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Well, there actually are horse and buggy companies around. But they are quite the niche.

Example: http://www.buggy.com/

Also fun reading: http://www.popularmechanics.co...

seawater and volcanic ash
http://www.popularmechanics.co...

Especially with these on the market:

> http://www.popularmechanics.co...

until you Prius from my cold dead hans

Incidentally, the Prius is a waste of a hybrid engine. The problem is the U.S. measures fuel economy in MPG. Fuel economy is actually GPM - how much fuel you burn to travel a fixed distance. Because MPG is the inverse of fuel economy, the bigger MPG gets, the less fuel is saved per mile driven. This is why the CAFE standards use a harmonic mean. That corrects for MPG being the inverse of fuel economy. e.g. Suppose you're going to travel 100 miles.

6.25 MPG tractor trailer = 16 gallons consumed
12.5 MPG SUV = 8 gallons consumed
25 MPG sedan = 4 gallons
50 MPG Prius = 2 gallons
100 MPG supercar = 1 gallon

Notice how every time you double MPG, the fuel saved is only half the previous step? The 12.5 MPG jump from a Suburban to a sedan saves you 4 gallons, while the what many people assume-to-be-bigger 25 MPG jump from a sedan to a Prius only saves you 2 gallons.

In other words, if the true goal here is to reduce fuel consumption, we should be concentrating on improving the efficiency of trucks. That's where we should be trying to add hybrid powertrains. Converting an economy car into a hybrid is barely worth the trouble. The MPG increase may seem big, but it's an almost insignificant amount. If you can improve a tractor trailer's economy from 6 MPG to 7 MPG (just a 1 MPG improvement or 17%), you've saved more fuel per mile driven than switching from a sedan to a Prius (a 25 MPG improvement or 100%). 100/6 - 100/7 = 2.38 gal saved per 100 miles. Vs 100/25 - 100/50 = 2 gal saved per 100 miles. You know how environmentalists scoffed at hybrid SUVs? That was actually one of the best types of vehicles to convert into a hybrid.

To avoid this problem of inverse fuel economy, the rest of the world uses liters per 100 km, which is analogous to GPM and a correct measure of fuel economy. This is the problem I have with the current push for clean energy - so much of it is about appearance and bragging rights (including calling EVs zero emissions when they clearly aren't), instead of actual results.

Okay... so...

it's a 500 kilowatt power generation
http://www.popularmechanics.co...

3/4 of which would be 35 gallons of diesel fuel *per hour*. A full load would be about 50 gallons *per hour*.

So "a few hundred gallons of fuel" would last between 8 and 6 hours.

Meanwhile... the solar will just keep working.. and working.. and working.. a regular energizer bunny.

However- you are probably talking about $30k + $3 per gallon ($115 per hour) for the diesel while I can't find the cost of that much solar and batteries. It might be a lot more than $30k + $2,500 per day for the diesel.

Generators are expensive and noisy to operate. And their fuel supply can still be disrupted.

While I've got no idea whether this site is a reliable source for such information...

DefenseOne is owned by Atlantic Media, the 700-person company which also publishes The Atlantic magazine (and Quartz).

Hours after their story ran online it was confirmed by:

The Washington Post
The New York Post
Newsweek
Popular Mechanics.

According to "The book of general ignorance" mosquitoes were the biggest killer of humans throughout history. The claim was rather bold though, IIRC that half of humans who ever lived died because of a disease transmitted by mosquitoes. That's 50 billion!!

Off-topic addendum - in the same book they say that the animal that has saved most human lives in history is the horseshoe crab, thanks to its "old fashioned" evolutionary speaking, blood. At least these days they don't kill them but "milk" them. It seems scientists have joined the Ubervald Temperance League :)

http://www.popularmechanics.co...

Contaminated "cells" reminded me about this :
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a22577/genetics-papers-excel-errors/

Good catch, that link pointed to the earlier failure.

Here's a link to the failure on the pad http://spacenews.com/spacex-narrows-down-cause-of-falcon-9-pad-explosion which was attributed to a helium tank failure http://www.latimes.com/nation/ct-spacex-explosion-20170102-story.html, or http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a23652/spacex-falcon-explosion-cause-helium-loading/.

