I don't see how they can equate biological replication with software:
BSA/The Software Alliance, which represents companies like Apple and Microsoft, said in a brief that a decision against Monsanto might “facilitate software piracy on a broad scale” because software can be easily replicated. But it also said that a decision that goes too far the other way could make nuisance software patent infringement lawsuits too easy to file.
Software isn't self replicating, a human you have to explicitly make a copy of it to get it to replicate. That's completely different than seeds that naturally replicate themselves and that replication is why you plant them in the first place. Someone could take one copy of software and install it on multiple computers, but it's not the software that's doing the replicating, it's the human.
And even if they stretch and claim that installing a program multiple times is the same as a growing plant self-replicating the seed it grew from, then there's no reason a decision against Monsanto couldn't be made narrow enough to apply only to living plants.
You mean the university email system that delivers the malicious email?
I have a crazy idea, tell users not to give personal information out by email. It's that simple.
NEVER give out personal information by email.
The university doesn't control all avenues of email delivery - some people use Yahoo, MSN, and other providers so even if they had a perfect phishing filter, some would still slip through other avenues.
After you've worked in an IT help desk for a while, you'd learn that there is no way to get people to follow a simple "Don't do this because it's unsafe" policy (for one thing, the list of unsafe behaviors is longer than anyone can remember). Try telling your boss (or a tenured professor) "You're an idiot! We told you not to give out personal information on links clicked from an email", and he'll say "But look, this website has our university seal on it, and it said it was from the IT department so I thought it was safe".
Perhaps instead of a Name and shame campaign; you can perform a campaign of inconvenience...
When a user is found to be the victim of a phishing attack, put them on a daily password reset for a week or month. Forcing them to create new passwords daily will be annoying while not crippling to their productivity and may *help* them be more vigilant in the future.
Why not just issue him a two-factor authentication token, then you can actually solve the problem instead of a bandaid approach that won't really help. (even if he has to do daily password resets, if he gives up his password in the morning, the hacker has 24 hours to use it).
The tokens are cheap (even cheaper when it is a smart-phone app), every company with data worth stealing should use them.
SD cards are going away on phones. They are slow and lead to customer complaints. Besides USB on the Go basically obsoletes them. Removable batteries mean a battery door. This makes the phone thicker.
Personally neither is a deal killer.
I don't think I'd want a phone without an easily replaceable battery - I replaced my one year old Galaxy Nexus battery last month and immediately got about 50% better battery life - back to when the phone was new.
I thought I'd regret not having an SD card slot, but I've only used just over half of the 32GB of storage space and that includes a half dozen movies that I loaded up before a long plane trip and a couple hundred CD's worth of MP3's. It still might be nice to have an SD slot so I could load up more media, but it's not nearly as limiting as I thought it would be and it sounds like USB OTG might make it a complete non-issue.
But I still want a replaceable battery - It doesn't even need to be convenient enough to do it on the go, I don't need a slide off battery cover, go ahead and screw it in place and make it a 15 minute process, just don't make it so hard that I'd need to send the phone away to the manufacturer and pay them $80 for a $20 battery.
Why is this at all google's fault? Why should they have to police google docs in such a fashion? Blame the people who suddenly decided phishing was a good idea.
Because they are providing the tool that is so easily abused by phishers.
It wasn't too long ago that open email relays were very common (and were quite useful), but now they are quickly blacklisted due to spammer abuse even though it's the spammer at fault, not the owner of the email relay.
If I set up a booth outside your house giving away free universal keys that will open every lock in your house, you would probably have a problem with it even if the keys are perfectly legal to sell and have many legitimate uses. Even if it's only the criminals that will use the keys to break into your house, you probably wouldn't want me making it easier for them.
You'd think that with all of the brain-power that Google has, they'd be able to come up with an automatic detection method for these scams that triggers an immediate manual review of suspected sites with a quick takedown - even though Google responds to abuse notifications within a few hours (as opposed to the few days it used to take them), a lot of personal information can be stolen in a few hours.
Just wait until these people find out that G.I. Joe has been turning children into war machines for half a century. He has a full complement of air, ground, and water assault vehicles. He has even militarized outer space with his own space shuttle.
