There's a fantastic article in last month's Esquire magazine. They interviewed THE GUY who shot Bin Laden. They preserved the shooter's anonymity, but it is the true, first hand account of the SEAL who pulled the trigger. Fantastic read.

He's retired now after 16 years in the SEALs and gets basically nothing. No pension, no help with job placement in the civilian world, he can't put what he did on a resume, and the medical treatment for chronic injuries for vets is a joke.

...because of the development model.

They fail because there was not enough though put in up front and the requirements are vague.

Sure, but how is a law enforcement officer supposed to be able to determine if someone is mentally unstable. Believing in the Illuminati is no more proof of mental instability than believing Fox News to be a reliable source of journalism. If ranting about the Illuminati is sufficient to detain someone without due process, then we should be doing the same for a large portion of our population that watches Fox News.

Exactly. Voting doesn't do squat when you're limited to two pre-approved choices that are both bad. And bullets (or explosives) don't help either; just ask Jared Loughner or Timothy McVeigh; their actions sure didn't help matters any.

The pen (or the keyboard) truly is mightier than the sword. Of course, while mighty, the keyboard isn't very effective when the country's populace is completely dumbed-down and apathetic.

Personally, my hope is that the political and economic pressures in the US will cause it to break apart into a handful of separate republics, and that by being freed of having to compromise with the other states with completely different views and values, some of those republics will prosper, much like some of the eastern European countries prospered after being freed of Soviet rule (such as Czech Republic and Poland).

Literally hundreds of chemical species are in their lists of banned substances it's amazing that anything can be made or grown there.

That shouldn't be a problem for growing things; you just wouldn't use any pesticides or artificial fertilizers. Farmers got along just fine hundreds of years ago before all these substances were invented. Considering how much food the EU produces (and exports), they don't seem to be having a problem there.

But yes, for modern manufacturing, having a lot of banned toxic substances would be a problem. It just isn't possible to make most manufactured goods without handling toxic or hazardous substances at some point.

Yay for protectionist, isolationist, centrally-managed, paternalistic government-crawling-up-your-pant-legs regulatory over-reach! So stimulating to the economy.

And imagine the opportunities for bureaucratic mischief as more and more layers are added in between someone who has something to sell, and someone who wants to pay for it.

When people complain about "big government," it's exactly this sort of (somewhat) unintended consequence and life-squashing administrative death by a thousand cuts that is really the concern. Too many byzantine rules and hoops to jump through, with too many low-level, unaccountable functionaries being gatekeepers in their own little fiefdoms. In the US, it looks like the IRS's increasing ugliness (to say nothing of what it will look like when they're policing everyone's individual compliance with ObamaCare requirements).

Domestically, this is what's being referred to as the rise of the Fourth Branch. And it's deadly.

One of the reasons the high-end luxury car brands have lower quality scores is because their owners have higher expectations, and complain more about minor problems. If there's a squeak or rattle in your new $100k Mercedes, you take it back to the dealership for warranty repairs. If there's a squeak in your $15k Ford, you just live with it. So Mercedes looks bad because it has an incident of a warranty repair, whereas Ford doesn't.

Also, Mercedes is not a luxury brand in Europe, only in the USA.

They just need to find a lode of rare-earth elements somewhere in their borders.

Like what? I'm just curious. For instance, suppose I have a small family (mom-n-pop) business here in the USA (that sells on the internet, rather than being tied to a specific locale), and decide I want to move to Europe. What would I be in for?

Not every pursuit of man must be directly profitable... and demanding that they all be so, creates failure and market distortion.

I suspect that if the results of this effort were released with an appropriate hybrid Open-Source license, as well as providing both the Open-Source contributors & corporate funders /contributors with some sort of tax break, that more European people and firms would see more benefits, than if the results were locked up in some sort of Airbus-esque version of Intel. Comparing the business strategy that Intel pursued with Itanium to ARM's, I become more certain in this line of thinking.

Or to put it another way, an entity which was more like ARM than Intel or AMD but which did not have a foundational priority to maximize shareholder returns (i.e. not a Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung (GmbH)) but instead with the priority to remain non-profit by folding all profits back into development efforts. And which produced and sold IP in similar ways as ARM but with hybrid licensing schemes, Open Source & non commercial projects could have access to certain parts of the IP, while commercial & proprietary projects would be required to buy a license or somehow contribute in kind. If the tax breaks for contributions were designed skilfully enough, then corporations inside the EU and paying taxes to the EU could, in a sense, spend less on R&D than it would cost to develop a new chip, by working on this EU wide collaboration and receive a commercial licence of similar value in return. The EU could protect cases of a 3rd party mass producing these chips as a commercial enterprise without a commercial license, with existing IP, contractual, and tax laws. So all corporations with EU subsidiaries would be obliged to follow these licenses, if they wished to use the chips and all chips or devices with chips would require the correct licensing to be sold in the EU.

