It makes brains so big it takes two stories to cover them.

Yes, aluminum is slowly becoming more adopted - although "slowly" is the operative word. Corvettes are not mass manufactured (tens of thousands per year) and are made of single-layer e-glass with polyester, which kind of sucks. Supercars are built better but are in much smaller quantities. And the point of needing to make them affordable and scaling up, that's my point. :)

You're joking, right? Before Tesla the stereotype of an electric car was a nerdy thing with the performance of a golf cart. They completely changed the public perception of electric cars, built vehicles with double the performance and range of the previous best electric cars, getting some of the highest car reviews and satisfaction ratings *ever* given for *any* type of car, and managed to start a brand new car company with a huge valuation, the first new US car company to make it big since the 1930s. Give them some F'ing credit.

Right, I cant imagine how Apple could possibly manage figuring out mass production of exotic materials...

Because that's clearly their field of expertise?

This might allow a competitor such as apple to completely end run the industry because all those years making gas driven drive trains

You mean, like Tesla already did?

complexities in making a great steering system all vanish in this transition.

Wait, you're talking self-driving cars with *no* manual override? Okay, that's going to be permitted first thing, in the year 2047... ;)

a legacy of factories not suitable for modern materials

A widespread transition to composites (which I really, really hope for) could do that, in a way that a switch to aluminum or other metals couldn't (working with aluminum isn't the same as steel, but you still have the basic principles of stamping, cutting, molding, welding etc, which all get thrown out the door when working with composites). But someone needs to find a way to make the composites competitive in a mass-manufacturing, non-niche environment. And preferably when I say "composites" we're not talking single layer E-glass and polyester here.... at the very least it needs to be foam or honeycomb cored with a vinyl ester resin to give the strength and longevity desired. Carbon fiber and epoxy would of course be even better if a good price point can be met. And hopefully in the future we'll be able to affordably get rid of more and more of those hydrogens in the structure... reinforced graphene/ta-C would probably be pretty close to the ultimate manufacturing material one could get, combining the highest known tensile strength with the highest known hardness and compressive strengths.

No, the GP is correct. The requirements for vehicles are radically different for portable electronics, and this leads to very different design choices. Tell me when was the last time you saw an iPod with an air conditioner just to cool its battery pack (which sometimes runs even when the iPod isn't in use), or a heater for cold weather charging? When was the last time you saw a iPhone with a battery that was warrantied for as much as a decade? When was the last time you saw an iPad that was rated by the manufacturer to have no problems after sitting out every day every winter in temperatures of -20C, summer temperatures of +40C with no shade, etc? When was the last time you saw any sort of portable electronics that broke its batteries up into separately sealed canisters that prevent fire from propagating from one to the next, or that can withstand a highway-speed collision? Portable electronics generally don't even do any charge balancing, let alone the sort of "be able to handle the loss of entire clusters of batteries" sort of management that vehicle packs have to be able to do (eg, rather than single cell or a couple-cells-in-series like consumer electronics, the Roadster has 6831 cells clustered into "bricks" of 69 cells in parallel to minimize the effects of individual failures, 9 bricks series per sheet, and 11 sheets, with moderate monitoring and control at the brick level and heavy monitoring and control at the sheet level).

The requirements are not similar, and as a consequence, neither are the packs.

Wrong again. Energy density is of critical importance in both applications.

No, you are the one who is again wrong. EV battery packs are generally significantly lower energy density than portable electronics battery packs, AND they generally run at lower DOD ranges, not charging up to full and not being allowed to even near total discharge. Often a lower-density chemistry is used as well for the same longevity reasons, such as a phosphate or manganese spinel (although a couple manufacturers, Tesla being the most notable, currently use cobalt 18650s). This sort of careful charge maintenance and lower density chemistry election, plus charge balancing, temperature maintenance, and fault isolation and tolerance are necessary to meet the sort of longevity demands of vehicle consumers, which are very different from the longevity demands of users of portable electronics.

The two top demands of EV battery packs are longevity and cost, and these far outstretch the importance of energy density. People could give a rat's arse if their car is 50 kilos lighter if they can't afford to purchase it or have to swap out the pack after three years. Don't get me wrong, weight is an important issue (mainly in terms of ride quality, and to a smaller degree efficiency), but it's not on the same order of magnitude of effect in terms of marketability as longevity and cost.

I think you're mixing some things up. The EV1's tires were standard size (P175/65R14) and only 50 PSI. They were low rolling resistance but nothing spectacular by modern standards. I certainly hope to see big advances in tires in the coming decades (we really need tires that can adapt to the circumstances, changing their pressure and thread area / type in contact with the ground area depending on conditions and driver demands), but there's no radical departures I'm aware of coming in the immediate future.

Yes, I would welcome any chance to see the US move to metric and catch up with everyone else.

