The free market is ultimately self-destroying - a monopoly is a very stable situation. Once one company achieves dominant status there are all sorts of underhanded tricks they can use to beat back any smaller competitors. Exclusive deals at retail or on raw materials, selling at a loss to undercut a competitor on price until they go out of business. If you don't limited that freedom a little with regulation, it ends up being not free at all.

Rovers are cool, but they can't compete with the excitement of a crewed mission. Apollo captivated a generation, and there's not even very much to see on the moon.

We were supposed to have that back in 1999.

One of the jobs I applied for years ago even got me to the interview - but I learned later that the whole thing was a sham. They promoted someone internally, and had always intended to, but there was some legal requirement that they consider external applicants equally. So they interviewed a bunch of outsiders to put on a show and appear to comply with the law.

If youtube were launched a few years later, it would likely have been forced to shut down by the cost of legal action.

A little more work and we might not even need the torrent sites. Magnet links can be copied and pasted with ease, including into facebook posts.

Usually by bringing in some files obtained elsewhere.

I did a bit of research.
http://www.otherpower.com/imag...
A lead-acid being used only near top-up charge level can reach 50% efficiency - but that's only if you maintain it near full charge, and only dip into it a little bit, as they are least-efficient at charging when almost full. If you're using it in a deeper cycle the efficiency is much better, easily reaching 90%. You have to really abuse it to hit 50% efficiency, but it is concievably possible for a poorly-designed system, perhaps one that performs only light load-redistribution as a secondry function while intended for long-term backup power with corresponding capacity.

Not just fashion. Solar cells improved a lot - those you can get now are a lot more efficient than they were back then, which means home solar power... still isn't economical. But it's within sight of economical. It's just expensive, not ridiculous like it used to be.

Small wind generators produce very little power. They have to get too big for home use before they become viable. Remember that power output increases with the square of the radius.

Power generation from solar falls in the winter. A lot.

It's not the loss of sunlight intensity that does it. It's the daylight hours. Your panels operate for a smaller fraction of the day.

The appeal is obvious: No pilot and no instruments means a lot of weight saving, and frees up precious passenger space.

Which is why China may well become a future leading nation in manned space research. When America loses a few astronauts, they shut down the program for the best part of a decade and spend hundreds of millions in investigation and refinement. When China loses someone, they'll carry on with the next launch while investigating quietly, then hold a ceremony to remember the patriotic sacrifice and remind the people what those lives were risked for.

It's also a bad choice of phrase, as currently 'VR legs' only work if you have either a lot of space or a very elaborate omnidirectional treadmill. Bit of a difficult problem that.

Though I suppose it might bring back the arcade? If you need a suspended harness or a sizeable warehouse for full-immersion runarounds, it's going to mean people traveling to places. Pressing a 'walk forward' button isn't going to be the same.

It causes illness for good reason. A mismatch between visual field angle and vestibular angle doesn't occur very often in a natural environment - the only place you'll find it is on a boat and when wearing head-mounted displays. Before those, it always indicated something impairing the vestibular system, which likely implied a poison. There's evolved response based on this: 'Visual/vestibular mismatch, probable poison detected, initiate purge of stomach contents before any more is absorbed and make a note not to eat the green berries.'