Unlike internal combustion engines, electric brushless motors can last pretty much forever. Drivetrain wear is probably the #1 reason cars depreciate in value. If there's no wear, there's no depreciation.

ahem, about that.

Three drive train replacements in 30k in an ICE vehicle would qualify it under probably every states lemon laws.

I have two cable companies, U-Verse, and a WiSP available at my house, though only the competitive cable provider interests me since I have no desire to deal with any big telco at home since I deal with them way too much at work and the WiSP has some fairly restrictive limits on usage relative to my families usage (~200GB/month and we haven't even cut the cord yet, if we do I expect that to roughly double).

Actually, you generally can't choose DSL providers anymore since the FCC stripped state utility commissions of the power to force naked DSL offerings to CLECs by the ILECS (FCC 05-78).

My buddy who lives in the hill country (near Dripping Springs) uses a WiSP for his connection and uses T-Mobile's WiFi calling since literally no provider offers service at his ranch. If you want something a bit more convenient than the cell download two-step perhaps look to see if they're available in your part of the hill country =)

Round power connectors are crap. The jacks stretch and stop making proper contact in no time. Apple used to use them back in the PowerBook days, and on the PB 145, I broke at least three cables and at least two or three jacks on the back of the device over the course of three or four years.

What in the everloving god do you DO to your laptops? I just polled the guys around me and in a collective 30 years spanning thousands and thousands of machines we came up with TWO machines that needed repair due to power port problems.

Err, the church has always been learned, in fact most of the information that survived through the dark ages survived because of monks. If you're thinking of Galileo, the church knew he was correct but they didn't think that the populace should be exposed to it without preparation, that might have been very arrogant, but it hardly shows a lack of scientific knowledge by the Pope.

The problem Apple had is they wanted the entire front to be sapphire, but with holes for the buttons and such, your phone has the screen protected but nothing protruding through the crystal which makes it almost infinitely easier than what Apple was trying.

Wonder what the efficiency is like though.

I'd assume it will end up somewhat close to Fischer–Tropsch, about 50-60% max efficiency.

Intel's new SoC's reduce what you need for a basic end-user computer to a motherboard the size of a stick of gum. And that's not an exaggeration.

Oh yes it most certainly IS an exaggeration, it's 10cm by 4cm, much larger than a gum stick at 8.5cm by 2cm. Plus the Intel needs a fairly large power brick. Now some of the Android sticks are as small as a pack of gum and are low enough power that they can run off the USB port built into some TV's (if they're made for charging a phone it will work, if they're only for running a flash drive then it won't) so they really are tiny.

Shit, why not sync it to your cellphone? If it's a couple GB it'll fit on any reasonably sized phone and who leaves their phone anywhere? If you're really paranoid then encrypt it before the sync in case you somehow lose your phone.

A combination of the back yard and wallet idea, have a solar powered rPi in the back yard with an SD card acting as a backup target, there are plenty of waterproof rPi cases and solar to USB panels.

Very cool, then it should be able to smoke a plane in destination to destination times, between crowded takeoff slots and the fact that trains can do city center to city center it's no contest. The cost is obviously astronomical because of the tunneling, but I'm not sure an artificial island expansion to add air capacity would be that much cheaper, Kansai was $20B and Chbu was $7B, add in inflation and more expensive raw material costs and you're looking at probably half the cost of the train route.

They can't un-cancel Fringe, Leonard Nimoy is dead, Josh Jackson got picked up for a second season of The Affair, John Noble is doing Sleepy Hollow. They could pickup the idea and reboot the series but the head writers are all on other projects, JJ Abrams is a bit busy, only J.H. Wyman is available from the original staff so even a reboot would be unlikely to be anything like the original run.

600km/h is 3/4 of the speed of a modern airliner (

No, it's 2/3rds, Boeing 777 cruise speed is 905km/h, 747-400, 787, and A380 are slightly faster, A340 is slightly slower.

However, if you never go anywhere and have really good 4G coverage, setting your phone to 4G-only may well be a good workaround to reduce your chance of an intercept.

The current generation of Stingray devices can do LTE interception.