Actually there's quite a lot of data, quite widely reported. Google it.

That is the theory, but real-world experience with the world's most successful EV (Nissan LEAF) isn't bearing it out. There doesn't appear to be any significant benefit to limiting charging to the 80% level. What is proving to matter, a lot, is temperature. The risks of very cold temperatures are so extreme that the cars have built-in battery heaters (powered by the batteries, obviously) to protect against them, so in practice cold just reduces range, but hot temperatures seriously impact battery longevity.

Another theoretically-predicted battery-killer that is not showing real-world degradation is quick charging. I believe Nissan has even stopped telling people they should limit the amount of level 3 charging they do.

Excellent points about larger capacity batteries needing to survive fewer cycles, though.

This is exactly the corporate culture shake-up that's required.

Microsoft has a lot of really smart people, and the financial and other assets needed to put them to work doing great things that can compete and win on their own, actually serving customers rather than trying to lock them in and then exploit them.

MS could be great. But they need a radically different internal dynamic to get there. Will this guy be able to do that? I'm skeptical, but I really hope he can.

Some western states are now setting 80 mph speed limits on freeways through long unpopulated stretches, and 90 mph is a fairly common speed there. But not 100.

China only does assembly. They do not design the chips, and they do not write the software.

Not only that, there is the problem that nearly everyone chooses to ignore, the insecure baseband system and processor. One of the biggest moves China could make would be to both design and certify a processor and a baseboand OS. Then they could just run their own version of Replicant or whatever on the other processor while knowing that the 'hidden' part of the system is also clean. It's the certification that is a big barrier for most teams but China could squash it easily.

No idea.

I've had 'yum update' do things like change completely where data files for a service are stored, update the configuration, but not move, link or otherwise do anything with the existing data. I've also had 'yum update' introduce kernel level file system bugs that result in data corruption. Both on vanilla Centos installs with no extra repos.

Bring back my beloved Audigy line.

Don't forget, he was a noted political pundit/analyst as well. He just decided to put his money where his mouth was. Tell Ann Coulter to run for congress or the senate, and see what happens.

No, it doesn't. They were all somewhat different up until the Telstar introduced the 32-panel, pentagon-and-hexagon stitching pattern, but it appears to me that remained unchanged for almost 40 years, from 1970 to 2006. The balls in between appear to have the same stitching pattern, just different printed designs.

I dunno.. my LEAF's maintenance schedule for the first 150K miles is pretty much "rotate tires, every 7500 miles, check brakes every 15,000". Checking the brakes, of course, involves checking the brake fluid levels, so there is a fluid. At 150K miles you do have to replace the oil used to cool the battery charger.

But, in general, EVs are very close to maintenance-free.

He might as well have said '640k should be enough for anyone.'

Earth is 12,742 km in diameter. The moon is 363,104 km, 28.5 diameters, away at perigee, and 405,696 km, 31.8 diameters, at apogee.

In round numbers the moon is 30 Earth diameters away.

Meh. A simple error in the writeup, which I'm sure is not present in the scientific papers.

http://lunarscience.nasa.gov/?question=3318

The screams... it's all about the screams. And dinner. Think of it as the psychotic version of dine-in movie theaters.