That is the dumbest comment that I've seen on Slashdot in a long time. I am at a loss for words. You should be proud of yourself.

Your assertion is wholly unconvincing sans citations. Care to provide links to your source material, or are you simply trying to push you anti-nuclear, anti-government agenda?

The president of the senate is the Vice President. You probably mean "the senate majority leader."

... spoken like a true conspiracy theorist. A concept baked-in to Hanlon's Razor is the assumption that people generally try to do the best job that they can, within their abilities and constraints. This implies that most problems result from unintentional errors rather than malicious intent. Some people simply cannot accept the true level of complexity of the systems that humanity has created and their inherent fallibility. For those people, it is far more comforting to assume that it is all guided by an unseen hand with a larger (and in this case, malicious) purpose. It's the ideology of the conspiracy theorist, and it is shown by history to be nonsense.

SpaceX is the ONLY significant player in commercial launch vehicles that ISN'T using decades-old technology. They developed their launch vehicle (including engines) from scratch on their own. Orbital Sciences is launching forty year old technology with no potential for doing it better or cheaper than it was done in the past. SpaceX is on a trajectory to cut LEO insertion costs by a factor of 10. Don't hate Musk because he is a better engineer than you will ever be - try to learn from his innovative approach, drive, and business acumen. One failure out of nineteen launches for a new, from-scratch rocket design is pretty impressive, IMO.

Fun fact: "wrong" is an adjective. The usual grammatically-correct way to put it is "it was spelled incorrectly."

LOL!

I assume that you are referring to Challenger and Columbia? There's an argument to be made that a LAS may have saved the crew of the former, but I don't see how one would have benefitted the crew of the latter- it's a LAUNCH abort system, not a re-entry abort system. They would still have all died regardless.

It won't eliminate your entire bill. The battery is a storage device, not an electricity generator (like a solar array). All that it can do is store electrical energy from the grid during low-priced periods (off-peak times, i.e at night, increasing your off-peak usage) and release it during high-priced periods (peak times, i.e. on weekdays, decreasing your peak usage). If you have time-of-day-based billing set up with your utility, this has the potential to reduce your bill by shuffling up to 10kWh per day from on-peak to off-peak pricing tiers. This assumes that you use at least 2kW of load for at least 5 hours during peak times, every day. This would use the full 10kWh of storage in the battery daily and takes into account the 2kW sustained power delivery limit of the battery. Under these conditions, you could save the (Rpk - Ropk)*Epd*Keff, where Rpk and Ropk represent the peak and off-peak rates, Epd is the energy shuffled per day (10kWh max), and Keff is the charge/discharge cycle efficiency, including the inverter which is extra and NOT built-in to Tesla's battery (about 90%). Assuming an on- / off-peak price differential of $0.10 / kWh, that yields a max daily savings of $0.90. Keep in mind that on-peak rates typically only apply during weekdays, so that's only 5 days of savings per week, or $4.50 / week. Over a year, that $234 in potential savings, max. At a cost of $3,500 for the battery, it will not even pay for itself over its warranteed 10 year life, and this doesn't include the cost of the required inverter and installation! Basically, this has no value for consumers as an investment. The only beneficiaries are energy companies, since it would allow them to smoothe-out their generation profiles, increasing their usage of cheaper, base-load generating plants and allowing them to put-off distribution network upgrades to handle peak loading. The conclusion: it will need to be massively subsidized by utilities for it to make financial sense for non-generating customers. Utility customers with solar, wind, or fossil fuel-based generating capacity will benefit more, but that's a tiny fraction of residential customers presently.

Well-said!

Well-said and I agree completely. I wish that I had mod points to award you.

Oh no! I forgot to add "a" in front of "critical"! Please, Grammar Nazi, go easy on me!

Nice job avoiding the substance of the original comment to instead focus on being a grammar Nazi. The passive-aggressive smiley face to wrap it up was a nice touch. The original commenter's point about the higher moldability of younger engineers is excellent. It is critical part of having new employees assimilate smoothly into a company's culture.

Coward: despite your merit-less claim to the contrary, herd immunity is the ONLY reason that anti-vaxxers have the luxury of electively not vaccinating their kids while still having a reasonable chance of them staying healthy. They are getting a free ride from herd immunity without contributing to it and they should be thanking all of the responsible parents out there whose good decision-making is protecting the AVs' kids from the irresponsible choices of their parents. The degree of herd immunity in a population is massively sensitive to the vaccination rate of that population and the herd immunity threshold (HIT) for a particular disease. For example, with measles we can support ~5% of the population being unvaccinated (or not successfully immunized due to poor response to the vaccine) without substantially compromising herd immunity. In general, that's enough to allow for all of those who cannot be vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons to remain so without adverse social impact. Add-in the anti-vaxxer dummies, bringing the unvaccinated fraction of the population to ~10% or greater, and suddenly the herd immunity is massively compromised and all non-immunized individuals are put at risk. As a society, we cannot afford to allow the selfish and uninformed to put others at unnecessary risk with absolutely NO benefit. Read the Wikipedia article on herd immunity, particularly the section on "free riding": http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...

That's not what the proposed law requires. Are you purposefully creating a straw-man here, or do you genuinely not understand? No one will be forced to be vaccinated. If you want to participate in our social education system, then you must vaccinate or have a legitimate, non-kooky reason for it. If you electively choose not to vaccinate, then fine, but you must find some other way to educate your kids that doesn't risk the health of others. No forced vaccinations, here.