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Uh, no.

Colorado's proposed legislation is limiting magazines to 15 for rifles, 8 for shotguns.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/us/gun-control-laws-clear-initial-hurdle-in-colorado.html?_r=0

Maybe it's you who needs to stop misrepresenting?

So, "confiscation" is the correct term, then? He didn't sign the form to get the boat out of customs impound so they couldn't release it to him.

This sound like another occurrence of true vs. right answers: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/the-true-answer-and-the-right-answer/

There is some additional growth in govt and spending, particularly in the security arena that I'd be all for cutting dramatically (I'm looking at you DHS). However, a bigger issue is that the economy is still recovering, so tax revenues are still low.

This article explains it decently (and has original image I linked):

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24sun4.html

The majority of the budget deficit and increase in spending can be blamed on 4 major items:

1. The war in iraq
2. Bush era tax cuts
3. Financial collapse and related stimulus spending
4. Ever increasing health care costs

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24editorial_graph2/24editorial_graph2-popup.gif

This isn't a democratic only spending spree though they're to blame as well. I'd say more blame could be heaped on the government for poor decisions on which risks/investments are worth the reward in the realm of defense, health care, stimulus, and financial regulation.

We have troops in 25 countries (not counting territories), not "nearly ever country on earth."

You're a fucking idiot. Read the FIRST LIKE OF YOUR OWN FUCKING LINK:
The military of the United States is deployed in more than 150 countries around the world, with 173,929 of its 1,388,028[1] active-duty personnel serving outside the United States and its territories.

The average age for most military personnel is nearly 30. http://www.statisticbrain.com/demographics-of-active-duty-u-s-military/

The average age of DEATH of a US soldier was 25 in 2010. When you're killing off all the young ones, you kind of skew the "Average age" of employment now don't you?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/us/19dead.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

The largest number of troops are stationed in first world Europe, South Korea and Japan.

Then we have the SECOND sentence in your own fucking link:
Most of these overseas personnel are deployed in combat zones in the Middle east, as part of the War on Terror.

Your facts are completely baseless and you can't even be bothered to read your own reference material. So I'm not quite sure what to say other than: Shut the fuck up.

I personally like this approach. I remember a case where a mother and daughter pair were ordered to be chained together. Just found the link: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/15/us/judge-orders-delinquent-girl-to-be-chained-to-her-mother.html

Turns out they had to be shackled for 30 days, else mom got 30 days in jail. Maybe this is a little better than punishing just one or the other.

I'm fairly certain my usage of term "means testing" in this manner is an accepted definition, though perhaps there are other definitions as well.

I am also placed in an odd situation of being to the left of today's NYT Op-Ed: Old and Rich? Less Help for You :

It may surprise some Americans to learn that the United States spends quite a lot on the affluent, especially through the entitlement programs at the heart of the budget fight: Social Security and Medicare. Both programs move money from relatively poorer young people to relatively richer old people, and they are growing ever more expensive. Means-testing — allocating benefits according to need — might offer both sides a way out. The approach would require agreement on two principles. First, give less to the wealthy rather than take more from them.

The reason I'm to the left is that the contributor wants to do the same means testing with Medicare, while I prefer a universal, equal-access socialized healthcare system. I also find the suggestion to means-test based on lifetime income to be intriguing and worthy of further consideration, proposed because it would reduce gaming the system. No doubt if someone made millions throughout their life, lost it all, and are now in need of taxpayer assistance they would still be able to draw benefits after proving so.

In terms of the implementation of the "elimination of SS benefits based on income thresholds" (call it means testing or claw-back, whatever), many Americans lack the fiscal discipline to handle their wages/salary and still be able to pay their eventual income tax bill if they didn't have withholding from their paycheck. I know from being self-employed that it required careful attention to my spending to ensure I could pay the large tax bill due in April because I had no "pay as you go" withholding.