Sorry I inadverently linked to a different failure that was linked to a different helium tank failure.

Instead of simply voting you down I'll tell you why people don't like this post.

Nobody cares about the things you're talking about here. Even thought your story relates to the lifespan of c64 computers 3 years is an extremely short lifespan for 1980-1990s computer hardware. Particularly when we're talking about commodore hardware
Here is a c64 operating in a polish auto shop, metallic dust and smoke, oil, humidity usually places like this kill machines in under 10 years.
http://www.popularmechanics.co...
Here is one running hvac for a school district
http://www.popularmechanics.co...

So we've all heard legends of long lived commodores. A story like yours just has people wondering how the fuck you killed 3 in a decade!!!

Of course I already know because according to you as soon as you busted your last c64 you went straight over to your roommates brand new 7000 dollar thinkpad from his brand new dream job... and deleted COMMAND.COM.

Meaning that the lifespan of a c64 vs a PC is about 2000x longer which is quite impressive actually. It's just that in the creimer's stubby hands life is short for even the hardiest of computers. Unless you're aware that creimer is a disaster area the story just doesn't make any sense.

I have to admit though. You're getting close and closer to the day when you can hide behind a new sockpuppet and be left in peace. Keep up the good progress!

Instead of simply voting you down I'll tell you why people don't like this post.

Nobody cares about the things you're talking about here. Even thought your story relates to the lifespan of c64 computers 3 years is an extremely short lifespan for 1980-1990s computer hardware. Particularly when we're talking about commodore hardware
Here is a c64 operating in a polish auto shop, metallic dust and smoke, oil, humidity usually places like this kill machines in under 10 years.
http://www.popularmechanics.co...
Here is one running hvac for a school district
http://www.popularmechanics.co...

So we've all heard legends of long lived commodores. A story like yours just has people wondering how the fuck you killed 3 in a decade!!!

Of course I already know because according to you as soon as you busted your last c64 you went straight over to your roommates brand new 7000 dollar thinkpad from his brand new dream job... and deleted COMMAND.COM.

Meaning that the lifespan of a c64 vs a PC is about 2000x longer which is quite impressive actually. It's just that in the creimer's stubby hands life is short for even the hardiest of computers. Unless you're aware that creimer is a disaster area the story just doesn't make any sense.

I have to admit though. You're getting close and closer to the day when you can hide behind a new sockpuppet and be left in peace. Keep up the good progress!

If there's one thing that has become very clear it is that Musk is not good at estimating how long something will take. At the same time, when he says it will happen, it does generally happen. The really good example of this is SpaceX. The Falcon 9 took far longer to get off the ground and be really reliable than he predicted, but once it did, it became an absolute monster in the industry. More than a third of all rocket launches worldwide this year are SpaceX launches http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a27290/one-chart-spacex-dominate-rocket-launches/ and the projections suggest that will be more than half next year, even without the Falcon Heavy (which is another example of this since it has taken much longer but will eventually go). The real issue with Tesla is that if things go slowly enough then the other car companies will essentially out-compete him; but by his own description he's essentially ok with that, since the primary point of Tesla was help deal with global warming.

Same thing that happens for all generation sources: money needs to be invested to keep things up. Levelized Cost Of Energy (LCOE) calculations take all factors into consideration so that the costs of the various generation sources can be compared on an apples-to-apples basis.

Coal, nuclear, and even natural gas and oil units have higher maintenance costs than solar as well as variable fuel costs. Those factors mean that all solar needs to do is reduce its installation costs sufficiently and it is the cheapest source. This has happened, solar is the cheapest worldwide generation source by LCOE (not in the US yet, as they have relatively low energy costs, especially relative to their per capita GDP).

Is Russia Russia Russia.

And that's fine. KEEP DIGGING.

But why is NOBODY looking into CHINA CHINA CHINA?!

We have proof they meddled in our elections in 1996. Does everyone think they just magically stopped?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

In between you know... stealing our nuclear secrets in 1999?

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03...

And weapon secrets... in 2009?

http://www.popularmechanics.co...

BUT SURELY they stopped right before the 2016 election! So don't worry guys, we don't need to look anymore.

