I wonder if this explains why some young people seems so damn stupid. They get fed far to much useless information constantly via the phone their eyes seem to be glued to, and it has filled up their brains.
well, at some point, you'll get down to one user, and when they loose 50% of that user, well, depending on which half they lose, they may lose the other half right along with it. (assuming the user is parted at the waistline, everything from the torso up may be salvageable, but if thats the half that decides to quit Facebook that year, I doubt their legs will keep an active account.)
I agree, he picked the worst name possible. Just because of the trope attached, it turns a lot of people off because the first thing their brain does after reading the word 'soylent' is scream in Charlton Hestons voice ' IS PEOPLE!". Not a good marketing scheme.
As far as I can tell, they are getting around that by simply supplying the 'ingredients'. They simply order various packages of powdered ingredients, put them in a box (in separate packages), and mail that to you. They are not manufacturing anything in house, they are simply selling you a kit to make your own grey goop out of. If I wanted, I could go on amazon and order all the same shit, and make it myself. They are simply selling the convenience of getting it all at once, in one box.
Well see, in America, we eat a lot of processed crap that is usually triple packed. (little individual packets, in a box, that is wrapped in plastic) So you can only fit a couple items in a bag before its to bulky to handle. Couple that with the fact that our flabby arms can only carry a load of about 2 lbs (the weight of a average fat laden cheeseburger) and it becomes a real challenge to haul 75 liters of sugar water home in one trip.
Or, maybe this person is like my family was when I was a kid. Dads job payed once a month, so we made one trip to town, and bought two shopping carts worth of groceries. Lots of canned soups, dried pasta, frozen vegetables, rice, beans, and other 'staple' foods that meals can be crafted from. Not everyone can afford to shop every day for their individual meals. A lot of people claim that if you plan a month of menu, and shop ahead of time for everything possible, then stick to that menu, you will spend less on food in a year than 'piecemeal' shopping your food day to day. This is because you limit the opportunity for impulse buying.
Personally, my standard for 'walking distance' to a store is based entirely on milk. For each degree above 40F milk rises, you lose 1 day of shelf life. Our local store keeps its milk as near 33 degrees as it can, because we are very far from everywhere, and this increases its shelf life as much as possible. IF I can walk the milk home without it rising above 40F, then its within walking distance. Farther than that, and we take the car. (and a cooler with ice, for perishables in warm weather).
I don't do it professionally, thats for sure. This is simply a case of "hey, you know a lot about computers right? will you work on mine?" I'm sure If I where being paid to work on it, I would have found the 'fix'.
What amazes me is that it explains so much. I have no idea how many XP users have asked me to work on their computer 'because it has gotten so slow' and after full virus and malware cleanings, the system was noticeably slower than it should be for the hardware. This problem actually seems to explain it. Usually, all that cleaning involved a restart, and if this bug was causing slowdowns for more than an hour (I've read comments on the earlier/. posts about his testifying to multi day resource hogging after restarts) Then I would generally never be on their machine long enough for it to clear out. Couple that with the fact that a lot of people (especially older ones) completely shut down their computer when not using it, and its possible that the update checks would never finish on a particular machine. My old advice turned out to be solid. "leave it on for a few days, and see if it gets better"
Ok first, its not doing electrolysis, there is oxygen dissolved in sea water, much like C02 is dissolved in a bottle of soda water. fish's gills (and supposedly, this machine) are able to literally filter that oxygen out of the water. they are not breaking down actual water molecule the way electrolysis does. (if there where, I suspect we'd be using fish to power hybrid cars)
After looking around the internet a bit, it looks like this is more of a design students wet dream project. His website details how was learning to scuba dive, and he found normal dive equipment 'bulky' and 'difficult to use', So he designed this device. There are no technical specs anywhere to be found only vague references to 'advanced batteries' and whatnot.
