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Comment Re:As a private pilot... (Score 1) 66

Tilbit is absolutely correct, though. Nicholai Tesla did some great work, mainly in his early years, but he increasingly started making claims without any serious experimental or theoretical backing whatsoever to drum up public interest, many of which are in complete violations of the laws of physics. A lot of his claims were based on "evidence" along the lines of "It was 30 degrees yesterday and it's 40 degrees today, therefore next year Earth will be vaporized." And in a lot of cases he appears to have outright just made stuff up.

This isn't to diminish his earlier work. He was an excellent tinkerer and ran across some really useful concepts and worked out equations to describe and utilize them. But he increasingly abandoned that for hype as time went on.

Comment Re:As a private pilot... (Score 1) 66

That makes absolutely no sense, and I fail to see what relevance it has to my comment.

It makes perfect sense, so you clearly have no conception of what the person is proposing.

You're talking about flying where someone holds onto a stick and manipulates control surfaces, They're talking about flying where they punch in "123 Maple Street" and the computer flies them there. One could of course allow both modes of flight, but the latter is what most people envision (or at least what I thought most people envision) when they hear "flying car".

Beyond that, I would like to add that while flying introduces new risks for manual piloting, it also removes a lot of them. Both commercial pilots and long-haul truckers in remote locations have similar roles in terms of spacing between vehicles and time behind the wheel, but only one's job is easy enough that they can have an autopilot do it for them for 90% of the trip. Yeah, someone cruising at 20.000 feet might be doing their makeup or texting on their phone, but at least they're not going to hit a tree while doing it.

(and yes, I know that if you replace all cars with planes, the skies get a lot more crowded, which is why I compared to a remote-location trucker, just to point out that the basic situation is easier in 3 dimensions where one's "lane" is much wider, there are no ground obstacles to hit, no hills, no bends in the road, etc, and traffic is split up among many well-spaced layers that are easy for a plane to maintain... no, millions of drivers cannot fit into our ATC system as-is, and I'm not claiming that, it requires a new system with greater automation)

Comment Re:Supplant Niche (Score 1) 66

Also, I'll add that you missed the obvious criticism of flying cars - the "dropping out of the sky upon failure" one ;) Any realistic "flying car" is going to have to have some really dang good failsafe mechanisms not only to protect its occupants in such a case, but people on the ground as well.

Comment Re:Supplant Niche (Score 1) 66

Disagree. A good car doesn't have down force (beyond gravity), downforce means aerodynamic drag, a good car should rely only on the force of gravity for its grip. The things that help a plane also make a car more fuel efficient - streamlining and lightweight construction. Cars have slightly different streamlining reqs due to operating near the ground, but the general principles are the same. Of course you've got wheels out there, but so do many light planes. Lightweight construction is often described as the opposite of crash safety, which is very important in cars, but with foam core composites you can have both.

As for the GP's comments: I don't think anyone really expects your average driver of a flying car to be behind the stick controlling flight surfaces; I think most people envision something more like a good quadcopter where everything is managed for you by control software that maintains position and attitude (despite changes in balance, wind, etc) or even fly preset routes / automated traffic management. People don't envision runways, they envision VTOL. They envision not a helicopter (non-roadworthy, giant exposed spinning prop), but something roadworthy with nacelles.

One big former problem with flying cars was the weight, size, cost and complexity of the sort of high power engines you needed for them, and if you needed multiple engines (quadcopter-style), then all the more problem. It pretty much ensured that your flying car would have a supercar price tag. But electrification of transportation looks to be solving that one - high power outrunner electric motors are very simple and have just ridiculous power to weight ratios. Battery energy density is still a problem (and would be even more of a problem if your lifting surface area is limited and you lose a little efficiency to your prop geometry), but it's constantly improving, the percentage rate of growth on electric passenger airplanes is even faster than that of electric cars (although starting from a much smaller starting point, mind you).

No, I'm not saying I envision the world suddenly switching over to flying cars - far from it. I'm just pointing out that the problems aren't as intractable as folk often make them out to be.

Comment Re:No (Score 0) 264

if your privatized swat team only responds with full combat gear then that is the only hammer you have and being privatized you need to make the local cop areas use your services too.

militarization of american police is on going and is about money mostly. not about being outgunned or shit like that - and also about the short training needed to be a copper in the USA and the shit ass stupid attitudes like "you shoot only to kill!" that are not standard in other western countries..

Comment Re:So what (Score 1) 168

shrinking can allow for higher speed.

that's what makes this article sound dumb just by the blurb(..that it takes x amount of time to get to the other side of the chip and thus the chip can't run faster bullcrap).

I mean, current overclocking records are way, way, wayyy over 5ghz. so what is the point?

Comment Re:The Discovery channel? (Score 4, Insightful) 103

Both are terrible, and started going downhill around the same time, racing each other to the bottom - beginning in 2005 (when you started getting shows like Deadliest Catch and Decoding the Past, which became the prototype for many future series of increasingly less "reality"), and then full force by 2007 where you start getting too many shows to name.

One thing that drives me crazy almost as much as the blatant pseudoscience presented as fact is the extensive acting presented as reality. I mean, okay, I get it, a purely "reality" program is pretty much impossible, the very requirements of filming it make it so. Even in stuff like Les Stroud's "solo" work he always had a base camp just a couple kilometers away from him and stayed in communication with them by radio. But now the stage guidance, product promotion, and "weekly scripted adventures" have gotten so absurd and obvious, they don't even try to hide it any more. I thought that they couldn't get any lower than the bogus survival show Man vs. Wild (where the host pretended to be living in homemade shelters and surviving off wild food, when he was actually staying in luxury hotels and show consultants prepped everything from making "rafts" for him to releasing "wild" animals for him to catch). But now almost all of their shows are like that or even worse. And the product promotion, my god - have you seen the Pawn Stars plugging for Skype? If you're going to have your "reality show" stars plug a product in your show, at least get people who can act.

The changes are so visible with time, too. Take Mythbusters for example - watch some of the early eps and compare with the modern eps and look at how much more is obviously staged acting with everyone reciting a script (not to the extent of Smash Labs, but still). Apparently Discovery Communications has decided that this is what people want to see - bad actors going on "daily adventures" and having "witty banter".

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