= = =
In other words, perfect as a second car for upper-middle-class suburbanites who don't drive far.
That's a small population. = = =

Even setting aside the gap between the average suburbanites actual commuting patterns and vehicle requirements as scientifically measured vs. their psychological perceptions of same, at least 80% of USians classify themselves as "upper middle class". So no problem.

sPh

Yes, I know, Lake Woebegone. Don't electrocute the messenger.

So until electric or combination electric-ICE vehicles meet 101% of the needs of 100.0% of the population of the US - including the very small minority who live in isolated rural areas - they should not be popular (or even sold!) anywhere in the US including the metro areas where 85% of the population lives and commutes. Got it.

sPh

Can you point to any statistics showing that the out-of-warranty replacement frequency for a battery pack on a Prius, Volt, Leaf, or Tesla is any higher than the out-of-warranty blown engine frequency on ICE vehicles? Anecdotally I haven't heard anything about it being so and most Prius owners I know have exceeded the mfgr's estimated battery life by a factor of two. But perhaps that is just anecdata and there are statistics showing otherwise?

It does seem that electric vehicles must jump through all kinds of hoops to be considered "successful" that ICE cars do not meet themselves.

sPh

= = = That, and plenty of folks live 50 or more miles out of the nearest urban center, = = =

That's one of those cherished American myths that turns out not to be the case. US population went from below 50% urban to above 50% urban around 1895 (between the 1880 and 1890 censuses) and today around 85% of all USians live and work within urban/suburban/exurban agglomerations. Not dense central cities but sufficiently dense and interlocked that they aren't really tooling through the countryside they way they believe.

sPh

= = = until charging stations are ubiquitous, the convenience factor for using a gas-powered car will weigh heavily on consumers's minds. = = =

What baffles me is why the Chevy Volt hasn't sold better. It is electric for 95% of all metro area needs (and 85% of US people live in a metro area), plus 275 miles gas tank range for trips out of town. Easily 90% reduction in gasoline usage for 99% of all owners. Not expensive compared to other vehicles I see people commuting in solo, esp with a tax credit.

Yet not even close to a success.

Alice posts a video using music that Bob owns the copyright to. Carol posts a video that uses music Bob falsely claims to also hold the copyright for. Unfortunately Bob's false claim against Carol doesn't change the fact that he actually does have a legitimate legal claim against Alice's video. So kicking him off the system means he's going to issue a takedown against Alice. The whole point of bringing him into the system was to give him an incentive to leave Alice alone.

The problem here isn't Bob and Alice -- that part of the scenario is working fine. The problem is Bob and Carol. There's no incentive for Bob not to make false claims against Carol. That's the bit that has to be fixed.

75% of the right-click open-in-new-windows actions in Firefox 38 result in a bare window with no menu, controls, or scrollbars. Tried a few config setting which resulted in 5x5 pixel windows. Really useful.

sPh

Well, it may interest you to know that courts judging "emotional distress" is not some new Internet fad. In the year 1348 an innkeeper brought suit against a man who had been banging on his tavern door demanding wine. When the innkeeper stuck his head out the doorway to tell the man to stop, the man buried the hatchet he was carrying into the door by the innkeeper's head. The defendant argued that since there was no physical harm inflicted no assault had taken place, but the judged ruled against him [ de S et Ux. v. W de S (1348)]. Ever since then non-physical, non-financial harm has been considered both an essential element of a number of of crimes, a potential aggravating factor in others, and an element weighed in establishing civil damages.

This does *not*, however, mean that hurt feelings in themselves constitute a crime. It's a difficult and sometimes ambiguous area of the law, but the law doesn't have the luxury of addressing easy and clear-cut cases only.

As to why a new law is need now, when the infliction of emotional distress has been something the law has been working on for 667 years, I'd say that the power of technology to uncouple interactions from space and time has to be addressed. Hundreds of years ago if someone was obnoxious to you at your favorite coffeehouse, you could go at a different time or choose a different coffeehouse. Now someone intent on spoiling your interactions with other people doesn't have to coordinate physical location and schedule with you to be a persistent, practically inescapable nuisance.

Does this mean every interaction that hurts your feelings on the Internet is a crime? No, no more than everything that happens in your physical presence you take offense at is a crime.

Every time nuclear power comes up someone blames environmentalists for the industry's problems -- in this case before the problems have manifested. It's an article of faith.

So far as I can see there's only ever been one plant in the US that's ever been cancelled for environmental concerns is the proposed plant at Bodega Harbor, which as you can see on the map would have been right on top of the San Andreas fault. In every other case projects have been shut down after serious miscalculations in the industry's economic forecasting (e.g. lower energy prices in the 80s than anticipated in the 70s), often exacerbated by poor project management performance. In those cases environmentalists were just a convenient scapegoat for management screw-ups.

You can see that because after the very largest anti-nuclear protests in history -- against Seabrook in NH and Diablo Canyon -- the plants were built and put into operation anyway. If a company had a plant under construction that it could make money operating, that plant would get built, even if thirty thousand people turned out to protest.

Well, you have to factor in the Iranian cultural mania for disagreeing with each other. The Shah couldn't keep them under his thumb, neither can the mullahs, who have their hands full disagreeing with each other.

From a tyrant's perspective Iran is ungovernable, which doesn't mean elements in the government don't give tyranny a go on a regular basis. It's an ideal setup for producing martyrs. The futility of cracking down means you have a little space to rake some muck before official anger overcomes reason.

I currently have a web radio transceiver front panel application that works on Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, Amazon Kindle Fire, under Chrome, Firefox, or Opera. No porting, no software installation. See blog.algoram.com for details of what I'm writing.

The one unsupported popular platform? iOS, because Safari doesn't have the function used to acquire the microphone in the web audio API (and perhaps doesn't have other parts of that API), and Apple insists on handicapping other browsers by forcing them to use Apple's rendering engine.

I don't have any answer other than "don't buy iOS until they fix it".

Well, alright, lets take close air support in Afghanistan. What would have been the cheaper, easier-to-maintain solution with better time on station?

I distinctly remember it being promised that the F-35 would beat anything but an F-22 in air-to-air combat, at a fraction of the price. It was not part of the original concept for the system but it was definitely sold politically as being capable of acting as a poor man's F22.

I wonder about the helmet mounted display, whether that's something you'd consider absolutely necessary in an aircraft whose job is to hit surface targets in contested airspace.

To be fair, that was not the original justification for the thing. That was mission creep.

I think the original impetus was to have something stealthy that could do ground strikes in enemy territory. And it makes sense to do a naval version of the same thing. If they'd just focused on that they'd have been done a long time ago with a solid design, which of course in engineering nearly always turns out to be more versatile than you planned for. Adding STOVL and the whizbang helmet (cool as that may be) as necessary elements of the system turned this into an "everything for everyone" project, which almost always turns out less versatile than you hoped.

Sure you can identify scenarios where the A-10 is useless. But in the last twenty years it's been extremely useful in a number scenarios we've actually faced.

The idea that a system ought to play every role in every conceivable situation is why the F35 performs none of them very well. In hindsight the idea of accommodating the Marines' need for a STOVL aircraft in the same basic design probably dictated too many compromises in the plane's other roles.