What about the cases where the car passed by before it was in the database as stolen/owned by a felon? If you only stored the matches and threw away the rest of the data, you lose the ability to immediately act to capture someone the minute they enter the list.
Which, no doubt, is exactly WHY they brought up data retention time, rather than solely going for an up/down on preauthorization for data collection (and risking losing it all).
Would, keeping the data for, say, 30 days, then destroying any that wasn't part of an ongoing investigation (and subject to a warrant), satisfy your objection?
Kind of dumb that they put this information at the END of the article instead of in the headline. I thought there was not a problem until I got to the very end of the article.
This is a standard journalistic technique, used when the editors want to keep something out of general knowledge but not be accused later of trying to bury it.
In this case the entire POINT of the suit is that info on Joe Law-abiding Citizen's movements is being recorded forever in a searchable database. If the newsies approve of that they can't leave it COMPLETELY out of the article. So they focus on the use of the system for crime fighting, put this core issue in the last paragraph, and hope enough of the readership stops reading before they get to it that it doesn't become the day's hot topic or percolate into "the common knowledge".
The smart thing to do, as a reader: When you get bored with the droning, skip to the last couple paragraphs and see what they're trying to hide but don't quite dare to leave out completely.
(It still won't find the stuff they DO dare to leave out completely. But it DOES find a lot of important stuff you'd miss otherwise.)
I've seen your argument dozens of times -- "government isn't allowed to use x because it reduces the effort required for y"....
There are a number of things that government agencies might do that are harmful, but haven't been a major problem because the amount of it they can afford to do is limited by expense, which only a police state could afford. (Example from the WW II era: Maintaining dossiers on all citizens.) While this expense is high, even if the activity isn't legally recognized and subject to formal warrant requirements or other controls, Adam Smith's "invisible hand" tends to reserve its application to targets selected due to an individualized suspicion.
Automating these things makes them cheap enough that it becomes practical to use them on all, rather than just on suspects. They can then grow from an occasional nuisance to a pervasive menace to the freedom of all.
Whenever improvements in technology make such a breakthrough and government begins to use it to infringe the rights of all, the citizens, via the legal and/or political systems, must actually get around to determining whether the activity is proper and restraining it if it is not, or lose the associated rights.
Thus, as computer technology improved record keeping and searching, you saw Supreme Court rulings explicitly recognizing a constitutional right to privacy. This is a continuation of that trend.
If we allow these types of systems to creep into our society on the merit of "it will savez the childrens!!" type arguments, with no objections, then it will be a sad day when the powers that be finally hook everything together and can pinpoint your exact location, with live video feeds, no matter where you go.
They've got that already (at least if you carry a cellphone or frequent areas with face-recognition software on the "traffic" security cameras). The cameras give them real-time feeds from known locations and the cellphone system checks where your phone is every 5 minutes or so (and I'm pretty sure it can be commanded to do it more often), whenever the phone is powered on. Resolution can be anywhere from "nearest cell tower" to feet, depending on the system and whether one, two, or more towers are in range. (This began to make it into public awareness when the mailbox bomber was captured in rural Nevada within 25 minutes of powering up his phone.)
Once they decide they want to track you they can do it quite easily - at least in urban areas.
What this controversy is about is keeping permanent records of where you've been, even if you're not currently wanted, so they can work this surveillance backward in time from the moment they decide to go after you all the way back to when the system was set up.
Also about who can access the records, under what circumstances, whether there's a limit on how long they're kept, etc. Right now there are no controls at all. So the police can keep the records forever, and in principle any police department functionary can access them.
Including the girlfriends of the local gang members who got jobs in the police department so they could tell the gang where the police are patrolling, if they've been dispatched to a location the gang members are currently "working", what residents notified the police they're on vacation, etc. Now they can also research the past habits and current whereabouts of potential victims.
Baby Boomers. The largest generation ever in the United States, and raised to hide under their desks any time there is a fire alarm or attack, thanks to the Cold War.
Generations X and Y were raised that way, too.
That's why, while Cho Seung-Hui was going down the asiles shooting them, the students at Virginia Tech were hiding under the desks rather than putting up resistance.
Unfortunately, the cycle I have in mind is mountain driving.
Scavenging power on a downgrade to use on the next upgrade (or to fight air friction once you emerge from the foothills onto a plain) is the same problem as scavenging power on a stop to use for the next start. But it has a much larger storage requirement - comparable to several tens of miles of level driving.
