Assumptions this "study" makes that are deal killers:
1) The cost of connecting these people will be less than the revenue derived from their inclusion. (If it wasnt... why are we considering extending service to them again? Is it charity? Big business doesnt "do" charity.)
2) Having access to increased information sources will increase the rate that people leave impoverished conditions, and that this is a thing that big business can profit from. (how do you determine this, and even if true, how does increased income equality really translate to increased profits by big business, compared with the same increases their competitors will derive without having to pay for it? I remind you again, big business does not "do" charity.)
3) the increased intrinsic costs of providing data service at discounted prices to these people will be fully predictable, and will not denude the profitability their inclusion in e-commerce will have. (see 1 and 2 above-- again, big business does not "do" charity.)
Basically, the only way anything like this will gain traction is if you can prove this:
Being the first to provide access to these people means exclusive access to their wallets, which have money inside that you can then take, your competitors cannot, and the money you can take will be more than the cost of extending the service. Profit is garanteed.
That is by no means what the reality of this situation is. While all ships rise with a rising tide, the amount you rise compared to your competition is what really matters to big business. They dont want to help their competition rise higher than them, by being the ones who suffer the expense of adding the extra water. Big business does not do charity.
This will be true of all digital sources, unless you want to export part of the key synthesis to an external device that different local em biases.
If you do that, then you have to trust that source implicitly not to have a subtly poisoned distribution (See the NSA's backdoored random source that caused such controversy in the past few years.)
Perfection is likely not attainable, even with hardware RNGs. This lets you get reasonably good samplings from wholly local, but less robust sources. To effectively exploit the unifying em bias of the device, you would need to know very specific features of the device, and how ambient signals interact with it to shape the distributions, THEN introduce very strong EM signals to the system to get the predictable patterns needed to assault the resulting encryption based on those distributions.
Those imply 1) that they have physical access to the device generating the keys (why not just put a bug on?) so that they can accurately measure the signal response curves of the circuits inside, and 2) are actively monitoring the target making the communications to be able to influence the EM background to create the reference signal needed to break the encryption.
With those prerequisites, quibbling about the quality of the random is the least of the privacy concerns.
Upon subsequent reflection and investigation, her complaint looks like this:
1) She makes original content. She wants to be reimbursed and or recieve remuneration for distribution of that content. Fine there, no problem.
2) She complains that the DMCA policy with content ID requires her to give Google/youtube a permissive license to redistribute her work, and considers this racketeering.
Red flag there.
Seriously, to legally let people see her content on youtube that she has uploaded, youtube needs a permissive license to do that distribution. It is a legal requirement of the law. All uploaders uploading content to Youtube have to agree to this, otherwise youtube cannot display the content.
In the unlikely case that she does not upload anything to youtube itself, but would still like to have any content that is incorrectly uploaded by fans automatically blocked or monetized for her, Youtube still needs a legally extended copy of her work, and rights to produce derivations thereof, in order to legally generate the fingerprint that contentID uses to identify such uploads, and if she chooses to monetize, youtube needs a license to redistribute that content to legally send her money.
She seems to think ContentID is magic unicorn poop, and does not need her blessing to be legally used, because it needs her content to operate.
Without the license and authentic samples she needs to provide, youtube has no good means of determining if a specific video is a violation or not. It is not magic, nor are they clairvoyant-- and fraudulent DMCA takedown notices are a very real thing, so even being hyper vigillant and having an IP lawyer on retainer to do nothing but browse youtube for violations to send takedowns over is not going to completely remove the problem.
She seems to feel that if youtube did not exist, that people would suddenly stop wanting to share her music/videos. This is demonstrably false, and people did this very thing with radio recordings on mix tapes in the 70s and 80s all the time, long before youtube was even remotely a possible thing.
Rather, she needs to be more pragmatic, and understand that imitation is flattery. That users sharing her videos gives her more exposure, and makes her a more popular artist. That she can monetize this behavior of her fans, and get paid a little every time somebody sees one of those fan uploaded copies, by giving youtube a distribution license, and choosing to monetize with adverts.
She doesnt seem to grok that she can either profit from the situation, or be in petulant denial about the real world as regards "her precious", make nothing, and be relegated to obscurity because nobody knows her or her work.
If I were her, I would be more than happy to give youtube a limited redistribution right, and avoid having my fans be criminalized for uploading their copies of my videos because they love them. I would eagerly give Youtube what they need to legally identify, stream, and insert advertisement remuneration streams in so they could cut me a check. The novelty! being PAID for exposure, instead of paying for it!
Instead, it is the popular battle cry of the *AAs that Youtube represents a rival distribution system (because it is!), and that it must therefor be destroyed, because competition reduces profitability. Unlike the *AAs, youtube tells you upfront how much (in a rate) they reimburse per advert view, and they reliably cut you a check without all the hollywood accounting to prove that you actually owe them money instead. She seems to have cognitive dissonance over this-- she loves being an independent artist, free of the shackles of the *AAs and their abusive policies toward musicians and artists-- but fails to comprehend how Youtube enables that position on the internet by enabling her fans to promote her for free.... by uploading her videos.
If I were a modern musician, I would do the following:
At the bumper page of any of my videos, I would have a short license along these lines:
Low quality random means the distribution has biases or predictable patterns over long sequences.
Take eg, noise from a microphone. I has a distribution bias, and a few other problems that make it bad as a random source.
It is however, completely independent from data taken from a camera, which will have its own biases.
The idea here is pretty good- two biased sources that have uncorrelated biases can get you a less biased, more uniform distribution of values, and better entropy per sample.
Another source might be magnetometer data, or accellerometer data. There will be ramdom "jitter" around the data read. The data figure averages out to the reading you use normally. In this case, we dont care what direction you are moving or pointing. We are interested in the jitter, which concentrates around the bias of your heading. Naturally, it clusters around the bias, and is not uniform, making it a low quality source.
The more of these uncorrelated but low quality sources you can leverage, the more uniform and less predictable the sample distribution will be.
I see this very salient question raised earlier-- why not use a dedicated white noise generator for random picks?
Most places you are going to need a good random integer are going to be in places where a dedicated diode based noise source is going to add cost to the system, and thus not be ideal. Things like an ATM machine, a cellphone, a laptop, whatever.
The cost is not in the actual component cost (a diode costs what, a few cents?) but in a standardized interface to that noise source.
Conversely, there are several very low quality sample sources that have no physical correlation with each other on such systems that can be leveraged, which have well defined methods of access, which add zero additional cost to the system.
Say for instance, microphone input + radio noise floor on a cellphone. Perhaps even data from the front and rear cameras as well. (EG, take Foo miliseconds of audio from the microphone, get an snr statistic from the radio, and have a pseudorandom shuffle done on data from the front and rear cameras. These sources are, independently, horrible sources of random. They are however, independent of each other. If this guy has found a really good way of getting good random from bad sources, then a quality random sequence can be generated quickly and cheaply this way. This would allow the device to rapidly produce quality encrypted connections without a heavy computational load, vastly improving the security of the communication, and do so without any additional OS level support, or extra hardware.)
When deriving a key pair for the likes of GPG, it can take several minutes of "random" activity on the computer to generate a sufficiently high quality entropy pool for key generation. That is far too slow to have really good, rapidly changing encryption on a high security connection. Something like this could let you generate demonstrably random AES 256 keys rapidly on the fly, and have a communication channel not even the NSA can crack.
The trick here is for them to reliably demonstrate that the rapidly produced sequences are indeed quality random sequences with no decernable pattern.
I dont think he wants to constipate DNS lookups with a 100+mb host file APK.
Even if cached 100% in RAM, it takes non-trivial amounts of time to parse enormous lists, and it is seriously bad policy to have to parse an enormous list on each and every lookup.
That's why DNS is designed the way it is, so that smaller lists are parsed on lookups.
Not to mention the baked in improvements in managing deployment, given dns's centralized nature vs managing gods knows how many instances of a corpulent hosts file.