Finally, I ended up on a scuba diving board, where a kind soul who actually knew something posted the following (from wikipedia)
Artificial gills (human) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"They are generally thought to be unwieldy and bulky, because of the massive amount of water that would have to be processed to extract enough oxygen to supply an active diver, as an alternative to a scuba set.
As sea water contains 7 ppm oxygen, 1,000,000 kg (1,000 tonnes) of sea water holds 7 kg (1,000 short tons holds 14 lb) of O2, the equivalent of 5,350 litres (1,410 US gal) of oxygen gas at atmospheric pressure.
An average diver with a fully closed-circuit rebreather needs 1 liter (roughly 1 quart) of oxygen per minute. As a result, at least 192 litres (51 US gal) of sea water per minute would have to be passed through the system, and this system would not work in anoxic water.
These calculations are based on the dissolved oxygen content of water."
Another person noted that these figures are at 100% efficiency, and that is an improbable expectation meaning that the which means this system would have to be able to pull the output of a fire hose through itself. This means that you could probably use the thing to propel yourself through the water at a high rate of speed. Also, I don't want to put a 'revolutionary new battery' with that much potential energy *practically in my mouth*. Now, even if you managed 100% efficiency, and kept the water flow to that 'paltry' 51 gpm, and devised some way to make it not jet you off into the deep, your left with one more problem. The damn thing is electric. And even with the best batteries on the market, your going to get mere minutes of use out of the thing at that size. Compare that to the hours a diver can stay down (with proper mixture and training) and this device is obviously wishful thinking. Well done/. editors, you trolled yourselves.
And this is how you put the cord in the conduit. You tie a plastic bag to the end of the cord (which should be on a good spool), stick it in the conduit, and then hook a shop vac hose to the far end. Most people cut a clear soda bottle to use as an adapter between the shop vac hose and the conduit. The result is, the vac pulls the bag (and the cord) through the conduit, and when you see the bag land in the bottle, you shut the thing off. I saw someone pull over a run over 100 feet long, buried underground that way,(not digging that up to add cord) and it worked like a charm.
I was totally guessing about the spring back, your explanation makes far more sense. As for ruining the helmet, even with polystyrene helmets, it is advised to dispose of the helmet and replace it after a serious crash involving a blow to the helmet, so there is no real difference there. You should email your suggestion about triangle structures vs square to the creator, I think you are on to something there.
if you bother to read the article, you would learn it absorbs far more of energy. They state that a 15mph crash can subject the brain to 220G of force wearing a polystyrene helmet. Using the paper helmet, the test units brain-analogue was subjected to a mere 70G of force. This was tested in Europe, where regulations state for a helmet to be approved, the brain may not be subjected to more than 300G of force at 15mph. So a significant improvement over traditional polystyrene helmets, in terms of energy absorption and dissipation. I posit that this is most likely due to the fact that paper does not recoil back to its original form as much as the polystyrene.
True, rights holders expect to be paid for their content. However, you may have noticed that an e-Book generally costs far less than a good quality library bound book. (i ignore paperback books in this case, simply because a decent library will get decently bound books, so they last a long time and do not have to be replaced)
Now, lets get to the examples. On amazon right now, a kindle copy of the latest NY times best seller (a John Grisham novel) costs 6.49$. The hardcover version costs 14.87$ this means a library can afford two copies to lend out digitally, or one physical copy. (assume for now that the cost of the kindles was factored into the construction of the library.)
This is to say nothing about the thousands of public domain books. For example, a good library bound copy of 'The adventures of Huckleberry Fin' costs around 20$ on amazon. The kindle version is FREE. As are thousands of other books that belong in any good public library. allowing users to read on computers, and check out kindles opens up the door for a library to offer a vast amount of wonderful reading to the public at no cost, with as many copies available as can be asked for.
As another poster noted, the area this library is being opened in is not a well off neighborhood, and internet access and personal computers are not prevalent in the area, meaning that, while *you* may be able to download and read these books at your leisure in your house, most of the residents in the area in question do not have the ability to do so.