If you have that storage the car gets the same high mileage in mountains as on plains - with the bonus that you get to start out with a "full electrical tank" at the equivalent of 75 cents/galon. If you don't it's just another gasoline car trying to take the mountains - but with an underpowered engine and carrying a heavy load of useless batteries.
One of the best markets for hybrid vehicles is Northern California. There you have the world's largest concentration of (sometimes fanatical) environmentally-conscious early-adopters, with the disposable income (from silicon valley employment) and will to buy a premium environment-friendly car.
But for many of them the commute involves a trip through one of several passes in the coastal range. And for many of them their vacations and/or weekend getaways involve trips to Tahoe, Reno, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Los Banos camping areas, Half-Moon Bay, Big Basin, Nappa Valley,...
So a plug-in hybrid with sufficient energy storage to handle 3000 feet of upgrade (when fully loaded with camping gear and several passengers) and scavenge the power on the downgrade is a replaement vehicle for most of the people in the area. (Such a car would also be capable of getting similar performance in the driving cycles of most of the rest of the country.)
But with only a few miles of storage it's a commuter-only vehicle - for that fraction of the population that already pays a big premium to live within bicycling distance. So now they have to have TWO cars - one for commute one for everything else. Two prices to pay, two sets of MANUFACTURING energy costs, and only SHORT commutes at high mileage (or equivalent) to ammortize these costs.
Yeah? Mine's 14 mi - which is one of the shortest I've ever had - and no recharge at work. Shorter commutes usually aren't an option in cities with strong zoning laws (unless you want to live in the slums near the industrial district).
Nice try, Toyota, but still just an expeisive toy.
Main advantage is bragging rights for the politically correct (as they start another round of rotating blackouts by recharging these puppies right at the evening load peak and kick in the lower-efficiency natural-gas "peaking" generators at the utility, canceling the carbon footprint advantage they're claiming.)
This sounds like they just added a charger and modified the engine/charge control algorithm to let the batteries go low before the engine starts, but didn't expand the battery pack - or even add the second pack that they built room for in the origina prius.
That's better than a home-made conversion. But it's not a serious "plug in hybrid" by a long shot.
Until it has enough battery and charge rate to scavenge the entire energy from going down:
- Altamont Pass to the central valley or Livermore,
- Donner Pass to Reno or Sacremento,
- Echo pass to Carson City or the Central Valley, and
- Monitor Pass to the Nevada High Desert or Silver Lake, then Carson Pass to the Central Valley. it's just a toy.
Once it can handle those (and has a charge control that can be set to take advantage of it) you've got a car that can completely replace a gasoline-only vehicle for Northern Californians (and most of the rest of the country as well), with a performance and mileage improvement to justify the extra cost.
Completing the circuit is the easy part. Just like an extension cord, you have a positive and negative wire. Circuit complete.
Which means the tether has to support, not just its own weight and the elevators, but also the conductors and the insulators.
You're talking perhaps several times as much power down one tether as is currently generated in the entire continental US. Power is current times voltage.
So you're talking both some horrendous currents (i.e. HEAVY wires) and horrendous voltages (i.e. big, heavy insulators and lots of space betwen the conductors.) And lots of electrical forces trying to smash the wires together and magnetic forces trying to spread them apart. They can't be made to cancel, since the current varies with load, and the forces must be handled by the insulators, making them even heavier.
Then, assuming you manage to keep it from breaking under the added weight, coming apart, shorting together, or being shaken into oblivion by interactions with the earth's fields, the load must be put into an elevator car and the car attached to this high tension wire and climb it.
It's a pity they didn't get around to opening a public discussion on the subject back when one of the major figures in such planning was available to comment.
Just send the electricity down the wire like any terrestrial power line.
Running a massive current through the tether, even if possible, would cause all sorts of havoc. Reduction in strength (of a material already pushing the limits of material strength). Side-forces from interactions with the earth's magnetic field (and shaking from magnetic storms varying that field) could cause all sorts of havoc.
Then there's the issue that a transmission line doesn't carry any power inside the wire. The power is carried in the fields around and between the wires. You'd need more than one skyhook to complete the circuit. They'd massively repel each other - by an amount proportional to the square of the current, so it varies with load - causing still more structural issues.
