If Ford could make an electric F150 that had a generator dock in the bed for long trips, 98% of the concerns Americans have with EVs would be moot. Go rent a well maintained generator from your local dealership (could also work with a small trailer attachment for sedans) and be on your way.

On August 21, 2017, the contiguous United States will experience its first total solar eclipse since 1979.

Solar eclipse of May 10, 1994 I went and saw it in St Louis. How do they define contiguous U.S.

Not a denier in most senses of the word, but I don't prescribe to the doom and gloom media portrayals or the fixes that involve countries paying for their carbon output to other countries, or any other such, socialistic in nature, fixes. I am a big fan of basic research and "sciencing" our way out of this problem.

  A couple times a month there are technologies on the front page of Slashdot that make me think if we did this at a large enough scale we could solve this issue. I realize there are often issues of scale that prevent this, but combinations of multiple technologies will hopefully get us there in the near future.

There was one such tech last month, I believe, that was a plastic and glass film that could be produced for 50 cents a square meter that would push a significant amount of energy off planet into space. I did some rough math on it and figured out that it would cost about 6 trillion dollars of the stuff to radiate as much energy back into space as global warming is estimated to be trapping. This is not counting the fact that you could put it on places that would reduce energy costs for air conditioning and refrigeration. 6 trillion is a lot, but it would be less than a percent of world GDP over the course of 10 years. As I recall, this was a material that actually existed and was not just some theory on the drawing board.

This combined with increased adoption of Solar, the potential for getting Fusion working in the next 20 years (I know always in the next 20 years, but some real improvements are happening), electric vehicles, and increased power storage capabilities could bring the world to carbon neutrality before the doom and gloom predictions come true. I think getting carbon neutral power generation tech into maturity and adoptable by third world countries trying to be first world countries is the best way forward.

We have learned over the past 30 or more years, it is very difficult to convince people that limiting their lifestyle or country to help fix a problem that will probably not have a noticeable effect on them or their family in the next 30 years. I suggest we immediately abandon that method as it just hurts the cause. Focus on the positive cool tech and money saving efficient ways of solving this problem and the denialists will slowly fade into the background while we usher in a world with inexpensive electricity and extreme efficiency.

That's not how it works. You have to get to about .85 c to get 1/2 the time from the pilot perspective (I'm just looking at a graph I didn't want to do the calculation, although I'm sure there is a calculator out there). at .5c it probably only saves you about a year of the 8 years.

I hold no expectations from Magic leap, but my hope is at the least they are doing some good basic research on the problems involved with good AR. I hope they set it up so that if they fail miserably one of the companies that invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the company can take up where they left off and deliver on the hype in the next 5-10 years. This is the type of research that would not have otherwise been done, and I am glad it is being done by someone (in theory at least). For something that could have significant lasting impacts on how we interact with the world, investing 5% the cost of the Apollo program doesn't seem that crazy. Especially since there doesn't seem to be much (any?) effect on the average taxpayer.

As far as I can tell this whole fake news thing started because of an article claiming Trump would end up with more popular votes in the election. I read that article and would probably fall within the category of people where it may reinforce their political biases. Yet, it was so obviously wishful thinking anyone with any degree of critical thinking would see it for what it was. Its primary source was twitter, and it said so right up front. If using twitter to determine popular vote counts makes sense to most people then we have some serious issues. It did use some common misunderstandings of how votes are counted in the case of absentee ballots, but these were all easily debunked a little later on. I think most people who read the article quickly figured it out. The problem (I think) was many people did not read the article. They just sent it along on their Social media feeds which tricked a bunch of other search algorithms. On Slashdot we sometimes don't even read the summary, why would you expect average Joe to dig into a headline that already confirms their world view.

I graduated HS early and took a year of welding for something to fall back on in case college didn't work out. Never had to take a welding job after college, but it did provide me with some extra money during school. Overall a good experience, and one I would recommend given today's post college job market.

I think this link is much more interesting/informative. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP