I DO have mod points today, but all the good posts are already at +5, or nearly.

Dunno - in a world of rigged markets- designed to destroy savers and small investors, one might be wise to convert mere inflatable fiat money into harder assets, like the ability to continue to afford transport no matter what oil - or electricity - prices do. In my own case, my Volt is charged from my solar array - I'm off-grid. When not charging my car (most of the time) the extra solar power I bought to handle the car is used for other luxuries...so you can't charge all the cost of the solar system to the car alone.
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I also find it interesting to know that Bob Lutz is an AGW denier, yet as a "car guy" really got behind this one and almost forced GM to get in the game. He's pretty impressed with Musk in this Charlie Rose interview - and so am I. This *was* the link which no longer works, at least if you have adblock, perhaps: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11984
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But I'm also the type of car buyer that no-way will set down a significant chunk of cash and then hope the company makes the car I ordered the right way, and without going out of business, and by the time I need it. That's Tesla's weak point right now, everything else looks peachy. Yeah, they're expensive. Find another car as nice that isn't - as Elon himself said, I realize there's no shortage of exotic-expensive cars for rich guys, that's not the point - the point is, he has to sell those first expensive ones to make enough money to stay in business so as to make the ones we normal people can afford - looks like a good plan so far.
It's just that I, like many, know that there are actual and not always subtle differences between say, cars, or guitars - play or drive 3-4 supposedly identical ones if you don't believe that - and so I don't tend to order stuff like that - I gotta touch it first, the one I'm going to get.

You left out a few obvious and large places the money goes. Banks - every person in that chain borrowed money, and has to pay interest. Taxes - mostly dead weight. If you never borrow a dime yourself, an astonishing percentage of all money you spend pays some interest to some bankers. Period. You can't starve them out.

Is that, according to Bob Lutz, it pushed Chevy to make the far more practical Volt. I've had one for 2 years, and love it, it wasn't sooo pricey, and you could actually get one the day you wrote the check.

As a competitive target shooter, I'd take exception to your statement that guns are only for killing. I don't kill stuff with mine.

Had been prescribed for a huge fraction of those who turned out to be mass killers. Real good correlation. Could be that since we shut down most of the asylum system (which did have a lot of issues on its own) we let people be on the street we used to keep in mental-hospital custody, trusting them to take drugs that may or may not solve their problems? Medical hubris?

Not sure how it is now, but earlier versions of VS could indeed handle other than windows targets. My outfit regularly built custom embedded hardware, that had to be connected to windows PCs. So we wrote code for both, and inside the same project in VS - had to add a little batch file kind of stuff that VS would invoke to build the embedded stuff, but it was way cool, and could, with one button - build both and run them both for testing. As VS moved along, this became harder and harder to do, and I'd bet that by now, it's useless for such things - I gave up on it right around the .net "revolution", mostly because if I'm going to write in some interpreted language, none of .net (or java) would be my choice - at least for me, perl works better as reasonably quick duct tape than any of the others in that class of things. And now I go to download Qt creator to see how that one is. I haven't liked any of the IDEs for linux as well as I *used* to like devstudio (up to 6 - after that, I couldn't stand it).

Why do you think the DHS is buying bullets in the billions, litmus tests are applied to high army officials (will you shoot civilians) and so on? It's because they ARE paying attention to the near-unanimous dissent we all express online. Psychologists might call this "projection" - they know they'd be truly pissed had we screwed them the way they have us (think - the amount of money bailing out banks could have made each person in this country rich and actually have stimulated the economy) - so they assume we're as angry - and dishonest - and vengeful, as they would be in a similar situation were the roles reversed. A fearful person is the most dangerous. How is our government acting? Fearful of us, in the wrong way...after, strangely enough, using fear or trrrists to manipulate us and steal our constitutional rights A-Z. Pretty damn sick, since indeed the government itself is made of "us".

Last I checked the US gov can and does kill people with drones anyplace on earth it suits them. You can't move that far away. You can only vote for one of a set of two chosen, pre-vetted clowns in any election for a seat that has any power. Dream on....

of men, and I can find a way to hang him with them. The objections due to the idea they can't analyze it all mean nothing whatever - that would only be useful for you know, actually catching terrorists etc, which they've shown little competence for. No - the threat here is once you become a "person of interest" for whatever whim - they now have your whole past, and can surely find something on you as an excuse to harass/jail you. All those usually non-enforced discretionary laws now come into play, you know the ones they said we only use to bust those bums from out of town, those other people? Now, it's you.

Ammonium nitrate can detonate all by itself. Look at the chemical formula. NH3NO3. When the nitrate breaks up, you get nitrogen (which becomes N2 with release of energy), oxygen. Ammonia is flammable, and when it breaks up, you get H - which burns with the O, and N, which becomes N2 again, also with a release of energy.
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Sure, it's easier to make ammonium nitrate into a bomb if you add a fuel or sensitizer (see tannerite, or ANFO) but it's not required if you hit the stuff hard enough.

Mate 1.6 over Ubuntu 12.04 is *almost* as nice as my favoured custom 10.04 desktop setups that I truly love. It's not as pretty out of the box, but you can do nearly all the same stuff (put launchers anywhere, autohide both bars, and so on). The main trouble I'm having is on a new build that had to have 12.04 due to a UEFI ASUS mobo having UEFI that despite being turned off in the bios, would not let 10.04 run (which would have done all I needed). This new build will not run virtual box for the couple of things I need windows for in my physics lab - if you think linux hardware support stinks (in general, it doesn't) try finding it for drivers for things like mass spectrometers. On the other hand, try getting windows to run a perl/gtk program - it's theoretically possible, but...
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Cannonical claims they've fixed the VB bug - I have a long thread with them about it. Well, now it installs error free, but during boot of any windows appliance, it crashes LINUX along with windows - and these machines run on all the other (10 or so) machines I own, so it's not them.
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Damn assholes breaking perfectly good things just to be "new" and trying to capture the mostly going to mobile market for the sheep that only consume. I can't understand how that would apply to a free opsys, while I do understand the MS attempts there. But it looks like the rest of us, who need a real keyboard to type real content or code, and who actually produce things that require the power of a desktop are being left completely out of some jerk MBA's business calculation, since we are, in fact, a small minority of the population. Good luck sheeple, getting along without us when we "go galt". Rejection can be a two way street.

Written by the most honest man, and I can find a way to hang him with them. Old saying, variously attributed, stated long before just about everything you do or say could be written down to do that with - should you manage to become a "person of interest". So that's what is truly scary here.

But it's microsoft selling this? I feel much better now - it'll never work well enough...

I've been told by software simulation vendors that no way can their stuff - even if it was running on every supercomputer on the planet for years, could solve the 10e19 body problem I have simulating a fusor's emergent behavior. The math guys have let us down here in science-ville. And if you can't even really do it feedforward for 3 bodies that only attract (vs ions, electrons, charge exchange, and neutrals) I don't have any hope of it being done for my field in my lifetime.

Get cracking, math guys. Until then, the universe is its own best simulator and it runs in real time - my lab. But it's kinda hard to trace the history of a single particle in that soup.

That's way not fair to DEC, I worked there in its heyday, and their CEO was an utter angel compared to Ellison - we met and had some fun discussion. He just didn't get the next step in the evolution right. DEC didn't fuck people over like Oracle. DEC treated us employees RIGHT. They made good stuff for what the times were, and we all liked working with it. Customers loved it, and us. Can you say any of that about oracle? Didn't think so.