This is normally handled with employment by filling out a very simple W-4 that estimates what your withholding from your pay should be. People who don't want to be surprised by a large claw-back "benefit elimination" charge when they file their taxes might prefer this kind of approach. As you probably know, no one cross-examines the allowances you enter on your W-4... it's your funeral (or your increased, interest-free loan to the government) if you fill it out incorrectly. Takes less than five minutes to fill out and doesn't need to be revisited unless you have major status changes in your life.

I'm skeptical of this story. They are basically saying that somehow the wiring got messed up in such a way that everything still worked, but the battery was improperly charged/discharged by the APU. The evidence they have is some lights that flickered. This seems fishy to me.

I tend to agree. The summary and TFA are so confusing, its hard to figure where exactly the miss-wiring was. Was it in the APU, or the APU's seperate battery, or the Main Battery, or what? They simply say the APU Battery was "incorrectly connected". Does that mean it was never intended to be connected to the main battery, or was reverse wired, or shorted or operates as a different voltages, or what?

So far Boeing is mum on this particular report.
Instead they are proceeding with insulation between battery cells and cooling.

Boeing’s plan would be to redesign the batteries to place insulation inside and around each of the eight cells to minimize the risk that a short circuit or fire in one of thecells could spread to the others, as investigators have said occurred on the battery that caught fire in Boston on Jan. 7. Boeing might also adjust how tightly the batteries are packed.

So no clue what caused it but if we insulate the battery a little better maybe we can contain it? Seems almost as fishy as the article mentioned above.

I don't think you're understanding the analysis of the data. I did take in account that lead affects children much more than adults -- my argument was that there would be the same 15-20 year lag before the effects could be reflected in crime statistics. The thing is, once that 15-20 year time is accounted for, one would assume that crime would gradually fall as lead removable was a gradual process. Legalized abortion, however, was immediate. And the dip in the crime rate was sharp, and immediate, in that 15-20 years after Roe v. Wade.

I too question the validity of most large statistical analyses, especially when one is attempting to draw conclusions about society. But Levitt and Donohue are extremely thorough in their research and they do analyze many of your concerns. At this point, to address most of your retorts, I would just be quoting their research.

Here is the full paper, you should find it interesting.

You'll notice that, as you should have concluded from my post above, that it's not just a matter of being poor. It's not just a matter of being unwanted. It's when those two problems overlap that a child becomes destined for a life of crime. Wealthy people have less abortions because 1) they can afford birth control/contraceptives 2) they tend to be more intelligent. Police corruption and selective enforcement is an issue, but we're talking about things like murder and assault. I don't think I need to pull up any statistics for you to believe that murder and assault occur on a much smaller scale among the wealthy than the poor.

Remember, the argument isn't that legalized abortion is the only factor responsible in reducing the crime rate. The argument is that legalized abortion was responsible for the massive dip in the crime rate during the 90s. Some of the ideas you mentioned can be dismissed off-hand. The 'war on drugs' was the cause of much violence violent crime and has been deemed a failure by anyone with half a brain, the winding down of the 60s cultural revolution can be dismissed because (and I probably should have specified) we're mainly looking at violent crime, not just crime (although both decreased, violent crime was deemed the more important statistic). It's questionable whether ADHD is a real mental disorder, and I haven't seen any indication that those diagnosed with either ADHD or autism commit violent crimes at a higher rate than anyone else.

The real question is what can we do to bring down the crime rate further, assuming we still feel it is unacceptably high.

It will remain an unanswered question if we reject the best explanations for crime with the most evidence because they're not politically correct or, in your case, because we make the claim that these things are unknowable. The problem with statistics is that they are often used without taking enough variables into account -- such as the lead/crime correlation. When they are used comprehensively, as in Levitt and Donohue's research, they can be enlightening.

Saving the best of a crop for next year's planting is also a time honored farming method.

One that has not been in wide practice in many places since farmers started growing hybrid seeds, which have greater yields but are not exceptionally suitable for replanting. Hybrid seed has been one of the greatest inventions in human history and we couldn't feed the world without it.

this is a patent that will never expire

The patent on their first Round-Up Ready soy expires next year.

