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Has anyone, anywhere, managed to build a serious one yet? One you can actually deploy without also triggering a nuclear holocaust in the process? Because in that case we have bigger problems than a few fried bits of kit.

Non Nuclear EMP bombs do exsit. How easy it is to make one in your garage is another matter sill your right about a bigger problems than a few fried bits of kit. pop off one of those next to any big Stock Markets could shut it down for days or weeks. perhaps cause enough economic damage push over an already unstable economy.

The FBI is going for straight up exaggeration no ifs buts or maybes, they are lying. PS Platoon size varies around the world so I just went average easy 'LOW' number and this is what the FBI are trying to insinuate http://people.howstuffworks.com/mafia1.htm, straight up bullshit, all organised crime and mafia and capos in charge of somewhere between 10 and 50 criminals, as you have petty criminals under the wise guys, it's all so laughably obvious, tied to the conspiracy charges and Rico http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act, really and, I mean really, lame.

Too much has become real from science fiction, and it's scary. One little ferinstance, Jules Verne had "electric bullets" that were mocked for over a century, of course you couldn't put enough charge into a projectile to make a foe fall "as if struck by a thunderbolt", right? http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/other-gadgets/taser-shotgun-shell1.htm

The citation on the wikipedia article seems to dead. I tried reading more about preproduction cars and none of them seem to talk about Joe Dane being able to buy/borrow one. Take the how stuff works article It talks only about testing, in secrecy, in extreme locations. Nothing else. Is there a different source that talks about these. I am genuinely curious.

Have you ever been clocked with police radar? Ka band radar is basically the same frequency as these L3 machines. The only difference is the mmw nudescanners are a lot less powerful.

Citation needed. In fact, I would assume exactly the opposite is true: Imaging an object should require a much stronger reflection than simply using the Doppler effect to determine its velocity.

For instance, a magnetic flowmeter uses a very low-strength magnetic field of about 25 gauss [PDF] to measure a fluid's velocity, but a MRI machine uses a field with a strength of 5,000 to 30,000 gauss in order to actually image something.

Yep...of course, depending on who it is performing it you may have a hard time finding anyone that cares. But here's how it works, and it will blow your mind if you don't already know. http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/music-licensing.htm

Cats, power lines and shiny glass buildings kill more birds than wind farms. Of course we don't have that many wind turbines yet, but still the figures don't look that scary. http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/wind-turbine-kill-birds.htm

Wind farms apparently do weird shit to bats though: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14593-wind-turbines-make-bat-lungs-explode.html

So, buses are already less efficient, and commuter rail and AMTRAK only reach their efficiencies because of high utilization.

Not less efficient. And of course AMTRAK is going to have horrible numbers (still better than cars though) because it's an antiquated system running on diesel engines. The future isn't AMTRAK vs the modern Prius, but the modern Prius vs modern electrically powered trains. You can also directly power an electric train with wind or hydro power - which wont work with cars - or solar power (not efficient on cars).

But you can't get high utilization if you try to switch people from cars to public transit because then you need many more trains at more times, a lot of which are going to be poorly utilized.

And highway capacity is poorly utilized at 3:00 am. But that's been a double standard in this country for decades: public roads are a car subsidy worth hundreds of billions a year, while mass transit is supposed to be self-sufficient.

Massive government investment has to be paid through taxes somehow. So, either you tax fossil fuels, or you tax everything, or you tax someone else who isn't causing the problem.

Since you skipped it the first two times here it is again: slash military spending and use those funds for green energy development. At a trillion dollars a year, how long do you expect it would take to put solar panels on the roof of every public building in America? And it could be done without a single cent in carbon taxes. And it would result in an economic boon as money is spent at home on direct job creation rather than pissing it away in the arabian deserts.

You want to tax everything because what you really want is increase taxes further, you're just using "global warming" as an excuse to do so.

See above. Oh, and feel free to back away from the sophistry at any time.

Why should I, in my energy-efficient home and with my tiny car, pay higher taxes for the costs other people (according to you) are imposing on poor south sea islanders?

Why should I bother to address your straw man? Because, even if your storyline had any basis in reality, climate change is everyone's business. The same way public education is everyone's business, whether or not you yourself have children.

And of course, there's the FACT that the costs of mitigating climate change are INSIGNIFICANT next to the costs of *not* mitigating it.

First, those were nowhere near as massive as changing over a large part of the energy producing capacity of the world to some different energy source.

