Yep. Volt price dropped another $1200 just the other day. After tax credits it's now barely more expensive than a Prius.

i simply don't belive it. the same argument was used to justify subsidies for electric cars, yet they still don't make economic sense and are more of a novelty or rich person's toy.

Really? So the Model S costs the same as a Roadster?

Sorry if we can't please you with prices instantly dropping to 10% of their former value. I find it unfortunate that you have to be inconvenienced by the fact that these things don't instantly jump forth by orders of magnitude. But if you can't see the continual line of improvements in electric cars from the start of the California ZEV days up to the present day, then I can't help you there.

Metallic lithium is not used to produce li-ion batteries. The traded forms of lithium carbonate and lithium chloride are. And the 25kg figure would be a carbonate equivalent, not a metal equivalent.

Is this a joke? What makes you think lithium produced from the ocean is less "pure" than lithium produced from salt flats? Is the isotopic concentration wrong or something? ;)

Lithium carbonate is lithium carbonate, the world over.

I know - everyone is always hating on door nails. I myself would regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.

Of course we're not talking about what the houses uses all the time. We're talking about the spikes that make up part of everyone's everyday lives. Using the stove. Using the microwave. Using an electric kettle. Using a hair drier. Using an electric washer or drier. Running the toaster. And on and on. These things all can use 1 1/2 kW on up just on their own. Anything that needs to make heat is going to gobble down the power.

2 kW sustained max is just way too low.

Burning natural gas, aka heat, is not a "higher grade" energy than electricity, it's a lower grade energy. Electricity can be converted losslessly into heat. Turning heat into electricity loses a large chunk of it.

I agree though that 2kW sustained / 3kW peak is too low for most people - even if they don't use an electric stove. Yes, one can arrange to not use multiple high consumption devices at the same time, but the goal needs to be to not make people's lives more complicated. It's so easy to forget what you have going, too... I always forget that I can't run my microwave and my electric kettle at the same time because they're both on the same circuit and combined it's too much power consumption.

I agree. Duh, the program is obviously not perfect and screws up sometimes. But I'm amazed by how good it actually is. Even being able to just ballpark it some of the time would be impressive, but the fact that it gets pretty reasonably close most of the time, I find that incredibly impressive.

Someone on my Facebook feed was complaining about how in a washed-out picture of three children the picture guessed only two of them right, but saw one (a young boy) as an adult woman. My response was to crop out just the washed out face, take it out of context, and point out, if you saw this face, not understanding anything about the context, could you guess it? I certainly couldn't have. But that's exactly what the software has to do.

I took a number of pictures of myself in different angles, making different faces, etc, and its range on age guesses was only 3 years. My brother-in-law managed to get a 20-year difference in guesses by making faces, but I couldn't manage it, and neither could most people I know who tried. Again, computationally, it's very impressive.

Yeah, it bites all of us (I can't write a thorn here). They only care about Americans so after countless redesigns there's still no proper unicode support.

Speak for yourself. My lander was near the epicenter and I lost five crew :( I was aiming for Diablo Canyon to pick up some radioactives but I had to return to orbit to recrew.

And how exactly do you know what her DNA is? There are XX men and XY women.

And seriously, of all of the stupid measures of who someone is, DNA has to take the cake. "Okay, okay, this Stephen Hawking guy seems to be smart, but that doesn't matter, what does his DNA say? Does his DNA say he's smart? If not then I don't care what he has to say."

I don't think NASA needs to make the fictional heroes; I think every piece of sci-fi that comes out helps inspire the next generation. I guarantee you that there's tons kids and young teens who saw, say, Gravity and think that's what it is to work at NASA and have set that as their aspiration. "Astronaut" is usually in the top 10 of what kids want to be when they grow up.

More than anything else, I see the main point of having astronauts is just to inspire kids. Just knowing that there's people going up there is enough - they don't need ot be doing big stunts that cost hundreds of billions of dollars to put a footprint on a distant body; they simply need to be twirling around in zero G in LEO.

How many current astronauts can you name?
How many current astronauts can anyone here name off the top of their head?

The time of astronauts as heroes has passed. Far, far more people today do care about MESSENGER and New Horizons than they do about what astronauts are doing in space. They get more coverage in the popular press too. MESSENGER hasn't been a big public eye-catcher (except briefly when it crashed) but there was lots of attention about Rosetta, MERs, MSL, Cassini periodically (for example, the geysers of Enceladus, the Huygens landing, etc), and you better believe New Horizons is going to get a lot of coverage when it does its Pluto flyby (the public has a lot of interest in Pluto, more than in a long time due to the "demotion" controversy)

Yes, the percentage of Americans who read about these sort of things when they come up in the news (let alone follow them in depth) is probably in the 10-20% range. But so? How many specific sub-programs in the Social Security Administration or Internal Revenue Service can you name? NASA still captures the public imagination in a way that no other part of the federal government does. It doesn't take a moon landing to do that.

I'm sitting right next to a dinosaur now and scratching its head.

There wasn't an extinction of the dinosaurs. There was an extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.

I think we should secretly replace their employees with Folgers crystals and see if anyone notices.