The NHTSA says there are 16,000 cases of "Sudden Unintended Acceleration" per year in the United States, per 263,600,000 private vehicles. Which means, that with 500,000 vehicles, over the 7 years of the study, the expected number of events would be 212.

So, if 127 events have been reported, that makes them twice as safe as the average private vehicle. Congratulations on proving the opposite of your point, Mr. Short Seller...

We tried WebEx, Skype, GoToMeeting, and BlueJeans at my company. All of them were awful in one way or another. I still shudder every time I have to go on a WebEx call from one of our clients.

Zoom has been rock stable for the last two years, and we've basically had no problems since we switched. With offices in New York and Denver and people in satellite offices all over the U.S. we use Zoom basically nonstop and it's never had any major issues. With every other service we had whole days where the system was unusable.

GoToMeeting and WebEx calls especially seemed to take half the meeting just getting through the "Can you hear me?" part of the conversation. BlueJeans made a lot of promises but was just as bad as WebEx, and never seemed to work reliably with the same hardware. Some days the cameras just wouldn't work at all. The next day they'd just mysteriously start working again, but the microphone wouldn't mute.

Skype was acceptable -- until Microsoft bought them.

Let me get this straight...

"A survey... is a data collection ploy"?

Next you'll tell me that books are an "information storage medium ploy"?

What amazing reporting.

...Australia would have jailed Abraham Zapruder for the Kennedy assassination.

Maybe we should go back to blaming the guys pulling the trigger, whether it's on the gun or the video camera.

Yeah, it'd be a great headline:

SpaceX Launches Crew Vehicle to Space Station in 1 Month, Crew in 6 months, and test Mars Rocket by end of 2019. Meanwhile VG and BO in "Hot Pursuit" with 3D Computer Simulations of Vaporware Rockets

Sorry, you can say what you want, but for all intents right now VG is flying an X-15, and BO is launching a souped up Redstone rocket, while SpaceX is actually flying a vehicle somewhere around the Saturn IB equivalent. Two of those get you to "space" in a purely academic sense of the word, but the other is a real spacecraft. In the first space race, those were over a decade apart, and that's about how far ahead SpaceX appears to be right now.

If you demand we should talk about BO and VG's orbital launchers, which, as of now, are little more than plans on a drawing board -- maybe (and we can't know since Jeff "Lex Luthor" Bezos is so ultra-secretive) an incomplete collection of parts (BE-4 engines, some fuel tanks) -- then you still have to give SpaceX the edge because they're building the Starship (nee 'BFR') now, with pictures promised by Elon in the next few weeks. (so, maybe by February).

Now, does that diminish what they accomplished today by creating a "passenger-safe" re-usable craft that can take you up to near the Karman line? No, not at all. But it does not "put SpaceX and Blue Origin to Shame" like some of the headline writers seem to be saying. Strangely, they forget to mention the billions of dollars over budget and years late Orion capsule, and Boeing Starliner in the same breath. Odd that.

You have proven we can detect previously unmeasurably small amounts of radiation. Seriouslly? You had to boil down an entire bottle of wine to 4 grams of solids, then put that into the core of a gamma ray detector, just so you can determine that instead of one atom of Cesium-137, there were two.

Talk about over-hyped headlines. The only important sentence is, "[They] showed levels to be indistinguishable from background noise."

...SpaceX is still scheduled for an unmanned crew dragon test in August, mid-flight abort/escape test in October, and first manned flight in late December. (Source: Spaceflight Now's Luanch Schedule)

The first flight article just left the Plum Brook test center bound for Florida and mating to a Falcon 9 Block 5.

I fail to see where SpaceX is behind on this. Now, if you want to look at Boeing, last I heard the first flight article has yet to even finish being built, much less undergone vacuum, vibration, and cold testing like the Crew Dragon has.

But, hey, their capsule only costs the taxpayer 50% more than the Dragon, and was started 4 years earlier.

I believe the comment made by one historian (Clay Jenkinson) was, "Thomas Jefferson was the only one of the Founding Fathers that could have written the Declaration with that grandiose style. If George Washington would have written the Declaration of Independence, it would have read, 'We Quit!'"

You do realize that the thermite reaction (Fe2O3 + 2 Al 2 Fe + Al2O3) has no vapor byproducts. The alumina is a solid, and the iron comes out as a liquid. i.e. There's no smoke from a thermite reaction.

Let me extend that argument: Reactors don't fail if people follow safety procedures.

If the argument isn't good enough for nuclear power, then it's not good enough for solar power either.

First of all, you didn't read the unit of measure. It's deaths per terrawatt hour of power production. The rest of your response is gibberish because of that.

Solar power kills, yes, through falling off roofs, but also from the very fact that these are panels generating kilowatts of power. Touch the wrong wire and you just as toasted as if the power came from a coal plant.

Finally, the fact that you think 6th generation nuclear plants (unlike the 1st generation Chernobyl, and the second generation Fukushima plants) explode, shows just how ignorant you are about the advances in nuclear generation technology.

The truly sad part about Fukushima, is that, while so far zero people have actually died from that plant, on the same day over 20,000 people died from the 9.0 earthquake and ensuing tsunami that damaged the plant far beyond its design parameters. Of course, we've forgotten all about those so we can all point at the word radiation and run around like children.

There's far less radiation within 100 yards of fukushima daishi 1, as there is on most of the beaches in Brazil.

Please, go pick up a book or at least google liquid salt thorium reactors.

Wind and solar are safer? Try again (Sorry for the formatting)

Deaths per terrawatt hour (Worldwide):
Coal (world) 244.00
Oil 52.00
Biofuel/Biomass 50.00
Peat 50.00
Natural Gas 20.00
Coal (US) 10.00
Wind 0.15
Solar 0.10
Hydro 0.10
Nuclear (world) 0.04


Data from here. The Nuclear number is inflated by Chernobyl, which represents over 95% of the deaths from nuclear power.

These represent numbers from the entire history of power production. Solar is getting safer (mostly because of already installed panels continuing to produce power) but the installation of solar panels is still the 7th most dangerous job, with a fatality rate of over 32 workers per 100,000.

Aluminum was more valuable than gold before Deville came along and figured out electrolysis in 1859. Guess what made that process so cheap that we now throw piles of aluminum cans away without a thought -- not that we should?

Cheap electricity.

Guess what? You can extract iron from ore using electrolysis as well.

Iron Metal Production through Bulk Electrolysis
Green Iron

A nuclear plant could easily power a processing plant to produce methane from the CO2 in the air and water (Sabatier reaction). The high energy density of liquid methane fuel can then be used on aircraft with a net-zero carbon footprint. The net effect is a "nuclear powered airplane."

Many steel plants already use induction furnaces for for melt processes, but the addition of coke to remove impurities is a required part of the process. Using induction heating with a much smaller carbon injection reduces the footprint from steel production, while CO2 capture and electrolytic splitting becomes possible with massive energy sources. In other words, capture the CO2 that does come off, and re-split it to carbon and oxygen, which also lets you re-use the carbon on the next batch of steel. Bonus.

The real killer is concrete production, as the cooking off of CO2 to create portland cement is actually one of the major sources of CO2 in America. Again, capture and reprocessing becomes possible with the availability of cheap power, though I personally think alternatives to traditional cement need to be found.

In any case, abundant energy at low prices derived from an "assembly line" 6th generation walk-away safe nuclear reactor would solve pretty much every one of the problems out there when it comes to carbon emissions and energy. And that merely assumes fission. With Lockheed supposedly producing a "semi-truck sized" fusion 100MW fusion plant that could be parked next to any major factory, the game changes even more.