When you travel as a group of several skier/snowboarder in the same car, the equippement don't necessarily all fit in the back's ski trap.
You either have to pushdown one of the back seats (and lose one place for one gang member), or you put all the skis and snowboards on the roof (at a small mileage cost but you still have enough room for the whole team).

Well after reading a bit on-line, it seems that they have a business model running a bit differently:
- they "almost give-out" the charging station to terrain owner (owner of highway shop/gaz-station, etc.)
- the owner only has to supply electricity (and as said electricity is cheap)
- in exchange, the owner gets an increased traffic in the shop/restraurant
(people, who have 10 to 30 minute to kill until full charge and buy food/drinks).

In that context, it's in the land owner's best interest to have a open technology in the charging stations:
- the more open the standard, the more different drivers can stop to charge, and thus the more customers.

And Tesla in turn has a small advantage too:
- the more shop/restaurant along the highway are likely to rent such stations, the more charging spots there are going to be overall, and the less potential customer will be afraid by range problems.
- thus market for eletrical vehicle increase (of which Tesla has a substantial mind-share, and produce the longest-range vehicle)
- thus market for car lithium batteries increase (a field where Tesla is leading, to the point that some people want to persuade them to drop the Model S and concentrate entirely on batteries for other companies).

Or to put it differently: all this charger will need batteries to charge, and Tesla is apparently the best game in town for batteries.
(It would be as if Sanyo started to provide "free charging station" around in a country where Enloop have the strongest market penetrance)

Also, I don't see any reason for Russia to have any interests in Snowden's intelligence.

On the contrary, I see 2 reasons NOT to:

- Russia probably knows most of this already. That's the country with FSB/KGB/etc.: They've been at this spying game for a long time and have a lot of experience. If a lone guy like Edward can pull such an operation without much help, imagin what Russia could do with way more ressources. (Ditto for China).

- Because he's known, it would be a diplomatic problem to openly use snowden as an intelligence source. better not touch him even with a 10-foot-pole and rely on their own (better funded, better trained) spy force.

Electricity is dead cheap.
A full charge cost a lot less than the equivalent range in gaz.
Tesla will probably center around a different model to attract customers.

One very possible model would be for Telsa to keep the charging either free or with only a small monthly/yearly fee, and earn most of the money through the services next to the station. (The charging is going to last up to 30 minutes any way. The driver and passenger are very likely going to take some time eating or drinking something).

The problem with DOS Box, it that's a full blown emulator. You're emulating a complete clone of a PC (which take some performance hit, specially if you consider playing the game on a handheld device, where DOSBox still has a significant impact on battery life).
Whereas 2D game engines of the era aren't extremely complex and could be ported to modern hardware without excessive work.

2D platformer of that era don't have extremely complicated engines.
more or less, the only assembler parts and low-lever system calls you're going to see would be the graphics (mostly: gfx-mod init, drawing sprites, drawing tiles. so mostly a bit of bliting) and sound (playing the music. here it's pretty much low level, with music specifically written for hardware, like fm synthesis).
compare this to 3D engines (where big bunch of assembler handle drawing a whole 3D scene so tons of code, but music is using some 3rd party middle ware for midi playing).

Rewriting the graphics routine using SDL isn't that much complicated. It boils down to rewriting the 2-3 tiles & sprite blitting routine with modern SDL (compare to a 3D engine, where the best course is to scrape it and rewrite a different engine using opengl).
Music might be harder (probably the best course is to use an adlib emulation library).

I happen to have the necessary skill set (it's been a hobby of mine, both back then and now, both writing mine and hacking others') but I won't necessarily have the time :-(

The point of having the source would be to easily port the game with SDL to any other platform.

Because Slashdot is US based and is english speaking, and nearly all the discussions here can there for fit within basic ASCII char-set. (Except a few loan-words which are acceptable without accented chars anyway).

The fact that you and I come from other regions and speak other languages won't change the fact that Slashdot doesn't give a fuck about non-english language and their scripts. Support for UTF-8 is not a vital necessity on /.

On the other hand, motivated people like me have found a compatible way around.

Also, given the avarage geekness here around, html entities don't feel that far stretched. Probably half the /. readership has edited HTML source in vi or emacs (depending on religion).

And collision avoidance systems in modern cars (standard for some amnufacturer, about to be mandatory in a couple of years in EU) are definitely a help to make the "short glances away of the road".

Of course, such systems ARE NOT an excuse to do a lousy jobs and construct very distracting and attention grabbing interfaces.
BUT it's always reassuring to know that electronics can help making your travel a bit safe.

use HTML entities like "é" :
"cliché" give "cliché"

TLS/SSL is not an encryption scheme. It's protocol which defines how a client application and a server negociate an encryption. You can't use it for mush else.

AES is an encryption scheme, you could encrypt anything with it (an SSL connection, a ZRTP media transmission, password-protect an archive, encrypt a file with OpenPGP)

of course libraries like openssl will implement both (because what purpose would be SSL without actually being able to encrypt ?!) and other functionnality (S/MIME, similar to openPGP in that it use PKI for encryption, but instead use the same central authority model as SSL, instead of the web-of-trust model like openPGP).
Note that several Linux distribution also feature the same level of use simplification.

I've never said it's impossible to make it better. But the user will always need some level of intervention (like at least caring that encryption happens, and checking that correct keys are used).

OTR basically works this way above any chat stream.

It's made entirely transparent, user won't notice that encryption is happening (I mean, unless they log into GMail and notice that the GTalk/Hangout chat logs only contain encrypted garbage).

The only required action from the user is running through a "socialist millionaire" identity confirmation.

It boils down to different trust models.

Trusting every involved government to stop indiscriminately spying on all its citizens require quite a leap of faith.
Encrypting between your correspondent and you doesn't require trust in 3rd parties like government or secret agencies.

Under this situation, having encryption anyway is always good in case that the gov decides to deceive you.

But yeah, I agree with you that achieving *proper* encryption isn't easy.

Now there's another effect: increasing usage of encryption increases (as I've said above) the cost of spying.
So use TOR even if it's just for pr0n !

Yep, have the same option in my ebanking interface too
(make an additional security to the "unusual pattern detected" approach).

Well that's exactly what TFA says:
car runs on the lithium battery.
when doing short trips like comuting between home and work ( typical everyday trips are 50 km according to TFA ) you simply run of the battery and recharge it at home/at work.
when doing long road trip, instead of stoping at a fast charging station, the alumium kicks in and is used to top the regular lithium battery.