Of course the federal government can tell states they can't have their blue laws. Such are continuously being struck down by the courts. County courts, state courts, and of course federal courts. Although the outcome of any given case is pretty much a crap-shoot. An appalling number of courts concoct or approve laughable sham "secular purpose" excuses to keep them on the books. For example one such ruling declares "While Sunday was originally a day of religious observance, the passage of time has converted it into a secular day for many citizens and has freed it from its exclusively religious origins... The cities have valid secular reasons for prohibiting the sale of beer on Sunday, including enhancing the safety of the travelling public, promoting domestic tranquility, shielding children from the effects of drinking, and accommodating the reduced number of law enforcement officers working on weekends". The court is pretty well admitting that the law was flagrantly unconstitutional and invalid when the legislature established it, and is engaging in wildly creative post-hoc rationalizations trying to hang a token "current day" secular purpose on it in a highly motivated effort to avoid striking down a law that was never validly created in the first place. Note that NONE of the listed rationalizations is even remotely a reason to ban beer sales on any particular day of the week, except for the last one regarding "reduced number of law enforcement officers working on weekends". Any late night drinking rolls at midnight into drinking and early-morning drunkenness of the next day, and a substantial portion of any purchases are destined for next-day consumption. Approximately half of any effect of restricting sales will actually show up on the following day. The only way to take seriously a purpose of "accommodating the reduced number of law enforcement officers working on weekends" (i.e. Saturday and Sunday) would be a ban on Saturday sales.

I have a relatively high opinion of the courts in general, but the level of flagrant Judicial dishonesty that often flies about in defense of Blue Laws is quite appalling.

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If you're worried about a NSA attack, a VM isn't going to save you. There have been several known exploits to break out of VM's. That will get them access to any harddrive if there's one connected at all. And if there isn't, there have been occasional exploits to flash a rootkit into BIOS. They could also activate Wifi or Bluetooth to infect any nearby computers or smartphones or any other smart devices, which could even bounce the infection back to the current computer after it's rebooted without the LiveCD and/or without the VM and/or with the harddrive reconnected.

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I presume the cages are sized to keep body parts out.

Unfortunately the laws of physics seriously don't like your suggestion of tighter cages. At low air speeds and with abundant power available you can use tight cages no problem. But when you're at high air velocities to get substantial thrust and where power efficiency is crucial, any obstruction in the air stream is a serious issue. Aerodynamic drag is proportional to velocity squared. When you multiply air speed by ten, the drag caused by each cage wire is multiplied by a hundred. This means thrust loss, as well as draining the batteries trying to compensate for lost thrust. Adding batteries to compensate for the extra power drain increases your weight. Increased weight means you need to compensate with that much more thrust, which in turn means more weight and more power drain. It is a problem that compounds upon itself. You need the cage wires to be as thin and sparse as as you can get away with, short of inviting serious accidental injury.

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Pardon the nitpicking, but hovercraft are ground effect vehicles, generally with a skirt. A more appropriate label here would be "quadcopter strapped to a bike".

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I had the same reaction, that strapping a bicycle to it seemed totally irrelevant. But I guess you can bike down to the river, fly across, and continue biking. And if you don't mind burning some of your flight time you can use the batteries to power the bike. That gives you a combination of long ground range with the ability to fly over terrain or traffic at will. Cute. Too bad you're stuck with those big bulky fans all around it in cycle mode. If those could fold down compactly it would actually be a pretty practical combo to place on an electric bike. Well, of course that's setting aside the suicide-machine factor.

Final analysis: Darwin would approve.

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Nah, hovering is easy. The hard part is keeping your dirigible-bike from floating away into the sky when you hop off.

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350 pound flight capacity minus 187 pound vehicle weight seems to indicate a 163 pound (74 kilo) passenger limit. Not great, but that's certainly not "anorexic child-size styrofoam dummy" either. I'm an adult male, I could get there if I cut out the peanutbuttercups and switched to diet soda.

Oh well, I guess that means I'm never going to be able to ride it. Diet soda is vile.
How about they work on inventing that? Soda that tastes like sugar-water without being sugar-water? Chuckle.

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Tommy! I told you to stop doing that at 500 RPM! You'll grind it off!

