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Every principle of engineering leads to one inescapable conclusion about a flying car, or "roadable aircraft": it can ONLY be a lousy example of both. The practical reality is, you can have a crap car, and a crap airplane, for five times the money and ten times the chance of dying from sudden impact. IMHO, this particular pursuit can only be evidence of American greatness IF you think techno-triumphalism without foresight is a great thing. Americans love cars because they associate them with "freedom" in a quasi-religious fashion. But look at the unintended consequences of happy motoring: the astounding wealth squandered on the doomed project of suburbanization, and the paving of the American West. Suppose we were able to build a Blade Runner-esque hover-car that runs on magical cheap biofuel made from lawn clippings? Every alpine meadow, mountain lake, canyon rim, and forest vale would be colonized by fat "extreme suburbanites" who would fly to and from their "green" modular McMansions. Dude: walkable cities connected by mass transit. * P.S. As an avid paraglider pilot, I wince at the "Maverick" para-car. Once you understand that rudderless paragliders have no cross-wind landing capacity, and the wing-loading of that size canopy dictates a landing speed in excess of 30mph, you realize that the roll cage is there for a reason...

According to The New York Times, the two men are from Chechnya. Their family also reportedly lived briefly in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, before moving to the United States in 2002.

“The parents of teenagers would love to have a car that won’t go very far or go very fast. They could just cruise around the neighborhood, drive it to school, see their friends, plug it in overnight.” Because that kind of electric car offers something that doesn’t threaten incumbents and provides a low-end solution, Christensen says that has a greater chance of surviving and ultimately upending the auto market than Tesla’s flashy Roadsters and sedans.

To say the same thing a different way: Probability relates to random events, not to states. The random event in this situation is the placing of the car and goats. Selecting a door to open, whether that be by the contestant or the host, has no bearing on this event.

In the world of human endeavor, we have two types of problems: economic and technological.

As he spoke, Mudd clicked through a deck of slides — 114 in all — projected on a large screen behind him. The figures were staggering. More than half of American adults were now considered overweight, with nearly one-quarter of the adult population — 40 million people — clinically defined as obese. Among children, the rates had more than doubled since 1980, and the number of kids considered obese had shot past 12 million. (This was still only 1999; the nation’s obesity rates would climb much higher.) Food manufacturers were now being blamed for the problem from all sides — academia, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. The secretary of agriculture, over whom the industry had long held sway, had recently called obesity a “national epidemic.”

What’s all the excavation for? It’s for parking. Underground parking. In most cities and in most soil conditions, the giant holes are only there to satisfy off-street parking rules, and to do that, you need a deep, deep hole. A hole like this one.

City requirements for off-street parking spaces raise rents. They jack it up a lot at the bottom of the housing ladder. Proportionally speaking, the bigger the quota and the smaller the apartment, the larger the rent hike.

The more interesting question in our mind is what is compelling Israel to oblige with the U.S. wish for peace talks. Israel and the United States have been on rough footing since Obama took office, mainly due to Netanyahu’s failed attempt to pressure Washington into aligning with Israeli policy toward the Palestinians and Iran early on in the Obama presidency.