Computer failures and the resulting damage are not comparable to nuclear power.
Capitalism does not solve much. It is more like fire; a useful tool but extremely dangerous and easily spreads causing great harm to anything in it's path. Capitalism is quite EVIL and simply because it is better than all the other blanket solutions does not mean it is something to be proud of nor should it have a religion built around it. Capitalism is simply a lesser evil in a general sense.
5 and 10 year predictions are not worth much. We have been hearing stuff for decades that does not happen. Frankly the only people capable of nuclear power is the military and they operate at a loss... I'm for nuclear power when Homer Simpson can safely operate one. Plus all the stuff I've read over the years seems to indicate it is far better to build many small reactors than build centralized ones... distributed systems are anti-capitalistic...
Ayn Rand Economics do not work and MOST people think libertarian ideals are crazy. Just because of a movement in that direction in many schools does not mean that brand of economic religion works -- especially since we benefited greatly post WW2 and heavily exploited our situation to create an economic empire - it would be hard to fail without doing something really stupid. We've been going downhill ever since and anybody pushing something tries to lay claim to our past success.
Our political system is broken. Most people realize this. The politically "connected" RUN this Plutocracy so it does what they want; which is naturally is to protect their source of power if not gain some more power.
Amazon.com benefits indirectly from state resources but pays nothing; meanwhile local businesses do pay and are punished for the overhead. Local shipping companies actually cost HALF than the national ones; so it is not entirely local stores impacted, an online local business has lower shipping but still must add tax.
Plenty of states provide tax benefits for local businesses to indirectly mess with interstate commerce.
It is not interstate commerce it is shipping tax INSIDE the state. States can tax inside businesses any way they wish; the motives are a separate issue. Lawyers and politicians have a talent for abstracting things from the literal rules in order to circumvent them. It is already done today and if prohibited they surely can find a way around it. Would be if they put their talents into doing something good for a change.
YES! Transcripts so the literate and simply skim the text and skip the video postings. I don't like it when articles link only to videos-- then I read people's comments instead.
You only got my contribution to the hit counter out of curiosity so do not assume interest in your videos by web stats.
Everybody loves to blindly have faith science and smart people will solve all the problems our thoughtless selfishness create; ironically, I bet a lot of anti-intellectual science haters believe this as well (that is, between missing their biblical doomsday predictions.)
Nuclear is not new. It only has a renewed propaganda campaign about how great it is - also not new, but needed given past failure and lack of credibility.
Demand is growing faster than supply can grow.
Unrealistic demands put against realistic limits is the problem; sadly, just like many things in life the people living in a dream world are upset at being forced to wake up. The realistic conservative position is to plan for the worst.
Humans just do not scale; there never was evolutionary pressure - if anything the worst sort of humans reproduce in the greatest numbers.
Therefore impose a SHIPPING TAX on all the companies which MUST operate inside the state to deliver those items! No way of getting around that (without overhead costs.) The massive logistics shipping companies do makes dealing with a state's "import" tax extremely easy for them to implement by comparison.
What about local business? They are exempt; so is freight shipping. Sure some clever business might form to import products then ship them to people somehow illegally... Well, maybe the loophole might be a local warehouse where you pick up your items yourself; but that might not be a bad deal in the end and that warehouse would add some cost make some taxable profit for the state.
Does anybody see how the lack of import taxation is causing a HUGE problem for our economy?? Not just our states but especially the cheap stuff coming in from China... and the foreign subsidized industries intent on killing our industries (like how the USA has done historically to other nations - we don't even spot our own tactics being used against us!)
Well, I've been involved in a recount and I have a lot of computer experience plus some experience in security and forensics and I say PAPER is the only way forward. Yes, hand counts are dull and take a lot of labor; it is a small price to pay (especially compared to those who die defending democracy.)
Your post is almost entirely distracting side issues without addressing the core problem.
As Stalin said, "It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes." You think merely by having the people who count the votes 1 step removed from directly counting the votes makes things safer? WRONG.