I know you will suffer a brain aneurism and die if you ever realize how futile your trolling er... hmm.. "evangelism" is, but just a slight clue wont be so fatal, will it?
There are effective levels of compromise that can be done here.
For starters, A power-users set of options may be turned on, after viewing a scare page.
Something along the lines of: "If you are reaching this site at the direction of a technical support rep claiming to work for Microsoft, Close this window now and hang up. Microsoft support will NEVER tell you to change ANY options in this control pannel. By setting the options in this control pannel, you acknowledge that you are taking personal responsibility for the health and reliability of your system, and release Microsoft from any and all waranty coverage, without exception, agree that you are no longer entitled to any support of any kind from Microsoft, and agree to not hold Microsoft liable for any damages or loss of revinue involving this system. If you agree with these conditions, click OK below. If not, close this window now."
Then have all the deep-system options a hardcore power user could want inside. To prevent these options being set programmatically behind people's backs by malware, it needs to have crytpographic exchange involving the user's input to enable, or some similar blockade to stop malware turning it on silently.
For the people that really want to manage their device themselves, such an option should be available IMO.
Some devices are even cheaper. The ZSUN sdcard sharing adapter is only 11$ off amazon. It can run openwrt, meaning basically all of your listed features are possible (vlan not so much, only 1, unconnected, physical ethernet header).
I has 2 wifi radios, so it makes a very cheap repeater, and has a reasonably fast internal SDCard slot, so it could do light duty fileserving. With a little hardware modification, it could do USB print serving as well. (Designed to be powered from a USB port, but is wired in host configuration, not gadget. This means that if you supply power to the voltage pins, and put a gender changer on the connector, it should be able to see a connected printer and still operate.)
Mostly the FCC just doesnt want to deal with people in the US telling the router that they live in Japan, and thus using spectrum on the far edge of the 2.4ghz and 5ghz bands that are not public license in the US.
The chip makers are cheap fucks and control the radios with a volatile software blob (looking at you broadcomm) which means that an open platform like linux is able to push custom blobs on at boot time. Because the chip makers wont right thier wicked ways, the router oems just lock the device down in order to comply. The FCC would have done better to go after broadcomm and pals, if you ask me. Marvel, mentioned in the article, does things right with actual honest to god firmware controlling the radio.
Flash memory has a write life limit, because of how it physically operates. (The gates that store the information degrade from having their states changed. Eventually, they degrade to the point where they are unreliable.)
Due to architectural restraints, flash memory is changed in 64kbyte blocks, on average. Most filesystems still believe the smallest writable unit is 512 bytes. This means that when you write lots of little files, and the card tries to be space efficient, the same block can be read-erase-written dozens of times on just a few filesystem writes. The choice of file system is very important here. This is one of the reasons why FAT performs so well on flash disks-- FAT has a very large cluster size (when used on "large" disks. ahem.), and can align natively with this block size in many cases. NTFS does not have a good block alignment with most flash systems, because the allocation unit sizes are not nice even multiples of the block size.
EXT CAN have the block size specified at file system creation time, but special care needs to be taken to assure inode size corresponds to the physical flash block size, which most people dont do when they reformat the media.
Poor alignment makes the device degrade much faster than it really should under ideal conditions, and drastically shortens device lifespan, even with advanced internal wear leveling. This is especially true if the system using the device as storage is treating it like a spinning disk, and not trimming writes and coordinating cache flushes with flash in mind.
Most likely, you have been destroying your media through improper data alignment in this fashion, and when it cant handle any more writes, it tells you so.
A microSD card weighs less than 1 gram, and requires very little power to run. It has faster access time than those DVDs as well, being solid state.
Good use cases include:
Teeny tiny drones, with large integrated map sets and aggressive flight telemetry logging
Large data store on tiny pocket NAS (like a ZSUN running openwrt). (Aside from corporate espionage, There are some useful situations where a sizeable local file store without a big honking server would be beneficial. Say, hosting the client images for a bank of thin-client terminals at a coffee shop. The ZSUN could live peacefully above the ceiling tiles. The ZSUN has dual wifi radios, so it can act as both a repeater/bridge, and a local NAS on a shoestring budget.)
Large user-added storage to ultra-thin, ultra-low-power devices, like "toy tablets."
Storage for "enormously large" password libraries for portable WPA passcode breaking solutions.
in addition to just "Hey, now I can film non-stop with my GoPro for over 24hrs! awesome!"
Some of the older tablet devices out there had hidden internal microSD slots instead of soldered flash chips. Straight up replacement with one of these is a direct storage upgrade.
There are quite a few ways a really spacious microsd card is very desirable and useful. Dont scoff too much at the price. It will go down with time.
These would be useful on ultra-cheap win8 tablets, like those Nextbook things at walmart.
They come from the factory neutered with a tiny internal flash storage, typically under 20gb of useful capacity, but feature a microSD slot.
What you do is format the card as NTFS, but dont provide a drive letter. Instead, you mount it as an NTFS junction at say C:\SDCard, then you create softlinks under there to individual folders in Program Files, and other important places.
That way C:\Program files remains traversable by the windows update process (and wont break spectacularly) because it is still native to the system volume, but the installed program directories underneath are redirected elsewhere on a per-program basis. (So, eg, the internet explorer subfolder remains native, but the Office 2007 subfolder is a symlink to the sdcard volume, etc.)
This is pretty easy to do with some freeware like symmover.
Big honking storage would turn the cheap walmart toy into a somewhat useable low-power tablet.
The storage would be even friendlier to use on a linux friendly tablet PC, as it could be mounted as/home.
For people with Linux Deploy set up on their phones, Big honking SDcard storage would let them set up a much more useful linux chroot with much more installed in it.
Big honking storage like this is really aimed at power users like that.
The prior suggestion I saw of setting these up in a raid array isnt so hot though. While individually these cards boast an interesting read/write access time, the limiting factor for raid will be bus saturation. Typically, the bus that lots of these would be put on is USB. USB has a limited total bus bandwidth, which IIRC, is 12mbit for 1.1, 400mbit for 2.0, and USB 3.0 is 5gbit. Once you saturate the bus, additional devices in the stripe only add complexity without benefit. For USB 3.0, that works out to about 7 of these cards (assuming the 96MB/sec figure holds, which it probably doesnt.). After that, the USB bus itself is the bottleneck. More cards wont make it go any faster, and the cost would be prohibitive. About the only neat thing about such an array would be the very low power requirements.
These cards are really best used in devices that SHOULD have had beefy internal storage, but dont, because of cheapness on the OEM's part.
When everyone evades taxes, no taxes are collected. When no taxes are collected, no vital services that maintain the society can be provided. The society ceases to function, and everyone suffers.
When some evade taxes, (to maintain their wealth, naturally!), but others do not, the ones evading the taxes privatize their gain (an orderly society with working essential services), while socializing the loss (All those other people have to pay for it.)
Sickeningly, those best able to shift that burden onto others, ar the least liklely to have serious, like changing consequences of having to pay, and the ones forced into the situation, are the ones most harmed by being forced into it.
Sheltering your wealth is NOT victimless, because no action is without consequence, and the ideal you have stated (everyone evades paying) harms everyone the most.
That's just taxes. There are numerous other ethical problems with simply sheltering fortunes against sagging economies through exploiting the world monetary system.
That is what people are outraged about-- that these kinds of things happen all the time, and are considered "normal" in the world of international high finance.
I thought I pointed that out? The people of the western world are collectively asking that question because of the disparity in how the system operates in this regard.
That is why the argument "But it is perfectly legal!!" is assinine. The fact that it is legal is what is being taken exception to. People want it to not be legal!
I can fully understand why they would want to make it illegal--
Not only does it allow the wealthy to shift the burden of maintaining an orderly society onto the more scrupulous (because, pshaw, they could set up offshore accounts too, if they werent so dumb and poor minded!-- or whatever) by allowing them to "avoid" taxes on their wealth, It allows their financial fortunes to rise with the tide of everyone else during the good times, but fail to sink like the others when that tide goes out.
