The article referenced by TFA says the worms are "... Eisenia fetida or red wiggler worms native to Europe imported from France and raised locally by Helene Beaumont ..." I'm currently being invaded by stink bugs imported from China, so I'm not particularly fond of folks proposing solutions that require importing non-native critters. Can't they find an indigenous turd-eating worm?

Gotta have a thickness to calculate overall mass. If you'd prefer to have a thinner spherical shell, feel free to re-calcualte the required mass. Me? I'm not going to get hung-up on the details, though I was surprised to find the resources required to be "reasonable."

Personally, considering that the sphere is 150e6 km in radius, I'm thinking that a 1km shell is pretty damned thin.

No, no, no. You can't just post an IMDB link to a cheesy spy move most of the young-uhns here have never heard of. You need to provide them with a teaser of sorts. Allow me to demonstrate ...

The cited FA is far too complex, and is doomed to fail. If the wind is blowing the wrong way on the morning of the heist, all is lost. Rather, I would suggest that said supervillian employ a former astronaut (turned henchman) to sneak aboard the Shuttle while it is parked along Sepulveda Boulevard. The ATH could then ignite the engines on the fully-fueled and completely preflighted Shuttle at an opportune moment - there's a reasonably straight piece of Sepulveda just before it enters the LAX airport property. Since the ATH is also a pilot, he would simply fly the Shuttle to the nearest private airfield controlled by the super-villian (I hear Drax Industries has a number of facilities in Brazil.)

Funny ... about a week ago I was thinking about Dyson spheres on the drive in to work. I did some quick math when I got in. To create a Dyson sphere 1km thick at an earth-radius from a star, you'd only need 197 or so Jupiter-sized planets of suitable material to do so. I was expecting it to be several orders of magnitude more. Not that I think that's a plausible number, considering that gas giants aren't composed of useful building materials.

Hey, like I stated up-thread, these are my observations of events from about 8 years ago. I participated in the discussions directly. I got to read BATFE's instructions to modify Form 1 and send it in. Seems goofy as hell, but it was also apparent that they didn't have a proper procedure for dealing with home-made non-NFA firearms. If they've come to their senses in the mean time, that's probably a good thing.

In our discussions on the topic, it was clear that the regulations for home-made firearms were poorly thought out. BATFE didn't want to set any kind of precedent that might create a loophole, so they were using the tools they had at their disposal. I know it sounds like something out of a M*A*S*H episode, but the BATFE instructions were along the lines of "cross out the text in section N and write in 'home made pistol, see attached'", then attach a separate sheet indicating caliber, action, trigger type, magazine capacity, etc. So he did, and received the appropriate "not disapproved" copies of the paperwork a couple of weeks later.

I don't recall if there was a tax or not. I believe that was one section that was N/A (but required an explanation as to why.) He only built four 1911s over the space of about 2 years. He got good at it, and the exercise lost it's value at that point.

Most firearms can be willed to another person, provided it's legal for the recipient to have them (i.e. not a convicted felon, etc.) NFA weapons have additional scrutiny, and the BATFE has issued a position on those. Transfer of regulated firearms needs some oversight and paperwork from an FFL (and a lawyer.) Alternatively, if you have no desire to receive firearms that are willed to you, you can contact your local police barracks and they'll destroy them for you. Or you could sell them, but unless the estate executor acts directly on your behalf, you''ll probably need to take legal possession of the firearms before you can sell them. As always, consult a lawyer regarding your specific circumstances ...

A good friend of mine wanted to build a 1911 pistol (mostly as a machining exercise.) He contacted his lawyer as well as the BATFE. He was advised by both to fill out the Form 1 document. BATFE also provided him with a list of things he needed to do - identification of himself as the manufacturer (engraved on the frame) and serialization were the biggies. Granted, this was about 8 years ago, and I haven't dealt with this stuff since. My friend passed away shortly after, so I can't ask him for details.

There were issues with his wife inheriting the firearms. As you mentioned, the language is wonky. It wasn't clear if it was even legal for his lawyer to hold the firearms in probate until the matter was sorted. Ultimately, the 1911s were destroyed under supervision of state LE reps. Damned shame. At the time, ATF had issued a position on NFA inheritance, but as y'all have pointed out, home-made firearms ain't NFA items. The whole situation is a mess because the ATF rules don't work well with home-made items (i.e. "you're not supposed to do that.")

