I did not estimate anything. 8-10 years is the expected lifespan of the average car made today as designed (also known as the design lifespan). This is based on a "typical" usage of 20K miles per year (which of course is a lot more miles than many people drive, but less than others). Of course many vehicles last longer then that and many shorter then that. It all depends on how you use them. Likewise, you can expect some of the Tesla vehicles to last more or less years also depending on how they are abused or taken care of.

Additionally, 8-10 years is the typical expected life span of regular gas burning cars today. While you *might* get by with extending a gas burning car's lifetime by rebuilding the engine for less than the cost of a replacement battery pack in a tesla car, it really is probably going to be a wash once you include the other maint costs...maybe even a win for the Tesla car. I really think the Tesla car is on par with it's gas counterparts both in terms of operating costs, range and features. The only fault is it's highish price tag, but it deserves the price tag given that it's a pioneer for technology innovation. They can't be expected to have competitive prices until they have competitors. And nobody else has a vehicle that even comes close. The Volt, leaf, ect are jokes compared to this car's capabilities.

TFA mentioned the planets had lost significant portions of their mass to the intense heat. I doubt there would be anything left for an archaeologist to look at.

So...your grave still exists on whats left of a scorched rock vs being completely destroyed leaving nothing but particles in space? Sounds WAY better!

Well, there is that...and the whole stability issue. I am still not interested until it gets stable. I guess some people have had some success with it not crashing, but it crashes all the time for me and my wife on different computers/OSs. And no, we don't run any special extensions or anything. Chrome doesn't crash doing the same thing on the same machine...so we use that now.

Yes, but really it's time this happened. Microsoft finally has a half way decent browser, it's been 18 months since IE6 and 7 were end of life'd, there is no reason for people to still be running on IE6/7 other then organizations being too stubborn or bureaucratic to make their stuff work on the new. The last project I was on we as a team of 8 devs + project manager and two testers spent weeks making the app backward compatible with IE6 just because there was other stuff that they refused to fix that only worked on IE6 so parts of the company was stuck on IE6. Obviously updates can be controlled, but hopefully this will start breaking up the log jam of dependencies on broken old version of IE...

And this would be the point where the fact that the Firefox devs have been trying to do too much with a "browser" becomes beyond blatantly obvious. Firefox team: get your stuff together or you will die a slow death of attrition.

So if they "clone" the thing, then attack with the clones, does that mean we will have a CLONE WAR? Sheesh, has start wars affected me or what? :)

Not surprised really. Well, a little surprised it has taken this long for something like this to happen given the leaks about how poorly encrypted (or not encrypted) the control channels are on these things.

I am a USA citizen, but I am really kinda glad they have it and hope they do share the tech with everybody. I think UAVs just serve to further insulate soldiers from the violence of war and make war crimes WAY too easy. If everybody has these little gadgets, then it levels the battlefield a bit as it were.

Seems less likely than Jurassic Park to attract enough tourists to keep such a venture solvent. Besides...what can they really do with one set of DNA? You bring one back from the dead as it were, but wouldn't you need at least two (male and female) to re-start the species...and several to have any remotely healthy genetic diversity? Frozen specimens have shown what the animal was like...not sure what more could be learned from a living example?

Why not use real twins? Seems like it would be cheaper and easier to apply some SNL makeup magic to a set of real twins to make them look the part instead of doing a bunch of digital post processing.

It was less then that actually. Businesses that are looking for a stable platform to work from will generally not even try to hit a target that moves that fast. And consumers are going to get "upgrade fatigue"....already are actually. I stopped using Firefox a few weeks ago and probably will not go back unless they stop this insanity and come up with a better way of doing things. The volume of jokes in these comments accurately reflects what FF has become: a joke.

OTOH, Chrome is treating me very well. It has all the features I need, behaves very well on almost all sites I go to (even ones that I wouldn't expect to work well) and almost NEVER crashes. Oh, and it's perceived speed on windows is WAY faster then FF right now (I could care less about benchmarks, I need my browser to be responsive in the real world)

What would be even more cool is if the software could "put it back"...re-create the look of the original picture. Obviously that would not be possible for some edits...but maybe for some of the airbrushing and such done on models?

Suck on this! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-Population-1800-2100.png

Graboids! Sweeeeet:)