Red herring. Even more so given the fact that other energy sources can be plugged into the existing grid, and solar panels can be plugged directly into existing buildings. To head off the next red herring, no, they don't power your house at night without battery storage. But when is energy use the greatest? On hot, sunny days.

Many of those government projects also turned out to be harmful and/or inefficient. Rural electrification and the federal highway system are, after all, in large part responsible for the kind of inefficient energy utilization you are now complaining about. If low density living hadn't been subsidized by the US government in the first place, blah blah blah

I don't know what's more impressive, the attempt at deflection or arguing that successful federal projects have increased energy use right after arguing that federal projects could not change our energy use. And, of course, nevermind that those same rural areas are prime areas for wind or solar farms, or that greens have long argued in favor of replacing highway sprawl with mass transit.

I'm all for r

Yes, it can.

Horsepower is measured at the top RPM, so while your waiting on your RPM to get up to that 900, the electric car has instant power (or horsepower, if you want to call it that) all the way through. But if you insist on using the HP analogy, the White Zombie http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2010/07/zero_to_60_mph_in_less_than_3.html weight is only 2,275 pounds, Has 355 volts of energy and can generate 2,400 instantaneous amps. Convert that to 1kW = 1.34 HP accroding to http://auto.howstuffworks.com/how-does-horsepower-figure-into-electric-cars.htm and you get 852kW = 1141.68HP

No no, ice picks and hammers are used for lobotomies

WRONG!

Right here, moron.

The problem is that in the 1980s and 1990s, Republicans were GLEEFULLY GETTING SPECULATION REGULATIONS REPEALED. It's the same sort of crap in other markets (see: Republican repeal of Glass-Steagal separation of banking and stock market) that caused the Bush Depression.

I mean, how many accidents will occur once human error is removed from the equation?

Yes, because we all know that GPS and street information can never be wrong. That truck driver won't just be stuck under the overpass, he'll be all the way through (just missing a bit of the trailer), since the vehicle will be going full, safe speed for that unpaved part of the superhighway.

Lets see, since there cameras and sensors all over these autonomous vehicles, I guess it will be literally impossible to add one more sensor that sticks up about 3 inches or so above the trailer to detect potential collisions. Plus bridges are often labeled with signs indicating their height. It would literally be impossible to have all of those cameras OCR those signs as an additional indicator of a potential collision. And since I thought of these 2 possibilities in 60 seconds, theres no way there could possibly be any additional possibilities given just a bit more thought, and no way the guys at google could possibly think of the same. Nope, it's convertible trailer time for sure.

I mean, how many accidents will occur once human error is removed from the equation?

Yes, because we all know that GPS and street information can never be wrong. That truck driver won't just be stuck under the overpass, he'll be all the way through (just missing a bit of the trailer), since the vehicle will be going full, safe speed for that unpaved part of the superhighway.

And wind turbines kill a lot of birds.

That depends; do you consider less than 0.00008% to be a lot?

It takes about a train car full of coal to power your house for 30 years.

That doesn't sound right... but after doing the math I see it is. I'll post this anyway for other doubters:

Thermal energy of coal: 6,150 kWh/ton.
Average US household energy use per year: 10,000 kWh
Result: 1.6 tons of col per year, over 30 years = 48 tons of coal

Size of a train car: ~100 tons

Okay, so that is about right. The Average US household energy value seems to vary about 2-fold based on source. I picked something in the middle.

Fun fact, the guy who oversaw the Chilean obseravtory was probably my dad, James Crocker. It was the "VLT" (Very Large Telescope, catchy name) out in the desert.

More funny fact, he eventually moved over to Lockheed Martin and currently works with all the rovers and mars observers.

His contribution to Hubble was that he was the guy who came up with the idea for the "packaged optics" or extending mirrors and lenses to correct the hubble's vision.

http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/7415-discovery-nasa-james-crocker-video.htm

Researchers have determined that the risk zone for driver airbags is the first 2 to 3 inches (5 to 8 cm) of inflation. So, placing yourself 10 inches (25 cm) from your driver airbag gives you a clear margin of safety. Measure this distance from the center of the steering wheel to your breastbone.

Or, http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199807093390219:

A limitation of our study is that the new regulation defines the safe distance as 10 in. (25 cm) from the breastbone to the steering wheel.

or, http://www.wikihow.com/Adjust-Seating-to-the-Proper-Position-While-Driving

Distance from the wheel: There should be a minimal clearance of 10" (and preferably 30cm) between the center of the steering hub and the base of the breastbone (sternum). It should also not be further away that 45cm.

