For context, the video they are referring to is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H901KdXgHs4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H901KdXgHs4 This really is a

For context, the video they are referring to is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H901KdXgHs4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H901KdXgHs4 This really is a textbook case of how not to respond to criticism. There's a little bit of everything. You've got the incredibly bad misunderstanding of fair use: > One unscrupulous individual even took our viral Solar Freakin' Roadways video (by volunteer Michael Naphan) without our permission, and has used it to create another video, in which he has embedded deliberately misleading information. He is even making money by placing advertising on it to make a profit! The paranoid delusions: > the naysayers began coming out in force trying to grab some attention. They use non-scientific "facts", misquote and mislead, and sometimes flat out lie. They write unprofessional articles and create deceiving videos to lead people astray... And there are other journalists who have written articles with really irresponsibly misleading information. The labeling of other people's cost figures as "false" when they admit they have no idea whether they are false or not: > We are still in R & D, and we haven't even calculated the cost for our prototype. Presenting a false dilemma: either heat the roads or your children will die: > Does the current system of snow removal sound cheap to anyone? What would saving over 1300 lives and preventing over 115,000 injuries per year be worth? (No mention of the original context of the criticism, which was that heating roads are expensive relative to plowing the snow, the existing way we get snow off roads) Presenting a traffic light as evidence that LEDs can be seen in bright sunlight, completely forgetting the fact that traffic lights require sun visors for the sole purpose of making the LEDs visible. Not to mention that they have Fresnel lenses, louvers, and all other kinds of special engineering that makes them visible in sunlight. No mention of what kind of analogous techniques they will use. And a picture of the LEDs in a very dark room, to drive the point home that they will work in sunlight, trust us. A claim that glass is a suitable material for roads because of its moh's hardness rating. By that logic, tungsten carbide wedding rings would be indestructible, and in reality, one bad drop from waist height can destroy them [0]. This is an an argument so bad I can't believe an actual scientist wrote it. Hell, Wikipedia even says in the first paragraph "the Mohs scale is not suitable for accurately gauging the hardness of industrial materials." This argument doesn't even reflect a first-paragraph-Wikipedia-level understanding of the topic. Long discussion of the troubles of the existing road system with the hidden implication that pretty much anything would be better (except, you know, all the stuff that would be worse). Seriously, this is really, really bad. I was hoping they had some novel surface protectant they would pull out and say "sure, this would be bad with ordinary glass, but we've got this special coating that is cheap to produce and will change materials science and we're putting it through final testing now." But no, they literally intend to do this with off-the-shelf tech, appeal to a hardness argument that wouldn't pass a high school chemistry test, and brand everybody who disagrees with them as "irresponsibly misleading" "naysayers". [0] http://www.examiner.com/article/exclusive-handle-with-care-tungsten-ring-break-shatter-and-crack-warning http://www.examiner.com/article/exclusive-handle-with-care-t...