It is not a machine counting the votes anymore than a gun kills a victim-- it is the person behind the machine that does it. Do not be so literal minded. The machine, like a firing squad, hides which person actually did it, they themselves may not even know.
You put that accounting computer out on the internet and tell everybody it can not make mistakes and publish the IP address. Lets see how well it works in the real world (not to mention how much better secured your PC likely is over most voting machines I've seen or read about.)
Me too. But we can vote on gay marriage or some other tiny issue. The big issues have nobody to vote for and have not since Carter. Nobody honest is going to fly into office after a disaster because those guys are not allowed to rise in todays system even Obama coming "from nowhere" was fake, it was to appease the public with an outsider and a feeling of change helped by the symbolism of his skin color. Even the backlash is now engineered.
Some of us "depressing" people saw all this coming but nobody can handle the truth anymore. Hell, "Dr. Doom" was what they ridiculed the only honest economist talking publicly about the pending collapse. The morons who were 150% wrong are still respected pundits and allowed on TV at every opportunity. (Sports pundits seem to be handled no differently either.)
No, not that much changed is the problem; even that part about killing US citizen terrorists was claimed to be already possible from a previous law (which expired or wasn't explicit enough to satisfy John McCain; i forget which but the OTHER candidate wrote the bill... and I think a veto wouldn't have stopped it anyhow, which they knew wasn't going to happen before they voted.)
It is that no ass kissing politician (does anybody vote for anything else?) has the guts to stop something that they KNOW will be used to blame any future nutcase's actions on them-- even if the guy is stopped, it'll be "why did he get that far?" "We would have stopped that if we had --Fascist law-- that the evil --honest politician-- repealed." The only safe thing would be to arrest him BEFORE he commits the crime, then they will not make that attack stick but instead rant about freedom to not be arrested prematurely, until they are in power... then the two sides switch strategies. You'd think TV nation would recognize a redo; oh wait, they don't. Aren't they redoing Spiderman soon? - already
Plus Obama doesn't even have the guts to be impeached for invoking the 14th Amendment; which was one of the threats during the whole farce about the illegal debt ceiling.
Amy has never lowered her show down to the level of CNN even. I've been listening since they started almost every day without fail. 1 time she had some conservative nut who basically just insulted her the whole time + he didn't let her talk either. She let him run out of air and that showed him for what he was and she stayed on topic.
Up to the point Amy had Clinton on I never saw somebody piss off Clinton like that, she really seemed to get to him like nobody else did with her tough and respectful questioning.
Sure she has opinions, who does not? But she does not exercise them like everybody else does. She chooses the questions and the guests but does not put in any commentary of her own. Sure some questions require a bit of an intro which you could say is giving a speech but she does not do that; it is good real journalism-- something rare today. Quite often if you do not preface the question with some context you will get some slick talking point or even a total lie but if you set them up so they can't simply make up the usual BS they either have to dispute your statement before giving the memorized answer or they have to THINK and give you a unconventional answer. Or just call you names. The JOB is to get to the truth not to kiss ass or be entertaining/childish.
Me I think a large part of the conservative sheep (the majority are sheep) are a result of the birth of the modern corporate think tank around that time period. Big tobacco should come to mind as research was getting attention in that area. Also, Nixon's judge Lewis Powell wrote a letter urging corporations to create think tanks to counter the educated people saying stuff that upset the corporations (at the time people like him were thinking they were all communists-- Marx was a thinker, so anybody who thinks critically about the state of things.... Hey, I know some conservatives and it doesn't take much criticism before they start feeling that way about you.)
Plus you have a generation raised on popular science BS and exaggeration but mostly lots of media HYPE about "the home of the future." We do not have flying cars. We do not work 30-35 hours a week and robots are not making our lives better (instead making work suck more as only desperate people in 3rd world nations can compete with our robots. plus there are less jobs.) They were sold on silly relatively uninformed dreams that never came about. Technology that did happen made life more complex. For every thing that did get easier we had more details and expenses as well... plus modern products BREAK more often and the old "primitive" ones lasted or could be repaired.
Every tiny step science makes forward is another blow against traditional beliefs.
Ever wonder if rigid adherence to school authority and brutally forcing full compliance ends up producing an incompetent electorate who are unable to maintain a democracy? I do not.
Its one thing to be disruptive and ruin things for others and quite another to be free thinking and question authority. This kid had to be smacked down because his tweet showed some character and we must squash anybody developing that if they are going to be happy little worker drones for walmart someday.
It is as if we reward programmers by how many lines of code they write.
A JUDGE is supposed to JUDGE something. We put all these extra detailed rules on everything to employ more lawyers while removing as much actual decision making as possible.
When we take out the common sense of a HUMAN who can put situations into context and deal with specifics of each situation while a GENERIC blanket statement of law is just a brain dead policy. It is literally brain dead and if we keep defining more detail it will not be impossible to train some new IBM machine to replace judges too.
Law is NOT a bill of some kind of payment. We have to stop this MBA mindset being applied to every aspect of life. It hasn't been helping our economy in modern times that well either; but it surely is out of place everywhere else. The purpose of a law is to get compliance of some sort - not to make you "pay a debt to society" with prison time. Where did that idiotic phrase come from anyhow? Rules sometimes need breaking-- we allow self defense as an exception and it is coded into the rules but all exceptions are not thought of nor are they equally applied simply because more details are added.
I am totally fine with these highly important (politically) school testing programs be completely politically correct. They should create even more regulations for test designers that go beyond a simple banned word list.
Have you read any of these tests? I have. The math problems were in english? yes, testing math by using reading comprehension. One problem used a banister - for a 3rd grade math problem! Ban the use of words like that. I don't think I've heard somebody ever use the word banister in conversation now that I think of it.
Some problems have cultural biases, consumer biases, and a few looked to me like IQ problems more than anything else. Spacial relations problems? really? they do nothing to develop those skills anymore-- all that stuff was removed for more teaching for the test. One principal was clever in that he made all the parents take their child's test. It was sad how they did on it but he woke many of them up.
Simplistic thinking. Chicken vs Egg problem. If you do not understand it, another nation will eat your lunch down the road. China is kicking our ass and free market zealots are hurting themselves over their religious economic beliefs... and us realists know better. Free yourself from the reality distortion field of religion.
It will not be long until you are required to hire people. Too many people, not enough legitimate jobs and way too much trouble with massive unemployment.
All this will come and eventually most people will recognize the problem when it is big and obvious. Smart software, better robotics, out sourcing... The machines can be beaten by cheap Chinese labor for now. THINK about it. To beat out expensive automation we must be desperate, poor, undervalued and unregulated (unclean, unsafe, and unaccountable.) If working for Foxcon China is so great then why do they put suicide nets around the buildings?
But macs fail to mount/tmp in a secure way; there is only 1 mount point. One can wonder about the next OS with the option to forbid non-signed apps from running and how that will impact this.
Yes we can. Little by little it has been going downhill; the "fanatics" speak up and nobody listens as the pot slowly approaches boiling point. All these small losses add up over time and the democracy falls into despotism due to negligent citizenry. This is the way all democracies go; as Ben Franklin said at the close of the constitutional convention.
Success just makes it easier to fall down faster; why be vigilant citizens? that takes time, work, and thinking - we'd rather watch nobodies battle in the reality TV arena.
Put it into the trunk! if you need range you lose storage space. or have it hook on to the back of the car; like a bike rack. a small generator wouldn't be that bad to attach. so your car gets a "butt" for long range trips.
What bugs me is the electronics on all the electrics are not designed to handle power coming in while driving the car - I've asked each time. If it can handle it then there is a future market for range extension devices. A trailer being the idea I had over a decade ago.
Around town I don't need to be hauling around a generator. Besides, one could RENT the generator for long trips and not have to own the thing. I would also want to run it on propane which is superior to gasoline. I could do it myself if one of these cars would just allow charging during use... somebody out there I hope figures out how to hack into the regenerative braking system and use that to run in external power.
