Banks are better equipped. They'll just start issuing NFC cards (linked to multiple accounts) and G Wallet wil be out of business.
Heh. It's possible, I suppose, but about 10 years ago I spent a lot of time working with banks, trying to get them to agree to allow their credit apps to coexist on a single card. It was known in the industry as the "white card" concept. The card was intended to be a customer-owned smart card which could be loaded up with many credit cards as well as other apps (probably all ID and finance-related). I think it's a great idea, myself. I did 10 years ago when the idea was to reduce my whole wallet to a single card, and I think it's an even better idea now that we're talking about eliminating the wallet entirely and just using the phone -- which I always have with me anyway. I'm hoping my phone can also become my car and house keys, my driver's license, my loyalty cards, etc. Basically there's no reason the single device couldn't manage all of my personal and identity data, and do it very securely, thanks to the embedded secure element.
Think the banks were interested 10 years ago? No way! There was no way they were going to give up the opportunity to have a branded card in their customers' wallets. In fact, even for single-bank cards one of the advantages of smart cards that I touted to them -- the fact that smart cards are much more durable than magstripe cards -- was of negative value to them, because they like sending you a new card every two years. Why? Because their statistics show that sending you a new card gets you to use it more!
Banks have all kinds of incentives to oppose this sort of thing.
Of course, now that Google is making it impossible for the banks to successfully oppose card unification, on smartphones and -- if there's anything to this rumor -- on plastic cards, they might have to join it. That's what the ISIS consortium is about, but I notice that banks haven't been joining in droves. IMO, they fear the mobile network operators, who would like nothing better than to become the world's payment transaction engines, and the banks really don't want to lose that business. Worldwide credit/debit card transaction volume is measured in tens of trillions of dollars annually. Getting even a very small percentage of that sort of cash stream is worth a lot, which is why the MNOs are anxious to get in and banks are anxious to keep them out.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, and much of my work is related to Wallet. I have carefully avoided saying anything based on inside information acquired while working for Google. I have a lot of knowledge about this space that was acquired during previous employment, though.)
Oh one note on terminology: It's only called "NFC" when it's embedded in a phone and combines contactless smart card technology with dumb RFID technology, and able to act as both card/RFID chip and reader. When it's in a reader-powered card it's just called "contactless smart card" technology.
you have to adjust the code and actually test it, which can't be done in a few days
Huh what? It takes more than a few days to test a change like adding some text to the bottom of a web page? Granted that there are multiple browsers and configurations to test, but even manually that's not more than a few hours' work... and if Apple's web site is managed by competent engineers they should have automated tests for that anyway. This sort of change should take minutes, not days, much less weeks.
And I guess that there are enough incompatibilities that it wouldn't have made sense to call it KDE3.99.01, which would have warned people.
Perhaps just calling it 4.0 alpha 1, alpha 2, etc., would have been the best approach. The numbering had to be changed to 4, though, based on the standard development library numbering conventions -- major numbers change when forward compatibility is broken, meaning that apps compiled against the old lib cease working with the new lib; minor numbers change when backward compatibility is broken, meaning that apps compiled against the new lib won't work with the old one. Sub-minor changes are expected to be both forward and backward compatible.
It just causes windows to stretch and compress (a little) as though they're made of rubber when you move them. I can't think of any purpose for it, but it isn't distracting and is kind of pleasant. Makes your windows feel more like physical objects as you move them around.
You may have done this prior to availability. But you missed the Ford Focus EV. It's substantially larger than the Leaf but I'd like to see the analysis include it.
I didn't miss it; I excluded it because it's not available in my state.
Feel free to copy my spreadsheet and add it, though... or just click on the "Share" button (assuming you're logged into a Google account) and request that I give you edit permission, and then you can add it to my copy.
As has been explained many times, the comparison is a false one. Canadian elections have many fewer races that need to be tallied. The much larger number of votes per voter that have to be counted make hand counting a slow process in the US, and we're too impatient to wait days for the results.
Personally, I think we should combine the approaches: Paper ballots that leave a clear record plus machines for counting the paper ballots. Add some statistically-driven hand re-counting (the amount of re-counting needed can easily be computed based on the desired level of certainty and the closeness of the closest race) to verify the machine outputs and you can be certain that the counting was done correctly.