Simply because you CAN do something, does not mean you should.
By your reasoning, if an online game has a technical issue that can be exploited to your advantage, it is "Totally not cheating" to use that exploit, because the game lets you do it--even if that exploit basically makes it so you cannot lose.
And further, "If you have an issue with it, you should take it up with the game's developers."
Newsflash-- it is still cheating.
In this case, the cheaters have a hand in developing the game, and have a vested interest in keeping the exploits-- and other people dont really have a choice to not play against them.
The ethics of the action are indepedent of the legality of the action. A cheater seeks an unfair means of getting ahead of the competition. Most offshore account providers have prohibitive minimum deposit values to make use of them, making them effectively unusuable by nearly everyone but the already wealthy. This makes them unfair, even though, should some outrageous circumstance drop shitloads of cash on a random joe, he is technically "able" to open one himself, if he knows about them.
A technical exploit in an online game is likewise available to anyone who knows about it and has the tenacity to exploit it-- everyone has the same binary user application after all, and play on the same servers. the rules apply to everyone. Theoretically, anyone can do it!
But doing such an exploit will get you just as banned.:)
Why? because it is cheating.
Thinking that everyone should cheat, and that by not cheating you are just dumb or something, is so unethically minded I dont even know where to begin.
The same applies to global finance. The system lets you do it. That does not make it stop being an unfair and abusive practice against less powerful market actors, and thus unethical to even consider.
That kind of reasoning could be applied to literally any questionable behavior, including literally illegal ones.
But as to "why I care:"
Let us consider a moment, a wealthy politician who is involved in policy decisions that would affect the nation's credit rating with the IMF, and thus the comparative value of the native currency against that of other nations. In the US, this is literally every congressman and senator-- They are all involved in the anual fiscal budget process, and thus contribute to these decisions.
The very existence of a foriegn money shelter is a conflict of interest in this case-- Given sufficient holdings of exchanged currency, a devaluation of the domestic currency would result in a marked increase in capital power of the investment.
EG, let's say that when the exchange is first made, the currencies are at parity 1:1 exchange. The money is now no longer in dollars-- it is now in some foriegn currency. The US's credit rating is degraded, say because of insanity on capitol hill involving the budget deadline, and now the exchange is.75usd:1whatever. The effective fortune of the politician just increased by 25%, especially if they believe the US Dollar will rebound. After the devaluation, they exchange back to US dollars, wait for the recovery, then buy foriegn notes again. Possibly even repeat.
You cannot prove that they did this intentionally. What they did is "perfectly legal."
Does that make it socially acceptable though? I say "No." The potential for rampant, flagrant abuse is astounding, and the people who can afford these shelters are the very people in positions capable of enacting these kinds of events.
It is perfectly legal for a wealthy person (Let's say a Greek politician) from Cyprus to have heard, through whatever means, that the banks were going to seize private deposits, and to have taken extraordinary measures to create offshore shell accounts and transfer their fortune there to protect it while everyone else that lacked the connections to create this labyrinth of obfuscation had their accounts siezed in the forced austerity plan.
Because it was perfectly legal, there is no controversy?
I fully expect that very situation to be there at least one time in this data dump.
That's the problem with conflict of interest-- you cannot prove that they did the transfer with knowledge of the impending crash that the public did not have, and further, there might not have even been laws like the US's insider trading rules concerning such action to begin with. That does not change the percieved injustice of a wealthy politicians continuing to be wealthy, after crashing the bank and loan infrastructure, and financially emperiling everyone else around them-- which is exactly what these kinds of services are essentially for.
There is a reason I used the poisoned pigeons analogy earlier. Something can be perfectly legal, and yet be very repugnant at the same time. Claiming "But it is not a crime to poison pigeons!" does not in any way reduce the repugnance of poisoning the pigeons for sadistic pleasure.
Privatizing gains and socializing losses is repugnant. Obfuscated foriegn accounts exist for this very purpose.
In theory, evidence collected through illegal means cannot be submitted in court. "fruit of the poisoned tree" and all that.
In practice, in the US at least, there is this insideous thing called "parallel construction" where the prosecution pretends that they have a magic crystal ball, and knew all along about the nefarious dealings of Pamela, and just so happens to be putting forth a case against her at this time as a pure coincidence.;)
If I am not mistaken, the fact that these accounts are legal is a significant contributor to the public outrage (fabricated or otherwise) concerning this media event.
EG, if there were no laws against poisoning pigeons in the park, then a group of kids showing up with cans of bugspray and hosing down birds to watch them flop around until dead would not be illegal. That does not mean that the behavior is socially acceptable-- just not illegal in this contrived example. (Yes, I am well aware that it is indeed illegal to poison pigeons in most western countries. This is just an analogy; tortured and not ideal perhaps, but just an analogy.)
The real world example of the panama papers reveals a substantive effort by many power elite to obfuscate holdings, financial connections with industries they may be regulating as elite power brokers, and dealings with agencies or groups of less reputable character, as well as run of the mill tax avoidance, and sheltering of assets from unsteady local economies.
The practices are not "illegal", but they are socially unacceptable, which is why there is a scandal. The fact that "such things are actually legal" throws gasoline on the fire, not water.
Another tortured analogy might go something like this:
In many European countries, prostitution is perfectly legal. A conservative political figure publicly decries the practice of prostitution, but uses obfuscated holdings such as these to pay for such services on a very regular basis. No laws are violated-- the money was his to spend, and the service he obtained with it is legal. That does not make the circumstances stop being scandalous-- That of his blatant hipocracy, and abuse of client privilege to hide it to continue to snooker his electorate.
So, the fact that these accounts are not illegal does not remove the controversy, it is what causes it.
Oxyhydrogen may be a good "energy transport" medium for use in PV aviation. (Hear me out here. I am well aware of the fringe BS associated with oxyhydrogen. I am not going to spout any of that here. I am much more interested in how it can actually be leveraged.)
According to wiredchemist.com, distilled water has a vapor dissolution capacity for hydrogen and oxygen gasses as follows:
100g of water can dissolve.00016g of hydrogen gas and.0043 of oxygen gas, at 293K.
According to wikipedia (yay.) oxyhydrogen, when burned at 2:1 ratio produces 241kJ for every mole of H2 burned.
1 calorie is 4.186 Joules, and 1 calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise 1g of water 1C. (C and K conveniently align on the same scale by design.)
1 mole of hydrogen weighs 1.00794g.
With these values, we can determine how many moles of hydrogen can be suspended in a water based carrier, and how many degrees we can raise the temperature of that water via combustion.
This works out to 629962.5 g of water needed to hold the full 1mole hydrogen gas.
The combustion of the 1mole hydrogen produces 241kJ of energy, which is 60250 calories. It takes one calorie per gram of water to be raised one degree. Doing the math:
60250cal / 629962.5g water =.09C increase in temperature.
Not surprising, this is why we dont have water powered cars.:)
What we need is a way to increase the amount of hydrogen we can store in the water. The best way to do that is with reactive polar molecules that contain a lot of hydrogen, that are highly soluble in water. Sadly, the best candidates are also major contributors to smog formation. (Ammonia being a very good candidate. Ammonia is highly exothermic in the creation of nitrous oxide in the presense of a platinum-rubidium catalyst, causing a self-sustaining reaction as long as there is oxygen to combust with. It contains a shitload of hydrogen, and is highly soluble in water. However, the resulting compound is basically nitric acid, and is basically acid rain. Yay.)
Since all the usual chemical additives to add more hydrogen all contribute to atmospheric pollution, we have to sideline them.
Thankfully, water ice can form stable molecular cages for dense hydrogen gas-- eg, "Hydrogen Clathrate" is a real thing that can be made.
