I thought the only way you could be liable for patent infringement was to commercially (i.e. profitably) reproduce the work. The Cottin Gin was pattented by Eli Whitney, but he didn't make a cent off of it because the design was so simple. Everyone went home and made their own, and there wasn't much Eli could do about it. Unless they sold their reproductions, they weren't liable
[If this is true]: While this would protect the Linux kernel and the non-profits that don't sell (Debian), I'm not sure where this would leave companies like RedHat. RedHat could be considered a "seller of Linux", but they actually only sell support services. It is possible to download and install from RedHat without paying a cent.
Houston planned it's HOV's this way and (I hope) learned the hard way why this sucks.
Once you have a highway, the land around the highway goes up in value if it is commercial. The result is you have the standard strips of shops and gas stations spring up along side. This pushes Residential out (no one wantes to live next to a highway anyway).
The result is that when the HOV is converted into rail stops, the stops are now so far from the actual residential neighborhoods that people have to at least drive to the stops. There is no place to park at a stop in the middle of the highway surrounded by strip malls, and the commercial value is so high that the cost of buying out the land by the govt for parking is impassibly huge.
The best solution IMHO is to define population centers and have a dedicated elivated (or subway) rail system independent of the current ground system. Time lost to excessive stopping can be made up for with straight(er) line paths to destinations.
Not to interrupt the interesting flame war, but if I were blind and had to play pick the troll, I'd probably pick you.
The reason is simple. He uses facts and logic to back his claims. The facts you do have you have shifted in view, misrepresented (as alizard has pointed out) or degraded into personal propaganda (what does "I'm in college" have to do with the debate? what does "You're the king of all trolls" have to do with the debate?).
Calling names is calling names. It worked well in Kindergarten, but here where the big boys play thought and intelligence is going to be required to win the confidence of your peers.
No, but if you are talking about selling the actual option you are getting into very complicated pricing models. While I am not an econ/math major and don't know the in's and out's of greeks and what not, I believe the Option's value come down more to the market volitility and the amount of time left on the option (for American Options). I understand what you are saying, and yes there is some value to the option in what you are saying. But most people who deal in the actual options (as opposed to using the options for physical stock trading) value the actual option, not the physical amounts it can move for you. Thus, you are dealing with a different crowd when you try to sell the actual option.
I hope that made some sense. It's tough to describe "selling the right to sell (or buy)" or "buying the right to buy (or sell)" rather than simple buys and sells.
If you buy a put option, you have to have the stock you want to put. This implies additional investment in that stock so you can put it later. Granted you can turn around and sell it at a profit nearly instantly but you still have to have that extra capital to do it.
Also remember that transactions are not quite instantaneous, and as such if you have to work your volumes up from small to large due to inadequate initial capital time may hurt you as the price ocntinues to jump as you buy @ market and sell to the cpty you have the put option with. (esp. if they try to cause delays in putting the money in your bank so you can buy more to sell them and screw them over again with their option).
I didn't do stocks, but i did work with commodity trading.
The quickest way is to do a "short" position. Basically you sell shares you don't have. In stocks, I think you have to buy enough shares back from the market to cover the ones you've sold by the end of the day (commodities work differently).
With a put option, you basically make money selling the actual option (called the "premium"). Basically a company pays you the premium in order to be able to forcably sell you shares at dates and amounts set in the option contract (which can get pretty complicated/exotic if you want them to be). You make money if the price goes down, because no one exercizes the right to make you buy (they'd lose money if they did), and you make $$$ off of the premium.
The problem is risk. Put Options and shorts have a better chance of bankrupting you, since a price can go expenentially high. This isn't the case on buying shares because the price can only go down to $0 (you can only lose the initial amount you spent on the shares)
If spam continues, they charge money to the users. Users can't afford to fight back, so they have to eat the cost.
If they charge the senders, the spam goes down and they won't get the cash because the messages sent goes down. Or the spam companies may have enough $$$ to fight back.