Then to take a step into an even better world, apply Chaum & Rivest's Scantegrity II system to the paper ballots. That will allow individual voters to be able to verify that their ballots were in fact received and counted correctly and allow anyone who wants to audit the system as a whole to verify the integrity of the ballot production, distribution, collection and counting process. It requires slightly more expensive ballots, since they have to be printed with two inks, one visible and one invisible, and requires printing of more ballots since the various audit processes intentionally spoil some number of ballots. It also requires special markers, but produced in volume they will be no more expensive than regular markers.
IMO, the degree of assurance added more than justifies the increased ballot cost.
There's a third issue. The EC was also intended to slightly increase the effective power of small states, to prevent them from being dominated by the large states. In point of fact, it has exactly the opposite effect, due to bloc voting, which is what your examples highlight. Were states to allocate their EC votes proportionally, and were they able to do so perfectly (i.e. with fractional votes), then it would have the intended effect. Of course, large states would be foolish to reduce their effective power by proportionally allocating their votes.
And therein lies the problem with something like the Leaf. Why would I pay $35,000 for a car that goes a whole 60 miles and requires a good 10 hours to recharge if I can't find a quick-charge port? I could get something like a Sonata hybrid for $10k less that has more range, more room, more power, and takes all of 5 minutes at a gas station to refill.
But gas is a lot more expensive than electricity. Total cost-wise, for many people the EV is cheaper. Oh, and the range is more like 80-90 miles if you drive efficiently.
The Leaf is meant for "city drivers" who can afford an expensive, short-range car alongside a moderate gasoline car for longer trips.
True, though the price differential between gasoline and electricity does, at least for some people, make the Leaf less expensive than a comparable gasoline car, assuming they need to have two cars anyway (I actually bought my Leaf because I needed a third car).
lol, what do you haul things with, or do you rent a truck from Home Depot every time you want to pull your boat, trailer, etc?
Toys...
I just got a 2012 Leaf (which I love -- awesome little car), and I also have a camp trailer (28'), a boat (20') and an ATV trailer, so I think I'm well-positioned to answer your question:
I pull the toys with my Dodge Durango. I commute and go to the grocery store and take the kids to school and etc., etc., in the Leaf.
Electric cars are competitively priced if you are actually in their target market.
Rich people?
Not necessarily.
I'm not rich, and I just bought a Nissan Leaf after crunching the numbers very carefully. I'm far from poor, but I'm not rich. I did the math and with some reasonable (for me) assumptions over an 8-year time-horizon the Leaf was less expensive than *any* gasoline-powered car I could find. Well, any new gasoline-powered car, equipped comparably to the Leaf.
For example, the cheapest pure-gas car I looked at was a Kia Rio. $18.5K purchase price, plus sales tax less my guess at residual value after 8 years yields a net vehicle cost of $17.3K. Added to that, I calculate that I'd spend $13.2K on gas over 8 years, for a total of $30.5K. In per-mile cost, $0.32.
A better option was the Honda Insight. Price with tax of $22.5K, less tax credits estimated at $1.7K, for a net vehicle cost of just under $17.8K, but with an 8-year fuel cost of $10.5K for a total of $28.4K. $0.29 per mile.
In comparison, the Leaf costs $37.9K with tax, less $12.3K tax credits (federal and state) for a net vehicle cost of $22K. The 8-year energy cost, though, is $4.5K yielding a total of $26.6K. $0.28 per mile.
In addition, I think my Leaf will have significantly lower maintenance costs over the 8-year period, so it's a little better than the numbers above show.
However, there's also the downside that my calculations assume I need an additional gasoline-powered vehicle for trips which exceed the electric range. In my case that's the case, and will be (in fact, the Leaf's "energy" cost above is actually a mix of electricity for the Leaf and gasoline for my Saturn Ion).
I think EVs are economical now. That's why I bought one! Because it was the cheapest option.
There are some caveats, though. In order for them to make sense, you first need to be in a position to buy a $35K car, and you need to have a long-enough time horizon for the lower electricity costs to pay for the premium over a comparable gas car. You also need to have driving patterns that stay within the electric range, with enough time between trips for recharging. Related to driving patterns, if you ever drive well beyond the range of the electric, you need a cost-effective alternative. In my case I already have two gasoline-powered cars and needed a third vehicle (there will soon be five drivers in my house!), so it's reasonable for me to fall back on the gas cars when necessary. Another alternative, if you don't need to make longer trips often, is to rent. Finally, you need to get tax credits. Without the available tax credits the EVs are middle-of-the-road options. Not terrible, but not great.
