I'm not the OP, but I hate subtitles. Especially for a game like Portal, so much of the humor is in the delivery of the lines that I feel that seeing the subtitles appear and reading ahead (which is essentially impossible to avoid, at least for me) spoils the experience a lot. I also feel like it takes me out of the experience a bit.
If the games had an option to "show me subtitles but only display the subtitle for a line after the line is complete" I'd probably use it a lot more, but I explicitly go in and turn off subtitles when they're on by default, and only turn them back on after I hit multiple points where I can't understand the dialog.
That said, my Steam account has 126 Linux games from 627 games total.
I was curious so I thought I'd see it for my library even though I figured won't be gaming on Linux any time soon. And even though that latter thing is still true, I was surprised; several titles that I thought were not available for Linux have been added, like Mark of the Ninja.
For me, 25 of 84 titles in my library (I have a much smaller collection than you, apparently:-)) are available on Linux. That's actually a higher percentage (30% vs 20%).
And if you count Portal 2, then if I total the amount of time that Steam says (it lies, but hopefully in an unbiased manner) I've played games that are available for Linux as opposed to the amount of time I've played all games, it's even bigger: 47% of my time playing any Steam game has been spent in something available for Linux.
So I'm impressed by their library. Not impressed enough to move my gaming PC to Linux by any means (there are too many old games that will probably never be ported for that to apply until there is a compelling advantage to Linux for this), but impressed nevertheless.
This isn't really anything anyone hasn't already said, but....
Ignoring the general stupidity of many TSA practices, and that this is an artificial market created by government inefficiency, what's so fundamentally wrong with paying more to get through faster?
Nice airline ticket there. It'd be a shame if you missed it.
I don't count putting the mouse cursor in the corner a gesture. For instance, while I could be wrong I don't think I've ever heard someone call the action opening Expose a gesture.
If you do, then I guess I have used one on a handful of occasions -- but not any more. The only thing from the charms bar I'd want is "settings" and "start", and I open both of those with the keyboard.
Like I said, I'm not saying Win 8's design is good -- I just disagree with the gesture characterization.
...ith the added insult of requiring gestures even on a mouse-based machine!
I've been using Windows 8 for quite some time, and without commenting on my overall opinion, I have never once done anything that I would consider a "gesture."
This sounds like a very useful idea to a relatively small market. For instance, for several years I didn't drive to work, but instead took the bus. "If my car is at home, the package can be delivered there" doesn't necessarily apply to everyone, for instance me. Given the choice between having it go into my trunk or onto the front porch of a house or even the hallway of a "secured" apt building, the trunk sounds like it would be much more attractive for many deliveries.
Not all games are VAC-protected, and not all VAC-protected games have every server VAC-protected (I think). For instance, you won't have VAC running for single-player games.
I'll also say that ideally, even in a case like the one you mention, ideally what the instructor would do is grade some of the tests, see that it was way out of line with reality, and then go back and reevaluate how much of the test a good student "should" have been able to do. For instance, look at what the TAs were able to accomplish and dial down that expectation a bit, or something like that. Then once you have reestablished your expectations, then go back and continue grading & regrading.
I suspect basically all teachers have at least some feedback from the raw scores students achieve to the letter grade; eliminating that entirely is both psychologically hard and probably pedagogically undesirable. (E.g. if you can move a grade boundary a little bit to get it out of a cluster, that'll often be good, and it leaves you unresponsive to your own mistakes.) But too much feedback is almost as bad as too little in most cases (not yours).
How can you set a cutoff when you don't know how hard the test is? Curves are a crutch of bad teachers.
That's part of why I say a straight curve is a crap way of grading: they make it easier to get away with bad teaching (or at least bad test writing and prep).
Being in the top 5% of the class should be an A right? Even if the professor writes a "bad" test, right?
