make (the cost of the actual solar cell material itself is on the road to irrelevance, more and more it comes down to installation costs).
As he rightly points out, putting the solar cells NEXT TO the road works much better.
If you're talking about the shoulder, I'd call that "part of the road". If you're talking about building a whole new structure, no, that's idiocy. The point of this is to minimize land use and to eliminate the need to build two separate structures (a road and a solar panel farm). Labor costs dominate both of these, so eliminating half your labor is A Big Deal(TM).
Not that I think this team has approached things in the right order. "Solar freaking walkways" are much lower hanging fruit. And their focus on winter climes is a stupid way to start as well. But yours (and Thunderf00t)'s arguments are just stupid.
And the idea of putting it in parking lots is even dumber. Yeah, parking lots where cars are parked on it during the day (this blocking the sun) and empty at night (where there's no sun).
Except that even the idiot team that ran the kickstarter wasn't focusing on the parking spaces themselves. Seriously, stop what you're doing, right now, and go to Google Maps, pick a random spot in the country (don't bias it), zoom in, find the nearest road, and look at it. Observe how little of the road is shaded by cars. The answer will be, "virtually none".
Okay, let's try to bias it. Pick a city of your choice. Now pick a random spot in it and zoom in, not biasing your zoom in more than that. Look at the nearest road and observe how little is shaded. Again, "very, very little"
And the award for worst form in which to present a counterargument goes to: Youtube video clips! (runner-up goes to "Scrawled on the exterior walls of the International Space Station")
Sorry, but I'm not going to be watching four videos from here. I wouldn't even do it for you if I was in a convenient place to watch youtube videos. The last thing I want is to waste 15 minutes watching some random net users droning on about something that would take 30 seconds to read if written down.
Could you please you sum up what they say that's in contradiction with my above post, and my post below?
Slashdot Mirror
In Straw-Man Voting Systems internet voting software, you're absolutely right!
Meanwhile, in the non-straw-man case, this is a well recognized problem with dozens of easy solutions which anyone spending 15 seconds thinking about the problem could solve. For example, Estonia lets people vote as many times as they want, either in person or on the computer, only the last one counts, and in-person always overrides electronic. So unless you're literally holding crowds hostage all day until the election is over, no, that's inapplicable. And if you're holding crowds hostage to control their voting preference, that's no difference from holding a crowd of opposing voters hostage and not letting them vote in any other system.
Another example solution is letting people cast "test votes" or "dummy votes" which look exactly like real votes, but aren't tallied. The user knows whether they're logged in to cast a test/dummy vote because they know what information they chose at the registrar's office when they registered, but not only does the "buyer" not see a difference, but there's no way that the user can even prove it to them if they wanted to. They can *say* "this is my real account", but the "buyer" has to take them on their word.
These are just two examples among many. Meanwhile, in traditional voting someone can just buy off / force a person to submit an absentee paper ballot for whoever they want, or have them snap a cell phone shot in the polling booth.
That was just an example. Let's pick another one - say, absentee voting? Does Norway allow that, and if so, how do they prevent vote buying with absentee votes?
It's like you didn't even read my post. Here, I'll just use blockquotes to respond.
You:
Me:
(I could also add "absentee voting", the old-fashioned way of vote buying)
You:
Me:
Me, elsewhere in greater specificity on this specific "intractable problem":
Is there anything else that my previous posts, or in fact spending about 15 seconds thinking about the problem, or taking the time to read about any actual implementations out there before commenting on the subject, can answer for you?
Given the state of today's technology, no form of electronic banking can be considered reasonably safe, accurate or secure.
So should banks all shut down their online banking services?
I searched for figures and found that for the 2000 election alone, municipalities alone are estimated to have spent $1B on voting (not counting the registration side). Yes, I don't think that's an insignificant sum. Yes, I think software could be way, way cheaper.
Thank you - this is a key, often overlooked aspect. I find E-voting on regular elections to really be more of a "pilot stage" on the road to true democracy. Or, what I think is an important difference, toward true representative (liquid) direct democracy, wherein you can choose someone (or multiple people, for different types of issues) to vote for you (and they can forward delegate the votes onward if they choose), and you can change / override them at will. A delegate could be some estimeed professor of constitutional law, they could be be the head of some NGO that you support, it could be your cousin Chris who "tends to follow this stuff and seems to make sense when he talks about it", whoever you want.