Instead of the paltry.00016g/100g ratio of liquid water, solid hydrogen clathrate can have ratios 48mole hydrogen gas to 136mole water ice! (ratio of 1 : 2.8333)
1 mole of water is 18.015g.
Now, that 1 mole hydrogen still will produce the 60250cal of energy on combustion, but now only has to heat 51.04g of water. The net temperature increase from 0c (ice) is 1180 degrees C from combustion of this fuel!!
60250cal / 51.04g water = 1180.44670 delta-C
Now we're talking!
But there's a rub:
Hydrogen clathrate can only be formed under absurd pressures. How absurd? 300MPa @ 250k, and takes over 30 minutes to form.
So, let's compromise.
We dont really need a steam exhaust stream hot enough to melt aluminum, now do we? And, efficient combustion of a solid is very much dependent upon particle size, and rate of reactant intermix. So, let's not use solid hydrogen clathrate. Let's use a combination of hydrogen peroxide and distilled water, with hydrogen clathrate slush as the fuel. This gives us our oxidizer in liquid form, gives us our fuel in the form of the clathrate ice microcrystals, and gives us bulk propellent in the liquid water. We can add a tiny amount of sodium silicate to help prevent the mixture from freezing solid. (On combustion, it will turn into trace amounts of silica gel in the exhaust stream. Basically, microparticle glass dust. You dont need very much of this stuff to combat ice formation. Alternatively, you could add alcohol if you dont mind the production of some CO2 in the exhaust stream.)
I dont think you are thinking about this correctly.
You have clearly shown that solar-electric with chemical battery storage is not equivalent to fossil fuel.
Why stop at that point, and not continue? Namely, the 737 is designed with a specific set of criteria in mind, which focus heavily on cost per flight, which is why the design impetus is to cram as many people as possible on board, and the strap big assed engines that produce lots of thrust on what is otherwise a ballistically propelled brick with aerofoil control surfaces.
The principle feature driving the design of the 737 (and 787, and other jumbo jets) is the cost of fuel, and the need to maximize occupant to fuel consumption ratio.
In short, you are making a faulty comparison. You correctly point out that photovoltaic power is not a replacement for jet fuel. yes. This is true. Photovoltaic is MUCH CHEAPER over vehicle lifetime than jet fuel.
With that in mind, the design considerations for commerical PV air transports are completely different-- why insist on the 737 form factor? it makes no sense at all to do so!
What makes sense for commerical PV air transports is leveraging the reduced costs of the "fuel" and maintenance, against the lower energy density. Due to lower maintenance costs, more vehicles can operate on the same maintenance budget. Due to less expensive "fuel", more vehicles can operate on the same budget. So, logically, the number of passengers per vehicle can be reduced, and retain the same profitability by increasing the number of vehicles in service.
The target ratio is, and always will be, humans delivered to destination / cost of delivery.
It will of course, take longer due to the lower engine thrust (unless a solution is found), but the service on the flight can be increased, making the flight a more enjoyable feature of the trip. There are fewer passengers per flight, so better attention per passenger from flight attendants.
Writing off commercial PV air transport because PV cannot substitute jet fuel in a system designed for features related to the costs of jet fuel, without considering the reasons for those designs is not very rigorous intellectually.
Instead of jumbo jet, think more Cessna Citation personal jet size craft, and more of them.
Remember, not everyone needs to get from Dallas to Tokyo in under 6 hours. The slower, cheaper, and more amenity rich trip on a properly considered PV powered flight are for people who want to get from A to B as part of a deadline relaxed vacation.
The people needing to get there yesterday will have the option of more expensive jet fuel based transport.
What the human can do is not related to its eyes, per se. What the human can do, is realize there is icy conditions when it steps outside on the way to the car. The car lacks this wide array of additional information the human has access to. It is limited to what the connected fleet tells it, and what its much more limited sensors tell it. Sensor data can be faulty. A failsafe is needed.
Like I pointed out-- IR cameras detect the radio opacity of the surface they are trained on. Ice and liquid water both absorb IR light. The camera will not be enough to tell the car that there is ice, instead of water.
Granted, for safety, a wet surface should not be driven faster than, IIRC, 35mph due to hydroplaning. The reality is that occupants will complain mightily about their autonomous vehicle driving that slow because it sprinkled a little, and the car is unlikely to observe such a restraint as a consequence.
Without other data telling it that the opaque road surface is from ice instead of rain, or slush, the vehicle will think the road is wet, not icy. Being alert when the car is barreling down the road unaware of the hazard, and telling the car "hey, slow down, there is ice!" is a good safety check for the autonomous system. it doesnt mean you have to drive for it, it just makes the drive safer because the car has another system (the occupant) to help it make driving decisions.
Automated sensors that might let it know that it is ice instead of slush or rain include thermometers. Those might not be accurate either though, especially if the county/city has been spreading salt all over. It could well be below zero, and still be slush, not ice. Likewise, it could be warming up after the ice storm that left the ice, but the road is still frozen.
Another system that might work would be integration with weather radio broadcasts, but that too has the potential to foul things up with erroneous weather report data based only on radar indications.
The best system in the vehicle for evaluating road conditions is still the occupant.
(why cant autonomous systems detect ice 100 meters ahead?) IR cameras detect if the road is reflective or absorptive of IR spectra. Water in general is IR absorptive. IR cameras cannot tell the difference between a wet surface and an icy one. Likewise, it cannot tell ice from snow, or slush, even if it has a thermometer to tell it that it is below the freezing point outside. (which would itself be prone to anomalous temperature readings from wind chill, or from engine heat.)
The issue with antilock brakes you mention is only partially correct. Most drivers do not know how to properly brake on ice. For drivers that do, they consistently perform better without antilock brakes. Most drivers are just bad drivers. So, the antilock brakes save lives overall. That does not mean human drivers that know how to actually drive on inclement surfaces are inferior.
As for what a human occupant can do for an autonomous system on inclement roads, aside from take over?
For starters, they can instruct the vehicle to drive with more caution-- avoiding going 75mph on the icy highway, for instance.
Distracted occupants (and I dare say, a person fucking in the car is going to be quite distracted, or else the sex will have to be really bad.) are not going to be so mindful, until the vehicle mistakes an icy road for a wet one, loses traction and either puts them into the center wall, flips them over, or puts them in a ditch.
Inclement weather is not accident avoidance. Especially ice.
That is "Oh shit, I lost traction control on three of my tires!"
The autonomous system cannot determine if the road 100 meters ahead is covered in a thin sheen of black ice or not.
People ARE dumb enough to be fucking behind the wheel while the autonomous system tries to navigate iced up roads.
The best an autonomous system can do is aggregate road data from other autonomous cars nearby to attempt to determine if there is ice ahead. -- a fat load of good that does if your autonomous vehicle is the one that skids out on it first, or if your vehicle is not receiving such telemetry for whatever reason.
I trust the idiot fucking behind the wheel of an autonomous vehicle about as much as I trust a politician not to lie. That is to say, not at all.
Automation makes the driving experience more predictable by removing human error. This is both good and bad. It leads to conditions where the vehicle will make predictably bad choices, but the occupant will believe otherwise.
I can hardly wait for that episode of "sex sent me to the ER."
"Female subject was hospitalized after suffering a 70MPH front impact while having sex."
Seriously, people are dumb enough to not only let the car drive while they are having rabbit sex in the driver's seat, they are likely to do it even when the weather conditions are highly inclement, such as when roads are icy, or there are other hazards that would render any autonomous system dangerous.
I imagine some wealthy fuck and his floozy fucking on the way to a hotel for "business trip" on an iced up road, colliding with the center partition doing 75mph, with all the trimmings.
Slashdot Mirror
For real.
Assumptions this "study" makes that are deal killers:
1) The cost of connecting these people will be less than the revenue derived from their inclusion. (If it wasnt... why are we considering extending service to them again? Is it charity? Big business doesnt "do" charity.)