Yeah, that gets into the grey area that I quoted, where you [hypothetical you as a prof] have to do something to compensate for not writing a good test. If you need to make an adjustment after the fact (especially for a test that's too hard), that's one thing. But just going in planning on just grading everyone against each other is another. And if you find yourself making significant adjustments a lot, that's an indication that you're bad at writing tests, or are subconsciously falling back on "well I can just curve it".
You seem to be presuming that a curve is lowering grades to distribute them, when the only time I was graded on a curve, it was an increase to distribute them.
My definition of "graded on a curve" is that the cutoffs are set after the test is given, based on the performance of the students on the exam so as to (approximately) get a desired grade distribution. For all the reasons that other people have said, I think this is a shitty way to grade.
I'm not arguing hard tests are bad*, but the instructor should set the test based on what portion of the material is worthy of each grade. In your case, maybe the instructor says "hey, I know this is a hard exam, so 60% is going to be a C". (They don't necessarily need to tell the class this, just know it and try damn hard to stick to it.) The important thing is that the scales are set by the instructor based on how much mastery of the material he or she feels is needed to hit that level.
This isn't a hard line in reality -- for example the scores could come back and the instructor goes "damn, that was a lot easier/harder than I thought it was going to be" and maybe adjusts things a bit, or maybe they plan 65% to be the cutoff between two grades but then there's a cluster of scores right at 65% so they bump it a little to one side or the other -- but I think the latter is definitely an ideal to strive for. And that's true even if the instructor sets their expectations and hence the scores based on the grade distribution they want -- it's still a different mindset, and I think that both that mindset is important as well as not making your students compete against one another directly.
(* I do think that working hard to stratify students is probably counterproductive to what is supposed to be the goal of education, which is to teach. But let's not go there for this argument.)
Faculty love grade inflation because they spend less time dealing with pissed off students and helicopter parents
That's not even a primary motivation, though it may be a side benefit. (IANAProfessor, but I was the instructor (not TA) for two semesters of a class on compilers.)
Dealing with grades is a lot of stressful work. You have to worry about consistence between students. You have to worry about where to set the cutoffs in a way that's fair. You have to worry about suspected cheating, and deciding whether you have enough evidence to pursue the matter. You have to deal with setting lateness policies and deal with lateness excuses. And like you said, you have to deal with the occasional student complaints.
But even beyond that, I'm under the probably-biased impression (because I can't actually cite anything for this) that there's some evidence that if you remove the pressures of grades from the students, they'll actually learn better. So as a result, there are a fair number of very student-heavy teachers who don't like grades from a pedagogical standpoint.
I'd want to look into that last bit a bit more before I took a definitive side, but if that evidence were to hold out, in some respect there's nothing to even fix about grade inflation.
If you just want to give either pass or fail, then I would say that you do not NEED a grade from this kind of classes.
Sure, but there are institutional difficulties with pass/fail courses, for instance in the case that I mentioned. I don't even know if taking a course pass/fail and passing it will count toward graduation requirements in a typical.
Now obviously the ideal solution to this is to change those difficulties, but that requires buy-in from not just campus-wide committees but also things like potential employers or grad schools who will (/may) be looking at your transcripts. (Actually I took a weird route through school into a job. Do entry-level employers look at transcripts?:-) Maybe not so much a problem.) I suspect seeing a lot of pass/fail courses would seem like a red flag.
Going A-F has some issues I'll admit, but... it's at least an interesting idea and worth thinking about what it's worth taking from it. (For instance, what about doing A-C-F? Less inflation than A-F, but not as many of the stratification problems that come with A-B-C-D-F. Or maybe do mostly A-C-F, but have very thin bands for B and D so the cutoff isn't so sharp. I don't know.)
IMO, there's also another glaring flaw in Johnson's premise that students gave better student evaluations of teachers who graded more leniently. There is a HUGE assumption there that the various teachers running the same classes were all equal in their quality of teaching. Why is it so difficult to believe that some teacher was able to reach and educate more of his students than someone else?