Where did these strong-arm, amoral tactics come from? The cell phone companies in the US are the same ones that were phone utility companies and have the "I'm a utility monopoly" mindset.
Yes, this is a horribly one-sided mindset, but their treatment of me as a customer led me here in the first place.
In my previous consulting job, I was one of two people who had any knowledge of any *nix flavor (and thus I had one of the only Linux laptops) in the major city where we worked. Most of the issues I delt with were with our server side program, and required something *nix comparable for problem resolution and minor fix authoring (shell scripting, etc.). Everyone else, including area IT staff (cept the one other person) was NT background only.
I had the guts of one major project along with sole copies of other work items including several client's maintenance scripts, the New Hire Setup and Installation Guide, SQL for finding database incosistnecies, the only UNIX installer for our software, etc. on my laptop.
I was called out of the middle of meeting with the major project people to be laid off. My laptop was taken on the spot "to prevent destruction of important data".
The rest of the project people never received the DB design I was going to present with them. As best I heard from other people afterward, no one knew how to recover the data from the laptop but the one remaining person and they nixxed his job ~3 days before the laptop was supposed to get to him (he was at a different office in the same city).
Last time I checked up on my former company (less than 1 year after I was laid off), it was bought out by a competitor:)
Great, so when the donations finish coming in the RIAA can refile suit to claim unspecified damages from the first litigation. Which, if he didn't have a good lawyer, may be a possibility depending on the wording of the settlement. Not many college students can afford one...
Except this wall has a very small, negligable mass.
Thus, you could also make a balloon with extra lifting capasity just by vacuuming out the inside of a field. It could also fly closer to space than any other balloon, since it has a vacuume(essentially 0 density).
Or you could have containment for mass-sensitive matter (antimatter, etc.)
How about a see-through wall with zero heat transfer by contact?
How about a wall that cannot melt, because there is nothing there to melt? We may finally have something we can melt diamond/carbon in
Sometimes you have to think outside the ridgid plasma cube
You can't just throw money at a problem at expect it to go away. It's like saying space launch is no problem because we just need to shoot something upward at a speed of 100,000 m/s. You are ignoring the reality of the world
Simply pumping food or money into Africa is not the solution. Why? Because anything with value will be used to make a personal profit. This will happen either internally through corruption, or externally through raids and strongarm tactics. We can (peacefully) detect & replace corrupted people. External factors we can't control as much. The only place you won't have external factors is in places that are suitabally developed to recognise large amounts of money can't be made off of small food shipments (i.e. the populace isn't starving). But such places don't need aid anyway...
The world, unfortunately, works very much as Sgt. Paul Howe quoted in Black Hawk Down. In most of the world, power [and therefore order] still flows through the barrel of a gun. Is it nice? No. Is this what we want? [Defense contractors aside] No. This is required because this is the way the world works. Thus, we still need to be able to have muscle to make sure that food goes where it's supposed to. etc. We cannot change human nature (greed to the point of violence), therefore we must go with it (enough violence to stop the greed).
You also forget that these advancements are meant to save [friendly] lives. If I can make a bigger bomb that can kill 4 rooms of a bldg instead of 1, that's 3 fewer places I will be shot at from.
Actually, all glass (tinted or not) absorbs UV. The tinting usually is to keep visible or near-visible light out (at the expense of turning it into heat).
This is also why you don't want a UV coating on glasses that have actual glass lenses.
You are thinking in a closed box. Perhaps you could not use user-defined variables as they exist in half-life, quake, etc. Or have some things such as walking rate not defined as variables. Or defined as variables only from the server side. Granted the code will probably look more like spagetti, but it would make things more interesting for the cheat developers/players.
There probably needs to be some minor security in the code because we don't want the world we're creating to be too easy to manipulate, but we don't care if it breaks down. This security is not required though. Think of this "cheatproofing" more like you would think of creating AI opponents. You don't want them flawless, but you don't want them to be too easy. If that doesn't happen exactly as you wish it's not THAT big of a deal. It just affects the game play.