2) Having access to increased information sources will increase the rate that people leave impoverished conditions, and that this is a thing that big business can profit from. (how do you determine this, and even if true, how does increased income equality really translate to increased profits by big business, compared with the same increases their competitors will derive without having to pay for it? I remind you again, big business does not "do" charity.)
3) the increased intrinsic costs of providing data service at discounted prices to these people will be fully predictable, and will not denude the profitability their inclusion in e-commerce will have. (see 1 and 2 above-- again, big business does not "do" charity.)
Basically, the only way anything like this will gain traction is if you can prove this:
Being the first to provide access to these people means exclusive access to their wallets, which have money inside that you can then take, your competitors cannot, and the money you can take will be more than the cost of extending the service. Profit is garanteed.
That is by no means what the reality of this situation is. While all ships rise with a rising tide, the amount you rise compared to your competition is what really matters to big business. They dont want to help their competition rise higher than them, by being the ones who suffer the expense of adding the extra water. Big business does not do charity.
This will be true of all digital sources, unless you want to export part of the key synthesis to an external device that different local em biases.
If you do that, then you have to trust that source implicitly not to have a subtly poisoned distribution (See the NSA's backdoored random source that caused such controversy in the past few years.)
Perfection is likely not attainable, even with hardware RNGs. This lets you get reasonably good samplings from wholly local, but less robust sources. To effectively exploit the unifying em bias of the device, you would need to know very specific features of the device, and how ambient signals interact with it to shape the distributions, THEN introduce very strong EM signals to the system to get the predictable patterns needed to assault the resulting encryption based on those distributions.
Those imply 1) that they have physical access to the device generating the keys (why not just put a bug on?) so that they can accurately measure the signal response curves of the circuits inside, and 2) are actively monitoring the target making the communications to be able to influence the EM background to create the reference signal needed to break the encryption.
With those prerequisites, quibbling about the quality of the random is the least of the privacy concerns.
Upon subsequent reflection and investigation, her complaint looks like this:
1) She makes original content. She wants to be reimbursed and or recieve remuneration for distribution of that content. Fine there, no problem.
2) She complains that the DMCA policy with content ID requires her to give Google/youtube a permissive license to redistribute her work, and considers this racketeering.
Red flag there.
Seriously, to legally let people see her content on youtube that she has uploaded, youtube needs a permissive license to do that distribution. It is a legal requirement of the law. All uploaders uploading content to Youtube have to agree to this, otherwise youtube cannot display the content.
In the unlikely case that she does not upload anything to youtube itself, but would still like to have any content that is incorrectly uploaded by fans automatically blocked or monetized for her, Youtube still needs a legally extended copy of her work, and rights to produce derivations thereof, in order to legally generate the fingerprint that contentID uses to identify such uploads, and if she chooses to monetize, youtube needs a license to redistribute that content to legally send her money.
She seems to think ContentID is magic unicorn poop, and does not need her blessing to be legally used, because it needs her content to operate.
Without the license and authentic samples she needs to provide, youtube has no good means of determining if a specific video is a violation or not. It is not magic, nor are they clairvoyant-- and fraudulent DMCA takedown notices are a very real thing, so even being hyper vigillant and having an IP lawyer on retainer to do nothing but browse youtube for violations to send takedowns over is not going to completely remove the problem.
She seems to feel that if youtube did not exist, that people would suddenly stop wanting to share her music/videos. This is demonstrably false, and people did this very thing with radio recordings on mix tapes in the 70s and 80s all the time, long before youtube was even remotely a possible thing.
Rather, she needs to be more pragmatic, and understand that imitation is flattery. That users sharing her videos gives her more exposure, and makes her a more popular artist. That she can monetize this behavior of her fans, and get paid a little every time somebody sees one of those fan uploaded copies, by giving youtube a distribution license, and choosing to monetize with adverts.
She doesnt seem to grok that she can either profit from the situation, or be in petulant denial about the real world as regards "her precious", make nothing, and be relegated to obscurity because nobody knows her or her work.
If I were her, I would be more than happy to give youtube a limited redistribution right, and avoid having my fans be criminalized for uploading their copies of my videos because they love them. I would eagerly give Youtube what they need to legally identify, stream, and insert advertisement remuneration streams in so they could cut me a check. The novelty! being PAID for exposure, instead of paying for it!
Instead, it is the popular battle cry of the *AAs that Youtube represents a rival distribution system (because it is!), and that it must therefor be destroyed, because competition reduces profitability. Unlike the *AAs, youtube tells you upfront how much (in a rate) they reimburse per advert view, and they reliably cut you a check without all the hollywood accounting to prove that you actually owe them money instead. She seems to have cognitive dissonance over this-- she loves being an independent artist, free of the shackles of the *AAs and their abusive policies toward musicians and artists-- but fails to comprehend how Youtube enables that position on the internet by enabling her fans to promote her for free.... by uploading her videos.
If I were a modern musician, I would do the following:
At the bumper page of any of my videos, I would have a short license along these lines:
This vi
Not necessarily.
Low quality random means the distribution has biases or predictable patterns over long sequences.
Take eg, noise from a microphone. I has a distribution bias, and a few other problems that make it bad as a random source.
It is however, completely independent from data taken from a camera, which will have its own biases.
The idea here is pretty good- two biased sources that have uncorrelated biases can get you a less biased, more uniform distribution of values, and better entropy per sample.
Another source might be magnetometer data, or accellerometer data. There will be ramdom "jitter" around the data read. The data figure averages out to the reading you use normally. In this case, we dont care what direction you are moving or pointing. We are interested in the jitter, which concentrates around the bias of your heading. Naturally, it clusters around the bias, and is not uniform, making it a low quality source.
The more of these uncorrelated but low quality sources you can leverage, the more uniform and less predictable the sample distribution will be.
I see this very salient question raised earlier-- why not use a dedicated white noise generator for random picks?
Most places you are going to need a good random integer are going to be in places where a dedicated diode based noise source is going to add cost to the system, and thus not be ideal. Things like an ATM machine, a cellphone, a laptop, whatever.
The cost is not in the actual component cost (a diode costs what, a few cents?) but in a standardized interface to that noise source.
Conversely, there are several very low quality sample sources that have no physical correlation with each other on such systems that can be leveraged, which have well defined methods of access, which add zero additional cost to the system.
Say for instance, microphone input + radio noise floor on a cellphone. Perhaps even data from the front and rear cameras as well. (EG, take Foo miliseconds of audio from the microphone, get an snr statistic from the radio, and have a pseudorandom shuffle done on data from the front and rear cameras. These sources are, independently, horrible sources of random. They are however, independent of each other. If this guy has found a really good way of getting good random from bad sources, then a quality random sequence can be generated quickly and cheaply this way. This would allow the device to rapidly produce quality encrypted connections without a heavy computational load, vastly improving the security of the communication, and do so without any additional OS level support, or extra hardware.)
When deriving a key pair for the likes of GPG, it can take several minutes of "random" activity on the computer to generate a sufficiently high quality entropy pool for key generation. That is far too slow to have really good, rapidly changing encryption on a high security connection. Something like this could let you generate demonstrably random AES 256 keys rapidly on the fly, and have a communication channel not even the NSA can crack.
The trick here is for them to reliably demonstrate that the rapidly produced sequences are indeed quality random sequences with no decernable pattern.
I dont think he wants to constipate DNS lookups with a 100+mb host file APK.
Even if cached 100% in RAM, it takes non-trivial amounts of time to parse enormous lists, and it is seriously bad policy to have to parse an enormous list on each and every lookup.
That's why DNS is designed the way it is, so that smaller lists are parsed on lookups.
Not to mention the baked in improvements in managing deployment, given dns's centralized nature vs managing gods knows how many instances of a corpulent hosts file.
I know you will suffer a brain aneurism and die if you ever realize how futile your trolling er... hmm.. "evangelism" is, but just a slight clue wont be so fatal, will it?