Basicly, in designing this library, they said "instead of building an expensive building strong enough to hold thousands of pounds of paper books, and buying thousands of books to fill it with, lets build a cheeper building to hold some computers, and buy a few hundred of kindles". The base kindle costs 69$, so for between the cost of 3 or 4 library quality books, you get 1 kindle, I've never seen a library that had fully 1/4th its stock checked out at once, so far fewer kindles than that are needed. A few hundred should suffice initially. Then, you are able to populate a large portion of your library with books that are literally free, and spend far less than normal physical item cost on the books that are not public domain. The net result is more books in the hands of readers, even if its a kindle.
And as for the romance of a physical book may be required for some people, but the e-ink of a kindle is just fine for plenty more people, It seems to me that this library was built on the idea is simply to get people reading, where they were not before. Let them start reading, so they can discover the romance of physical books. (which is hugely secondary, compared to the intellectual benefits of reading).
Some of the info i've seen was they where asking for 35 years, and multiple millions of dollars in fines. So maybe they where going to offer 6 months in minimum security, but the way it sounds, he was under the impression he was not getting a 6 month offer, but a lifetime of prison and debt.
I have a second cousin who plays with a big name orchestra in Denmark or somewhere, (upright bass) Anyways, he, and most other big time orchestral music people say that If you travel with your instrument, you buy a seat for yourself, and one for your instrument, and it comes on the plane with you. NEVER trust it to baggage handlers, or any other person you can't see. It never leaves your line of sight. (like the article says, that object is your living, it is your life, treat it as such.)
Also, the person that thought it was a good idea for every mobile site to have a banner or an interrupt page telling you to download the sites app? beat him to death with as many wiffle bats as it takes to get the job done. I need an app for every website I visit like I need double pneumonia and a infected hemorrhoid.
Yes, I, (and anyone who has passed their 'hunter safety training' class as a kid) can locate the heart on those animals with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
When I was in hunters safety, one of the last things we did was to shoot at paper targets with pellet guns. These targets where a sheet of 8.5x11 paper, with an animal one one side (we did deer, elk, moose, and bear) and on the reverse, lined up with the target on the front, was a anatomy drawing of the target animal, with all the vital organs depicted. Our task was to shoot these targets at a 100 yard equivalent distance (the animal on the paper looked the size it does at 100 yards) and have our shots in the 'kill areas'
Now, I know 'hunters safety' courses vary from state to state, and are not mandatory for adults in many states, which saddens me, but my point is, that many many hunters have attended these courses as children, and are aware of the information in them. Personally, I think the sort of course I took (which was in Montana) should be required in all states, of all hunters.
Now back to the point. As for the heart, that organ is surrounded by another vital organ, the lungs, which, when penetrated by the appropriate caliber round for the size of the animal, will kill them nearly as fast as a perfect heart shot. We also where taught that, unless extreme circumstances dictate it, to avoid aiming for the head. The brain of a deer (or any decent game animal in north america) is a target no larger than the end of a soup can, and surrounded by the some of the hardest bone in the body, it is NOT a prime target. As for the neck shot, there is a fair amount of debate as to wether or not it is an 'ideal' shot. It is possible to hit an animal in the neck in such a way as to cause it to bleed into its throat/esophagus, making tracking much more difficult, while the animal drowns in its own blood, and it is also entirely possible to penetrate the muscles in the neck, miss the spine and vital arteries entirely, and simply give the animal a terrible flesh wound. Of course, all your stated results are also possible. The heart/lungs target is in the end, a larger target, and less prone to non fatal wounding.
In reality, in terms of sustenance hunting, (where you need the animal for food, not trophies) the selection of target area on the animal comes down to "which vital area am I able to see and hit and kill this animal." Sure, occasionally you may hit part of a front quarter due to slightly off shot placement, but at least you have 3 quarters and the back straps of meat, instead of going hungry. Besides, the shot quarter goes to feed the dogs, so its not really wasted anyways.
