(Don't vote me up for this either. Dismissive first posts are another HN trope, so in this regard I'm as guilty as The Economist.)
What makes you think The Economist is interested in probing the nerdosphere? Would Tesla, Apple, etc., be more effective? For sure, the '... adoption is 10 years away' thing is funny. Makes me reminisce for Popular Science.
If I were to guess; they are advertising where their technological sympathies lie. It is more about managing their brand than probing an audience.
That was a pretty fun one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA
If we hadn't canceled it we'd be colonizing the Solar System by now.
... speaking of flying nuclear reactors
Quote: "Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Pluto's sponsors were having second thoughts about the project. Since the missile would be launched from U.S. territory and had to fly low over America's allies in order to avoid detection on its way to the Soviet Union, some military planners began to wonder if it might not be almost as much a threat to the allies. Even before it began dropping bombs on our enemies Pluto would have deafened, flattened, and irradiated our friends. (The noise level on the ground as Pluto went by overhead was expected to be about 150 decibels; by comparison, the Saturn V rocket, which sent astronauts to the moon, produced 200 decibels at full thrust.) Ruptured eardrums, of course, would have been the least of your problems if you were unlucky enough to be underneath the unshielded reactor when it went by, literally roasting chickens in the barnyard."
Of course I was down-voted: HN's readership doesn't like to be told that it's a trivially exploitable source of clicks.