"The system is said to generate up to 30kw of green energy an hour "

That makes no sense at all. Please get your terms right. kilowatts are a measure of POWER and not ENERGY. Yes, there is a HUGE difference. Are you saying it generates a continuous 30kw? if so then the addition of "an hour" doesn't really make any sense because it would generate 30kw in any period of time. If you're saying it generates 30 kilowatt-hours then please give a time frame for this (you mean a day? an hour? A year?)

Or are you saying that 30kw is the nameplate capacity for power output? In that case, giving some indication of the capacity factor would help. In either case saying "30kw of green energy" really makes my skin crawl, because it's completely wrong. You can't interchange power and energy. Unless, of course, you stated more clearly that 30kw was the output continuously - in the case the time variable would be implied to be an arbitrary amount of time multiplied by the power to give energy. (30kw of power = 30kwh of energy per hour)

I admit they are broke, but why donate all their resources to Tesla? Tesla Motors does have what appears to be an excellent product, but they have been chronically behind schedule and have pulled their full product line remains vaporware. The media treats Tesla like they're the future and they can do no wrong. The fact is that they're still struggling to get their final product done and way behind.

I'm not saying that Tesla isn't going to succeed eventually, but they don't have any magic touch and they're not any kind of do-no-wrong super-company. They have an expensive product that may eventually reach full market penetration.

"The average navy ship has 8 to 10 nuclear reactors on it"

Uh... no. Nuclear reactors are currently only used on carriers and submarines. Carriers only have two reactors onboard. That's all they need. The USS Enterprise is the one exception. It is also the oldest nuclear carrier in the fleet. It has eight nuclear reactors. The only reason it has so many, however, is because they're small compared to the two on Nimitz carriers.

In any case, power shouldn't be an option for a laser like this. Since it will only be fired for a short period of time the power can be acumulated in capacitors or batteries or possibly something like flywheels that will provide the burst it needs.

Jim Jong Il must be very pleased.

Back in my day, we used to call these things "Wheelchairs" and they were generally reserved for people who had some kind of disability that prevented them from walking, which is generally what one does to travel short distances in an urban enviornment.

You can't really blame a company for downsizing workers that it doesn't need and are not helping the bottom line. A company will employ exactly the number of people necessary to meet their needs and if they end up selling less units or having a decline in their buisiness in general then there's no point in keeping the payroll at its higher number.

It could be competition from other phones but it's probably just as much (or more) the world economy. They're hurting just like the rest of the companies in the world and if cutting employees is the only way for them to keep their solvency then it's for the better in the long run. Yeah, it sucks, but really it's not that they're doing this just for the hell of it, it's economic reality.

It's not like this somehow changes the ability of the government to monitor things going on on the ground. It's already possible from satellites and high altitude planes (and has been for decades) and it's not as if its limited to the government either. Anyone can hire a plane to do areal survey imaging or even a private satellite imaging company.

It would be nice if this somehow were able to reduce costs spent on spy satellites. A single satellite can cost billions when you include launch.

Kids can do amazing things when they spend all their waking hours being forced to do it by their parents. Take any two year old and spend seven years with intensive and unrelenting cramming of manuals and they'll pass the exam by nine easily.

There was a kid in the 1990's who was about that age and she was trying to set a record for being the youngest pilot to fly coast to coast. She had an instructor flying because she was too young for a license but was the youngest person on record to have piloted a plane and had a bunch of other records for young take offs and landings.

Then she crashed the plane and died.



Show me a kid who has the ability to pass tests and certifications reserved for adults AND at the same time is able to spend some time playing with friends and doing normal things that don't involve intensive and unending compulsory study and then I'll be impressed.

What I think we could really use is BETTER mobile operating system(s). We don't need more of them - I'm more about quality than quantity.

This could have completely saved the PalmOS platform and kept the Palm brand a high profile and respected source for mobile devices... had they come out with it about five years ago. PalmOS was great at one time, but the competition kept getting better and Palm didn't. All Palm could do was add patches to an old operating system to try to keep it working with newer phones. Thus developers walked away and the OS turned into FrankenGarnet while not actually improvising.

It's too bad. Palm had a huge library of software going for it, but when you treat your developers and users like Palm has, that dries up fast.