The link I have is dead but a german guy had built a clever dam that didn't do much harm. it was a large drain and the water would swirl around down the drain; it was easy to allow a stream to pass while putting most the water into a large bowl to flush down the drain. the turbine was vertical and worked of the spin of the water down the drain but a more intrusive prop could be used. Sure it is not as powerful and its lower scale... I'm not sure it would scale that large. but it is an Aerator as well and can be done without causing harm...
actually, dams could be done with less harm if they provided a minimal stream to route around the lake.
Am I the only one thinking of the next posting "Dysfunction In Modern Science?" on/. today right after this one?
Or the one a while back about a child who made a TREE with solar leaves that performed better but it turned out he had it all wrong and the media hyped the BS?
For me, in winter I have a 78 degree perpendicular with the sun-- that is nearly vertical in which case a bunch of staggered 45/-45 degree panels would work and the lower ones would get a lot of sun considering they are supposed to work fine with 10 degrees off center and the snow would reflect light towards them as well....
Problem is the sun is near 0 degrees in the summer. so half the panels would get jack.
CIGS panels handle diffuse light better; get those cheaper as many of us have more of a 2/3 cloudy year. Or IR light since most the IR light is not impacted by clouds. Or various coatings I've read about that keep more light from bouncing off the panels...
Or how about a small scale low pressure steam turbine? heat still beats out PV by a huge factor if you can extract energy from it effectively enough you can beat PV not to mention that heat storage works better than batteries.
The UK has been trying to beat the world to 1984 for a long time now - maybe China will win but the UK trying hard.
The UK lacks the protections of many other nations; they don't have free speech. The only good side is that when you "slander" McDonalds their legal system is more fair and a couple of people can spend their afternoons beating back the megacorporate censorship without going broke; in the USA corporate terrorism is the name of the game-- nobody dares go up against them and they get people to change at the mere thought of being a target (that is those who are terrorized by them.) No, it doesn't take a bomb to make some action terrorism.
Slashdot Mirror
Computer failures and the resulting damage are not comparable to nuclear power.
Capitalism does not solve much. It is more like fire; a useful tool but extremely dangerous and easily spreads causing great harm to anything in it's path. Capitalism is quite EVIL and simply because it is better than all the other blanket solutions does not mean it is something to be proud of nor should it have a religion built around it. Capitalism is simply a lesser evil in a general sense.
5 and 10 year predictions are not worth much. We have been hearing stuff for decades that does not happen. Frankly the only people capable of nuclear power is the military and they operate at a loss... I'm for nuclear power when Homer Simpson can safely operate one. Plus all the stuff I've read over the years seems to indicate it is far better to build many small reactors than build centralized ones... distributed systems are anti-capitalistic...
Ayn Rand Economics do not work and MOST people think libertarian ideals are crazy. Just because of a movement in that direction in many schools does not mean that brand of economic religion works -- especially since we benefited greatly post WW2 and heavily exploited our situation to create an economic empire - it would be hard to fail without doing something really stupid. We've been going downhill ever since and anybody pushing something tries to lay claim to our past success.
Our political system is broken. Most people realize this. The politically "connected" RUN this Plutocracy so it does what they want; which is naturally is to protect their source of power if not gain some more power.
Amazon.com benefits indirectly from state resources but pays nothing; meanwhile local businesses do pay and are punished for the overhead. Local shipping companies actually cost HALF than the national ones; so it is not entirely local stores impacted, an online local business has lower shipping but still must add tax.
Plenty of states provide tax benefits for local businesses to indirectly mess with interstate commerce.
It is not interstate commerce it is shipping tax INSIDE the state. States can tax inside businesses any way they wish; the motives are a separate issue. Lawyers and politicians have a talent for abstracting things from the literal rules in order to circumvent them. It is already done today and if prohibited they surely can find a way around it. Would be if they put their talents into doing something good for a change.
YES! Transcripts so the literate and simply skim the text and skip the video postings. I don't like it when articles link only to videos-- then I read people's comments instead.
You only got my contribution to the hit counter out of curiosity so do not assume interest in your videos by web stats.