Of course, all of this will get better: range will improve, charging time will decrease, cost will come down. But there's a chance that an EV may be an economical choice for you now.
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.
What we really need is a formal standard based on end-to-end auditable voting. Some really outstanding work has been done in this space in the last couple of decades, applying the principles of cryptographic security to design and implement voting schemes that are provably secure and still provably anonymous while still eminently practical. These schemes, like Punchscan, Scantegrity and Scantegrity II allow voters to prove to themselves that their ballot was not only not modified or lost, but even that it was counted correctly -- but without giving them the ability to prove that to anyone else (to avoid vote coercion/buying). The systems can be automated for efficiency without losing their fundamental character and are designed to be 100% auditable and verifiable. Well, to be precise, they can be audited and verified to any desired degree.
If someone rooted one of the seeds of your Linux ISO and stuck a bunch of child porn in it, you're guilty of both downloading and distributing child pornography at that point.
No, you're not.
With very few exceptions all criminal statutes have intent as a key element of the crime. If there was no intent, there was no crime. In many cases mere knowledge is enough to satisfy the intent requirement, and in some it can be argued that it's sufficient that you should have known. But in the case of downloading Linux ISOs, barring some additional information you had, there's no reason you should have known it contained kiddie porn, and therefore you haven't committed a crime. That's not to say you couldn't be charged and tried (which could seriously screw up your life), but the prosecutor would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you knew or should have known that the files contained illegal material in order to convict you. Which means the government would have to have pretty compelling evidence that you did know, or at least had strong hints. That's pretty unlikely.
Interesting. I'm not a lawyer, nor have I ever gone to law school, but it seems like the language of the statutes I know best -- those of Utah -- would have to be distorted pretty heavily for a court to reach that conclusion. There is no discussion of licenses, or even permission, just "knowledge that the person's presence is unlawful" and some explanation of how notice must be given. There is a general requirement of a culpable state of mind for any crime except strict liability crimes, but the requirement just says "intent, knowledge, or recklessness shall suffice to establish criminal responsibility". And of course there is a general notion of justification, based on a "reasonable man" standard: Could the court conclude that a "reasonable man" would believe the police officer had to trespass without a warrant? That seems unlikely -- and in any case a question for a jury, not the court.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but a court would have to completely ignore the plain language of the law in Utah in order to find a police officer wasn't trespassing.
If more people dislike the law than like the law, the law will change.
No, it doesn't work like that. Not here.
Yes, it does. I think the war on drugs is idiotic, but the fact is that a large percentage of the citizenry supports it. If that weren't true it would be repealed. The last poll I saw (sorry, don't have a link) showed that a large majority of Americans believe the War on Drugs is a failure (duh) but only around a third supported ending it. I know lots of conservatives who agree that it has failed but believe that we just haven't tried hard enough, or else don't know what to do but believe that legalization would be even worse.
It is trespassing, and the criminal defendant could sue the cops. However, for something like this you could only get nominal damages in an amount barely enough to buy lunch. Unless perhaps they destroyed something valuable in the process of driving across his field and installing the cameras.
In some (most? all?) trespassing is a criminal offense, so you wouldn't sue for damages you'd press criminal charges. Well, if they damaged something you could also sue for damages. It's a misdemeanor crime, of course, but it has always seemed to me that any evidence collected as the result of criminal action should be inadmissible. Apparently not.
Population is a non-problem. Growth is already basically zero (and often negative) in the developed world, and leveling off in the developing world. We've already reached "peak child", to use Hans Rosling's terminology. Due to the trajectory already in place we will reach ~10B population by around 2050, but that's it. We need to figure out how to handle that many people, but no more, and in fact beyond 2050 there's every reason to expect that the population will begin to decline, barring significant improvements in longevity.
An excellent book I'd recommend to anyone who is scared of the future is "Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think". This Swedish garbage burning is an example of the healthy trajectory the world is on... no, it's not a perfect solution, but it's a significant improvement, both in greenhouse gases and in waste management, and it will be followed by other significant improvements. We're following an exponential curve of improvements in efficiency and cleanliness while the population growth is leveling off.