There are effective levels of compromise that can be done here.
For starters, A power-users set of options may be turned on, after viewing a scare page.
Something along the lines of:
"If you are reaching this site at the direction of a technical support rep claiming to work for Microsoft, Close this window now and hang up. Microsoft support will NEVER tell you to change ANY options in this control pannel. By setting the options in this control pannel, you acknowledge that you are taking personal responsibility for the health and reliability of your system, and release Microsoft from any and all waranty coverage, without exception, agree that you are no longer entitled to any support of any kind from Microsoft, and agree to not hold Microsoft liable for any damages or loss of revinue involving this system. If you agree with these conditions, click OK below. If not, close this window now."
Then have all the deep-system options a hardcore power user could want inside. To prevent these options being set programmatically behind people's backs by malware, it needs to have crytpographic exchange involving the user's input to enable, or some similar blockade to stop malware turning it on silently.
For the people that really want to manage their device themselves, such an option should be available IMO.
Some devices are even cheaper. The ZSUN sdcard sharing adapter is only 11$ off amazon. It can run openwrt, meaning basically all of your listed features are possible (vlan not so much, only 1, unconnected, physical ethernet header).
I has 2 wifi radios, so it makes a very cheap repeater, and has a reasonably fast internal SDCard slot, so it could do light duty fileserving. With a little hardware modification, it could do USB print serving as well. (Designed to be powered from a USB port, but is wired in host configuration, not gadget. This means that if you supply power to the voltage pins, and put a gender changer on the connector, it should be able to see a connected printer and still operate.)
Mostly the FCC just doesnt want to deal with people in the US telling the router that they live in Japan, and thus using spectrum on the far edge of the 2.4ghz and 5ghz bands that are not public license in the US.
The chip makers are cheap fucks and control the radios with a volatile software blob (looking at you broadcomm) which means that an open platform like linux is able to push custom blobs on at boot time. Because the chip makers wont right thier wicked ways, the router oems just lock the device down in order to comply. The FCC would have done better to go after broadcomm and pals, if you ask me. Marvel, mentioned in the article, does things right with actual honest to god firmware controlling the radio.
MicroSD is flash memory.
Flash memory has a write life limit, because of how it physically operates. (The gates that store the information degrade from having their states changed. Eventually, they degrade to the point where they are unreliable.)
Due to architectural restraints, flash memory is changed in 64kbyte blocks, on average. Most filesystems still believe the smallest writable unit is 512 bytes. This means that when you write lots of little files, and the card tries to be space efficient, the same block can be read-erase-written dozens of times on just a few filesystem writes. The choice of file system is very important here. This is one of the reasons why FAT performs so well on flash disks-- FAT has a very large cluster size (when used on "large" disks. ahem.), and can align natively with this block size in many cases. NTFS does not have a good block alignment with most flash systems, because the allocation unit sizes are not nice even multiples of the block size.
EXT CAN have the block size specified at file system creation time, but special care needs to be taken to assure inode size corresponds to the physical flash block size, which most people dont do when they reformat the media.
Poor alignment makes the device degrade much faster than it really should under ideal conditions, and drastically shortens device lifespan, even with advanced internal wear leveling. This is especially true if the system using the device as storage is treating it like a spinning disk, and not trimming writes and coordinating cache flushes with flash in mind.
Most likely, you have been destroying your media through improper data alignment in this fashion, and when it cant handle any more writes, it tells you so.
A microSD card weighs less than 1 gram, and requires very little power to run. It has faster access time than those DVDs as well, being solid state.
Good use cases include:
Teeny tiny drones, with large integrated map sets and aggressive flight telemetry logging
Large data store on tiny pocket NAS (like a ZSUN running openwrt). (Aside from corporate espionage, There are some useful situations where a sizeable local file store without a big honking server would be beneficial. Say, hosting the client images for a bank of thin-client terminals at a coffee shop. The ZSUN could live peacefully above the ceiling tiles. The ZSUN has dual wifi radios, so it can act as both a repeater/bridge, and a local NAS on a shoestring budget.)
Large user-added storage to ultra-thin, ultra-low-power devices, like "toy tablets."
Storage for "enormously large" password libraries for portable WPA passcode breaking solutions.
in addition to just "Hey, now I can film non-stop with my GoPro for over 24hrs! awesome!"
Some of the older tablet devices out there had hidden internal microSD slots instead of soldered flash chips. Straight up replacement with one of these is a direct storage upgrade.
There are quite a few ways a really spacious microsd card is very desirable and useful. Dont scoff too much at the price. It will go down with time.
You mean like a ZSUN?
Conveniently has an (unconnected) wired ethernet header, dual 802.4G radios, is cheap, and can run OpenWRT?
These would be useful on ultra-cheap win8 tablets, like those Nextbook things at walmart.
They come from the factory neutered with a tiny internal flash storage, typically under 20gb of useful capacity, but feature a microSD slot.
What you do is format the card as NTFS, but dont provide a drive letter. Instead, you mount it as an NTFS junction at say C:\SDCard, then you create softlinks under there to individual folders in Program Files, and other important places.
That way C:\Program files remains traversable by the windows update process (and wont break spectacularly) because it is still native to the system volume, but the installed program directories underneath are redirected elsewhere on a per-program basis. (So, eg, the internet explorer subfolder remains native, but the Office 2007 subfolder is a symlink to the sdcard volume, etc.)
This is pretty easy to do with some freeware like symmover.
Big honking storage would turn the cheap walmart toy into a somewhat useable low-power tablet.
The storage would be even friendlier to use on a linux friendly tablet PC, as it could be mounted as /home.
For people with Linux Deploy set up on their phones, Big honking SDcard storage would let them set up a much more useful linux chroot with much more installed in it.
Big honking storage like this is really aimed at power users like that.
The prior suggestion I saw of setting these up in a raid array isnt so hot though. While individually these cards boast an interesting read/write access time, the limiting factor for raid will be bus saturation. Typically, the bus that lots of these would be put on is USB. USB has a limited total bus bandwidth, which IIRC, is 12mbit for 1.1, 400mbit for 2.0, and USB 3.0 is 5gbit. Once you saturate the bus, additional devices in the stripe only add complexity without benefit. For USB 3.0, that works out to about 7 of these cards (assuming the 96MB/sec figure holds, which it probably doesnt.). After that, the USB bus itself is the bottleneck. More cards wont make it go any faster, and the cost would be prohibitive. About the only neat thing about such an array would be the very low power requirements.
These cards are really best used in devices that SHOULD have had beefy internal storage, but dont, because of cheapness on the OEM's part.
Things like the afore mentioned tablet PCs.
Do you really not see the ethical problem?
When everyone evades taxes, no taxes are collected. When no taxes are collected, no vital services that maintain the society can be provided. The society ceases to function, and everyone suffers.
When some evade taxes, (to maintain their wealth, naturally!), but others do not, the ones evading the taxes privatize their gain (an orderly society with working essential services), while socializing the loss (All those other people have to pay for it.)
Sickeningly, those best able to shift that burden onto others, ar the least liklely to have serious, like changing consequences of having to pay, and the ones forced into the situation, are the ones most harmed by being forced into it.
Sheltering your wealth is NOT victimless, because no action is without consequence, and the ideal you have stated (everyone evades paying) harms everyone the most.
That's just taxes. There are numerous other ethical problems with simply sheltering fortunes against sagging economies through exploiting the world monetary system.
Really, you cannot see these?
(shakes head)
The controversy *IS* "Why is this legal?!"
That is what people are outraged about-- that these kinds of things happen all the time, and are considered "normal" in the world of international high finance.
I thought I pointed that out? The people of the western world are collectively asking that question because of the disparity in how the system operates in this regard.
That is why the argument "But it is perfectly legal!!" is assinine. The fact that it is legal is what is being taken exception to. People want it to not be legal!
