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If price of the electric car > Price of cheap gas fueled car + 200,000 miles of gasoline then don't buy

If economics are how you judge a vehicle, spending anything more than a couple grand on a used car is a bad decision for you.

If economics are your *only* consideration, maybe. Personally, I just bought a Nissan Leaf, and the evaluation was made primarily on economics -- but with the starting point that I was going to buy new, because I prefer to buy new and drive for many years. Given the available new car options, and my driving patterns and related requirements, and the available tax credits, the Leaf and the i-MiEV were the cheapest options. Many small gasoline-powered cars were much cheaper up front, but when you factor in 8 years of fuel, the electrics win hands down (for me).

If anyone is interested in my analysis, I did it in a Google Docs spreadsheet, which I'm happy to share: http://links.willden.org/electric

Note that if you dig into the calculations in the spreadsheet some of the cells contain insanely-complex formulas which are not obviously meaningful. My calculation was done by assuming a normal distribution of trip lengths, applying the obvious cost function to lengths and computing the expected value of the resulting random variable. That calculation is fairly hairy and the resulting formulas are expressed primarily in terms of the Gaussian error function. I used Mathematica to compute the expected value expressions and then converted them to spreadsheet formulas. The result works very nicely, but the functions appear to be insane. For example, the image I included on this Google+ post shows the expression for the expected cost of operating a plug-in hybrid.

If they have no clue how to properly handle that data you can expect it to get destroyed.

They don't have to know how to handle it, that's what the Reed-Solomon coding is for -- as long as *enough* of them handle it correctly, the data will be there. Also, my software periodically (monthly) crawls the backups to ensure that all of the shares are still present, so unless many holders of shares screw up at the same time, failures are recoverable.

Encoding parameters are chosen based on assumed reliability of individual nodes and a target file reliability. I've written a paper about how the reliability computations are done. For my purposes, I assume the probability of my data surviving on a given machine for one month is 96%. That is, I assume that once every two years hardware failure, catastrophe or user error will trash the data on a given machine, BUT, I choose encoding parameters that provide enough redundancy to ensure that, under the assumption that failures are independent, my odds of losing a given file are less than one in a billion. Those are the odds of losing it from the storage grid, I also have my own local copy, on a RAID-6 file system, so the odds of losing it completely are even smaller.

Those are theoretical probabilities, of course. Realistically, when you're down to such tiny probabilities, other rare events (aka "black swans") become more likely issues. My purpose in shooting for one-in-a-billion is just to make the loss probability small enough that other issues dominate.

My family and friends all get the same protection for their data (except the local copy), and it's completely transparent to them. Backups just happen every day, at no cost other than bandwidth, disk space and electricity (gotta keep the machines running 24x7). No human effort required.

... for a week-long backpacking trip in the Wind River mountain range.

My requirements weren't large, all I wanted to do is to be able to recharge my Palm Centro. I knew I wouldn't have phone service, but I wanted to be able to use it as an e-book reader and music/audio-book player. I love the 140W panel I mounted on top of my camp trailer, so a small, portable solar panel that I could carry with me seemed like exactly what I wanted.

What I found is that there are a lot of inexpensive, lightweight, poorly-built, underpowered devices out there that would require many hours of good sunlight even to recharge my phone. There are also a few devices that are expensive, durable and provide plenty of power, but most of them were also pretty heavy, and the lightest were -- no surprise -- the most expensive.

For the price of solar power, I could have bought three or four extra batteries for my phone, and had plenty of power for a week of heavy use, and the batteries would have been far lighter than any of the solar panels. Unless your power requirements include being away from an outlet for weeks at a time, this will be true for everyone.

In the end, I bought a $10 device that takes 4 AA batteries. Each set of alkaline batteries charges my phone from zero to full 2.5 times. I took two sets of batteries, just in case, but never used the second one. Now I take the charger with me when I travel, filled with rechargeable AA batteries, so I never have to find an outlet in an airport. I use rechargeables to avoid having to buy and throw away a lot of alkaline batteries, but I like the security of knowing that unless I'm out in the wilderness, buying a pack of AAs is nearly always an easy option for instant power.

Maybe not a terribly "green" solution, but far more practical than carrying around a heavy solar charger and trying to find the sun.

