Even if you aren't an engine geek like me, this is worth watching

In fact far more are rejected than built and even many of those that make it to concept or prototype stage end up on the cutting room floor. . 

After all this was the guy who ran the NSA spying program under the GW Bush administration.

Reshared post from +Dan Gillmor

Chilling excerpt from Radley Balko's important new book on police militarization:

Reshared post from +Andy Ihnatko

I discovered a new yardstick for measuring how hot it is in the Public Garden.

You know it's damn hot when even the squirrels are thinking "Hell with it. I'm just going to flop right here. That's my plan for the afternoon."

You know it's super damn hot when a squirrel can't be arsed to scamper back into the safety of the branches when a Human draws close with a camera.

And if the squirrel is so lethargic from the heat that it refuses to twitch so much as a whisker even when the Human shoots a seven-image HDR sequence…it's time to stop taking photos of squirrels and time to set off to make inquiries of the gentleman inside the ice cream truck parked at the corner of Boylston and Arlington.

(Seriously. This guy was the second or third squirrel I spotted just flopped on the ground or a branch. That gray suit is a ten out of ten for style but zero out of ten for summer comfort.)

Reshared post from +Atheist ®

~ J?hn

Throughout much of 2007 and 2008 I was in regular contact with David and his boss at the time +Darryl Siry at Tesla while I was writing for AutoblogGreen. Through the early part of 2007, everyone at Tesla was still claiming that customer deliveries of the Roadster would begin by fall. However, that summer while we were at an even in Ann Arbor, I remember telling my editor  +Sebastian Blanco that it seemed unlikely that deliveries would begin before mid-2008.
  
Turns out I was write although the problems were actually much more significant than I imagined. In addition to all the software issues that Vesprimi describes, the original 2-speed transmission design was a mess and they had to start from scratch with a new supplier.

As of January 2008, when I went out to San Carlos for my first drive, they were still putting together a plan to reengineer the motor, power electronics and transmission while launching production with an interim solution to limited the torque output and locked the transmission into a single gear. 

I actually had my first ride in the Roadster, sitting shotgun with SVP of marketing Siry in November 2007, and the car felt fairly solid at that time as Siry blasted through one of the canyons in Malibu but the company still wasn't quite ready to let a journalist behind the wheel. http://green.autoblog.com/2007/11/17/video-riding-the-pch-and-more-in-a-tesla-roadster/

By that time both Vesprimi and co-founder Martin Eberhard had been fired from the company. A few weeks later, editors from the four big car magazines each had their turn piloting the car and I followed right after http://green.autoblog.com/2008/01/28/abg-first-drive-hitting-the-road-in-the-tesla-roadster/

If nothing else, the saga of Tesla proved one thing to a lot of really smart people in Silicon Valley, building a car and a car company is a hell of a lot tougher than building a smartphone app, web site or a social network. 

The Stratos was an absolutely bonkers, purpose-built rally machine powered by a race-tuned Ferrari Dino V6 engine.