I can fully understand why they would want to make it illegal--
Not only does it allow the wealthy to shift the burden of maintaining an orderly society onto the more scrupulous (because, pshaw, they could set up offshore accounts too, if they werent so dumb and poor minded!-- or whatever) by allowing them to "avoid" taxes on their wealth, It allows their financial fortunes to rise with the tide of everyone else during the good times, but fail to sink like the others when that tide goes out.
Simply because you CAN do something, does not mean you should.
By your reasoning, if an online game has a technical issue that can be exploited to your advantage, it is "Totally not cheating" to use that exploit, because the game lets you do it--even if that exploit basically makes it so you cannot lose.
And further, "If you have an issue with it, you should take it up with the game's developers."
Newsflash-- it is still cheating.
In this case, the cheaters have a hand in developing the game, and have a vested interest in keeping the exploits-- and other people dont really have a choice to not play against them.
The ethics of the action are indepedent of the legality of the action. A cheater seeks an unfair means of getting ahead of the competition. Most offshore account providers have prohibitive minimum deposit values to make use of them, making them effectively unusuable by nearly everyone but the already wealthy. This makes them unfair, even though, should some outrageous circumstance drop shitloads of cash on a random joe, he is technically "able" to open one himself, if he knows about them.
A technical exploit in an online game is likewise available to anyone who knows about it and has the tenacity to exploit it-- everyone has the same binary user application after all, and play on the same servers. the rules apply to everyone. Theoretically, anyone can do it!
But doing such an exploit will get you just as banned. :)
Why? because it is cheating.
Thinking that everyone should cheat, and that by not cheating you are just dumb or something, is so unethically minded I dont even know where to begin.
The same applies to global finance. The system lets you do it. That does not make it stop being an unfair and abusive practice against less powerful market actors, and thus unethical to even consider.
That kind of reasoning could be applied to literally any questionable behavior, including literally illegal ones.
But as to "why I care:"
Let us consider a moment, a wealthy politician who is involved in policy decisions that would affect the nation's credit rating with the IMF, and thus the comparative value of the native currency against that of other nations. In the US, this is literally every congressman and senator-- They are all involved in the anual fiscal budget process, and thus contribute to these decisions.
The very existence of a foriegn money shelter is a conflict of interest in this case-- Given sufficient holdings of exchanged currency, a devaluation of the domestic currency would result in a marked increase in capital power of the investment.
EG, let's say that when the exchange is first made, the currencies are at parity 1:1 exchange. The money is now no longer in dollars-- it is now in some foriegn currency. The US's credit rating is degraded, say because of insanity on capitol hill involving the budget deadline, and now the exchange is .75usd:1whatever. The effective fortune of the politician just increased by 25%, especially if they believe the US Dollar will rebound. After the devaluation, they exchange back to US dollars, wait for the recovery, then buy foriegn notes again. Possibly even repeat.
You cannot prove that they did this intentionally.
What they did is "perfectly legal."
Does that make it socially acceptable though? I say "No." The potential for rampant, flagrant abuse is astounding, and the people who can afford these shelters are the very people in positions capable of enacting these kinds of events.
So, what you are saying is:
It is perfectly legal for a wealthy person (Let's say a Greek politician) from Cyprus to have heard, through whatever means, that the banks were going to seize private deposits, and to have taken extraordinary measures to create offshore shell accounts and transfer their fortune there to protect it while everyone else that lacked the connections to create this labyrinth of obfuscation had their accounts siezed in the forced austerity plan.
Because it was perfectly legal, there is no controversy?
I fully expect that very situation to be there at least one time in this data dump.
That's the problem with conflict of interest-- you cannot prove that they did the transfer with knowledge of the impending crash that the public did not have, and further, there might not have even been laws like the US's insider trading rules concerning such action to begin with. That does not change the percieved injustice of a wealthy politicians continuing to be wealthy, after crashing the bank and loan infrastructure, and financially emperiling everyone else around them-- which is exactly what these kinds of services are essentially for.
There is a reason I used the poisoned pigeons analogy earlier. Something can be perfectly legal, and yet be very repugnant at the same time. Claiming "But it is not a crime to poison pigeons!" does not in any way reduce the repugnance of poisoning the pigeons for sadistic pleasure.
Privatizing gains and socializing losses is repugnant. Obfuscated foriegn accounts exist for this very purpose.
In theory, evidence collected through illegal means cannot be submitted in court. "fruit of the poisoned tree" and all that.
In practice, in the US at least, there is this insideous thing called "parallel construction" where the prosecution pretends that they have a magic crystal ball, and knew all along about the nefarious dealings of Pamela, and just so happens to be putting forth a case against her at this time as a pure coincidence. ;)
If I am not mistaken, the fact that these accounts are legal is a significant contributor to the public outrage (fabricated or otherwise) concerning this media event.
EG, if there were no laws against poisoning pigeons in the park, then a group of kids showing up with cans of bugspray and hosing down birds to watch them flop around until dead would not be illegal. That does not mean that the behavior is socially acceptable-- just not illegal in this contrived example. (Yes, I am well aware that it is indeed illegal to poison pigeons in most western countries. This is just an analogy; tortured and not ideal perhaps, but just an analogy.)
The real world example of the panama papers reveals a substantive effort by many power elite to obfuscate holdings, financial connections with industries they may be regulating as elite power brokers, and dealings with agencies or groups of less reputable character, as well as run of the mill tax avoidance, and sheltering of assets from unsteady local economies.
The practices are not "illegal", but they are socially unacceptable, which is why there is a scandal. The fact that "such things are actually legal" throws gasoline on the fire, not water.
Another tortured analogy might go something like this:
In many European countries, prostitution is perfectly legal. A conservative political figure publicly decries the practice of prostitution, but uses obfuscated holdings such as these to pay for such services on a very regular basis. No laws are violated-- the money was his to spend, and the service he obtained with it is legal. That does not make the circumstances stop being scandalous-- That of his blatant hipocracy, and abuse of client privilege to hide it to continue to snooker his electorate.
So, the fact that these accounts are not illegal does not remove the controversy, it is what causes it.
Can we move past that line of reasoning now?
This got me thinking.
Oxyhydrogen may be a good "energy transport" medium for use in PV aviation. (Hear me out here. I am well aware of the fringe BS associated with oxyhydrogen. I am not going to spout any of that here. I am much more interested in how it can actually be leveraged.)
According to wiredchemist.com, distilled water has a vapor dissolution capacity for hydrogen and oxygen gasses as follows:
100g of water can dissolve .00016g of hydrogen gas and .0043 of oxygen gas, at 293K.
According to wikipedia (yay.) oxyhydrogen, when burned at 2:1 ratio produces 241kJ for every mole of H2 burned.
1 calorie is 4.186 Joules, and 1 calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise 1g of water 1C. (C and K conveniently align on the same scale by design.)
1 mole of hydrogen weighs 1.00794g.
With these values, we can determine how many moles of hydrogen can be suspended in a water based carrier, and how many degrees we can raise the temperature of that water via combustion.
This works out to 629962.5 g of water needed to hold the full 1mole hydrogen gas.
The combustion of the 1mole hydrogen produces 241kJ of energy, which is 60250 calories. It takes one calorie per gram of water to be raised one degree. Doing the math:
60250cal / 629962.5g water = .09C increase in temperature.
Not surprising, this is why we dont have water powered cars. :)
What we need is a way to increase the amount of hydrogen we can store in the water. The best way to do that is with reactive polar molecules that contain a lot of hydrogen, that are highly soluble in water. Sadly, the best candidates are also major contributors to smog formation. (Ammonia being a very good candidate. Ammonia is highly exothermic in the creation of nitrous oxide in the presense of a platinum-rubidium catalyst, causing a self-sustaining reaction as long as there is oxygen to combust with. It contains a shitload of hydrogen, and is highly soluble in water. However, the resulting compound is basically nitric acid, and is basically acid rain. Yay.)
Since all the usual chemical additives to add more hydrogen all contribute to atmospheric pollution, we have to sideline them.
