They're out there. There are a couple of hybrid models in the 1/2 ton full size form factor

Several manufacturers have gotten out of the U.S. small truck market recently. Ford and Dodge both dropped their small and mid-size offerings due to falling sales in the small truck arena. It's a hard market to break into and there's a lot of brand loyalty among the consumers.

They already do. These machines have been around in commercial use for nearly a decade (that I am aware of) -- perhaps a bit longer. The machines are wicked expensive to purchase (think price of a nice house) and expensive to operate. They typically only use them with materials that are hard to machine, on projects that have unusual geometries, or for one off custom design parts (like human jaw replacement).

You shouldn't consider the number of actual kill events. You should consider the number of events in general. Eventually a meteor will "get lucky" and take out a major city. Any such event, anywhere in the world, will have world-wide impact (no pun intended). It would be wise to prepare a solution, if we have the technology (which we do).

What your suggesting by not preparing is like the insurance question: "I've never been sick, been in an accident or had my home damaged; so, why should I carry insurance?" You pay for the insurance policies because it's wise to do so. The economic fallout of not having insurance will literally ruin you, it could take decades to recover financially, should you actually have an incident.

But they do.

Medical fields, electronics and semiconductor industry, chemical industry all spend billions each year. Automotive industry income sheets read in the billions per quarter and they all have substantial R&D expenses. The cost to build and maintain power plants and infrastructure runs into billions per year, nationwide.

Research into lighting technology, not so much; but, without the supporting infrastructure there would be no electric lights to begin with. I referred to lighting and refrigeration specifically because those were two of the earliest technologies that drove buildout of electrical infrastructure and had the largest impact. (power plants were initially being built to support lighting -- all the other stuff followed).

There's a potential work around. They could build funded natural gas fired plants, then come back later and construct a coal to syn gas conversion plant. It's not ideal. Carbon emissions overall would likely be higher (thermodynamics being what it is). It requires water. But it gets you there and the most expensive bits (electrical generation plant and distribution infrastructure) can be funded by World Bank, etc.

Then we shouldn't do it. While your at it, please turn over all technology in your possession that didn't exist 200 years ago and, at the time, would have been considered impractical or impossible. Cell phones, automobiles, computers, implanted medical devices, plastics and synthetic fibers, electric lighting and refrigeration... to name a few items.

we have preliminary numbers. Russia has been hit by potential city shattering meteorites twice in a hundred years. If the Tunguska event happened over a populated area it would no longer have been populated. If Chelyabinsk had entered at a slightly steeper angle, it would have been significantly worse. As it is, it entered at a shallow enough angle that it broke up high in the atmosphere and reducing the effect of the shock wave. We have a reasonable handle on the larger nation killing, and extinction causing, world ending variety. What we don't have is sufficient tracking data on the smaller city killers.

Or make the tool. I have a rolling tool cabinet full of various tools; and, in there is a sorter containing all the various security bits I've run across. Not having the tool is really not an excuse, when it's readily available from at least five different reputable online vendors.

You can still open the Apple computers too. He's just too lazy to do it.

They replaced the entire OS because the kernel stack was a tangled mess of spagetti that had numerous dependencies that made absolutely no sense. It was an unholy merger of Win9x and WinNT/2k with bells and wistles added throughout it's life (and three service packs).

And if we do do "some kind of" military work? No cameras allowed in production areas. -- that sign is prominently posted in places in our building.

While that number is low, it's not far off. you need power and communication. interchip communication for a phone is largely serial. So, you need a bus with a minumum of 2 or 3 dedicated pins for communication and 2 pins for power. One has to assume the RAM and some FLASH would be embedded on the CPU block. Additional memory space (flash) would also use a serial communication bus. You could either use the same bus as all the peripherals or add a bus specifically for memory. Similar answer applies for the screen, for the camera, and for all the other peripherals. Since they're trying to keep the modules more or less interchangeable, they either limit the bus width or run all the possible bus combinations to all the modules. The simple solution is one shared bus (KISS principle).

Darn. dkleinsc beat me to it.

"All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there."