How about this, and this, and even this.

Not exactly the same, of course, and these sites (second one is my server, go easy on it -- the other two links have more stuff anyway) are pretty much limited to the production of one publisher, because that's the only publisher around so far that understands DRM-free ebooks and lax policies on sharing are good for their business. But others are exploring the ideas (look at the list of publishers).

Part of the difference in attitude I think I understand: I suspect you're significantly younger than I am, and your perspective is influenced more by recent events. I grew up during the height of the Cold War, and there *was* an imminent threat, even if we weren't actually shooting. I haven't asked, and so can't really speak for the young soldiers joining today, but I am quite certain that people haven't fundamentally changed and that very few young people actually want to go to war. The war in Iraq hasn't hugely impacted the recruiting efforts, so there must be some other reasons, and I think the fact that Iraq is such a *safe* (there were days in Vietnam and hours in WWII where we lost more soldiers than we've lost in the years in Iraq) war probably makes it somewhat less frightening than it would be otherwise.

There's also the fact that I, and most of my relatives in the military, and many of the people currently in Iraq, didn't join the US military, they joined their state's National Guard. Historically, the National Guard rarely actually goes to war and also does a lot of worthwhile things that don't involve actually going to war. That's the family tradition I mentioned, National Guard service, as well as prior generations of wartime military service. The small town that my family is from also has a strong tradition of military service. Look at this picture of the cemetery on Memorial Day; each one of those flags you see decorates the grave of a veteran who was in the theatre of combat during a war. I do have to say that I regret the fact that my father, younger brother and some cousins are entitled to flags and I am not. You may call that silly, and I certainly would agree that I wouldn't choose to go to war just so I could have a flag on my grave on Memorial Day, but there *is* a regret, and I don't think that's a bad thing.

Further, although I think the decision to invade Iraq was misguided, I am proud of my relatives who are over there right now. I think that the invasion of Iraq will prove to be a good thing for the Iraqis, that they'll ultimately be a happier and freer people for it (though that depends in large part on them). I'm unclear as to why their freedom is worth untold billions billions of tax dollars, but the people I know who are in Iraq now consider it worth the time and risk to their own lives to do a good thing for the Iraqis.

There's a big difference between *wanting* to go to war and being willing to go to war, which is the issue that prompted me to post originally. People who want to go to war are crazy. People who are willing to go to war even though they don't want to are admirable, even if *you* think their reasons are misguided. Note that this applies to some degree to terrorists as well, although I cannot see any justification for the intentional slaughter of innocents.

Finally, my other issue with your position is that it's one of condescension and arrogance. Because you calculate the value of military service and conclude that it's a bad idea, you assume that anyone who arrives at a different result is an idiot, never bothering to consider that they may be reasoning from a different axiomatic system. Were I to do the same, I'd conclude that you're selfish and frightened. I don't conclude that because I can see how your assumptions differ.

My position is that joining the US military, whatever branch, is an admirable thing to do as long as it's done for reasons of patriotism and with an intent to serve. The fact that the military has been misused is just an indication that we *civilians* in the US are not doing our job. We're not pulling our weight and keeping our government in check. That's our failing. Mine and *yours*, not the failing of the people who offer to risk their lives for our freedom.

Bottom line: If you think the military action is wrong, blame the government that ordered it and the civilians who supported it -- or at le

By chance, anyone remember this technology? I have no idea what happened to it, but it would be a blockbuster open source app if done today, and was platform independant.

That's very interesting. If I understand what you're saying, was it something like this? That's a description I wrote up for a system I'd like to build if I every get the time.

See his family history page here: http://willden.org/Histories/histories.html

Those are *my* family histories, not Nigel Cunningham's. :-) Bleah... I *really* need to fix those pages...

Ward and Stake Missionaries are often referred to as Home Missionaries. So calling himself a "home missionary elder" isn't incorrect.

I've never heard ward and stake missionaries referred to as home missionaries. I suppose it's possible, though. However, ward and stake missionaries do not change jobs or relocate to accept such a calling.

See his family history page here:
http://willden.org/Histories/histories.html

All Mormon missionaries are Elders (except for rare female missionaries). Ward and Stake Missionaries are often referred to as Home Missionaries. So calling himself a "home missionary elder" isn't incorrect.