I can't speak to that, but I will share another "student evaluations somewhat incentivize the wrong things" bit I've seen discussed in a couple papers. One of the big buzzwords in teaching is "active learning", i.e. actually having your students do some work to figure things out rather than just lecture at them. There's good evidence that heavily incorporating active learning does tremendous good for student learning; if you look at students' long-term recall (e.g. in the next course), even relatively mediocre teachers (still measured by their students' long-term learning) who do a lot of active learning probably do about as well or better than the absolute best lecturers.
What happens during student evaluations? Students complain "the teacher isn't teaching" and "why do I have to learn everything myself", and the teacher takes a hit on the evaluations.
Teachers who grade on a curve don't understand what a GPA is meant to represent.
Or they're choosing to use material that is more difficult than most of the students can handle, so the top students can better stand out with their mastery of the material.
But... that's not grading on the curve.
Sure, it's setting your expectations based on what will produce a bell curve or uniform distribution of grades or whatever your goal is, but those are still very different things: grading on a curve retrospectively sets cutoffs to get the grade distribution you want regardless of the material, while making the material difficult proactively sets your expectations before people have even taken the test.
The former of those, at least, is bad for actually getting your students to learn. The latter... well, I don't know exactly, but it's somewhere between "much less bad" and "good".
I have some experience from when I was a grad student both teaching at the college level and participating in a reading group on teaching, and grading is a very difficult issue for pretty much the reasons you describe. I think the ideal situation would be if more classes would/could be taught pass-fail.
There was actually a class at my university -- admittedly, sort of a special-purposes class -- where the prof wanted to teach it pass fail but it wasn't allowed to be graded in that way. So he just said "okay, fine; I'll grade it nominally A-F, but the only grades I'll actually give out are A and F." Like I said this was a special-purpose class that would have been somewhat unfair to grade more traditionally and pretty fair to grade with a heavy focus on attendance, but it's at least an interesting idea. Assuming you think the purposes of a class is to help the students learn rather than attempt to rank the student's somewhat arbitrarily, there are good reasons to think doing something like that even in a more normal class would better accomplish your goals.
Gold isn't default yet, but they are working on it. I very recently built it for an experiment, and presumably used the latest stable version of binutils at the time, and in that I'm pretty sure it didn't even build Gold by default and it definitely didn't install Gold as ld by default.
So first, from my informal observations I think you'd find O'Caml much more commonly used than either of those for academic projects in compiler research.
Second, don't look at it from the point of view of what the researchers are writing their programs in, but rather look at what languages they're analyzing and what they're using to do it. And even though the researchers are writing in O'Caml or whatever, the programs they're interested in looking at are usually C, C++, or Java, because those are what is used out there in the real world. Java has a different suite of tools (SOOT is popular), but if you're looking at someone doing work work either on compiler optimizations for or on some kind of analysis of C or C++ code, chances are quite good they'll be using LLVM to generate their IR.
Now, as to driving 8-10 hours without a stop, good luck. Worse, not even truck drivers are allowed to drive for that long without a break. In fact, they are required to take a minimum of a 30 minute break during any 8 hour period (i.e., they can not hit 8 hours of driving).
He didn't say he'd drive 8-10 hours without stop, just that he wanted to get that much actual driving in in a day. And IMO, that's short.
For example, take your trucker example. I'm not sure what that's supposed to be arguing, because 30 minutes every 8 hours is only even remotely approachable in the absolute best of conditions for the car (and awful conditions for the driver) -- 45 mph in 110 degree heat with no A/C running, according to Tesla's calculator. At 70 mph in a comfortable temperature, you'll barely be looking at 3 hours of driving off of a full charge. In that situation, even under unfairly favorable calculations for the Tesla, you'll be on the road about 85% of the time, which is about 3 times the breaks of the trucker.
