Having worked for government, I can only say that I wouldn't be entirely surprised if a group of enthusiasts could do a much better job than a bunch of contracted government programmers. I often find contracted government work to be a complete mess, poorly documented and often using as many tools as they can charge for. While not everyone ends up like this it is more often than not the case.

Enthusiasts on the other hand are more interested in what works, not so much in what is politically the best tool to use or how much to charge the taxpayer.

This doesn't even pass the common sense logic rules if you understand physics. The issue is there's not much energy in these types of radio waves. A cellphone transmits a maximum of around 1 watts, a wifi router 50 milliwatts if you're lucky. By the time the radio waves have reached you their effective power has already dissipated by the square of the distance. Sure you might get a voltage potential that's in the 7 volt range but how's that useful if there's next to no current to do anything. Short of standing under a high voltage power line or next to some high power transmitter which probably wouldn't be safe for your health, this isn't going to work.

People also misunderstand Tesla's work. Tesla's work wasn't that you could just pop up an antenna and get free power. His plans involved putting up a massive transmission tower that would dump power into the air at an efficient frequency. A coil and antenna could then be used to pick up this power wirelessly. Great idea but the issue then is how exactly would you charge for this power when anyone with some know how could build a receiver to grab the "free" power?

I've seen that video. I do have to hand it to the guy, if that was my car I wouldn't still be smiling and talking enthusiastically about it. I have a Chevy Volt which as a car is a whole lot better. :)

Hydrogen Fuel-Cell systems are interesting but I suspect the whole idea doesn't work. There's still a problem of how you're actually suppose to produce the hydrogen for cheap. Imagine developing a combustion engine while you haven't even worked out a process to drill or refine oil for the engine. Besides, I'm not sure folks would want to buy fuel for their laptop rather than just plugging it in for few pennies of electricity.

Okay first of all when google tries to eliminate child porn, they have the assistance of the police who in general are trying their best to eliminate this content because we've deemed this sort of content less than legal. I think most would agree this is a clean directive and relatively simple to understand.

When it comes to media organizations such as RIAA, it's pretty obvious they don't care too much about the music, people or privacy. All they care about is making money from the system. This results in them blanketing everyone with lawsuits including themselves and folks who are completely innocent.

If the police were like this it would be like them shooting everyone in the building to catch a single criminal because somehow that's a much better idea that actually doing your job correctly. This is the key difference between google looking for child porn and looking for pirated media. The organizations they need to co-operate with operate entirely differently.

Very very few folks understand the appeal of EVs but since I own a 2013 Volt, I can share with you why it's loved by owners. The Volt has a large enough battery that it can run entirely on battery for the first ~40 miles including highway speeds. The car is so silent that with the windows down it feels like you're zipping along on a bicycle. I was in fact surprised to hear the brakes "creak" the first few times at a stop. The fun part comes with accelerating. Most folks will not punch the petal to the floor because on a regular gas car repeatedly doing that will likely wear out your engine or damage something. It also causes most gas engines to burn through gas horrifically. On an EV, there's a slight whine and smooth take-off and at no point does your car sound like it's going to blow up. My daily round-trips average about 20 miles and with electric power being so cheap you end up taking odd trips to the store if you have spare power without worrying about burning up excessive gas. There's no transmission gearing so the car doesn't suffer from any cheap automatic gear shifting jumps and you climb hills like they weren't there.

If you run out of electricity, the Volt turns into a hybrid essentially burning gas on and off (it shuts off at stoplights and down hills) Allowing you to drive across the entire country on a moments notice without having to resort to superchargers which don't exist in Canada. If you go down a huge hill or mountain, the regeneration recovers power in the battery and saves your brakes from melting.

This is why Volt owners like their cars so much. It's an electric without limitations. More range would make it even less likely that gas would be used and help for folks who drive insanely long distances in their daily travel. Probably the Volt's biggest weakness was it's former high price before the recent huge discounts and its somewhat poor advertising.

Maybe I'm a little off on my law but civil damages are when people sue each other. So it makes sense if Google used the information in some way that hurt you then you have the right to sue Google for damages. In Canada, for a while when cellphone calls were not encrypted, it was perfectly legal to listen to the calls provided you did not use the information gleamed off that to benefit in any way. Google to the best of our knowledge deleted this information or no longer has it so what exactly would you be suing Google for? How did Google collecting this information harm you or how in the world are you ever going to prove that?

Frankly I suspect that self-driving cars will come someday. We already have cruise control, back-up sensors, heck fall asleep lane drift sensors on some modern cars and I don't see people objecting to them. In fact, a fair number of folks really like those features. One only needs to look at manual versus automatic transmission to realize that a majority of the public likes automatic transmission but the enthusiast likes the manual stick.

