Well, there are some original model Prius out there with over 1M kilometers on their less overengineered batteries so I think any speculation about throwing away a Tesla because of a worn battery pack are just a bit pessimistic.

The tax credit is there to jump start the industry, and there are per manufacturer and total vehicles sold caps on the credit, compared to all the perpetual credits for the oil and gas industry that's actually extremely progressive.Oh, and you can buy a Nissan Leaf and take full advantage of the credit without being anything approaching "Rich".

Thing is, in California electricity costs almost the same as gas

The top tier with southern california edison is $0.32/KWhr so filling the top capacity model S costs $27.20 and gives you a 300 mile range for a cost per mile of $.09. The average price of gas in southern California is currently ~$3.50 so to match the Tesla you'd have to achieve ~38MPG, which is quite a bit better than the 740i achieves, probably the most comparable vehicle to the Model S. Heck, the most fuel efficient large BMW in the US, the 535d, only achieves 30MPG combined. This also neglects the fact that if you have the money for a Model S you can afford to put up solar panels to avoid falling into that top tier of consumption so your real cost per mile could be significantly lower.

When I was in university,I used an HPUX system that had been heavily retrofitted to use all of the gnu applications and utilities that were available at the time. Nobody ever insisted that it ever should have been called GNU/HPUX. At east one release of Minix extensively used gnu software as well. If that was ever an expectation of Stallman's for operating system installations that heavily depended on GNU, then should have been in v1 of the GPL. Doing otherwise, and pulling this only after Linux had started to acquire some notoriety of its own makes him look just as bad as people who sit on patents until some really big company start to use it without knowing about the patent, and start enforcing it only then.

Who said I was talking about the kernel? Stallman's insistence that distros should be called gnu/Linux simply because of how extensively it relies on them is rebranding, pure and simple, and it's something that Stallman should have pointed out in v1 of the GPL. Doing otherwise just makes Stallman as bad as the patent trolls he objects to so much.

It's Linux, not GNU/Linux, no matter what Stallman insists. Linux is released under the GPL, but it is not, itself, part of the GNU project.

