I'm poised to install a $4K backup generator in the next few months. I don't live in a region where I can force my neighbors to pay for my tech goodies, and the $9K difference doesn't get paid for on any kind of time horizon that outpaces even a basic interest rate.

The generator also has a near-infinite runtime, in the case of a bad storm. However, it needs more maintenance, so if there were price-parity I might opt for the battery.

Give it another five years and that just might be feasible - good for Musk for getting this ball rolling, and kudos to the early adopters who take it in the pocket to promote the technology.

If slashcode had ever evolved beyond 2001, we'd be selecting comments like this to replace the summary.

And even with the 'cannon' in China, do we know who lit the fuse?

Almost certainly the same people who arranged for NXDOMAIN on github.com a few weeks back. They really hate that there are open source anti-censorship tools on there.

They had to stop breaking DNS for github since most of China's Internet developers couldn't get any work done anymore.

That Chinese developers are freely using a California hosting service which has benefits to everybody in the world, and everybody recognizes that the "damage" here is government, it actually gives me a bit of hope. People do prefer to cooperate on all things, until a few sociopaths get a set of keys.

Is this a Bayer or Shell astroturfer here to spread disinfo?

It seems unlikely that development support of XP is more costly than the revenue generated by XP users. And Apple has plenty of cash. But this may still be shrewd - let's see if there's a bump in Mac sales this quarter. These users represent existing Apple customers running an OS that Microsoft abandoned. They don't need to know about how fast Apple abandons hardware, but to be fair Apple does upgrades pretty nicely. They can blame MS and gain the customer, all by hosing said customer. Devious and clever.

That's not how cancer works. Cancerous cells are constantly arising and being killed by the immune system. Let's assume that eating healthy food reduces the incidence of metastatic cancer. Then it is preventing cancer in many instances. To claim that it prevents all run-away cancer processes would be a stronger claim with a much higher bar to meet.

Who was actually harmed by this crash? A bunch of wall street speculators running computer programs to trade faster than regular people. Who gives a shit. If anything, it exposes the vulnerability so it can be fixed.

Wall Street (and The City) give a shit, and they own the governments. This is exactly how the system is set up to work for them.

Guess who gave more money to candidate Obama than every other candidate combined ever, at the time? Your clue letters are 'G' and 'S'.

And, of course they all bet big on both horses, so they're covered no matter how a given race turns out.

Just being a standard doesn't stop obsoletion. Wireless shows you that. Within days of actually being ratified as a standard, the next wireless standard is in the works and people start pushing our pre-N or pre-AC products.

Yet you can still configure an -AC AP to allow -b devices to connect to it. B-only devices were last made in, what, 2001? It's limiting, and sometimes not the default, but real standards usually try to incorporate backwards-compatibility if they can.

Can you imagine the uproar if older HDTV tuners suddenly stopped working with new broadcasts?

Odds are some "smart" TV's are losing YouTube, or will with the next change. By the end of their 20-year life-expectancy, most of those things will only be able to play HDTV and HDMI. The ones that aren't bricked by malicious malware by then, anyway.

There might even be some that lose functions before the warranty runs out - is the manufacturer liable for firmware updates to maintain functionality?

Google's clearly going to externalize all the costs of reacquisition and recycling - it's not established what obligations, if any, they have when they offer a product and refuse to support it for a "reasonable" time. I'm just surprised with that with a Google of money, it's not worth it to them to hire a guy to keep the old API working, so that those eyeballs don't migrate to other services. If Youtube fails and Hulu keeps working, it would be an error to assume that people will just go buy a new TV to keep up with YouTube - they will substitute other services in most cases.

There aren't even any 3G towers that I know of.

Seriously? A good chunk of the existing phone base can't even do 4G - prepaid is still largely 3G-only phones, which are still sold new today. It would be very rare to have 4G-only coverage areas in a town.

However, if you never go anywhere and have really good 4G coverage, setting your phone to 4G-only may well be a good workaround to reduce your chance of an intercept.

The article states that the earlier figure was incorrect; the Baltimore police actually used it 4,300 times, not 25,000 times.

It's still a big enough number that they must have full-time staff dedicated to these illegal searches. No wonder B'more has so many problems with dropped calls.

Wannabe central planners think they have all the answers.

Here's a crazy idea - stop artificial price fixing of water and let the stupid uses become unprofitable through millions of decisions by people who know about their own business.

"Oh, no," they say, "we know better. Even though they created this mess with that attitude.

Remember, Slate's entire business model is to find fault where there is none and assign blame. Keep this in mind when you read their next inflammatory article and you'll see the pattern.

Open is nice, but the Cyanogen people need to pay the bills.

There's no point to CM if it's not secure. If they're installing Microsoft blobs by default, it's not secure. We know Microsoft openly cooperates with the NSA on eavesdropping technology - I even wonder if this is a subtle warrant canary.

Assuming the least-bad possbility, then if they want to offer an easy-to-use tool to install a tested Microsoft bundle from the CM servers, then fantastic - for people who want to make that trade-off.

fuel needed for the landing is inefficient compared to a splashdown parachute recovery

The barge/ocean is just a temporary measure. The vision is twenty rockets launching a day and returning to the launch site to prep for the next launch.

There were about 120 rocket launches last year. SpaceX's mission statement is to reduce the cost of launches by 100x, and utilization rates go up as costs fall, so it's not just 100x more launches - twenty a day is probably very conservative if they hit their price targets.

Queue the folks who can't imagine what anybody would do with more than 640 launches a year.