The problem if you don't allow representatives of any kind then on low-turnout issues (some of which will be *very* low turnout), pressure groups can have undue influence. For example, if 90% of a town's residents are environmentally conscious but there's some obscure zoning bill that would allow a sensitive area to be turned into a chemical plant down the road, and the company called on all its employees to get out and vote for it, even though they only make up a tiny percentage of the population, they still stand a chance of getting the bill through because most people don't follow every little issue that comes up for a vote. By allowing for delegates, you never face this situation. But if someone feels betrayed by their representative, or goes through a political philolosophy change, or whatever, they can swap them out immediately, or override them on a particular issue.
And I've heard people complain about direct democracy saying that it's "mob rule" and would have negative views on minority rights. But *all* democracy has that problem. Which is why you don't leave the job of safeguarding rights to the public, you leave that to the courts. The court system is the balance to the tyrrany of the majority, and needs to be maintained as such.
1. Proof of vote is completely different from online voting. You can have online systems without proof of vote. You can have paper systems with proof of vote.
2. Proveable vote selling already exists. Very few polling places ban cell phones with cameras.
3. Systems can and in fact already do exist to allow a voter to prove to themselves that they voted for a particular candidate but not to others. Approaches include things allowing voters to cast "test votes" or "dummy votes" that look just like regular votes, or letting voters vote as many times as they want but only counting the last one.
There's countless ways, with varying levels of likelihood depending on the details of the system. Party operatives can infiltrate the other party to get counted as voters. Vote counters could be paid off or blackmailed. Ballots can be disappeared before they get to the counters and the voters listed as not having voted. Premarked ballots can be made to arrive from voters who didn't actually vote. Machines can cast false votes. People can be tricked into choosing the wrong candidate. Recorded precinct totals can be changed. Recorded district totals can be changed. Absentee ballots can be "never received". Provisional ballots are even easier to disappear. Or you can just rule them invalid without ever having to explain yourself. Voters can be kept from the polls due to hundreds of tactics, including intimidation, limited voting hours, incorrectly listed voting hours, unexpectedly early closings, bad information about where the station is, inaccurate reporting as to where a person is registered to vote, and so forth. And of course votes can be bought, sold, or pressured just as easily, especially nowadays in the age of cell phone cameras.
Yes, I think it's disingenous to pretend that internet voting is the only system where there are challenges. And most of the things people often present as intractable problems actually have a number of very reasonable solutions.
Millions of people every day trust their entire life's savings to online banking and investing. Yet we can't choose a freaking school commissioner on the internet because that's insecure? Which do you think most people care more about?
And the award for most inexplicably angry reaction goes to....
So electronic voting is expensive but paper voting is cheap? Could you explain that logic?
The fewer people who go to polling stations, the fewer stations you need (at least in areas of at least moderate population density where driving distance would become a factor if there were fewer). There's an awfully lot of overhead behind polling stations, both before, during, and after the election.
The coal plants thing is really misunderstood. They're shuttering old, inefficient (25%-ish) coal plants and adding new high efficiency (40%-ish) gassification-based plants. In what world is that a bad thing, nearly halving your carbon for a given amount of electricity? Beyond that, the new plants are designed to ramp up and down rapidly. This means that while they'll operate as baseload plants in the beginning, they'll steadily switch over to being peaking plants as increasing renewables capacity gets added.
You don't have to eliminate *100%* of carbon emissions to solve the problem. Hitting 90% of them is good enough. Perfect is often the enemy of good.
Oh, and about the price? Yeah, Germany pays an average $0.35/kwh, versus $0.12 in the US. But they also have higher electricity taxes, pay 4x more for natural gas and have insolation levels similar to Alaska; you can't just compare countries' prices directly like that. I mean, I could compare Germany to Hawaii - Hawaii averages $0.38/kwh, gets 3-5 times more sun (plus has much greater per-capita resources on clean baseload like geo), has lower electricity taxes, and nonetheless emits more carbon per capita.
Of course, carbon taxes hurt your goods competitiveness internationally. Which is why I support CAT (the carbon equivalent of VAT), or more generally, PAT (Pollution-Added Tax). All goods get taxed on embodied pollution when they enter a PAT zone and refunded when they leave a PAT zone. Thus nobody gets a competitive leg up by gutting their environmental regulations. And it should be in compliance with existing WTO rules.
