If you haven't had Windows Update break things then you're not technically savvy, at least insofar as you have never supported more than 5 machines. Out of my 350 machines I find that at least every other SP or major patch breaks something. Often it's every major patch. It doesn't always break all the machines, but it almost always breaks something.
I honestly can't understand why you wouldn't want to understand the patches you're installing. You might even want all of them, but you still ought to understand what they are supposed to do. This is not an opportunity afford to you by Windows Update, and it certainly wouldn't happen with automagic updates.
So thank you very much, but I'll keep being "unreasonably paranoid" and get my patches the old fashioned way -- by reading security advisories and deciding which patches I need.
Btw, The US also has censorship problems. Just look at how american news sources acted over Iraq - did a single mainsteam journalist criticize the government's plan?
Usually I'd first question how the fact that the press didn't cover something constitutes censorship, but that's just not appropriate here. Did you ever read a paper, watch TV, or listen to the radio anytime before the war? Or during the war? Or afteward? If so, how did you miss the blatent bashing of the war effort?
By the time we actually got to shooting at people, most of the media was behind the war. But if you look closely you'll find that even during the battle, there was freely available opposition in the media -- complaints about the battle plans, about the motivation for the war, etc.
Now, you could argue that there should have been more opposition in the press, or that a politically-free press isn't effective if it chooses not to cover things that aren't popular. When you argue censorship though, when all you really mean is "my personal viewpoint wasn't on TV enough to make me feel good" it makes your opinions very hard to respect.
I knew my car had a black box (actually my car isn't that new, but go with me here). I'm all about my car having a black box. It's not even a safety vs. freedom thing. I fail to see how using an objective source to recreate an accident -- something that already warrants an investigation under current law -- is a bad thing. It's not like the cops are coming to check my black box every week to make sure I wasn't speeding. Like most people, I'd object to that. It's being used when there's already a valid investigation.
And what are you suggesting with you buzzword SCO statement? That because companies ignored some mail they got the US is hypocritical? I guess I'm too dense for that one. Or maybe it was just a setup for the next line about SCO, to help get us in the mood. Let's take a look at that one -- other governments sue SCO, while the US allows the people and businesses being injured to sue on their own. Man, I really hate it when the government lets me decide for myself whether I want to sue someone.
And finally there's the troll about cell phones. I don't know, could the disparity have something to do with the US already having sufficient mobile communications infastructure installed and running when the now-current system was invented? Are you seriously suggesting that we rip out old cell towers every time a new technology is invented? Do you really want to make cell service that expensive?
If a company's only goal is profit, how can you say the same isn't true of people? Both viewpoints are obviously flawed -- companies and individuals are both motivated by personal gain, but this in itself is not destructive. In short, profit != bad.
Doing good for the people around you often results in personal gain, whether you're a business or an individual. Speaking as a business owner, I can tell you that it's significantly easier to make money when you customers feel that you're trying to improve the community. It's just common sense.
And by the same token, business that are interested in screwing others to make money are owned by people of a similar nature. You would again be simply shifting the source of the contribution from the business entity to its owners.
Finally, making contributions anonymous isn't a bad plan on the surface, but I'm not sure you could make it effective. Candidate Bob gets $400,000 from Mr. Anonymous. Next week, someone with a returned $400,000 check walks in for his apointment with Candidate Bob. In short, you can't enforce anonymity without abridging my rights.
I didn't say the process couldn't be improved. I said that companies contributing to candidates isn't the problem, and I think it's pretty hard to disagree with that. I am also pessimistic about some of your suggestions, but I hardly think objections like "this change won't be effective without a reduction in our civil liberties" are invalidated by my pessimism. Frankly I hope everyone has a pessimistic view of such ideas.
I for one think that a contribution cap is a great idea, but it doesn't provide the solution you think it does. It just brings down the price of candidates. People can still give money, people of similar interest (i.e. owners of a company) can still band together to give significant amounts. Most importantly, the same people that couldn't afford candidates before, still can't now.
The concept of having the government pay for advertising is similarly falwed, because it wouldn't be effective without a ban on political advertising, which has serious constitutional issues. Take a look at today's political ads -- how many are actually paid for by candidates? You'd be right to think that you could fix this with an amendment, but I for on am not big on being banned from public political speach.
We all know the two-party system is a bunch of crap, and I might actually have to give you the runnoff vote as a solution. It's something that could be changed before I die, since it's a state-level thing. Moreover, it could give people with multi-million dollar ad budgets a chance. I'm all about that plan...
