I remember those horrible "Count Dracula seatbelts" from the last century that would try to strangle you when you got into the car. No thanks.

nt

Seriously, after decades of "marvelous new miracle battery/ultracapacitor/whatever" stories that come to nothing ... yes, research has been very active. A lot of laboratory results have, for one reason or another, not yet made it out of those laboratories. And some (one of the ultracapacitor "companies") seem to have flown by night with the venture capital.

These sodium batteries are a different story, They are actually being manufactured (apparently several companies are making sodium ion batteries) and are on the market. Since these actually exist, they could be a game changer.

What others have said. 10 years ago, my nephew (a Marine) died of a MRSA infection. The symptoms reported of this Boeing whistleblower sounded very familiar.

Depending on what state you're in, a third party vote may 1) have absolutely zero chance of any impact whatsoever on the results, and 2) will show dissatisfaction with both of the "major party" candidates offered to us.

California, for instance, is a winner-take-all state, and so heavily Democrat that Biden (or anyone whatsoever with a "D" after their name on the ballot) could put on devil horns, paint his face red, and affect a Bela Lugosi laugh, and he'd still get over 60% of the vote.

I always threatened to write in Cthulhu as "the lesser evil", but usually ended up voting Libertarian as a "plague on both your parties" vote. (Yeah, the LP is ... problematic ... in several respects. Still, it registers a "neither of those turkeys" vote.)

Now, in a state somewhat more plausibly in play... My voting will probably look a lot like Dick's in that "Third Rock from the Sun" episode.

I recall your presentation at the Hackers Conference years ago showing the home-made radar gun you made to log the excessive speed of maniacs racing down your street, to show city council the need for speed bumps. I (like everyone else) was wondering about your dashing back and forth in front of the stage... then noticed your radar gun (on the Macintosh screen you had set up, IIRC) was clocking your speed as you did it. Nice demo.

Good times.

A friend of mine working at "one of those places" stamped his waste basket with some of those stamps.

I think I recall it was required that the waste basket be burned.

Would you object to a school library stocking the likes of The Turner Diaries?

Yes?

Then get over yourself and this tendentious prattle about "banned books".

Some books (and The Turner Diaries is bodaciously one of them) should not be stocked in school libraries.

Reprocessing wastes recovers the U238 and plutonium bred from it. Plutonium is, famously, fissionable.

But.

The long amount of time the fuel in a power reactor runs results in a high percentage of the plutonium being, not Pu239, but Pu240 and Pu242.

These are also fissionable, but they have a high rate of spontaneous fission. For making bombs... this is a bad thing. It's very very difficult to get it to go boom. It used to be considered near impossible; the Carter administration went to extreme effort to make a bomb with power reactor plutonium to put a thin gloss of justification on their banning of reprocessing. It seems that the "device" in question had to be physically very large, and not practical to transport to a target.

There is a reason that no country (India, Pakistan, North Korea) has used power plant plutonium to make their bombs. They've built special-purpose breeders for the purpose. One would assume they would not have gone to that trouble and expense if it hadn't been necessary.

> The illiterati would not accept that though, they'll just claim that the programming has been corrupted and that we can't trust the people who designed it.

Thus open source. "Show me where in the code it can produce an incorrect count."

One reform I would like to see is to put sharp teeth into the law that it is required to have watchers from both parties during all phases the counting of the votes. Exception: If one party does not provide watchers, or if their watchers walk out. Cameras are absolutely permitted at all phases of the process.

The moment counting watchers from either party are excluded from the process, the entire vote is tossed out. Completely. That precinct either doesn't get a vote in this election, or a new election must be held for that precinct, and those who excluded the other party from the process are guilty of a major felony.

Exception: If one party does not provide watchers, or if their watchers walk out. No spoiling a vote by not participating.

The counting of the vote should be as open as it is feasible to make it.

Green background? I don't care.

Videos reduced to CGA quality for no reason whatsoever other than just to inflict pain on Android users? That's annoying.

Apple deliberately inflicts pain on anyone using a non-Apple product, and then, like a spouse abuser, blames them for the pain.

I'm not a crypto guru, but I do wonder...

Could a system be devised with these characteristics:

1) You cast your vote, and your receipt has a code on it. You can use this code on the government web page to verify that your vote was counted as cast.

2) It is not possible ("computationally infeasible") from the receipt to reverse-engineer what your actual vote was, just that this vote was counted as cast, so for vote buying/intimidation schemes, you literally can not prove how you voted to anyone.

(When I was thinking about this a few years ago, I believe there were other parts to it, but this seems to be the important bits.)

Obviously, all software at all levels of this scheme would have to be open source.

Note, that mail-in votes are already not really securely "secret ballot".

Navigation: When a single map update costs more than two (2) brand new Garmin GPS units with included lifetime map updates... No thanks. I'll use Google Maps on my phone. (Yeah, Google... but the insurance companies don't seem to be using it. Yet.)

Monitored security: Extra cost subscription feature that I do not subscribe to.

Preconditioning: Ditto. Actually, if I'm within key fob range, I can turn the car on to get the AC running a few minutes before I get to the car with it, no Internet entanglements.