Tilbit is absolutely correct, though. Nicholai Tesla did some great work, mainly in his early years, but he increasingly started making claims without any serious experimental or theoretical backing whatsoever to drum up public interest, many of which are in complete violations of the laws of physics. A lot of his claims were based on "evidence" along the lines of "It was 30 degrees yesterday and it's 40 degrees today, therefore next year Earth will be vaporized." And in a lot of cases he appears to have outright just made stuff up.

This isn't to diminish his earlier work. He was an excellent tinkerer and ran across some really useful concepts and worked out equations to describe and utilize them. But he increasingly abandoned that for hype as time went on.

That makes absolutely no sense, and I fail to see what relevance it has to my comment.

It makes perfect sense, so you clearly have no conception of what the person is proposing.

You're talking about flying where someone holds onto a stick and manipulates control surfaces, They're talking about flying where they punch in "123 Maple Street" and the computer flies them there. One could of course allow both modes of flight, but the latter is what most people envision (or at least what I thought most people envision) when they hear "flying car".

Beyond that, I would like to add that while flying introduces new risks for manual piloting, it also removes a lot of them. Both commercial pilots and long-haul truckers in remote locations have similar roles in terms of spacing between vehicles and time behind the wheel, but only one's job is easy enough that they can have an autopilot do it for them for 90% of the trip. Yeah, someone cruising at 20.000 feet might be doing their makeup or texting on their phone, but at least they're not going to hit a tree while doing it.

(and yes, I know that if you replace all cars with planes, the skies get a lot more crowded, which is why I compared to a remote-location trucker, just to point out that the basic situation is easier in 3 dimensions where one's "lane" is much wider, there are no ground obstacles to hit, no hills, no bends in the road, etc, and traffic is split up among many well-spaced layers that are easy for a plane to maintain... no, millions of drivers cannot fit into our ATC system as-is, and I'm not claiming that, it requires a new system with greater automation)

Also, I'll add that you missed the obvious criticism of flying cars - the "dropping out of the sky upon failure" one ;) Any realistic "flying car" is going to have to have some really dang good failsafe mechanisms not only to protect its occupants in such a case, but people on the ground as well.

Disagree. A good car doesn't have down force (beyond gravity), downforce means aerodynamic drag, a good car should rely only on the force of gravity for its grip. The things that help a plane also make a car more fuel efficient - streamlining and lightweight construction. Cars have slightly different streamlining reqs due to operating near the ground, but the general principles are the same. Of course you've got wheels out there, but so do many light planes. Lightweight construction is often described as the opposite of crash safety, which is very important in cars, but with foam core composites you can have both.

As for the GP's comments: I don't think anyone really expects your average driver of a flying car to be behind the stick controlling flight surfaces; I think most people envision something more like a good quadcopter where everything is managed for you by control software that maintains position and attitude (despite changes in balance, wind, etc) or even fly preset routes / automated traffic management. People don't envision runways, they envision VTOL. They envision not a helicopter (non-roadworthy, giant exposed spinning prop), but something roadworthy with nacelles.

One big former problem with flying cars was the weight, size, cost and complexity of the sort of high power engines you needed for them, and if you needed multiple engines (quadcopter-style), then all the more problem. It pretty much ensured that your flying car would have a supercar price tag. But electrification of transportation looks to be solving that one - high power outrunner electric motors are very simple and have just ridiculous power to weight ratios. Battery energy density is still a problem (and would be even more of a problem if your lifting surface area is limited and you lose a little efficiency to your prop geometry), but it's constantly improving, the percentage rate of growth on electric passenger airplanes is even faster than that of electric cars (although starting from a much smaller starting point, mind you).

No, I'm not saying I envision the world suddenly switching over to flying cars - far from it. I'm just pointing out that the problems aren't as intractable as folk often make them out to be.

Trust me, you don't want to get spanked by them.

And their christmas gifts are terrible.

You live somewhere where daily highs in your garage below -30C are "normal" (implying highs of -40 to -50 outside)? Where do you live, the freaking moon? And you'd store your car suchly without plugging it in?