For me and my height, that results in *almost* (but not completely) straight arms in addition to being able to control the pedals properly - not too straight or bent - either is problematic in an accident. Other pages document an ideal arm bend of 120 degrees.

What you are saying is true, at least as far as males being more individualistic. But the OPs point is still valid. It is also well documented that men are better at handling spacial relationships than women, but women have better language skills. Here is an article on one of Discovery Channel's web sites that talks about these documented differences (don't let the site name throw you off, it is a decent article that sums things up nicely without dumbing it down to Homer Simpson level.).

Thank Enron for finding loopholes to legalize oil derivatives in 2006 which led to a rapid doubling of gas prices.

Here's a fairly decent breakdown: http://money.howstuffworks.com/oil-speculation-raise-gas-price.htm

That's some faulty logic. With so much money at stake, warlords aren't killing people to harvest organs. Poor people voluntarily do it for a small cut of the profits. The black market already exists, and the laws are keeping those black market activities alive.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/life/human-biology/organ-donation7.htm

The donors were recruited mostly from the slums of Brazil, flown to South Africa where the operation was performed, compensated between $6,000 to $10,000 and returned home [source: Rohter]. The South African middlemen were then able to sell the organs for as much as $100,000 [source: Handwerk].

There's absolutely NO POINT in banning compensation to the donor, because as soon as the organs are harvested, the people who have them can sell them. What do you think would change if organ donors received $500k in the US, except that the shortage of organs would fall?

Maybe this will encourage GM to bring back the Hy-Wire platform

20 minutes.
http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2010/02/16/world-record-127-the-record-for-holding-your-breath-is-shattered-and-now-stands-at-19-minutes/

What's the scientific explanation?

It's called the Placebo Effect. And it works equally well whether you're praying to Mohammad, praying to Jesus, or even if you just think you're getting some new, effective treatment (which could just consist of sugar pills). It's not indicative that some demigod somewhere is helping you heal, only that your attitude can have a huge impact on your recovery.

Most money already is electronic. Total U.S. money (M3) is around 10 trillion dollars. Hard U.S. currency in terms of bills and coins is a little under 1 trillion and of that 1/2 to 2/3 is outside of the U.S. I do agree with your sentiment though.

http://frugalliving.about.com/od/foodsavings/f/Honey.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Preservation
http://www.stilltasty.com/questions/index/128
http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2009/04/15/why-doesn%E2%80%99t-honey-go-bad/

Any other questions?

Not relevant. It was the law and he broke it. Of course it was unjust but we get into a whole mess of legal trouble if we start revising past laws and pardoning people of crimes we now think where unjust.

I see where you're coming from, and it's a good argument, assuming it would cause a legal mess. I don't pretend to be as smart as most of the folks on this forum, but my position is if a law is determined to be unjust, people should no longer be punished for it, even if the punishment is simply having an arrest on their record. Based on that position, I think it's absolutely a relevant point. Your position seems to be two-fold: the law is the law at the time it was the law, making a crime punishable, regardless of whether the law broken is now deemed unjust, and it would cause a mess of legal trouble to attempt to an "undo". Admittedly, I don't know enough about law to determine exactly what problems specific or general pardons for breaking this law would cause, but I do know people are pardoned all the time, and it doesn't seem to cause much if any damage. Folks even receive pardons for crimes that are NOT now considered unjust (there are plenty of examples of pardons offered in return for testimony or evidence against someone else), and those pardons don't seem to be the causing our legal system to crumble, at least in any specific sense (the almighty dollar seems to be doing that on its own). Also, we might have to agree to disagree on this point; otherwise I think we get dangerously close to opinions on what the law is intended to accomplish.

How about exactly because it's 50 years later and he's dead. Why bother?

We bother because it rights a past wrong. I know if I was convicted of a crime that led to my professional disgrace and I ended my life 2 years later (not saying the conviction led directly to this; just that it seems likely to have contributed in Turing's case), anybody who knew me in life or now reads my history and agrees that I was unjustly damaged by a stupid law would feel vindicated if I was given a posthumous pardon. If the assumption is there's more to be gained than lost by offering the pardon (which is my position), then it's the right thing to do.

That's not much of a counter-argument.