3dldf, a2ps, acct, acm, adns, alive, anubis, apl, archimedes, aris, aspell, auctex, autoconf, autoconf-archive, autogen, automake, avl, ballandpaddle, barcode, bash, bayonne, bazaar, bc, bfd, binutils, bison, bool, bpel2owfn, c-graph, ccaudio, ccd2cue, ccide, ccrtp, ccscript, cflow, cgicc, chess, cim, classpath, classpathx, clisp, cobol, combine, commoncpp, complexity, config, consensus, coreutils, cpio, cppi, cssc, cursynth, dap, datamash, dc, ddd, ddrescue, dejagnu, denemo, dia, dico, diction, diffutils, dionysus, djgpp, dmd, dominion, dr-geo, easejs, ed, edma, electric, emacs, emacs-muse, emms, enscript, eprints, epsilon, fdisk, ferret, findutils, fisicalab, fontutils, freedink, freefont, freeipmi, freetalk, fribidi, gama, garpd, gawk, gcal, gcc, gcide, gcl, gcompris, gdb, gdbm, gengen, gengetopt, gettext, gforth, ggradebook, ghostscript, gift, gimp, gleem, glib, global, glpk, glue, gmediaserver, gmp, gnash, gnat, gnats, gnatsweb, gnome, gnowsys, gnu-c-manual, gnu-crypto, gnu-pw-mgr, gnuae, gnubatch, gnubg, gnubiff, gnubik, gnucap, gnucash, gnucobol, gnucomm, gnudos, gnue, gnufm, gnugo, gnuit, gnujdoc, gnujump, gnukart, gnulib, gnumach, gnumed, gnumeric, gnump3d, gnun, gnunet, gnupg, gnupod, gnuprologjava, gnuradio, gnurobots, gnuschool, gnushogi, gnusound, gnuspeech, gnuspool, gnustandards, gnustep, gnutls, gnutrition, gnuzilla, goptical, gorm, gpaint, gperf, gprolog, grabcomics, greg, grep, gretl, groff, grub, gsasl, gsegrafix, gsl, gsrc, gss, gtick, gtk+, gtypist, guile, guile-dbi, guile-gnome, guile-ncurses, guile-opengl, guile-rpc, guile-sdl, guix, gurgle, gv, gvpe, gxmessage, gzip, halifax, health, hello, help2man, hp2xx, httptunnel, hurd, hyperbole, icecat, idutils, ignuit, indent, inetutils, intlfonts, jacal, java-getopt, jel, jwhois, kawa, kopi, leg, less, libc, libcdio, libdbh, liberty-eiffel, libextractor, libffcall, libgcrypt, libiconv, libidn, libjit, libmatheval, libmicrohttpd, libredwg, librejs, libsigsegv, libtasn1, libtool, libunistring, libxmi, lightning, lilypond, lims, linux-libre, liquidwar6, lispintro, lrzsz, lsh, m4, macchanger, mailman, mailutils, make, marst, maverik, mc, mcron, mcsim, mdk, mediagoblin, melting, metaexchange, metahtml, mifluz, mig, miscfiles, mit-scheme, moe, motti, mpc, mpfr, mpria, mtools, nana, nano, ncurses, nettle, network, ocrad, octave, oleo, orgadoc, osip, panorama, parallel, parted, pascal, patch, paxutils, pcb, pdf, pem, pexec, pgccfd, phantom_home, pies, pipo, plotutils, polyxmass, powerguru, proxyknife, pspp, psychosynth, pth, pyconfigure, pythonwebkit, qexo, quickthreads, r, radius, rcs, readline, recutils, reftex, remotecontrol, rottlog, rpge, rush, sather, scm, screen, sed, serveez, sharutils, shishi, shmm, shtool, sipwitch, slib, smalltalk, social, solfege, spacechart, speex, spell, sqltutor, src-highlite, stalkerfs, stow, stump, superopt, swbis, sysutils, talkfilters, tar, termcap, termutils, teseq, teximpatient, texinfo, texmacs, thales, time, tramp, trans-coord, trueprint, unifont, units, unrtf, userv, uucp, vc-dwim, vcdimager, vera, vmgen, wb, wdiff, websocket4j, webstump, wget, which, womb, xaos, xboard, xhippo, xlogmaster, xmlat, xnee, xorriso, and zile are all GNU. Linux is not.

The objection to calling it GNU/Linux should not be taken as a refusal to acknowledge the important role that GNU software has played in Linux's development and success, but that role does not spontaneously give Stallman permission to rebrand Linux, as if it were always part of his own project. If Stallman had really wanted any products to get publicly rebranded as GNU simply because they utilized GNU products so extensively, that's something that should have been clearly written into GPL v1. Such an explicit claim, however, probably would have resulted in GNU never becoming particularly popular in the first place.

Your claim that I am a 'terrible human being' noted. So what does that make you given the fact that your claim is based on my comment, which states that no human should be forced to be a slave to another human by anybody, especially by the violent power of the state?

What does that make you, a 'better' human being, to want to use the violent power of the state to force people to give up portion of their live involuntarily for any supposed benefit of anybody at all or for any reason whatsoever for that matter?

At the very minimum it makes your position extremely inconsistent within itself, claiming that being what you are a 'better' comparing to what I am, while declaring that people need to be forced by violence (that is what state is - violence), subjugated to the will of the collective and not be allowed to decide how to control their own lives?

Then again, no socialist ideas are consistent within themselves. The so called 'green' socialists are of the opinion that people are destroying the planet. They want to use the violent power of the state to subjugate the individuals, to turn their productivity to the state, so that the state would decide what to do with it, supposedly for the benefit of the environment somehow (while the worst damage to the environment comes from the operation of the state, nuclear disasters, wars, pollution). They do not see the inconsistency of their ideas at all. They want the state to control the resources, but obviously for the state to do so, it needs to throw bones to the subjects, the bones being subsidies.

