The other problem is lift. When you get to that kind of altitude, you either need to be at orbital speeds (not going to happen) or you need an incredible wingspan relative to mass to get lift from what little atmosphere is available. A third option is some kind of thrust to directly counteract gravity, which would be horribly fuel inefficient. Regardless, you end up with an extremely specialized, hard to fly aircraft like the U2 or SR-71 Blackbird, which has severe limitations in "normal" flight characteristics just so it can fly high and fast. Plus you're not going to be able to scale those kinds of specialized designs up from transporting just one or two people to an entire load of people to achieve the passenger volume an airline requires.

What do you mean? Netflix and Hulu give away free broadband ISP connectivity to their customers? And Netflix and Hulu have free massive pipelines and distributed hosting to the internet? Man, that's pretty cool. Just because Netflix doesn't directly own the wires between the content and your house like ye olde cable companies doesn't mean that the customer is not paying for the delivery of the goods.

No, it's not the OS that's needed, but the protocols. For example the Internet is not an OS - it is a set of protocols built on protocols with more protocols running on top. What is needed for home automation is the protocols allowing a "dumb" device like a sensor or button to be able to connect to something that unifies everything together and lets them communicate. What OS, if any, is running on the devices doesn't matter.

I use SSH for everything. I use it between my cell phone and the wall charger. I use it between my thermostat and my furnace. Probably most importantly, I use it between my my remote control and TV. Never can be too careful these days.

That is by far the geekiest thing I've seen in a long time. As someone who has also ported Quake to run on hardware it wasn't designed for, my hat's off to you.

That article is from 2007. Since then a Sky Crane was used to land the 1 ton Curiosity rover on Mars. I think it's pretty clear that we simply may not land an entire 100 ton payload as a single vessel, but would instead land the various supplies, habitats, and people as separate payloads. Perhaps they all come on a single ship (unlikely), but there's no reason with our current technology that we couldn't land the pieces separately. Worst case would be the humans don't land close enough to the supplies to be able to survive long-term, in which case Plan B is to explore similar to how the Apollo Lunar program did, and head back after several days. Then a later mission would bring another set of people to use the supplies already delivered.

That site appears to have just copy / pasted the story from The Aviation Herald, and they didn't even bother to link to the images. Here's the original article with the radar images:
http://avherald.com/h?article=...

Does that radar indicate ground speed or airspeed? If ground speed then of course that will drop as the aircraft climbs, although the airspeed may stay the same.

This makes sense. One of the things that drives me nuts about those cheap Chinese no-name Android tablets is the display. They draw every other pixel in a checkerboard type fashion, and if your eye is totally still then you don't notice. However if you move your eye quickly back and forth you can clearly see that only half the pixels are drawn at a time. So there's something about the motion that doesn't allow enough processing time to smooth that out. It's amazing how much our visual processing smooths things and even totally fills in parts that aren't even visible, but that requires an image to be steady at least to some degree.

Here is a higher resolution version of the map:
http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/oco2/p...

I live in an orange area of the US, and it's not the "corn belt" either, but the Appalachians.

It's called the yNot.

There are other products that let you do that already. We're talking about real-time audio translation from one language to another at the moment.

It depends on how "selfish" the state is. State lawmakers are always looking to increase revenue and income into their state. Since automobile dealers are local, and they get a cut of auto sales, it is beneficial, generically, for states to only allow dealerships to sell cars and get their local, in-state cut of the revenue. So it takes lawmakers that can see beyond that immediate income and have vision enough to embrace the future even if it has some cost to their state.

Then of course you have states like Texas, that produce oil and gasoline, who don't like Tesla and their new-fangled 'lectric cars, who of course want to make it hard on Tesla because that is a threat to revenue for their state.

Describing a concept, and making a fake CGI video of how it might work, does not mean they have "created it". They haven't even revealed where this is at in the development cycle, and the video is very clearly pure CGI. (for one thing, nothing on these augmented displays will look right except from the driver's perspective, which will be annoying for passengers, and the camera does not show the driver's perspective in this video).

With the "B column" (the column between the front and back door), why should I have to turn my head >90 degrees to see an oddly shaped screen that shows me what is only right behind the column? When I signal how about show me EVERYTHING to that side of the vehicle on a screen that's, um, like right in front of me so I don't have to take me eyes off the road or crane my neck?

Congratulations on still being alive.

According to an article at ZDNet, the office Google is closing has 50 engineers, and they've been offered positions in offices outside of Russia. Adobe already closed offices in Russia earlier this year, for likely the same reason.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/g...