If this fellow and those who share his views are sincere, then they ought return all those things which Science hath given them. That means they don't even get to live the life of the Amish, because they still use simple machines like pulleys and gears and those could clearly not exist without Science.

Let them return their cars, their modern fabrics, their TVs and computers and cell phones. Let them not travel upon paved roads, for those are marvels of modern Science and engineering. Let them have nothing save that which was constructed by hand using tools of no greater sophistication than bronze implements. Let them herd sheep and goats and spin wool and till the soil and walk everywhere they need to go, communicating by speech and clay tablets.

If they do all those things, then it's fine by me if they serve in Congress and make decisions about matters of Science.

But if they don't, then they can GTFO and take their brain damage with them.

I have a different perspective on this. To me, it's a dick-measuring contest where the "authorities" are putting Joe Q. Citizen in his place for daring to point a marker at them. It doesn't feel terribly different from what the cops do to citizens who videotape their conduct during protests--beat them silly.

The TSA, TIA program, Echelon, [Fatherland | Motherland | Homeland] Security Department, pervasive surveillance, and many other recent erosions of our freedoms have set this country on a swift tilt to totalitarianism. Note: I didn't say "Obama" or "Bush" or any other partisan attribution because it's a bipartisan effort on behalf of the government and those who control it to keep the rest of us down.

Unless those aforementioned parties straighten out and fly right in a hot hurry, I suspect they will soon long for the days when the only things being pointed at them were laser pointers and cameras.

Yes, yes, the U.S. government outguns any amount of rednecks with rifles, but the rednecks and other less-than-red necks outnumber the entire armed members of the U.S. government by orders of magnitude, and the number of soldiers willing to drop napalm on suburban Houston, though still greater than we would hope, is still far less than the government would like to pretend.

at the event along with my wife and kids and 15 other people I invited to come along. All of them loved it. I found it less earth-shattering and more corporate than the year before. For example, the bio-hackers were absent, which was sad because they blew the possibilities wide open for me last year. Also, gone were the people who built furniture out of scraps or bicycles out of bamboo, carbon fiber, and resin. Many of the smaller but brilliant projects you can usually find inside in the Hall of Science were absent.

There were, in their place, many, many more corporate sponsors.

So I say, last year I witnessed 9 different revolutions in the offing. This year, only two. A pox upon corporate America, and all the evil it brings. May it die a thousand deaths in ignominy.

Please remember to wear your heat suit when venturing outside the vessel.

I was in the new Tesla dealership in the Roosevelt Field Mall in Long Island on Sunday. The Model S is a good sized sedan. I did see 5 grown adults sitting in it. The car itself looks great, like a Bentley, I thought. I learned of the constellation of supercharging stations there, which put in a nail in the coffin of range-anxiety ninnies.

But letting you recharge for free? That's genius. A swift kick in the nuts to both the oil and traditional auto industries. More power to Tesla! God how I'd love to see the fossil fuel people utterly collapse in a year in the face of such disruptive vision.

You're living the dream. Thanks for posting such a strong testimonial. I keep saying, "What if we stopped shipping $365 billion/yr overseas to buy oil and spent the money here?"

Have you posted info about how you went off-grid? I've been thinking about doing the same thing but there's not much cut-and-dried info out there that I've been able to find.

We live in Brooklyn, in Park Slope. We have a car, because it's vastly easier to move our small children around (plus their strollers and diaper bags and toys and snacks, etc, etc) in a car than it is to heft all that up and down the stairs in the subway and ignore the glares of other riders because you're taking up too much space in the car. Same goes for the bus. Once a kid is old enough to carry their own backpack, sure, the need for the car drops a lot. But as someone who has traditionally been anti-car, there are legitimate reasons to have one even in NYC. Now, if you don't want to lose your mind on an on-going basis, you ought to pick a car that is small so you can find more parking spaces you can fit into.

I visited the new Tesla store in Roosevelt Field Mall in Long Island yesterday. According to them, you can fully charge the car overnight from a regular outlet. A full charge will take you 300 miles. Americans drive an average of 29 miles/day, which means in one night's charge you can drive for 10 days.

Tesla is building a network of supercharging stations across the country along interstate highways, too. So for your daily commute, you're covered. For your Thanksgiving trip to grandma's house, you're covered.

As far as everything else, there are these big cables running everywhere that carry the stuff called electricity, which happily is the same stuff you fill your batteries up with.

