I suggest you start digging, and see how deep you get before the authorities complain. That should provide an approximate answer.

It doesn't matter what the distribution is, or even that you know the distribution, provided that you can put a lower bound on the entropy. See the Turbid project papers for details. Turbid is a project that uses quantum resistor noise in ordinary sound cards to provide guaranteed entropy for cryptographic use (though at a relatively low bitrate).

You can also use resistor noise, a good amplifier, and an ADC to make moderately high bandwidth true quantum RNG. I priced out a simple design with a microcontroller on a USB key footprint; looked like $50-100 in prototype quantities, less in large quantities, for 10 KB/s output (or so). Getting the entropy is looked like the easy part; it then needed a fair bit of CPU power (by microcontroller standards) to hash that into usable bits.

You can also (with a lot more software work, and low bitrates) use the resistor noise present in audio input channels to good effect. Turbid is a project that does just that. Note that when evaluating such projects, the hard part is not getting the numbers, but proving that they have enough entropy, and that they've been properly processed to preserve it. Turbid does an excellent job on this important documentation step.

I think it should be legal. That doesn't mean I like it. I also think calling it opt-out is disingenuous at best. It's easy to put a password on my wifi; not so easy to disable the UIN on my phone. Suggesting I turn off the phone is the same as suggesting I turn off the wifi: it misses the whole point of having the phone or the wifi. The two cases, while similar, are not the same, and reasonable people can have opinions that depend on the details of a particular case, not simply the superficial similarities.

Let me know when you find a better way of making new virgins.

Football vs. Handegg.

It may not be the thrust of OWS, but it certainly is one of their major points. See The99PercentDeclaration, for example.

We can accelerate particles to near C, and then send them through matter at speeds faster than light would travel through said matter; see said article for some nice examples. If, as the OP suggests, c is actually slightly higher than the measured speed of light in a vacuum (in other words, vacuum has a refractive index > 1), then we should have plenty of examples of FTL particles from particle accelerators, not just some neutrinos.

If that were the case, we should be able to accelerate particles to faster than light speeds. There's nothing that prevents a particle from traveling above c in a material with an index of refraction > 1; see Cherenkov radiation.

Going fast at altitude doesn't make landings inherently difficult; you just need to slow down before you get there, which isn't usually that hard. For a couple examples of high-velocity manual piloting: Pete Knight flew an X-15 re-entry from over Mach 4 with no electrical power, no backup electrical power, and correspondingly no instruments. And Gordon Cooper flew a manual re-entry of a Mercury capsule from orbit:"So I used my wrist watch for time," he later recalled, "my eyeballs out the window for attitude. Then I fired my retrorockets at the right time and landed right by the carrier."

This cable is ridiculously long. There's a wide range between "really stiff and not flexible" and "infinitely stiff, or close enough that you don't have to worry about it", at least when it comes to space elevators. This pageseems to hit a few of the major points. There's plenty more out there.

Tolerance of micro-impacts is clearly required; you can't watch out for everything. But there's a significant amount of debris out there that is large enough you need to watch out for it. Your choices for handling it will tend to involve moving either the elevator or the debris; moving the elevator might turn out to be easier. Note that moving a tremendously stiff cable a distance of 10^-6 times its length is not that big a deal. The hard part is the dynamic stability control.

I think you underestimate the control problems inherent to very long, very flexible structures that need to move to avoid debris. It's a lot more like a machine than it looks at first glance.

If it costs $2700, that implies there's a fair bit of energy going into making it, whether directly or indirectly. If that's mostly labor costs, what do you think those employees do with that money?

Certainly there are greener and less green alternatives when looking at similar price points, but I don't see how spending 10x the amount on a bike could possibly be considered a "greener" alternative.

You also need to not be a particularly tempting fruit. See spear phishing, advanced persistent threats, Stuxnet, etc.

It may still be monolithic, but it's at least possible to switch and take your data with you. Not perfect, but a huge improvement.