Put less sarcastically, my argument is if there's no harm in offering pardons to one person convicted of this particular crime, there's no harm offering a blanket pardon to all people convicted of this particular crime. Of course, this is not true of a crime that is still on the books, but violators of many current laws have been pardoned individually. I provided an example of this situation previously, but here are a few more http://people.howstuffworks.com/presidential-pardon2.htm. It seems to me that if one can somehow be pardoned of a crime that is still illegal, one can and should be pardoned of a "crime" that is not.

My position on this is simply that in a case where a law is found wrong enough to be completely reversed, there seems to be enough precedent set that anyone convicted of the crime should be completely exonerated from any wrongdoing. Let's look at it a different way: if someone is currently serving a sentence for breaking a law that is overturned, should they finish their sentence? I don't think that's right, and I suppose my naivety extends this opinion to offering a pardon for the entire crime, not just the remainder of the punishment. In Turing's case, his punishment can never be acknowledged as a mistake to him, precisely because he's dead. Still, there are people who would like to see the reversal of this law come all the way around, exonerating anybody who was damaged by it, posthumously or not.

All that weight, all that fuel goes into the air

You are SERIOUSLY saying that a gallon of fuel goes right into the air? Incredible!

You may want to do more research before going off half-baked with your claims. BTW, one of the outputs is also water - better ban that too! You might even have some in your house RIGHT NOW!

It's a shamed that so many people alarmed something do not take the time to learn even the most basic chemistry to decide what is fact is really alarming...

That's a very complicated and heavier way of doing what's already being done - using smaller balloons inside the larger one to alter the pressure (and thus density and thus lift) of the larger balloon. (Saving the weight of the storage tanks, which is the ruling factor.)

http://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/blimp1.htm

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/question473.htm

The main ice covered landmass is Antarctica at the South Pole, with about 90 percent of the world's ice (and 70 percent of its fresh water). Antarctica is covered with ice an average of 2,133 meters (7,000 feet) thick. If all of the Antarctic ice melted, sea levels around the world would rise about 61 meters (200 feet). But the average temperature in Antarctica is -37ÂC, so the ice there is in no danger of melting. In fact in most parts of the continent it never gets above freezing.

At the other end of the world, the North Pole, the ice is not nearly as thick as at the South Pole. The ice floats on the Arctic Ocean. If it melted sea levels would not be affecteÂd.

There is a significant amount of ice covering Greenland, which would add another 7 meters (20 feet) to the oceans if it melted. Because Greenland is closer to the equator than Antarctica, the temperatures there are higher, so the ice is more likely to melt.

The numbers here are likely to be more accurate:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/spmsspm-c-15-magnitudes-of.html

The complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the West Antarctic ice sheet would lead to a contribution to sea-level rise of up to 7 m and about 5 m, respectively [Working Group I Fourth Assessment 6.4, 10.7; Working Group II Fourth Assessment 19.3].

Yet another source: http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/sea_level.html

Antarctica and Greenland, the world's largest ice sheets, make up the vast majority of the Earth's ice. If these ice sheets melted entirely, sea level would rise by more than 70 meters.

Your move. Let's see what asshole you pulled this "not more than a foot" number from.

just wait legos will be pirated very quickly i know that if i had a 3d printer i sure would print them.

In order to make lego bricks which both hold together firmly and can be easily pried apart requires precision injection molding http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/lego1.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego#Manufacture. 3D printers don't have the tolerance, material strength, nor finish quality required for producing strong tight-tolerance pieces like this. Printing is just a fundamentally different manufacturing process which is good for certain tasks but not this kind of task.

There are stereolithography machines which do additive manufacturing by curing a photosensitive polymer one layer at a time, and these can be quite precise. However they are slow and very expensive to run. They are useful for some specialized tasks like building structures which could not be machined in a single piece using traditional machining equipment due to internal structures. There is little choice of material though as you are limited only to liquids that are photo-curable and you only get to choose one material for a given solid piece. There's no manufacturing revolution here, it's a specialized piece of equipment which produces small quantities of parts at a high price. Useful for prototyping and specialized tasks, not mass production.

No, the Voyager probes transmit at 23 Watts, which is basically nothing. The entire power system on the craft can generate about 250 Watts, which is used for all the systems. The fact that Nasa can track an object transmitting half the power of a lightbulb 11 billion km away to very fine precision is absolutely the most amazing thing they ever did in the space program IMHO.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/question431.htm

Follow closely, I'm only going to say this once.