I had that idea on a more general level. The answer to "gods" was to let them be.
Why? Well, because if you've cheated yourself up to god (and everyone else has also) you will still want to dominate. What can you do to better the person who can do everything? Disable their powers. I think the gaming user community would actually begin to patch the game themselves as they remove power from others to further their own domination.
The only issue I can see is if someone gets their jollies taking the game server down repeatedly.
Not actually. The idea in my mind was that you build the game such that it would take more work to unravel more items. Or that different cheats would require different methods to access due to buffer locations in the server, etc. Not that they would be hidden away completely, as nothing truly is.
It's just a matter of enabling different properties in different ways, as opposed to having them all be accessable in the same way. They're all just as vunerable, it'll just take more work to get at them;-).
Security through obsecurity isn't security, but it means you'll have a few more hours of unraveling the obsecurity ahead of you
Supposed you have a game & server concept similar to this, but programmed in a way to not take game security dead-serious. In fact, as the cheats, etc. came out this would not be shunned, but instead part of the game. The people with the best cheats take the cake, can gather clanmates and share what they know. Your clan is then defined by the abilities they have aquired through manipulation of the game workings (in addition to the standard tags, skins, etc.)
I'm sure you could develop a program in a way to separate out abilities (such as speed, gravity, damage types) such that any crack wouldn't give up everything else
Which brings on two negative points:
-It sure wouldn't be appealing to newbies, who start on ground zero
-Anyone who successfully gets full access ("GOD") may be unsurpassable and ruin the game for everyone. This can be overcome by having the game focus include things other than Power by Might (i.e. killing sprees), such as trade, etc.
If there ever was a prime canidate for an open-source friendly game, this concept would be it:)
Ok, so then when you need info on one of those resumes you do a word search through lots of compressed files? I don't think so...
If you want quick and easy access to that information, it must be uncompressed (~12k) and then it must be in a database for easy access. That (believe it or not) makes it about 5x the size it once was (DB indexes, unique keys, etc.) So now we're at about 50k, or 24 GB a year. The database will probably need to be configured for a max of 2 years worth (just in case you can't delete one year for awhile) which is close to 50 GB. And sifting through 24GB of data takes a big, well designed database. You Are Now Well Beyond Microsoft Access!
In short, no it's not cheap if you actually want to access and use the information.
You don't change magnetic fields with chemical reactions (at least in this case). The encapsulating of the magneticly active particle in the hard disk is a chemical reaction. The field that particle has will have to be manipulated in some other way (which, according to the article, was TBD due to the small size of the particles).
The most a chemical reaction can do to a magneticly active element/molecule is make it non-magnetic, or to undo the previous reaction.
Nuclear engines and people trying to stifle them
on
Concorde to be Grounded
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have news for you. If we are ever going to make transportation advances, we need fuels with greater energy to weight ratios. If you can think of any fuel that acheives the same amount of energy to the amount of mass used (fuel only, not counting the actual engine) that's also production ready, i'd like to hear it.
People thinking that fallout will land in their yards have stifled innovation of nuclear propulsion (esp. in manned space travel) for a long time. I'm not saying you/they don't have a good arguement, but if we are to move forward as a society we need to at least try.
Yeah we'll probably fuck up somewhere, and we tend to learn only from our mistakes. But like any experimental advance we need to trust that we will try to learn from our mistakes, control the damage, (and yes, it will be greater damage than we may have ever seen as a people) and keep moving on.
Additionally, as we advance, we will have things of even higher enegry-to-mass ratios than nuclear power. You think these will be safer to work with? They have more energy contained in them. As such, they'll be that much more dangerous!
The only thing that can protect us from this danger, really, is distance. And to move out to greater distances takes greater energy. So if we don't use our high energy tools at hand, we'll stagnate as a society and never be able to truly distance ourselves from whatever we impose on ourselves anyway.