So tax those, who are productive, steal their productivity (lives, time on this planet, creativity) and allow the state to subsidise others? How is that consistent with the 'green' ideology, which is of the opinion that human activities cause ecological problems on this planet? They would be consistent if they in fact decided to completely remove subsidies, we get more of what we subsidise.

Providing subsidies causes an influx in births, those who live on subsidies do not have to care as much how to provide for the offspring, their birth rates are higher. It is an inconsistent position to provide for more subsidies from those, who already control their own birth rates to those, who will not if given subsidies.

But of-course socialist positions are never consistent.

As a side note, I have formed my opinions on this matter over 30 years ago, I only read Ayn Rand's novels out of curiosity maybe 2 or 3 years ago, I don't need anybody to form my opinions for me, which is, by the way, why I am an individual, not an ant in a colony.

for Windows 10 of course.

I suspect we've all encountered managers that don't grasp the difference between "managing" and "intimidation". But after your first job out of college, you will discover that you have better things to do with your life than burn the candle at both ends for a crappy job.

More importantly, the "death-march" style of project management doesn't produce good results. What you describe can't become the norm, simply because any company that uses it will find itself internally paralyzed, completely unable to adapt to a changing market. When individual projects stretch on for longer than the company's strategic plan, the threat of firings doesn't really mean much because none of you will still work there in five years.

Find a new job today and save your sanity.

No -- and, thus, I am not going to like Windows 9. I will hold my nose and use it for a few programs, but Microsoft's agenda is fundamentally incompatible with making the sort of OS I want to use.

I know what you do NOT do, you do NOT put a gun to OTHER people's had to steal their money from them to 'help' anybody whatsoever under any circumstances. No amount of misery can be justified to destroy individual freedom.

If a person is irresponsible and has children, too bad for those children, however that's what other family members are for. Beyond that there are private organisations that try to help children. Governments cause massive pain for children by destroying the economy that they and their parents live in.

What's your litmus test on Windows 9?

I want an OS that:

1) Doesn't attempt to hide the workings of my computer from me -- in particular, don't hide the way that paths and directories really work. (As a bonus: remove the spaces from system directories, dammit, because I get real tired of escaping them when I access my NTFS partition from a real OS.)

2) When something goes wrong tell me what the fuck it was. "The internet connection has limited connectivity" doesn't tell me a damn thing. "DHCP timeout" tells me something. Include both messages, by all means, for the benefit of Grandma -- but Grandma likely can't fix her internet connection on her own anyway.

3) Don't be patronizing. Copying .mp3's to a phone shouldn't give a "Your phone might not be able to play this file, copy anyway?" message, and there are a thousand things like that in Windows.

4) Get rid of file locking, or at least allow an override. I can decide whether a file is sufficiently "in use" that I shouldn't delete it.

5) Don't attempt to push other MS products (cloud services, "stores", and the like) on me, and don't keep spewing Windows Media Player etc. icons around after I delete them once.

 

- government has no place in anything that private individuals need and provide for themselves and others absent government.

Energy, clothing, food, shelter, education, transportation, roads, schools, investments, entertainment, mail, anything at all that people need, individuals need, individuals, people create and once they create it, if others like it, they can also buy these solutions from the individuals that created it. That is what businesses are: individuals solving individual problems that become solutions for the entire societies.

Your complete lack of understanding of these simple realities of life and your dogmatic belief in something 'grander' than you are, are blinding you and obviously somebody so blinded cannot see the forest for the trees. "Libertarian" is just a moniker. The point is individual freedom.

Free people create stuff based on their own creativity.

Slaves only work hard enough not to get beat up too much (just enough not to be taxed too much).

Looks to me you prefer a 'society' of scared, ignorant children rather than a society of grown up people actually thinking for themselves and building stuff they need and trading with other grown ups for stuff they built.

Plus, take the images and invert the colors. You can clearly see editing work.

I expected to see some sort of obvious contrast in the background when I tried this, but I didn't notice anything. What does one look for?

Yes it is... but you can do an approximation to it in polynomial time, which for most practical purposes is going to be just as good.