Serious question: if an aircraft were to hit or suck one of these things into its engines, what would happen? I would imagine that a flimsy construction of metal and plastic would simply vapourize (or glance off if just hitting the exterior) and do no harm. Certainly compared to a goose or other weighty bird, a drone seems like a pretty insubstantial thing.

far fewer than a 747 or even 737

You're wrong about the 737 - the 737-100, which was the 737 variant around when Concorde was designed, could seat 85-124 depending on configuration. Concorde was 92-128. The 747 was only unveiled the same year Concorde was, so again the Concorde design was contemporary with the 707 rather than the 747. The 707 had a slightly higher seating capacity, but it wasn't vastly more. In the 60s, it probably was anyone's guess how things would go - they'd only just left the propellor era behind. Some thought speed, others capacity. In hindsight, capacity won out, but that was far from obvious in the early 60s when Concorde's specification was fixed.

Confused about the issues? Don't be! Here's my easy one-step guide to taking sides on this issue.

Ask yourself one question: are you a douchebag?

Y: FBI
N: Apple

Well that's weird. I have a very similar GPU (R9 270 @975MHz) but using an i5 CPU. The test said that despite being 0% CPU bound, I only got a 0.4 average fidelity score - almost as low as it goes on the scale. How can that be? Since my GPU card is low end but up to date, I wasn't expecting top marks or anything, but I wasn't expecting it to be anywhere like that low either. Something's not right.

I have come to a conclusion. Windows is not a good quality operating system.

hope you don't have an accident with it anywhere along that chain

Almost the same chain that ordinary gasoline/petrol has at the moment. So it's no less safe, and that well-established infrastructure can cope with the demand and recharge times that meet users current expectations.

fuel cell that is around 60% efficient

That's about 2-3 times as efficient as just burning the fuel to create motive power. The electric motors are likely to be ~95% efficient. That's a huge improvement right there.

Pure electric cars using safe batteries with loads more power that can go 300 miles

The energy density of these 'safe' batteries is way poorer than liquid hydrogen both by volume and weight. It's crazy that half the weight of a 2-ton pure EV is its batteries (with current technology) just to give it a barely acceptable range (followed by several hours to recharge). Obviously research should get that better over time, but it's a got a long way to go to beat hydrogen. A fuel-cell car makes a lot of sense during this transitional period between the dinosaurs and the pure EV of the future - it's a huge improvement in efficiency and pollution but can leverage existing infrastructure.

Your argument seems to be we should ignore this because it's not as good as some imaginary car of the future, rather than we should be interested in this because it's better than the frankly terrible non-imaginary car of the past.

using petalobe screwdrivers

Yeah, those 10^15 sided screws are a bugger to not strip. That's why I replace mine with pentalobe screws - much more robust.

steal Chrysler (the company that made Jeeps) from its shareholders

Haha, you capitalist ideologues make me laugh. What was the alternative? Apparently it was "too big to fail", but that was the only other option, which would have put hundreds of people out of work and closed the company for good. Where were the shareholders when the chips were down? Oh that's right, cashing in their shares before they tanked, thus ensuring they tanked.

As for Jeep being a Fiat, so what? Almost every car is made by someone else these days. BMW makes Rolls Royce and Mini, Land Rover is an Indian company, and so on. In fact, the US has owned most of the world's supposedly local brands through Ford and GM for most of the 20th century (and had no compunction in closing down many of them when things got tough, not giving a fuck for the workers of Saab, Vauxhall, Holden, etc). How does it feel now that the boot is on the other foot? Why is it like this? Because capitalism, that's why. If you don't like it, vote for a better system.

I agree it's pretty stupid, but the stupidity is in making the shifter look exactly like the traditional shifter. Some cars have had sequential shifters for some time now ("flappy paddles") and they stay in the same position whatever gear you're in, so that part of it isn't the problem. The problem is the placement and appearance of the control, which misleads the driver into thinking it works differently than it actually does.

Sequential gearboxes are a good thing in some situations - they're faster to shift than traditional manual or auto boxes (at the expense of making getting into reverse a nuisance), but that really only matters for performance cars. It's pointless putting it into a shitty rental box, but if you do, use flappy paddles, FFS.

It be like: strip a car down to its bare chassis, removing all extraneous weight, seats, anything that's there for comfort or convenience, then keep cutting out more metal - panels, half the floor, roof. Bolt on a huge turbo and nitrous and watch it do a ¼ mile in 8 seconds. Great, but it ain't going to get you to the shops and back.

Wrong. I don't know about Google, but I do know about Safari. When it's in private mode, all of the data that is normally saved to disk for any purpose is stored in encrypted memory, so within a private session, you get the benefit of caching, go forward/back, etc. But once you close the private window, all that encrypted memory is erased and released. Apps using the NSURLSession APIs can do exactly the same thing.

Horrid car. If it hadn't been picked randomly to be the centrepiece of a cultish film, no-one would remember them now except possibly as the reason for an infamous downfall. And being part of a cultish film might be a good enough reason to want to own an original one as a conversation piece, but who in their right minds would want to own a new one, to be used as an actual car?

I've known two young men who were very heavy cannabis users. Both were incredibly intelligent - among the smartest guys I ever met. However, both became manic depressive and that only got worse over time. Eventually both of them (who didn't know each other) committed suicide. Hard to unravel cause and effect, and only two data points but it's made me very wary of heavy pot use. The occasional smoke, not a worry, but habitual use is a killer, I believe.

I assume you're trolling. But on the offchance that you're actually swallowing this BS, there's only one response: you big wussy pussy.

...is fear itself. Seems these wise words have been largely forgotten. As a nation, the USA is the most lily-livered scaredy cats out there. I'm not talking about individuals, just the national characteristic. Why else spend such vast sums on a military that has more or less nothing to do? (and for which idle hands the devil makes plenty of work, starting wars it can't finish and general meddling). Why else are guns so fetishised? Why else is so much effort being put into monitoring everyone's trivial business? Why else are fingers pointed at harmless scapegoats like ordinary muslims? My country, right or wrong? Think about it.