The other problem is that driving conditions degrade the Tesla's performance dramatically. Conditions that would put the estimate at under 200 miles are reasonably common, and the most time-efficient way of driving is to only charge it partway, so you in poor-but-realistic conditions you could be looking at stops every 2 hours or less. (70 mph in even 32 degree temps with the heat on gives 196 miles. At 0 degrees it's 178. Let's say we're interested in 20 degrees, and guess 188. Increasing the speed by 5 mph decreases range by 10-15 miles, so let's say I'm interested in the range at 73 mph (this "may or may not" be my speed on the IN and OH turnpikes, for instance) and guess we're down to 180. Now multiply by 80% because of an incomplete charge, and you have 144 miles, or just a hair under two hours at 73 mph.)
However, how many ppl drive their car more than 250 miles/day constantly?...Tesla will have a supercharger every 100 miles in the USA, so that you do not have to worry about that.
You don't have to do it constantly, just on occasion. For example, do you live in a city or live alone and only have one car? I don't know about you, but at least I wouldn't make it an electric. Even that 100-mile supercharger interval doesn't make it sound appealing for reasons I've said in another post: even the superchargers are too slow for long trips. "Just rent a car when you actually need to drive somewhere!" doesn't exactly make a good advertising slogan.
I'm very excited about electric cars now for commuting and very short trips, but once you get to the point of needing more than one charge on the road (which could happen in as little as ~5 hrs of driving in very realistic conditions -- really, even less than that) I think it starts to look really unattractive.
Because that's really in their head, more than about any particular drive being possible.
It really isn't, at least from what I can tell, for long road trips. Even under the numbers from Tesla's range calculator you just can't make the same pace you can in a gas car even in reasonably forgiving conditions. In moderately hard but still very realistic conditions, it becomes even less favorable:
If you put in 70 mph and 32 degrees, you get 204 miles. And that's on a full charge. But that's not the most time-efficient way of charging -- better is to spend about 45 minutes charging to, IIRC, about 75-80% capacity. That drops you to 164 miles. So that's "drive for less than 2 1/2 hrs, charge for 45 minutes." That's making pretty poor time IMO.
And what about colder weather and, say, 75 mph (which their range calculator doesn't even go up to)? You could easily be driving less than 2 hrs between charges, even if the superchargers were placed perfectly.
I'm super optimistic about something like the Tesla for around-town driving and shorter trips. But for the longer ones... I think Tesla needs very good coverage with cheaper battery swaps than they are planning.
This one is also pretty spectacular: "But nothing on the market could print the material, and no available materials could print pieces strong enough for his purposes."
how different is it from the real destruction of real, valuable things?
I'd argue it isn't, but I'd also point out that people destroy real, valuable things all the time for entertainment value. And participation in these EVE battles is pretty much that -- it's at least largely voluntary participation for entertainment value.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not the OP, but I hate subtitles. Especially for a game like Portal, so much of the humor is in the delivery of the lines that I feel that seeing the subtitles appear and reading ahead (which is essentially impossible to avoid, at least for me) spoils the experience a lot. I also feel like it takes me out of the experience a bit.
If the games had an option to "show me subtitles but only display the subtitle for a line after the line is complete" I'd probably use it a lot more, but I explicitly go in and turn off subtitles when they're on by default, and only turn them back on after I hit multiple points where I can't understand the dialog.
I was curious so I thought I'd see it for my library even though I figured won't be gaming on Linux any time soon. And even though that latter thing is still true, I was surprised; several titles that I thought were not available for Linux have been added, like Mark of the Ninja.
For me, 25 of 84 titles in my library (I have a much smaller collection than you, apparently :-)) are available on Linux. That's actually a higher percentage (30% vs 20%).
And if you count Portal 2, then if I total the amount of time that Steam says (it lies, but hopefully in an unbiased manner) I've played games that are available for Linux as opposed to the amount of time I've played all games, it's even bigger: 47% of my time playing any Steam game has been spent in something available for Linux.
So I'm impressed by their library. Not impressed enough to move my gaming PC to Linux by any means (there are too many old games that will probably never be ported for that to apply until there is a compelling advantage to Linux for this), but impressed nevertheless.
