You should offer a service: if one of us is feeling guilty about burning gas, but we're not sure if using electricity from gas, oil or nuclear, we can offset our carbon footprint by buying you a Tesla that you can run on 100% guaranteed green* Icelandic geothermal power.

(*well, all those volcanos and geysers probably pump out obscene amounts of CO2 and radioactive shit, but that's not humanity's fault and they're still gonna do that if you don't harvest the energy).

Why does it have to be across the US?

The problems start when you have to drive more than about 100 miles. Yeah, you can do 200-300 miles in a Tesla (depending on model) but then you have to start to think about things like do you need a heater/ air con/lights? Will you be able to recharge at your destination? If not, is there a supercharger en route? How much distance does that add? Hoe much time does that add?

So, forget trans-USA road trips. Just imagine a 100 mile each-way trip to a meeting somewhere (there and back in a day), with no guarantee of a power point at your destination, with no guarantee of 'goldilocks zone' weather.... and you're already worrying about range, whether there's a supercharger en. route, and having to leave an hour earlier.

That said, Tesla's fast battery swap looks like a much more practical alternative to a gas station. The 'charging station' idea doesn't scale if EVs get more popular: if you sometimes have to queue at a gas station with 15 pumps and a 5-minute turn around time, a couple of charging bays where people park and then head off for a meal just isn't going to cope.

... I'm not completely opposed to the notion of buying a "green" commuter car and renting for long trips (assuming that you live somewhere where you can get rental cars delivered at short notice in the event of a family emergency etc).

The notion I'm opposed to is buying a $70000 luxury saloon and still needing to rent another one for long-distance trips. If I bought a $50k+ car it would be precisely because I found myself making long journeys and wanted the comfort.

The Tesla S seems to have a niche for people with a home-based daily commute of, say, ~70 miles each way - long enough to justify wanting to do it in a really nice car but comfortably within the maximum range (so you could still pop out in the evening without waiting for the overnight recharge).

As for gas savings... If you're paying $70k for a new electric car when you can get a really nice gas one for $50k, a couple of k$ a year on gas is hardly a consideration. If you buy a brand new car rather than a 1-year-old one, the devaluation when you drive it off the forecourt could have kept you in gas for a couple of years...

Not according to this which claims "an Apple spokesman told them" (distinct lack of "horse's mouth" links, unfortunately) that it would be updated to run on Yosemite.

It suggests that one of these things solved a real problem that the users actually had, while the other solved problems that the developers thought the users ought to have.

A simple solution that does something useful, now, is worth 100 elegant applications that will totally revolutionise your work once they're finished... provided you completely re-arrange your practices to match the software.

It doesn't have to be a dichotomy. The regulations shouldn't be on what is sold, but on how it is sold.

If someone walks up and ask for a super-gutbuster-megasize McMeal, fine - their decision. However, if someone walks up and orders a regular burger, don't try and upsell them to a larger portion. Don't offer to 'super size them' for a small amount (probably pure profit - I suspect the marginal cost of an extra squirt of syrup and another potato is a tiny proportion of the fixed cost of serving a meal), and don't have 'meal deals' that make a burger, drink and fries cheaper than just a burger and a drink*.

Also look at minimum portions (and this applies to 'better places' too, especially in the US): a Danish doesn't have to be the size of Denmark - if someone is really hungry they can buy two. A "starter" is not meant to be a full meal (calling a 10" pizza a 'flatbread' doesn't make it a starter - been there a few times!).

Even in the supermarket, why do chicken Kievs and suchlike always come in 2 packs? (and, conversely, when things do come in 'serves 1' portions, why are they 1/3 the size of the 'serves 2' version?) Why are bread rolls 60p each or £1.30 for 4?

ANS: because, one way or another, it lets businesses make more money or have a competitive edge. They're not going to change unless they are forced.

* Actually, I usually get diet cola anyway with a burger and (too much) < (too much + more), so its the unwanted fries that are the problem - yeah, I chuck them away sometimes, but its an effort: the easiest way not to eat food is not to buy it.

Thing is, although Elite used procedural generation, the game was about space combat, trading, piracy and smuggling with cutting edge (for the time - kids today won't understand) graphics. Things like the planet names and descriptions, and the fact there were a gazillion systems, were part of the atmosphere, not the Unique Selling Point.

Same with Minecraft - when you get fed up of exploring your effectively infinite world, there's building stuff, playing with redstone circuitry, fighting, potions, railways, breeding horses... The procedural generation is part of an ensemble. So the jury's out until we here what No Man's Sky's gameplay is like.

265 miles then recharge at the nearest filling station would be fine. Hell, after 265 miles I'd be ready for an hour's break.

The reality, though, is 265 miles (assuming you're starting fully charged from your mains-equipped garage), minus x miles if you need air con, lights or heating, minus y miles detour to take in the nearest supercharger, minus z miles extra safety margin (because if you run out its a tow to the nearest supercharger) isn't quite there yet. From the map on Tesla's website, there are plenty of US states with no superchargers at all. According to the same map, there are 0 in the UK (which may be out-of-date).

Looking at the UK, there's an OK-looking network of non-super chargers (still nothing like the filling station network), but they're typically 1 regular (13A) bay + one fast charger bay. If you turn up and the fast charger is in use (with the occupants off somewhere having a meal or shopping) then you better have enough charge to get 50 miles to the next station...

Also, since the battery size is determined by the size of the car (unless you fill all the luggage space with battery), having to buy a full-size sedan just to get a > 100 mile range is a problem if you really want a compact. Personally, the Tesla is the sort of car I'd only consider if I was making regular long trips.