(Sorry, this is kinda scatterbrained... hope it makes sense)
It's called the Carnot (Car-no, silent t)cycle, after the Frenchman of the same name who published a book on the effect as it related to steam engines, I think...
State viewpoints are different. Texas has a section in the Penal code for firearms which makes anything that has a barrel and fires a projectile with expanding gas (other than hand-compressed gas and CO2 cartriges, i.e. chemical propellants) an illegal weapon, no matter what the projectile is.
I think there's one important point that everyone is forgetting which makes a drive-by-wire concept really appealing to both auto manufactures and to home consumers. Fewer moving parts.
what do you think is cheaper
1) A steering column made from stamped metal with a universal joint, crumple plate (collisions), hydraulic pump (power steering only), gearbox, and shock dampening slip joint
2) 2-3 flexible copper wires and an electric motor.
(We don't count the computer to run the setup because it's already there in fuel injected cars)
How many other systems can be done this way?
Brakes (trailer brakes are already electric) Throttle Cab controls / thermostat Hood leaver cable Parking brakes Clutch (some cmay argue over the "feel" of the clutch...i think it can be done) Gear shifting (for a manual transmission) Engine fan Water pump Oil pump some fuel pumps
Hell, with the GM car the entire friggin driveline is like this. No more transmission at all! No more drive shaft, radiator/antifreeze, or even an engine compartment. Given some time, i think a vehicle like this could last longer than the vehicles of today.
The benefits more than outweigh the risks. If you have a friend with a crap car, buy a haynes manual for it and just try to go fix it. I'll bet you that with most (> 55%) of the problems you encounter will be ones that would not exist on a fuel-cell car like GM's (not including body / appearance problems).
(Yes, there will be new problems. But short of engineering failures there shouldn't be many that can be overcome with time).
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the only way you could be liable for patent infringement was to commercially (i.e. profitably) reproduce the work. The Cottin Gin was pattented by Eli Whitney, but he didn't make a cent off of it because the design was so simple. Everyone went home and made their own, and there wasn't much Eli could do about it. Unless they sold their reproductions, they weren't liable
[If this is true]:
While this would protect the Linux kernel and the non-profits that don't sell (Debian), I'm not sure where this would leave companies like RedHat. RedHat could be considered a "seller of Linux", but they actually only sell support services. It is possible to download and install from RedHat without paying a cent.
Houston planned it's HOV's this way and (I hope) learned the hard way why this sucks.
Once you have a highway, the land around the highway goes up in value if it is commercial. The result is you have the standard strips of shops and gas stations spring up along side. This pushes Residential out (no one wantes to live next to a highway anyway).
The result is that when the HOV is converted into rail stops, the stops are now so far from the actual residential neighborhoods that people have to at least drive to the stops. There is no place to park at a stop in the middle of the highway surrounded by strip malls, and the commercial value is so high that the cost of buying out the land by the govt for parking is impassibly huge.
The best solution IMHO is to define population centers and have a dedicated elivated (or subway) rail system independent of the current ground system. Time lost to excessive stopping can be made up for with straight(er) line paths to destinations.
Right, so you can also read what was said as "saving that much [ground level] ozone from being created". FWIW, that's how I interpreted it...
Not to interrupt the interesting flame war, but if I were blind and had to play pick the troll, I'd probably pick you.
The reason is simple. He uses facts and logic to back his claims. The facts you do have you have shifted in view, misrepresented (as alizard has pointed out) or degraded into personal propaganda (what does "I'm in college" have to do with the debate? what does "You're the king of all trolls" have to do with the debate?).
Calling names is calling names. It worked well in Kindergarten, but here where the big boys play thought and intelligence is going to be required to win the confidence of your peers.