Just make shells recognize postfix commands as arg1 arg2 arg3, cmd (e.g. foo bar, echo will print "foo bar") and then alias it to dammit!
This isn't really anything anyone hasn't already said, but....
Nice airline ticket there. It'd be a shame if you missed it.
I don't count putting the mouse cursor in the corner a gesture. For instance, while I could be wrong I don't think I've ever heard someone call the action opening Expose a gesture.
If you do, then I guess I have used one on a handful of occasions -- but not any more. The only thing from the charms bar I'd want is "settings" and "start", and I open both of those with the keyboard.
Like I said, I'm not saying Win 8's design is good -- I just disagree with the gesture characterization.
I've been using Windows 8 for quite some time, and without commenting on my overall opinion, I have never once done anything that I would consider a "gesture."
This sounds like a very useful idea to a relatively small market. For instance, for several years I didn't drive to work, but instead took the bus. "If my car is at home, the package can be delivered there" doesn't necessarily apply to everyone, for instance me. Given the choice between having it go into my trunk or onto the front porch of a house or even the hallway of a "secured" apt building, the trunk sounds like it would be much more attractive for many deliveries.
Not all games are VAC-protected, and not all VAC-protected games have every server VAC-protected (I think). For instance, you won't have VAC running for single-player games.
I'll also say that ideally, even in a case like the one you mention, ideally what the instructor would do is grade some of the tests, see that it was way out of line with reality, and then go back and reevaluate how much of the test a good student "should" have been able to do. For instance, look at what the TAs were able to accomplish and dial down that expectation a bit, or something like that. Then once you have reestablished your expectations, then go back and continue grading & regrading.
I suspect basically all teachers have at least some feedback from the raw scores students achieve to the letter grade; eliminating that entirely is both psychologically hard and probably pedagogically undesirable. (E.g. if you can move a grade boundary a little bit to get it out of a cluster, that'll often be good, and it leaves you unresponsive to your own mistakes.) But too much feedback is almost as bad as too little in most cases (not yours).
That's part of why I say a straight curve is a crap way of grading: they make it easier to get away with bad teaching (or at least bad test writing and prep).
Yeah, that gets into the grey area that I quoted, where you [hypothetical you as a prof] have to do something to compensate for not writing a good test. If you need to make an adjustment after the fact (especially for a test that's too hard), that's one thing. But just going in planning on just grading everyone against each other is another. And if you find yourself making significant adjustments a lot, that's an indication that you're bad at writing tests, or are subconsciously falling back on "well I can just curve it".
My definition of "graded on a curve" is that the cutoffs are set after the test is given, based on the performance of the students on the exam so as to (approximately) get a desired grade distribution. For all the reasons that other people have said, I think this is a shitty way to grade.
I'm not arguing hard tests are bad*, but the instructor should set the test based on what portion of the material is worthy of each grade. In your case, maybe the instructor says "hey, I know this is a hard exam, so 60% is going to be a C". (They don't necessarily need to tell the class this, just know it and try damn hard to stick to it.) The important thing is that the scales are set by the instructor based on how much mastery of the material he or she feels is needed to hit that level.
This isn't a hard line in reality -- for example the scores could come back and the instructor goes "damn, that was a lot easier/harder than I thought it was going to be" and maybe adjusts things a bit, or maybe they plan 65% to be the cutoff between two grades but then there's a cluster of scores right at 65% so they bump it a little to one side or the other -- but I think the latter is definitely an ideal to strive for. And that's true even if the instructor sets their expectations and hence the scores based on the grade distribution they want -- it's still a different mindset, and I think that both that mindset is important as well as not making your students compete against one another directly.
(* I do think that working hard to stratify students is probably counterproductive to what is supposed to be the goal of education, which is to teach. But let's not go there for this argument.)
That's not even a primary motivation, though it may be a side benefit. (IANAProfessor, but I was the instructor (not TA) for two semesters of a class on compilers.)