Thankfully, water ice can form stable molecular cages for dense hydrogen gas-- eg, "Hydrogen Clathrate" is a real thing that can be made.
Instead of the paltry .00016g/100g ratio of liquid water, solid hydrogen clathrate can have ratios 48mole hydrogen gas to 136mole water ice! (ratio of 1 : 2.8333)
1 mole of water is 18.015g.
Now, that 1 mole hydrogen still will produce the 60250cal of energy on combustion, but now only has to heat 51.04g of water. The net temperature increase from 0c (ice) is 1180 degrees C from combustion of this fuel!!
60250cal / 51.04g water = 1180.44670 delta-C
Now we're talking!
But there's a rub:
Hydrogen clathrate can only be formed under absurd pressures. How absurd? 300MPa @ 250k, and takes over 30 minutes to form.
So, let's compromise.
We dont really need a steam exhaust stream hot enough to melt aluminum, now do we? And, efficient combustion of a solid is very much dependent upon particle size, and rate of reactant intermix. So, let's not use solid hydrogen clathrate. Let's use a combination of hydrogen peroxide and distilled water, with hydrogen clathrate slush as the fuel. This gives us our oxidizer in liquid form, gives us our fuel in the form of the clathrate ice microcrystals, and gives us bulk propellent in the liquid water. We can add a tiny amount of sodium silicate to help prevent the mixture from freezing solid. (On combustion, it will turn into trace amounts of silica gel in the exhaust stream. Basically, microparticle glass dust. You dont need very much of this stuff to combat ice formation. Alternatively, you could add alcohol if you dont mind the production of some CO2 in the exhaust stream.)
This reduces the amount of hydrate nee
I dont think you are thinking about this correctly.
You have clearly shown that solar-electric with chemical battery storage is not equivalent to fossil fuel.
Why stop at that point, and not continue? Namely, the 737 is designed with a specific set of criteria in mind, which focus heavily on cost per flight, which is why the design impetus is to cram as many people as possible on board, and the strap big assed engines that produce lots of thrust on what is otherwise a ballistically propelled brick with aerofoil control surfaces.
The principle feature driving the design of the 737 (and 787, and other jumbo jets) is the cost of fuel, and the need to maximize occupant to fuel consumption ratio.
In short, you are making a faulty comparison. You correctly point out that photovoltaic power is not a replacement for jet fuel. yes. This is true. Photovoltaic is MUCH CHEAPER over vehicle lifetime than jet fuel.
With that in mind, the design considerations for commerical PV air transports are completely different-- why insist on the 737 form factor? it makes no sense at all to do so!
What makes sense for commerical PV air transports is leveraging the reduced costs of the "fuel" and maintenance, against the lower energy density. Due to lower maintenance costs, more vehicles can operate on the same maintenance budget. Due to less expensive "fuel", more vehicles can operate on the same budget. So, logically, the number of passengers per vehicle can be reduced, and retain the same profitability by increasing the number of vehicles in service.
The target ratio is, and always will be, humans delivered to destination / cost of delivery.
It will of course, take longer due to the lower engine thrust (unless a solution is found), but the service on the flight can be increased, making the flight a more enjoyable feature of the trip. There are fewer passengers per flight, so better attention per passenger from flight attendants.
Writing off commercial PV air transport because PV cannot substitute jet fuel in a system designed for features related to the costs of jet fuel, without considering the reasons for those designs is not very rigorous intellectually.
Instead of jumbo jet, think more Cessna Citation personal jet size craft, and more of them.
Remember, not everyone needs to get from Dallas to Tokyo in under 6 hours. The slower, cheaper, and more amenity rich trip on a properly considered PV powered flight are for people who want to get from A to B as part of a deadline relaxed vacation.
The people needing to get there yesterday will have the option of more expensive jet fuel based transport.
The human eye is not magic.
What the human can do is not related to its eyes, per se. What the human can do, is realize there is icy conditions when it steps outside on the way to the car. The car lacks this wide array of additional information the human has access to. It is limited to what the connected fleet tells it, and what its much more limited sensors tell it. Sensor data can be faulty. A failsafe is needed.
Like I pointed out-- IR cameras detect the radio opacity of the surface they are trained on. Ice and liquid water both absorb IR light. The camera will not be enough to tell the car that there is ice, instead of water.
Granted, for safety, a wet surface should not be driven faster than, IIRC, 35mph due to hydroplaning. The reality is that occupants will complain mightily about their autonomous vehicle driving that slow because it sprinkled a little, and the car is unlikely to observe such a restraint as a consequence.
Without other data telling it that the opaque road surface is from ice instead of rain, or slush, the vehicle will think the road is wet, not icy. Being alert when the car is barreling down the road unaware of the hazard, and telling the car "hey, slow down, there is ice!" is a good safety check for the autonomous system. it doesnt mean you have to drive for it, it just makes the drive safer because the car has another system (the occupant) to help it make driving decisions.
Automated sensors that might let it know that it is ice instead of slush or rain include thermometers. Those might not be accurate either though, especially if the county/city has been spreading salt all over. It could well be below zero, and still be slush, not ice. Likewise, it could be warming up after the ice storm that left the ice, but the road is still frozen.
Another system that might work would be integration with weather radio broadcasts, but that too has the potential to foul things up with erroneous weather report data based only on radar indications.
The best system in the vehicle for evaluating road conditions is still the occupant.
(why cant autonomous systems detect ice 100 meters ahead?)
IR cameras detect if the road is reflective or absorptive of IR spectra. Water in general is IR absorptive. IR cameras cannot tell the difference between a wet surface and an icy one. Likewise, it cannot tell ice from snow, or slush, even if it has a thermometer to tell it that it is below the freezing point outside. (which would itself be prone to anomalous temperature readings from wind chill, or from engine heat.)
The issue with antilock brakes you mention is only partially correct. Most drivers do not know how to properly brake on ice. For drivers that do, they consistently perform better without antilock brakes. Most drivers are just bad drivers. So, the antilock brakes save lives overall. That does not mean human drivers that know how to actually drive on inclement surfaces are inferior.
As for what a human occupant can do for an autonomous system on inclement roads, aside from take over?
For starters, they can instruct the vehicle to drive with more caution-- avoiding going 75mph on the icy highway, for instance.
Distracted occupants (and I dare say, a person fucking in the car is going to be quite distracted, or else the sex will have to be really bad.) are not going to be so mindful, until the vehicle mistakes an icy road for a wet one, loses traction and either puts them into the center wall, flips them over, or puts them in a ditch.
Inclement weather is not accident avoidance. Especially ice.
That is "Oh shit, I lost traction control on three of my tires!"
The autonomous system cannot determine if the road 100 meters ahead is covered in a thin sheen of black ice or not.
People ARE dumb enough to be fucking behind the wheel while the autonomous system tries to navigate iced up roads.
The best an autonomous system can do is aggregate road data from other autonomous cars nearby to attempt to determine if there is ice ahead. -- a fat load of good that does if your autonomous vehicle is the one that skids out on it first, or if your vehicle is not receiving such telemetry for whatever reason.
I trust the idiot fucking behind the wheel of an autonomous vehicle about as much as I trust a politician not to lie. That is to say, not at all.
Automation makes the driving experience more predictable by removing human error. This is both good and bad. It leads to conditions where the vehicle will make predictably bad choices, but the occupant will believe otherwise.
I can hardly wait for that episode of "sex sent me to the ER."
"Female subject was hospitalized after suffering a 70MPH front impact while having sex."
Seriously, people are dumb enough to not only let the car drive while they are having rabbit sex in the driver's seat, they are likely to do it even when the weather conditions are highly inclement, such as when roads are icy, or there are other hazards that would render any autonomous system dangerous.
I imagine some wealthy fuck and his floozy fucking on the way to a hotel for "business trip" on an iced up road, colliding with the center partition doing 75mph, with all the trimmings.