This is obviously a prototype, but I wonder cheap you could make an operational system? Fuel costs are the the largest component of an aircraft's operating costs, and the most variable. Relatively slow (~100 mph) solar UAVs could make a lot of sense for UPS, FedEx, etc.

And you would be right. A "6000x12000 km" orbit is 12000 km from the center of the Earth at closest (since the Earth's radius is about 6000 km), and 18000 km from the center of the Earth at farthest. The energy of the orbit is defined by the average distance, which is 15000 km. The initial orbit is about 6300 km, so it's 2.4 times as energetic as the final, meaning a large burn by the rocket's upper stage to loose that energy and change orbits.

On top of that, the final orbit is also inclined at 45 degrees to the equator, compared to 28 degrees for the intial orbit. That requires another big out-of-plane burn which means more fuel.

Really, this is an orbit that you would only go to if you had big powerful hot rod of a rocket that you wanted to try out...

IMHO, they really need to push this for scientific computing initially, as they tend to buy in bulk and are not very binary dependant. They are claiming it is so low power (2.7 W) that it would be easy to put an array, say, eight of them on a 1U motherboard for 64 cores.

IMHO it's just further evidence that small electric vehicles are, and always will be, really dorky looking and totally impractical. Though I'm sure all five people in the target market will respond to this post.

As someone who has been on both sides as both an author and reviewer of scientific papers, "peer reviewed" doen't not mean something is automatically correct, simply that it is worthy of publication. It's closer to saying it's plausible, and should be out there for the scientific community to discuss. Correctness is more judged by reproducability over a timescale of decades, but even that is not definative.

Science is a lot more messy that a lot of people would like to believe...

It's actually quite efficient. That's why the parking lot of my apartment is full at night, but empty in the day, and vice versa for the parking lot at work. The demand for the cars is usually not even enough to really make use of unused cars. Short-term rentals make sense in a highly urbanized area (see ZipCar), but in most of North America, car ownership (or long-term rental) will still make more sense. Indeed, it's precisely the same as the prevelance of rental apartments in citys, but home ownership in more rural areas.

The real solution to infinite range with a self-diving electric car is induction chargers built into the road, especially highways. That way, the car only ever needs to use the battery when on short trips.

Will do, as long as it's a fast enough reactor that I can use it to reprocess my own waste. Statisitically, it will be safer than rooftop solar, which has killed far more people per watt-hour of energy produced.

NIMBY is much less scary when you understand how things work.

Do not think that the four-fingered hands of our robotic overlords are cartoonish at all.

You mean like fission? If all (literally all, including all transport) of the world's energy was from the fission, we would have enough uranium (assuming zero incease in efficiency) for at least 300 years from proven reserves. If you add thorium into the mix, we have enough for several thousand years. And if that's not enough, the Moon is rich in both uranium and thorium.

So, we do already have a vitually unlimited source of carbon-free energy. It's just that evironmentalist pseduo-scientific FUD prevents us from using it.

Multiple floppies? Decedent capitalist pig-dog!

I did several installs starting from a single floppy with a kernel, shell, and ftp. Once on the network, nothing else is needed.