I thought legal barratry had to target the same defendant repeatedly.

The iPhone got in on this somehow without all that; while Motorola, Samsung, HTC, and so forth kept their hold. Nokia went another way; Blackberry has been up and down. The manufacturers who didn't pounce on Android dropped out of the running.

It seems open-source software didn't displace those manufacturers who took advantage of the market change. What makes you think all this new technology will displace GM?

Odd then that they already use Spinning missiles beacuse they help solve the re-entry problems

phallax ammo needs replenishing, lands somewhere perhaps in the costal town you are shooting over, and can't be run continuously. It cannot deal with non-lethal modes of attack (rubber dingy). it's very expensive. it has the problems of toxicity from DU. And most of all it's short range.

there are other uses for lasers that projectile weapons don't satisfy easily.
http://www.army.mil/article/82...

there a high peak power, low total energy, laser ionizes a trail from the laser to the target device. then you send a bolt of lightning down that air column, which continues to ionize it while it electrically destroys the target. This can be used to disable vehicles non-lethally from remote distances. It can even be used to destroy roadside IEDs.

Another use, in fact the one it was originally researched for in the 1990s, is discharging lighting storms. In the 1990s there were multiple outages of the internet and other coms systems with astonishing price tags, due to lightning strikes. These don't seem to be as much of a problem now, at least not making the news. But at the time it looked like our new electronic infrastructure would need protecting.

ships are the ideal laser platform due to their abundant power and cooling, as well as their weight carring capacity, sturdy rigid platform, limited storage space for ordinance. Moreover ships are a highvalue asset that in recent years have been denied access to coastlines (littoral) due to proliferation of cheap anti-ship weapons. so defeating those is important to the navy. the main drawback with lasers is you can't fire them over the horizon, and thus the longer range weapon will always bee needed as well.

There never was a mission for the navy to shoot down nuclear missiles. there may have been a mission to shoot down anti-ship missiles. But they already had the Phalax and it is probably as effective as laser would ever be for that mission. But the drone situation changed everything. There wasn't a good way to deal with these, and the pinpoint accuracy of lasers combined with the low power requirements needed makes lasers the ideal weapon for this. Similarly, non-lethal weapons to fend off small craft boats are better solved by lasers than projectiles. Lasers are a great weapon for the navy since they have abundant power and cooling at hand. It means they can carry less explosives making their own vessels safer and reduces the logistics needed for re-supply.

What's remarkable to me is that in the 1970s the idea of a laser weapon seemed ludicrous since they deposited more energy into the laser than into the target, focusing through heated air was a problem, and simply rotating a large target (balistic missile) greatly increased the power needed to damage it. Now we have breakthroughs in laser diode efficieniency, and slow moving non-spinning targets with a low damage threshold

It's a bit simpler than that.

There are all kinds of strategies and techniques geniuses use--the same way a woodworker uses a rotary router upon wood--to achieve maximum utility from their brain. It is a simple tool requiring skill to produce results, as you apply skill with e.g. Krita to draw a digital painting: one tool, hundreds of technical procedures to produce complex results.

One of the most primary strategies used by the greatest geniuses--not simply experts who excel in a single field of interest, but geniuses who excel at anything they attempt on a dare--is to instill motivation. They examine a problem requiring effort, understand its implications, and find a reason for interest: something they already want, or a new thing they suddenly realize a desire for, is more readily achieved by this new effort. In this way, every task, every study, every problem becomes engrossing; the individual has an unfettered desire to pursue this thing which is lain before him, and so fails to recognize the effort he puts forth, and so puts forth much effort without resistance, and so excels.

You observe simply that some things require excessive effort to gain an end not sufficiently interesting; were that end more interesting, it would be more pursued. Likewise, the closer that effort is to something interesting--if an aspect of the effort itself is discovered interesting, or if each step of progression directly translates to a useful step of progression in something else interesting--the more strongly it is pursued. Simply put: if upon completion of X you can improve Y, completing X becomes interesting because of Y; if by way of progressing toward completion of X you improve Y, X becomes interesting because it is essentially Y as well.

You observe, of course, that turning the second situation into the first is a good control for humans: if doing 10% of X grants you 10% of Y, and you do not want people interested in Y to perform X, then you must adjust the system surrounding X, Y, or both such that completing X grants Y, or such that X has less impact on Y, so as to require more effort for returns and less returns for effort.

They wouldn't. They'd outsource that part, and keep their necessary engineers. They'd pay Apple or Google or Tesla to build their fancy displays, their self-navigation systems, and their electric battery management systems, in the same way Subaru pays Porsche to build engines and Cadillac pays Mercedes-Benz to build their suspension systems. The investment for any of these companies to build the systems of the others would be large, save Tesla who would just ensure their continuous survival by becoming the battery supplier for everyone.

It is malicious prosecution. They're setting settlement lower than cost, meaning they're not confident they can win a high-cost lawsuit. If they ever initiate prosecution, it's straight malicious prosecution; holding the threat and strategically avoiding prosecution is coercion and legal racketeering, possibly criminal directly under the RICO act, supported by pattern behavior which indicates that they believe their activities constitute malicious prosecution.