By my calculations, 1000kg distributed across 6 wheels is 166kg on earth, which translates to 62kg on mars. What surprises me about the damage is that a copy of the rover was stress tested in death valley, so this level of wear and tear should have been anticipated, as the force on the wheels there was much higher. I wonder if another environmental factor, like mars' extreme cold, or increased radiation due to lack of magnetosphere is affecting the materials in the wheels.
Hell, in this state, robbing a store with even a toy gun counts as armed robbery. Imagine going to prison for pointing a plastic kids toy at a McDonalds clerk and demanding the cash in the drawer. This is a thing that happened here.
Same way you get rid of your old couch pretty much. Put it on the street corner with a sign that says "free couch" and it will sit until it rots. Put a sign that says "Couch, 50$" and it will be gone before you get back to your front door.
Great anecdote (or myth) about copper thieves from my area. Supposedly (and i've never actually confirmed this story, but it sure sounds good). Some copper thieves purchased a old power company truck at auction, which still had the giant spool assembly on it. They modified this spool rig to run in reverse very quickly, and supposedly, over the course of a few days or weeks, went along several miles of phone line on poles and detached the cable from the insulators, and left it lying on the crossbeams of the telephone poles. This meant that the phone system still worked. Then, on the final night, they went out, cut the line at both ends of their work, hooked it to the truck, and spooled it up. They took two miles of copper in a matter of minutes.
This story goes well with the story that some drug runners bought the same model pickup as the local power company used, painted the local power company's logo on it, and was driving on private back country roads to avoid the border patrol stations, pretending to be inspecting lines, or whatever, until some rancher noticed that the logo was hand painted and had a spelling error or some such nonsense.
of course, all this is probably fiction designed to scare the outsiders, but it sure makes for good entertainment!
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if this explains why some young people seems so damn stupid. They get fed far to much useless information constantly via the phone their eyes seem to be glued to, and it has filled up their brains.
well, at some point, you'll get down to one user, and when they loose 50% of that user, well, depending on which half they lose, they may lose the other half right along with it. (assuming the user is parted at the waistline, everything from the torso up may be salvageable, but if thats the half that decides to quit Facebook that year, I doubt their legs will keep an active account.)
I agree, he picked the worst name possible. Just because of the trope attached, it turns a lot of people off because the first thing their brain does after reading the word 'soylent' is scream in Charlton Hestons voice ' IS PEOPLE!". Not a good marketing scheme.
As far as I can tell, they are getting around that by simply supplying the 'ingredients'. They simply order various packages of powdered ingredients, put them in a box (in separate packages), and mail that to you. They are not manufacturing anything in house, they are simply selling you a kit to make your own grey goop out of. If I wanted, I could go on amazon and order all the same shit, and make it myself. They are simply selling the convenience of getting it all at once, in one box.
Not really, Without Pasteur, its more like for every degree above 40F milk rises, you gain 1 more salmonella outbreak.
Well see, in America, we eat a lot of processed crap that is usually triple packed. (little individual packets, in a box, that is wrapped in plastic) So you can only fit a couple items in a bag before its to bulky to handle. Couple that with the fact that our flabby arms can only carry a load of about 2 lbs (the weight of a average fat laden cheeseburger) and it becomes a real challenge to haul 75 liters of sugar water home in one trip.
Or, maybe this person is like my family was when I was a kid. Dads job payed once a month, so we made one trip to town, and bought two shopping carts worth of groceries. Lots of canned soups, dried pasta, frozen vegetables, rice, beans, and other 'staple' foods that meals can be crafted from. Not everyone can afford to shop every day for their individual meals. A lot of people claim that if you plan a month of menu, and shop ahead of time for everything possible, then stick to that menu, you will spend less on food in a year than 'piecemeal' shopping your food day to day. This is because you limit the opportunity for impulse buying.