But you followed it with suggestion 4 -- not showing candidate's names -- which makes its hard to believe that you were making serious suggestions. Issues are all fine and dandy, but you're forgeting thing like say, moral character, which *is* an important thing to pessimists like me. There's also the problem that all candidates could run on with the same viewpoints on all issues -- the ones that polls say will get them votes -- much like they do now. It's not like there's some way to hold them to their pre-election platform. (We also don't want to hold them to their pre-election platform, because if we do we're voting for a referendum, not a leader)
I've always wondered why it is legal for a company to contribute towards a campaign. What else can it be construed as except a bribe for better business conditions?
I assume then that you propose outlawing private contributions as well. Otherwise you'd just be shifting the financing from the company to it's owners, who are real people, and who are making such contributions for their personal benefit, be it through the company or otherwise.
Then there's the question of why individuals should be allowed to buy politcal influence if companies are not. Or who would fund politics if it weren't for individual or corporate contributions. I'm all for a low-budget election, but low-budget to the point of people not knowing the candidates doesn't help anyone.
In short, you've got a great idealistic statement. Wonderful. Come back when you've got a suggestion for improvement, rather than just a complaint.
I know that, at least in theory, CFC can break down into free chlorine and reatact ozone, but can anyone point to ANY evidence that this EVER happened in any significant way. Given even the most conservative estimates of CFC release, and chlorine lifetime in the ozone layer, we should still be seeing significant increases in the size of the ozone hole.
Though CFCs are no longer used in industrial processes, there are still lots of them out there, leaking out of old, high-pressure cooling systems. Put that together with the 100 years that we were supposed to be worrying about escaped CFCs, and we're a good 50+ years from the polution peak.
Unfortunately this is one of the rare instances where keeping quiet about bad tree-hugger science is good for both the industry and the environmentalists -- HCFCs replacing CFCs means that the industry gets to sell bigger A/C units.
Even if nobody talks about it, it's starting to look like the "science" that banned CFCs wasn't so great. In fact, because we've moved A/C systems to HCFCs and other less efficent fluids, banning CFCs would actually contribute to the greenhouse gas problem, should that be shown to exist.
The method they use to charge less is to fsck suppliers, not employees. And even that isn't so bad, if you can come up with the volume. Wal-Mart will only let you make 3% on your toasters, but you can sell 8 million of them, and take advantage of their distribution network.
And I have worked at Wal-Mart, well above minimum wage, and I actually enjoyed it. Wal-Mart isn't holding people at gun point to get them in to work.
As far as I can tell, the average american understands "democracy" to have a lot less to do with voting and a lot more to do with civil liberties. We enact democratic systems because in most cases they represent the best method for ensuring the continued protection of such liberities. This is not a requirement of the system though.
Frankly, having a feudal socitey wouldn't make my life any worse, so long as I still had my liberties. I'd be a bit worried about losing my freedom in the future, but that's a problem with human nature, not the system of government.
And when it comes to preserving civil liberties, an area in which no governmental excels, theocracies have a particularly bad record. I can't imagine why you believe we should allow such a system to be installed -- a secular government would still allow all these people to practice as the believed, and would not exclude all the minorities in the Iraqi population. You can't argue that the minorities wouldn't be oppressed -- the very nature of a theocracy excludes the practice of any other religion.
Heck even in Iran, a very anti-american place, they aren't so happy with their "democractic" theocracy. It might have something to do with elected officials being overruled by in-for-life religous leaders. Hardly seems like a democratic system.
If they were really spamming AOL, they wouldn't need a mail server -- their could just tell their mail client to use mailin-03.mx.aol.com as the SMTP server, and it would gladly accept any mail bound for aol.com. Or at least it would before this ridiculous policy. The ability of people to run mail servers is not an issue -- SMTP doesn't care.
The only people using NT are businesses that are reluctant or unable to upgrade.
This is true, but it's also a lot more people than you might think. NT was the first MS OS that could even pretend to work as a server. In fact, once you get it working right (which is no small job) it's actually pretty stable. Considering the cost, the downtime, and the hassle of moving to 2000, it's hard to justify in a lot of small and mid-sized businesses.
No, with this technology you can track as many people and locations as you have sensors and databases for. This isn't some long-range GPS technology. It requires sensors within a very short distance, so if you're seriously talking about tracking *everybody* you'll need a lot of resources -- less than it would take to put a human tail on every person, but still a lot of time and money.