Oh. I see. So, when the Bridgestone tires I bought fail catastrophically, then you would jump up and point your finger at me, saying, "Aha! See?! You ought to have done your research on the expansion coefficient of steel-belted radials *before* you bought those tires. Well, I did, because I'm a know-it-all Poindexter, so I. have. no. sympathy. for. you."

OK. In the real world, in technical fields you have to run 24/7/365 just to stay even with the people in *your* field. You don't have time to micro-manage every step of the chain between what you do and the end market (whatever that is). So saying that, gasp, a cancer researcher might have not fully vetted a mere domain registrar like GoDaddy before paying for their services and therefore it's his fault is puerile at best.

You didn't try very hard to get the lay of the land, if you're saying those things about NY. NY is a great place to raise kids. Lots for them to see and do and be stimulated by. The neighborhood I live in is bursting at the seams with young families. They have phenomenal playgrounds to play at, like the sort of stuff I used to dream about as a kid. They have massive parks to play in, classes to take, activities to do. If you prefer lower-density neighborhoods, there's always Staten Island, Far Rockaway in Queens, Riverdale in the Bronx, or NJ.

And for adult interests like art, culture, and cuisine I can walk to world class cuisine, any kind of cuisine, in less than 5 minutes from my house and pay less than you would at McDonald's. And the art and culture you can usually get for free, especially in the summertime when they have free concerts and performances galore.

I grew up out West in the 70's and I know all the stereotypes about the big, bad city, and I can tell you that not one of them is true.

and they want their stereotypes of cities back. Dirty, filled with crime, derelict neighborhoods, etc. etc. Thanks to the meth epidemic I'd say that suburbs and rural America have inherited that rap.

I live in Brooklyn. Yesterday I took a break from programming and went for a casual walk through the neighborhood, swung past the cafe on the corner where there was a full-fledged ceilidh going on, then went up the street through a block party where the kids were drawing with chalk on the street and playing in the fire hydrant they had opened a bit as a sprinkler. Through Prospect Park where people were playing cricket and eating tandoori BBQ. Then around through the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens where they were having a bonsai exhibition. Out the north entrance and sat and watched the mathematically patterned dancing fountain in front of the Brooklyn Museum of Art for a bit. Then swung back through the green market at the top of Grand Army Plaza where I picked up some of the finest organic veggies on the Eastern seaboard for dinner. There was a bluegrass/folk trio jamming just inside the GAP entrance to Prospect Park, so sat and listened to them for a while. Then walked back home past artists selling works that would be hanging in a museum in the rest of America.

That wasn't a special festival day, just an average summer day in New York. Didn't have to plan to see any of those things. Just did, because they're just there and they're just happening like that all the time, everywhere here. Had I walked in a different direction I'd have seen plenty of similar things that way.

None of any of that sounds anything like the weird, dystopian picture you painted of the big, bad city.

For me, being around that degree of refined creativity and passion is incredibly inspiring as a human being and as a technologist. So, yeah, because the suburbs are the opposite of that sort of density and complexity, they are soul-crushing.

But I'm glad you like it there. Please stay.

The cops and firefighters have their own dedicated coms. So why do they need another? Citizens, however, do need an emergency system if the government decides it wants to begin censoring communications, monitoring them, or shutting them down. Having a mesh network that could spontaneously form would be especially useful in that case. Rather makes the prospect of cops being able to confiscate cameras and other devices recording their misconduct rather futile, doesn't it? As in, sure, take the guy in the front's phone or camera, but all the thousand people in back already have the footage and are uploading it to the broader internet, plus they have footage of the exact officers who are confiscating the guy in front's camera.

Loved the Stainless Steel Rat. It influenced my life in 3 key ways. Jim di Griz's mastery of judo inspired me to earn a green belt and stand up successfully to the bullies in my junior high school. And if it weren't for you I wouldn't have known Esperanto existed. Never learned much of that, but it kicked off a life-long love for languages that has led to mastery of five others. Lastly, it began a life-long quest for a real-life glass of Syrian Panther Sweat.

I have grown heartsick, just down- and dog-tired, of the cottage industry in the public discourse of setting everyone at each other's throats. Pundits spend so much time and energy inciting riots while real problems go unaddressed.

So when this fellow comes along and tries to stir up the same nonsense among programmers it gets my goat. Didn't we learn anything from lasting damage of the vi vs. emacs Holy Wars of the past? TIMTOWTDI, people. Don't buy into this guy's screed.

Do we need a public awareness advertisement of a field of nerds at each other's throats while Stephen Hawking looks on, a tear running down his cheek?

My natural geek bias is coming out, but this defines team sport and puts the Olympics to shame. Phenomenal achievement--congratulations to NASA and JPL!