The phrase "Home Missionary" has broader meaning within Christendom, particularly in Restorationist sects (Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism, Jehovah's Witness, Church of Christ, and many others that came out of the Restorationist movement, so their vocabularies overlap).

Mormonism, compared to the rest of Christianity, is a rather lassez-faire (though morally strict) religion (i.e., a layman's church, no paid clergy, etc.). As a result, you have a lot of regional variation within Mormon culture. For example, I much prefer the attitudes of what I call "midwest Mormons" to those of "Utah Mormons". Though I lived in Australia from 2 to 4, I can't say I got a sense at that age of how "Australian Mormons" are. In general, Mormons outside of the west coast are usually more laid back than the culture that permeates in the Church west of Utah.

Disclaimer: I was raised Mormon in the midwest (Kansas City, Missouri, mostly). I slowly dropped out of the church between 16 and 18 and now describe myself as a "hopeful, spiritual, implicitly critical, explicitly skeptical, freethinking, existentialist, humanist, agnostic, atheist, anarchist".

I am impressed with your knowledge, however.

:-)

I'm a descendant of people who who made the trek from Iowa to Salt Lake City (and then on to southern Utah) in a prairie schooner, and who kept pretty decent diaries as they did it. Reading their diaries got me interested in some of the details of life at that time, which is why I know a little something about wagons. The diaries are fascinating. Here are some snippets chosen more or less at random from the autobiography of Ann Willden (sister of my great-great grandfather). She was seven years old when she walked from Iowa to Utah.

One day an old Indian Chief came to our wagon. I saw him coming and ran to the far end of our "prairie schooner". He saw that I was afraid of him, so to tease me, ran his long spear as far into the wagon as he could reach. I surely was frightened for I thought he was going to kill me.

At one time, all the men who could get away from the wagon train, went after a herd of buffalo. All returned from the hunt but my father and a companion. The train could not wait for them, as camp had to be made further on so they were left behind. At nine o'clock that night they had not reached the camp and the company became uneasy about them. A lantern was hung on a tall tree and guns were fired every few minutes. About three o'clock in the morning an answer came to the watching and anxious people. The answer was a gunshot fired by the lost ones.

One day Charles [Ann's 15 year-old brother] was driving our wagon and John [13 year-old brother] was driving the sheep behind the wagon. There was another company behind our outfit and our parents got out of our wagon and said they would walk awhile and talk with the people. Mother told me to stay in the wagon and care for my little sister [that would be Mary, age 2]. After awhile John came to the wagon and called to me, "Annie, won't you come drive the sheep, I am so tired?" I was willing to do so. Had I gotten out of the wagon on the "nigh" side all would have been well, but--instead, I got out on the opposite side. The oxen, not being accustomed to this, kicked me under the wagon, a wheel struck my back and squeezed up my dinner, and my prized lead pencil was lost in the food. This pencil was a piece of common lead that I had in my mouth, chewing and trying to shape into a pencil. Though I was badly hurt, I mourned the loss of my pencil. While being run over I was calling frantically to by brother, "Stop that wagon". I must have been made of India rubber not to have been seriously injured. My frantic parents came running to learn the trouble and there was great excitement in the train for a little while. I was able to walk the next day.

The great prairie was covered with high thick grass and hidden underneath the grass was cactus. The wagon train left the main road to camp and I was walking behind in my bare feet. The cactus thorns would get into my feet and I would sit down to get them out, and I would get them into my hands. The wagon soon got so far ahead of me that I was sure I was lost. The people behind did not know of the cactus and thought I was lingering because I had gotten into a "stubborn spell". In a short time, which seemed like hours to me, my brother came for me on horseback. When my thorny condition was discovered and doctored, I was petted and comforted.

Amazing stories. Besides lead poisoning and getting run over by a 2000-lb wagon, Ann also spent a winter living in a hastily-constructed dugout with nothing to eat but a cache of seed wheat, had 10 children, survived Indian raids... she was one tough woman. I have a dozen other biographies of ancestors who had similar experiences and took the time to write them down. Really cool stuff.

I use "mwm". Gets out of the way, and generally stays there.

