I'm guessing that the Secret Service has been instructed to not let anyone with a wooden stake and a small brick near him...

Wow. If you're joking, good dig... If you're serious, then Slashdot is well and truly lost...

How many platinum seconds to a New York Minute?

No, but I met George Clayton Johnson once. He sure looked like he could use a renewal. He had started babbling about how we're now living in a science fiction age with computers and cell phones and the Internet.

Come to think of it, he looked like he could have been cosplaying Gandalf or Dumbledore too.

So is the Universe coming, or going?

Carousel begins!

Renew!

Renew!

I've actually had a +4 of one of the negatives before, but it's been many, many years since that happened.

Not necessarily true. Those that travel in their own vehicles for their work-day, doing service calls or other appointments, or handling jobsite work or other field work would probably exceed the range. Those that live in-town and work in agriculture or oil extraction probably would exceed the range.

You're probably still looking at the overwhelming majority being able to use the all-electric car, but don't mistake that everyone would be okay, many would not.

And if that couple has two cars, and if they want new cars, then it makes sense for one of those two cars to be electric.

My commute is 20 miles round-trip. My wife's is 40 miles round-trip. Nearly every type of store or business that we do regular business with is along our commutes. We could easily commute with an electric without running out of range, even if we had to go ten miles out of our way to do so, and even if we couldn't plug-in at our places of employment, though I expect that the positive press from the charging station would make that pretty likely.

Where's the body-shell made?

From a safety point of view, that's where Chinese cars have been problematic, not in their brakes, or even their seatbelts or airbags.

Yes, melting plastic in a closed environment. Brilliant. Instead of planning for their little hobby-jump in Low Earth Orbit, let's bring a cranky, tiny toy to make coat hangers... (in free-fall LOL). I just love the armchair engineers and programmers here going on about the 3D printer will be this tool to help colonize the universe..

I never said that it would help colonize the universe.

I expect that it'll be useful when that plastic tab on that rocker switch that's used all of the time breaks off, so they an print themselves a replacement instead of waiting weeks or months for a resupply mission to bring them one, or when an astronaut realizes that a particular control stick or other device is causing skin abrasions, so they could design and print a different one that doesn't cause sores, or any of a whole set of times when a spaceman needs some small, insignificant-on-earth part that is literally worth its weight in gold because they just don't have access to it.

I could even see circumstances in an Apollo-Thirteen kind of accident where engineers at NASA could come up with a fix that's safer and more reliable than duct-taping some plastic sheeting to a bulkhead because the tech to manufacture a few parts exists with those that need those parts.

I actually don't care for this modern 3d printer hype, but this is one of the few places where I could see a 3d printer being particularly useful.

Thing is, you're melting plastic and placing that melted plastic where you want it to be. In gravity and endless atmosphere this is easy, the gravity helps feed the raw materials through a hopper and ensure that the plastic stays where you place it, and the essentially endless atmosphere carries away noxious fumes so that you don't poison yourself. Unfortunately on a space station or in a spacecraft you have no effective gravity and a very limited atmosphere, so you cannot pollute nor can you rely on gravity to make things go where you want them.

Consider the effort and design that goes into the toilet. A simple act that humans have always done on Earth is not so simple in space, and millions of dollars have been spent to account for biology designed to function with gravity assistance when that gravity is not available.

In Boeing's defense, it's b-o-e-i-n-g, not 'boing'. A trampoline was never being considered.