We have trillions to bomb people with, but not for science. Unless it leads to better bombs.

All I have to do is wait and examples will be everywhere, because gas cars are moving to turbocharged direct injection right now, and that's eliminating the cost advantage. They're just as expensive as diesels because they have basically all the same parts, even though they tend to use less metal because most engines don't have opposed cylinders. Right now though, there's few like models to compare, although I did find one high-end counterexample: The BMW/Alpina B4/D4. The M4 costs £59,145, the B4 £58,950, the D4 £58,600. They all have extremely similar performance, they all have 3 liter engines, they all have twin turbochargers, they all have direct injection. The diesel has a little less horsepower and a little more torque, and by all accounts is slightly less exciting if what excites you is the car feeling like it's fast when you diddle the throttle, but it feels just as good to drive and it's right around the same numbers.

TL;DR: New emissions restrictions are pushing gasoline to be just as expensive as diesel, but it's still an inferior fuel. And in fact, the new gasoline engines foul their intake valves in a way that the diesels don't.

Subaru isn't aiming for maximum performance out of their diesel. But they will, since the diesel performance segment is heating up. It's not just in europe, but also in the US. Cummins is starting to crank out some exciting engines again, light-duty sized engines with heavy-duty levels of output. They have the potential to reduce fuel consumption in OTR trucking substantially.

If you can bring it in cheaper, I'm sure they'd be interested in what you've got to say. Nobody wants to use a satellite link for communications.

Writing makes my hand hurt ever since one of my elementary school teachers (fuck you sideways, Mr. K, you lazy piece of shit) made me write "I WILL NOT DISRUPT THE CLASS" hundreds of times on multiple separate occasions after doing such disruptive things as looking at the other children after I finished long, long before them. Apparently, giving me more work to do was outside the scope of his job description. So I occasionally jot a note, and I sign things when necessary, but I far prefer to type. Even text input on a modern smartphone is less painful.

This doesn't seem to harm me in modern society in any way. Let cursive go. It's unnecessary to have two script systems. Also, cursive writing is stupid anyway. When normal roman characters are malformed you can still usually tell what they are. Words outright change meaning when people squash their cursive script too much. It's a bad invention.

The problem is that the statement was "is diesel such a bad fuel? I thought low sulfur diesel in modern vehicles was pretty OK with great gas mileage?" and your reply was "Lol, ummm NO! The Euro market has been waay ahead of the US in this area for awhile. Hell they couldn't bring over their diesels for the longest time because our fuel was too shitty to run them!" We are specifically talking about the area of diesel fuel quality, in which the USA is in fact superior to most of the rest of the world, as I said.

If you cannot manage to stay on topic, you're gonna have a bad time.

When are we going to admit that building telescopes on earth is a stupid idea, when we know how to get to the moon? Granted, we're a bit rusty... But we really want them on the far side of the moon anyway, and we're still building them here.

These people's right to participate in the global internet as full citizens has been sold out in exchange the prestige of hosting a radio telescope that shouldn't be on this planet anyway. And what did they get for it? A discount on shitty internet access.

With every new piece of news I am further dismayed with our failure as a species. I can't shake the nagging sensation that we deserve to become extinct.

So you're going to make it cheaper by digging a 20' trench into bumfuck nowhere?

Most standard data transfer protocols can handle a few seconds' latency, including FTP. People who have satellite internet can still use FTP. Hell, they can still use HTTP, which you may note also uses TCP.

On the other hand, interactive traffic of all kinds goes straight into the toilet. Even using an AJAXy website will be painful. Gaming is right out. So's Skype, hangouts, voip in general. It might work, but it will be horrible.

Rail-based PRT does not rule out personal vehicles. It would cost you more to have one, because you'd have to pay for a siding with switches and not just a driveway, but you could still have one. Or you'd store it at a facility, and it would pull up out front of your house on a schedule, or after a short delay.

In the current system, your neighbor has to pay for you to be able to drive your car up to your front door, by helping you maintain the road system. Under PRT, you would have to pay the cost to park in front of your house yourself. But you would still be able to have a private vehicle. Vehicles could be made which would drive both on PRT and on carriageways, but it would be inefficient.

Finally, you might be happy with your personal vehicle, but automobiles are unsustainable on our current energy infrastructure before we even talk about the tires. I brought them up initially because they are a source of fine particulates even when used as they are meant to be used. But PRT on a rail doesn't have tires, so we both eliminate a lot of rolling friction and a lot of dust and waste. I don't want to breathe your tires. I don't want to breathe my tires. We can and should do better.

I presume that's what they're actually doing, but it's not a problem for the telescope like it is for the users. The multi-second latency isn't a problem when you're sending bulk data.

Yes, you are spot on. I imagine that you only have 2GB because your P4 takes RDRAM, which was named after the sound RAMBUS executives made while going to the bank to cash their ill-gotten gains: RDRR! Ahem. Anyway, throw that thing away! By now you can get something faster under a hundred bucks. I literally just threw away my P4 with 2GB. It's too big and consumes too much power to be worth saving. There are netbooks with more cojones.

OK, I'm privileged because I can afford to throw away a computer, even if it is a shitty old P4. But you should seriously be able to score someone's old MB+CPU+RAM for thirty or forty bucks. And by "old" I mean "way newer than your crappy P4"

I started puberty earlier than my schoolmates but I still didn't develop socially as rapidly as the girls, probably because boys don't have to deal with creepers following them home from school asking them inappropriate questions as often and so on. I don't think it has as much to do with the hormones as with the way they're treated.

The latency of satellite is unacceptable for interactive communications. Internet-by-postcard.

It would probably be cheaper to just build a ring of point to point links using COTS wifi equipment.

What happens at a hundred feet? The atmosphere doesn't get thin enough to notice difference until a thousand or so.

Most 'drones' of that description don't have enough range to be a threat to aircraft unless you're actually standing on the airfield, so who cares? Meanwhile, lots of drones under $500 have big pieces of metal in them which would definitely eat an engine and which would possibly crack a windshield or puncture the skin of the aircraft. They're not made out of all that much, you know.