My myth box runs evilwm, at least when Myth is running.

Although I hadn't really planned it that way, I've actually found myself using my Myth system as a computer for work, occasionally. So, I have a few user accounts on the system: The "mythtv" account, which is automatically started up when the machine is booted, runs evilwm and Mythtv and nothing else. If you exit MythTV, though, you drop back to KDM and can log in as one of the other accounts, where you get a regular KDE desktop.

Since I work from home, I've found it very handy a few times to use my family room as a sort of improptu conference room. When others come over, I set up a sturdy 6'x3' folding table, throw a 10/100 ethernet switch and a couple of power strips underneath it for connecting laptops, and then we use my big TV (50" Samsung DLP connected to the Myth box via DVI) as a big shared display.

Surprisingly useful. Pisses my kids off when they want to watch movies. I just point out that I am The Dad :-)

As to the question about what else to install: Web and FTP servers might be useful if you really want to expose it to the Internet. Personally, I have another Linux box which does those jobs. OTOH, I also don't bother thinking much about what software I want on the box. If I run into a need for something, I just install it. But that's with Debian. Gentoo users have to plan their needs a little further in advance ;-)

Here's a little project that I've been meaning to do for quite a while that I think would be a nice senior project. A full implementation would be way too much work, but a simplified version could be both accessible and useful. I think this is the sort of project that, if done well, could generate enough real-world usage and interest to make a name for the author.

A while ago I noticed that most geeky homes and small businesses have something in common: Lots of computers, few of which are backed up effectively, and most of which have disk drives that are significantly larger than needed. So it occurred to me that a backup solution could make use of this spare storage to create additional copies of important, or even all files, on different disks and in different machines. Files that already exist on multiple machines need not be duplicated further, so there would be no need to bother excluding most system files from the backup system.

If that sounds at all interesting, you can read this description I wrote a while ago while thinking through the issues and just threw on my web site (very plain OOo-generated HTML, sorry).

I'll get around to building this thing eventually, but I'd love to see someone use it as a project to get it started.

... and it's great.

My main reason for wanting to build a DVD jukebox with MythTV was so my kids could watch movies without them destroying their favorite DVDs. It works very well. Even my three year-old can navigate the menus and find the movies he wants without assistance (he insists on it, actually -- gets mad if you do it for him) and without damaging anything.

As for keeping special features and menus, I don't know. If you have plenty of disk space, just store the raw ISO image and xine and mplayer will do the right thing with it. Theoretically, it shouldn't be too hard to rip all of the titles from the DVD, recompress them all, and then remaster a new, smaller ISO image that still has all of the features. I don't know of anything that does it, though.

In my case, I really don't *want* the menus. I want a list of movies and when I pick the one I want, I want it to play the movie, period. No waiting two minutes for the funky intro to play through so the menu items appear. No previews. No nothing, just the movie. YMMV, of course. On the rare occasions I do want to watch some of the other features, I pull the disk off the shelf. But I have lots of shelves, so that may not work as well for you.

BTW, in case you're interested, here are the specs on my system:

• TV: Samsung 50" DLP connected via DVI.
• MythTV box: Shuttle case with an Sempron 2800+ underclocked to be a Sempron 2000+. Underclocking keeps it cooler, and therefore quieter.
• Video card: Run-of-the-mill Nvidia FX 5200 with DVI out. $30.
• Audio card: On-board VIA VT8233 AC97 audio controller with TOSLINK (optical) output.
• Audio receiver: 600W Yamaha surround sound system connected to PC via TOSLINK input.
• OS: Debian Sid
• MythTV software: current versions from Sid.
• Storage: A file server in another room (Debian Sarge, Athlon 1.4GHz), with four 200GB ATA-133 hard drives in it, each on its own controller, with LVM over RAID-5. Connected to the Myth box via Gigabit ethernet which, for some reason, only gets 100Mbps.
• Video capture card: None. We don't watch regular TV, haven't for 10+ years. I do download a few programs via Bittorrent, and I may someday get a Hauppage or the like and capture the few programs I want to watch that way instead. Or I may not. Dunno.