= = = =
Of course the variants that involve pairs of counter-moving ribbons (and progressively larger arrays of them as you go up) as a conveyor belt also have potential to carry power - at the cost of added strength in the ribbon to transmit the power-bearing force imbalance.
= = = =
And none of this would work if the ribbon is a dipping-into/toward-the-atmosphere rotovator design, rather than an anchored-to-the-surface synchronous skyhook.
Oh, yeah, that minor detail of "transmitting it back to Earth" might be a bit of a hitch.
That detail was figured out almost half a century ago:
- Use radio waves with wavelengths of about a millimeter. These penetrate the atmosphere well and are not strongly absorbed by water (i.e. no major losses in clouds or cooked birds falling from the sky at design power densities.)
- Use synthetic-aperture techniques to form a beam centered on the ground-based rectenna and pilot-carrier transmitter. Loss of the pilot signal causes the transmitters to desynchronize and the beam to defocus, becoming annoying narrowband background radio noise, rather than staying focussed and tracking sideways.
Transmission losses from geosynchronous orbit to ground are comparable to those in high-tension lines from ground-based power plants to cities.
Meanwhile you can grow grass and graze cows under the rather lacy structure of the rectenna. So you don't even lose the use of the land where it is constructed.
I'm in favor of jackasses storing their guns safely and the rest of the community compromising on sane regulation of weapons.
I'm in favor of compromising on regulation of weapons, too.
I'm willing to compromise on only repealing or striking down HALF of the regulations on weapons.
This year.
Regulations on training, storage, etc. serve merely to lower the bar to the level required by regulation. The mandatory minimum becomes the effective maximum. In their absence people typically seek training on their own until they believe the have learned enough - and are generally trained to a far higher level of proficiency and indoctrinated with far better habits of safety in gun handling and storage, than the proposed laws require.
(Except, of course, for the trojan horse laws (such as DC's) that are disguised gun bans which work by creating requirements that are impossible to achieve, prohibitively expensive, would render guns useless if obeyed, or are entrapment mechanisms.)
There's also that part of the population that [horror images deleted]
You might find it instructive, before parroting those urban myths and stereotypes, to do a little research on the actual number of people hurt or killed in such incidents per year.
Then ask yourself if preventing such such a vanishingly small number of lives and injuries is worth actually having the enormously greater number that were prevented by with-gun self-defense in the same period.
Of course that's the sort of thing an adult would do. Which brings us back to the "grandfather post". B-)
The adult in me says... Guns of destruction are bad.
No, that's the adolescent in you that says that. It wants to stop killing, hurting, and threatening, and goes after a tool that is capable of such things.
But once you've had enough time and thought to understand the unintended consequences of the simple "solution" - disarming the law-abiding - you'll reach the adult understanding that self-defense requires force, and that a credible threat of retaliatory force produces a net reduction in killing, hurting, and threatening.
"Mutual Assured Destruction" works at both the wholesale level (having prevented an all-out nuclear war for over half a century now) and the retail level (convincing crooks they want to leave you alone and either go after an easier victim or find a new line of work.)
Second-order effects often swamp first-order effects, producing (initially) counter-intuitive results. Part of growing up is learning which situations are like that, and what the useful counter-intuitive solutions are. (To people with less experience this is often mistaken for wisdom, cynicism, or evil.)
Unfortunately there is a significant fraction of the population that either never DOES grow up or never learns some important lessons about rare, but deadly, situations.
There are times when I feel the urge to write "citation needed" on every single article on conservapedia,...
You're confusing the wiki software with the wikipedia organization and its encyclopedia.
The "citation needed" bit is part of the wikipedia organization's standards of proof for entries in its own encyclopedia. They are trying to emulate an actual encyclopedia, acting as a secondary souce summarizing identified primary sources.
Any other organization using the wiki software to target whatever function they wish and implement whatever standards they wish.
Expecting Wikipedia's standards to be used on some other organization's wiki just because they use the same software is like expecting everyone using some text editor to use both the citation systems for legal briefs and scholarly journal entries, just because that text editor is used both by lawyers and professors.
[My english is better than most other people's german, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
"posted"
(Unless there's some variant I'm unaware of, perhaps in UK English or a reference to a comedy routine, where "posten" would be proper or humorous in that sentence.)
The whole thing sounds to me like running web applications as popups that are exactly like the locally run application windows, both in appearance and in all, or most, of the infrastructure behind them.