Maybe I should have gone for a less dramatic example to make my point more clear: video cameras. Everybody and his uncle has a video camera up in their store. Kwik-mart, Wal-Mart, Bob's Farm & Fleet Mart -- they all have cameras. Tapes from these cameras are regularly used by the police to place X at Y at time Z. How are RFID tags any different? They have less effective range, and *no* guarantee that the person wearing the RFID is actually the person we think it is. At least on tape we can link a face to a specific person.
I'm also wondering how big brother aquires the initial RFID->Person link to start with. Sure, he can grab the ID of the shirt you're wearing when you're at the DMV, but what about the other 25 shirts you own? Are you seriouslly suggesting that big business is going to let big brother into their point-of-sale systems? Even if they set up a sensor outside your front door, they would still need a *person* to verify that the RFID by the door is you, and not your friend/wife/kid/etc.
This technology is incapable of invading your privacy in private settings -- it doesn't have the range to reach inside your home, or any other "private" place that's not already under control of big brother. They would have to break in to put up sensors, and this is already illegal.
Moreover, it *is* legal to go fishing for past associations, and it's done all the time. It's a standard part of criminal investigations, and I as far as I can tell, there's no reason it shouldn't be. You don't have a resonable expectation of privacy when you're walking down the street, and I've yet to see how these devices could track me anywhere else.
In order to ask the question "who has been attending subversive meetings," you first have to define "subversive meetings" for the computer. If you can do this you could go down to the neighborhood and ask questions -- who has been here? When? What did they look like? This is more time consuming, and less accurate, but it's based on the same information, whether it comes from people or machines.
35mm photographic film has the potential to invade privacy. With a camera and the right lens, it has an effective range of much more than 1.5 meters. And yet the world still turns. Amazing, isn't it?
Yes, RFID tags allow more easy access to INFORMATION THAT ALREADY EXISTS. It's not like you'd need a search warrant to figure out who is buying products A, B, and C. Nor do you need one to find out where such products are taken. All you need is a guy with a van and some free time.
The only advantage that RFID tags offer is that you can replace a human tail with a series of receivers. And at a 1.5 meter range, that's a lot of receivers. And they still can't track you in your home.
I understand your concern about giving up liberty, but this isn't a liberty versus safety issue -- it's privacy versus convenience. And no, privacy is not the same as liberty. In an ideal world, you could be observed at every moment, and still be free. We obviously don't live in such a place, but it's just as absurd to assume that any invasion of privacy results in a loss of liberty.
Take the telephone as an example -- you can obviously be tracked by the use of your phone, but you sacrifice privacy for the convenience of communication. The same example could be extended to cell phone -- less privacy, more conveneince. This same thing has been going on since caveman Bob moved in with caveman Joe, giving up his privacy for the convenience of companionship.
Has it occured to anyone that giant, anonymous corporations both employ and sell to real, live human beings, and that is therefore in their best interest to keep people alive? I'll agree that they sometimes need to be reminded of this, but the concept that business is evil and uncaring is just silly -- without people there would be no way to make money.
Has anyone consider such problems as carrying hydrogen to a filling station, pumping hydrogen from the filling station to your car, and driving around with a tank of hydrogen? All of these situations seem considerable more dangerous with hydrogen than gasoline.
At room temperature and pressure only a small amount of gasoline is combustible (gaseous). At the same conditions however, 100% of hydrogen is combustible. Hydrogen also release much more energy when burned.
Consider this situation: A fault filling connector in a passenger vehicle. A car with such a problem pulls up to a filling station, releases 10% of it's fuel load into the air (due to the faulty connector), and blows up itself, the filling station, and anything else in the neighborhood when the doom light turns on.
And you need take but a moment to consider the economics of changing the largest energy consuming activity (transportation) from one source to another. Changing vehicle manufacturing, energy production, energy distribution, vehicle service, etc. is not something that can happen quickly.
In short, while fuel cells have great energy density, that's not always an asset. Between those technical issues and the economic and political ones concerning our current energy production, it will take a very long time for Joe Public to see any such technology in his car.
I get a little worried whenever I come across an article without some liberal fanatic bashing conservatism and the US. Without you I wouldn't be able to sleep at night, but now that you've established that guns 're bad and the US is el Diablo I can rest soundly.
Maybe it's just me, but this whole flamebait is just a bit old. I suppose though, that it will keep up until we bail your pansy asses out of another war.