You know, if I was China, I'd actually be pushing for Russia investigations to keep people from looking into all my dirty laundry...

Exactly. My understanding is that diesels are 10%-20% more efficient (energy produced per unit of carbon burned).

True, but gasoline engines are getting better. http://www.popularmechanics.co...

If that's the case, 100 million diesel cars translates into 10-20 million gasoline cars NOT on the road in Europe (from the carbon emissions perspective). If you believe in anthropogenic global warming at all, that massive reduction in carbon emissions would greatly outweigh the cost to society

I'd like to see that calculation, please. I'd like to see your method of quantifying the costs to society.

of 5,000 presumably ill people dying slightly sooner than they would have due to NOx.

5,000 deaths per year. And your statement "presumably ill" people means: people with asthma and people who have the flu or pneumonia.

I actually think that people with asthma still deserve to live. "Let's kill them, they're presumably ill" is not acceptable reasoning to me.

Russian Drone With Thermite Grenade Blows Up a Billion Dollars of Ukrainian Ammo

The Russians are already perfecting their techniques in the Ukraine

But some materials are currently "downcycled" into less desirable products that can be recycled no further. Soft-drink bottles made from PET (polyethylene terephthalate), for example, often end up as polyester fibers in clothing or carpets. It is possible to make new PET bottles from recycled stock, but the process is currently more expensive than making them from petroleum.

source: http://www.popularmechanics.co...

Great Britain's newest, largest, ...best, wonderful... new aircraft carrier, it runs XP
While The QE is a big ship, it only carries half the aircraft of the Gerald Ford.

Even though it's not the big boy on the block, this is one big, very capable ship. A lot to be proud of. So what do they run on the computers running the ship? Windows XP? Are they out of their gourd?

http://www.popularmechanics.co...

Can't make this stuff up. I see that they claim this is only temporary. However once it's in, it's often really tough to get rid of it.

And how many of them will be around in 18 years?

Maybe half of them will still be around then, I don't really know. We still find Amigas running HVAC systems.

If I'm a business owner and the badge reader on my warehouses work fine for 10 years, why would I replace them? I figured they would still work fine for another 10 years, only to find out that nobody can get into the building in 2038. And that's funny, all the repair people are too busy today to do anything about it. And I can't seem to leave a voicemail to the badge suppler because it keeps hanging up.

Hopefully the traffic lights work. Depends on if your particular state's government is competent or not.

The four Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines provide the UK's entire nuclear deterrent. ...
The four submarines have just one critical flaw: They all run Windows XP.

http://www.popularmechanics.co...

Why the hell would anyone mount a machine gun on a satellite?

Why, indeed?

These days there are such things as guided bullets. It's not hard to imagine a large projectile (in the tens of mm range, perhaps) which would be guided not by fins, but by jets. Then you could make a course correction.

Not to mention the recoil will put your satellite out of alignment instantly.

Obviously, you take that into account.

You're probably right anyway, though. You'd use something more like a rocket and less like a bullet. For example, you could use a Gyrojet.

I was wondering the same thing. It's a bit of a non-story without any technical information whatsoever. The NASA prototype airship described by Alan Weston in TFA, which may be along the same lines as what he is developing with Brin, sounds more like Aeros' COSH "Control of Static Heaviness" system; pumping Helium from the main envelope into smaller bags at a higher pressure or vice versa in order to control buoyancy, which is a different approach to the Airlander combination of aerodynamic and buoyant lift. But there's no telling whether that's actually the way Brin's project is going.

Old news. There's other options out there that are already certified:

http://www.popularmechanics.co...

Even Popular Mechanics, long known for being too slow to deliver the news, told us about Oak Ridge National Laboratory's ultrasonic clothes dryer back in 2015!

Missile defense will do little against artillery. Millions would die in the south, but don't let that get in the way of your idiotic statements.

So have we been arming them or not? With what? Colt .45s?
As for your fear of their artillery, it's vastly overblown
http://www.popularmechanics.co...
http://www.popularmechanics.co...