I can't think of a better way to assist malicious web apps in fooling the user by removing any clue that they're not something local and innocuous.
My guess is that this energy is too small to put any additional stress on the heart.
Not if it's scaled up to any practical size - even to power very tiny stuff.
Pulling energy from the flow or the vibrations in it raises the backpressure. The pressure has to rise or the pressure in the veins downstream collapse in the lower-pressure part of the cycle, which causes all sorts of havoc, such as floating blood clots that produce strokes and heart attacks.
Pulling energy from the flexing of the vessels due to the pressure cycle resists the pressure cycle, much like "hardening of the arteries". Again either the amplitude of the cycle must increase - leading to both overpressure on the high side and a positive feedback crash of the system over time - or the vessels leading to or from the constriction suffer problems, leading to stuff like floating clots...
Best option would be to splice the genny in like it was additional tissue with a normal blood supply and a normal reaction to blood flow. But you'd still need to have the heart expand and do more work, which would still be likely to lead to shortened time before old-age style circulatory problems set in.
There are several other ways to pull power from the body that don't involve screwing around with the load on the heart. So this one seems to me to be a non-starter.
What would be really elegant is painting roads to collect solar power for cars. There is a whole lot of road out there!
Paving with solar cells would collect power from the sun that hits the roads. (Using solar panel sunshades would eliminate wear problems.) More power could be had by paving the median, pull-over lanes, and surrounding veggie area, to collect the sunpower that hits it. Yet you're still pretty light for powering the traffic.
But putting a row of windmills down the median could collect power from the sunlight hitting a FAR larger area. Windfarms the size of the interstate highway system would be in the right ballpark to power the traffic with a big surplus. Enough to make a big dent in powering the cars and trucks that are on the minor roads and the infrastructure they're commuting to/from.
Slashdot Mirror
What about the cases where the car passed by before it was in the database as stolen/owned by a felon? If you only stored the matches and threw away the rest of the data, you lose the ability to immediately act to capture someone the minute they enter the list.
Which, no doubt, is exactly WHY they brought up data retention time, rather than solely going for an up/down on preauthorization for data collection (and risking losing it all).
Would, keeping the data for, say, 30 days, then destroying any that wasn't part of an ongoing investigation (and subject to a warrant), satisfy your objection?
Kind of dumb that they put this information at the END of the article instead of in the headline. I thought there was not a problem until I got to the very end of the article.
This is a standard journalistic technique, used when the editors want to keep something out of general knowledge but not be accused later of trying to bury it.
In this case the entire POINT of the suit is that info on Joe Law-abiding Citizen's movements is being recorded forever in a searchable database. If the newsies approve of that they can't leave it COMPLETELY out of the article. So they focus on the use of the system for crime fighting, put this core issue in the last paragraph, and hope enough of the readership stops reading before they get to it that it doesn't become the day's hot topic or percolate into "the common knowledge".
The smart thing to do, as a reader: When you get bored with the droning, skip to the last couple paragraphs and see what they're trying to hide but don't quite dare to leave out completely.
(It still won't find the stuff they DO dare to leave out completely. But it DOES find a lot of important stuff you'd miss otherwise.)
How does it change the situation?
...
I've seen your argument dozens of times -- "government isn't allowed to use x because it reduces the effort required for y".
There are a number of things that government agencies might do that are harmful, but haven't been a major problem because the amount of it they can afford to do is limited by expense, which only a police state could afford. (Example from the WW II era: Maintaining dossiers on all citizens.) While this expense is high, even if the activity isn't legally recognized and subject to formal warrant requirements or other controls, Adam Smith's "invisible hand" tends to reserve its application to targets selected due to an individualized suspicion.
Automating these things makes them cheap enough that it becomes practical to use them on all, rather than just on suspects. They can then grow from an occasional nuisance to a pervasive menace to the freedom of all.
Whenever improvements in technology make such a breakthrough and government begins to use it to infringe the rights of all, the citizens, via the legal and/or political systems, must actually get around to determining whether the activity is proper and restraining it if it is not, or lose the associated rights.
Thus, as computer technology improved record keeping and searching, you saw Supreme Court rulings explicitly recognizing a constitutional right to privacy. This is a continuation of that trend.
If we allow these types of systems to creep into our society on the merit of "it will savez the childrens!!" type arguments, with no objections, then it will be a sad day when the powers that be finally hook everything together and can pinpoint your exact location, with live video feeds, no matter where you go.