I don't know where you'd find references that discuss the trend, but a good place to start is Google's IPO. Read the founder's IPO letter. On the question of other companies following suit (with the corporate control structure, at least, if not the user-serving focus), look at the info about Facebook's IPO. There have been lots more in between, and I think it's likely that the majority of Silicon Valley tech IPOs since 2004 have followed Google's lead, but I don't know where to find figures to support or refute that belief.
Saying this is a flaw in Tesla's side is like saying that a dyslexic can't be a good scientist because of poor writing skills.
Nonsense. It's like saying a dyslexic scientist must find ways to overcome his dyslexia -- which is a flaw! No one is going to pay attention to scientific papers rife with spelling errors, that's just reality and it's not something society needs to change to address. Instead, the dyslexic scientist uses a spellchecker, gets help from friends, colleagues and editors to clean up his errors, and does whatever is required to produce a well-written, readable paper so that his ideas and results won't be hidden behind a flawed presentation.
Also, it's far from accurate to say that Edison was a "poor engineer". He was a very good engineer. Not as good as Tesla, but very talented. Yes he had other strengths that allowed him to succeed, many of his PR stunts were in bad taste and I was well aware of Edison's patent assault on moviemakers (though it's not really accurate to say that he was demanding "huge" fees... the fees were reasonable, it's just that movie execs found that by fleeing to the west they could avoid paying anything). But the bottom line is that Tesla could have addressed his own shortcomings by getting the right sort of help... and even more importantly it is *not* society's job to make sure that people can succeed at making large amounts of money, or at doing anything. It's society's job to provide access to opportunity. What people do with that opportunity is up to them. Tesla had vast capability and squandered much of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Banks are better equipped. They'll just start issuing NFC cards (linked to multiple accounts) and G Wallet wil be out of business.
Heh. It's possible, I suppose, but about 10 years ago I spent a lot of time working with banks, trying to get them to agree to allow their credit apps to coexist on a single card. It was known in the industry as the "white card" concept. The card was intended to be a customer-owned smart card which could be loaded up with many credit cards as well as other apps (probably all ID and finance-related). I think it's a great idea, myself. I did 10 years ago when the idea was to reduce my whole wallet to a single card, and I think it's an even better idea now that we're talking about eliminating the wallet entirely and just using the phone -- which I always have with me anyway. I'm hoping my phone can also become my car and house keys, my driver's license, my loyalty cards, etc. Basically there's no reason the single device couldn't manage all of my personal and identity data, and do it very securely, thanks to the embedded secure element.
Think the banks were interested 10 years ago? No way! There was no way they were going to give up the opportunity to have a branded card in their customers' wallets. In fact, even for single-bank cards one of the advantages of smart cards that I touted to them -- the fact that smart cards are much more durable than magstripe cards -- was of negative value to them, because they like sending you a new card every two years. Why? Because their statistics show that sending you a new card gets you to use it more!
Banks have all kinds of incentives to oppose this sort of thing.
Of course, now that Google is making it impossible for the banks to successfully oppose card unification, on smartphones and -- if there's anything to this rumor -- on plastic cards, they might have to join it. That's what the ISIS consortium is about, but I notice that banks haven't been joining in droves. IMO, they fear the mobile network operators, who would like nothing better than to become the world's payment transaction engines, and the banks really don't want to lose that business. Worldwide credit/debit card transaction volume is measured in tens of trillions of dollars annually. Getting even a very small percentage of that sort of cash stream is worth a lot, which is why the MNOs are anxious to get in and banks are anxious to keep them out.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, and much of my work is related to Wallet. I have carefully avoided saying anything based on inside information acquired while working for Google. I have a lot of knowledge about this space that was acquired during previous employment, though.)
Oh one note on terminology: It's only called "NFC" when it's embedded in a phone and combines contactless smart card technology with dumb RFID technology, and able to act as both card/RFID chip and reader. When it's in a reader-powered card it's just called "contactless smart card" technology.
you have to adjust the code and actually test it, which can't be done in a few days
Huh what? It takes more than a few days to test a change like adding some text to the bottom of a web page? Granted that there are multiple browsers and configurations to test, but even manually that's not more than a few hours' work... and if Apple's web site is managed by competent engineers they should have automated tests for that anyway. This sort of change should take minutes, not days, much less weeks.