There's also a huge scalability problem with charging stations - a regular gas pump can fill one car every few minutes, an EV charging bay can only top-up one car every half hour but by that time the occupants will probably be staring their third Big Mac or in the mall trying on shoes. While EVs are a rarity you can get away with a couple of charging bays every 50 miles, which will probably pay for themselves by attracting wealthy Tesla owners to shops and restaurants. If they take off, you'd be talking about wiring up half the bays in the main parking lot.

I think its great that Tesla are working hard on some of these problems... I wish people wouldn't pretend that they were all solved.

(Actually, I've seen a video of Tesla's robotic quick battery swap procedure, which seems more viable for on-the-go recharges, and would be particularly sensible combined with a battery-leasing scheme).

Why? Does that have more vitamin A than an egg roll?

Yup, that's what's wrong with normal bananas - no payola for Big Agro.

Couple of important differences:

First, follow the money. Which side of each 'debate' is being bankrolled by big business?

Which side relies on "absence of evidence* is evidence of absence" and is expecting the other to "prove" its case by making firm "this is going to happen" predictions about a huge, complex, poorly understood natural system? (*and we get to choose what we mean by 'evidence')

Which side is proposing to "test" their position by forging ahead and irreversibly introducing material into the environment and seeing if any of the other sides doomsday predictions come true? You know, like continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere in increasing quantities, or going a head and introducing GMOs into the environment?

Which side is spouting scientifically incorrect bullshit like "CO2 is a harmless inert gas" or "We've been using GMOs for thousands of years?" (see thread above).

I'm not against GMO research provided it takes place in a sealed vat in a biologically isolated environment. Meanwhile, in Europe the problem is over-production fuelled by subsidies, and intensive farming (even without GMO) fucking up the environment. The third world is starving for a complex variety of reasons, including (but not limited to) poor infrastructure, wars, corrupt politics and some guy in Rome telling people not to use condoms. None of these problems are solved by maize resistant to one (expensive) brand of weedkiller or tomatoes with a 1-month shelf-life, especially when the end result is that your essential food crops are now (c), (r), (tm), patent-pending, copy-protected BigAgroCorp property. The amount of risk justified by these "benefits" is pretty much zero.

Not that Javascript doesn't have faults, but what exactly is it about Javascript that means it can't be used offline? The only real hurdles to writing 'offline' apps in Javascript are the lack of traditional local file access and other anti-cross-site-scripting features in browsers which have nothing to do with Javascript itself and everything to do with security concerns that would affect any 'web language'.

I give you, for example, GitHub's new "Atom" editor which, as far as I can tell, is mostly Javascript, running in its own gimped version of Chromium with the local file access API enabled. I assume Adobe Brackets is the same. Any 'offline' Javascript code that you've written in Node.JS are obviously a figment of your imagination, too.

Meanwhile, languages that "compile" to Javascript as if it were bytecode seem to work quite well, like the aforementioned 'Dart', Coffeescript, Haxe and Google Web Toolkit (which compiles Java to JavaScript). From what I've seen, although they ain't gonna be used for climate modelling or big data anytime soon, their performance is quite adequate for the sort of thing that web apps need to do.

No, it doesn't. It just suggests that interstellar travel and communication are very, very difficult. They don't have to be impossible, just hard enough to put a spoke in the Ponzi-scheme galactic colonization plan that the Fermi prediction relies on, and why SETI hasn't found any needles in the haystack yet.

We know that space travel is hard. We got from powered flight to landing on the Moon in a single human lifetime, then hit the wall. We have hugely successful, experimentally proven theories of physics that say that FTL travel is impossible, and well-reasoned scientific speculation showing that the possible loopholes (Alcubiere warps, wormholes etc.) require access to exotic matter, consume ridiculous amounts of energy, and (fortunately, for causality's sake) have deal-breaking complications... and even if they work may only provide near/at/slightly over lightspeed travel. We know enough about energy and matter to start doing the sums for slower-than-light interstellar travel and work out how difficult it is* (even SF writers fall back on Unobtanium power rather than 'old fangled' fusion drives for their generation ships, now).

As for communication/detecting signals, our only data point is us: A century or so after inventing radio, we're already switching to highly compressed, encrypted digital signals indistinguishable from noise without the 'key', transmitted at the lowest power and tightest beam possible.

So, despite all the plausible resolutions of the 'Fermi paradox' which, while not proven, are built on reasoned extrapolation of what we do know, why do people focus on the least plausible resolution: 'there are no aliens' which, while impossible to conclusively disprove without actually finding an alien, relies on us existing on the tail end of a probability curve?

That is anthropocentric thinking bordering on religion.

* Plus, if you can build generation ships that can survive in interstellar space, and manage their populations, it would be far, far easier to build space habitats and park them somewhere with solar energy and big chunks of raw materials floating around. Kinda reduces your incentive for Ponzi colonization which, as Greg Egan put it, "is what bacteria with spaceships would do".

Red herring. Where did the GP say that the nearside lane was clear? I've often been overtaking a string of slow-moving traffic, only to have some wanker in a big German saloon (the sort with the aggressive-looking LED running lights designed to intimidate peons without flashing and honking) drop out of hyperdrive 6" behind my tailpipe. If the nearside lane did have room to swing a cat, they would use it to pass you.

Less freedom than what? An XBox, Playstation or Wii with locked-down hardware, that probably aren't ever going to support alternative software or game stores without jailbreaking? And good luck building a homebrew XBox or Playstation using your choice of components.

Steam seems to be the least worst of the game platforms.

The real test of a SteamBox is whether you can quit Steam, access the underlying OS and install other software. AFAIK that is eminently possible under SteamOS - whether Steam Boxes will be locked down is unknown (it would be a mistake).

It would be nice if that underlying OS was Linux, but it sounds as if Valve has dropped the ball. It's OK taking forever to create the next version of Half Life - but if you're relying on third party hardware manufacturers you need to stick to schedule.