They've got that already (at least if you carry a cellphone or frequent areas with face-recognition software on the "traffic" security cameras). The cameras give them real-time feeds from known locations and the cellphone system checks where your phone is every 5 minutes or so (and I'm pretty sure it can be commanded to do it more often), whenever the phone is powered on. Resolution can be anywhere from "nearest cell tower" to feet, depending on the system and whether one, two, or more towers are in range. (This began to make it into public awareness when the mailbox bomber was captured in rural Nevada within 25 minutes of powering up his phone.)
Once they decide they want to track you they can do it quite easily - at least in urban areas.
What this controversy is about is keeping permanent records of where you've been, even if you're not currently wanted, so they can work this surveillance backward in time from the moment they decide to go after you all the way back to when the system was set up.
Also about who can access the records, under what circumstances, whether there's a limit on how long they're kept, etc. Right now there are no controls at all. So the police can keep the records forever, and in principle any police department functionary can access them.
Including the girlfriends of the local gang members who got jobs in the police department so they could tell the gang where the police are patrolling, if they've been dispatched to a location the gang members are currently "working", what residents notified the police they're on vacation, etc. Now they can also research the past habits and current whereabouts of potential victims.
It's kind of like the old saying that Mussolini made the trains run on time.
Interestingly, Mussolini DIDN'T make the trains run on time.
He made the press SAY the trains ran on time, until it became a catchphrase.
Baby Boomers. The largest generation ever in the United States, and raised to hide under their desks any time there is a fire alarm or attack, thanks to the Cold War.
Generations X and Y were raised that way, too.
That's why, while Cho Seung-Hui was going down the asiles shooting them, the students at Virginia Tech were hiding under the desks rather than putting up resistance.
Unfortunately, the cycle I have in mind is mountain driving.
...
Scavenging power on a downgrade to use on the next upgrade (or to fight air friction once you emerge from the foothills onto a plain) is the same problem as scavenging power on a stop to use for the next start. But it has a much larger storage requirement - comparable to several tens of miles of level driving.
If you have that storage the car gets the same high mileage in mountains as on plains - with the bonus that you get to start out with a "full electrical tank" at the equivalent of 75 cents/galon. If you don't it's just another gasoline car trying to take the mountains - but with an underpowered engine and carrying a heavy load of useless batteries.
One of the best markets for hybrid vehicles is Northern California. There you have the world's largest concentration of (sometimes fanatical) environmentally-conscious early-adopters, with the disposable income (from silicon valley employment) and will to buy a premium environment-friendly car.
But for many of them the commute involves a trip through one of several passes in the coastal range. And for many of them their vacations and/or weekend getaways involve trips to Tahoe, Reno, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Los Banos camping areas, Half-Moon Bay, Big Basin, Nappa Valley,
So a plug-in hybrid with sufficient energy storage to handle 3000 feet of upgrade (when fully loaded with camping gear and several passengers) and scavenge the power on the downgrade is a replaement vehicle for most of the people in the area. (Such a car would also be capable of getting similar performance in the driving cycles of most of the rest of the country.)
But with only a few miles of storage it's a commuter-only vehicle - for that fraction of the population that already pays a big premium to live within bicycling distance. So now they have to have TWO cars - one for commute one for everything else. Two prices to pay, two sets of MANUFACTURING energy costs, and only SHORT commutes at high mileage (or equivalent) to ammortize these costs.
Just saw the posting saying the base prius only goes 2.5 mi. Ok, so maybe they did put in the second pack, too.
Still a toy.
My round trip to work is 7.5 KM.
Yeah? Mine's 14 mi - which is one of the shortest I've ever had - and no recharge at work. Shorter commutes usually aren't an option in cities with strong zoning laws (unless you want to live in the slums near the industrial district).
Nice try, Toyota, but still just an expeisive toy.
Main advantage is bragging rights for the politically correct (as they start another round of rotating blackouts by recharging these puppies right at the evening load peak and kick in the lower-efficiency natural-gas "peaking" generators at the utility, canceling the carbon footprint advantage they're claiming.)
This sounds like they just added a charger and modified the engine/charge control algorithm to let the batteries go low before the engine starts, but didn't expand the battery pack - or even add the second pack that they built room for in the origina prius.