In other words: they're generating circumstantial evidence enough to demonstrate malicious intent and abuse of the legal system in court. A good prosecuting lawyer can raise a lawsuit here and argue, legally, that these people are intentionally avoiding entanglement in an actual lawsuit, and so believe themselves to be pursuing a criminal action, and are avoiding that action but using the threat as leverage for racketeering--they are attempting to extort a broad base of victims for money through illegal abuse of the courts.

How is Q different than the usual Price-to-Book ratio, which formally has the same english definition of the share price to the per-share Asset value of the company? The price-to-book value doesn't go below 1 usually because a leveraged buyout of the company could fund it self by selling off the pieces. The Q-value seems to define assets as replacement value which is unclear. Is replacement value to be taken as what the assets would trade for in their used shape, or what they would cost to buy new.

They're all working with the same faculties, you know; geniuses aren't endowed with better brains.

I have a large and fairly complex plan that puts a permanent end to all homelessness and hunger in the United States, costing less than our current welfare system, softening the blow of economic downturns and high unemployment, and even satisfying the problems of social security old-age pensions. It's a simple set of core actions with piles and piles of justification and analysis attached, rather than a network of fragile and uncertain bits of legislation built in a delicate web of questionable certainty. The beauty of it is that it's quick, easy, and durable; it solves all sorts of social problems through very minor action, through action which cannot fail because failure would come by spite which would only open the door for others to come profit by pushing success: this system will make some people extremely rich, and they will become rich by taking action to house and feed the poor, and yet the well of money they draw from for this is strictly and absolutely limited so as to not create a dangerous drain on our economy.

Do you think I was able to do such a thing because I was born with a much more capable brain than yours? Do you think it came with the package, a special upgrade you did not receive? Would you determine I'm some sort of in-born economic genius with a brain anatomy functionally superior to yours, genetics which you are denied, above and beyond the collective ability of all other humans on this planet? I have none of that; you have the same facilities I do, simply not put to the same use.

Your observation is quite right, but incomplete: there is no "smart kid" in the class; you only have one with some interest, and you will foster geniuses by creating interest in them. There are mental techniques to turn humans into intellectual gods, yes, and you can instill them within every single human child who enters your classroom, if only you can push the right button to make that child interested in learning. With those tools, then, you can repeat the same: grant them an interest in history, in mathematics, in languages, in technology, and they will become experts in those subjects in short order.

Do note that "uneconomic" means costs to someone increase. When that someone is taxpayers, money comes out of people's and business's hands; when that someone is the operator, they raise prices. In the first cases, people have less money with which to eat and commute, and businesses have less money with which to hire people, and so some people fall to poverty where they become mentally ill and diseased; in the second case, some people can't or refuse to afford the service, reducing its usefulness, slowing economy, and causing a similar effect on a larger or smaller scale--larger if it affects commerce at a high comparative advantage, smaller if it only affects people's ability to commute to work and the employer just fires them and hires more local people.

Economic consequences trickle down to real consequences measured in human suffering and death. Every economic action is measured by its offset: it causes damage amounting to 1500 people dying of poverty, but creates stimulus amounting to 2000 people rising out of poverty, and thus gives a bonus of 500 people rising out of poverty--the first 1500 may be sheltered, or they may be exchanged (person A falls to poverty so persons B and C can rise out of poverty). When given the equivalent option, I tend to favor sheltering; when given no equivalent option, I am completely unmoved by exchange (given the option of 50 million starving adults who are starving now or 0.1 million starving children who would starve if we saved those adults, I'll throw the children into the streets). I solidly oppose actions which increase human suffering in total, because it's uneconomic.

That switch controls a throttle system that manages air intake in gas trains, fuel intake in diesel trains, and electricity regulation to the motors in electric rail. If the air or fuel intake sticks open, you get runaway acceleration; if an electrical component shorts or a solid state power MOSFET starts bleeding current, you get excess power to the motors. In that case, your switch might not work, unless it's engineered to cut off some other system--in race cars, the kill switch powers down the fuel pump by disconnecting the battery, because the throttle may stick open and cutting fuel pump cuts fuel going to engine in any and all cases.

Knee-jerk reaction. "It flipped over! You should have X! Do it! Do it now!" Next week: "The automated system didn't work, and caused the train to accelerate out of control and flip over! What irresponsible ass turned this on without proper testing?!"

It's simpler than that: the author purports to see a black swan that will blindside the industry and cause a major turn-over; but you can't see black swans, and so this is not a blind risk. The auto industry is probably sitting on contingency plans to partner with various manufacturers at the tipping point, waiting back to avoid the major investment, knowing that it's a lot of start-up risk to start manufacturing cars. This is a controlled and managed risk, not the kind of industry-disrupting black swan that rises out of nowhere and leaves everyone confused about wtf just happened.