And I guess that there are enough incompatibilities that it wouldn't have made sense to call it KDE3.99.01, which would have warned people.
Perhaps just calling it 4.0 alpha 1, alpha 2, etc., would have been the best approach. The numbering had to be changed to 4, though, based on the standard development library numbering conventions -- major numbers change when forward compatibility is broken, meaning that apps compiled against the old lib cease working with the new lib; minor numbers change when backward compatibility is broken, meaning that apps compiled against the new lib won't work with the old one. Sub-minor changes are expected to be both forward and backward compatible.
It just causes windows to stretch and compress (a little) as though they're made of rubber when you move them. I can't think of any purpose for it, but it isn't distracting and is kind of pleasant. Makes your windows feel more like physical objects as you move them around.
You may have done this prior to availability. But you missed the Ford Focus EV. It's substantially larger than the Leaf but I'd like to see the analysis include it.
I didn't miss it; I excluded it because it's not available in my state.
Feel free to copy my spreadsheet and add it, though... or just click on the "Share" button (assuming you're logged into a Google account) and request that I give you edit permission, and then you can add it to my copy.
As has been explained many times, the comparison is a false one. Canadian elections have many fewer races that need to be tallied. The much larger number of votes per voter that have to be counted make hand counting a slow process in the US, and we're too impatient to wait days for the results.
Personally, I think we should combine the approaches: Paper ballots that leave a clear record plus machines for counting the paper ballots. Add some statistically-driven hand re-counting (the amount of re-counting needed can easily be computed based on the desired level of certainty and the closeness of the closest race) to verify the machine outputs and you can be certain that the counting was done correctly.
Then to take a step into an even better world, apply Chaum & Rivest's Scantegrity II system to the paper ballots. That will allow individual voters to be able to verify that their ballots were in fact received and counted correctly and allow anyone who wants to audit the system as a whole to verify the integrity of the ballot production, distribution, collection and counting process. It requires slightly more expensive ballots, since they have to be printed with two inks, one visible and one invisible, and requires printing of more ballots since the various audit processes intentionally spoil some number of ballots. It also requires special markers, but produced in volume they will be no more expensive than regular markers.
IMO, the degree of assurance added more than justifies the increased ballot cost.
There's a third issue. The EC was also intended to slightly increase the effective power of small states, to prevent them from being dominated by the large states. In point of fact, it has exactly the opposite effect, due to bloc voting, which is what your examples highlight. Were states to allocate their EC votes proportionally, and were they able to do so perfectly (i.e. with fractional votes), then it would have the intended effect. Of course, large states would be foolish to reduce their effective power by proportionally allocating their votes.
Why the hell do we vote for the judiciary?
What is your alternative mechanism for removing bad judges?
(Shrug) I just went to the Porsche dealer and wrote a check, and then got on with my life.
Turn in your nerd card.
And therein lies the problem with something like the Leaf. Why would I pay $35,000 for a car that goes a whole 60 miles and requires a good 10 hours to recharge if I can't find a quick-charge port? I could get something like a Sonata hybrid for $10k less that has more range, more room, more power, and takes all of 5 minutes at a gas station to refill.
But gas is a lot more expensive than electricity. Total cost-wise, for many people the EV is cheaper. Oh, and the range is more like 80-90 miles if you drive efficiently.
The Leaf is meant for "city drivers" who can afford an expensive, short-range car alongside a moderate gasoline car for longer trips.
True, though the price differential between gasoline and electricity does, at least for some people, make the Leaf less expensive than a comparable gasoline car, assuming they need to have two cars anyway (I actually bought my Leaf because I needed a third car).
lol, what do you haul things with, or do you rent a truck from Home Depot every time you want to pull your boat, trailer, etc?
Toys...
I just got a 2012 Leaf (which I love -- awesome little car), and I also have a camp trailer (28'), a boat (20') and an ATV trailer, so I think I'm well-positioned to answer your question:
I pull the toys with my Dodge Durango. I commute and go to the grocery store and take the kids to school and etc., etc., in the Leaf.
Does that answer your question?
Electric cars are competitively priced if you are actually in their target market.
Rich people?
Not necessarily.