Everybody loves to blindly have faith science and smart people will solve all the problems our thoughtless selfishness create; ironically, I bet a lot of anti-intellectual science haters believe this as well (that is, between missing their biblical doomsday predictions.)
Nuclear is not new. It only has a renewed propaganda campaign about how great it is - also not new, but needed given past failure and lack of credibility.
Demand is growing faster than supply can grow.
Unrealistic demands put against realistic limits is the problem; sadly, just like many things in life the people living in a dream world are upset at being forced to wake up. The realistic conservative position is to plan for the worst.
Humans just do not scale; there never was evolutionary pressure - if anything the worst sort of humans reproduce in the greatest numbers.
Spies like to use Linux because their security matters; they like you to use windows because that makes their job easier.
Therefore impose a SHIPPING TAX on all the companies which MUST operate inside the state to deliver those items! No way of getting around that (without overhead costs.) The massive logistics shipping companies do makes dealing with a state's "import" tax extremely easy for them to implement by comparison.
What about local business? They are exempt; so is freight shipping. Sure some clever business might form to import products then ship them to people somehow illegally... Well, maybe the loophole might be a local warehouse where you pick up your items yourself; but that might not be a bad deal in the end and that warehouse would add some cost make some taxable profit for the state.
Does anybody see how the lack of import taxation is causing a HUGE problem for our economy?? Not just our states but especially the cheap stuff coming in from China... and the foreign subsidized industries intent on killing our industries (like how the USA has done historically to other nations - we don't even spot our own tactics being used against us!)
Well, I've been involved in a recount and I have a lot of computer experience plus some experience in security and forensics and I say PAPER is the only way forward. Yes, hand counts are dull and take a lot of labor; it is a small price to pay (especially compared to those who die defending democracy.)
Your post is almost entirely distracting side issues without addressing the core problem.
As Stalin said, "It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes." You think merely by having the people who count the votes 1 step removed from directly counting the votes makes things safer? WRONG.
It is not a machine counting the votes anymore than a gun kills a victim-- it is the person behind the machine that does it. Do not be so literal minded. The machine, like a firing squad, hides which person actually did it, they themselves may not even know.
You put that accounting computer out on the internet and tell everybody it can not make mistakes and publish the IP address. Lets see how well it works in the real world (not to mention how much better secured your PC likely is over most voting machines I've seen or read about.)
Mod parent up.
I do not think /. is the place to reference a libertarian holy book.
Me too.
But we can vote on gay marriage or some other tiny issue. The big issues have nobody to vote for and have not since Carter. Nobody honest is going to fly into office after a disaster because those guys are not allowed to rise in todays system even Obama coming "from nowhere" was fake, it was to appease the public with an outsider and a feeling of change helped by the symbolism of his skin color. Even the backlash is now engineered.
Some of us "depressing" people saw all this coming but nobody can handle the truth anymore. Hell, "Dr. Doom" was what they ridiculed the only honest economist talking publicly about the pending collapse. The morons who were 150% wrong are still respected pundits and allowed on TV at every opportunity. (Sports pundits seem to be handled no differently either.)
No, not that much changed is the problem; even that part about killing US citizen terrorists was claimed to be already possible from a previous law (which expired or wasn't explicit enough to satisfy John McCain; i forget which but the OTHER candidate wrote the bill... and I think a veto wouldn't have stopped it anyhow, which they knew wasn't going to happen before they voted.)
It is that no ass kissing politician (does anybody vote for anything else?) has the guts to stop something that they KNOW will be used to blame any future nutcase's actions on them-- even if the guy is stopped, it'll be "why did he get that far?" "We would have stopped that if we had --Fascist law-- that the evil --honest politician-- repealed." The only safe thing would be to arrest him BEFORE he commits the crime, then they will not make that attack stick but instead rant about freedom to not be arrested prematurely, until they are in power... then the two sides switch strategies. You'd think TV nation would recognize a redo; oh wait, they don't. Aren't they redoing Spiderman soon? - already
Plus Obama doesn't even have the guts to be impeached for invoking the 14th Amendment; which was one of the threats during the whole farce about the illegal debt ceiling.