Personally, my standard for 'walking distance' to a store is based entirely on milk. For each degree above 40F milk rises, you lose 1 day of shelf life. Our local store keeps its milk as near 33 degrees as it can, because we are very far from everywhere, and this increases its shelf life as much as possible. IF I can walk the milk home without it rising above 40F, then its within walking distance. Farther than that, and we take the car. (and a cooler with ice, for perishables in warm weather).
Thanks for the tip. First testbed, my parents XP machine.
I don't do it professionally, thats for sure. This is simply a case of "hey, you know a lot about computers right? will you work on mine?" I'm sure If I where being paid to work on it, I would have found the 'fix'.
What amazes me is that it explains so much. I have no idea how many XP users have asked me to work on their computer 'because it has gotten so slow' and after full virus and malware cleanings, the system was noticeably slower than it should be for the hardware. This problem actually seems to explain it. Usually, all that cleaning involved a restart, and if this bug was causing slowdowns for more than an hour (I've read comments on the earlier /. posts about his testifying to multi day resource hogging after restarts) Then I would generally never be on their machine long enough for it to clear out. Couple that with the fact that a lot of people (especially older ones) completely shut down their computer when not using it, and its possible that the update checks would never finish on a particular machine. My old advice turned out to be solid. "leave it on for a few days, and see if it gets better"
After looking around the internet a bit, it looks like this is more of a design students wet dream project. His website details how was learning to scuba dive, and he found normal dive equipment 'bulky' and 'difficult to use', So he designed this device. There are no technical specs anywhere to be found only vague references to 'advanced batteries' and whatnot.
Finally, I ended up on a scuba diving board, where a kind soul who actually knew something posted the following (from wikipedia)
Artificial gills (human) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"They are generally thought to be unwieldy and bulky, because of the massive amount of water that would have to be processed to extract enough oxygen to supply an active diver, as an alternative to a scuba set.
As sea water contains 7 ppm oxygen, 1,000,000 kg (1,000 tonnes) of sea water holds 7 kg (1,000 short tons holds 14 lb) of O2, the equivalent of 5,350 litres (1,410 US gal) of oxygen gas at atmospheric pressure.
An average diver with a fully closed-circuit rebreather needs 1 liter (roughly 1 quart) of oxygen per minute. As a result, at least 192 litres (51 US gal) of sea water per minute would have to be passed through the system, and this system would not work in anoxic water.
These calculations are based on the dissolved oxygen content of water."
Another person noted that these figures are at 100% efficiency, and that is an improbable expectation meaning that the which means this system would have to be able to pull the output of a fire hose through itself. This means that you could probably use the thing to propel yourself through the water at a high rate of speed. Also, I don't want to put a 'revolutionary new battery' with that much potential energy *practically in my mouth*. Now, even if you managed 100% efficiency, and kept the water flow to that 'paltry' 51 gpm, and devised some way to make it not jet you off into the deep, your left with one more problem. The damn thing is electric. And even with the best batteries on the market, your going to get mere minutes of use out of the thing at that size. Compare that to the hours a diver can stay down (with proper mixture and training) and this device is obviously wishful thinking. Well done /. editors, you trolled yourselves.
And this is how you put the cord in the conduit. You tie a plastic bag to the end of the cord (which should be on a good spool), stick it in the conduit, and then hook a shop vac hose to the far end. Most people cut a clear soda bottle to use as an adapter between the shop vac hose and the conduit. The result is, the vac pulls the bag (and the cord) through the conduit, and when you see the bag land in the bottle, you shut the thing off. I saw someone pull over a run over 100 feet long, buried underground that way,(not digging that up to add cord) and it worked like a charm.