Big fire at Monsanto, and the world starves because no seed grows?

They don't produce all their seed in one spot you know, nor are they the only seed company out there.

According to The New York Times: "But according to a person with knowledge of Facebook’s investigation, the compromised site, iPhonedevsdk, an online forum for software developers, is still infected. (In other words, unless you want to be owned by hackers, do not visit the site.)" http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/apple-computers-hit-by-sophisticated-cyberattack/

Your link suggested heating & cooling accounted for 43% of residential and 24% of commercial energy use; I wouldn't call that a "very small fraction".

I was specifically commenting on Namarrgon's post: "What new technologies are needed? Thermal insulation has proved highly effective, and many people report up to 90% reductions in energy use & emissions."

The article was talking about getting rid of 90% of total emissions, so they obviously can't be talking about doing it through insulation alone, since insulation obviously doesn't affect things like transportation and lighting. With more investment in nuclear power tech, many of those categories would have been carbon-neutral by now (with cars being the most difficult to convert, because on-board battery energy density needs to catch up as well), but the government listened to the anti-nuclear-power hippies and screwed that up. And then of course there are sources of pollution not directly related to energy use: garbage, cow farts, etc.

Each of those problems has a very simple capitalist solution: make people pay full cost, which includes paying for pollution liabilities (and in some cases risk insurance). The government currently does the very opposite: subsidizing trash pickup, subsidizing meat production and meat-related pollution liabilities, subsidizing overseas security for oil companies, etc, etc, etc. I'm all for overthrowing socialist governments that steal ("nationalize") private property, but, when Uncle Sam does it at taxpayer expense, it becomes just another subsidy that makes oil more affordable, thereby stifling the competitiveness of all alternative sources of energy.

But I agree, there's no hope of getting energy consumption down by anything close to 90%.

It's laughable to think that energy consumption will go anywhere but up, up, up...

But then I stop laughing, remembering that, with enough government tyranny, all things may be possible...

Insulation certainly helps, but not nearly that much. Demand will increase for a long time yet, I expect. However, emissions depend on generation methods, as well as consumption. Carbon-neutral generation is a separate question, but can potentially reduce emissions to virtually zero (if we got off fossil fuels altogether).

Agreed, but we need to get there first, and fossil fuels are a temporary but crucial stepping stone.

And we wouldn't want carbon emissions to be "virtually zero" - filtered CO2 is a valuable commodity for greenhouse farming.

Oh, and then there's the about 96% of this planet's CO2 emissions that have nothing to do with human activity... (Don't tell Al Gore.) Irrigate some deserts and plant some trees, and we're in balance.

--libman

So the Tea Party is just astro-turfing? Yet the Occupy Wall Street is grass roots?

That's correct. The Tea Party was a construction made with the Koch brothers money and the assistance of Fox News to publicise it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html?_r=0

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

Are grassroots movements funded by billionaires (plural)? Or do they consist of people who live in tents for months? Do they have Sarah Palin as a spokesperson and lame stream media (meaning non-murdoch owned publications) fighter , or nobody - but everybody by design, intending to be better representational (whether that contributed anything meaningful is debatable).

"Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause."

Richard Muller, Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature.

Because their scientific arguments are so weak: The conservative billionaires have to resort to funding public relations campaigns against climate research.
I wonder how many "skeptics" you can buy with 120 million dollars?

Missing (yet) in the Amazon catalog are puppets, in particular of judges, senators and other high government positions. They could use it in a (incoming) role playing game called Lobby, a bit much like Troika, but with puppets to give it more realism.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D03E5DD1E3DEE32A25751C1A9669D946397D6CF

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/b/john_m_broder/index.html?match=any&query=oil&submit.x=14&submit.y=11&submit=Search This does show that he has written over 418 of his 1877 total articles with the word 'oil' in it. Most of his articles I scanned through deal with piplines and climate changes. No real history of automotive reviews. I wonder why he decided to do a review of the Tesla, or he was picked to do the review?