Both are terrible, and started going downhill around the same time, racing each other to the bottom - beginning in 2005 (when you started getting shows like Deadliest Catch and Decoding the Past, which became the prototype for many future series of increasingly less "reality"), and then full force by 2007 where you start getting too many shows to name.

One thing that drives me crazy almost as much as the blatant pseudoscience presented as fact is the extensive acting presented as reality. I mean, okay, I get it, a purely "reality" program is pretty much impossible, the very requirements of filming it make it so. Even in stuff like Les Stroud's "solo" work he always had a base camp just a couple kilometers away from him and stayed in communication with them by radio. But now the stage guidance, product promotion, and "weekly scripted adventures" have gotten so absurd and obvious, they don't even try to hide it any more. I thought that they couldn't get any lower than the bogus survival show Man vs. Wild (where the host pretended to be living in homemade shelters and surviving off wild food, when he was actually staying in luxury hotels and show consultants prepped everything from making "rafts" for him to releasing "wild" animals for him to catch). But now almost all of their shows are like that or even worse. And the product promotion, my god - have you seen the Pawn Stars plugging for Skype? If you're going to have your "reality show" stars plug a product in your show, at least get people who can act.

The changes are so visible with time, too. Take Mythbusters for example - watch some of the early eps and compare with the modern eps and look at how much more is obviously staged acting with everyone reciting a script (not to the extent of Smash Labs, but still). Apparently Discovery Communications has decided that this is what people want to see - bad actors going on "daily adventures" and having "witty banter".

in an 11,000 volt cable

Actually, since it's for optical data transfer, not power transmission, it's a 11,000 volt line. When it's for power transmission, it's called magma.

Well, at least it wasn't a... eukaryotic strain of flu virus?

My BS detector went off when I saw that graph, so I had to actually read the paper... and now I understand the graph and it's not at all what it seems to be.

See that giant circle for silver? That doesn't mean "a massive amount of silver", or even "a massive amount of environmental impact from silver". These circles are sized proportionally to how much more of a resource is needed than in the current generation mix, if all power came from that source. Since almost no silver is used in the current generation mix, anything that actually uses silver - even if a rather small amount - will dramatically inflate its circle.

In all of the study's graphs, the amount of silver used is so small that the bars don't even register one pixel tall, so you can't really estimate how much they're talking about. The only graph where you see any height at all, Fig 8, is the graph relative to total world production - but even in their highest scenario it's less than 0.5% of world production. And the study itself notes, "Silver in PV cells might be replaced by other metals". Silver has only a 6% better conductivity than copper, it's not a big difference. And if you're willing to use slightly thicker or more frequent connects, you can use cheap and hyper-abundant aluminum. Either way, the amount of metal involved is practically irrelevant, the interconnects we're talking about here are practically microscopic.

or a feral possum.

How dare anyone make fun of Pluto after all it's been through!

7 Up has a mass of 16.1+4.9-3.5 MeV/c.

Um, yeah, I don't believe you for even a quarter second.

1. Nobody who runs a wind farm would refer to wind turbines as "windmills". Seriously, that's like a third-grade level mistake. This is a windmill. This is a wind turbine. Nobody in the industry would ever call a wind turbine a windmill, they'd get laughed at.

2. The typical bat in the US weighs about 10 grams. Even if we assume that the "trucks" are only pickup trucks that can haul 2 tonnes and your use of the plural only means two - about the lowest possible way we could interpret your "truckloads every year" comment - that would be 400 thousand bats per year. Your mere 700 commercial-scale wind turbines (less than 2% of the US total) would have long ago driven to local extinction any bats in your area.

The reality, of course, is that estimates for all bat deaths from wind turbines in the US combined range from about 30k per year to 800k per year. All combined.

3. Your "destroys the health of operators and technicians" line puts you solidly in autism-vaccine cookoo land.

Just ignoring your grossly inaccurate description of wind power availability, or the concept that a wind farm operator is going to hire someone who despises wind power with a red-hot passion to run their facility.