The average lifetime productivity of an American is about $2 million. Why should we spend 5000 lifetimes worth of productivity to go to the moon? A place we've already been to before, and which is close enough that we can just carry all needed supplies from Earth. There's practically nothing left to learn from such an endeavor which we cannot already learn from the ISS. The only proposed moon project I've heard of worth a damn is to put a radio telescope on the far side, shielded from all the EM noise from Earth.

Manned space exploration already has a terrible return on investment compared to unmanned. But if we're going to do it, focus on solving new problems - long term space travel for a mission to Mars. The R&D into constructing a self-contained ecosystem and recycling water and oxygen will actually have some practical applications here on Earth.

I'd hazard a guess that this is a disgruntled insider, based in part on the fact that they claimed knowledge of internal practices (charging for profile deletion, but then retaining the information anyway)

Hey, they were only keeping open the possibilities for future business models.

My wifi is near unusable at the extremes of my own house. When I go outside, I can't usefully hitch to it more than a few feet from the house. Any drone that wants to inject something would have fly really close.

The point of doing this from a drone is that it'll have unhindered line of sight to the target wifi network. Once you have line of sight, it's just a matter of cranking up the signal (both transmit and received) with a directional antenna until you can hear and be heard by the wifi router. With a good enough antenna, distance is irrelevant. You might have heard in the news that we're picking up signals from a robot spacecraft that's currently 3 billion miles away. It's done by using a really big directional antenna here on Earth. The transmitter on the spacecraft itself only uses about 20-30x more power than your home router.

Man, they've got you snookered real good. Advertising's entire purpose is to remove money from your wallet.

And if the thing you're buying with that money is worthwhile (increases your productivity - whether directly by helping you work or indirectly by helping you relax and recharge), then removing that money from your wallet is a good thing. Good economic transactions are ones where both the buyer and seller are better off after the sale. But without advertising, you cannot obtain the information you need to judge if something is a good purchase. Your old laptop breaks and you need to buy a new one. How do you pick the best laptop for your money if the manufacturers and stores don't advertise?.

OP is absolutely right. Fundamentally, advertising is dissemination of information. I didn't have a TV for 3 years. I didn't think I missed the ads, until I was hanging out with my friends and they decided we should watch a movie. I had absolutely no idea what movies were playing, and wasn't able to contribute at all to the discussion about what movie we should watch. Because I hadn't seen any ads for movies. In fact I wasted a lot of their time because they had to give me a brief plot synopsis of each movie they were discussing.

Where advertising crosses the line is when it becomes dishonest. Either disseminating false information, or trying to entice people to buy in ways which are completely orthogonal to the product being advertised (the brand of beer you drink will make sexy women hang out with you? Really?). But banning all advertising would break society as we know it. How are you going to find an apartment to rent if the landlord isn't allowed to advertise he has one available, and you're not allowed to advertise that you're looking for one?

Unlike email, which spammers send essentially for free, paper junk mail is paid for and in fact provides about 1/3rd of the funding for the US Postal Service.

Actually, when you put it like that, marketing (spam + selling marketing info) pays for 100% of most people's email. If you have a free email account with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc., it's not really free. It's being paid for by selling your info to marketers. Just like spam/junk mail.

That's the way electricity is sold in the U.S. The utility company maintains and charges for the wires. The electricity is sold by another company, and you get to pick which company you're buying it from. If you choose to get it from renewable sources, the cost is higher but the energy part of your bill gets sent to them. The individual electrons are not sorted, but the sum balance of them are.

That said, this is like diesel vs. gasoline, where the crude oil wants to break down into a certain fraction of diesel vs gasoline. As long as your demand for those two products equals the supplied amount, prices remain low. If demand gets skewed in one direction, then you end up having to do inefficient refining to convert diesel to gasoline (or vice versa), and the price goes up. Same thing here - as long as electrical demand for conventional vs. renewable sources remains about the same as the supply, the marginal price for renewables will remain rather low. But if you start pushing for 100% renewables, the price will skyrocket due to the inefficiency of matching renewable power generation profiles to power demand profiles.

Its a good thing my reason for wanting hybrid and electric vehicles is purely economical.

