I'm actually a huge fan of the idea of an electric car with an external-combustion range extender under the hood. High-efficiency turbines (of the sort they use in industrial power generation, not the sort in aircraft and the M1 Abrams) are very durable, but also quite heavy. However, if we're talking about a 40 HP generator in a 400 HP car, it can afford to be 3x as heavy per HP as a normal car engine. Doubling the efficiency is worth something.

Not, dealers don't charge you for recalls - ever. That's why they're recalls. They charge the manufacturer, and usually make a bit of money in the process. Some things they won't fix unless you complain, but there's a list of things they'll fix the next time they see your car, if it needs them (because they're fast and the dealer makes a little money doing them). There's often a non-descriptive line buried in the invoice somewhere that lists some recall numbers or just mentions them obliquely, with no charge associated, so most people never notice.

How much this varies by brand, I don't know, but certainly the luxury dealers do this, and for safety-related recall everyone does (for the safety ones you'll probably get a postcard about the recall, but the dealer will still just do it automatically). It's not like they hide all this, they just don't call attention to it.

Except that an S-class is actually good, while Whole Foods is explicitly a sort of scam designed by a conservative to separate foolish hippies from their money (this isn't a secret or anything). While WF didn't invent the "call it organic and charge twice as much" idea, they sure did capitalize on it.

They've really nailed the presentation of goods to fool hippies (well, more accurately, middle-class, middle-aged people who still think hippies are cool) into paying more for food. The model doesn't work so well for young hipsters though, which is why the corporation is creating a new chain of stores just to have a different presentation to target hipster suckers separately.

You live in a city, don't you. And anyhow:

Most cars get "automatic updates" from the dealer whenever you bring it into service. There's usually a long list of non-critical recalls that neither the manufacturer nor he dealer is keen to tell you about, but if you get service at the dealer all the fixes will be quietly applied. More and more, these are firmware patches.

So, to answer your question "so commonly that most people never realize there was an update". Tesla is somewhat unique in adding new features this way, but fixes are quite common.

They can potentially be powered by unicorn giggles, but there's still a lot of coal power in the US, and coal-powered cars aren't great by any measure. Worse, the only "renewable" (what a BS buzzword) power that scales is solar, and that's a poor choice for the mostly-nighttime load of charging cars.

There's no energy shortage in the first place to be worried about: the only good reason to buy an electric car is if it's a better car for the price. The Tesla Model S still isn't really, at the price, unless you're buying for 0-60 times (which I might well do), but for the first time it's close. The real test will be the Model 3 - potentially revolutionary, but so are a lot of things you can't actually buy.

Ah, sure, lots of things are called "warp drives" I guess. Yeah, that sort of drive seems wildly impractical for all sorts or reasons.

What I'm talking about is somewhat different: it's an asymmetric warping of spacetime in just the same (smooth and continuous) way that all mass distorts spacetime symmetrically, such that you "fall" in some chose direction. It doesn't require the same exotic material as a wormhole, but I think it requires soemthing equally exotic (it's been a while, but I vaguely remember there are 2 different kinds of negative mass).

No argument there. But if someone were really demonstrating a drive with unexpected properties, not just stage magic, that's an experiment worth repeating.

We do, but then we see what else that math predicts. Most of the really crazy-non-intuitive stuff in QM has come from very unexpected consequences of the math that later proved out in experiment.

Heck, the whole crazy idea that the universe once had an additional field that certain particles couple with, preventing change in spin polarity without energy input, but then that field "condensed:, and now those same particles can spontaneously change spin - that's all just seeing where the math led. Until the Higgs Boson was found, a big chunk of electroweak theory hadn't been directly confirmed by experiment.

Wait, what's this slope I'm sliding down? Where did this come from? It sure is slippery!

Oddly enough, I've always been able to hear my SSDs (of various brands) when they were accessed, at least in a quiet room. I've always wondered why.

This is why there are different states! Intelligent people can disagree on such issues - go live in a state whose laws you agree with. Trying to force your personal idea of what's rght on everyone everywhere is totalitarianism (with a large dose of intellectual arrogance).

IR seekers are really easy to make and it's a fun robotics project. Simple to do with analog controls even (the principle is so easy it was highly classified for years). Launch your rocket into the Sun every time.

Tracking a specific target instead of the brightest heat source is much, much harder, but if the drone is the only dark spot in the field of view of the camera, that should be do-able. Fun to try, anyhow.

Are you thinking of a wormhole, not a warp drive? I'm not talking about a Star Trek FTL drive, but instead a device that warps space, just like gravity does, but asymmetrically. I don't believe it's possible either, but it's still allowed by accepted physics, and it wouldn't require lots of mass.

I don't think we'll know enough about this concept, or about negative mass, to rule them out until we finally understand how mass is quantized, or, rather, where rest mass comes from in the first place. Maybe when quantum gravity is finally understood there will finally be an explanation for rest mass, but maybe it's even further down the road.

Heck, we can't even measure the rest masses of quarks accurately -- not even one significant digit in some cases -- let along explain the values There's lots of physics left to be done there.

The math of modern physics has been shockingly predictive. All sorts of crazy shit has turned out to be true - so much so that people believed in String Theory for 20 years with no evidence whatsoever (and some still cling to that belief). Those people aren't stupid: "following the math" has a really good track record. It's best to keep an open mind until we get better theories.

You realize it was the church, not the unions, that prevented the 7-day workweek for most of Western history, right?

I have a strong aversion to XOR hacks (and bithacks in general) because of the freaking crazy precedence the operator has in C/C++. Fine for well-reviewed library code, but I cringe when I see it used offhandedly for terseness.

// If foo is green, handle the green case
if (foo & COLOR_BITS == GREEN) { ... }

Eesh - that can be a frustrating bug at 3AM when you don't see the problem reading through the code, and it's working fine for some cases.

Of course, if you're only using ^ on Boolean values, then fine, I'm with you. I've never seen anyone do

if (GREEN == foo ^ RED == bar) { ... }

like that without parens, but at least it would do the expected thing.

Strangely enough, I do in fact have toilets and breaks at work, and I don't have mafia thugs stealing a portion of every paycheck. This isn't the 1800s, and a union has no place among professionals.