I don't know what a non-competition agreement is, but I've signed more than one non-compete agreement. It's the name of the agreement because of the non-compete clause, a term used in contract law. It's not supposed to grammatically correct. If I signed an "ain't nobody got time for that" agreement, it would still be called an "ain't nobody got time for that agreement" despite the poor grammatical form.
Do most developers use caps lock for typing capitlized constants and other things?
Yes. Since I have learned touch typing, I use CAPS LOCK extensively. Like in the previous sentence. If I have to type more than two (or one?) upper case characters I always use it.
It was indeed one of the most difficult key to learn, maybe because if I accidentally hit another key, the usual Backspace does not correct it. But it is well worth to learn it. Otherwise I had to switch between LEFT SHIFT and RIGHT SHIFT after almost every character, which drives me crazy. I am not sure, but I assume, that those who hate CAPS LOCK never really learned touch typing well, if at all.
It is by no accident that there was a SHIFT LOCK key on every typewriter (and that was less useful than CAPS lock), which was mostly used by professional typists.
I almost exclusively use the left shift key for typing ALL CAPS, and just use my left ring finger to cover for my little finger when I'm typing all caps. Oddly, when I'm typing in mixed case, I use both shift keys, using the right caps key for letters I type with my left hand. I learned touch typing on a typewriter, but I did most of my early programming on a Sun keyboard that has the Caps Lock moved down below the left shift key and has a Control key where the Caps lock key is on a typewriter.
when writing a few letters in caps I always hit it, then again I dont use archaic style editors that require me to hit more than a alt combo to access all of its features regardless of case
my model M has 104 keys, alt, ctrl and ctrl alt gives me 1124864 possible combinations, more than I care to remember
You want 1124864 keyboard combinations, but can't remember that the first letter of a sentence is capitalized or which punctuation is used to end a sentence, and don't know where apostrophes are used?
Well, at least you don't use an archaic editor, I guess that's something.
Really? I've never seen anyone use it while programming. Even when I'm typing long stretches of code in ALL CAPS like SQL statements, I never use the shift-lock.
I've tried mapping it to Control or Esc, but found that didn't really help with anything and just made it harder to use a different keyboard that wasn't remapped.
Maybe my distaste for CapsLock comes from the fact that my editor is case-sensitive, and I don't want to have to remember the state of the CapsLock key when escaping into edit mode. Do most developers use caps lock for typing capitlized constants and other things?
Is a million dollars a lot of money for a murder trial?
Prosecuting a murder case can easily cost more than a million dollars - and that's not even including the public defender's costs if defendant doesn't pay for his own defense.
A large part of what your pinky does is slam the return key over and over again. Get something like a Kinesis contour or the expensive Data Hand which uses the thumb for return key. It will take a huge load off your right pinky.
Or just remap the useless caps lock key to act as a return key.
I've been using Open Office / Libre Office for at least 5 years now. It does more than I would ever need it to. Honestly... it has too much. So I don't see how there's even a market anymore for Microsoft Office, cloud or not.
I can see why you'd say that but, believe it or not, some of us have IT departments larger than our mom's basement.
Has "mom's basement" replaced "Library of Congresses" as the Slashdot standard unit of measure (SSUoM)?
Here's one datapoint: my last company had an IT department about the size of my mom's basement to support 1000 users. And we're using MS Office - almost half the company is on Mac's and they use MS Office too.
A single trip with a single car proves nothing. My neighbor has had his car in the shop 4 times over the past year because of a recurring "check engine light" problem, but my car, of the exact same model and year hasn't had a single problem.
Neither of our anectdotal experiences show that this model is crap, nor that it is good.
Let's see what happens after a 100 or a thousand people drive the car over the route.
Do we know whether or not the car actually had an automatic transmission? Auto transmissions are mostly popular in the US and Japan. Everywhere else manual transmissions are at least as common as automatics. If the car did have a manual transmission that makes the story even more incredible. It means that he didn't have a traditional clutch and thus couldn't separate the engine from the transmission by merely pressing down his foot.
