By definition, weapons of mass destruction are rather indiscriminate in their effects, killing innocent civilians. They're can only be aimed approximately. AGW of course is only a WMD metaphorically, not literally, as it didn't arise with the intent to kill, even if it does.
The stagnation of design in the factory-built market was caused by a few jury decisions to hold manufacturers liable for crashes, not by government regulation. The liability problem made USA manufacturers stop introducing bold design changes. The "51% rule" holds that if the customer builds an airplane himself, then he's the manufacturer and assumes liability. This has caused all of the interesting design progress to show up in the kit plane market instead of in the factory-built market. (Two examples are composite construction and canard wings, although both features are available factory-built from non-USA manufacturers.) Government regulation has helped bring new pilots into the fold with the recent introduction of the Sport Light Aircraft pilot's license.
Separate from the airplane price issue, though, is that that geeky guys that might have become private pilots are diverted today into electronics and software. "Tech" used to mean airplanes.
And one of the ten words always seems to be "meh".
By the time the drone has enough collision-avoidance to keep from crashing into everyone else's drones (probably using some kind of identifying beacon), it will be better to have the drones form a mesh network to transmit views from different places, than to have each drone fly to a point of interest to get their own (redundant) view.
It's not "them" that causes such a guilt-ridden and indecisive state. Settle down, boy!
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Well, it *could* be.
Your story shows how strongly our beliefs grip us, no matter how strong evidence to the contrary.
If Moscow was at the same lat/long as Minneapolis, it would be the same city. Moscow's latitude is almost 56 degrees, whereas Minneapolis is at 45 degrees. But your main point is correct in that Moscow and Minneapolis have similar average January low temperatures, around 14 degrees Farenheit.
Looks like 200 Wh/kg is industry leading for widely used technology.
http://bioage.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c4fbe53ef019b0033dc98970d-800wi
To see free markets in action, go to a country where there is one, such as Kenya. Watch people bleed to death in the ER as they wait for their relatives to get there with money. Then tell me about free markets.
In the USA, with anything less than single-payer, you could die just from losing your insurance card. Such cases have been documented. Promises ain't cash, buddy.
I really enjoyed Cryptography Decrypted which takes a similar history-based approach. It's shorter and written in an entertaining way.
Now, just like medical diagnosis, most law and software development can be automated too. Other things, like teaching, can be massively leveraged. Still other things, like minor video production, can be handled by the consumer herself.
In the end we'll consume more services and less goods not because the services are so valuable, but because they're so cheap. People won't be able to get jobs making/distributing/selling goods, so they'll enter the service economy by default. For examples of this look at poor countries, where people making $10K/year can have a housekeeper/cook and a gardener.
Severing the employment/health insurance link once and for all is the only way the USA will get the business fluidity needed to compete in the modern world. Why should the executive of a startup, or any other company, have to waste bandwidth thinking about employee health care, or child care, or transportation, or retirement plans? Those are issues for society at large and should be resolved by society at large, not the business exec (who BTW is imminently under-qualified to make such decisions). He/She has a business to run, right? with enough product/marketing/financing decisions to fill the day.
Damn those mass delusions!
"Engineers are now starting to get paid for their true value, which arguably has not been case for a long time, but it is now, and Google is at heart of this. Google discovered an algorithm change can generate another $100 million in revenue. So now companies are more willing to have superstars, and there are engineers at Goggle making tens of millions of dollars."
The optimum committee has no members. -- Norman Augustine