Autofocus:
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/autofocus8.htm
relies on infrared to determine focus length. The theaters know this and have detectors to sense infrared light sources in the audience, and (falsely) assume that having an infrared light source means you're trying to record with a camera.

We have the tech.....we just need to use it. Lets pack a mobile phone with the mechanism from TickleMeElmo It's then trivial to write an Android or iOS app to send a phone into a vibrating frenzy. I mention this toy because the article states that it's a bit over the top for a toy and ofcourse thats just what we want.

Check out where our gas comes from. Hint: it's not the Persian Gulf (well, they supply 13% of our gas according to that link). The GP is right: the fact that we have enough natural gas for what we use it for now for the foreseeable future does not mean we can support using it as transportation fuel for any significant proportion of our transportation.

Optical drives are SLOW.

slow slow slow.

So slow, this is the reason you need to install so many PS3 games. slow slow slow.

FTFY
Why are they so slow you ask? (and I'm glad you did)
They are slow because of a little thing called centrifugal force. If you've ever ridden on a merry go round you are familiar with CF. The same CF that threw you off of the merry go round is at work on spinning platters. Go beyond a certain spinning speed and the polycarbonate material the BD or DVD or CD or even the aluminum/glass ceramic the HDD is made out of will disintegrate. That's why the XBox 720i (in partnership with BMW) will have an SSD for running it's core and a HDD for booting games that actually run "In The Cloud".

And yes, desert water is not infinite... Greenland is a desert now? Funny. I expected them to be warmer. And less wet.

In point of fact, the definition of a desert is how much precipitation per year there is. The arctic is one of the biggest deserts in the world, and I'm sure that could include Greenland. Here's a map for your perusal.

Utilizing solar power for the plant-tending machinery sounds like a good idea, at first... then you realize that plants themselves are solar powered, and therefore every square meter you are devoting to powering the machinery is a reduction of the potential plant-matter production. A possible semi-alternative might be to make the roofs of all homes into solar arrays, thus providing shelter and power simultaneously - of course, the occupants of those dwellings may not want to give up the electricity this would generate.

LFTR-based energy solutions come immediately to mind as a cheap, plentiful, and safe solution to our power needs.

Thorium is fairly plentiful, is produced as a "waste" by-product of conventional mineral-extraction processes, and the US has a stockpile of it large enough to run the entire country (and then some) for nearly a decade. The process of extracting energy from it results in an incredibly small mass of waste, orders of magnitude less than our current plants produce.

To top it all off, it's impossible for a LFTR plant to "melt down", and the startup/shutdown process takes a matter of hours, rather than weeks or months. As a matter of fact, there was a research group who made a reactor in the 50s who simply turned it off for the weekend on Friday, then turned it on again on Monday - they just shut it down for two days, then brought it back up.

As another indication of safety, the US government funded a research group in the 1950s who very nearly put a thorium reactor in an airplane. They stopped not because of safety concerns, but because fission-powered aircraft were not as cheap and expendable as the newly-developed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) technology as a delivery system. Missiles don't require a crew to ride them into enemy airspace.

Speaking of the military aspects of cheap power, one interesting "benefit" of LFTR technology is that weapons-grade fissionable material is not a waste product of the process. This may have something to do with the huge number of fast-breeder nuclear reactors in the US; their main product (other than energy) is weapons-grade plutonium.

Yet another indicator of safety: This is a pdf from the Thorium Energy Alliance that has, on its front page, a picture of enough thorium to satisfy a person's lifetime energy needs being held in a bare hand. You see, thorium isn't nearly as "radioactive" as other nuclear materials - it's not fissile, it's merely fertile.

If the US isn't careful, they're going to lose any ability to utilize this technology; Both China and India are working on thorium-based reactors currently, with China's expressed goal being to monopolize the IP rights - yet another reason to abolish the current Intellectual Property system?

More information on thorium and thorium-based technologies can be found here.

OK, so Obama (just to pick an example) pushed to end military discrimination against homosexuals, and that didn't impress you, but now that comcast can't charge you a little extra to view google, THAT impresses you? Come on, man...get your priorities straight. Are you only impressed when there's something in it for you?

Yeah, I will get modded down for saying that, but there are good reasons why we should not want homosexuals in the military.

Posting anonymously as I'm moderating on this thread...

No, I won't mod you down for being a fucking asshole. You just keep trying to pass off your hate filled crap. And remember that your homophobia may well stem from your own latent homosexuality, no really.