I think it's safe to assume that the Renault technician he was on the phone with would have suggested "Press the clutch pedal to the floor, coast to a stop, make sure the car is in neutral, wait for the tow truck to arrive to help figure out how to shut it off."
The handbrake isn't a binary switch. He could have slowly engaged it to reduce his speeds without locking up the rear wheels. If he employed this method, he'd have to do it sparingly as the brakes would overheat if left engaged and the car didn't stop shortly after. That being said, I'd love to conduct an experiment to see if the handbrake could be used completely stop a front-wheel drive car going 125MPH.
In some cars the parking brake is separate from the hydraulic brakes - it may have it's own (smaller) caliper, or may use a small drum instead of the disk that the hydraulic brakes use. So it has a lot less heat shedding capacity and very well may fail to stop a high speed car.
Additionally, many American cars have a floor pedal to set the parking brake, you press down to set it, then press down again to unlatch it, which makes modulating the brake difficult.
I call BS. You can't get a car inspected in my state(TX) if it doesn't have a kill switch. They will flunk you right then and there if your key being turned off doesn't turn everything except accessories off. It's the first thing they check, turn car off then on, if they can't do that cycle you fail inspection. Thanks to my Saturn ION 2007 for that...stupid ignition cylinder breaks and doesn't let you turn the car off.
Many newer cars don't need a key to start it - as long as your key is somewhere in or near the car, you can just press a button to start the car. And press a button to shut it off. This will work find under normal conditions (like your DMV inspection), but if the car computer ignores the "turn off car" button press while you're driving at speed, there's no way to force the car to turn off.
Maybe fly-by-wire cars need a failsafe physical switch that manually cuts power to the ignition system or fuel injector pump.
So I take it you never ever registered a product you purchased? So if your big screen TV goes out four months after you purchased it - hey you don't need no stinking warranty support of service! You'll just pay for a new one right?
I've never need registration to get warranty support, just proof of purchase.
Those cards that say "Return this card to register for your warranty" are just a ploy to get marketing information, you don't have to return the card.
According to their site, a fuel pod is ~55 cubic centimeters. Brookstone wants $20 for two. A liquid fuel had better be nigh-indistinguishable from magic for $180/liter.
"Why aren't fuel cells, not internal combustion engines, the "range extenders" in plug-in hybrid cars?
It's because electric cars use a *lot* of power - this is the same reason electric cars don't come with solar panels on the roof so you never need to charge them - it takes a lot of energy to charge an electric car.
Since the power cells cost $20, they must contain more than fuel, they probably include some consumable electrodes or membranes.
The fuel cells are are rated to produce 55Wh (with 2.5W maximum draw).
A Nissan Leaf goes 73 miles on its 24KWh battery pack - so that's 328 Watt-Hours per mile.
It would take about 6 of these $20 power cells to power your car for one mile or $120 (though you may need 150 of these chargers in parallel to generate enough power).
Even if you assume a 90% drop in price when scaling this up to car size, that's still $12 per mile.
I've seen refrigerator-sized, $20,000 natural gas fuel cells for powering (and heating) your home, but if you're going to power your car from natural gas, why not just make it a hybrid that uses an natural gas powered engine instead of an electric car that has a bulky and expensive natural gas powered fuel cell?
Cruise control was never set to 54 mph as claimed in the article, nor did he limp along at 45 mph. Broder in fact drove at speeds from 65 mph to 81 mph for a majority of the trip and at an average cabin temperature setting of 72 F.
At the point in time that he claims to have turned the temperature down, he in fact turned the temperature up to 74 F.
The charge time on his second stop was 47 mins, going from -5 miles (reserve power) to 209 miles of Ideal or 185 miles of EPA Rated Range, not 58 mins as stated in the graphic attached to his article. Had Broder not deliberately turned off the Supercharger at 47 mins and actually spent 58 mins Supercharging, it would have been virtually impossible to run out of energy for the remainder of his stated journey.
Let me get this straight: I can't drive 65 or turn up the heat without having to worry about getting stranded? It takes an hour to refill the thing, and I have to do it three times to drive 600 miles?
Why the fuck would I ever want to buy one of these cars?
Why are you asking us? If the car doesn't meet your needs, of course you wouldn't buy it. Not every car is meant to meet the needs of all drivers. not every driver goes on 600 mile trips regularly.
