Hmmm... you don't have to go wind though. If you can get 10 cents per KWh, and the system takes 30 KW, you're looking at three dollars/per hour to run this thing, or $72 per day. At 1000 litres per day, we're at 7.2 cents per liter. (Plus the cost of the system) Still seems pretty high for any kind of large-scale deployment - more than 72 times the (ideal) cost of desalinization.

I wonder how economical it is... is it cheaper than desalinizing sea water? If the answer's 'no', there's really no story here.

I work with tele-operated robots, and I must say this is an amazingly useful feature. The robots can establish a connection with either WiFi or 3G, and are meant to navigate in indoor environments. With WiFi, you can go a short distance before losing signal. With 3G, you can go a short distance before losing signal.

People with laptops or mobiles seldom notice the dead zones - they don't suddenly stop walking whenever they hit one.

I strongly recommend Lord Toede.

At least I won't have to pay the Microsoft extortion tax on devices capable of running Linux. Well, not the hardware tax anyways - the IP tax still applies.

TB can be vaccinated against.

I develop software for a small company, and it sounds like you administer a large one... but when you say: "Dislike of portables has nothing to do with controlling you", I think you are lying. You would like to force me to install AV software (you can't, I develop in Linux), clean up my machine (whatever that means), wipe it without my permission, stop me from taking it with me, and generally have control over everything I do on the system.

I can imagine this making a certain amount of sense if computers connected to the work network had special privileges over external machines (they don't), or if we prevented remote login to our servers (we don't). Other than protecting me from my perceived incompetence, they only reason I could see for taking away control of my own machine is that you don't trust me not to run off with IP or company secrets. But I doubt you'd be able to accomplish that no matter what you do.

In short, it seems to be more about control than security. I'm not sure that up-time is an issue here either, since I can always put my laptop away and switch to the IT-administered PC on my desk if it should die.

Oops, that should have been the cost of the battery, not the vehicle.

Well, I guess you could alter the charger to stop charging the battery once it reaches 60% capacity... I believe the Prius stops drawing from the battery before it is completely drained as well. But in that situation, you'd be looking at making very short trips only.

I would just use up your battery as you see fit. I suspect the price of lithium ion batteries will continue to drop within the next 5-10 years.Tthe US government expects the cost of an electric vehicle to fall to $3,333 by 2030: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/gas_graphic_fullsize.jpg

Electric vehicles are normally charged to 100% capacity to extend the range. I don't know of any that deliberately charge to less than 100%.

The wikipedia has this to say about the Prius battery: "They are normally charged to 40–60% of maximum capacity to prolong battery life". As such, they don't reflect the lifespan of a battery that will be fully recharged after each use.

There are places where the placement of the lines seems to be a result of the terrain, and places where it ignores the terrain. Seems unlikely to be a visible pattern - I'd expect the lines to always ignore the terrain in that case.

I've never had a problem with the stability or performance of a Linux system. I've had significant problems with BSD systems with poor hardware support. Why should I "actually put some time in to making the system just the way you want, and RTFM" for a negligible gain?

I have often wondered if the Universe might be the single particle at the center of a black hole, which are always created with a high spin. I understand that this particle takes the shape of a disk due to its rotation, rather than collapsing to a single point. It would explain why galaxies are spreading apart rather than joining together - somehow the stretching of the black hole translates into a 3D effect on the 'inside'. If the black hole were not spinning, I would expect matter in the universe to condense to a black hole, and there would be no 'inside' or 'outside', only a black hole regardless of how you look at it.

To me, this makes sense as energy seems to flow into the patterns of matter - subatomic particles and atoms - like jelly into a mold. There are some hidden rules at play that make matter the way it is, and not some other way. No matter how you convert energy to matter, you end up with it forming these elementary particles. I would expect that to be true for the mass inside of a black hole, in the same way it's true for matter on the outside. The black hole, viewed from the outside, would have the same mass as our Universe.

Unfortunately, I can't think of any way to test this hypothesis, though it might be interesting to the compute the spin of such a black hole, and see if we can correlate it to any phenomenon we can observe.

And yet, the CIA world factbook lists US military expenditures at 4% of the GDP. As they list the GDP as 14.66 trillion, that's 595 billion dollars annually. That matches what the wikipedia says, that the US spent over 600 billion on the military in 2008.