To be fair, the "NYT" didn't lie - Broder did. The NYT backed up one of their journalists. Which they should!

WRONG. The editor should have read the article, said "You're full of shit" and rejected it.

You don't throw your soldiers out into the enemies tender mercies, just 'cause.

No, the NY TImes did not blindly defend Broder. The NY Times has a "Public Editor" - an independent source who investigates and publicly discusses whether the Times did the right thing on controversial stories. She's been looking into this controversy pretty closely - see her blog. She hasn't finished her investigation, but she does say "I reject Mr. Musk’s central contention that Mr. Broder’s Sunday piece was faked in order to sabotage the Model S or the electric-car industry."

Like any organization, the NY Times makes mistakes. But they have enough integrity to own up to it when they do.

The math on the new deal angers former Amazon workers, especially those who are still unemployed. For Texas to give up more than $250 million in tax revenues in exchange for 2,500 jobs amounts to about $100,000 per job. Most distribution workers are paid $20,000 to $30,000 a year. The rest benefits the company’s bottom line, which generally increases executive bonuses and shareholder returns.

These tax deals are indeed bogus. But are the people out on the sidewalks carrying signs? Also: that article gives some indication to the corruption occuring specifically in Texas and donations to their comptroller. Wild stuff. Welcome to the Republican America where we bow to the business, who is paying low wages to the employees, and where the business gets tax breaks to come and then leaves. And the politician can run on how they created jobs. And the lobbyist can give campaign donations to the comptroller and get away with it.

Cutting CO2 mainly depends on technology (or cutting the standard of living, which most people don't want to do), aimed at two areas:

1) Non-emitting cars. Electric cars look more viable every day; it's not inconceivable that most people could be driving them by by 2050.

I'm not so sure... have you seen this review of the Tesla S? :o)

It's not about the .6 miles. It's about trying to say "the car died right in the parking lot" in his review.

Who said that? That's not either stated or suggested in the review or in the rebuttal. If you're saying that's what the author was trying to do, maybe you ought to offer some evidence.

It's not about the .6 miles. It's about trying to say "the car died right in the parking lot" in his review.

Who said that? That's not either stated or suggested in the review or in the rebuttal. If you're saying that's what the author was trying to do, maybe you ought to offer some evidence.

NYT public editor has an entry about this case:
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/conflicting-assertions-over-an-electric-car-test-drive/

The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00

Mr. Musk promised on Monday to write a blog post critiquing my drive and to publish the logs he says he has of how I drove and why the battery pack drained. We will link to those when they appear.

And he actually did link to TFA when it became available, while Musk never even mentions the follow-up.

And if the car electronics were well designed, that would defend from hacks like the GP described. Except they aren't. The entertainment systems are connected to the driving systems for features like adjusting the radio volume to cover the engine volume or displaying car status on entertainment screens. Those connections are not done in any sort of intelligent or secure way.

The times does do their own investigation. That's what the public editor does. The public editors have limited time positions so they have less incentive to suck up, and instead be as impartial as practical. For example, the public editor was critical of the Times for following through with bringing on the guy from BBC as the new CEO after the Saville tragedy.

Here's her *first* article on this issue:
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/conflicting-assertions-over-an-electric-car-test-drive/

She says it won't be the last.

It's worth reading the New York Times article author's response to the accusations which was written before Elon Musk's new blog post with the data. And also remember when this all happened before? I'm not sure who to believe, but I'm not sure why everybody thinks the NYT reporter is blatantly lying but Musk wouldn't fudge the numbers a little. I think some of Musk's response is weak and still dances around some major issues that the reporter had with the car. All the graphs he posted are shown in miles instead of time, which hides some of the problems that the reporter talked about, like going to bed with with a 90 mile charge and waking up and finding the battery with 25 miles.

Also, why would he try to tarnish this car? He doesn't appear to own an oil company.

Broder has a negative bias about electrics, and the flap no doubt sells papers.

