Should I count the old NES I have sitting around? Its CPU is probably less powerful than the microcontroller in my dishwasher. I know for certain that it's less powerful than many of the control chips in my hard drive. The ICs on a hard drive alone have enough power and RAM to run a sophisticated, modern OS (depending on how general-purpose the ICs are).

I could probably point out more than 20 microprocessors within 3 feet of where I'm sitting without too much flexibility in the definition.

Prices have been coming down as more production of carbon fiber ramped up. For most of the last 10 years, the majority of production went into the aerospace industry. There's now enough production capacity to fulfill general automotive needs, too.

The real problem I see here is that like plastic parts, a break in a carbon fiber part means the whole piece has to be replaced and color matched. Metal parts can often just be banged back out and the paint touched up. In cars of yore, chrome bumpers didn't even need to be painted at all--just bolt the sucker back on. Plastic bumpers these days are a pain.

Took only slightly longer than fuel injectors and overhead cams.

You can look good without sacrificing aerodynamics. 911s are among the most aerodynamic cars ever built, and lots of people think they're also the most beautiful cars ever built. Porsche figured out an efficient shape for a car in the 1930s, and until very recently, nobody found a better one (that being the "boxfish" design).

The little bit of improvement in drag coefficient that the Prius has over the 911 is mostly due to extra downforce on the 911. The Porsche could easily be as good or better if it wasn't designed for speeds on long back straights.

The problem with Lithium batteries is specific to Li-Ion, not Li-Po, which is what most electric cars are getting.

Nickel mining is most certainly damaging to the environment. TANSTAAFL.

It's about the only way to config some old office laser printers.

I would conceivably pay $10 for a cup where I've been shown that everything has been done perfectly from the growing location, to cultivating, to roasting, to grinding, to brewing. The beans would probably be Kona, and the roasting process would have been meticulously tweaked to perfection.

If it's just any old beans with some frothy milk added, then no. These days, a $1 McDonald's coffee is perfectly good for when I forget to buy more beans or I'm too rushed to do it myself.

That said, the donotwant tag on this story is inappropriate. This is the best news urban mischief makers could have had. A few Guy Fawkes masks should be enough to shut down this idea forever.

You can always "break" thermodynamics when you limit the scale in either space or time. We consider oil and coal to be energy-positive because we're not counting the energy put into the process to make the stuff in the first place (limiting the time scale). We consider solar photovoltaics to be energy-positive because we're not counting the energy that came out of the sun (limiting the space scale).

Fission/fusion work the same way. They're just releasing many times more energy than you could get from breaking a chemical bond.

Meh. Nuclear reactors of any kind use tiny amounts of fuel for the amount of energy they give out. Transmuting tiny amounts of one element will only give you tiny amounts of another element.

Some fission reactors can produce usable amounts of fuel for other fission reactors, but only because we can't find significant amounts of the output elements in nature.

ITER still makes sense on theoretical grounds; you push the boundaries of Science and something good is bound to come out of it.

The stated reason why these guys were rejected from peer reviewed journals was that they hadn't come up with a viable theory of how it works. Their data shows that it has positive energy output, but they have no idea why. If it does actually work (a big "if"), then some of the data from ITER may end up showing why this thing would work.

But it's probably all nonsense, anyway.

Not so much logic as "I learned just enough about thermodynamics to prove that the sun can't work".

They'll start naming them the way sequels get named.

• HTML: The Legend Continues
• HTML Unleashed
• HTML: The Next Generation
• HTML Reloaded
• Final HTML Fantasy XII-2

Your own dogfood. Eat it.

The numbers posted in the GP are just to get to LEO. The Saturn V got 119MT to LEO, but only 45MT to the moon. That was enough to send three guys, a buggy, and some porn. And one of the guys had to stay behind in lunar orbit (which I guess is what the porn was for).

If we're going to bother with the moon again, we'd like to do something more than just take a quick look around and scurry back to Earth, so we're going to need a lot more than 119MT to LEO.

And if you look at the other numbers for those 300HP engines, they're often getting better gas mileage than their slower predecessors.