I used to have DSL through TDS until I started having problems with nexflix buffering. The movie would play fine for 1 hour and then start to have buffering issues.
I did some network speed tests using dslreports and a local speedtest server. If I was just doing normal web browsing and then did a speed test I would get a decent speed, plenty good for netflix streaming. Then I tried watching a movie, one hour into it buffering started, I shut down the movie and immediately ran a speed test and found that my bandwidth had been cut exactly in half.

I repeated this test a number of times and then switched to cable internet and told TDS to get fucked - they wanted me to switch to a more expensive plan but did not admit to throttling my connection. Now I have higher speed cable(charter) and haven't noticed any throttling or had any trouble with netflix playback(HD).

No, but slashdot can protect you from sexually transmitted diseases.

teh interweb is teh suxors

The basement of the heritage foundation?

Today hackers gained access to my bank account and increased the ballance to 100 millions dollars without alerting authorities.
Actually that didn't happen. My bank account is perfectly secure. There are no hackers anywhere that are smart enough to do such a thing.

Peak oil doesn't mean that we are going to run out of oil, it means that we are going to run out of cheap, high quality, easy to extract oil.

Example: Iraq just sold the rights to develop their oil reserves for $2 per barrel. These contracts will probably go down in history as the best oil extraction deals ever made because Iraqi oil fields are as sizable as those in Saudi Arabia, the oil is high quality: easy to pump easy to drill, the fields have always been underdeveloped and underutilized and all other large developed oil fields are in decline so the price is sure to spike higher even as production ramps up.

Oil shale can be a source of oil, but it is not a source of cheap oil which means that our society will need to change fundamentally as the price we pay for energy increases faster than the rate of inflation.

Using electricity from coal fired power plants to power a 90% inefficient incandescent light bulb releases more mercury and radioactive particles into the air and water than the mercury used to make a CFL and you can safely dispose of a CFL.

The parent vonage link is a referral link so you can pay high rates and he has to shill to get cheap service.

The cool thing about electric cars is that they are so much more efficient that you don't need batteries that are as energy dense as gasoline. The tesla roadster has a range of 240miles with a battery pack that holds 53kWh. A gallon of gas has the energy equivelent of about 35kWh. So a tesla can go 240 miles on only 1.5 gallons of gas. This is because the battery and motor are so much more efficient than an internal combustion engine which wastes most of the gasoline energy as heat.

So in order to build awesome electric cars we either need batteries that can be recharged a little more quickly or batteries that can store a energy a little more densely, but we don't need energy storage as dense as gasoline for electric cars to work well.

Wasting wind power to create hydrogen through electrolysis(only 60% efficient) and then using more energy to futher convert it into liquid fuel to burn in conventional engines(20% efficient) might make sense if we had a large excess of wind energy. The problem is that while wind energy is clean and there are many good locations to site wind farms in the US the amount of electricity produced does not come close to meeting our demands for clean electricity. Maintaining our traditional reliance on liquid fuels for transportation is the wet dream of oil industry execs but it doesn't make sense to perpetuate wasteful energy usage as energy becomes more scarce and costly.

Battery powered electric vehicles(85% efficient) are in testing right now by most major car manufacturers. They will be on dealer lots within 2 years, and while they may not be very affordable when launched their fuel efficiency and ability to use cheap/clean energy will help offset the cost. We don't need to wait 50 years to switch our transportation system, it can happen gradually over the next 10 years as the current fleet of cars are replaced with new ones.

Btw Huge wind farms in remote locations is not the only renewable energy source, residential solar power can create energy where it is needed and power the cars of the future.

Apple will never an app that would allow users to bypass the applestore.

You can however jailbeak your phone and then install apps from source repositories. I have used cydia to install a number of unapproved apps, but so far I haven't been that impressed by these "free" black market apps because most of them contain advertising. And this is likely to break every time apple releases a new version.

Not only do the useless voicemail messages make you waste your minutes, but they make leaving voicemail more time consuming and less appealing, the alternative to voicemail messages is SMS which carriers make tons of money on because texting is usually an extra charge on top of your standard service.

We have the best government money can buy.

Electric cars of the future will not carry and do not need the energy equivalent of 10 gallons of gasoline. The tesla roadster has a range of 240 miles which is provided by a 53kwh battery pack. The car that MIT is building has a range of 200 miles so their battery pack is probably 45-48kwh. Since one gallon of gas is 35kwh and because efficient battery management systems rarely fully deplete the battery that means that an electric car with this type of range only needs the energy equivalent of 1 gallon of gas for a fast recharge. So you are off by a factor of 10 in your calculations.

The current tesla roadster can be fully charged in 3.5 hours using a 220V/70A, their next car, the model S will support 440V charging in order to significantly improve charging times - but we are sill talking hours for a full charge. Despite the long charging times this level of performance will probably be good enough for most people most of the time given the average daily commute of 20-40 miles.

You are correct that what MIT is trying to do will be a huge energy draw that cannot be supported by current residential electric services. They are connecting directly to their campus power plant which will never be possible for your average consumer.