I will not buy a car that takes longer to recharge than it does to drive off that charge. That's absurd.

The MIT nerds are just ignorantly stereotyping BBQ chefs. You'd figure that they of all people would be sensitive about looking down on others, but I guess not. BBQ chefs aren't morons who use old oil barrels for pits (they're not food grade and will make your food taste like shit). If they do reuse an old barrel, it's one that has held food like olives, and it is reused because it's cheaper and better than buying a brand new one. Seriously, duh.

Just check all this out. Science, science, science. It's all over BBQ these days. All the wisdom of the elders has been tested, trialed, and the old myths like "salt gets into meat by osmosis" and "pink chicken is not safe" have been busted and thoroughly debunked. Just check out the following SCIENCE:

The Thermodynamics of Cooking
What You Need to Know About Wood, Smoke, and Combustion.
The Maillard Reaction And Caramelization
The Science of Wet Brines
Basic Meat Science
Why We Don't Need Grill Marks, and Why You Should Flip Often

And there are about a kajillion more articles like this on this one site. There are many, many more sites all across the internet. All of them are full of science. MIT isn't breaking new ground here, as much as they'd like to think so. Up to and including computer-controlled cookers that turn out perfect meat every time.

There are already commercial grade ovens the precisely control smoke and hea pretty much any BBQ shop that does more than a few hundred pounds a day uses these.

  MIT is reinventing the wheel.

I have similar issues:
  - Towing several tons (travel trailer or 23 foot trailerable-with-extreme-trailer deep-keel coastal-water-ocean-capable sailboat) up and down mountains and cross-country.
  - Going to/from the ranch - over 250 miles one way (over the Altamont grade, across the central valley, and through a pass in the Sierras) - with the last 0.7 miles sometimes hubcap-deep mud.
  - Carrying ranch groceries for several months and/or other supplies or equipment from the nearest supermarket etc. - 27 miles away.
and so on.
  - Off-roading to visit ghost towns and other historic sites in the Nevada Desert - where "running out of gas" - in the absence of cell phone service - might mean your skeletons are discovered in a couple years.

On the other hand, for trips about 3/4 of the year and NOT towing, a plug-in hybrid or an all-electric vehicle with sufficient range, serious regenerative braking, and adequate cargo capacity for two week's groceries and luggage for two, would be ideal. Charge it up at each end (off a windmill/solar at the Nevada end) to start full, use regenerative braking on the downslopes to power across the valley or up the next up slope. For a hybrid: Top off the batteries while cruising the central valley and use batteries plus engine to avoid being a creeping traffic hazard on the mountain roads.

My cycle would be almost identical to a Silicon Valley worker who mostly commutes 25 miles each way and occasionally vacations at the Lake Tahoe ski resorts or Reno or camps in the Sierras. A single vehicle that could do both - rather than needing two vehicles to accommodate the use pattern - would be ideal.

Not at a $Trillion a program. It crowds our spending for stuff that actually works. I think the first-wave stuff should be top-of-the-line stuff that we dump R&D into to keep it 20+ years ahead of everybody else and I think the first-wave stuff should be capable of making it safe for everything else to fly pretty much unchallenged. After that, give me cheap stuff that works. We can have multiple types of aircraft in each role, but they need to be cheap to design, cheap to build, and cheap to fly.

The F-16D's unit cost is $27.4 Million. A fleet of 1000 of those costs you $2.74 Billion (which over 5 years is pocket change).
The F-35's unit cost (averaged between the three models, which range from $148 Million to $337 Million) is $245 Million each (no R&D costs included, just building one). A fleet of 1000 then costs $245 Billion. Over 5 years, that will consume 9% of the entire DOD budget. For one plane. One shitty plane that can't dogfight and whose cockpit is too tight to allow pilots to look behind them.

The F-35 doesn't even have a well-defined role. The F-22 rules the skies; bar none. The B-2 owns all ground targets regardless of ground defenses. What's left that we need a plane that costs up to $337 Million before we put gas, weapons, or a trained pilot in it?

On this 4th of July, the day when Americans flock to their grills and smokers

That's it? Seriously? Rather depressing...

My BMW X3 is quieter than a Leaf at highway speeds. and it has a 3 Liter V6.

Yes I know this is a fact. Rode in a friends leaf, they are not quiet unless they are sitting still.

They go for $29K. I dont know where you keep coming up with this massively low number. Not one Nissan dealer I can find has them listed at $20K.

We don't know exactly what this guy did.

It does not matter. One does not — or, rather, should not — have a right to forcibly alter other people's memories or perception of himself. If the courts can force Google to erase the records, will they not be able to force the victim erase her memories as soon as the procedures are perfected? For the Greater Good[TM]?

The non-existent "Right To Be Forgotten" recently invented by our progressive European friends strikes again.

And what it means is, as soon as the technologies for altering human memories are perfected, the same "right" will be enforced on humans. In TFA's example, that molested girl herself retains her memory of the crime — and the criminal. Will some future court-decision not order her to undergo a memory-wiping procedure to help the man rehabilitate himself?

Need not be a crime — your ex-wife may demand, you subject yourself to such memory-cleansing wiping out the good times you once shared as part of a divorce settlement. And employees leaving a company or a government organization may be required to surrender their memories of trade secrets or even of ever working there...

Well, we've been told for decades already, that one has a right to a "safety net" even if other people must be robbed at gun-point (via the IRS) to pay for it. For fewer decades we've been told, one has a right to enter into a business transaction in a place of "public accommodation" — even if it happens against the other party's ("bigoted") will. Though everybody has (and should always have had) a right to engage in consensual sex with anybody else, a right to be considered "married" by people holding a different ("parochial") opinion on what the concept means was recently established instead.

This "Right To Be Forgotten" will not be far behind. Troll my elbow, it is coming.

Considering teens around here have their parents buy them $15,000 to $50,000 cars for their 16th birthday, a dirt cheap $3000 toy is nothing.

And that is the problem. You dont have to have any IQ at all to own and operate a quadracopter like that. Only need a checkbook or credit card.

Honestly, I think they need undercover cops to walk around and just taze the hell out of drone owners that do that crap. No warning, just a tazer to the balls for 5 minutes and then say, "Stop being an asshole, have a nice day."

Wait one second...

Actions have persistent consequences?

I didn't realize that.... I thought we were entitled to always get forgiveness or at least a do-over if we needed it, no matter what we did?

Signed,
All of modern culture.

What's the age got to do with anything? We have working airframes; working designs that are proven to be exceptional at their respective jobs. We could spend a whole bunch of time, money, and lives (test pilots mostly, and some regular ones too during initial roll-out) on new designs, but we'll get maybe slightly better (or possibly slightly worse) performance out of them and in the end we'll net out behind.

Fire up the plants and start rolling new A-10s and F-16s off the assembly line (alone with F-22s). Streamline the manufacturing so they're produced as inexpensively as possible. If we find how to do their jobs better in 20 years, we'll have wasted only some minor resources in manufacturing, so the risk is minimal. They're a fantastic investment. Own the skies with the F-22, the ground defenses with the B-2, and everything else with cheap, effective aircraft.

I know our government doesn't like that because it isn't porked up all to shit, but it's the right way to move forward militarily.