That's something I think a lot of people are missing about EVs, and which TFA touches upon. They look at the economic price per mile, and conclude that EVs must be vastly more efficient than ICE cars. In terms of energy consumed, they're actually almost the same.

ICE car gets 30 mpg. A gallon of gasoline has 120 MJ/gal. So (forgive the mixed units) you're consuming about 4 MJ/mile.

A Tesla S has a 85 kWh battery, and can go 253 miles. That's 1.2 MJ/mile. The EV is a lot more energy efficient!

But wait, what about energy production costs? Mining, refining, and transport adds about 15% to the energy consumption of gasoline. So the ICE vehicle is up around 4.6 MJ/mile.

The Tesla S has a charging efficiency of about 80%. It also has a discharge efficiency, but that is built into the EPA mileage figures which are calculated using battery capacity, not energy pulled out of the battery.

Electrical power lines have a transport efficiency of about 98%.

Coal power plants have an efficiency of about 40%

Coal mining and transport adds about 10% to the energy consumption cost.

The actual energy consumption of the Tesla then is 1.2 * 1.1 / (.8*.98*.4) = 4.2 MJ/mile (assuming 100% coal). Not much different from an ICE car. In fact if you converted these back to MPG, the ICE car actually gets 26 MPGe, the Tesla gets 28.6 MPGe (though obviously the latter would vary based on electricity generation source).

As it turns out, almost the entirety of the reason EVs are cheaper to operate than ICE cars is not because of energy efficiency - both use almost the same amount of energy per mile traveled. The EV is cheaper because coal is so much cheaper than gasoline. Coal costs about $55 per ton, and a ton of coal produces about 21 GJ of energy, for a final cost of 0.26 cents per MJ. Gasoline at $3/gal is about 2.5 cents per MJ. An order of magnitude more expensive than coal.

The only reason distilled petroleum is used as an energy source for transportation is that this huge cost disadvantage is more than offset by the high energy density - 42 MJ/kg for gasoline, 0.55 MJ/kg for the Tesla S battery (and 21 MJ/kg for coal if you're curious). You can carry more of it around (greater range), and you can load it up more quickly and easily (faster refueling). Those are the primary hurdles EVs have to jump to achieve widespread adoption, not economic. Gasoline was already a very poor economic choice in the first place, but that wasn't a big enough drawback to prevent it from being widely adopted in transportation.

Boats and especially planes are much more weight-sensitive than cars. Consequently, you will not see electric boat and plane motors becoming practical as primary propulsion until battery energy density increases substantially. Boats also suffer from much higher energy consumption per distance traveled, e.g. The battery that pushes a Tesla 300 miles would only push a boat for about 30 miles.

Where electric boat motors can make sense today is as a secondary motor. Unlike cars where the wheels have direct contact with solid ground, boat propellers have to gain traction from a yielding liquid. Consequently, the "gearing" of the propeller (pitch vs rpm) matters, and it's most efficient at one point. A propeller designed for full speed may be inefficient at trolling or maneuvering speed. Many boats use a second, smaller motor for this purpose. Depending on how much it weighs and how often it's used, this could potentially be replaced by an electric motor.

As for letting off the brakes when getting rear-ended, that may not be a good idea - the guy in front of you may not appreciate turning a 2 car wreck into a 3 car wreck. Especially if said impact pushed them into crossing traffic.

I've actually been in this exact scenario. I was on the freeway when traffic in front suddenly stopped due to an accident. I stopped, but noticed in my rearview mirror that the two teenage girls in the car behind me were busy yammering away with each other. They got closer and closer, before finally noticing that I was stopped and slamming on the brakes.

Here's the crucial part. Based on their distance, how fast they were going, and how quickly the brakes were slowing them down, I could estimate that they were going to stop about a meter past my rear bumper. As it turned out I had stopped with a good 3 meters between me and the car in front. So I just scooted forward a couple meters (this is the reason you're supposed to stop far enough back that you can see the rear tires of the car in front). The girls came to a screeching halt just behind me, heads flung forward against their seat belts, bounced up, and they started nervously laughing at each other. No collision, nobody got hurt, nothing got damaged.