Dealing with grades is a lot of stressful work. You have to worry about consistence between students. You have to worry about where to set the cutoffs in a way that's fair. You have to worry about suspected cheating, and deciding whether you have enough evidence to pursue the matter. You have to deal with setting lateness policies and deal with lateness excuses. And like you said, you have to deal with the occasional student complaints.
But even beyond that, I'm under the probably-biased impression (because I can't actually cite anything for this) that there's some evidence that if you remove the pressures of grades from the students, they'll actually learn better. So as a result, there are a fair number of very student-heavy teachers who don't like grades from a pedagogical standpoint.
I'd want to look into that last bit a bit more before I took a definitive side, but if that evidence were to hold out, in some respect there's nothing to even fix about grade inflation.
Sure, but there are institutional difficulties with pass/fail courses, for instance in the case that I mentioned. I don't even know if taking a course pass/fail and passing it will count toward graduation requirements in a typical.
Now obviously the ideal solution to this is to change those difficulties, but that requires buy-in from not just campus-wide committees but also things like potential employers or grad schools who will (/may) be looking at your transcripts. (Actually I took a weird route through school into a job. Do entry-level employers look at transcripts? :-) Maybe not so much a problem.) I suspect seeing a lot of pass/fail courses would seem like a red flag.
Going A-F has some issues I'll admit, but... it's at least an interesting idea and worth thinking about what it's worth taking from it. (For instance, what about doing A-C-F? Less inflation than A-F, but not as many of the stratification problems that come with A-B-C-D-F. Or maybe do mostly A-C-F, but have very thin bands for B and D so the cutoff isn't so sharp. I don't know.)
I can't speak to that, but I will share another "student evaluations somewhat incentivize the wrong things" bit I've seen discussed in a couple papers. One of the big buzzwords in teaching is "active learning", i.e. actually having your students do some work to figure things out rather than just lecture at them. There's good evidence that heavily incorporating active learning does tremendous good for student learning; if you look at students' long-term recall (e.g. in the next course), even relatively mediocre teachers (still measured by their students' long-term learning) who do a lot of active learning probably do about as well or better than the absolute best lecturers.
What happens during student evaluations? Students complain "the teacher isn't teaching" and "why do I have to learn everything myself", and the teacher takes a hit on the evaluations.
But... that's not grading on the curve.
Sure, it's setting your expectations based on what will produce a bell curve or uniform distribution of grades or whatever your goal is, but those are still very different things: grading on a curve retrospectively sets cutoffs to get the grade distribution you want regardless of the material, while making the material difficult proactively sets your expectations before people have even taken the test.
The former of those, at least, is bad for actually getting your students to learn. The latter... well, I don't know exactly, but it's somewhere between "much less bad" and "good".
I think this is a very insightful comment.
I have some experience from when I was a grad student both teaching at the college level and participating in a reading group on teaching, and grading is a very difficult issue for pretty much the reasons you describe. I think the ideal situation would be if more classes would/could be taught pass-fail.
There was actually a class at my university -- admittedly, sort of a special-purposes class -- where the prof wanted to teach it pass fail but it wasn't allowed to be graded in that way. So he just said "okay, fine; I'll grade it nominally A-F, but the only grades I'll actually give out are A and F." Like I said this was a special-purpose class that would have been somewhat unfair to grade more traditionally and pretty fair to grade with a heavy focus on attendance, but it's at least an interesting idea. Assuming you think the purposes of a class is to help the students learn rather than attempt to rank the student's somewhat arbitrarily, there are good reasons to think doing something like that even in a more normal class would better accomplish your goals.
Gold isn't default yet, but they are working on it. I very recently built it for an experiment, and presumably used the latest stable version of binutils at the time, and in that I'm pretty sure it didn't even build Gold by default and it definitely didn't install Gold as ld by default.
So first, from my informal observations I think you'd find O'Caml much more commonly used than either of those for academic projects in compiler research.
