Usually if a gasoline tank is punctured, the fuel would just leak out, and not catch on fire. If its diesel, its much more unlikely to catch fire. The best way to deal with a battery fire is to eject it. This has been done historically on some aircraft with NiCad batteries. The batteries are kept in an isolated bay and is held in by fusible links. If the battery goes into a thermal runaway, it will drop out of the bottom of the plane and become somebody else's problem. Tesla could implement a modular battery design, with a grid of shields to allow the same functionality. Perhaps they will do this in the future.

http://xkcd.com/644/

I flew for the airlines up until 2005, well before the tablets in the cockpit.

None of the airlines are replacing critical paper copies with an electronic version. Historically, there would be three copies of all the manuals and charts, one for the captain, one for the first officer, and one for the airplane.

The iPads replace the 40 pounds of paper that each pilot used to be required to carry.

The aviaion industry is probably the most cautious and slow moving industry out there (in response to the poster who brought up decades-old technology in the cockpit). Pilots welcome the new technology -- it usually makes their jobs easier, but it must pass an unbelievable amount of scrutiny (over the course of many many years) before it can actually completely replace an older, but proven tech.

Plenty of old engines can get a supplemental type certificate (STC) to run on motor gas. The problem is that gasoline is hard to find these days. In Massachusetts, there is not a single service station, on or off airport that sells gasoline. They all sell gasohol, which is gasoline with 10% ethanol (or in rare cases MTBE) added. Every STC that I've seen specifically excludes fuel with alchohol additives. One reason being alcohol's affinity for water. You need to be able to separate out the water from the fuel and you can't do it if alchol is present. At high altitudes (cold temperatures), water, or hydrous ethanol can become slushy, clogging fuel lines and filters. Needless to say, that's very bad. Cubs and Ercoupes probably can run on motor gas (without alcohol), because they do not have high performance / high compression engines, and were never restricted to at least 100 octane fuel.

Access is still provided via the API. Just because they got rid of a button in their GUI doesn't mean they are denying you access. They are probably just trying to clean up their interface by removing extra features that no one uses.

The solution is for Dell to get all that bloatware working in wine and install it! While they are at it, they can root the kernel/filesystem so that it is impossible to delete.

Next step, install a small cron job that fiddles with /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuN/cpufreq/ so that the speed steps down slowly over time. Now they have recreated the Dell/Windows experience that their customers know and love.

Not really. People are using GIFs for animation. PNGs don't support that. Many browsers don't support APNGs. Regular PNGs didn't even work correctly in IE6, which took way too long to die.

The US does not mandate helmets for adults on bikes. It's possible that some states or jurisdictions do.

People at most income levels are directly "bothered" by the price of gas. Think of the CEO trying to justify $20k spent on a private jet flight to a board of directors, when only a few years ago, the same flight would have only cost $10k.

Not to mention the fact that our entire economy is very closely tied to the price of fuel, so even the folks who only own bicycles are touched by rising fuel costs.

You just need a series of tubes!

I thought of the mosquito killing laser gun years before they did.

I'm sure the reason they are not actually selling it, is that it occasionally sets nearby trees on fire when it misses a shot. My version won't start fires, but I'd be crazy to try to bring it to market knowing that the product would be in I.V.'s sights from the get go.

Way to kill innovation guys!

Their life is already bad enough...

"Now I lay me down to bed
Darkness won't engulf my head
I can see by infrared
How I hate the night"

--Marvin

The presenter did an excellent job of explaining the evilness.

A space elevator can't just go to LEO, it's got to go all the way to geosynchronous orbit (42,000 kilometers up) and then past that for a counterweight.

If we only had to go to LEO, we'd probably have done it already.

Also, there are a ton of satellites in LEO, and most of them are likely to hit the tether at some point. It is just a matter of time (and not as much time as you'd think -- you'd probably have a near miss every couple weeks).

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!