In an article he wrote March of last year he said: "Yet the state of the electric car is dismal, the victim of hyped expectations, technological flops, high costs and a hostile political climate.”

Here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/sunday-review/the-electric-car-unplugged.html?pagewanted=all&_r=4&

There's been mention of the 2/12 response from Broder (previous to Musk's rebuttal), but the first post-rebuttal articles are now showing up:
* http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/conflicting-assertions-over-an-electric-car-test-drive/?smid=tw-share
Plus a general line by line analysis of Musk's comments:
* http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/02/elon-musks-data-doesnt-back-his-claims-new-york-times-fakery/62149/

Broder appears to have posted a response.

Look at other articles he has written. He is consistently pro-oil and anti-environmentalist.

See: Dirty Hippies get arrested for obstructing the utopian big oil future.

This guy is an oil shill.

Look at other articles he has written. He is consistently pro-oil and anti-environmentalist.

See: Dirty Hippies get arrested for obstructing the utopian big oil future.

This guy is an oil shill.

Then, on the NYTimes' original response to the controversy (at http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/the-charges-are-flying-over-a-test-of-teslas-charging-network/ ) Broder writes:

Yet the graphic presented by Elon Musk ( http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/speeddistance0.jpg ) of speed vs. distance clearly shows that Broder's statement is false, unless Elon Musk is presenting false data logs. Of course, one possible explanation could be an uncalibrated speedometer, which showed Broder the numbers he wrote in his article. But considering the digital-ness of this fancy-schmancy electric car, I expect that the display is a digital display of speed and that the console speed displayed actually matches the speeds logged and graphed by Musk.
.
Now little things lke "I but the climate control to low at 182 miles" when he really did it at 212 miles (approximately eyeballed by me) which would have seemed like picking at details and mistakes takes on a sadder dirtier note of trying to spin the story the way he wanted it to turn out.
:>(
How sad for the nytimes if Elon Musk's allegations turn out to be true and Broder lied.

So the burn rate isn't increasing, big fucking deal. We're still not remotely at a break even point for water consumption so, guess what, there's still a huge problem.

I agree with you.

Here's what fuzzy is parroting:

Moreover, the poor, highly fertile countries that once churned out immigrants by the boatload are now experiencing birthrate declines of their own. From 1960 to 2009, Mexico’s fertility rate tumbled from 7.3 live births per woman to 2.4, India’s dropped from six to 2.5, and Brazil’s fell from 6.15 to 1.9. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, where the average birthrate remains a relatively blistering 4.66, fertility is projected to fall below replacement level by the 2070s. This change in developing countries will affect not only the U.S. population, of course, but eventually the world’s.

Why is this happening? Scientists who study population dynamics point to a phenomenon called “demographic transition.”

“For hundreds of thousands of years,” explains Warren Sanderson, a professor of economics at Stony Brook University, “in order for humanity to survive things like epidemics and wars and famine, birthrates had to be very high.” Eventually, thanks to technology, death rates started to fall in Europe and in North America, and the population size soared. In time, though, birthrates fell as well, and the population leveled out. The same pattern has repeated in countries around the world. Demographic transition, Sanderson says, “is a shift between two very different long-run states: from high death rates and high birthrates to low death rates and low birthrates.” Not only is the pattern well-documented, it’s well under way: Already, more than half the world’s population is reproducing at below the replacement rate. - Slate.com

This argument, which is not proven science, suggests the following: as technology and wealth improve likelihood of survival, people tend to have fewer children. That which technology does not do, birth control will also.

The main evidence for this, in this article's view, is that in fewer than half of the nations on earth, population growth has declined, and it took us as a whole longer to add the 7th billionth person than it has to add the previous billion.

The article is shoddy science for a number of reasons.

First, the nations that are declining in population tend to be the wealthier ones or ones aided by immigration in becoming so. Related to that is that the nations which are dropping in birth rate are importing large immigrant populations.