My only real concern would be the loss of the skill of driving for the younger generation in much the same way handwriting is going away. I am glad I have both great handwriting and top notch typing skills and would be sad to have not had either. Granted driving cars is ridiculously dangerous in that I've gotten to my current skill level in driving through experience, some of which were hair raising mistakes so it's a trade-off. Is it worth dying or potentially getting crippled for a skill is something we would have to ask ourselves.

As for myself, I would love a self-driving car especially on those long cross country trips. If it was reliable enough to nap on, it would be a great feature. There might be points where I might manual drive my car for fun but if I got tired or bored I could pass control to my car.

I thought this was somewhat known in the past already? From what I recall brain death occurs rather quickly. (The Brain is one of the the fastest organs to fail in your body in the event of the lack of oxygen.) From what I recall, what happens is that as a single neuron dies from lack of oxygen it releases chemicals which cause other neurons to fire faster causing them to fail faster and so on. This causes a massive escalating cascade failure which is why loss of oxygen to the brain kills you so quickly. Of course what happens to your mind in this massive electrical storm is still unknown. Maybe you gain some sort of awareness and reach a level of consciousness that is the afterlife. Maybe it's all an illusion and you just end up on the best mental rush in your life. I guess most of us will find out someday...

To be honest this is a really bad idea. Let's put it this way, do you think it's a good idea to shoot at an airplane? This would be an accident waiting to happen as I will bet some folks won't be able to tell the difference between a plane and a drone. What about stray bullets missing the "drone"? and hitting an airplane. Even worse is what do you do if you hit a drone and it goes up into a fireball (some are gas powered) and crashes onto someone's house because it is loaded with fuel.

Although it's slightly expensive, the Chevy Volt is a good compromise for those wanting to drive an electric and needing the range. I should know I own one. In the summers when mostly doing in city driving, the Volt's roughly 40 mile range battery gets me around gas free and charges entirely at night when I sleep. I also recently completed a 1300 mile cross-country road trip across Canada fuelling up with gas every roughly 200 miles or so. So basically you have a fully electric car if you don't drive too far and a hybrid car that gets a moderate 40 mpg (I managed to get this on my trip) when you need it.

While it makes sense that at least initially you would probably use less brain power due to the lack of some stimulus in VR, I think they're also missing another interesting fact. In humans, when we lose one sense, it tends to amplify the abilities we have left. Take a blind person for example. Some folks who are blind develop the ability to echo locate (sonar) so accurately that they can walk around blind and identify objects entirely from the sound bouncing off of them. The brain also rewires itself to handle sound processing more than visual.

Also when I was younger, I use to play on the text based social MUD VR like systems. Despite being text-based however, they used your imagination to fill in the gaps and if you got into it, it could almost be real. I compared it to reading a very good book with yourself as the main character. I know that before that point in my life, my reading and writing skills were no where near what they are now. What eventually amazed me even more was the ability to pick up on real-life traits based on the things people wrote in their VR character profiles. While I can't claim to be perfectly accurate, I was a little surprised myself when I outright guessed a few details about some folks online before I asked them about it to double-check.

I would bet that in that situation my brain activity probably would start out low but due to our intelligence (or imagination) that we have over rats, it could potentially amplify with time.

I own a Tungsten T3 and I still use it. It was considered probably the best Palm device of the entire generation. It's insanely powerful 400mhz ARM was only recently surpassed by newer Smartphones. I have my address information, password keyring program, car GPS (Tom Tom Nav 6), video player and image viewer functional on it. Best of all no ties to the the Internet so it in theory is extremely difficult to hack into. I'll probably keep using it until it breaks even if I eventually get myself a smartphone.

I used a hacked version of Graffiti (Jot) that allowed for greater functionality. It helped a lot. Palm also allowed for a lot of pirating too. XD

In some ways the Volt is GM's flagship car so they've been very careful to make sure it works for them instead of ending up with a disaster. I suspect their support of an enthusiast interface is to encourage that goodwill continues. They have an amazingly long warranty service and free 3 years on OnStar which for the regular consumer is something very desirable. It's helped them improve their product as well as their 2013 model battery improvements were partially based on the fact that the battery pack was degrading less than they had thought. Mind you I don't see this as a privacy disaster either. VoltStats site notes they don't have free access to air pressure and a few other stats that they use to use. I'm going to be a Volt owner soon and to be honest, I'm not worried about GM collecting data on my car. It looks like it'll lead to improvements for everyone down the road. If you're wondering why you'd want one, well it's a really nice electric car and while yes I could get a Leaf, it's my only car and without a gas engine you're going to freeze in some of the -20C sub zero temperatures in Canada. It's only downside is yes, it costs a lot of money to get one. But as a nice luxury sedan which is what I see it as, it's nice.