I wasn't aware that threat had gone away. As of 2013, Russia had 8,500 warheads and the U.S. had 7,700. China and North Korea both have more now than they did in the 1970s.

Driver's Ed teachers always told their human students to maintain a two-second following distance. With the much faster reaction times of autonomous vehicles, a safe following distance can be redefined to a much shorter value.

This is going to tremendously increase the carrying capacity of the existing highway system.

Hydrogen is a safe lifting gas for airships. “Odorless, Colorless, Blameless” by NASA employee Richard Van Treuren (Air and Space/Smithsonian magazine, April/May 1997) provides a great explanation. Here's a summary: http://www.green-energy-news.c...

Solar energy has always "worked." But it has not always been cost-effective.

Slashdot readers who held nuanced views that mass adoption should wait until it was cost-effective, have been characterized by other, un-nuanced Slashdot readers as "angry."

And it's not "hippies" who were right about solar; credit goes to the semiconductor scientists who kept upping the efficiency of PV cell designs, while reducing manufacturing costs.

If the customer (the U.S. government) wants its auditors to be able to question individual employees, that should be clearly stipulated in the contract, and then the contractor should have no qualms about meeting the terms of that stipulation.

Lesson learned for how to draw up future contracts, I guess.

Wow, so each Chevy Volt has received more subsidies than the entire cost of a Tesla Model S ($69,900 MSRP).

Shouldn't that be discussed heavily? You hear hardly a peep about it.

Three years ago, it was reported that the total government subsidies that had benefited the Volt, divided by the 6,000 Chevy Volts that had been sold, amounted to $250,000 in subsidies per vehicle sold.

Can you give us an update on total Volt sales, so we can recalculate that subsidies-per-vehicle figure?

It's worse than not caring. After the IRS Commissioner testified before Congress that Lois Lerner's emails were lost and gone forever, the Inspector General located the backup tapes easily -- and we learn that THE I.T. GUYS HAD NEVER EVEN BEEN ASKED TO RETRIEVE THE BACKUPS. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

Yes, in some elections we can only choose the lesser of two evils.

But it makes me mad when people use that as an excuse to not go to the polls. Because if you don't choose the lesser of two evils, you'll get the greater of two evils.

About 2 years ago Mozilla decided to always use some of your precious screen real estate to show a row of tabs, even when that's a total waste because you only have one tab open. The fix:
"Hide Tab Bar With One Tab"
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

In May 1945, von Braun had to decide whether to surrender to the U.S. or the USSR. This is how he described the decision:

Draw your own conclusion about his ethical compass.

Great question; but if you've figured out some of the pieces of the framework, you're further along in explaining the nature of God than if you haven't figured out some of the pieces of the framework.

That's why I tell people to study a physics book if they want insight into the mind of God.

Makes perfect sense: everyone who believes in God believes that God authored the laws of physics, but not everyone who believes in God believes that the Bible is divinely inspired.