That's better than a home-made conversion. But it's not a serious "plug in hybrid" by a long shot.
Until it has enough battery and charge rate to scavenge the entire energy from going down:
- Altamont Pass to the central valley or Livermore,
- Donner Pass to Reno or Sacremento,
- Echo pass to Carson City or the Central Valley, and
- Monitor Pass to the Nevada High Desert or Silver Lake, then Carson Pass to the Central Valley.
it's just a toy.
Once it can handle those (and has a charge control that can be set to take advantage of it) you've got a car that can completely replace a gasoline-only vehicle for Northern Californians (and most of the rest of the country as well), with a performance and mileage improvement to justify the extra cost.
Completing the circuit is the easy part. Just like an extension cord, you have a positive and negative wire. Circuit complete.
Which means the tether has to support, not just its own weight and the elevators, but also the conductors and the insulators.
You're talking perhaps several times as much power down one tether as is currently generated in the entire continental US. Power is current times voltage.
So you're talking both some horrendous currents (i.e. HEAVY wires) and horrendous voltages (i.e. big, heavy insulators and lots of space betwen the conductors.) And lots of electrical forces trying to smash the wires together and magnetic forces trying to spread them apart. They can't be made to cancel, since the current varies with load, and the forces must be handled by the insulators, making them even heavier.
Then, assuming you manage to keep it from breaking under the added weight, coming apart, shorting together, or being shaken into oblivion by interactions with the earth's fields, the load must be put into an elevator car and the car attached to this high tension wire and climb it.
No, thanks.
It's a pity they didn't get around to opening a public discussion on the subject back when one of the major figures in such planning was available to comment.
Just send the electricity down the wire like any terrestrial power line.
Running a massive current through the tether, even if possible, would cause all sorts of havoc. Reduction in strength (of a material already pushing the limits of material strength). Side-forces from interactions with the earth's magnetic field (and shaking from magnetic storms varying that field) could cause all sorts of havoc.
Then there's the issue that a transmission line doesn't carry any power inside the wire. The power is carried in the fields around and between the wires. You'd need more than one skyhook to complete the circuit. They'd massively repel each other - by an amount proportional to the square of the current, so it varies with load - causing still more structural issues.
= = = =
Of course the variants that involve pairs of counter-moving ribbons (and progressively larger arrays of them as you go up) as a conveyor belt also have potential to carry power - at the cost of added strength in the ribbon to transmit the power-bearing force imbalance.
= = = =
And none of this would work if the ribbon is a dipping-into/toward-the-atmosphere rotovator design, rather than an anchored-to-the-surface synchronous skyhook.
Oh, yeah, that minor detail of "transmitting it back to Earth" might be a bit of a hitch.
That detail was figured out almost half a century ago:
- Use radio waves with wavelengths of about a millimeter. These penetrate the atmosphere well and are not strongly absorbed by water (i.e. no major losses in clouds or cooked birds falling from the sky at design power densities.)
- Use synthetic-aperture techniques to form a beam centered on the ground-based rectenna and pilot-carrier transmitter. Loss of the pilot signal causes the transmitters to desynchronize and the beam to defocus, becoming annoying narrowband background radio noise, rather than staying focussed and tracking sideways.
Transmission losses from geosynchronous orbit to ground are comparable to those in high-tension lines from ground-based power plants to cities.
Meanwhile you can grow grass and graze cows under the rather lacy structure of the rectenna. So you don't even lose the use of the land where it is constructed.
I'm in favor of jackasses storing their guns safely and the rest of the community compromising on sane regulation of weapons.
I'm in favor of compromising on regulation of weapons, too.
I'm willing to compromise on only repealing or striking down HALF of the regulations on weapons.
This year.
Regulations on training, storage, etc. serve merely to lower the bar to the level required by regulation. The mandatory minimum becomes the effective maximum. In their absence people typically seek training on their own until they believe the have learned enough - and are generally trained to a far higher level of proficiency and indoctrinated with far better habits of safety in gun handling and storage, than the proposed laws require.
(Except, of course, for the trojan horse laws (such as DC's) that are disguised gun bans which work by creating requirements that are impossible to achieve, prohibitively expensive, would render guns useless if obeyed, or are entrapment mechanisms.)
... Wasn't supported on that version of Firefox. But worked on an older Netscape.
Wanted to look at 365 main in google maps' street view but the button isn't available.