(Yes, that is flamebait, but being hostile and armed I'm not too concerned)
Slashdot Mirror
If you haven't had Windows Update break things then you're not technically savvy, at least insofar as you have never supported more than 5 machines. Out of my 350 machines I find that at least every other SP or major patch breaks something. Often it's every major patch. It doesn't always break all the machines, but it almost always breaks something.
I honestly can't understand why you wouldn't want to understand the patches you're installing. You might even want all of them, but you still ought to understand what they are supposed to do. This is not an opportunity afford to you by Windows Update, and it certainly wouldn't happen with automagic updates.
So thank you very much, but I'll keep being "unreasonably paranoid" and get my patches the old fashioned way -- by reading security advisories and deciding which patches I need.
Usually I'd first question how the fact that the press didn't cover something constitutes censorship, but that's just not appropriate here. Did you ever read a paper, watch TV, or listen to the radio anytime before the war? Or during the war? Or afteward? If so, how did you miss the blatent bashing of the war effort?
By the time we actually got to shooting at people, most of the media was behind the war. But if you look closely you'll find that even during the battle, there was freely available opposition in the media -- complaints about the battle plans, about the motivation for the war, etc.
Now, you could argue that there should have been more opposition in the press, or that a politically-free press isn't effective if it chooses not to cover things that aren't popular. When you argue censorship though, when all you really mean is "my personal viewpoint wasn't on TV enough to make me feel good" it makes your opinions very hard to respect.
I knew my car had a black box (actually my car isn't that new, but go with me here). I'm all about my car having a black box. It's not even a safety vs. freedom thing. I fail to see how using an objective source to recreate an accident -- something that already warrants an investigation under current law -- is a bad thing. It's not like the cops are coming to check my black box every week to make sure I wasn't speeding. Like most people, I'd object to that. It's being used when there's already a valid investigation.
And what are you suggesting with you buzzword SCO statement? That because companies ignored some mail they got the US is hypocritical? I guess I'm too dense for that one. Or maybe it was just a setup for the next line about SCO, to help get us in the mood. Let's take a look at that one -- other governments sue SCO, while the US allows the people and businesses being injured to sue on their own. Man, I really hate it when the government lets me decide for myself whether I want to sue someone.
And finally there's the troll about cell phones. I don't know, could the disparity have something to do with the US already having sufficient mobile communications infastructure installed and running when the now-current system was invented? Are you seriously suggesting that we rip out old cell towers every time a new technology is invented? Do you really want to make cell service that expensive?
If a company's only goal is profit, how can you say the same isn't true of people? Both viewpoints are obviously flawed -- companies and individuals are both motivated by personal gain, but this in itself is not destructive. In short, profit != bad.
Doing good for the people around you often results in personal gain, whether you're a business or an individual. Speaking as a business owner, I can tell you that it's significantly easier to make money when you customers feel that you're trying to improve the community. It's just common sense.
And by the same token, business that are interested in screwing others to make money are owned by people of a similar nature. You would again be simply shifting the source of the contribution from the business entity to its owners.
Finally, making contributions anonymous isn't a bad plan on the surface, but I'm not sure you could make it effective. Candidate Bob gets $400,000 from Mr. Anonymous. Next week, someone with a returned $400,000 check walks in for his apointment with Candidate Bob. In short, you can't enforce anonymity without abridging my rights.
I didn't say the process couldn't be improved. I said that companies contributing to candidates isn't the problem, and I think it's pretty hard to disagree with that. I am also pessimistic about some of your suggestions, but I hardly think objections like "this change won't be effective without a reduction in our civil liberties" are invalidated by my pessimism. Frankly I hope everyone has a pessimistic view of such ideas.
I for one think that a contribution cap is a great idea, but it doesn't provide the solution you think it does. It just brings down the price of candidates. People can still give money, people of similar interest (i.e. owners of a company) can still band together to give significant amounts. Most importantly, the same people that couldn't afford candidates before, still can't now.
The concept of having the government pay for advertising is similarly falwed, because it wouldn't be effective without a ban on political advertising, which has serious constitutional issues. Take a look at today's political ads -- how many are actually paid for by candidates? You'd be right to think that you could fix this with an amendment, but I for on am not big on being banned from public political speach.
We all know the two-party system is a bunch of crap, and I might actually have to give you the runnoff vote as a solution. It's something that could be changed before I die, since it's a state-level thing. Moreover, it could give people with multi-million dollar ad budgets a chance. I'm all about that plan...
