Infrastructure has to be built one sale at a time. Tesla is demonstrating one way to do it with their supercharger network, with trickle chargers in the home, and supercharging stations scattered around the country, trying to bridge gaps in coverage.

A hydrogen infrastructure will look different, because pressurized hydrogen isn't as ubiquitous as electricity. They might have better luck with a regional approach, selling commuter cars in one city, and building up an infrastructure there just to prove it can be done. This could go hand-in-glove with a partnership with a rental car company, where your car price comes with discounted rentals for cross country trips. They might even be able to start with some fleet approaches: delivery vans, local taxi services, city government inspectors, etc. Get a few vehicles out there first, then expand into the consumer market. Once the hydrogen delivery trucks start making rounds to carry fuel to the fleet terminals, it's not a stretch to get them delivering to consumer facing refueling stations.

Or maybe hydrogen delivery service stations could be provided in a novel format, like a standard shipping container. Build a tank and pump system into a steel box, and make arrangements with a company like BP to drop one in the parking lot of an existing refueling station whenever you sell a car that's not within 10 miles of an existing station. BP may like drilling for oil, but their primary business is selling vehicle fuel. This is an opportunity that doesn't bypass them, like home charging stations do.

The one thing that would be likely to fail would be to take billions of dollars of investment, and build a national network of thousands hydrogen refueling stations before the arrival of millions of hydrogen consumers.

In suburban-heavy US metropolitan regions, Zipcars haven't made inroads yet because the sources and destinations of people are not close to each other. Suburbs are all houses (sources of people) but have no shops, factories, or businesses (no destinations). If my neighborhood was to have a successful zipcar garage that served everyone, it would have to contain as many cars as there are nearby residents, and it would still be emptied quite early in the mornings. The urban centers have few residents who would commute away from the city to work, and would not provide a demand for the tens of thousands of cars that would arrive every morning.

If the cars were self-driving, they'd be able to return to the suburbs to provide many trips per day. More trips per car means fewer cars are needed.

"Hey, Joe, now that we've finished surrounding the Capitol building lawns with mines, we've still got a bunch of extra mines. What should we do with them?"

"They're not extra. They said ring the building, so the plans are to mine the walks and driveways, too. Maybe if they wrote the policy better, they'd have thought to add an access route."

That's what I was thinking. If they are getting real people to agree with their position and sign up with their on-line site, how would that make their individual choices illegitimate? How could that be painted as "astroturf" when it's clearly legitimate support?

Look at the other side. If I worked for a railroad that operated thousands of tanker cars that ship oil across the country, I might go to the stop-the-oil-pipeline.org site and pledge my support. As a railroad, I burn thousands of gallons of oil to ship millions of gallons of crude. I have no interest in protecting the environment, yet here I am, signing up. It's not because I'm an environmentalist, it's because I don't want the competition to take away my business. Where is the story claiming this makes the environmentalists an astroturf organization? There isn't one, because it's not.

Why isn't this story looking into the CRM software in use by the environmentalists? Perhaps their bias is a bit too evident.

A "good" compiler should throw an error and refuse to compile it, because the function's return can never be reached. An "evil" compiler will spit out an ignorable warning, but let you build your bomb. That implies we need to use evil compilers to program the Kill-O-Bots.

So how many humans have to die before recognizing the AED is faulty? If it's a subtle fault, it might be delivering a barely ineffective treatment, and confused with an unsaveable patient. The THERAC 25 failure was a bit more dramatic, but it still killed many patients.

Would we accept the same levels of failure from the Kill-O-Bot 2000? We already fire missiles into crowds of people or convoys in order to take out a single high value target. If the Kill-O-Bot was more specific than a missile, but less than perfect, isn't it still a better choice?

Depends on how it identifies 'neckbeards'.

It's an anti-TARDIS card -- it's smaller on the inside.

Came here to say exactly this. Focus on your adventure. Coding will be here when you get back.

Like others I found the headline confusing. I read it as "Researchers are predicting the use of Wikipedia as a vector for the spread of disease". This may mean that:

• Disinformation and ignorance are diseases.
• Memes and computer viruses are diseases.
• Wilipedia contains information that leads to depression.
• Instructions on Wikipedia lead to substance abuse.
• This is getting entertaining, fill in your own reason here.

You'd be surprised how much damage an incompetent executive can do. It may not be immediate, but it poisons an organization systemically. A bad boss can be fired. Firing a bad exec may not remove the toxins fast enough for the organization to recover.

It's neither. It is a rocket that happens to have two wheels hanging beneath it, and Wile E. Coyote hanging onto a crossbar above it.

What, you're saying swamp coolers don't qualify as A/C? They may not use the traditional compression/expansion cycle, but they certainly do cool an area. And a mucosal surface like the nasal cavity would provide plenty of evaporation to further expel heat from the body. (Although I suspect that the dinosaurs in TFA used swamp cooling primarily in its most literal sense of "hey, let's stand in the swamp because it's cooler".)

The study postulates that dinosaurs' nasal cavities acted as heat exchangers. Without a heat exchanger, your traditional A/C wouldn't work, either. I wouldn't quibble with this categorization.

My biggest gripe is the article misused the term "model" when it clearly meant genus or species.

Social engineering will always work as long as humans have access to the data and systems. There are steps sys admins can take that can limit or mitigate the damage, but the bottom line is that if people need to access the data, then other people will be able to exploit them.

Heavy handed security often isn't the panacea it's advertised as, because ordinary users will find ways to deal with it. Do you make them change passwords daily? They'll resort to keeping a file of daily passwords. Do you make them fill out a big form to request access to a system? They'll request access to a dozen, in hopes that they will stumble across the correct one, and so won't have to repeat the ordeal; out of the dozen departments they request access from, some may approve the inappropriate request. Or some department head will proclaim "grant everything to my department, because I don't want to waste our time with all these expensive little requests." All of these can be exploited even in the best of situations.