I can't think of a single EV today that is "harder to open". But as stated I can easily envision Apple doing that. I can't envision any of the current manufacturers doing that.

It's funny to joke about, but I think the concept of them only allowing it to be serviced at Apple-certified garages would be quite high. They'd probably allow the tires and the like to be done elsewhere, but I have little doubt that they'd restrict access to any internals. And would charge a fortune for trivial tasks.

24 hours *if* you have air resistance. And then you're moving so slow that you barely get past the center.

Note that no vacuum is perfect so you will lose velocity. Their scenario should have started the person off at the south pole, not the north, for the extra altitude.

Note that the heat isn't really the materials problem that they make it out to be - it's an energy problem. You don't need a material that can withstand 4000, you just need cooling. And not linearly high cooling, but an exponential decline. The longer you cool the rock down to your target temperature, the deeper your effect on the rock temperature behind your tunnel walls, and thus the shallower the temperature gradient, and thus the lower the rate of heat loss. It's like trying to cool a hot house - the air conditioner really struggles in the beginning but it gradually becomes easier with time as the walls and everything inside the house cool down.

Now, the pressures, those are insane, and the normal approach to pressure maintenance on deep drilling - filling with a heavy mud - obviously wouldn't work here.

Sort of. Stealth aircraft are not perfect, they have some radar cross signature, and a low frequency radar significantly increases cross signatures. But the cost of this was vastly reduced range. The Serbs mentioned in the article had to wait until the plane was almost directly overhead to get a lock.

That said, that Serbian radar unit was incredibly clever, I've read about a lot of their tactics. They raided scrapyards all over the country and ripped radars off of old military jets and tweaked them to make dummies to confuse HARMs, they worked out down to seconds how long they could paint a plane before they had to flee and how to accurately predict when and where the coalition would fly what aircraft, they deliberately let jets past on bombing raids (knowing that they'd be dropping bombs on their own people) in order to get them on the way back when they'd be more vulnerable, they hand-modified their old Soviet radars to change their frequencies out of the design specs, swapping out capacitors and the like so that they wouldn't be detected by coalition forces and would stand a better chance at hitting stealth craft, etc. They were drilled and managed incredibly well. If the whole Serbian military had done as well as they did, Serbia would have held out far better.

What's really funny is that some people think they are giving technology to the gummit in exchange for the right to probe some of us. As if they would need permission.

Also, it's easier to hold a shield while operating a javelin.

Hopefully they might have fewer Star Wars prequels.

Kinda Apples and Oranges. UL testing is fairly straight-forward. The quick explanation - they stress the device in various ways and see if it catches on fire. Checking a crypto setup to a reasonable level of satisfaction can't be done externally. The code for the entire system must be examined, and that is relatively difficult to do.

-Matt

It's a cute concept, but the simple fact is, if you have some simple technology for gravity control that can take a primitive society whizzing around the cosmos, then that primitive society wouldn't be using flintlocks for battle. Because if you control gravity to the point that you can hop some primitive ship in and out of gravity wells and move at relativistic speeds then you're controlling *vast* amounts of energy to do so. And there's no way such a species is going to only make use of this vast amount of energy in their spaceships but not their weapons - even if they're only kinetic impactors.

My thoughts exactly. The environments we've physically checked so far are:

Earth: High degree of confidence that there is life here.
Moon: A couple spots on the surface, moderate degree of confidence that there is no life there. Surface in general, low degree of confidence, based only on comparing the few places we've checked with how the geology looks from orbit, with no data from many types of terrain. Elsewhere: no degree of confidence.
Mars: Same.
Elsewhere in the solar system: no degree of confidence (no other probes to other bodies have returned samples or returned data that would allow us to have any sort of confidence in determining whether life was present or not)
Elsewhere in the universe: no degree of confidence.

Many people gladly make assumptions about where life would or wouldn't be, but that's of course highly anthropocentric. "We need water, a solid rocky surface, a low radiation environment, temperatures in the 273-330 kelvin range, and these building blocks..." - you have no idea what you actually need, you have a sample size of "1". That's why people obsess over, say, Europa, despite us having absolutely zero evidence that there's any sort of life there. Heck, the best direct evidence currently on hand for life outside of Earth is probably Titan's "acetylene / ethane, hydrogen, and methane problem" (acetylene and ethane seem to be highly deficient at the surface compared to what should be there; there's some evidence that hydrogen may be disappearing at the surface; and Titan's methane persistence over geological times has long baffled; before the data on acetylene, ethane, and hydrogen was even known, it had been theorized that any life on Titan would most likely metabolize acetylene and ethane with hydrogen into methane). Plus, we know that there's extensive organic chemistry making all kinds of complex CHN "building blocks" in the upper atmosphere. But any life on Titan would have to be utterly different than LAWKI to survive the radically different environment.