But you followed it with suggestion 4 -- not showing candidate's names -- which makes its hard to believe that you were making serious suggestions. Issues are all fine and dandy, but you're forgeting thing like say, moral character, which *is* an important thing to pessimists like me. There's also the problem that all candidates could run on with the same viewpoints on all issues -- the ones that polls say will get them votes -- much like they do now. It's not like there's some way to hold them to their pre-election platform. (We also don't want to hold them to their pre-election platform, because if we do we're voting for a referendum, not a leader)
I assume then that you propose outlawing private contributions as well. Otherwise you'd just be shifting the financing from the company to it's owners, who are real people, and who are making such contributions for their personal benefit, be it through the company or otherwise.
Then there's the question of why individuals should be allowed to buy politcal influence if companies are not. Or who would fund politics if it weren't for individual or corporate contributions. I'm all for a low-budget election, but low-budget to the point of people not knowing the candidates doesn't help anyone.
In short, you've got a great idealistic statement. Wonderful. Come back when you've got a suggestion for improvement, rather than just a complaint.
I know that, at least in theory, CFC can break down into free chlorine and reatact ozone, but can anyone point to ANY evidence that this EVER happened in any significant way. Given even the most conservative estimates of CFC release, and chlorine lifetime in the ozone layer, we should still be seeing significant increases in the size of the ozone hole.
Though CFCs are no longer used in industrial processes, there are still lots of them out there, leaking out of old, high-pressure cooling systems. Put that together with the 100 years that we were supposed to be worrying about escaped CFCs, and we're a good 50+ years from the polution peak.
Unfortunately this is one of the rare instances where keeping quiet about bad tree-hugger science is good for both the industry and the environmentalists -- HCFCs replacing CFCs means that the industry gets to sell bigger A/C units.
Even if nobody talks about it, it's starting to look like the "science" that banned CFCs wasn't so great. In fact, because we've moved A/C systems to HCFCs and other less efficent fluids, banning CFCs would actually contribute to the greenhouse gas problem, should that be shown to exist.
The method they use to charge less is to fsck suppliers, not employees. And even that isn't so bad, if you can come up with the volume. Wal-Mart will only let you make 3% on your toasters, but you can sell 8 million of them, and take advantage of their distribution network.
And I have worked at Wal-Mart, well above minimum wage, and I actually enjoyed it. Wal-Mart isn't holding people at gun point to get them in to work.
As far as I can tell, the average american understands "democracy" to have a lot less to do with voting and a lot more to do with civil liberties. We enact democratic systems because in most cases they represent the best method for ensuring the continued protection of such liberities. This is not a requirement of the system though.
Frankly, having a feudal socitey wouldn't make my life any worse, so long as I still had my liberties. I'd be a bit worried about losing my freedom in the future, but that's a problem with human nature, not the system of government.
And when it comes to preserving civil liberties, an area in which no governmental excels, theocracies have a particularly bad record. I can't imagine why you believe we should allow such a system to be installed -- a secular government would still allow all these people to practice as the believed, and would not exclude all the minorities in the Iraqi population. You can't argue that the minorities wouldn't be oppressed -- the very nature of a theocracy excludes the practice of any other religion.
Heck even in Iran, a very anti-american place, they aren't so happy with their "democractic" theocracy. It might have something to do with elected officials being overruled by in-for-life religous leaders. Hardly seems like a democratic system.
Take a look around -- this is slashdot. 'round here we poke fun at the DMCA, not the people making bad jokes about it. Got it?
If they were really spamming AOL, they wouldn't need a mail server -- their could just tell their mail client to use mailin-03.mx.aol.com as the SMTP server, and it would gladly accept any mail bound for aol.com. Or at least it would before this ridiculous policy. The ability of people to run mail servers is not an issue -- SMTP doesn't care.
This is true, but it's also a lot more people than you might think. NT was the first MS OS that could even pretend to work as a server. In fact, once you get it working right (which is no small job) it's actually pretty stable. Considering the cost, the downtime, and the hassle of moving to 2000, it's hard to justify in a lot of small and mid-sized businesses.
No, with this technology you can track as many people and locations as you have sensors and databases for. This isn't some long-range GPS technology. It requires sensors within a very short distance, so if you're seriously talking about tracking *everybody* you'll need a lot of resources -- less than it would take to put a human tail on every person, but still a lot of time and money.
