How much did it cost to setup their infrastructure to produce these cars? It seems like it would be a loss if they don't sell any at all. Why wouldn't they raise the price?

The electric Fiat shares probably 90% of its parts and most of an assembly line with the gas-powered Fiat 500; it's the remaining 10% (particularly the batteries) that make the 500e so expensive to produce. California clean-air laws require Fiat to sell a certain number of electric cars if they want to do business in California and restrict how much Fiat can mark up the price of the electric version. If Fiat can't get the parts needed for less than the permissible markup, they're required to sell the cars at a loss.

I don't know about this balloon, but the ones I've been tracking on FlightRadar are solidly *above* controlled airspace. Airliners tend to hang out around 30,000-40,000 feet, business jets are typically 35,000-45,000 feet, and Google's balloons are at 60,000 feet and above.

That aside, both the passenger and the driver are aware of the optimal route

The passenger is aware of what his smartphone thinks is the optimal route.

Consider going from the Spokane airport to the Lakeside area: Google Maps routes you via I-90 and the Maple Street Bridge, but during rush hour, this is a wonderful place to run up the meter, with delays of 10-30 minutes on a 30-minute trip. Going via the Sunset Highway instead avoids much of the traffic (and cuts a quarter-mile off the meter), but to someone who's not a local, it looks like you're being dragged off into the middle of nowhere to be mugged, or at least ripped off on the taxi fare.

Now, as someone from out of town, how are you going to judge if the driver is telling you the truth about why he's going somewhere your smartphone doesn't want him to?

what is it you think is the problem? what do you think will surface? please no snark, I'm genuinely curious.

1) Drivers deliberately taking sub-optimal routes to run up the meter.
2) Drivers putting in too many hours a day, leading to an increased accident rate.
3) Drivers using the cheapest cars they can buy/skimping on maintenance to keep their costs down.
4) Drivers extorting passengers to pad their income ("An extra $20 off the books, and I won't take the scenic route").
5) Drivers refusing to take people to low-profit destinations ("Take you out there? The hour I'd spend getting back to the city for my next fare would eat my profits for the week")

Criminal record check is completely unnecessary. How are convicted felons ever going to find work if we put background checks on everything?

You make the background check appropriate for the job. For example, I don't want a taxi driver who's been convicted of mugging or drunk driving, but I don't care if he's got a past as an embezzler. Conversely, I don't care if my accountant spent his teenage years knocking over convenience stores for drug money, but a history of embezzlement is unacceptable.

That's only if you've got a pump lifting the water out, leaving 860 feet of empty pipe -- and if you're doing that, the energy cost is the same as if you put the membrane on the surface and used a high-pressure pump to simulate 860 feet of depth.

If you want to get away from needing pumps to filter the water, you need to base your calculations on the density difference between fresh water and salt water, not the difference between salt water and air.

The natural osmotic pressure of sea water is 390 pounds per square inch. You'd need to stick your filter deep enough that the pressure difference between your column of fresh water and the surrounding sea water exceeds that, which a back-of-the-envelope calculation says occurs at a depth of 6.6 miles. The Mariana Trench is 6.8 miles deep, so yes, it'll work, but just barely.

I don't know about GPS units, but I've had Google Maps send me on a complicated route through the alleys of a small town because someone forgot to enter a permitted turn at the intersection of two major highways. I've had it tell me to drive through a concrete barrier because someone recorded the intersection as a cross intersection rather than back-to-back "T" intersections. I've had it give me a route four hours longer than necessary, because it thought part of the short route was still closed for the winter. And most recently, it give me a route that ended twenty miles short of my destination because it picked the park administrative headquarters in a nearby city as the location of the park, rather than somewhere actually, you know, *in* the park.

20 kilotons is probably the upper limit of what their detector can handle. ">20 kilotons" is simply a way of expressing "off the scale".

No, modern telescopes use mirrors instead of lenses for two reasons:

1) Once a lens gets more than about a meter across, it starts deforming measurably under its own weight (and the direction and amount of deformation changes as you shift the telescope). A mirror can be supported across its entire width and does not have this problem.

2) A lens experiences chromatic aberration, causing different frequencies of light to focus at different points. You can reduce (but not eliminate) this by using achromatic doublets or other optical tricks (such as absurdly long telescopes), or you can take the easy way out and just use a mirror.

Hmm... the Incomputatibility of the Universe, maybe this is an avenue for proving the the Universe is not a simulation?

No, assuming the paper is correct, it merely proves that either P = NP, or that the universe simulation is running on a computer more powerful than a Turing machine.

The number of unrecovered black boxes is pretty damn low: in the past 25 years, only one airplane's recorders were lost. The rest were either destroyed in the crash, or deliberately not recovered.

I'm sure a "very clear explanation" is given, but I'm not going to read something that presents it to me at a rate of one sentence per page.

The author is correct, but he expressed it in a very awkward way: below Wanapum Dam is Priest Rapids Dam, and below that is the Hanford Reach, a free-flowing section of the river. If Wanapum fails, the Priest Rapids reservoir needs to absorb the entire flood; releasing it will cause flooding in the Hanford area.

A programming language with primitives like:

"Compile a list of all European Capitals"

sounds like a damned powerful language to me.

To me, that doesn't sound like a very powerful language, it sounds like a language with a huge standard library. Power comes from things like making

"Compile a list of all European capitals, but I don't consider Iceland to be part of Europe"

easy. If it's hard to step outside the limits of the standard library, it's not a powerful language.