My car hasn't been more than 100 miles from home in over 4 years. When we go on family trips, we usually rent a minivan since it's more comfortable for everyone. If I needed a new car, I'd probably get something like the Nissan Leaf since it has enough range for 2 days of commuting, and spending a minute plugging it in at night to charge it is more convenient than spending 15 minutes driving a couple miles out of my way and refueling a conventional car.
For what it's worth, that's one hour of high-power recharging. The equipment for that is not really cheap enough to put in your home, unless you're a zillionaire. Using a wall plug to charge it takes more like 8 hours, less if you have a 220V outlet.
Someone that can buy an $80K car can probably afford to install a 480V fast charge station at home if he really needed it.
But if you're using your car for commuting, you'll have it parked for at least 8 hours on both ends of your commute so the slower charger is fine. When you're traveling and need a quick charge, then you can stop at a quick charge station, but you certainly don't need one every day.
But to get 8 hour charging of an 85KWh battery pack, you'd need more than a 120V charger - you'd need at least a 50A 220V circuit to charge the battery in 8 hours.
Also, why would he try to tarnish this car? He doesn't appear to own an oil company.
Because no one wants to read "Test drove an $80K Tesla. It wasn't bad, range was close to manufacturer estimates, had no trouble keeping it charged on the long journey".
How many times have you read a review of a Toyota Prius and had it stand out? But imagine if it said "Prius unable to complete a simple highway journey!" then the author outlined how he called Toyota and did everything possible to make sure it could complete the trip, but it still ran out of gas and he had to have it towed.
If you have a Bluetooth handset that looks like an ordinary cell phone, what's the point of having the phone built-in to the watch? Just use an ordinary cell phone to make your calls instead of using Bluetooth handset that looks like an ordinary cell phone.
well... it's not really a funny joke if you have to explain it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how they can equate biological replication with software:
BSA/The Software Alliance, which represents companies like Apple and Microsoft, said in a brief that a decision against Monsanto might “facilitate software piracy on a broad scale” because software can be easily replicated. But it also said that a decision that goes too far the other way could make nuisance software patent infringement lawsuits too easy to file.
Software isn't self replicating, a human you have to explicitly make a copy of it to get it to replicate. That's completely different than seeds that naturally replicate themselves and that replication is why you plant them in the first place. Someone could take one copy of software and install it on multiple computers, but it's not the software that's doing the replicating, it's the human.
And even if they stretch and claim that installing a program multiple times is the same as a growing plant self-replicating the seed it grew from, then there's no reason a decision against Monsanto couldn't be made narrow enough to apply only to living plants.
You mean the university email system that delivers the malicious email?
I have a crazy idea, tell users not to give personal information out by email. It's that simple.
NEVER give out personal information by email.
The university doesn't control all avenues of email delivery - some people use Yahoo, MSN, and other providers so even if they had a perfect phishing filter, some would still slip through other avenues.
After you've worked in an IT help desk for a while, you'd learn that there is no way to get people to follow a simple "Don't do this because it's unsafe" policy (for one thing, the list of unsafe behaviors is longer than anyone can remember). Try telling your boss (or a tenured professor) "You're an idiot! We told you not to give out personal information on links clicked from an email", and he'll say "But look, this website has our university seal on it, and it said it was from the IT department so I thought it was safe".
Perhaps instead of a Name and shame campaign; you can perform a campaign of inconvenience...
When a user is found to be the victim of a phishing attack, put them on a daily password reset for a week or month.
Forcing them to create new passwords daily will be annoying while not crippling to their productivity and may *help* them be more vigilant in the future.
Why not just issue him a two-factor authentication token, then you can actually solve the problem instead of a bandaid approach that won't really help. (even if he has to do daily password resets, if he gives up his password in the morning, the hacker has 24 hours to use it).
The tokens are cheap (even cheaper when it is a smart-phone app), every company with data worth stealing should use them.
SD cards are going away on phones. They are slow and lead to customer complaints. Besides USB on the Go basically obsoletes them. Removable batteries mean a battery door. This makes the phone thicker.
Personally neither is a deal killer.