Amy has never lowered her show down to the level of CNN even. I've been listening since they started almost every day without fail. 1 time she had some conservative nut who basically just insulted her the whole time + he didn't let her talk either. She let him run out of air and that showed him for what he was and she stayed on topic.
Up to the point Amy had Clinton on I never saw somebody piss off Clinton like that, she really seemed to get to him like nobody else did with her tough and respectful questioning.
Sure she has opinions, who does not? But she does not exercise them like everybody else does. She chooses the questions and the guests but does not put in any commentary of her own. Sure some questions require a bit of an intro which you could say is giving a speech but she does not do that; it is good real journalism-- something rare today. Quite often if you do not preface the question with some context you will get some slick talking point or even a total lie but if you set them up so they can't simply make up the usual BS they either have to dispute your statement before giving the memorized answer or they have to THINK and give you a unconventional answer. Or just call you names. The JOB is to get to the truth not to kiss ass or be entertaining/childish.
Spot on for a large aspect that is overlooked.
Me I think a large part of the conservative sheep (the majority are sheep) are a result of the birth of the modern corporate think tank around that time period. Big tobacco should come to mind as research was getting attention in that area. Also, Nixon's judge Lewis Powell wrote a letter urging corporations to create think tanks to counter the educated people saying stuff that upset the corporations (at the time people like him were thinking they were all communists-- Marx was a thinker, so anybody who thinks critically about the state of things.... Hey, I know some conservatives and it doesn't take much criticism before they start feeling that way about you.)
Plus you have a generation raised on popular science BS and exaggeration but mostly lots of media HYPE about "the home of the future." We do not have flying cars. We do not work 30-35 hours a week and robots are not making our lives better (instead making work suck more as only desperate people in 3rd world nations can compete with our robots. plus there are less jobs.) They were sold on silly relatively uninformed dreams that never came about. Technology that did happen made life more complex. For every thing that did get easier we had more details and expenses as well... plus modern products BREAK more often and the old "primitive" ones lasted or could be repaired.
Every tiny step science makes forward is another blow against traditional beliefs.
Its not science that failed us.
Ever wonder if rigid adherence to school authority and brutally forcing full compliance ends up producing an incompetent electorate who are unable to maintain a democracy? I do not.
Its one thing to be disruptive and ruin things for others and quite another to be free thinking and question authority. This kid had to be smacked down because his tweet showed some character and we must squash anybody developing that if they are going to be happy little worker drones for walmart someday.
Expelling a child does impact them later in life more than being fired.
It is as if we reward programmers by how many lines of code they write.
A JUDGE is supposed to JUDGE something. We put all these extra detailed rules on everything to employ more lawyers while removing as much actual decision making as possible.
When we take out the common sense of a HUMAN who can put situations into context and deal with specifics of each situation while a GENERIC blanket statement of law is just a brain dead policy. It is literally brain dead and if we keep defining more detail it will not be impossible to train some new IBM machine to replace judges too.
Law is NOT a bill of some kind of payment. We have to stop this MBA mindset being applied to every aspect of life. It hasn't been helping our economy in modern times that well either; but it surely is out of place everywhere else. The purpose of a law is to get compliance of some sort - not to make you "pay a debt to society" with prison time. Where did that idiotic phrase come from anyhow? Rules sometimes need breaking-- we allow self defense as an exception and it is coded into the rules but all exceptions are not thought of nor are they equally applied simply because more details are added.
I am totally fine with these highly important (politically) school testing programs be completely politically correct. They should create even more regulations for test designers that go beyond a simple banned word list.
Have you read any of these tests? I have. The math problems were in english? yes, testing math by using reading comprehension. One problem used a banister - for a 3rd grade math problem! Ban the use of words like that. I don't think I've heard somebody ever use the word banister in conversation now that I think of it.
Some problems have cultural biases, consumer biases, and a few looked to me like IQ problems more than anything else. Spacial relations problems? really? they do nothing to develop those skills anymore-- all that stuff was removed for more teaching for the test. One principal was clever in that he made all the parents take their child's test. It was sad how they did on it but he woke many of them up.