Doesn't seem to be showing airborne/satellite images either.
+1 Redundant?
There's also that part of the population that [horror images deleted]
You might find it instructive, before parroting those urban myths and stereotypes, to do a little research on the actual number of people hurt or killed in such incidents per year.
Then ask yourself if preventing such such a vanishingly small number of lives and injuries is worth actually having the enormously greater number that were prevented by with-gun self-defense in the same period.
Of course that's the sort of thing an adult would do. Which brings us back to the "grandfather post". B-)
The adult in me says ... Guns of destruction are bad.
No, that's the adolescent in you that says that. It wants to stop killing, hurting, and threatening, and goes after a tool that is capable of such things.
But once you've had enough time and thought to understand the unintended consequences of the simple "solution" - disarming the law-abiding - you'll reach the adult understanding that self-defense requires force, and that a credible threat of retaliatory force produces a net reduction in killing, hurting, and threatening.
"Mutual Assured Destruction" works at both the wholesale level (having prevented an all-out nuclear war for over half a century now) and the retail level (convincing crooks they want to leave you alone and either go after an easier victim or find a new line of work.)
Second-order effects often swamp first-order effects, producing (initially) counter-intuitive results. Part of growing up is learning which situations are like that, and what the useful counter-intuitive solutions are. (To people with less experience this is often mistaken for wisdom, cynicism, or evil.)
Unfortunately there is a significant fraction of the population that either never DOES grow up or never learns some important lessons about rare, but deadly, situations.
There are times when I feel the urge to write "citation needed" on every single article on conservapedia, ...
You're confusing the wiki software with the wikipedia organization and its encyclopedia.
The "citation needed" bit is part of the wikipedia organization's standards of proof for entries in its own encyclopedia. They are trying to emulate an actual encyclopedia, acting as a secondary souce summarizing identified primary sources.
Any other organization using the wiki software to target whatever function they wish and implement whatever standards they wish.
Expecting Wikipedia's standards to be used on some other organization's wiki just because they use the same software is like expecting everyone using some text editor to use both the citation systems for legal briefs and scholarly journal entries, just because that text editor is used both by lawyers and professors.
If you hadn't posten it on slashdot ...
[My english is better than most other people's german, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
"posted"
(Unless there's some variant I'm unaware of, perhaps in UK English or a reference to a comedy routine, where "posten" would be proper or humorous in that sentence.)
Your use of English idiom is excelent.
Agree with your comments.
The whole thing sounds to me like running web applications as popups that are exactly like the locally run application windows, both in appearance and in all, or most, of the infrastructure behind them.
I can't think of a better way to assist malicious web apps in fooling the user by removing any clue that they're not something local and innocuous.
A phisher's dream.
My guess is that this energy is too small to put any additional stress on the heart.
Not if it's scaled up to any practical size - even to power very tiny stuff.
Pulling energy from the flow or the vibrations in it raises the backpressure. The pressure has to rise or the pressure in the veins downstream collapse in the lower-pressure part of the cycle, which causes all sorts of havoc, such as floating blood clots that produce strokes and heart attacks.
Pulling energy from the flexing of the vessels due to the pressure cycle resists the pressure cycle, much like "hardening of the arteries". Again either the amplitude of the cycle must increase - leading to both overpressure on the high side and a positive feedback crash of the system over time - or the vessels leading to or from the constriction suffer problems, leading to stuff like floating clots...
Best option would be to splice the genny in like it was additional tissue with a normal blood supply and a normal reaction to blood flow. But you'd still need to have the heart expand and do more work, which would still be likely to lead to shortened time before old-age style circulatory problems set in.
There are several other ways to pull power from the body that don't involve screwing around with the load on the heart. So this one seems to me to be a non-starter.
What would be really elegant is painting roads to collect solar power for cars. There is a whole lot of road out there!
Paving with solar cells would collect power from the sun that hits the roads. (Using solar panel sunshades would eliminate wear problems.) More power could be had by paving the median, pull-over lanes, and surrounding veggie area, to collect the sunpower that hits it. Yet you're still pretty light for powering the traffic.
But putting a row of windmills down the median could collect power from the sunlight hitting a FAR larger area. Windfarms the size of the interstate highway system would be in the right ballpark to power the traffic with a big surplus. Enough to make a big dent in powering the cars and trucks that are on the minor roads and the infrastructure they're commuting to/from.