I'm not rich, and I just bought a Nissan Leaf after crunching the numbers very carefully. I'm far from poor, but I'm not rich. I did the math and with some reasonable (for me) assumptions over an 8-year time-horizon the Leaf was less expensive than *any* gasoline-powered car I could find. Well, any new gasoline-powered car, equipped comparably to the Leaf.
For example, the cheapest pure-gas car I looked at was a Kia Rio. $18.5K purchase price, plus sales tax less my guess at residual value after 8 years yields a net vehicle cost of $17.3K. Added to that, I calculate that I'd spend $13.2K on gas over 8 years, for a total of $30.5K. In per-mile cost, $0.32.
A better option was the Honda Insight. Price with tax of $22.5K, less tax credits estimated at $1.7K, for a net vehicle cost of just under $17.8K, but with an 8-year fuel cost of $10.5K for a total of $28.4K. $0.29 per mile.
In comparison, the Leaf costs $37.9K with tax, less $12.3K tax credits (federal and state) for a net vehicle cost of $22K. The 8-year energy cost, though, is $4.5K yielding a total of $26.6K. $0.28 per mile.
In addition, I think my Leaf will have significantly lower maintenance costs over the 8-year period, so it's a little better than the numbers above show.
However, there's also the downside that my calculations assume I need an additional gasoline-powered vehicle for trips which exceed the electric range. In my case that's the case, and will be (in fact, the Leaf's "energy" cost above is actually a mix of electricity for the Leaf and gasoline for my Saturn Ion).
I think EVs are economical now. That's why I bought one! Because it was the cheapest option.
There are some caveats, though. In order for them to make sense, you first need to be in a position to buy a $35K car, and you need to have a long-enough time horizon for the lower electricity costs to pay for the premium over a comparable gas car. You also need to have driving patterns that stay within the electric range, with enough time between trips for recharging. Related to driving patterns, if you ever drive well beyond the range of the electric, you need a cost-effective alternative. In my case I already have two gasoline-powered cars and needed a third vehicle (there will soon be five drivers in my house!), so it's reasonable for me to fall back on the gas cars when necessary. Another alternative, if you don't need to make longer trips often, is to rent. Finally, you need to get tax credits. Without the available tax credits the EVs are middle-of-the-road options. Not terrible, but not great.
Of course, all of this will get better: range will improve, charging time will decrease, cost will come down. But there's a chance that an EV may be an economical choice for you now.
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.
Oh, and there is that all important question of how they hold up in a hurricane. Fisker's Karmas seem to have issues with getting wet.
Any reports of problems with submerged Nissan Leafs or Mitsubishi i-MiEVs?
Most kiddie-porn statutes do not require ANY intent, just simple possession is enough to get you busted.
Cite?
I can point to several counter-examples.
What we really need is a formal standard based on end-to-end auditable voting. Some really outstanding work has been done in this space in the last couple of decades, applying the principles of cryptographic security to design and implement voting schemes that are provably secure and still provably anonymous while still eminently practical. These schemes, like Punchscan, Scantegrity and Scantegrity II allow voters to prove to themselves that their ballot was not only not modified or lost, but even that it was counted correctly -- but without giving them the ability to prove that to anyone else (to avoid vote coercion/buying). The systems can be automated for efficiency without losing their fundamental character and are designed to be 100% auditable and verifiable. Well, to be precise, they can be audited and verified to any desired degree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems
http://static.usenix.org/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/chaum/chaum.pdf
http://www.economist.com/node/12455414?story_id=12455414
If someone rooted one of the seeds of your Linux ISO and stuck a bunch of child porn in it, you're guilty of both downloading and distributing child pornography at that point.
No, you're not.
With very few exceptions all criminal statutes have intent as a key element of the crime. If there was no intent, there was no crime. In many cases mere knowledge is enough to satisfy the intent requirement, and in some it can be argued that it's sufficient that you should have known. But in the case of downloading Linux ISOs, barring some additional information you had, there's no reason you should have known it contained kiddie porn, and therefore you haven't committed a crime. That's not to say you couldn't be charged and tried (which could seriously screw up your life), but the prosecutor would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you knew or should have known that the files contained illegal material in order to convict you. Which means the government would have to have pretty compelling evidence that you did know, or at least had strong hints. That's pretty unlikely.