And just to clarify, I am heterosexual and *not* a homophobe. I hold what seems to be a minority belief these days, that we are all humans and we should all be treated with a modicum of respect as human beings. Your small-minded and hateful attitudes make me want to hurl. Is this better than modding you down, jerk?

I mean, we build dams. Do you have any idea what would happen if Hoover dam were to collapse?

If Hoover dam collapsed, I could quite safely go there the next day with absolutely no worries to my health. Besides this really doesn't seem to indicate there would be massive loss of life...which itself could be mitigated by moving a few towns uphill maybe 30 feet? Not insignificant, but down river from Hoover isn't exactly heavily populated. The most significant damages would be in the loss of the electric and irrigation water which is a far different thing than dying due to radiation.

Dams generally aren't placed on top of very active seismic faults either...or at least not knowingly. Expressly because you can't engineer adequate prevention in a concrete structure under that much load. It's brittle and once it cracks its gone. This was a nuclear reactor both in an active seismic zone AND one prone to tsunamis. Sure they 'planned' for what they thought was the largest possible wave, yet were 5-10 meters short of what actually happened.

This is my point, you simply can't engineer for the level of safety you need with nuclear in a disaster.

And after an earthquake or even tsunami, I can go there the day afterward with no serious health risks.

Nuclear failures are in an entirely different league expressly because they are nuclear. They need massive active processes while operating normally in order to be safe. In a disaster, or as in this case for weeks afterwards, you don't have those processes available.

It's not that the lights allow you to see better, it's that the lights allow others to see you better, you self-centered dink.

As for your ridiculous efficiency argument: we would save roughly 100,000 barrels of oil per day, not millions. The next step is for you to decide how many more people dying per day is worth saving those 100,000 barrels, and then go look up the statistics on DRL.

Okay, I think you need to learn a bit about laser light. Laser light is VERY different to light coming from a torch. The whole point is that it does NOT spread out like a torch. I even went to the bother of googling you a link to a pretty easy to read webpage which explains the difference. Laser pointers do diverge, but nowhere near that of a torch. It is exactly due to this low beam divergence that even a low powered laser can still temporarily (or permanently) blind someone over a long distance.

can we 'cure' the mosquitoes before they bite us again?

We can introduce male mosquito genetically altered to have glow in the dark genes. This would help to eradicate the species of mosquito that caries malaria.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/life/genetic/gm-mosquito.htm

Put horns on it, produce 2000 of it and have them charge the enemies. I assure you it will discourage warfare like nothing else.

Not a problem. I've developed the Robotic Dog equivalent of a milk bone. Here Fido!

I don't know if they have reduced the MRI magnet strength over the years but when I got one about 10 years ago they told me the strength was 3 Webers. Looking up a quick translate table, 1 Weber = 1 Tesla, so either the old ones were 10x more powerful than the ones today, or you're an order of magnitude off.

But yeah, letting one go within 20 feet of an MRI would suck it in so quick it might shoot out the other side, or maybe the field would be strong enough to just hold it once it sucked it in.

For more cool scenes of devastation check out the image where an MRI sucked in a FORKLIFT! No shit, one of those large pallet jacks you use to drive pallets around factories, must weigh 100-150 lbs and it had NO PROBLEM sucking that into the maw of it's magnet, destroying it thoroughly, of course. Image is here: http://www.howstuffworks.com/question698.htm - check it out, if you ever had ANY doubt about the power and strength of an MRI magnet.

Gee, maybe you should tell that to Amtrak, they have been using "hybrid" diesel for years:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/engines-equipment/diesel-locomotive.htm

Unfortunately, you're incorrect: the IRS even taxes BARTERING at a calculated value.

http://money.howstuffworks.com/bartering4.htm
"In a swap, both parties have to list the market value of what they received as taxable income. This means that commercial and corporate bartering exchanges require filing a tax form -- a 1099-B, "Proceeds from Broker and Barter Exchange Transactions""

I'm not saying that taxation is intrinsically unfair, that would be crazy. We have to pay for the services and things that government provides. What I object to is the ability of our legislators to add a tax here, a user fee there, and another tax there, without ever being called to JUSTIFY it with something more substantial than "...all those services government provides..."

That's still on the order of a million gallons of gas saved each day in the US.

Here's a pic of the M60" searchlight, both visible and IR. Couldn't find a similar mount for the Abrams, it may be integrated.