I was totally guessing about the spring back, your explanation makes far more sense. As for ruining the helmet, even with polystyrene helmets, it is advised to dispose of the helmet and replace it after a serious crash involving a blow to the helmet, so there is no real difference there. You should email your suggestion about triangle structures vs square to the creator, I think you are on to something there.
if you bother to read the article, you would learn it absorbs far more of energy. They state that a 15mph crash can subject the brain to 220G of force wearing a polystyrene helmet. Using the paper helmet, the test units brain-analogue was subjected to a mere 70G of force. This was tested in Europe, where regulations state for a helmet to be approved, the brain may not be subjected to more than 300G of force at 15mph. So a significant improvement over traditional polystyrene helmets, in terms of energy absorption and dissipation. I posit that this is most likely due to the fact that paper does not recoil back to its original form as much as the polystyrene.
True, rights holders expect to be paid for their content. However, you may have noticed that an e-Book generally costs far less than a good quality library bound book. (i ignore paperback books in this case, simply because a decent library will get decently bound books, so they last a long time and do not have to be replaced)
Now, lets get to the examples. On amazon right now, a kindle copy of the latest NY times best seller (a John Grisham novel) costs 6.49$. The hardcover version costs 14.87$ this means a library can afford two copies to lend out digitally, or one physical copy. (assume for now that the cost of the kindles was factored into the construction of the library.)
This is to say nothing about the thousands of public domain books. For example, a good library bound copy of 'The adventures of Huckleberry Fin' costs around 20$ on amazon. The kindle version is FREE. As are thousands of other books that belong in any good public library. allowing users to read on computers, and check out kindles opens up the door for a library to offer a vast amount of wonderful reading to the public at no cost, with as many copies available as can be asked for.
As another poster noted, the area this library is being opened in is not a well off neighborhood, and internet access and personal computers are not prevalent in the area, meaning that, while *you* may be able to download and read these books at your leisure in your house, most of the residents in the area in question do not have the ability to do so.
Basicly, in designing this library, they said "instead of building an expensive building strong enough to hold thousands of pounds of paper books, and buying thousands of books to fill it with, lets build a cheeper building to hold some computers, and buy a few hundred of kindles". The base kindle costs 69$, so for between the cost of 3 or 4 library quality books, you get 1 kindle, I've never seen a library that had fully 1/4th its stock checked out at once, so far fewer kindles than that are needed. A few hundred should suffice initially. Then, you are able to populate a large portion of your library with books that are literally free, and spend far less than normal physical item cost on the books that are not public domain. The net result is more books in the hands of readers, even if its a kindle.
And as for the romance of a physical book may be required for some people, but the e-ink of a kindle is just fine for plenty more people, It seems to me that this library was built on the idea is simply to get people reading, where they were not before. Let them start reading, so they can discover the romance of physical books. (which is hugely secondary, compared to the intellectual benefits of reading).
Some of the info i've seen was they where asking for 35 years, and multiple millions of dollars in fines. So maybe they where going to offer 6 months in minimum security, but the way it sounds, he was under the impression he was not getting a 6 month offer, but a lifetime of prison and debt.
I have a second cousin who plays with a big name orchestra in Denmark or somewhere, (upright bass) Anyways, he, and most other big time orchestral music people say that If you travel with your instrument, you buy a seat for yourself, and one for your instrument, and it comes on the plane with you. NEVER trust it to baggage handlers, or any other person you can't see. It never leaves your line of sight. (like the article says, that object is your living, it is your life, treat it as such.)
relevent comic here:
http://d24w6bsrhbeh9d.cloudfront.net/photo/5713890_700b_v2.jpg
Sounds a lot like windows 8.
Also, the person that thought it was a good idea for every mobile site to have a banner or an interrupt page telling you to download the sites app? beat him to death with as many wiffle bats as it takes to get the job done. I need an app for every website I visit like I need double pneumonia and a infected hemorrhoid.
