"There are 100 ways I can think of for stopping a car without having brake disks."

You miss the forest for the trees. The article is just mumbo-jumbo. The wheel itself is a much larger diameter metal structure, subject to much larger stresses. Since the wheel isn't a problem, seemingly, then the friction disc brake isn't either. Remember that the disc brake doesn't have to operate at 1000mph, and doesn't have to endure the high centrifugal forces while being hot. Operation at 160mph is peanuts. Why did they goof and go with carbon discs I don't know, but the brakes aren't an issue at all. If the wheel survives, a similarly constructed brake disc will, too. The entire reason for having a separate braking disc and not using the wheel itself is the wear. The wheel has much larger diameter than the brake disc, so any braking wear on its circumference would require wheel rebalancing. That's an expensive, time consuming operation, since the wheel has to be balanced better than a hard drive spindle is balanced.

Of course if you actually looked at what you propose you'd realize that any inductive system still needs to use bulky rotors. It's the rotor's survivability that is the problem. The fact that it's a friction brake is rather inconsequential here. It's not the braking that is the problem. It's mere survivability of a disc brake at rotational speeds of an enterprise hard drive.

They do, although they are not really called cars anymore. The problem isn't 160MPH nor 6 tonnes. The problem is that the brakes have to survive "storage" (not braking) at 10kRPM, since the car will be going ~1000mph at some point. Everyone is focusing at the low speed or relatively forgettable weight. Those are not the problems, even my "little" Volvo XC90, when loaded, weighs about 2.5 tonnes, and I'm sure its brakes would survive slowing it down from 160MPH with a 3 ton brakeless trailer attached to it. Meh. But I don't really know if the front brake discs would survive being spun up to 10kRPM.

A Piston console with a bit of external storage is probably all one needs. It'd be physically very, very small.

It's much easier than it was in the year 2000, as far as I can tell. There are quite a few products at the local dollar store that are, in fact, made in the U.S.A. Same goes for home improvement stores - I've started to find U.S.-made tools.

Assuming that you have an internet connection and a networked printer at those locations, something like eFax would make much more sense. Or just set up your own Asterisk at some central location, use a T-38 VOIP provider, and send the print jobs to printers "out there".

It's not like an RHEL system will magically stop working because the licensing is messed up. Updates from RHEL servers will be unavailable for the time being and that's it.

Heck, I don't even know who would need solder paste without actually using a laser-cut stencil and, you know, actually printing the paste like it was meant to be - in quantity? What's the point? You don't even need or want a fine-tipped soldering iron. For reflowing anything with leads, you in fact want a nice 3mm-5mm wide, short tip with good thermal conductivity. You don't need solder paste, you do need a flux pen .

Huh? Pi can do great precision timing, you just have to run it as a bare-metal system.

"people get sick as a consequence of bad behaviour" Ah, circular reasoning FTW. In absence of STDs and Christian morality having bareback sex is not bad behavior anymore, you know.

So, there is your answer. The oscillators used here are not stable, and there must be a good reason for it. One possibility: those pingers are tuned electromechanical transducers. If anything, the electronic oscillator uses the transducer itself as the resonant circuit. Why? Because a perfect quartz-driven signal feeding a detuned transducer will not produce much in the way of hydrophonic output. It will be at the perfect frequency, but too faint to detect at any reasonable distance.

This!

That sounds to me more like a skunk feeding on them at night than CCD :) Yes, seriously, damn skunks can wipe out an entire hive in a couple of nights. The bees are too silly to resist the skunk's scratching on the bottom of the hive, it seems. They just walk out on the surface of the hive, since they don't fly at night, and the skunk just eats them. I've seen it happen, and it's both sad and silly-looking.

This problem has been solved, lemme think, about the time we were doing our first EVAs in LEO. Just because the beekeeping industry is more than half a century behind the times doesn't mean the problem hasn't been solved many times over.

A modern industrial robot on a moving base with a modern industrial vision system should handle that very efficiently. Possibly more efficiently than the bees themselves.