No, but if you are talking about selling the actual option you are getting into very complicated pricing models. While I am not an econ/math major and don't know the in's and out's of greeks and what not, I believe the Option's value come down more to the market volitility and the amount of time left on the option (for American Options). I understand what you are saying, and yes there is some value to the option in what you are saying. But most people who deal in the actual options (as opposed to using the options for physical stock trading) value the actual option, not the physical amounts it can move for you. Thus, you are dealing with a different crowd when you try to sell the actual option.
I hope that made some sense. It's tough to describe "selling the right to sell (or buy)" or "buying the right to buy (or sell)" rather than simple buys and sells.
If you buy a put option, you have to have the stock you want to put. This implies additional investment in that stock so you can put it later. Granted you can turn around and sell it at a profit nearly instantly but you still have to have that extra capital to do it.
Also remember that transactions are not quite instantaneous, and as such if you have to work your volumes up from small to large due to inadequate initial capital time may hurt you as the price ocntinues to jump as you buy @ market and sell to the cpty you have the put option with. (esp. if they try to cause delays in putting the money in your bank so you can buy more to sell them and screw them over again with their option).
I didn't do stocks, but i did work with commodity trading.
The quickest way is to do a "short" position. Basically you sell shares you don't have. In stocks, I think you have to buy enough shares back from the market to cover the ones you've sold by the end of the day (commodities work differently).
With a put option, you basically make money selling the actual option (called the "premium"). Basically a company pays you the premium in order to be able to forcably sell you shares at dates and amounts set in the option contract (which can get pretty complicated/exotic if you want them to be). You make money if the price goes down, because no one exercizes the right to make you buy (they'd lose money if they did), and you make $$$ off of the premium.
The problem is risk. Put Options and shorts have a better chance of bankrupting you, since a price can go expenentially high. This isn't the case on buying shares because the price can only go down to $0 (you can only lose the initial amount you spent on the shares)
What they are trying to do is make money.
If spam continues, they charge money to the users. Users can't afford to fight back, so they have to eat the cost.
If they charge the senders, the spam goes down and they won't get the cash because the messages sent goes down. Or the spam companies may have enough $$$ to fight back.
Where did these strong-arm, amoral tactics come from? The cell phone companies in the US are the same ones that were phone utility companies and have the "I'm a utility monopoly" mindset.
Yes, this is a horribly one-sided mindset, but their treatment of me as a customer led me here in the first place.
True Story:
:)
In my previous consulting job, I was one of two people who had any knowledge of any *nix flavor (and thus I had one of the only Linux laptops) in the major city where we worked. Most of the issues I delt with were with our server side program, and required something *nix comparable for problem resolution and minor fix authoring (shell scripting, etc.). Everyone else, including area IT staff (cept the one other person) was NT background only.
I had the guts of one major project along with sole copies of other work items including several client's maintenance scripts, the New Hire Setup and Installation Guide, SQL for finding database incosistnecies, the only UNIX installer for our software, etc. on my laptop.
I was called out of the middle of meeting with the major project people to be laid off. My laptop was taken on the spot "to prevent destruction of important data".
The rest of the project people never received the DB design I was going to present with them. As best I heard from other people afterward, no one knew how to recover the data from the laptop but the one remaining person and they nixxed his job ~3 days before the laptop was supposed to get to him (he was at a different office in the same city).
Last time I checked up on my former company (less than 1 year after I was laid off), it was bought out by a competitor
Great, so when the donations finish coming in the RIAA can refile suit to claim unspecified damages from the first litigation. Which, if he didn't have a good lawyer, may be a possibility depending on the wording of the settlement. Not many college students can afford one...
Except this wall has a very small, negligable mass.
Thus, you could also make a balloon with extra lifting capasity just by vacuuming out the inside of a field. It could also fly closer to space than any other balloon, since it has a vacuume(essentially 0 density).
Or you could have containment for mass-sensitive matter (antimatter, etc.)
How about a see-through wall with zero heat transfer by contact?