"Most of North Korea's guns can't actually reach Seoul—only about 700 of the North's 20,500 artillery pieces can reach the city. U.S. and South Korean artillery and air power would be quickly shutting down whatever enemy artillery they can find, and South Korea has an excellent civil defense system with underground shelters for most of Seoul's population."
So stop believing L'il Kim's threats

Missile defense will do little against artillery. Millions would die in the south, but don't let that get in the way of your idiotic statements.

So have we been arming them or not? With what? Colt .45s?
As for your fear of their artillery, it's vastly overblown
http://www.popularmechanics.co...
http://www.popularmechanics.co...

"Most of North Korea's guns can't actually reach Seoul—only about 700 of the North's 20,500 artillery pieces can reach the city. U.S. and South Korean artillery and air power would be quickly shutting down whatever enemy artillery they can find, and South Korea has an excellent civil defense system with underground shelters for most of Seoul's population."
So stop believing L'il Kim's threats

In case you missed my reply to another of your posts about Pyongyang's threat to Seoul, here it is again.

Short story - destructive potential of entrenched NK's "massive artillery" to South Korea's capital is massively overblown.

http://www.popularmechanics.co...

If NK is relying on artillery alone, their chances of "smashing Seoul to smithereens" is quite slim.
Harass, endanger, absolutely. But demolish? Only if no one is shooting back

http://www.popularmechanics.co...

He said he had a plan to defeat them within 30 days. No conditionals such as budgets included. And be honest, new spending takes time to work its way through the system - any weapons systems approved in the next budget won't see the light of day for years - and take even longer before they're actually deployable. Stupidity like this - a naval gun ship that can't actually fire shells because they would cost too much. A 22.5 billion dollar weapons system with no bullets. Oops.

That's because you're not liquidating hundreds of million's years worth of accumulated fossil fuel in a century or two. Even leaving alone all the side effects, that was a one-time bonanza. In the meantime, the efficiency of solar has, with a R&D budget that's miniscule in comparison with all that's gone into fossil fuels, has improved by leaps and bounds. http://www.electroschematics.c...

In fact, it's the cheapest form of energy in large swathes of the world already. http://www.popularmechanics.co...

The real problem is that renewable energy does not conform to a centralized model of concentrated wealth accumulation, so wealthy special interests are blowing a lot of smoke in your ears about it.

A flying car is also called "an airplane," and light aircraft have been around for a century. Curtiss never flew his Autoplane, but given that he was Glen Curtiss, there's no reason to believe he couldn't have if he hadn't been distracted by World War I. The Pitcairn PCA-2 was a production aircraft in 1923.

The History of Flying Cars.

The reasons this will be a non-event, like all previous attempts are as follows:

1. Flying vehicles must be built to higher standards for safety reasons - not just of the pilot and passengers, but if everyone. This means they are a lot more expensive.

2. Flying in three dimensions is more complicated than driving in two, and requires far more training. Most people simply can't handle the demands.

3. Ground traffic can be monitored and governed by simple rules and automated systems, like traffic lights and signs. Air traffic requires human controllers, and there is a limit to how many planes one controller can monitor. Automation can increase that limit, but not replace human judgment. The cost of replacing traffic lights with millions of air traffic controllers is . . . not feasible.

4. Self flying cars are even more ridiculous than self driving cars, given that self driving cars cannot handle streets that have not been mapped to millimeter precision, or road constructions, or bad weather, or any of a million other real life conditions. Flying is geometrically more complicated than driving, and there's no reason to believe anyone alive to day will live to see true self driving cars.

This is, in the end, simply an announcement that Airbus is going into the personal aircraft business with a high-tech helicopter for the obscenely wealthy. But I'm happy they're getting a lot of free publicity for it.

"It belongs in a museum!"

Hardly pointless: http://www.popularmechanics.co...

In a server room it is always noon... and winter.

Hardly pointless: http://www.popularmechanics.co...

As with every similar article they get so hung up on defending the status quo that they cannot imagine the alternatives. The only alternative they consider is getting rid of DST.

First, we have 8 months of DST and 4 months of "standard" time. So, "standard" is actually the exception and the supposed exception is actually the norm.

Second, if it's a great idea to get more day light during the 8 months that we have DST, then the argument should be for DST year round. In other words, let's change our time zones to be one hour advanced.

