Complex? Have you seen an internal combustion engine and all the mechanical workings? The advantage of the gas turbine electric hybrid approach is that your turbine doesn't need to change speed much, if at all. In a car or a helicopter or whathaveyou, you need to throttle the engine, and that makes things yet more complicated. In a helicopter, the mechanical complication makes the time between servicings very short. Electric motors solve those problems. Lithium-air batteries (if developed to full potential, in, say, two decades) could provide plenty of power and energy to get rid of even the gas turbine.

Control is definitely a solvable problem, and if ANYTHING has progressed incredibly rapidly, it's computer and sensor technology. Propulsion is solvable, as well. I don't see what's wrong with propellers controlled by electric motors (which have very fast response and very long life).

...it's rocket-propelled.

There is, in fact, no problem with feeding people in the developed world. It is, in fact, possible for technology to progress and even become widely available without every single problem in the world being solved.

And as far as infrastructure, well, the other replier handled that nicely.

A frog with wings would be a flying frog, not a bird.

BTW, did you bother clicking through to read the article? At least as portrayed, most of the space is taken up by the body of the car. It looks like a flying car, not like a roadable aircraft like the original terrafugia.

So determined are you to avoid acknowledging that, yeah, this fits pretty darned well the idea of a "flying car" that you'll move the goalposts so now it's only called "flying" if it uses something that currently is physically impossible? So, birds don't really fly either, then?

Nonsense.

A VTVL flying car as pictured is definitely a "real" flying car (i.e. we expected the future to look like). There is no misnomer in calling the concept a flying car. It's not an anti-gravity car, but that's why it's not called an "antigravity car."

And this is not terribly surprising that you'd respond that way... Closer and closer to the future we get, the more we'll redefine what REALLY is futuristic, so much so that even once we've "arrived," it won't feel like we have, so we'll move the goalposts further...

Forgot to RTFA, I see. The vehicles would be self-driving.

So, more of a Japanese-style of only allowing tip-top vehicles. Works for them, it could work for us (for flying cars). Also, Terrafugia comes with a full-plane parachute, so you wouldn't "literally drop out of the sky."

I am a physicist with no stake in nuclear energy. I doubt fusion will be better than /effective/ fission, at least for a very long time (we'd have to get to aneutronic fusion for it to be significantly better). But the good thing is that fission is /actually/ pretty darned good. Fast breeders, traveling wave, and LFTR (especially) offer enormous advantages over current designs. Heck, even more conventional modern designs are much safer. But we'll be stuck with the old ones (or nothing) because even the slightest accident (if judged by demonstrated fatalities, i.e. none in the case of Fukushima!) means the developed world runs away from nuclear power as fast as they can, largely because they don't understand it (physics is hard). Natural gas explosions happen, um, every single day and kill several people every year (and those are just the direct deaths, not counting global warming, etc).

And in spite of huge explosions rivaling or exceeding high-profile terrorist attacks, the world is running in a full sprint /towards/ natural gas. Germany, Japan, the US... Abandoning nuclear and building natural gas power plants. Why? Probably because everyone kind of understands it. People cook with it, heat their homes with it. Nuclear still has the stigma of the Cold War nuclear annhilation, but the irony is that most newer nuclear power plants (LFTR specifically) aren't well-suited to the nuclear weapons industry.

And by the way, nuclear is cheap. What makes it expensive is delays. Delays caused by endless lawsuits of people utterly afraid of nuclear power. And so we CAN'T build new nuclear power plants. Instead of taking 3-4 years, they take maybe 3 decades as construction is stopped by the courts until being given approval to proceed. At, say, 10% interest rate, over 25 or so years that increases the cost by /an order of magnitude/ over what it would be with a quick construction. That is 90% of the reason for the supposed high cost of new nuclear power. This is cited by opponents of nuclear power as reason for why we should oppose nuclear power, but that is, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy because lawsuits and political opposition slow down new construction. Meanwhile, we're doubling and soon tripling the carbon dioxide levels. Old nuclear power is cheap, still, because it has been operated for many decades and like renewables its upkeep and "fuel" cost is very low. Which is partly why utilities don't like them, since they have big upfront costs (like renewables) and the lack of fuel costs isn't a huge deal for them since they can just pass that on to the consumer. Both nuclear and renewables have too long of payback periods to satisfy investors wanting 10,15% annual returns. But for an economy growing at a moderate rate, even 5% return is plenty.

There's enough thorium to last hundreds of millions of years. We most certainly won't be the same species by the time we run out of nuclear fuel, and because of the recycling of the Earth's crust, there'll be more available by the time run out. Of course, the easiest to get stuff is still plentiful, and the tiny contribution of fuel costs to nuclear power generation is why thorium isn't looked at more closely. Also, LFTR reactors can burn up our old nuclear waste, so building new LFTRs would actually /reduce/ the long-term nuclear waste. They can burn up all the long-term waste so that only medium-term waste (which decays fairly rapidly, i.e. half-lifes of decades instead of thousands of years) is produced, which we can deal with until it decays to low levels.