How about a wall that cannot melt, because there is nothing there to melt? We may finally have something we can melt diamond/carbon in
Sometimes you have to think outside the ridgid plasma cube
You can't just throw money at a problem at expect it to go away. It's like saying space launch is no problem because we just need to shoot something upward at a speed of 100,000 m/s. You are ignoring the reality of the world
Simply pumping food or money into Africa is not the solution. Why? Because anything with value will be used to make a personal profit. This will happen either internally through corruption, or externally through raids and strongarm tactics. We can (peacefully) detect & replace corrupted people. External factors we can't control as much. The only place you won't have external factors is in places that are suitabally developed to recognise large amounts of money can't be made off of small food shipments (i.e. the populace isn't starving). But such places don't need aid anyway...
The world, unfortunately, works very much as Sgt. Paul Howe quoted in Black Hawk Down. In most of the world, power [and therefore order] still flows through the barrel of a gun. Is it nice? No. Is this what we want? [Defense contractors aside] No. This is required because this is the way the world works. Thus, we still need to be able to have muscle to make sure that food goes where it's supposed to. etc. We cannot change human nature (greed to the point of violence), therefore we must go with it (enough violence to stop the greed).
You also forget that these advancements are meant to save [friendly] lives. If I can make a bigger bomb that can kill 4 rooms of a bldg instead of 1, that's 3 fewer places I will be shot at from.
Actually, all glass (tinted or not) absorbs UV. The tinting usually is to keep visible or near-visible light out (at the expense of turning it into heat).
This is also why you don't want a UV coating on glasses that have actual glass lenses.
You are thinking in a closed box. Perhaps you could not use user-defined variables as they exist in half-life, quake, etc. Or have some things such as walking rate not defined as variables. Or defined as variables only from the server side. Granted the code will probably look more like spagetti, but it would make things more interesting for the cheat developers/players.
There probably needs to be some minor security in the code because we don't want the world we're creating to be too easy to manipulate, but we don't care if it breaks down. This security is not required though. Think of this "cheatproofing" more like you would think of creating AI opponents. You don't want them flawless, but you don't want them to be too easy. If that doesn't happen exactly as you wish it's not THAT big of a deal.
It just affects the game play.
I had that idea on a more general level. The answer to "gods" was to let them be.
Why? Well, because if you've cheated yourself up to god (and everyone else has also) you will still want to dominate. What can you do to better the person who can do everything? Disable their powers. I think the gaming user community would actually begin to patch the game themselves as they remove power from others to further their own domination.
The only issue I can see is if someone gets their jollies taking the game server down repeatedly.
Not actually. The idea in my mind was that you build the game such that it would take more work to unravel more items. Or that different cheats would require different methods to access due to buffer locations in the server, etc. Not that they would be hidden away completely, as nothing truly is.
;-).
It's just a matter of enabling different properties in different ways, as opposed to having them all be accessable in the same way. They're all just as vunerable, it'll just take more work to get at them
Security through obsecurity isn't security, but it means you'll have a few more hours of unraveling the obsecurity ahead of you
You just need to take it a bit further...
:)
Supposed you have a game & server concept similar to this, but programmed in a way to not take game security dead-serious. In fact, as the cheats, etc. came out this would not be shunned, but instead part of the game. The people with the best cheats take the cake, can gather clanmates and share what they know. Your clan is then defined by the abilities they have aquired through manipulation of the game workings (in addition to the standard tags, skins, etc.)
I'm sure you could develop a program in a way to separate out abilities (such as speed, gravity, damage types) such that any crack wouldn't give up everything else
Which brings on two negative points:
-It sure wouldn't be appealing to newbies, who start on ground zero
-Anyone who successfully gets full access ("GOD")
may be unsurpassable and ruin the game for everyone. This can be overcome by having the game focus include things other than Power by Might (i.e. killing sprees), such as trade, etc.
If there ever was a prime canidate for an open-source friendly game, this concept would be it
I'd be more willing to believe you if you posted as AC :)
Ok, so then when you need info on one of those resumes you do a word search through lots of compressed files? I don't think so...
