More weight. Capacitors have a low energy density than batteries. They do charge really fast, and last much longer. I’m not sure if they are more or less likely to blow up.

Didn’t we recently have Neil deGrasse Tyson explain to us that this is impossible?

“put a stack of raw materials and a 3-D printer on an aircraft carrier, and you could have a virtually unlimited supply of munitions for the aircraft. “

While I see instances where china consolidated its power, particularly it its close up sphere of influences, I see no indication what so ever that China is even contemplating a direct attack on the USA (but they are probably war gaming, isn’t everyone). It’s hard to see what China would gain from such a war.

Maybe thats part of the problem

And we make little springs out of it. It’s not that exotic of an alloy (actually a whole group of alloys). Machining it is somewhat difficult, but in sheet form, it isn’t that different to work with than stainless steel (it is somewhat more prone to cracking, but again, managable).

No, that would rather silly. What I’m saying is that our defense spending is larger than the stated defense budget of all the other nations in the world put together, and this at a time while we are piling on debt at a rather frightening pace. Now, many nations hide big chunks of their defense spending, so maybe we…

I’ve long thought we need an itemized tax bill. So much of your taxes go to program x, and so much to y.

Bankrupting the USSR also led to us having to delve into the middle east mess, which was previously mostly their problem. Besides, whom are we trying to bankrupt now? I’m not sure who “the enemy” is anymore.

Here are the numbers I found. I believe they include development costs, which seems appropriate

1. TV’s are usually cheaper than automobiles.

My apologies I wasn’t clear. I meant the new, expensive weapons are not worth it in comparison to buying older, less capable but cheaper ones.

And quiet possibly not worth it.

Arguably, USA can’t afford to buy its new super weapons either. How many F22s were we planning to buy, vs how many we ended up with? What about the F35?

I expect law enforcement to fight very hard to require a human attentive driver to be at the controls at all times, no matter who is actually driving the car. Without traffic citations, most municipalities will go bankrupt rather quickly.

I propose a simple, if somewhat unconventional solution:

Every single one that doesn’t want to tell the average american family that the $30k car they just bought and are already upside down on is now worthless.

I disagree. In order for autonomous cars to get a start, they will have to be able to share the pavement with ordinary human driven cars. We haven’t the money, time or space to build a separate network of streets and highways to be used exclusively by autonomous cars. At best, we can add some dedicated lanes here and…

I’m not trying to defend the morons who engage in this sort of thing, but it seems to me that the danger level here is somewhat overhyped. Over three years, we have around 10k laser incidents, and not a single crash (or near crash).

But you would need a 12.7mm socket, because converting from one system to the other isn’t going to magically change every standard bolt in the world. That is the legacy we left the world when we were the only industrial power post ww2, we stuffed industrial infrastructure world wise with standard hardware.