Sure. Or, just make it a hybrid drive with charging from the grid and have the best of both worlds.

Fire trucks are a small enough part of the vehicles out there to be less of a worry for efficiency. Reliability is a big thing for emergency vehicles.

There are a lot of garbage trucks and other utility type trucks out there that do short range stop and start runs that would probably make a lot bigger difference.

I'm quite familiar with intermodal transport. It becomes useful on longer runs. But, being able to just hook in to a powered feed is a lot more flexible.

For intermod, you have to have a truck and driver on either end of the rail link, plus the time to assemble the train, etc. It's quite efficient in a lot of ways, but unwieldy for mid range loads.

The short haul is a lot easier to do with batteries.

I like the idea of catenary wires or some other way for a truck on a freeway to get electric power from the road itself.

Use battery or a hybrid system to get from the customer pick up to the nearest interstate and them hook up to the electric for the long drive, and let the truck drive itself. Have that lane separate from the manual driving lanes.

An alarm sounds when it's time for the driver to take back over (or stops the truck in a safe place if the driver fails to take back over).

Makes the control system for the automatic driving part much easier as it's just following a wire or other guide.

Fire trucks have to use their engines for extended periods to run the on board pumps during major fires.

Bad enough having to find a hydrant. Imagine having to find an electrical outlet with sufficient current capacity to keep electric pumps going after the batteries are down.

The links aren't very informative.

Is it one of the weakened strains that's used for making oral polio vaccine? Those aren't terribly dangerous as they're already given orally to kids. They also tend to be present in the water in the areas oral vaccine is still given, as people shed the vaccine strain virus as they are building immunity.

Is it a full up wild type polio that might be used at some stage of making the injected vaccine?

And that's just a couple of questions I've got. Details makes a difference.

Not so random. Maybe a long ways distant. (i.e. It's vaporware, but give us more money.)

One of the problems of current quantum computing qubits is they are easily upset by thermal and other noise from their surroundings.

There are certain systems that involve Majorana fermions that have been theorized to be what are called topologically protected states. These would be largely immune to noise in a way similar to how electron pairs in a superconductor are immune to the normal energy losses that cause resistance in a wire.

A problem with this, is, we hadn't really shown that Majorana fermions actually existed.

This is a hot area of solid state physics research. Note that these are not particles in the usual sense, but things that behave like particles (like electron pairs in a superconductor behave kinda sorta like single particles). They fall under the general term of quasiparticles.

You mean everything: Doesn't have good coverage in the small town I'm in? Or, the batteries don't last long enough? Or gets roaming charges when in the wrong place?

Yeah... Big win...

This not only discusses it, but has a link to the actual Phys Rev Letters paper. Jester (the blogger) thinks it may be a more mundane explanation, but still an interesting one.

http://resonaances.blogspot.co...

"like lions and tigers keep their prey genetically healthy by picking off the bad ones, but you got a drug that keeps them away"

I don't think ZMapp is a very good lion or tiger repellant.

Cooked food.

That's a very old technology that I just can't seem to give up.

Steak tartare just doesn't sit well with my tummy, and a glass full of raw eggs for breakfast is right out, regardless of what Rocky thought.

And don't even get me started about raw potatos.

(Clue: Technology is not just electronics.)

No. There is another.

"Ivanova is god."

In response to shelling from South Ossetia which you somehow don't think of as a violation (of an agreement that only Russia recognized). The history behind that war is long, and each side can come up with justifications.

By your logic, the current war in Gaza wouldn't be considered aggressive because Israel was responding to rocket fire.

It's all aggressive. Your logic seems to be "My guys are good, so they are beyond criticism." Horse hockey.

"you'd be rotting in a cell for 25 years."

Mostly because the legal system is so slow it'd take that long to even get to trial.

As an Indian I know joked: "The British gave us stifling bureaucracy, but we PERFECTED it!"

Sounds like you don't just have memory troubles, but factual troubles as well.

Russia is indeed a major player in BRICS, but the Chinese economy is fully 4 times as large. Even Brazil's GDP is greater.

Now, how a dust up in the Ukraine will sink an economic union that the rest of outweighs Russia by 6 to 1 in GDP is beyond me. The Brazillians, Chinese, and Indians are not being heavily impacted by this.

Start learning some history. This is about the fact on the ground that it's extremely difficult to defend Western Russia without having at least a neutral Ukraine. It's just not far enough from Europe to Moscow. The military in Russia has a long memory, and it includes Napoleon and Nazi Germany invading. The Russian high command knows that the defense in depth and the long cold winter retreat in both cases was what let them win. Without the Ukraine they get very nervous.

This conspiracy theory that it's all to undermine BRICS at the behest of the Rothschilds or some other bogeyman/illuminati is laughable.

"The last time the Russians got this aggressive was their invasion of Afghanistan under Jimmy Carter"

I think you're forgetting that they invaded Georgia when George W. Bush was president.

I think that counts as pretty aggressive.