Yes, I, (and anyone who has passed their 'hunter safety training' class as a kid) can locate the heart on those animals with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
When I was in hunters safety, one of the last things we did was to shoot at paper targets with pellet guns. These targets where a sheet of 8.5x11 paper, with an animal one one side (we did deer, elk, moose, and bear) and on the reverse, lined up with the target on the front, was a anatomy drawing of the target animal, with all the vital organs depicted. Our task was to shoot these targets at a 100 yard equivalent distance (the animal on the paper looked the size it does at 100 yards) and have our shots in the 'kill areas'
Now, I know 'hunters safety' courses vary from state to state, and are not mandatory for adults in many states, which saddens me, but my point is, that many many hunters have attended these courses as children, and are aware of the information in them. Personally, I think the sort of course I took (which was in Montana) should be required in all states, of all hunters.
Now back to the point. As for the heart, that organ is surrounded by another vital organ, the lungs, which, when penetrated by the appropriate caliber round for the size of the animal, will kill them nearly as fast as a perfect heart shot. We also where taught that, unless extreme circumstances dictate it, to avoid aiming for the head. The brain of a deer (or any decent game animal in north america) is a target no larger than the end of a soup can, and surrounded by the some of the hardest bone in the body, it is NOT a prime target. As for the neck shot, there is a fair amount of debate as to wether or not it is an 'ideal' shot. It is possible to hit an animal in the neck in such a way as to cause it to bleed into its throat/esophagus, making tracking much more difficult, while the animal drowns in its own blood, and it is also entirely possible to penetrate the muscles in the neck, miss the spine and vital arteries entirely, and simply give the animal a terrible flesh wound. Of course, all your stated results are also possible. The heart/lungs target is in the end, a larger target, and less prone to non fatal wounding.
In reality, in terms of sustenance hunting, (where you need the animal for food, not trophies) the selection of target area on the animal comes down to "which vital area am I able to see and hit and kill this animal." Sure, occasionally you may hit part of a front quarter due to slightly off shot placement, but at least you have 3 quarters and the back straps of meat, instead of going hungry. Besides, the shot quarter goes to feed the dogs, so its not really wasted anyways.
video literally shows the guy pouring can of motor oil over a rusted AK-47. So yeah, not rustproof.
By my calculations, 1000kg distributed across 6 wheels is 166kg on earth, which translates to 62kg on mars. What surprises me about the damage is that a copy of the rover was stress tested in death valley, so this level of wear and tear should have been anticipated, as the force on the wheels there was much higher. I wonder if another environmental factor, like mars' extreme cold, or increased radiation due to lack of magnetosphere is affecting the materials in the wheels.
Hell, in this state, robbing a store with even a toy gun counts as armed robbery. Imagine going to prison for pointing a plastic kids toy at a McDonalds clerk and demanding the cash in the drawer. This is a thing that happened here.
Same way you get rid of your old couch pretty much. Put it on the street corner with a sign that says "free couch" and it will sit until it rots. Put a sign that says "Couch, 50$" and it will be gone before you get back to your front door.
Great anecdote (or myth) about copper thieves from my area. Supposedly (and i've never actually confirmed this story, but it sure sounds good). Some copper thieves purchased a old power company truck at auction, which still had the giant spool assembly on it. They modified this spool rig to run in reverse very quickly, and supposedly, over the course of a few days or weeks, went along several miles of phone line on poles and detached the cable from the insulators, and left it lying on the crossbeams of the telephone poles. This meant that the phone system still worked. Then, on the final night, they went out, cut the line at both ends of their work, hooked it to the truck, and spooled it up. They took two miles of copper in a matter of minutes.
This story goes well with the story that some drug runners bought the same model pickup as the local power company used, painted the local power company's logo on it, and was driving on private back country roads to avoid the border patrol stations, pretending to be inspecting lines, or whatever, until some rancher noticed that the logo was hand painted and had a spelling error or some such nonsense.
of course, all this is probably fiction designed to scare the outsiders, but it sure makes for good entertainment!