I don't think I'd want a phone without an easily replaceable battery - I replaced my one year old Galaxy Nexus battery last month and immediately got about 50% better battery life - back to when the phone was new.
I thought I'd regret not having an SD card slot, but I've only used just over half of the 32GB of storage space and that includes a half dozen movies that I loaded up before a long plane trip and a couple hundred CD's worth of MP3's. It still might be nice to have an SD slot so I could load up more media, but it's not nearly as limiting as I thought it would be and it sounds like USB OTG might make it a complete non-issue.
But I still want a replaceable battery - It doesn't even need to be convenient enough to do it on the go, I don't need a slide off battery cover, go ahead and screw it in place and make it a 15 minute process, just don't make it so hard that I'd need to send the phone away to the manufacturer and pay them $80 for a $20 battery.
Why is this at all google's fault? Why should they have to police google docs in such a fashion? Blame the people who suddenly decided phishing was a good idea.
Because they are providing the tool that is so easily abused by phishers.
It wasn't too long ago that open email relays were very common (and were quite useful), but now they are quickly blacklisted due to spammer abuse even though it's the spammer at fault, not the owner of the email relay.
If I set up a booth outside your house giving away free universal keys that will open every lock in your house, you would probably have a problem with it even if the keys are perfectly legal to sell and have many legitimate uses. Even if it's only the criminals that will use the keys to break into your house, you probably wouldn't want me making it easier for them.
You'd think that with all of the brain-power that Google has, they'd be able to come up with an automatic detection method for these scams that triggers an immediate manual review of suspected sites with a quick takedown - even though Google responds to abuse notifications within a few hours (as opposed to the few days it used to take them), a lot of personal information can be stolen in a few hours.
Just wait until these people find out that G.I. Joe has been turning children into war machines for half a century. He has a full complement of air, ground, and water assault vehicles. He has even militarized outer space with his own space shuttle.
I don't know what a non-competition agreement is, but I've signed more than one non-compete agreement. It's the name of the agreement because of the non-compete clause, a term used in contract law. It's not supposed to grammatically correct. If I signed an "ain't nobody got time for that" agreement, it would still be called an "ain't nobody got time for that agreement" despite the poor grammatical form.
Do most developers use caps lock for typing capitlized constants and other things?
Yes. Since I have learned touch typing, I use CAPS LOCK extensively. Like in the previous sentence. If I have to type more than two (or one?) upper case characters I always use it.
It was indeed one of the most difficult key to learn, maybe because if I accidentally hit another key, the usual Backspace does not correct it. But it is well worth to learn it. Otherwise I had to switch between LEFT SHIFT and RIGHT SHIFT after almost every character, which drives me crazy. I am not sure, but I assume, that those who hate CAPS LOCK never really learned touch typing well, if at all.
It is by no accident that there was a SHIFT LOCK key on every typewriter (and that was less useful than CAPS lock), which was mostly used by professional typists.
I almost exclusively use the left shift key for typing ALL CAPS, and just use my left ring finger to cover for my little finger when I'm typing all caps. Oddly, when I'm typing in mixed case, I use both shift keys, using the right caps key for letters I type with my left hand. I learned touch typing on a typewriter, but I did most of my early programming on a Sun keyboard that has the Caps Lock moved down below the left shift key and has a Control key where the Caps lock key is on a typewriter.
when writing a few letters in caps I always hit it, then again I dont use archaic style editors that require me to hit more than a alt combo to access all of its features regardless of case
my model M has 104 keys, alt, ctrl and ctrl alt gives me 1124864 possible combinations, more than I care to remember
You want 1124864 keyboard combinations, but can't remember that the first letter of a sentence is capitalized or which punctuation is used to end a sentence, and don't know where apostrophes are used?
Well, at least you don't use an archaic editor, I guess that's something.
its not that useless in programming
Really? I've never seen anyone use it while programming. Even when I'm typing long stretches of code in ALL CAPS like SQL statements, I never use the shift-lock.
I've tried mapping it to Control or Esc, but found that didn't really help with anything and just made it harder to use a different keyboard that wasn't remapped.