The main argument against "properly funded" (???) nuclear power comes from Wall Street, not K-Street. Politicians and nuclear fans in the general public have long been way more pro-nuclear than investors. The long nuclear pause in the US, and the complete running out of steam of the so-called "nuclear rennaissance", comes from a lack of people willing to invest in it, despite all of the taxpayer/ratepayer support they've been given over the years.
Now people here may argue that Wall Street energy analysts are idiots who don't know as much about the true cost of nuclear as they do, but do you all really expect me to buy that?
Those sort of analyses are over simplistic, though. For example, check what Iceland burns per capita. Crazy isn't it, right? Well not so crazy when you learn that of Iceland's three aluminum smelters, even the smallest uses more power than all of the homes and businesses combined.
You can't credit all consumption to the residential sector, and how much power the industrial sector will consume varies greatly depending on what kind of industries are present.
Terrorism is actually one of their selling points for Tel-Aviv. Since they're personal cars, and all of the cars are designed to self-brake in the event of a track outage, it's difficult to conceive of how a terrorist could do much more than blow themselves up and cause a minor traffic disruption. I guess if there was a crowd waiting for pods they could attack that...
$360 for every man, woman, and child courtesy of US taxpayers goes a long way. That's 5% of all government revenues. To scale it to US equivalents, its as if the US got 10 NASAs for free.
Neat link. The Morgantown solution sounds sort of like a halfway solution between busses and SkyTran. The individual cars are designed for holding a lot more people, and they always try to carry as many people as possible, not even dispatching a car to you unless five minutes go by without another person requesting the same destination. And during the day they basically operate as busses, stopping at all of the stops. And of course, because the mini-busses it uses are much heavier than the SkyTran personal cars approach, that means you need to build heavier tracks and viaducts to be able to support the weight.
Still, it's a partial solution. And its important as you point out, the more cars you make, the more you need to maintain. So SkyTran is going to have to put a lot of effort into ensuring that they're easy to maintain and have a significant stock of spares on-hand to rotate in as broken cars rotate out. And of course it'll be critical to be able to get broken cars out of the system ASAP. They say that the track is designed to be modular to quickly swap out in case of damage and that all vehicles maintain enough energy to get to a station in the event that something becomes impassable. I guess we'll see how that works out. I had pretty much thought that this project was abandoned, given that I hadn't heard any news on their Tel Aviv pilot in quite a while.
BTW, I thought SkyTran had abandoned maglev. Yet the article is saying it's maglev. Strange...
One thing I like about the SkyTran concept in particular is also something I liked about Hyperloop: reduced columnar loading. Versus having actual trains running elevated, you have many, much smaller individual loads. It's closer to having a low, constant load then a periodic, very high load like you get with trains. The less the peak load, the smaller, lighter, and cheaper you can build the columns and track.
I see they've dumped their old, aerodynamic-disaster "fully egg-shaped" cars that was all over their old promotional materials in favor of ones with streamlining that works in the real-world (egg-shaped front, rear taper). Good to see.
SkyTran seems to address well one of the three main complaints about public transport (the "It doesn't go straight from where you are to where you want to go" aspect, meaning you have to wait for the right line, go on pointless detours, sometimes to exchanges, etc). It doesn't however seem to offer a solution to the other two (the lack of terminals being present both directly at the start of your destination and the end of your destination, rather than having to walk for blocks or more on each end of the journey; and, inability to store things in your vehicle / take large objects with you). Still, it's a start. Combined with a small and/or foldable piece of personal transport tech, one could take a number of big steps in the direction of making it as convenient as personal vehicle ownership.
Why even limit it to team sports? At least if the Olympics is anything to go by, there's more "legitimate" individuals sports than team sports. So why not also have scholarships for single-player video games?
That is, to say, I look forward to getting a scholarship in Kerbal Space Program. ;)
I really don't know enough about this case to know whether the guy has a leg to stand on or not. I mean, sometimes blatantly false stuff is added on Wikipedia - remember the John Seigenthaler incident way back when? Of course, even that had its backlash. ;)
"The Wikipedia page said said I was an oversensitive litigious bastard!"