That said, I support renewables. An idea I'd like to see more of is hybrid geothermal and photovoltaic power plants co-located using the same infrastructure. Geothermal can act as storage or backing power for when the sun don't shine, and solar makes geothermal last longer. Solves lots of problems.

Hardly a valid criticism of my post.

You know, I can't solve all the problems in the world in a single post. Of course socioeconomic factors are huge, but it's possible to, you know, look at an issue and try to evaluate it critically without throwing up one's hands and saying, "welp, since this is only part of the problem, it's obviously not worth anyone's time..."

ANY single factor you try to adjust or optimize will be incremental. It takes a bunch of things working together to solve this problem of murder in this country. You're not helping any by criticizing a valid observation just because it isn't all-encompassing.

Right, so where's the part where I said we should ignore mental illness, etc? Also, where's the part where I claimed my post was primarily concerning what to do about suicides? I suppose I also didn't say killing puppies is wrong, so obviously I think we should kill puppies... ;)

Like hell it's inelastic. You may wish to /believe/ it's inelastic, and "everyone" you like and talk to at bars and hang out with may repeat this back to you as if it's irrefutable fact, but I guarantee you that having a conveniently lethal murder instrument helps quite a bit. We have a very high murder rate in this country, basically the highest of the developed world. Guess what country also has the most guns per capita, by a wide margin? Correlation may not imply causation, but correlation does hint pretty strongly that there's a connection.

And we know that guns are even more commonly used for suicide; suicide is NOT inelastic to supply of convenient suicide methods, and we know this because the suicide rate in England went down dramatically when they got rid of town gas (i.e. partially burned coal containing high levels of carbon monoxide used as fuel in ovens and such, a very convenient suicide method). Having such an enormous glut of legal guns in our country also means the black market also becomes flooded with guns.

Yes, there are some people who are hell-bent on killing and will attempt some way to do it, but a heck of a lot of people kill others in the heat of the moment or at least would be far less effective at it if they didn't have such an efficient killing instrument handy. It doesn't take a ton of foresight or coordination with others to shoot and kill a bunch of people with a gun. To do the same with another weapon, like a bomb, is actually a heck of a lot harder, as Boston vs Newtown shows. Or the recent Chicago five-fatality shooting spree (that sort of thing is pretty common... fatal shootings occur multiple times a week in Chicago).

This post is nonsense. NASA sure as heck will use OSC in the future, if they bid competitively

So they had some problems with a fairing on one of their launch families (Taurus I). Big deal. They have had dozens of successful flights in a row with their Pegasus launch vehicle, and they just had a basically flawless launch, perhaps even better than SpaceX's first Falcon 9 launch. The fairing thing was a problem with Taurus I, but clearly it hasn't hurt them on this launch.

Just because OSC doesn't vertically integrate everything like SpaceX doesn't mean they're "finished." Far from it, actually. I'm as big of a SpaceX fan as any, but SpaceX has been talking about 5-10 launches per year for a long time but still haven't managed to do more than 2 launches in a single calendar year. SpaceX has a lot of potential, but because of their high degree of vertical integration, they're also vulnerable to delays in getting all the internal projects streamlined. Meanwhile, OSC has a whole fleet of Cygnuses.

And OSC has ALWAYS done horizontal integration, they didn't sell out. They focus on what they're good at and for what they aren't good at they outsource, which is exactly how you're supposed to do it. Comparative advantage.

Also, OSC's Cygnus (especially the later ones) will have a lot more volume than Dragon, which is relevant because a LOT of space station cargo is volume-constrained, not mass-constrained.

And this sort of competition is very good for the market. It keeps SpaceX on their toes.

And by the way, OSC's main business isn't in rocket launch but in satellite work. OSC has said they really, really hope Falcon 9 is successful and cheap because it makes it easier to find a good, domestic launch vehicle for their satellites. OSC developed Antares because Delta II was retiring and they needed a good domestic launch vehicle in that payload range (instead of the headache of using a European, Russian, Indian, or Chinese launch vehicle or the really expensive Atlas V). OSC would /like/ to be out of the launch vehicle business.

That Italian court is such utter /bullshit/. What is the motivation to enter seismology studying earthquake prediction? Great pay? Nope. Recognition? Not really (no Nobel Prizes), at least not the kind you'd want. And with austerity, you're not going to get stable employment, either. When scientists are crucified for not being exactly right, all there is is downside, the risk of being accused of manslaughter if you say what you think. Congratulations, Italy, you might as well be in the Middle Ages.

I'd understand these charges if seismologists were as well-paid as surgeons are. But they flat /aren't/. If this is how members of society treats scientists, then members of society /deserve/ to lose their lives in earthquakes. But not their children. The blood of those who die is on the hands of those who blame the scientists and litigate. Anti-science is why we don't have better prediction.

-Chris