Tesla has been able to build their supercharger stations that can charge up about a hundred miles or more worth of charge in less than an hour... where you can stop to eat lunch and have the car charge up while you are eating.... on a long drive. Basically drive for about 2-3 hours and take about an hour break. There are enough of these stations available that you can now drive across North America with this kind of driving pattern and Tesla is working on Europe.

As for the short commute, most people generally live within 50 miles of where they work. Of those who live further away, many of them even carpool or use mass transit.

For those who think golf carts powered by lead-acid batteries are the ideal of an electric automobile, your sentiment is pretty much spot on. Welcome to the 21st Century where you can buy an electric automobile that doesn't suck any more and uses Li-ion batteries for storage. If you don't like Tesla, you can always get the Nissan Leaf. Or if you don't like either, there are shops that will swap out internal combustion engines in nearly any other automobile and refit your car to an electric motor too.

I was mainly responding to the presumption that somehow self-driving automobiles are somehow technologically equivalent to automated trains. Doing stuff like Google is doing with self-driving cars is far more complex due to the need to evaluate your position on the road, varying kind of pavement, working in conjunction with other vehicles of multiple sizes that are also moving mere feet away, and requires that 3D spatial recognition that is not trivial to create a computational model to deal with potential situations that may arise when driving on a highway that lacks rails. A locomotive is far more simple of a computational model and 30 year old technology works just fine. Upgrading the technology is mainly doing something like replacing a suitcase size box of electronics with the equivalent of a Raspberry Pi.

I agree, going into manual operation is not going to be easy for an operator who hasn't been practicing routinely and trying to get the job done.

As for the 1mm travel on the throttle and other complications like that, I call that damn lousy engineering and poor user interface design. That such things exist in the real world is unfortunate, and sometimes equipment operators need to fight such issues because they get the equipment which is handed to them and simply try to do the best job they can.

Correct. In fact, the iPhone 3GS maxes out at iOS version 6. I assume the 4 or 4S can run iOS 8, but that would be the oldest version you can install it on.

Considering how Europe currently has problems getting rid of its food (due to the Russia embargo), I doubt they'd be all too unhappy to step in should the US decide to stop feeding China.

'cause it's the same cheap crap that you pay lots of money otherwise just 'cause it has a silly picture and/or a certain name on it?

China circumvented that by arriving already at where the US is still heading: A rather small sliver of rich people oppressing a mass of poor ones, while at the same time ensuring that there is little upwards mobility, but just enough to create the odd success story to keep everyone believing in the dream.

That way you can effectively eliminate a middle class. But don't worry, the US is working hard to get rid of what's left of its middle class, then the two countries will be on par again.

So? Neither are our democracies anymore.

It's a victimless crime. Or rather, a crime where the victim deserves it. It kinda cancels itself out.

Then are you offering the correct premise or should I keep guessing 'til we both lose interest?

The main controls on a train are to go forward and backward. Hardly something that needs advanced artificial intelligence and 3D spacial comprehension. It is basically a one dimensional problem when operating a train, and monitoring the rails to make sure that one dimension situation doesn't change into a 3D problem. Sure, there is monitoring the equipment on the train itself where the motors are far more complex, but even that has its limits and isn't too complicated.

Everybody who has paid for their own trip to the ISS so far has gone through cosmonaut training at Star City (at least a six month training effort where they learn all of the sub-systems of the Soyuz spacecraft) and have become fully qualified astronauts in their own right. They usually have been involved with experiments done on the ISS as well, and usually bring up something to do. They are also responsible for performing "chores" while at the station.

About the only thing these "private astronauts" don't perform is an EVA to do repairs on the outside of the ISS.

I would imagine that when Boeing or SpaceX does the same thing, a similar kind of training is going to be required. If anything, because they are American companies needing to work with NASA a whole lot more, they will be required to be much more active in regards to NASA experiments (the previous astronauts were guests of the Russian Federation). The most certainly won't be merely floating in space and staring out windows.

NASA is only paying for the flight slots. Both Boeing and SpaceX plan on reusing their respective spacecraft, although for this particular CCtCAP contract I'm pretty sure they are supposed to be all brand-new vehicles.

The CST-100 is more like the Space Shuttle so far as it needs some refurbishment that takes a little bit of time, but it is still supposed to be just a couple of months turn around time from a landing to a new launch. SpaceX is aiming for "commercial aircraft" style of reuse where they want to relaunch the vehicle potentially within the same day it lands.

Even the Dragon spacecraft which is going up tomorrow (Sunday, Sept 21st) is merely sold for the mission, and SpaceX gets that vehicle to use for its own purposes. At the moment, SpaceX is using the opportunity to take the Dragon apart to study the engineering issues that have shown up on each mission, but that will soon end.

None the less, they are real spacecraft that have life support systems which have been operating as if they could be occupied. One of them had some biological specimens (I think some insects) and it was definitely pressurized in the interior volume, not to mention that Bigelow has gained the experience of operating these modules over a long period of time.

Bigelow Aerospace is currently slated to send up a vehicle next year on a Falcon 9, and supposedly a Falcon Heavy has also been sold but not on the manifest right now. With the current launch rate that SpaceX has been pounding out lately, this seems pretty likely to happen unless it is Bigelow who isn't ready.

Yes, this is off-topic as crap. Why are you harassing me? It's pretty douchey on your part.

I looked at the woman's history, and she is a confirmed liar and publicity hound. I NEVER claimed she made up the threats, ONLY that without confirmation her word alone is not credible.

I would acknowledge that credible evidence exists that she did, in fact, file a police report, if you were to post a link to some credible source of the report. Or am I supposed to simply accept your word for it? As for acknowledging that I'm wrong - what I said is still not wrong (but it is not relevant if there is a police report). What's wrong is your characterization of what I said. Will you acknowledge that?

We will find out in America if Puerto Rico becomes a state. Maybe. The last time that happened in America was in 1959.