> "natural financing source would be venture capital" . . . "they failed to convince anyone relevant"

I suspect most of those "relevant" people remember the whole Cold Fusion flap and have had it drilled into their heads that Fusion Is Bogus. Also, every time I even raise the subject of fusion in conversation, somebody retorts with the well-traveled saying that, "Fusion power is forty years away -- and always will be!", as if that was the definitive, final word on the subject.

For venture capital, the decision not to invest in fusion research -- any fusion research, by anyone -- is easy to make.

The article has no mention of any competing ships. Odd omission, isn't it?

The 2001 reference is particularly off-target here, since Boing are developing a mere capsule while SNC are developing a proper spaceplane. Their Dream Chaser will subject its occupants to much less G-forces during reentry, will have greater cross-range landing capability, and even has hybrid rocket engines on board for on-orbit maneuvering and other uses (such as flying the ship away safely if there's a booster failure). Plus, the Dream Chaser actually looks like a spaceship. What does Boeing have to counter that? Interior decorating!

Are we still talking about physically packing specimens of homo sapiens in some kind of gross physical vessel and somehow propelling it across interstellar space? Seriously?? This is the 21st Century, man! It's been obvious for a while now -- several decades at least -- that there are far, far more efficient ways to colonize the galaxy.

By the time interstellar travel becomes feasible, in terms of both technology and resources, surely our AI technology, our robotics technology, our molecular synthesis and manufacturing technology, and our understanding of biology and genetics should be easily advanced enough to ship a manufactory to the destination star system and then FAX across everything and everyone else that is needed there. The explorers and colonists are most likely to be AIs and robots -- although there's nothing to prevent transmitting and synthesizing human beings as well, if it makes any kind of sense to do so. (A human being off planet Earth is like a fish out of water, unless and until we win the cosmic lottery and stumble onto Earth 2.)

I just... I don't know what people are thinking when they trot out these star travel ideas that sound like something from the 1960s. Star travel is an idea about the future. Why do so many people look at this with their minds stuck in the past?

That's thinking outside the box. I like it. Nintendo should do it. But they won't. I might even say they "can't". It's a plan diametrically opposed to their entire corporate culture, their history, their way of thinking. It's hard enough for an individual to do a U-turn like that, but for a publicly held corporation with several thousand employees... They just can't.

Sometimes the old empire just has to fall, and new ones rise.

quote: "Apple crushed Nintendo by creating iOS devices and opening up it's platform to indie devs for a minimal fee."

The irony cuts deep. Nintendo first exploded into success by locking down the NES and keeping out all the crap games that had clogged the Atari VCS/2600 market. It's not easy for a company to turn against the strategy that made them. Why did it work so well then, but is backfiring now?

quote: "One big problem with netbooks was that people assumed that could MS Word, and when they found out they couldn't they returned the computer."

Did this actually happen or is it just an urban myth? (or Microsoft/Intel FUD?)

The way I remember things, there was a lot of buzz about a wave of ARM+Linux netbooks that were supposedly coming soon, and I wanted one, and none of them ever actually made it to market.

You can hate that term all you want, but it's been widely used for decades, and the rest of us aren't going to change our terminology because you posted a comment on Slashdot. Better get used to it.

As for the whole "long tailpipe" argument against EVs, that's so ten years ago. Come back when you get caught up with the debate.

I don't understand your maths. The article says they are aiming for 3.3 million vehicles. How did you arrive at 100 million?? That would be roughly a third of the cars in the USA! Nobody is expecting EVs to be adopted on that scale within that time frame.

As for the strain on the electrical grid... It may lead to some regional problems as the usage patterns change, but electric cars should not drastically increase the total national demand for electricity. Gasoline consumption will be reduced, and it takes a lot of electrical power to refine gasoline (especially as more low-grade crude continues to come onto the market).

The first six items in your list also apply to the huge amounts of electricity consumed by oil refineries in the production of gasoline!

You're totally right, and I think the industry is keenly aware of this, and they are working on how to address it.

Gasoline cars have been mass-produced and cost-reduced for decades. It's really quite amazing to look at the cost of an internal combustion engine and see just how cheap they are, considering the materials, parts and tolerances that they require to produce them. The same can and should happen to electric cars, but it just doesn't happen overnight, and it won't ever happen without them being in active production.

The Tesla Model S is Tesla's second car, and it's a huge advance over the Roadster. The Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf are first-generation products. We're just at the beginning of this change, so be patient!

Couple of points to make...

Coal is already on the decline in the USA, being squeezed out by cheaper (and much cleaner) natural gas. The Chinese, on the other hand, are building coal plants like crazy.

Many people don't realize that those magic oil refineries are most likely connected to coal burning plants too. Oil refineries use enormous amounts of electricity. I've seen an estimate that refining a gallon of gasoline requires as much electrical power as you need to move an electric car the same distance, given typical efficiencies.

IF you have your car in a garage and charge it overnight, then you may rarely ever need to charge it away from home -- only for road trips, really. Depending on your driving habits, you may go months without visiting a charging station.

Even then, if you have a Model S and stop at a Supercharger station, you'll have the option of paying for a battery swap, which can get you back on the road in about two minutes.

Finally... Remember that even 3 million cars is only about 1% of the cars in the USA. Today's electric car technology can't meet everyone's needs, but I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine it meeting the needs of 1% of the population. Things can grow from there as the technology continues to improve.

We had a long journey to get where we are now, with HDTV and large, flat screens, and surround sound in the "home theater". It was a worthwhile journey, because now we can watch the entire back catalog of movies, going back many decades, pretty close to the way they were meant to be seen. That was the destination, and we've finally arrived, and there's really nowhere else to go from here. The technology is a solved problem. 3D and 4K are answers in search of a problem.

From now on, it should all be about the content. Movie making, as an art, was largely perfected by the 1970s -- and yet, somehow a lot of bad movies (to say nothing of TV shows) still get produced. Putting them out in 3D or 4K won't make them good.

I've never understood how there can be any kind of debate about free will. To me it's like debating whether gravity exists. Maybe it's all just an illusion -- some sort of mass hallucination, perhaps? -- that leads us to think we're clinging to the surface of this orb in space?

To me, free will is demonstrated by every mark we make on the world. I mean, consider my house. It's not a natural formation; it didn't get here by accident. Somebody chose the site, drew up the plans, and decided to build it. That's free will. If there's no free will, then what is my house? A mirage? A dream?

People arguing against free will remind me of the philosophers Douglas Adams described in the Hitchhiker's Guide -- coming up with elaborate proofs that black is white, and then getting run over at the next zebra crossing.

My favorite film is Kodak Ektar 100, the modern wonder-film. It has super-fine grain, scans great, and produces vivid in-your-face colors. It makes everything look good -- except white people! Caucasians generally come out looking pink and sunburned. Well, I guess that's why Kodak sell Portra film too.