Uber drivers are subsidized by everybody else. Taxi drivers have to pay high insurance rates because the act of driving a long distance every day for a ton of strangers is a job that inherently leads to a much higher statistical rate of payouts. If they're driving as a taxi on regular car insurance, it's you that's paying the bill for their swindle of the insurance system.

Lemon Pledge. No seriously. The high dollar aircraft windshield treatment for bugs and water called Plexus is nothing more than Pledge wax with no scent.

Lemon pledge is used heavily by high mileage motorcyclists for years.

American corporations will instead do the following.

Get a government grant for the coatings, claim the actual full purchase price at full retail as the cost and pass that cost to ticket buyers.

Use the 5% fuel savings as a ,"we are saving the planet.... see? SEE?" advertising campaign.

Also add the costs of the advertising to the ticket prices.

Profits go up an additional 75%, claim they need more government subsidies.

Yeah, wouldn't that be great if I had linked it in my first post, and then if you had actually read my post well enough to see it?

and now retroactively Oracle can claim copyright on it?

No, there's no retroactive claim necessary under the Berne Convention - everything anybody ever writes is automatically copyrighted. All expression is by default subsumed by the State under that treaty (so cut the guys going apeshit over TPP some slack).

You wanted the government controlling every aspect of human interaction, you got it. Now the US software industry can proceed to burn in flames, the way the democracy wants (hence the term democracide).

If there's a silver lining, it's that this will breed further contempt for the law among the educated. As they flee its jurisdiction.

Ah, I see. I think I have erased from my memory the time when my daily commute was measured in hours -- I could only stand it for a few years early in my career and then gave up and moved to a job closer to home. I do sympathise, though.

How do you come to that assumption?

By linking to a peer-reviewed paper on the subject?

A nuclear warhead has lots of trouble to even "hit" an asteroid.

Essentially every space mission we have launched for the past several decades has had to navigate with a far more precision than that needed to get close to an asteroid and activate a single trigger event when close by.

The idea that we can not produce enough "green" energy is simply idiotic, and certainly not insightful.

Can vs. should. Many more people are dying falling off roofs installing solar panels than have ever died from a nuclear power plant. Fear is a motivation that achieves terrible results.

"Oh, it's just human lives - I'll take my fear, thanks" seems to be the current attitude of the econuts. We can't call them 'greens' or 'environmentalists' because they're really just supporting coal power, empirically. Real environmentalists rationally seek solutions that minimize environmental impact. Unless depopulation is also a goal, but why would they want to depopulate the solar installers first?

Covering 1/4 of New Mexico has been proposed as well - fewer roof-fall deaths, but an ecological disaster to fence of that much environment (not to mention the impact of the rare-earth mining in China that fuels these things).

Maybe Gates will come up with the needed order-of-magnitude improvement that we need. But it won't be on rooftops because the very best we can mathematically hope for is a low single-digit multiplier (3 would be *amazing*, 4 approaches impossible).

I'm one of the people who voted to shut down Rancho Seco back in the day,

And "thar's yer problem". Energy problems are all political at this point, not technical. Nuclear plants are less dangerous than other forms of power, even including the crappy old light water reactors we have to deal with (and which should have gone extinct by now, except for politics, especially the dominance of public nuclear insurance).

One thing Gates could do, that would be really good, is to advance the progress of superconductors. It already is cost-effective to run superconducting cables for power, if your demand is as great as NYC, but it's still only good for short runs.

With superconductors we could even deal with the political problems of nuclear power by putting most of the plants out in the Nevada desert and running the power on superconductors to where it needs to get used. For that matter, he could fund studies of a theory of gravity that might help us get to high-temp superconductors faster.

There are dozens of variables that all interplay; presumably Gates is aware of those factors and won't be too narrow-minded. A quarter billion dollars in lobbying money for the diffuse energy consumers' interests would do tremendous good in our corrupt system that's otherwise intent on democracide.

Only the first few times. Then it's just annoying.

We send spacecraft on comparable missions all the time. And it doesn't really take a spectacularly large payload to destroy (yes, destroy) an asteroid a few hundred meters in diameter. 1/2-kilometer-wide Itokawa could be blown into tiny bits which would not recoalesce, via a 0,5-1,0 megatonne nuclear warhead, a typical size in modern nuclear arsenals (in addition, the little pieces would be pushed out of their current orbit).

I know it's a common misconception that "nuking" an asteroid would simply create a few large fragments that would hit Earth with even more devastation, but that's not backed by simulation data. And anyway, even if it didn't blow the asteroid to tiny bits (which simulations say it would) and even if it didn't push the remaining pieces off trajectory (which they say it does), anything that spreads an Earth impact out over a larger period of time is a good thing - it means the higher percentage of the energy that's absorbed high in the atmosphere rather than reaching the surface (less ejecta, lower ocean waves, a broader (weaker) distribution of the heat pulse, etc), the weaker the shockwaves, the weaker the total heat at any given point in time, and the more time for Earth to radiate away any imparted energy or precipitate out any ejecta cloud. If the choice is between 15 Chelyabink-sized impactor (most of which will strike places where they won't even be witnessed) or one Meteor Crater-sized impactor (same total mass), pick the Chelyabinsk ones. 50 10-megatonne meteor crater impactors or one 500-megatonne Upheaval Dome impactor? Pick the former. The asteroid impacts calculator shows the former generating a negligible fireball and 270mph wind burst at 2km distance, while the latter creates the same winds 25km away (156 times the area) and a fireball that even 25km away is 50 times brighter than the sun, hot enough to instantly set most materials on fire.

But that's all irrelevant because, quite simply, simulations show that nuclear weapons do work against asteroids.

What we need is enough detection lead time to be able to launch a nuclear strike a few months before the impact date (to give time for the debris to disperse). There is no need to "land" or "drill" for the warhead. There is no pressure wave; instead, an immense burst of X-rays is absorbed through the outer skin of the asteroid on the side of the explosion, causing it to vaporize (unevenly) from within, especially near the ground zero point, and creating powerful shockwaves throughout its body. In addition to ripping it apart, the vaporized material and higher energy ejecta flies off, predominantly on the side where the explosion was detonated, acting a broad planar thruster.

How is it that only now anyone is introducing a reputation system to this industry?

Because a reputation system would have been harmful to the cartels' profits so the politicians were well-paid to ensure that didn't ever happen?

How is it that only now the barrier of entry to this industry is coming down?

Because a reputation system would have been harmful to the cartels' profits so the politicians were well-paid to ensure that didn't ever happen?

What exactly does a stringently controlled supply of government-licensed "taxi" drivers do for the consumer anyway?

Ensure the cartels' profits, a nominal revenue stream for the city, and a stream of graft for the politicians?

Wait ... which part of this situation hasn't been obvious for 80 years? The same conditions apply in nearly every politically-regulated industry (which is why consumer-regulation is always far more effective).

they are hopelessly incapable of spotting that corruption

To call out that corruption in a different situation is to deny yourself the very corruption you enjoy in your favored situation.

The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else.
- Frederic Bastiat, 1848

The patterning comes from young children not challenging their parents' misbehavior, for genetic fear of being left to starve on a hillside. The fundamental problem is American adults who are willing to allow themselves to be treated as children.

Have you ever had a LEGO brick turn squishy on you? Because that's what they're made of, ABS plastic.

It's a plenty tough enough material that I used it to manufacture parts for a geodesic dome for outdoor use as a greenhouse, and it held up fine. I also manufactured gears for a friends high end RC car after the manufacturer had gone out of business. Those gears see a lot of stress, and they held up fine.

ABS is a great material, and so is PLA.