If you want quick and easy access to that information, it must be uncompressed (~12k) and then it must be in a database for easy access. That (believe it or not) makes it about 5x the size it once was (DB indexes, unique keys, etc.) So now we're at about 50k, or 24 GB a year. The database will probably need to be configured for a max of 2 years worth (just in case you can't delete one year for awhile) which is close to 50 GB. And sifting through 24GB of data takes a big, well designed database. You Are Now Well Beyond Microsoft Access!
In short, no it's not cheap if you actually want to access and use the information.
"Now, go away, or I shall taunt you a second time-a! "
You don't change magnetic fields with chemical reactions (at least in this case). The encapsulating of the magneticly active particle in the hard disk is a chemical reaction. The field that particle has will have to be manipulated in some other way (which, according to the article, was TBD due to the small size of the particles).
The most a chemical reaction can do to a magneticly active element/molecule is make it non-magnetic, or to undo the previous reaction.
I have news for you. If we are ever going to make transportation advances, we need fuels with greater energy to weight ratios. If you can think of any fuel that acheives the same amount of energy to the amount of mass used (fuel only, not counting the actual engine) that's also production ready, i'd like to hear it.
People thinking that fallout will land in their yards have stifled innovation of nuclear propulsion (esp. in manned space travel) for a long time. I'm not saying you/they don't have a good arguement, but if we are to move forward as a society we need to at least try.
Yeah we'll probably fuck up somewhere, and we tend to learn only from our mistakes. But like any experimental advance we need to trust that we will try to learn from our mistakes, control the damage, (and yes, it will be greater damage than we may have ever seen as a people) and keep moving on.
Additionally, as we advance, we will have things of even higher enegry-to-mass ratios than nuclear power. You think these will be safer to work with? They have more energy contained in them. As such, they'll be that much more dangerous!
The only thing that can protect us from this danger, really, is distance. And to move out to greater distances takes greater energy. So if we don't use our high energy tools at hand, we'll stagnate as a society and never be able to truly distance ourselves from whatever we impose on ourselves anyway.
(Sorry, this is kinda scatterbrained... hope it makes sense)
It's called the Carnot (Car-no, silent t)cycle, after the Frenchman of the same name who published a book on the effect as it related to steam engines, I think...
State viewpoints are different. Texas has a section in the Penal code for firearms which makes anything that has a barrel and fires a projectile with expanding gas (other than hand-compressed gas and CO2 cartriges, i.e. chemical propellants) an illegal weapon, no matter what the projectile is.
6 00.html#pe001.46.01
Search for "Zip gun" on this page:
http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/statutes/pe/pe0004
I think there's one important point that everyone is forgetting which makes a drive-by-wire concept really appealing to both auto manufactures and to home consumers. Fewer moving parts.
what do you think is cheaper
1) A steering column made from stamped metal with a universal joint, crumple plate (collisions), hydraulic pump (power steering only), gearbox, and shock dampening slip joint
2) 2-3 flexible copper wires and an electric motor.
(We don't count the computer to run the setup because it's already there in fuel injected cars)
How many other systems can be done this way?
Brakes (trailer brakes are already electric)
Throttle
Cab controls / thermostat
Hood leaver cable
Parking brakes
Clutch (some cmay argue over the "feel" of the clutch...i think it can be done)
Gear shifting (for a manual transmission)
Engine fan
Water pump
Oil pump
some fuel pumps
Hell, with the GM car the entire friggin driveline is like this. No more transmission at all! No more drive shaft, radiator/antifreeze, or even an engine compartment. Given some time, i think a vehicle like this could last longer than the vehicles of today.
The benefits more than outweigh the risks. If you have a friend with a crap car, buy a haynes manual for it and just try to go fix it. I'll bet you that with most (> 55%) of the problems you encounter will be ones that would not exist on a fuel-cell car like GM's (not including body / appearance problems).
(Yes, there will be new problems. But short of engineering failures there shouldn't be many that can be overcome with time).