Maybe I should have gone for a less dramatic example to make my point more clear: video cameras. Everybody and his uncle has a video camera up in their store. Kwik-mart, Wal-Mart, Bob's Farm & Fleet Mart -- they all have cameras. Tapes from these cameras are regularly used by the police to place X at Y at time Z. How are RFID tags any different? They have less effective range, and *no* guarantee that the person wearing the RFID is actually the person we think it is. At least on tape we can link a face to a specific person.
I'm also wondering how big brother aquires the initial RFID->Person link to start with. Sure, he can grab the ID of the shirt you're wearing when you're at the DMV, but what about the other 25 shirts you own? Are you seriouslly suggesting that big business is going to let big brother into their point-of-sale systems? Even if they set up a sensor outside your front door, they would still need a *person* to verify that the RFID by the door is you, and not your friend/wife/kid/etc.
This technology is incapable of invading your privacy in private settings -- it doesn't have the range to reach inside your home, or any other "private" place that's not already under control of big brother. They would have to break in to put up sensors, and this is already illegal.
Moreover, it *is* legal to go fishing for past associations, and it's done all the time. It's a standard part of criminal investigations, and I as far as I can tell, there's no reason it shouldn't be. You don't have a resonable expectation of privacy when you're walking down the street, and I've yet to see how these devices could track me anywhere else.
In order to ask the question "who has been attending subversive meetings," you first have to define "subversive meetings" for the computer. If you can do this you could go down to the neighborhood and ask questions -- who has been here? When? What did they look like? This is more time consuming, and less accurate, but it's based on the same information, whether it comes from people or machines.
35mm photographic film has the potential to invade privacy. With a camera and the right lens, it has an effective range of much more than 1.5 meters. And yet the world still turns. Amazing, isn't it?
Yes, RFID tags allow more easy access to INFORMATION THAT ALREADY EXISTS. It's not like you'd need a search warrant to figure out who is buying products A, B, and C. Nor do you need one to find out where such products are taken. All you need is a guy with a van and some free time.
The only advantage that RFID tags offer is that you can replace a human tail with a series of receivers. And at a 1.5 meter range, that's a lot of receivers. And they still can't track you in your home.
I understand your concern about giving up liberty, but this isn't a liberty versus safety issue -- it's privacy versus convenience. And no, privacy is not the same as liberty. In an ideal world, you could be observed at every moment, and still be free. We obviously don't live in such a place, but it's just as absurd to assume that any invasion of privacy results in a loss of liberty.
Take the telephone as an example -- you can obviously be tracked by the use of your phone, but you sacrifice privacy for the convenience of communication. The same example could be extended to cell phone -- less privacy, more conveneince. This same thing has been going on since caveman Bob moved in with caveman Joe, giving up his privacy for the convenience of companionship.
When we learn to harness the yet untapped power of the insect world, this research will make us the clear leaders in space technology.
Damn...to late.
Has it occured to anyone that giant, anonymous corporations both employ and sell to real, live human beings, and that is therefore in their best interest to keep people alive? I'll agree that they sometimes need to be reminded of this, but the concept that business is evil and uncaring is just silly -- without people there would be no way to make money.
Except that the library isn't publishing information, as was the DoE.
Has anyone consider such problems as carrying hydrogen to a filling station, pumping hydrogen from the filling station to your car, and driving around with a tank of hydrogen? All of these situations seem considerable more dangerous with hydrogen than gasoline.
At room temperature and pressure only a small amount of gasoline is combustible (gaseous). At the same conditions however, 100% of hydrogen is combustible. Hydrogen also release much more energy when burned.
Consider this situation: A fault filling connector in a passenger vehicle. A car with such a problem pulls up to a filling station, releases 10% of it's fuel load into the air (due to the faulty connector), and blows up itself, the filling station, and anything else in the neighborhood when the doom light turns on.
And you need take but a moment to consider the economics of changing the largest energy consuming activity (transportation) from one source to another. Changing vehicle manufacturing, energy production, energy distribution, vehicle service, etc. is not something that can happen quickly.
In short, while fuel cells have great energy density, that's not always an asset. Between those technical issues and the economic and political ones concerning our current energy production, it will take a very long time for Joe Public to see any such technology in his car.
I get a little worried whenever I come across an article without some liberal fanatic bashing conservatism and the US. Without you I wouldn't be able to sleep at night, but now that you've established that guns 're bad and the US is el Diablo I can rest soundly.
Maybe it's just me, but this whole flamebait is just a bit old. I suppose though, that it will keep up until we bail your pansy asses out of another war.
(Yes, that is flamebait, but being hostile and armed I'm not too concerned)
Conservative Bastard
Heartland, USA