Interesting. I'm not a lawyer, nor have I ever gone to law school, but it seems like the language of the statutes I know best -- those of Utah -- would have to be distorted pretty heavily for a court to reach that conclusion. There is no discussion of licenses, or even permission, just "knowledge that the person's presence is unlawful" and some explanation of how notice must be given. There is a general requirement of a culpable state of mind for any crime except strict liability crimes, but the requirement just says "intent, knowledge, or recklessness shall suffice to establish criminal responsibility". And of course there is a general notion of justification, based on a "reasonable man" standard: Could the court conclude that a "reasonable man" would believe the police officer had to trespass without a warrant? That seems unlikely -- and in any case a question for a jury, not the court.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but a court would have to completely ignore the plain language of the law in Utah in order to find a police officer wasn't trespassing.
If more people dislike the law than like the law, the law will change.
No, it doesn't work like that. Not here.
Yes, it does. I think the war on drugs is idiotic, but the fact is that a large percentage of the citizenry supports it. If that weren't true it would be repealed. The last poll I saw (sorry, don't have a link) showed that a large majority of Americans believe the War on Drugs is a failure (duh) but only around a third supported ending it. I know lots of conservatives who agree that it has failed but believe that we just haven't tried hard enough, or else don't know what to do but believe that legalization would be even worse.
It is trespassing, and the criminal defendant could sue the cops. However, for something like this you could only get nominal damages in an amount barely enough to buy lunch. Unless perhaps they destroyed something valuable in the process of driving across his field and installing the cameras.
In some (most? all?) trespassing is a criminal offense, so you wouldn't sue for damages you'd press criminal charges. Well, if they damaged something you could also sue for damages. It's a misdemeanor crime, of course, but it has always seemed to me that any evidence collected as the result of criminal action should be inadmissible. Apparently not.
If you can't understand my point, it's really not worth trying to explain it to you.
Population is a non-problem. Growth is already basically zero (and often negative) in the developed world, and leveling off in the developing world. We've already reached "peak child", to use Hans Rosling's terminology. Due to the trajectory already in place we will reach ~10B population by around 2050, but that's it. We need to figure out how to handle that many people, but no more, and in fact beyond 2050 there's every reason to expect that the population will begin to decline, barring significant improvements in longevity.
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html
An excellent book I'd recommend to anyone who is scared of the future is "Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think". This Swedish garbage burning is an example of the healthy trajectory the world is on... no, it's not a perfect solution, but it's a significant improvement, both in greenhouse gases and in waste management, and it will be followed by other significant improvements. We're following an exponential curve of improvements in efficiency and cleanliness while the population growth is leveling off.
I don't know where you'd find references that discuss the trend, but a good place to start is Google's IPO. Read the founder's IPO letter. On the question of other companies following suit (with the corporate control structure, at least, if not the user-serving focus), look at the info about Facebook's IPO. There have been lots more in between, and I think it's likely that the majority of Silicon Valley tech IPOs since 2004 have followed Google's lead, but I don't know where to find figures to support or refute that belief.
Saying this is a flaw in Tesla's side is like saying that a dyslexic can't be a good scientist because of poor writing skills.
Nonsense. It's like saying a dyslexic scientist must find ways to overcome his dyslexia -- which is a flaw! No one is going to pay attention to scientific papers rife with spelling errors, that's just reality and it's not something society needs to change to address. Instead, the dyslexic scientist uses a spellchecker, gets help from friends, colleagues and editors to clean up his errors, and does whatever is required to produce a well-written, readable paper so that his ideas and results won't be hidden behind a flawed presentation.
Also, it's far from accurate to say that Edison was a "poor engineer". He was a very good engineer. Not as good as Tesla, but very talented. Yes he had other strengths that allowed him to succeed, many of his PR stunts were in bad taste and I was well aware of Edison's patent assault on moviemakers (though it's not really accurate to say that he was demanding "huge" fees... the fees were reasonable, it's just that movie execs found that by fleeing to the west they could avoid paying anything). But the bottom line is that Tesla could have addressed his own shortcomings by getting the right sort of help... and even more importantly it is *not* society's job to make sure that people can succeed at making large amounts of money, or at doing anything. It's society's job to provide access to opportunity. What people do with that opportunity is up to them. Tesla had vast capability and squandered much of it.