The predominant theory at present is that it's somewhere in the ballpark of 20km. Some argue for only a few kilometers, but that's a minority view. And it's even worse when you're at the bottom, the sea is expected to be about 100km deep.
How do you communicate through 20km of ice plus up to 100km of water?The total absorption in question here is just massive. Earthquake-strength sonar? ELF waves with a dozens-of-kilometers-long antenna? Cycling your nuclear reactor on and off and having a super-sensitive neutrino detector on the surface? Whatever method you use, your bandwidth will be ridiculously small - maybe 1 bit per second, give or take a couple orders of magnitude.
I really think any practical approach will require having either a cable or series of repeaters along the entry hole, and requiring the submersible to return to the entry hole to transmit data back up to the surface.
Wrong on all parts except for the last one. Look, you clearly know nothing about glass, so stop pretending to be an expert and talking down to everyone. There are scratch resistant coatings that cost as little as a couple dollars per square foot, and you can apply them to whatever glass you want, not "extremely expensive and extremely brittle glass". You're literally just making properties up out of thin air for glass.
Uh, by the definition of optics, they're structures that direct light.
I don't know what the other poster is familiar with, but I'm familiar with the LED "Smart Crosswalks" - google it. Yes, you can see them fine in the day.
Oh, god, Thunderf00t, thats who your videos are from? Yeah, I've ran into that guy before, he's a moron.
Which can be said about any road surface. What point are you trying to make? Are you trying to claim that glass will break easy under pressure? News flash, the glass glazing on some skyscrapers actually holds up their own collective weight. Glass has superb compressive strength. It's very poor in dealing with flexural loads, which is why you have to have panels that can flex between individual panes. And gee, remind me again, what's the proposal here for the road? Oh, yeah - panels.
Which is why you use a scratch-resistant coating like is used on countertops, bar code readers, and thousands of other glass products; they're not even that expensive, for a basic level of protection (if you want to get all the way to something like gorilla glass, that's rather pricey, but also totally unnecessary). Why did you not even consider anti-scratch coatings? And FYI, just like greenhouses continue to work when scratched, so do scratched solar panels. It's not the end of the world.
To prevent scratching, your surface simply has to be harder than what's rubbing against it. Few materials in the natural world are harder than quartz (Mohs hardness 7), so a Mohs hardness 7.5 coating is sufficient. It's not like people are going to be scratching rubies against the road.
And lastly, just like it's far easier to mount panels on a flat surface on the ground than some pre-existing home where you have to worry about structural integrity, leaks, etc, it's also far easier to maintain them on the ground.
Neither do rooftops. Only a small fraction of PV installations are on heliostats, they're mainly used for solar thermal. The cheaper PV gets, the less sense heliostats make (the cost of the actual solar cell material itself is on the road to irrelevance, more and more it comes down to installation costs).
If you're talking about the shoulder, I'd call that "part of the road". If you're talking about building a whole new structure, no, that's idiocy. The point of this is to minimize land use and to eliminate the need to build two separate structures (a road and a solar panel farm). Labor costs dominate both of these, so eliminating half your labor is A Big Deal(TM).
Not that I think this team has approached things in the right order. "Solar freaking walkways" are much lower hanging fruit. And their focus on winter climes is a stupid way to start as well. But yours (and Thunderf00t)'s arguments are just stupid.
Except that even the idiot team that ran the kickstarter wasn't focusing on the parking spaces themselves. Seriously, stop what you're doing, right now, and go to Google Maps, pick a random spot in the country (don't bias it), zoom in, find the nearest road, and look at it. Observe how little of the road is shaded by cars. The answer will be, "virtually none".
Okay, let's try to bias it. Pick a city of your choice. Now pick a random spot in it and zoom in, not biasing your zoom in more than that. Look at the nearest road and observe how little is shaded. Again, "very, very little"
Okay, bias to your heart's content. Pick out the
And the award for worst form in which to present a counterargument goes to: Youtube video clips! (runner-up goes to "Scrawled on the exterior walls of the International Space Station")
Sorry, but I'm not going to be watching four videos from here. I wouldn't even do it for you if I was in a convenient place to watch youtube videos. The last thing I want is to waste 15 minutes watching some random net users droning on about something that would take 30 seconds to read if written down.
Could you please you sum up what they say that's in contradiction with my above post, and my post below?