You're legal if you fill out BATFE Form 1 - Application to Make and Register a Firearm and pay the tax (which is really the core of the issue.) The home-made firearm must be properly marked, and it's yours forever. You may not sell it, give it away, etc. It must comply with a bunch of other rules too - not an automatic weapon, not a short-barrel shotgun, etc. If you make more than a few per year, you risk being classified as a manufacturer, which would be a "bad thing."

As for the 3-D printer pulling their lease, I understand that they would be concerned about liability, but I fail to see how they're going to insulate themselves from their customers' ability to "do bad things" with output from the machine. Will the next software update just print "ERROR - PC LOAD LETTER" on the display to prevent customers from possibly making something dangerous?
- Manager1: "Definitely no sharp edges ..."
- Manager2: "No sharp corners, either."
- SwEng: "So round edges are okay?"
- Mnaager1: "Hmm, no. Can't allow anything that could be used as a projectile."
- SwEng: [sigh]

"The first efforts to reach the Earth's mantle actually began back in the late 1950s, though plans for the journey were first drawn up in 1864 by the little-known French researcher Jules Gabriel Verne. The first documented attempt was made by the intrepid team of James Mason, Pat Boone, and Arlene Dahl. The most recent (and failed) attempt was made by Brendan Fraser and Anita Briem in 2008."

I was assuming you were piggy-backing onto an existing branch service, and couldn't have the entire power output - I went with only 5A @ 120V. That'd bring your 5-mile number down to 2.5 miles per hour of charge. I was also working from strict battery capacity, because load-usage is a huge variable. For napkin math, we're in the same ballpark. Either way, the energy demands for transportation are pretty large, and more so than most people are aware - which really is my point.

Power to parking lot lights is typically 277/480V, not 120. Further, the branch wiring for said lights is already operating at capacity - the facility owner (or builder) already cost-optimized the installation to satisfy the lighting requirement. Just because there's power somewhere, doesn't mean you can expect an arbitrary amount for an unanticpated usage.

As for "juicing up while you're in the shop," you need to consider that power requirements for transportation are roughly an order of magnitude (i.e. 10x) what you need for residential applications. Consider that a typical residential dryer outlet can supply 20A at 240V (nominally 5kW.) That's a 10-12 hour charging rate for an EV ... which has a 40kW+ traction motor.

Okay, enough speculation. A Nissan Leaf has an 80kW motor and a 24kWh battery. If you're easy on the throttle, you might get 1 hour of cruising around on a charge. The aforementioned dryer outlet will need 5-6 hours to recharge a depleted battery. Assuming you could get 5A @120V from your parking lot light pole (trying to keep the infrastructure upgrade requirements low,) you would get 0.6kW of charge. That represents 2.5% of the battery capacity. Full charge would require 40 hours at that rate. A one hour "at the shop" top-up would provide 1/40 of a full-charge range, or approximately 1.5 minutes of driving range.

Conclusions: Using a low-rate charger for an EV application is a complete waste of time. If you're 1.5 minutes from the shop, perhaps you should consider walking or riding a bike.

I like how they did it with Australia, dump them off on an isolated island where they're no longer a danger to their community, they can fend for themselves among the rest of the cutthroats. Don't need to kill them, let them kill each other since they all seem to agree that's the OK thing to do. Let their own values be the executor of their fate.

Hey, we could do something like that in the States ... say, Manhattan Island?

Yeah, but the IRS has a place on your tax return to declare barter transactions. So you can pay appropriate taxes if you choose to be an upstanding citizen. As for the compliance with Federal and State policies regarding food safety, sanitation, etc ... you're on your own.

But it doesn't work that way, except in a fairy tale. You can't just go jam funding at "poor" people. Doing so fosters dependency on hand-outs.

In his critique of the Great Society, Richard M. Ebeling argues that the Great Society resulted in the creation of a dependent class, the breakup of social groups and families, inflation, and government deficits.

Have a look at what damage foreign aid does to a community. At face value, it may appear that providing rice or shoes is a good thing. But after the initial feel-good, you realize that the "free" aid managed to kill off any local infrastructure for said goods - the local producers can't compete with "free" and consequently go out of business. With no local infrastructure, the population becomes wholly dependent on foreign aid.

The only valid way to pull people out of poverty is through nation-building. You're not going to get that with external charity funding. You also won't get that if the recipients of said programs really don't want to participate.