The legal problems with Uber seem to mostly stem from the insurance aspect. For-hire cars require a level of insurance that personal vehicles do not.

Yep, basically the only thing where we really excelled was in communications technology. People in the 50s barely imagined the level of communications we have today.

Everything else has been underwhelming.

Space colonies don't require that much energy; they just require an up-front investment to send the necessary infrastructure up to space on rockets. Once up there, they could harvest asteroids or moons for raw materials and use that to build. Also, in space there's lots of solar power available.

No, tires have more friction than air. And airplanes actually get pretty good fuel economy for larger models, when you divide by the number of passengers. The problem with airplanes isn't friction, it's the fact that they're fighting against gravity, and cars aren't.

Wrong and stupid. Hemp can be used for paper, which is more environmentally-friendly than normal paper because hemp (a "weed") grows far faster than trees.

The pro pot crowd points to Washington and hemp so they can point out how stupid our marijuana laws are, because these laws, in banning marijuana, also ban hemp, even though hemp does suck for getting high. It's a versatile and useful plant (but not for smoking), good for making rope, paper, clothing, etc., but we can't have it because of these stupid pot laws.

As I understand it, no. (I'm not a marijuana expert however.) From what I'm told, while the two plants are closely related, marijuana is really good for smoking, but the fibers are not very good for rope-making, whereas hemp has great fibers for rope-making and clothes and such, but sucks for smoking. So basically you can have one or the other, but not both.

It's kinda like trying to use a Prius for hauling plywood and concrete, and a Ford F350 for daily commuting. You could probably get both those combinations to work, but the Prius is not optimized for cargo like the F350 is, and the F350 gets lousy fuel economy compared to the Prius and is much harder to maneuver and park.

Go read this website. Dvorak really isn't that great compared to other layouts. If you're going to learn a new layout, pick one that performs better. Dvorak was a good idea, but it was designed in the days before computers and modern statistical analysis.

That's it! Exactly the one I was thinking of. It looks like "QGMLWB" is actually the best layout overall, according to his statistical work.

Dvorak is good, but Colemak is also a very good alternative that's probably a lot easier for Qwerty typists to adapt to. Also, some guy did a bunch of research and made a website (wish I had a link, sorry) about different keyboard layouts and found that Dvorak was actually eclipsed in some metrics by both Colemak and another layout he created.

>I think they do manual point-to-point wiring on the switches. But if you look at the sculpted shape of a Maltron, they don't lend themselves to conventional PCBs.

This sounds like an application for flexible circuits boards. Point-to-point wiring is far too labor- and time-consuming.

Is this the wisest choice? In my opinion, MicroUSB is actually a pretty crappy connector, and doesn't have very good retention. MiniUSB and regular USB-B ports are far better and sturdier choices for a corded item on my desk which gets bumped around a lot. The only really good thing about MicroUSB is the thinness, but that's only important on mobile phones, not large items like keyboards.

I don't get the bit about weight. Aluminum has a very high strength-to-weight ratio; you're not going to get a product with the same weight and durability with wood (e.g. you could use balsa, which is extremely lightweight, but it also have low strength and absolutely terrible hardness).

In high quantities, aluminum should be pretty economical; you can just use a big press to stamp it. The big cost here is the tooling, but after that the per-unit cost is cheap. Milling is far, far more expensive than pressing/stamping, and only really makes sense if 1) the quantities are really low and/or 2) the product cost is really high and 3) it's really needed for some reason. For enclosures and the like, stamping is usually sufficient.

To keep it from looking like an Apple product, there's something really cool you can do with aluminum called anodizing. Anodize it black and give it some corners and sharp lines and it won't look anything like an Apple product. Anodizing is better than paint since it's more durable. For a high-end product as this is sure to be, it should be within budget.