The stars that are close enough to Earth for a GRB to be dangerous can't produce a GRB. So it's not so much "in between bursts" as being in the right place.

You probably just take a several-billion-year nap.

The energy will have to come from elsewhere, then.

You're comparing apples and orange marmalade. The question is whether electricity is more easily managed than hydrogen, and with modern battery compositions, the answer is yes. Hydrogen is a PITA to manage. These days, batteries are fairly unlikely to burst into flames just sitting around, so the days when they were a big problem are over, unless you're Fisker.

Brief moments aside, America has long been so rich that we had excess cars lying about. Now we are so poor that we have excess cars lying about which nobody can afford to buy. They stack up at ports and rot there. Anyway, point is, reliability was not the primary concern for American buyers until recently, the two things that gave the Japanese a leg up were the energy crisis and emissions regulations. The American car companies just punted on emissions technology for years and churned out not just unreliable cars, but unreliable slow cars. Datsun and later Nissan was able to beat cars that were just as fast as Corvettes for half the money and with half the displacement (1971 240Z, 1984 300ZX Turbo, 1991 300ZX TT) during that era because it was competing with ultra-low-compression V8s with big crappy carburetors. And of course, when we first decided we cared about mileage, the Japanese were right there with double the numbers of the American companies.

Reliability is a factor, but the truth is that the American cars of the era when the Japanese got a leg up were just shit in every way. Today they're often actually quite good, surprisingly including and maybe even especially Ford.

Can you explain to us how the accounting is done? If I buy a part 20 years on for a vehicle for which I'm not even the first owner, and it's a part which can fit 20 different vehicles, how do you account for the profit? You don't have accurate statistics on failures on vehicles that old, because people don't bring them back to the dealer for service. From my various forays into automotive parts replacement and part ordering, I know that without exception the manufacturers charge absolutely abusive prices for replacement parts. You're telling me that having more expensive parts doesn't lead to more profit? Go on, pull the other one.

Automakers derive significant profit from parts sales, and EVs both have less parts and are less prone to failure than vehicles with ICEs. Auto dealers also derive significant profit from service, so they don't want to sell EVs. They won't need as much service, and most of what they need will be stuff that can be done by anyone. There's no good reason to go back to the dealer for it.

We've been driving production hybrids for fifteen years now. We already know the best way to do it, you replace the torque converter of an automatic transmission with an electric motor. In spite of that, people are still doing it in other ways which cost more money, and which increase parts count.

Bury a bunch of beacon power flywheels and top it with a generac natgas fuel cell

Or other brands, I just know these guys have stuff

Our grid is not a grid, it is bullshit, so it is likely that these connections will be made anywhere there is actually capacity. That might well be in places which make some sort of logical sense, or it might just be in places where they think EV drivers go and where they can find someplace to plug in their kit.

Yes, that's true, it's seven times higher. But the specific energy is only about a third as much. So the question then becomes one of cost of containment. And that's the real reason diesel wins. Diesel fuel is the most convenient fuel we have in terms of actually managing the fuel itself. It has all the same advantages as gasoline (as compared to hydrogen) plus the lack of volatility.

Yeah, but you pretty much have to be an asshole to want to burn hydrogen in an ICE, because it's so feasible to use it in a fuel cell.

Fuel cells have been demonstrated operating 10,000 hours without any decrease in efficiency, which is supposed to correspond to a roughly 300,000 mile lifespan. They'll have to make it at least twice that long, though, in order to get into big rig territory. On the other hand, the efficiency improvements gained by eliminating the big, complicated transmission could be significant.

Last I checked, containing it was still expensive, too. That's a problem in my book.

So what's the efficiency of the electrolysers? Last I checked they were down around 40% at best. And since we don't actually have a national power grid, we can't simply ship electrical power around at will. We can only ship it for relatively short distances.

Yes, but in terms of volume, it's not notably better than Li-Ion.

Also, let us not forget replacement, which is going to have to happen at about the same time for the fuel cell as it does for batteries. Fuel cells are still very expensive, just like batteries.

Finally, the charging time for an electric vehicle may be measured in hours, but the charging time for a hydrogen vehicle is measured in years. We'll have to wait years for the fueling infrastructure. But you can plug your EV in right now. How rapidly do you really think we'll get hydrogen fueling stations anywhere but in a corridor similar to where Tesla has "supercharger" stations? Right now there's only a handful on the seaboards.

Note that Apple is not donating all the proceeds to charity, as the headline suggets ("profit portion") but in fact a portion of profits. I am not new here so I am not surprised you have not read TFA but in fact the truth is that 100% of the profits from 25 apps will be donated, while a portion of the profits from Apple retail locations will be donated. Congratulations to ZDNet, they fooled you completely with that headline. Sucker.

No, as it stands now, we are effectively jerking off, because none of us are in a position to claim ownership of rocks in space. Only the first person to set up camp there will be in that position, not least because they will have a ready supply of said rocks.

You won't have to. They will be taken from you, just as easily as they were granted. Assuming you even think they were granted, which they actually weren't.

The question that needs to be asked though is if any country would be stupid enough to risk throwing nukes when the response is going to come from space. Once you're actually in a position to mine asteroids, you're also in a position to bombard the Earth with rocks.

chicken egg

pot kettle black

things are worth what people will pay for them

Too Short, Didn't Read? Allow me to elaborate. There's not much use for people here on Earth, mostly we stink up the place. Space is maybe not the next frontier (seems like we should finish exploring the oceans first) but it's coming up. We are curious monkeys, and we want to know what's out there. So we're going, sooner or later, if we don't drown in our own waste first. And in order to do that, we're going to have to mine asteroids, because of the externalities involved in lifting sufficient mass from Earth.

If you don't want us to go to space, I submit that this is not the site for you

What? Who told you that?

The citric acid in the lemon juice is sufficient once you've pasteurized the eggs. What it won't do is keep for years, which is why Hellman's mayo contains Disodium EDTA.

I agree with you about what we evolved to eat. But I don't agree with you about cows being environmentally friendly. Everywhere in the world they mostly graze land which used to be forest. Here in the USA that is definitely true. And I have a great example, in fact. I live in Kelseyville, which is in Lake County. It's named for a guy who enslaved, raped, and murdered the locals — it's a bit living in Hitlerville or Santa Torquemada. This town has a whole bunch of walnut trees, and indeed it used to be one of the biggest walnut producers in California. The US government paid people to plant these trees, and so they did. But first, they cut down whichever oaks hadn't already been cut down to make room for cattle ranching. Part of the idea, of course, was to eliminate the natives' food source. They ate acorns. You can live on those, but you can't live on walnuts alone.

So yeah, in places which naturally tend to pasture, grazing cattle is perfectly environmentally friendly. Problem is, those places are in the minority. Most places tend towards forest, if you give them enough time. And most of the places where cows now stand, trees once stood. Many of them have been recently slashed and burned.

I love me some meat, and I eat as much as I can, but let's not pretend that it's more environmentally friendly than vegetarianism. And sadly, cows are pretty much the worst. The methane of their flatulence is a significant greenhouse gas and the deforestation their existence implies is part of the problem with global climate today.