Second, the delay in adding the seventh billion may have very little significance. A few tragedies or droughts, some instability or disease, and a delay can happen. That's even assuming our estimates are right, since we're estimating that seven billion and when it occurred.

Finally, the article ignores the path of history. The poorer tend to outproduce the wealthier, which tends to make wealthy nations poorer and less stable, which tends to increase the birth rate as well.

Further, many of our magic cures like antibiotics are no longer guaranteed barriers to disease. In addition, many diseases are mutating. Life expectancy rates of a modern nature may be a blip on the radar.

As you noted, we're already at a stressing point. We don't need to look much farther than the collapse of fish stocks to see that we're trying to feed too many people.

The Slate article is suspect for another reason: Slate tends to pump out these feelgood articles every year or so encouraging us not to think about any problem that contradicts popular notions of fre

How long til a malicious person is able to crash (potentially lots of) cars in the real world by hacking into some cloud servers?

-2 years. Car vendors have shown themselves utterly incompetent at security a long time ago. It's likely that similar hacks exist for most if not all new cars bought today.

I call bullshit. There is no such diagnostic software.

Here are the names of some companies producing the "non existing software":

DiagnosisPro
Isabel Health Care

Here's a recent article on the New York times about the subject, Isabel Health Care has been around since at least 2006, when we recommended the software to a local hospital.

There is no complete database of every possible disease with typical and atypical presentations.

Complete in that it contains every disease known, and no you do not need agreement about the symptoms to enter them in a database. The reasoning process handles that part, you simply enter "some reports say these are symptoms, some other reports these other symptoms, and moreover it is always possible that a few symptoms maybe absent".
From the NYT article, here is one example of a "non such database":

Since the 1980s, Massachusetts General Hospital has been developing and refining DXplain, a program that provides a ranked list of clinical diagnoses from a set of symptoms and laboratory data.

The graph you link to shows the same thing as Krugman's (a flat line on a semilog plot is still flat on a linear plot): a jump in 2009 due to the impact of the depression on automatic safety net programs such as unemployment and food stamps (which continues, since employment has not recovered), and then nearly flat thereafter. Here's another one of Krugman's FRED plots (on a linear scale, if it makes you happier) showing federal spending as a fraction of potential GDP.

Much of the deficit increase in 2009 was due to existing "safety net" programs such as food stamps and unemployment insurance that kicked in in response to the depression, which was already underway when Obama took office. The rest was due to the financial bailout, in which Obama followed through on the bailout devised under the Bush administration. Obama brought an end to the growth in Federal spending

Ah, Krugman. Love that graph - on log scale! The absolute numbers are considerably different. Spending increased over the entire Bush Administration by about $900 billion; spending is up over $820 billion in just the first Obama term.

Assuming President Obama can restrain spending to just the rate of inflation (which would be a huge scale-back of his planned spending increases), he'd still end up close to twice the spending of President Bush, over his two terms.

Much of the deficit increase in 2009 was due to existing "safety net" programs such as food stamps and unemployment insurance that kicked in in response to the depression, which was already underway when Obama took office. The rest was due to the financial bailout, in which Obama followed through on the bailout devised under the Bush administration. Obama brought an end to the growth in Federal spending

Right. What's the alternative? Java? A language so insecure that the Department of Homeland Security told people to disable it. Where you have a huge pile of badly debugged libraries which keep changing.

What are the other alternatives? Over the years, Visual Basic, and Borland Delphi were tried. They're now half-dead languages. Stored procedures in databases and various XML-based hacks were used in some firms. Almost all these solutions are single vendor, which means you get overcharged or abandoned. Sometimes both.

"at some point he hit 75."

Perhaps factually true, but very misleading. The NYT's own graphicshows he drove the first leg of 114 miles in 1:24. That's an average of over 81 MPH.

Sure, lower averages on other legs, but there were also things like driving through NYC and stopping to eat, etc. Still, that first leg provides an idea of how he drives, and how he misleads.

