you were also missing half your roof. By your logic, you shouldn't put a roof over your head because a tornado might damage it.

PS. Homeowners insurance will cover and replace the solar panels that are damaged.

If a tree* lands on your roof, solar-panel covered or not, you've got enough problems. But that's what homeowners insurance is for.

*or anything heavy enough to break a solar panel

As you say, better generators cost more, and the power they generate is significantly more expensive than grid power. You would need to have a lot of power outages and spoiled food in order to break even on the cost during the usable lifetime of the generator.

A $2-3k generator and the cost of instillation is about 30% of the equipment costs of a solar installation, and the equipment is getting cheaper all the time (labor costs are flat or increasing). And a solar installation will pay for itself half way through it's warranted lifetime (about 1/3 of the way through it's usable lifetime).

Well I don't see what's so weird about displaying them on a bookshelf or table. Maybe with a nice tablecloth on top, and some candles and incense.

It's also a good place for me to put my sacrifices and to focus my prayers

I think the pintile injector they are using, while not "new," is still exciting. This is old technology that hasn't been used much for first stage engines, in the US at least.

The pintile injector probably allowed such a safe and rapid shutdown during the first launch attempt.

Yeah they would. Imagine perfect, zipper-like merging at highway speeds, and merging into a single lane to route around accidents, road work, or freight. The cars can all break and accelerate as one, and cars with equal acceleration/deceleration would be grouped together.

There is no lack of capacity on American highways. We could even reduce the number of lanes in each direction to two if everyone had driver-less cars.

Yeah because the primary purpose of a university is to make a profit. Sure, in the past the athletics programs were there for the benefit of the student body, but now it's the scholastic programs that are there for the benefit of the fans.

I took a solar installer class, and learned that it's usually not cost effective to retrofit a house. Few houses have the proper size roof at the right angle to maximize efficiency. If there are trees in the way you can't cut down, just forget it.

but lets assume you want to find out anyway. well, you first need to look at how much power you use, because it will impact the size of installation you'd need. add up everything that draws electricity in the house. You'll probably find you need a much bigger array than you have roof space.

Now, that will be the size of the array at optimum efficiency. you'll have to subtract out all the efficiency losses for incorrect angle and shade, and add extra panels in order to get you back up to your needs.

I'm assuming you need certified installers in Floria because of the hurricanes, plus you'll need to get an electrician to install the inverter and breaker boxes, and probably a second electrician from the electric company to wire it up to the grid. If Floria has installation rebates, you'll need to do everything up and up in order to get your rebate.

So, first thing first: find a way to reduce your power draw by at least 1/3. it'll start saving you money now, plus you'll need a smaller array if you do commit to installation. it's much cheaper to start with efficient appliances and adequate insulation than it is to overcome it with more solar panels. Panels are getting cheaper, but labor costs are at least half of the costs. and while equipment costs go down, labor costs are flat or rising. If you build a house, build it with solar in mind and you'll save a ton of money up front, and you'll break even much much sooner.

Electric engines would either use solar panels or RTG for power, not batteries. Hell, they'd use fuel cells before they used batteries. any of these options are much much lighter than normal fuel, but even if they were equal for certain sized payloads, electric engines are much more efficient, so as payload mass increases, fuel mass scales at a much smaller rate.

If you want to get paid by insurance, you'd better have a license.

Meanwhile: Facebook changes it's privacy policy for the 20th time since the announcement of google's policy change.

Do you mean VaSIMR?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magnetoplasma_Rocket
Or Hall Effect Thrusters?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall_effect_thruster

And Ion Thrusters of various types have been used as primary propulsion n space successfully ever since Deep Space 1. They've been used for satellite orientation and station keeping for decades. They are vastly more efficient than chemical thrusters, reducing the amount of propellant you need to carry, and therefore reducing launch costs.

I'm sure if Richard Feynman were alive today he would be a very vocal proponent of OS text books. In fact, I'm sure he'd probably spend an inordinate amount of time editing them himself!

first of all, it's Reprap. and they use the GPL and CC licenses.

But they only cover the documentation and the CAD files, of course. The actual ideas and aren't covered by copyright, but by patents.

"Wanna see my moon rock? take a look at that!"
"What do you mean it looks like a piece of gravel from the driveway?"
"Where did i get it? off ebay, why?"

end scene:
So the whole point of having a moon rock is showing it off, like a diamond. The act of proving it's a moon rock (e.g. sending it to a lab for testing) would probably end with it being confiscated from you. If you can't prove it's a moon rock, it might as well be any old piece of gravel, of which we have trillions right hear on earth.