I still need to add an IR receiver and an IR transmitter. The receiver so that I can use a remote control (right now I'm using a wireless keyboard. It works fine, but I still want a more "traditional" remote) and the transmitter so that I can configure the MythTV box to automatically power the TV and audio receiver on and off.

Google could then use their expertise to build Mozilla apps. It'll be interesting to see whether this happens or not.

Yeah, imagine a Gmail web interface built with XUL. Something like this, but built with Google simplicity, speed and style.

Disclaimer: The link goes to a copy of xulwebmail on my web server sitting on my cable modem. If it gets hammered too hard I'll take it down. Also, note that I don't think xulwebmail actually works, so don't bother typing your real e-mail account and password. Still, use mozilla or firefox and take a look at it if you haven't seen it before. It certainly looks like it could be a very cool way to do webmail... and lots of other stuff, too.

Y'know, justify your SUV love if you want, but don't make up shit. It's just *stupid* to try to claim that an SUV carries more people than a van. Or cargo.

Are you talking to someone else? You responded to me, but I never said any of those things.

They do *not* have a place hauling the kids around (they are insanely insafe, not having the full body construction that is a lifesaver in cars)

Actually, my new 2004 Durango has a five-star crash rating. The old one (1999 Durango) didn't do so well in government tests, but it certainly passed mine. It went off the road sideways at 70 mph into soft dirt which rolled it four times -- once end over end. My wife, four young children and I were all in it and we walked away with two small cuts, some bruises and sore muscles. I'm not sure we'd have done so well in a less sturdy vehicle. There's a picture here.

or commuting to work downtown

I don't commute, except to stumble downstairs or to drive to the airport from time to time, but until recently I had a Saturn SL2 for those purposes, and right now I'm driving a Toyota Echo.

You seem to assume that because I drive an SUV I must not have thought through what my needs are and what the vehicles offer. I assure you that I have and, for me, an SUV is ideal. If you had any reading comprehension skills you'd see that the *point* of the post you responded to was that SUVs *don't* make sense for the majority of people who buy them.

X 4.3 introduced a method for changing the screen resolution on the fly, without restarting X. GNOME 2.6 has a utility to do it, I don't know about KDE, though.

KDE 3.2 has it also.

It's a legal requirement to ensure I'm non-infringing on intellectual property.

Not unless you're selling something. US Code Title 15, Chapter 22, Subchapter III, Section 1114. IANAL.

KDE has nothing called a "control panel". There is a Control Center

Eh? There is a control panel, and its called "Control Center". I'm sorry you find that so confusing.

but that has nothing called "Size & Orientation"

Guess I must be imagining it then, huh?

When multiple-monitor support is first activated, the user will want to rapidly experiment with a variety of different settings until something comfortable is achieved...

I grant the utility, I just think you're focusing on one relatively minor lack. Windows has plenty of its own deficiencies, though I notice you conveniently chose not to respond to that part of my post.

No sane person would try to say that Linux or XFree86 or Windows or anything is perfect and feature-complete. What you're doing is trying to imply that because XFree86 has some obscure deficiencies (it has some much less obscure deficiencies, too, which you haven't mentioned) that it's seriously unusable. AKA Taking Cheap Shots. I could return the favor all day long with respect to Windows, but there's really no point.

The same holds for color depth.

But most importantly, changable bitdepth empowers reheadability. That would allow a proxy X server to move an application from one $DISPLAY to another, without imposing a long-term performance hit on either.

Eh? What you want is to be able to notify applications that the color depth has changed when they're moved from server to server, not to change the color depth of the server.

It saddens me to see people deploy VNC just so they can reconnect to a running X11 application from multiple X11 servers.

Agreed. Windows handles this *much* better.

That's hardly a feature of KDE. More like an ancient XFree86 capability that KDE just recently added a widget to activate.

Yes, I was imprecise.

and overplayed what is arguably the worst -- instant runoff voting (IRV), which not only has the ability to lead to more counterintuitive situations than plurality voting, but also becomes very complex to manage for large elections, because ballots are not "summable". You can't add up all the votes from one voting precinct and send a total on to the next tier up (ultimately you do want to collect all of the physical ballots together, but summability allows decentralized counting for faster results).