Second, don't look at it from the point of view of what the researchers are writing their programs in, but rather look at what languages they're analyzing and what they're using to do it. And even though the researchers are writing in O'Caml or whatever, the programs they're interested in looking at are usually C, C++, or Java, because those are what is used out there in the real world. Java has a different suite of tools (SOOT is popular), but if you're looking at someone doing work work either on compiler optimizations for or on some kind of analysis of C or C++ code, chances are quite good they'll be using LLVM to generate their IR.
He didn't say he'd drive 8-10 hours without stop, just that he wanted to get that much actual driving in in a day. And IMO, that's short.
For example, take your trucker example. I'm not sure what that's supposed to be arguing, because 30 minutes every 8 hours is only even remotely approachable in the absolute best of conditions for the car (and awful conditions for the driver) -- 45 mph in 110 degree heat with no A/C running, according to Tesla's calculator. At 70 mph in a comfortable temperature, you'll barely be looking at 3 hours of driving off of a full charge. In that situation, even under unfairly favorable calculations for the Tesla, you'll be on the road about 85% of the time, which is about 3 times the breaks of the trucker.
The other problem is that driving conditions degrade the Tesla's performance dramatically. Conditions that would put the estimate at under 200 miles are reasonably common, and the most time-efficient way of driving is to only charge it partway, so you in poor-but-realistic conditions you could be looking at stops every 2 hours or less. (70 mph in even 32 degree temps with the heat on gives 196 miles. At 0 degrees it's 178. Let's say we're interested in 20 degrees, and guess 188. Increasing the speed by 5 mph decreases range by 10-15 miles, so let's say I'm interested in the range at 73 mph (this "may or may not" be my speed on the IN and OH turnpikes, for instance) and guess we're down to 180. Now multiply by 80% because of an incomplete charge, and you have 144 miles, or just a hair under two hours at 73 mph.)
However, how many ppl drive their car more than 250 miles/day constantly?...Tesla will have a supercharger every 100 miles in the USA, so that you do not have to worry about that.
You don't have to do it constantly, just on occasion. For example, do you live in a city or live alone and only have one car? I don't know about you, but at least I wouldn't make it an electric. Even that 100-mile supercharger interval doesn't make it sound appealing for reasons I've said in another post: even the superchargers are too slow for long trips. "Just rent a car when you actually need to drive somewhere!" doesn't exactly make a good advertising slogan.
I'm very excited about electric cars now for commuting and very short trips, but once you get to the point of needing more than one charge on the road (which could happen in as little as ~5 hrs of driving in very realistic conditions -- really, even less than that) I think it starts to look really unattractive.
It really isn't, at least from what I can tell, for long road trips. Even under the numbers from Tesla's range calculator you just can't make the same pace you can in a gas car even in reasonably forgiving conditions. In moderately hard but still very realistic conditions, it becomes even less favorable:
If you put in 70 mph and 32 degrees, you get 204 miles. And that's on a full charge. But that's not the most time-efficient way of charging -- better is to spend about 45 minutes charging to, IIRC, about 75-80% capacity. That drops you to 164 miles. So that's "drive for less than 2 1/2 hrs, charge for 45 minutes." That's making pretty poor time IMO.
And what about colder weather and, say, 75 mph (which their range calculator doesn't even go up to)? You could easily be driving less than 2 hrs between charges, even if the superchargers were placed perfectly.
I'm super optimistic about something like the Tesla for around-town driving and shorter trips. But for the longer ones... I think Tesla needs very good coverage with cheaper battery swaps than they are planning.
...WinKey+Q brings up a nifty search overlay
No need to press Q in that... just press the Windows key and start typing, just like in 7.
This one is also pretty spectacular: "But nothing on the market could print the material, and no available materials could print pieces strong enough for his purposes."
So could the time you're spending reading and replying to stories and comments on /.
Your point?
I'd argue it isn't, but I'd also point out that people destroy real, valuable things all the time for entertainment value. And participation in these EVE battles is pretty much that -- it's at least largely voluntary participation for entertainment value.