Putting it simply, we can get rid of DST by making DST a year round thing. That simply means changing our time zone definitions and then we're done.

It is stupid (literally: stupid) to change the clocks twice each year. Let's just change the time zones and be done with it.

The value is negligible vis-a-vis the hassle it causes.

Actually the value is incredibly high vs the hassle that lasts for a few hours a couple of days a year.
http://www.popularmechanics.co...

Hardly pointless: http://www.popularmechanics.co...

Wow, that is a misleading article that makes a lot of random assumptions of all the things daylight savings causes.

Hardly pointless: http://www.popularmechanics.co...

When the article mentioned launching an electric drive, I was hoping it would be an EMDrive since they did some testing and validation of Roger Shawyer's impossible microwave in a coffee can drive, but looks like it is just an ion drive that is going up. Guess we will have to wait for Cannae Inc cubesat http://www.popularmechanics.co... or Roger's version that maybe the military has already send into space. Who knows.

CEO's nowadays always make it sound like their visions are brand new, that no one's ever tried to invent this stuff before. But c'mon, if the VTOL car was even a remote possibility, it already would have been invented. But there's already a rich history of people who have tried, and either failed in inventing it, or succeeded but failed with commercializing it, both fixed-wing car varieties and VTOL varieties.

There's too many challenges:

1) Safety -- If a car breaks down / runs out of fuel while in use, it rolls to a stop. If a flying object breaks down / runs out of fuel in use, it crashes.
2) Price -- To reduce risk associated with problem #1, you can't cut corners or make things cheaply.
3) Lack of Infrastructure -- Cars, airplanes, and helicopters all have governed mediums by which and through which they can travel. A flying car does not. Nor will it fit perfectly within any of the existing mediums reserved for the existing vehicles.
4) Fuel consumption -- VTOL consumes a considerable amount of fuel for takeoff and landing.
5) Inefficiency with Tilt-Rotors -- Most current engineered VTOL aircraft use tilt-rotor systems (like the V22 Osprey. They work for VTOL, but inefficiently, as explained here, and their nature limits where they can take off and land.

Some engineers, like the makers of the Elytron, have come up with some neat hybrid fixed-wing/rotor solutions, but these aren't solutions that can be commercialized easily into flying cars like suggested in this article.

Personally, I'm getting pretty tired of "Backseat Visionaries" who tell everyone what the future is supposed to look like but don't do their part in driving us there.

Electronic Arms 10/22 Bullpup

Voere VEC–91

Remington Model 700 EtronX

Metal Storm MAUL

Done correctly, electronic guns can reduce points of failure, not increase them. You’re still going to want to use lithium primary batteries, or some kind of float charger in your gun safe, but after 10 years unmaintained, conventional firearms are a little less reliable than they used to be, too.

I'm not sure Wakefield has admitted anything though I could be wrong. My understanding is he got struck off for massive conflicts of interest and has since been playing to the anti-vax crowd in the US attending various alt-health conferences. I read one amusing article on Popular Mechanics where he was a guest speaker on a conspiracy / woo cruise. He's clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel these days but still apparently unrepentant.

NATO doesn't want it either. Russia would defeat NATO in 2-1/2 days.

A Department of Defense official has backed the Rand Corporation think tank's claim that the Russian military could defeat NATO forces in the Baltics in 36 to 60 hours. The statement is the latest in a string of warnings that the Atlantic Alliance is too weak to mount a defense of the baltic states.

RAND Corp explains their study results

Samsung has sold millions of these things. Three of them have caught fire. That makes the odds of a device catching fire less than 1 in 1,000,000. Business Insider says that 17 cars catch fire every hour. Where are the cries for recalling cars?

I'm going to keep a copy of your post for safe keeping. This "what about y" device is constantly being invoked as justification for everything from mass surveillance to red rum so often in so many different contexts it usually makes me cringe/sigh Al Gore style whenever I encounter it.

