Still have a few questions about this, what if you build like 20 miles of this, and theres a faultline or heat causing two 10-mile halves to separate like 10 cm?, do you upend and move one half after the other?, or do you patch it in with cables and concrete? You might say earthquakes are rare, but even a change in heat can cause the road to expand. I have seen this first hand, I once worked on a bridgeproject on a 5km long bridge, and the edges moves quite a lot due to changes in temperature making the bridge expand or contract.

Im sure this modular concept works fine for building a porch, but making thousands of miles of road under all kinds of conditions, terrain etc is a whole new bag of problems.

I also worked in an office building once, that had these kinds of modular tiles for floors, buildt on stilts, so that you could stretch cables under there (the kind used in server-rooms) again, these things are fine for small server rooms/ilses etc, but when applied to large open office landscapes, they caused all kinds of havok and problems (they became wobbly, uneven, gaps formed etc.) And this was inside, in a brand new building, about as controlled an environment as you can get.

I would love to see these things becoming reality, but highly skeptical that its even doable.

Wow, just think of the new sidewalk he can build with all those recovered Tiles!!!!!

Lets not forget that currently the nation spends a great deal of money on simple yearly road repair, and that is only short term as most roads need to be entirely re-milled and replaced once or twice a decade.

I think this technology may well begin to seep into more liberal states, as others have said with parking lots (especially electric vehicle recharging stations) or perhaps with big and wealthy businesses like fast food chains. If the tiles can stay relatively undamaged over decades, eventually it would become very cost effective.

Yes melting snow would be improbable until perhaps there were enough roads connected to say the national grid. But everything else is not only probably but plausible.

I really hope this technology is implemented, slowly but surely. But I fear things like this won't become a viable alternative until the world is so tapped for oil and natural gas that there IS no alternative but to go with solar and wind technologies as a primary resource. Sadly America is woefully behind much of Europe. Some nations in Eur-Asia plan to be oil free within 100 years. The US will be mired in wars over the last scraps of the limited resources by then if something doesn't change.

Progress has a sense of humor. Awesome. Of course these guys would like to see every square foot of north american asphalt replaced with this stuff, but I think that they are smart enough to know that that isn't going to happen any time soon.

What could happen, however, is that we all gradually adopt the technology. First we start with with the densely wealthy liberal eco-conscious places that have a cultural incentive to swallow the initial economic hurdles and lower overall manufacturing costs to a point where it starts to make sense to the wealthy conservative gas guzzling folks, and then slowly expand from there.

The concept is sound. At some point the hardware might just become cheap enough to be viable - it's an option worth exploring, at the very least.

And if you think that making really long roadways out of relatively expensive tiles is impossible, try telling that to the ancient Romans.

They let their rabbit run around on the tile. Probably lucky they clean up the turds.

How stinking cute is that.

My sons will get a kick out of this. Can't wait to show it to them.

*doublepromote

P.S. They really need to clean the grout between their tiles. Ick.

He does and he uses it at his discretion.

When I am around the door is open and he is free to hop aboot.

Honest truth he came to me at six weeks liter trained from the respectable fantastic breeder.

I have never had a problem with his urine on carpet, he pees in his potty and rabbit poop does sometimes happen outside the enclosure, but it is not like dog poops, the poop comes out dry fairly well.

I said, never had a problem for me, he is out for 4 hours at a time and every time he feels the need of nature he hippity hops into his custom tiled corner pissoir and then hippity hops back to whatever he was doing.

Rabbits are very VERY clean by nature and habitual. he knows where to pee he knows where water is he knows where food is. Rabbits can not see in the dark so they need repetition, although they catch on quick. but think of how often the lights are OOT ? SMART FAST LEARNIN G LIL BASTARDS AND BITCHS.

Just tried it with a car battery I found. Now I need new tile.

Dude, get over your labels of racism for fucks' sake, and your dutiful putty mentality of absolute SHIT like "hanging out with a 'black' president and all manner of other cop-out meaningless, self-defeating bullshit like phrases such as, "Well, it COULD be worse." IN-FAN-TILE way of using your mind, a terrible thing to waste. It's this type of opinion formulation that breeds the most vile form of self-delusional ignorance and ineffectual citizenship. Fuck a bush, fuck a clinton, fuck a president, the office means absolutely nothing you imagine it to, as evidenced in your verbiage.

Christy's antics and office are an indication of the most advanced form of mafioso-esque tactics for garnering power, get a fucking clue-

He's a criminal, and Obama an absolute disgraceful insult to the office.

*backup=[...snipped...] and thanks to dailypicksandflicks.com for finding the original video, which I hadn't.

p.s. The filmmaker posted a comment to liveleak:

I'm the filmmaker, I'd like to share a couple of notes.
The "raining" of ashes from Mt. Etna is not rare, but this time it was unusually intense. Some towns nearby were hit even harder.
It lasted more than 30 minutes.
Yes, cars got scratched, some windshields got chipped. But no Ferrari's or Lamborghini's around!
The biggest pain is to clean up, we have to collect ash into sacks and stash them at the corners for a special service to collect them. It will take weeks to get rid of it all.
We have to wear masks while cleaning because thin ashes are believed to hurt your lungs.
Pompei was not covered with the same kind of ashes, but with a massive cloud of gas and burning ashes that can be found only at the top of Mt.Etna. We're safe down here (~60Km from the volcano.)
@caar1970 at 1:27 I'm wiping ash from a tiled floor, not a car.
@Joxed My vespa can handle dirt very well. It's not unsafe if you drive slow like I did.

This is the original URL of the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJfU3ylydYc Less..
Posted 12 hours ago By turisc

3:20 jesus christ... that kid is gonna smack his head on the tile you idiots!

It's a tracking device. Not exactly "revolutionary", I'm sure we all knew something like this would eventually hit the market. How do they get around the privacy issue if you can just slip a tile into someone's pocket and stalk them or attach it to a person's car, declare it lost, and use everyone's phone to keep track of their comings and goings?

Your video, Space Shuttle Thermal Tile Demonstration, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I saw a demo of this material at a NASA seminar once. The guy held a tile of it in his hand, toasted the other side to near-glowing with a blow torch, and 5 seconds later flipped it onto his other hand. The whole room flinched.

Cool, but rather disturbing also.

I'd assume that the power doesn't drop much at all with range... Did the person filming have it in a room fully tiled from floor to ceiling in matte finishes to keep it from scorching paint, wallpaper, etc?

Frankly, the implications of this kind of tech are much more disturbing to me than, say, Google Glass.