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Doh! I know exactly what happened. That part was small and blurry, and in my initial scan over the graph, before I sorted out what the graph wa showing, it looked like "kp". A corner of my brain thought WTF is "kp", and I kept scanning elsewhere for information. I saw the speeds across the bottom and the thrusts on the left and I recognized the shape of the graph, then saw the HP vs MPH title at the top. I realized the different color lines had to be different engine inputs and I glanced back at that top-right box to confirm it.... that it was listing different HP engine inputs.... and that "k" from "kp" was still lingering in my brain. chuckle. So the blurry "h" was read twice, once as "k" and once as "h". The 250khp to 500khp power figures did strike me as unreasonably large, but I wasn't going to doubt the graph and my attention was absorbed on other issues. Sso without further consideration I just mentally filed it away as presumptively plausible values for a top end (?military?) engine.

Ohhhh noooooo! You didn't...... cry cry cry. LoL.
I follow your reasoning, and it is a kinda cool point, but oh jezus I wish you didn't make that analogy. The prop is NOT spinning as a turbine, and I know that you know that it's not spinning as a turbine, but someone is going to read what you wrote and think that one or both of us said it's a turbine. Newbies already have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that the prop is a fan. Any whiff of describing it as a turbine feeds badly into the exact "contradictory explanations" that set off alarm bells for you.

I wish. You and I went to significantly above average highschools. The majority of U.S. highschool graduates only have one year of science, and it's generally something very generic like "Earth science" or something. It's only in the last few years that most highschools have moved to a two year science requirement, and even then, what percentage are going to include force-energy physics? I think the most common is a year of Bio, and even there most schools avoid or actively deny Evolution in that class :/

What happened there is an entirely arbitrary and semi-self-contradictory cornercase crawling out of the simplifying assumptions. They started with a model of an ideal (frictionless) cart, and then to model a "real" cart they lumped together all losses... including rolling friction.... into one term alpha. They then set alpha to total energy loss... and they were still modeling that alpha on an ideal frictionless cart. They also silently and arbitrarily assumed wind drag *wasn't* zero, despite the opposite parallel assumption of zero rolling resistance. chuckle.

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They say the only computer that can't be hacked is one that unplugged... but when your adversary is (apparently) a U.S. or Israeli Intelligence Agency, even that's not going to save you.

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The HTML code for extracapslock is <B>, like this:
"the <B>WORST WORST WORST</B> idea ever."

The HTML code for doubleextracapslock is <B><BLINK>, but most browsers don't support it because only fucktards use doubleextracapslock.

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In related news, an oil refinery did not explode today. Police and rescue workers report recovering zero dead bodies thus far from the fully intact structure. It is feared that the final death toll may rise as high as zero. We have no reporters live on the scene, so stay tuned for more breaking coverage as it doesn't happen.

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That's great in theory, but evolved monkeys are generally in short supply. Companies usually have to hire the regular kind.

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I believe NORAD has the best available tracking software. That might be a bit overkill though, considering the typically zero velocity of fiber optic networks.

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The submitter is either an ass, or he's playing a game provoking people to generate additional arguments for the 5th Amendment, perhaps specifically looking to combat the "give us your password or we'll lock you up" crap.

The submission is to full of fail to bother addressing it all, such as complaining that protections for the innocent sometimes make it harder to convict the guilty. Whaaaaaah! Whaaaaah! Whine!

But there's another fundamental reason that no one seems to have mentioned. The government requires a court ordered search warrant before they can intrusively violate the sanctity of your home. But there is something far more sacrosanct than one's home... one's very MIND. I can't think of anything more intrusive than the government wanting to invade your mind to carry out a "search" of your thoughts. There is nothing more sacrosanct than one's mind. Government agents showing up with guns and locking yuo in handcuffs, and screaming at you "Hand over your THOUGHTS and MEMORIES, or we will imprison you by force, if you resist giving us your thoughts and memories we are authorized to use lethal force if necessary to haul you off and imprison you."

Yeah. That's bullshit. The government wants to seize, invade, and search your mind, and the government promises not to imprison you if you comply. FUCK THAT.

And if you decline to comply, the government declares it's going to imprison you... and if you resist they can and will use any and all force, up to and including lethal force, to carry out that imprisonment.

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