Maybe my distaste for CapsLock comes from the fact that my editor is case-sensitive, and I don't want to have to remember the state of the CapsLock key when escaping into edit mode. Do most developers use caps lock for typing capitlized constants and other things?
Is a million dollars a lot of money for a murder trial?
Prosecuting a murder case can easily cost more than a million dollars - and that's not even including the public defender's costs if defendant doesn't pay for his own defense.
A large part of what your pinky does is slam the return key over and over again. Get something like a Kinesis contour or the expensive Data Hand which uses the thumb for return key. It will take a huge load off your right pinky.
Or just remap the useless caps lock key to act as a return key.
Playing the clarinet, is that what the kids are calling it these days?
"Oh Bernadette, please play my clarinet."
I've been using Open Office / Libre Office for at least 5 years now. It does more than I would ever need it to. Honestly... it has too much. So I don't see how there's even a market anymore for Microsoft Office, cloud or not.
I can see why you'd say that but, believe it or not, some of us have IT departments larger than our mom's basement.
Has "mom's basement" replaced "Library of Congresses" as the Slashdot standard unit of measure (SSUoM)?
Here's one datapoint: my last company had an IT department about the size of my mom's basement to support 1000 users. And we're using MS Office - almost half the company is on Mac's and they use MS Office too.
A single trip with a single car proves nothing. My neighbor has had his car in the shop 4 times over the past year because of a recurring "check engine light" problem, but my car, of the exact same model and year hasn't had a single problem.
Neither of our anectdotal experiences show that this model is crap, nor that it is good.
Let's see what happens after a 100 or a thousand people drive the car over the route.
Do we know whether or not the car actually had an automatic transmission? Auto transmissions are mostly popular in the US and Japan. Everywhere else manual transmissions are at least as common as automatics. If the car did have a manual transmission that makes the story even more incredible. It means that he didn't have a traditional clutch and thus couldn't separate the engine from the transmission by merely pressing down his foot.
I think it's safe to assume that the Renault technician he was on the phone with would have suggested "Press the clutch pedal to the floor, coast to a stop, make sure the car is in neutral, wait for the tow truck to arrive to help figure out how to shut it off."
The handbrake isn't a binary switch. He could have slowly engaged it to reduce his speeds without locking up the rear wheels. If he employed this method, he'd have to do it sparingly as the brakes would overheat if left engaged and the car didn't stop shortly after. That being said, I'd love to conduct an experiment to see if the handbrake could be used completely stop a front-wheel drive car going 125MPH.
In some cars the parking brake is separate from the hydraulic brakes - it may have it's own (smaller) caliper, or may use a small drum instead of the disk that the hydraulic brakes use. So it has a lot less heat shedding capacity and very well may fail to stop a high speed car.
Additionally, many American cars have a floor pedal to set the parking brake, you press down to set it, then press down again to unlatch it, which makes modulating the brake difficult.
I call BS.
You can't get a car inspected in my state(TX) if it doesn't have a kill switch. They will flunk you right then and there if your key being turned off doesn't turn everything except accessories off. It's the first thing they check, turn car off then on, if they can't do that cycle you fail inspection.
Thanks to my Saturn ION 2007 for that...stupid ignition cylinder breaks and doesn't let you turn the car off.
Many newer cars don't need a key to start it - as long as your key is somewhere in or near the car, you can just press a button to start the car. And press a button to shut it off. This will work find under normal conditions (like your DMV inspection), but if the car computer ignores the "turn off car" button press while you're driving at speed, there's no way to force the car to turn off.
Maybe fly-by-wire cars need a failsafe physical switch that manually cuts power to the ignition system or fuel injector pump.
So I take it you never ever registered a product you purchased?
So if your big screen TV goes out four months after you purchased it - hey you don't need no stinking warranty support of service! You'll just pay for a new one right?
I've never need registration to get warranty support, just proof of purchase.
Those cards that say "Return this card to register for your warranty" are just a ploy to get marketing information, you don't have to return the card.
Only once somebody clones the fuel cartridges.
According to their site, a fuel pod is ~55 cubic centimeters. Brookstone wants $20 for two. A liquid fuel had better be nigh-indistinguishable from magic for $180/liter.