In this way, any company could produce, or have a 3rd party produce, chips based on this IP and include them in their commercial offerings all over the world. However, EU companies who vigorously participated in the development could have advantages when it comes to providing chips to the EU market, while at the time encouraging lower costs for EU consumers by allowing for non-commercial licenses.

Naturally, this leaves open the possibility of a foreign group making unlicensed chips & devices for markets outside the EU. Essentially, this is a similar problem which ARM faces, but I am not familiar with any large examples of this kind of abuse... but I live in the EU, so it's possible that in various places around the world there are such things... but I guess, if they do exist, they've never become a big enough problem to make the news. Presumably this is due to the limitations that ARM places on their licensing in regards to 3rd party Fabs.

amend/abolish ridiculous labor laws which are killing startups

I'm just curious; what kind of labor laws do they have which are killing startups? Over here in the US, hiring isn't that hard when you only have a few employees, and even asl long as as it's under 40 I hear the labor laws aren't too hard to keep up with. Over 40, however, it starts getting really complicated, at least that's what a small company I used to work for told me.

It still costs money. More asphalt, more padding = more cost, more labor to put it in. If you don't have to put it in, that saves you money to keep up with the luxury models, which was my only point.

Roughly speaking, when you go to make an EV, you want an efficient motor to better conserve battery power. A more efficient motor can also be used as a more efficient generator when you're doing regenerative braking. One thing about electric motors is that larger, more powerful ones are also more efficient. So when you use a very efficient motor you end up with power levels that can run a luxury performance vehicle.

Now consider long range - batteries are not only limited by the amount of energy they contain, but the amount of power they can provide(IE energy over time). Longer range = more batteries, which also equals more power - indeed, more than enough to run that bigger, more efficient and powerful electric motor at it's full potential. So we're back to luxury performance vehicle levels of power.

As an aside, back in the day auto companies that make hybrids did a lot of research into increasing the power capacity of their batteries so they could put a smaller, shorter ranged battery in. Regenerative braking was seriously limited by the power absorption capabilities of the battery. With a long range EV? Not so much.

With a Leaf, maybe. Tesla warranties their batteries for 8 years/125k miles.

They're on record saying that they expect their 60 kwh pack to last at least 200k miles, and you can pre-purchase a new 60kwh battery pack replacement in 8 years for $10k today.

Not from what I'm seeing. At 150k there's a chance it'll be on it's 2nd. In addition, Different battery chemistries have different behaviors, characteristics, and quirks. Still, consider that when you have a multi-thousand dollar battery you're not just clamping any old charge system to it. They're carefully mated for optimal performance and lifespan.

For example, from what I've read, '100%' charge for the common EV's is actually only 90% of the battery's capacity, which reduces battery degradation substantially, and we've come a long way in LiIon manufacturing. With long range EV's, the battery pack actually ends up so huge that even a 'fast charge' is more like a normal charge for smaller battery packs. A fast charge for a NiMH cell is something like 10 minutes, and will cause problems with heat and such. An equivalent 'fast charge' for an EV takes over an hour even with a special fast charge station due to the sheer size of the battery pack.

As Rioki mentioned, it's been my perception that motor noise has always overpowered road noise, especially at higher speeds, as the engine power necessary to maintain a given speed to goes up exponentially as your speed increases due to wind resistance.

I would hope that by the time such technology came to be, we'd have advanced beyond the silly notion that one can effectively ban ideas or knowledge.

There are already plenty of detailed plans widely available for building all sorts of weapons that can be made at home with relatively little difficulty or expense.

There are plans and even parts kits available to allow almost anyone to build themselves a STEN sub-machine gun.

Plans: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2624298/sten-mk2-complete-machine-instructions

STEN Mk III Parts kits $125: https://www.apexgunparts.com/product_info.php/cPath/51/products_id/1435

"Can't stop the signal, Mal." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVF9lZ-i_ss

The only effective way to disarm US citizens is to kill a large portion of the population (maybe a majority) straight away, first thing, with no warning, then herd the remaining survivors into camps/gulags/prisons. There is simply far too many gun-making resources and too much materials, knowledge, and tools widely available in the US, never mind all the weapons already held by the people, to do it effectively any other way.

Considering the above, it would be a shame if all those FEMA camps that the government has recently been readying for use suddenly experienced a rash of fires and vandalism that left them unusable.

Strat