But the article completely ignored the Condorcet voting method, which is pretty universally considered to be the best system from a technical point of view. Like IRV and Borda, Condorcet voting asks voters to rank their choices, which is very important because it allows a voter's entire set of preferences to be applied, but unlike them it has far better mathematical properties (mainly because it "discards" almost *no* information from the ballots); is much more "stable" in the sense that changes to votes don't do counterintuitive things; manages to satisfy a slightly relaxed version of Arrow's criteria, which no other voting system can do; and is "summable".

In fact, it's quite arguable that Arrow's criteria were overstated and that the slight weakening of one of his axioms is correct, even though it destroys his proof. Thus it's possible there *is* a perfect voting system, and, arguably Condorcet is it.

Condorcet's clever idea was "pairwise" evaluation. When you only have two candidates, simple majority is a perfect system, so Condorcet applied majority voting to multiple candidates by just taking them two at a time. Since each voter ranks all of the candidates(*), each ballot expresses a choice about any pair of candidates, and you can easily tally up the public's actual preference between that pair.

If one of the candidates is preferred over each of his opponents, then that candidate is the winner, which is very logical if you think about it. It's easy to show that this will happen most of the time, the only time it won't happen is in a three or more-way race where the candidates are all fairly close and where the electorate is seriously divided. What happens is you get a "cycle".

For example, suppose you have three candidates, A, B and C and suppose a majority of the voters ranked A over B, a majority ranked B over C and a majority ranked C over A. Mathematicians have devised some moderately complex but very accurate ways of resolving such issues, basically by looking at how badly the candidates were beaten in their losses. The result is a very stable, very predictable system that accurately reflects the electorate's will and pretty much completely eliminates any possibility of successfully "gaming" the system by casting an insincere vote.

If you'd like to read more about Condorcet and a technical evaluation of the various methods, look here. If you'd like to play with it a bit, I have a Java implementation that you can find here. It's very rough, since I just hacked it together a couple of days ago to evaluate votes for a new name for a SCUBA diving club I'm involved in, but it works pretty well. Just make a file called "rawballots.txt" that contains one ballot per line, with the candidates listed in order, separated by commas (there's a sample on the web site), place the file in the same directory as Condorcet.java, and compile and run (javac Condorcet.java; java Condorcet). My code also abuses the Condorcet system a little by trying to construct a complete ranking of all candidates rather than just finding the winner (it does this by finding a winner, then adjusting the defeats matrix to make him a loser, then finding another winner, until all candidates have "won").

(*)It actually isn't necessary for every voter to rank every candidate. Essentially, any candidates a voter chooses to leave off the ballot are considered as ranked equally and below all of the candidates that were listed. For example, if there are candidates A through E, and I cast a ballot like:

A,B,C

That means I prefer A over everyone, B over C-E, C over D and E and I don't have a preference between D and E.

Actually, although it would probably make voting interfaces to complicated, the method even allows me to express the fact that I don't have a preference between higher-ranked candidates. Something like:

A, (B|C), D

Would mean I like A over everyone, prefer either B or C over D or E, and prefer D over E.

When we're figuring out who won in the pairwise election between B and C, this ballot is a "tie" and effectively doesn't give a vote to either. When counting up the election between B or D and any of the other candidates, however, this ballot expresses a preference.

The point here is that talented people are getting caught up in this downturn. And the idea that if you are good you WILL get a job is COMPLETE BULLSHIT.

No, it isn't. I don't know a single talented software developer who's out of work, unless it's by choice. Many of them have had to relocate, many have had to take a pay cut, but all of them are gainfully employed. And so are you.

Todays take-home assignment:

I get cold calls from recruiters every couple of months, offering to set up an interview with some company they're working with. The opportunities always have salary ranges attached that are too low, and sometimes have other unpleasant conditions (long commute, or heavy travel or some such), so I'm fully aware that I'd have to tighten my belt if I lost my current job, but there's no doubt I'd get another one, and quickly.

Is my skill set so amazing then? I don't think so: Twelve years of software experience, most of it with C++, but some with a variety of other languages, including Java, on a wide variety of embedded platforms, Unixes and PCs, BSs in Math and CompSci from an unknown state university. I have a decent résumé, but nothing that would make me so much better than the friends you mention.

It's bad, but it's not that bad.