oops hit submit too soon.

The flare pot looks nice and it might improve heat transfer. If the interior is also fluted, it would be very difficult to keep clean. The exterior flukes have nice large radius of curvature so should be easy to clean, but still not as easy to clean as the regular smooth pans. Food in contact with the wall might heat up too quickly and not transfer the heat to rest of the food. Food away from the wall might be undercooked and the food in contact with the wall might char. It is probably suitable for soups and broths. But for cooking rice and such not very liquidy food, heating the wall too rapidly would be a problem.

Back in my undergrad days I worked on a ducted windmill and my friend worked on improving the firewood stoves used by typical rural south Indian womenfolk. A circle of stones with an aluminium pot on top was what he was trying to "improve". Did some clay based sealing of gaps and nice clay ring to set the pot on top with carefully created vents. All using plain stones and clay. Was able to raise the efficiency of heat transfer to the pot. No material to buy at all, just stones and clay.

Well, field trials revealed that he was too good and raised the temperature to nearly the melting point of aluminium! The flue gases and soot abraded the bottom of the pots and they started leaking in just a few sessions. The older inefficient method wasted firewood, but the pots lasted longer.

Then the right thing to do is to realize that the company is too big to manage and split it into smaller pieces. That is the job of the board of directors. But the board and the CEO form a conspiracy to milk the corporation instead of providing true value to their customers. They give huge pay to CEOs, who in turn spend lavishly on the board. They nominate each other for directorships. This is corruption at the highest levels, and it is all legal because they are all private entities. Till the board is sued by the share holders for malpractice and held accountable they will not change.

Small investors like you and I may not have the resources to sue. But these giant mutual funds that own significant parts of these companies too give them too much of a latitude. If the giant mutual funds, Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab and a few more join together to form a Corporate Governance Auditing Board or something and hold the directors' feet to the fire, and fire them for incompetence and sue them for malpractice, then things might change.

Pointy Haired Bosses. Dilbert reference.

This is precisely why higher the CEO pay results in poorer performance by the company. All that pay, blinds the CEO, makes them think they are invincible, if the market is shoving that many billion dollars their way, they must be doing everything right. It sets up the eco system where flatterers, sycophants and yes men thrive insulating the CEO from real news and real feedback.

To think one man, with some initiative can change the culture of a company the size of Microsoft, with entrenched interests, history of turf warfare and empire building is blowing smoke. That company went through spectacular expansion and growth in the 1990s. All those very capable people, the ones who have the vision and ability and the guts to skate too close to or even past the edges of legal behavior have all cashed out, burnt out or pushed out. As the able ones leave, the fraction of PHBs who are clueless when there is not a de-facto monopoly increases. They are playing the same game that used to be effective when there was a WinTel monopoly on desktops, and desktops had the monopoly on computing.

A truly visionary CEO will realize this, break the company into pieces that will once again compete or perish and resign. But Satya Nadella is no Michail Gorbachev.

There is no question it is an amazing technology. As an engineer I can only say, wow!.

But as a taxpayer ...

And each bullet costs just two times the GDP of the entire village the terrorist is hailing from! And we will make up for it in volume too!

Some times I wonder if it would be cheaper to feed, cloth, provide healthcare and house all the Afghans than what we spent on military over there. Afghanistan hardly has 30 million people. Per capita income is 500$ a year. Just 15 billion dollars total. We spent 1 trillion dollars in the war over there. Our government is borrowing at historically low rate, 10 year t-bills go at 2.5%, the interest charges on that debt alone is 25 billion dollars a year!

I don't know if it would have worked. But the idea goes like, take a large well defended perimeter. Free food, clothing, hospitals and homes inside. Let people in after disarming them. Expand the area as more and more people move in. We might be able to take in 90% of the population inside, standing obediently at the breadline and the hospital waiting rooms. I don't know. May be an idiot slashdot keyboard warrior.

No need to wait for Fourth of July any more. Once this technology is fully deployed in all airports by TSA you would be seeing this. . The large donut and the thick pillar are parts of the Van de Graff generator.

Even dogs don't have hearing acute enough to tell the difference. It is as idiotic as asking for certificate of authenticity for the weasel-poop coffee. If you can't tell the difference in taste, why bother drinking poop coffee? If you need an oscilloscope to tell the difference what is big point in buying this sound card?

That bug is so stupid it shows up 14 years late to the party. Geez.

When these politicians give tax payer money to private companies to create "jobs" the tax payers get such a raw deal.

If we just put the trillion in the bank at 4% interest rate, you would get 40 billion dollars a year, It could pay 1 million people 40K a year. None of these projects ever create even a large fraction of a million jobs. Even if it uses the money to hire half million people to dig a trench and the other half to close it up it would provide greater economic impact to the economy than such boondongles.

Most delivery fleets can go electric, they have predictable routes, a home base, time to charge and the range is not very critical to them.

Solar panel prices are falling through the roof, scratch that, there is no damage to the roof. Some studies show that SolarPV might deliver electricity cheaper than grid in 25 states in just two years. Energy storage price break through is likely to happen first to homes than cars because storage for home does not have weight, volume and crashworthiness constraints. Already utility companies are worried and doing what they do best. Lobby the local government and utility commissions.

But one sure fire way to keep their customers tied to the grid is to encourage electric cars. If every home is charging two or three cars overnight they might not be able to ditch the grid. Since night load for the utilities is just 66% to 70% of peak day time load they can serve this market without additional investment in power plants.

Peeling off a large customer base from gasoline companies to the grid would be in the long term interests of the electric utilities. Why aren't they doing it?

Almost every gasoline car sold in America today can go 300 miles on a tank of gas and in 10 minutes be refueled to go another 300. So most people don't rent cars. If the car rental companies come up with some kind of monthly fee based car rental program targeted towards electric car owners, it would be creating a new market segment for itself. May be a 10$ a month plan that gives you access to cars/pickups at some fixed rate. Or a 20$ a month plan that gives so many rental-days which get accumulated in the account. Many pricing models would work. Throw in some free charging when the customer has checked out a gas car, allow them to choose between cars, pickup trucks and moving vans... Or a 250$ a year plan that gives 14 rental days sold through electric car dealerships... or electric car makers...

Helping a big part of American car owners to switch to electric cars would create a huge market segment for the gas car rental companies. Why aren't they doing it?

Yeah, why can't we empower most human beings to be programmers? Hey, why not empower them to be hedge fund managers or rocket scientists? If Joe sixpack wakes up one day and feels like picking up a scalpel and perform a simple appendectomy why shouldn't he be able to do it? Why are we stopping him?

Even with training most people could not paint a simple landscape or compose new music or even come up with an original joke. So why should everyone be "empowered" to be programmers? Who is stopping them anyway? Heck we don't even have the equivalent of AMA that can sue people for programming without a license. In fact that rant would have more validity against the legally chartered professional organizations that have the monopoly in issuing credentials and stopping people from practicing law, medicine, accounting etc without license.

I agree with you. I mean, if I have a class JonSkeet and I need to create an instance of it, I would not name it Westley. Bad programming practice.

Joking aside, your post here clearly shows that you belong to the all time great people list. People with good name recognition who are not jerks are quite rare.