Start an executive consultancy service. For $10,000 per day we will pay our 'consultant' $9,800 per day to provide guidance. Furthermore, we will hire anyone you want as a consultant.

Bullshit. Every manufacturer out there would LOVE to make EVs. They aren't bad people taking kickbacks from big oil. EVs have a ton of issues with legality (disposal) and logistics (shipping old batteries that are flamable if not discharged properly and leak hazardous waste) that make it almost impossible for manufacturers to sell them. Plus the laws say the manufacturer is responsible for all that disposal.

If any manufacturer can figure out how to make money on EVs they all will jump on the bandwagon within a year or two.

Savor the irony that it's environmental protection laws that are holding up EVs for all this time.

If you subtract the costs from legal obligation to dispose of the EV at the end of it's life the price is right in line. The big difference is the hidden tax from these things being unable to go to a landfill or be easily destoryed and the costs associated with disposal being a requirement on the manufacturer.

No problem. Just throw an electric generator in the back to charge it while you drive.

GM didn't quit on the Volt because they were stupid. They quit because of the logistics problems with EVs that still aren't solved. Tesla has a huge number of hurdles ahead of them that they have no idea how to deal with.

EV makers are responsible for the disposal of the vehicles and batteries they sell. That's the reason Chevy only leased the Volt, and that's why they quit making them. It's very expensive to dispose of EVs (hazardous waste, even shipping the battery back to Chevy is prohibitively expensive), and it's very difficult to track every single vehicle to know where it is so that should something happen to it they are there to take it away. It's a huge hassle they weren't prepared to deal with.

It's probably not too bad if your dick size is either 12" or 10cm. But yeah, trying to view things by dick size with a non standard size would suck.

Except, you know, it's like using a 5-10 year old laptop except you can't use it plugged in.

So it would be just like chess allegedly already was during the Soviet era.

The strength of computers at chess is a bit of a complicated subject. Chess computers are really only very good at one thing (calculation), while the bulk of the program is there to cover up the weaknesses (everything else) as best as possible. When you see a human vs computer match the majority of the heavy hitting is really just the computer selecting moves from a database of human games, relying on human strategy, to carry it through hopefully to a winning position. However while all this is happening it's calculating and (somewhat badly) evaluating millions of positions, which means it doesn't make any tactical mistakes.

For some reason a computer playing from a database of pre-selected human games just doesn't sit as well for me as if the computer were actually finding the best moves through it's own calculation.

Also of note is that even with the massive database and relentless calculation, humans can beat computers at correspondence chess where the humans can spend enough time to calculate out everything just like the computer does. It's the time limit that makes their calculation so strong.

But to answer your question more directly, computers are rated somewhere around 3500 (although their rating has more to do with beating other computers), while Magnus Carlsen is rated 2870. However despite a 600 point rating difference, I'd expect he'd draw the majority of games against computers in a match.

http://xkcd.com/605/

499 of them redacted, one blank.

One of my best friends growing up had wood heat in his house. His family lived in a cabin in some fairly remote woods. Damping wasn't to limit temperature it was to limit the burning of the wood. A big roaring fire that you add logs to every 45 minutes is great when your sitting around the fire, but terrible when your sleeping and don't want to get up every 45 minutes. A heavily damped fire burns easily for 6 hours without any additional fuel.

No. Tesla doesn't have a distribution model in the US.

The concept that a manufacturer would sell cars directly to consumers and bypass dealers isn't a new idea that Tesla dreamed up. It was an idea Ford toyed around with a hundred years ago and for which laws have long since been in place. Every car company that has formed since then has gone through this same process of building a network of dealers and Tesla is doing it to.

More importantly, however, is that other manufacturers aren't worried at all about Tesla selling cars direct because it's just bad business for Tesla. Dealers do a lot more then sell cars, they also operate service centers. When you buy parts you do it through your dealer. When you get warranty work done you do it through a dealer. When you buy a Tesla and there is warranty work to be done you take it to California...

So to paraphrase, a car isn't a vehicle for disseminating information the way a book is.

Think of trans-fats as being like saturated fats that your body can't remove and will stay in you for a long time. They have an accumulative effect that is much harder to manage.