Consumers have paid far more for liquid consumables.
And to answer the question in the article:
"Why aren't fuel cells, not internal combustion engines, the "range extenders" in plug-in hybrid cars?
It's because electric cars use a *lot* of power - this is the same reason electric cars don't come with solar panels on the roof so you never need to charge them - it takes a lot of energy to charge an electric car.
Since the power cells cost $20, they must contain more than fuel, they probably include some consumable electrodes or membranes.
The fuel cells are are rated to produce 55Wh (with 2.5W maximum draw).
A Nissan Leaf goes 73 miles on its 24KWh battery pack - so that's 328 Watt-Hours per mile.
It would take about 6 of these $20 power cells to power your car for one mile or $120 (though you may need 150 of these chargers in parallel to generate enough power).
Even if you assume a 90% drop in price when scaling this up to car size, that's still $12 per mile.
I've seen refrigerator-sized, $20,000 natural gas fuel cells for powering (and heating) your home, but if you're going to power your car from natural gas, why not just make it a hybrid that uses an natural gas powered engine instead of an electric car that has a bulky and expensive natural gas powered fuel cell?
From TFA:
Cruise control was never set to 54 mph as claimed in the article, nor did he limp along at 45 mph. Broder in fact drove at speeds from 65 mph to 81 mph for a majority of the trip and at an average cabin temperature setting of 72 F.
At the point in time that he claims to have turned the temperature down, he in fact turned the temperature up to 74 F.
The charge time on his second stop was 47 mins, going from -5 miles (reserve power) to 209 miles of Ideal or 185 miles of EPA Rated Range, not 58 mins as stated in the graphic attached to his article. Had Broder not deliberately turned off the Supercharger at 47 mins and actually spent 58 mins Supercharging, it would have been virtually impossible to run out of energy for the remainder of his stated journey.
Let me get this straight: I can't drive 65 or turn up the heat without having to worry about getting stranded? It takes an hour to refill the thing, and I have to do it three times to drive 600 miles?
Why the fuck would I ever want to buy one of these cars?
Why are you asking us? If the car doesn't meet your needs, of course you wouldn't buy it. Not every car is meant to meet the needs of all drivers. not every driver goes on 600 mile trips regularly.
My car hasn't been more than 100 miles from home in over 4 years. When we go on family trips, we usually rent a minivan since it's more comfortable for everyone. If I needed a new car, I'd probably get something like the Nissan Leaf since it has enough range for 2 days of commuting, and spending a minute plugging it in at night to charge it is more convenient than spending 15 minutes driving a couple miles out of my way and refueling a conventional car.
For what it's worth, that's one hour of high-power recharging. The equipment for that is not really cheap enough to put in your home, unless you're a zillionaire. Using a wall plug to charge it takes more like 8 hours, less if you have a 220V outlet.
Someone that can buy an $80K car can probably afford to install a 480V fast charge station at home if he really needed it.
But if you're using your car for commuting, you'll have it parked for at least 8 hours on both ends of your commute so the slower charger is fine. When you're traveling and need a quick charge, then you can stop at a quick charge station, but you certainly don't need one every day.
But to get 8 hour charging of an 85KWh battery pack, you'd need more than a 120V charger - you'd need at least a 50A 220V circuit to charge the battery in 8 hours.
Also, why would he try to tarnish this car? He doesn't appear to own an oil company.
Because no one wants to read "Test drove an $80K Tesla. It wasn't bad, range was close to manufacturer estimates, had no trouble keeping it charged on the long journey".
How many times have you read a review of a Toyota Prius and had it stand out? But imagine if it said "Prius unable to complete a simple highway journey!" then the author outlined how he called Toyota and did everything possible to make sure it could complete the trip, but it still ran out of gas and he had to have it towed.
If you have a Bluetooth handset that looks like an ordinary cell phone, what's the point of having the phone built-in to the watch? Just use an ordinary cell phone to make your calls instead of using Bluetooth handset that looks like an ordinary cell phone.
well... it's not really a funny joke if you have to explain it.
It would be a better joke if he wasn't describing a product that already exists: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/smartphone-too-big-get-a-smaller-phone-for-your-smartphone/