Boldly inquiring about cries for recalling products that catch on fire takes it to a whole new level.

http://www.reuters.com/article...

http://q13fox.com/2016/09/30/s...

http://abcnews.go.com/Business...

http://www.techtimes.com/artic...

http://jalopnik.com/5935974/fi...

http://www.autonews.com/articl...

http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/01/...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04...

http://www.popularmechanics.co...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

http://www.streetdirectory.com...

https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2...

If you want to hear cries from victims themselves click keywords and enter fire. http://www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/o...

Here you go singing/dancing AI...

113 million dollars to fix.
49 million dollars for the death and destruction costs.
Ford chose death and destruction over the lives of customers.

To this day I won't own Ford.

http://www.popularmechanics.co...

You seem to be going in a lot of wrong directions. Maybe this will help:

World Trade Center controlled demolition conspiracy theories

In the PBS documentary America Rebuilds, which aired in September 2002, Larry Silverstein, the owner of 7 WTC and leaseholder and insurance policy holder for the remainder of the WTC complex, recalled a discussion with the fire department in which doubts about containing the fires were expressed. Silverstein recalled saying, "We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it". "They made that decision to pull", he recalled, "and we watched the building collapse." Silverstein issued a statement that it was the firefighting team, not the building, that was to be pulled.[72][78][79]

And this:

NIST Releases Final WTC 7 Investigation Report

The extensive three-year scientific and technical building and fire safety investigation found that the fires on multiple floors in WTC 7, which were uncontrolled but otherwise similar to fires experienced in other tall buildings, caused an extraordinary event. Heating of floor beams and girders caused a critical support column to fail, initiating a fire-induced progressive collapse that brought the building down.

In response to comments from the building community, NIST conducted an additional computer analysis. The goal was to see if the loss of WTC 7's Column 79—the structural component identified as the one whose failure on 9/11 started the progressive collapse—would still have led to a complete loss of the building if fire or damage from the falling debris of the nearby WTC 1 tower were not factors. The investigation team concluded that the column's failure under any circumstance would have initiated the destructive sequence of events.

You might want to look into these resources:

Debunking 9/11 Myths: Introduction to PM Expanded Investigation

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

NIST Releases Final WTC 7 Investigation Report

You might want to look into these too:

Debunking 9/11 Myths: Introduction to PM Expanded Investigation

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

That is misinformation.

NIST Releases Final WTC 7 Investigation Report

The extensive three-year scientific and technical building and fire safety investigation found that the fires on multiple floors in WTC 7, which were uncontrolled but otherwise similar to fires experienced in other tall buildings, caused an extraordinary event. Heating of floor beams and girders caused a critical support column to fail, initiating a fire-induced progressive collapse that brought the building down.

In response to comments from the building community, NIST conducted an additional computer analysis. The goal was to see if the loss of WTC 7's Column 79—the structural component identified as the one whose failure on 9/11 started the progressive collapse—would still have led to a complete loss of the building if fire or damage from the falling debris of the nearby WTC 1 tower were not factors. The investigation team concluded that the column's failure under any circumstance would have initiated the destructive sequence of events.

You misunderstand the quote:

World Trade Center controlled demolition conspiracy theories

In the PBS documentary America Rebuilds, which aired in September 2002, Larry Silverstein, the owner of 7 WTC and leaseholder and insurance policy holder for the remainder of the WTC complex, recalled a discussion with the fire department in which doubts about containing the fires were expressed. Silverstein recalled saying, "We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it". "They made that decision to pull", he recalled, "and we watched the building collapse." Silverstein issued a statement that it was the firefighting team, not the building, that was to be pulled.[72][78][79]

You might want to look into this:

Debunking 9/11 Myths: Introduction to PM Expanded Investigation

And maybe: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

Tinfoil hat?

It was an Israeli operator SpaceCom satellite for Facebook. I would love to see the specs on that satellite to see if it was not multi-purpose?

It looks like an unmanned drone flying at supersonic speeds directly into the rocket. Doesn't need to be a missile, but needs to be small enough to not be picked up by radar. I have not seen any of the radar data released, so that would be something I would look into if I was Musk. A small drone with a small explosive payload going kamikaze?

Since it was at Cape Canaveral, Florida it would not be a stretch to think something in international waters would have difficulty launching an unmanned drone....

http://www.popularmechanics.co...