"I don't see where the ... style of driving, as he described it, should have had a dramatic effect on the vehicle's range."

He doesn't accurately describe his style of driving, though. Despite the author's claim that "Mr. Musk's logs may show I hit 75 m.p.h. for a mile or two during my trip," the NYT's own graphic shows otherwise.

First leg - 114 miles in 1:24 = 81 MPH average.

Mr. Musk has referred to a “long detour” on my trip. He is apparently referring to a brief stop in Manhattan on my way to Connecticut that, according to Google Maps, added precisely two miles to the overall distance traveled from the Delaware Supercharger to Milford (202 miles with the stop versus 200 miles had I taken the George Washington Bridge instead of the Lincoln Tunnel). At that point, I was already experiencing anxiety about range and had called a Tesla employee from the New Jersey Turnpike to ask how to stretch the battery. She said to shut off the cruise control to take advantage of battery regeneration from occasional braking and slowing down. Based on that advice, I was under the impression that stop-and-go driving at low speeds in the city would help, not hurt, my mileage.

Before I set out from my home in suburban Washington, I informed Tesla that I intended to make a brief stop in New York and that I would spend the night in the vicinity of Milford rather than attempting to make it to Boston, which was theoretically possible with a full charge at Milford, although it was a bitterly cold night — and that clearly affects the car’s range. I added 185 miles of range at Milford, knowing that I wouldn’t need 242 or 265 miles before recharging the next morning.

When I parked the car for the night at a hotel, the range meter showed 90 miles remaining, and I was about 45 miles from the Milford Supercharger. As I recounted in the article, when I awoke the next morning the indicated range was 25 miles. The rest of that story is told in the article, including a Tesla official’s counsel, which I followed, that an hour of charging at the Norwich, Conn., utility would restore much of the range lost overnight, which had disappeared because of what he called a “software glitch.”

I don't see where the actual size of his detour (2 miles) or style of driving, as he described it, should have had a dramatic effect on the vehicle's range. It doesn't seem like the problem, at least according to his account, is between the seat and the steering wheel.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/automobiles/stalled-on-the-ev-highway.html http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/the-charges-are-flying-over-a-test-of-teslas-charging-network/

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/automobiles/stalled-on-the-ev-highway.html http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/the-charges-are-flying-over-a-test-of-teslas-charging-network/

And in the actual rebuttal, the reporter mentioned that:

1. The car displayed "Charging Complete", and its reported range estimate was sufficient to reach his destination
2. The detour in question was only two miles long
3. He may have gone above the speed limit for a mile or two, but that was probably before he stopped to charge at Newark. His problems came after that. And surely driving below the speed limit for 100 miles mitigates the excess energy usage caused by going above the speed limit for one mile.

This is an awful lot of hooplah about a software problem. If the car did say it was fully charged, obviously it was not.

All modern cars have software bugs, some worse than others. Even gasoline powered cars have them. A car like the Tesla is so new and has so few users that more bugs are likely to be discovered. That's what happens when you want a bleeding edge car. If you want something well tested and less likely to have significant bugs, buy last year's Prius.

1. The car displayed "Charging Complete", and its reported range estimate was sufficient to reach his destination
2. The detour in question was only two miles long
3. He may have gone above the speed limit for a mile or two, but that was probably before he stopped to charge at Newark. His problems came after that. And surely driving below the speed limit for 100 miles mitigates the excess energy usage caused by going above the speed limit for one mile.

Feeding the 416 horsepower motor of the top-of-the-line Model S Performance edition is a half-ton lithium-ion battery pack slung beneath the cockpit; that combination is capable of flinging this $101,000 luxury car through the quarter mile as quickly as vaunted sport sedans like the Cadillac CTS-V.

You'd think the NYT could at least get the pricing right.

There's a bit more "he said / she said" in this followup article:

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/the-charges-are-flying-over-a-test-of-teslas-charging-network/?ref=johnmbroder

including links to Elon Musk's "detour" claims, and the NYT journo's rebuttal.