A computer-controlled car which knows exactly the distance to the car in front, distance to the car in the rear is, how fast it's approaching, and how quickly it's decelerating. It can easily make this kind of calculation and decide if its better to let off the brakes and scoot forward, or press down hard on the brake to absorb the rear collision but avoid hitting the car in front. I lucked out because I happened to be watching the entire situation develop in the rearview mirror, and could accurately estimate their speed and rate of deceleration. But a computer could calculate this at any time. And if you watch the video, the Google car had enough situational awareness that it could've easily detected cross traffic - it wasn't just tracking the cars immediately next to it.

Chris Langdon has created a new strain of the weed which looks like a translucent red lettuce. An excellent source of minerals, vitamins and antioxidants, the "superfood" contains up to 16 per cent protein in dry weight. ... It has twice the nutritional value of kale." Langdon says, "When you fry it, which I have done, it tastes like bacon, not seaweed. And it's a pretty strong bacon flavor."

It's people. Translucent Red is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. That's why it tastes like bacon - we taste like pork. Next thing, they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them! You tell everybody. Listen to me. Hatcher. You've gotta tell 'em! TRANSLUCENT RED IS PEOPLE! We gotta stop them! Somehow! Listen! Listen to me... PLEASE!!!

Yeah that statement left me scratching my head too. It was added by the editor, not the submitter, so it's probably not surprising that it was poorly phrased. If you follow the link, you find that it's about people not trusting banks, so they're using their mobile phone carrier to handle small monetary transactions.

Incidentally, 1/1063 the brightness would put the sun at about magnitude -19.2, or about 400x brighter than the full moon, 2.5 million times brighter than Venus at its brightest.

The main imager (LORRI) is a 208mm diameter telescope with a 2630mm focal length, or f/12.6. The spider and secondary obscure 11% of the area, so that's equivalent to f/13.4 in terms of light gathering for photographic purposes. Exposure times are 50-200 ms, or 1/20 to 1/5 sec.

On Earth, the sunny 16 rule says on a sunny day the proper exposure at f/16 is when your shutter speed is 1/ISO. So f/16, 100 ISO, 1/100 sec. The atmosphere absorbs roughly half the sunlight, so in earth orbit that would become f/16, 100 ISO, and 1/200 sec.

Pluto is about 32.6 AU from from the sun right now, so the sun's brightness there is 1/32.6^2 = 1/1063 what it is at Earth.

Going from f/16 to f/13.4 gets you about 1.43x more light.
Increasing exposure time from 1/200 sec to 1/10 sec gets you 20x more light.
That leaves a deficit of 37.2x, which you can get by increasing CCD sensitivity to ISO to 3,720.

ISO 3200 was easily attainable by high-end consumer digital camera sensors 10 years ago, much less a commercial one specially designed for scientific purposes.

You probably saw a lot of news coverage during the weekend of Independence Day - July 4th. The 4th is the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence when the U.S. colonies began their revolt against the British Empire, so is considered the nation's birthday. It's a great big party over here. Everyone gets the day off (got July 3rd off since the 4th was a Saturday), puts up flags and dresses up in red, white, and blue, fires up the barbecue grill for a big family picnic with hot dogs and hamburgers, and watches fireworks at night. I hear those fireworks companies do over half their annual business on that one day alone.

Same thing happened with Mars Pathfinder, which landed on 4 July 1997. The two really had little to do with each other, but with the news focused on both the nation's birthday and the pictures coming back from Mars' surface, it was inevitable that the connection between the two was oft mentioned, and most of NASA's staff were in national party mode when on camera.

Downlink speed is limited to 1 kbps (bits, not bytes). 2 kbps if they use a trick involving shutting down power to instruments to boost transmit power.

Reminds me of the early 1990s when JPEG images first started showing up. Full-color 640x480 GIF photo scans were a couple hundred kB and could take 10+ minutes to download over my 2400 baud modem. I was astounded that a 30-40 kB JPEG could look just as good to the eye. Course the JPEG took over half a minute to decode and display back then, but combined with download time it was still faster. (Yes computers and network speeds used to be that slow - it's why the early web made extensive use of thumbnail pics.)