Simplistic thinking. Chicken vs Egg problem. If you do not understand it, another nation will eat your lunch down the road. China is kicking our ass and free market zealots are hurting themselves over their religious economic beliefs... and us realists know better. Free yourself from the reality distortion field of religion.
It will not be long until you are required to hire people. Too many people, not enough legitimate jobs and way too much trouble with massive unemployment.
All this will come and eventually most people will recognize the problem when it is big and obvious. Smart software, better robotics, out sourcing... The machines can be beaten by cheap Chinese labor for now. THINK about it. To beat out expensive automation we must be desperate, poor, undervalued and unregulated (unclean, unsafe, and unaccountable.) If working for Foxcon China is so great then why do they put suicide nets around the buildings?
But macs fail to mount /tmp in a secure way; there is only 1 mount point. One can wonder about the next OS with the option to forbid non-signed apps from running and how that will impact this.
Yes we can.
Little by little it has been going downhill; the "fanatics" speak up and nobody listens as the pot slowly approaches boiling point. All these small losses add up over time and the democracy falls into despotism due to negligent citizenry. This is the way all democracies go; as Ben Franklin said at the close of the constitutional convention.
Success just makes it easier to fall down faster; why be vigilant citizens? that takes time, work, and thinking - we'd rather watch nobodies battle in the reality TV arena.
Put it into the trunk! if you need range you lose storage space. or have it hook on to the back of the car; like a bike rack. a small generator wouldn't be that bad to attach. so your car gets a "butt" for long range trips.
What bugs me is the electronics on all the electrics are not designed to handle power coming in while driving the car - I've asked each time. If it can handle it then there is a future market for range extension devices. A trailer being the idea I had over a decade ago.
Around town I don't need to be hauling around a generator. Besides, one could RENT the generator for long trips and not have to own the thing. I would also want to run it on propane which is superior to gasoline. I could do it myself if one of these cars would just allow charging during use... somebody out there I hope figures out how to hack into the regenerative braking system and use that to run in external power.
The link I have is dead but a german guy had built a clever dam that didn't do much harm. it was a large drain and the water would swirl around down the drain; it was easy to allow a stream to pass while putting most the water into a large bowl to flush down the drain. the turbine was vertical and worked of the spin of the water down the drain but a more intrusive prop could be used. Sure it is not as powerful and its lower scale... I'm not sure it would scale that large. but it is an Aerator as well and can be done without causing harm...
actually, dams could be done with less harm if they provided a minimal stream to route around the lake.
Am I the only one thinking of the next posting "Dysfunction In Modern Science?" on /. today right after this one?
Or the one a while back about a child who made a TREE with solar leaves that performed better but it turned out he had it all wrong and the media hyped the BS?
For me, in winter I have a 78 degree perpendicular with the sun-- that is nearly vertical in which case a bunch of staggered 45/-45 degree panels would work and the lower ones would get a lot of sun considering they are supposed to work fine with 10 degrees off center and the snow would reflect light towards them as well....
Problem is the sun is near 0 degrees in the summer. so half the panels would get jack.
CIGS panels handle diffuse light better; get those cheaper as many of us have more of a 2/3 cloudy year. Or IR light since most the IR light is not impacted by clouds. Or various coatings I've read about that keep more light from bouncing off the panels...
Or how about a small scale low pressure steam turbine? heat still beats out PV by a huge factor if you can extract energy from it effectively enough you can beat PV not to mention that heat storage works better than batteries.
The UK has been trying to beat the world to 1984 for a long time now - maybe China will win but the UK trying hard.
The UK lacks the protections of many other nations; they don't have free speech. The only good side is that when you "slander" McDonalds their legal system is more fair and a couple of people can spend their afternoons beating back the megacorporate censorship without going broke; in the USA corporate terrorism is the name of the game-- nobody dares go up against them and they get people to change at the mere thought of being a target (that is those who are terrorized by them.) No, it doesn't take a bomb to make some action terrorism.