My understanding is that recharging the battery is essentially re-smelting the aluminium ore that the discharge process generates. Hence I would expect that recharging the battery is effectively no different than making it in the first place. You do not have to purchase new aluminium ore but you do have to reclaim it from the empty battery. Hence I would expect that the recharge cost will be very close to the cost of a new battery so I think it will be more like the opposite of what you suggest e.g. charge $1,000 for a new battery and get $100 off the next battery when you return the first.

Thanks for your inquiry. Don't bother to give your name or address, simply head down to the nearest book store and purchase a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. You will be hearing from us soon.

[excerpts from Secretary of State testimony before the UN]

"... Numerous sources tell us that they are moving, not just documents and hard drives, but Protoplanet fragments to keep them from being found by inspectors. [...] In this next example, you will see the type of concealment activity [...] We must ask ourselves: Why would the Moon suddenly move equipment of this nature before inspections if they were anxious to demonstrate what [evidence of Protoplanet impact] they had or did not have? [...] While this -- less than a teaspoon of Protoplanet dust, [shows small glass vial] a little bit about this amount -- provides evidential clues of a Protoplanet impact, UNSCOM estimates that the Moon could be harbor TONS of Protoplanet material, enough to wipe out every competing Lunar formation theory on Earth [...] The Moon has now placed itself in danger of the serious consequences called for in U.N. Resolution 1441. And this body places itself in danger of irrelevance if it allows the Moon to continue to defy its will without responding effectively and immediately. [...] There can be no doubt that the Moon has in its possession evidence of planetary impact and the capability to rapidly produce more, much more. [...] My colleagues, we have an obligation to our citizens, we have an obligation to this body to see that our resolutions are complied with. We wrote 1441 not in order to go to war, we wrote 1441 to try to preserve the peace. We wrote 1441 to give the Moon one last chance. The Moon is not so far taking that one last chance. We must not shrink from whatever is ahead of us. We must not fail in our duty and our responsibility to the citizens of the countries that are represented by this body..."

THE TIME FOR ACTION IS NOW. We must move on the Moon, in waves of human exploration and occupation to establish the Protoplanet theory, secure all available Protoplanet evidence, and ensure the evolution of our species' manifest destiny to expand into space. Also.

And then, ON TO MARS to further secure the region. We must gather an invasion force, resolve to stay the course until 'mission accomplished', and declare war on Martian aggression (which has been implicated in the sudden disappearance of Pluto).

As an alternative to conquering the rest of our world so as to destroy the currency of others to protect the value of our own... as an alternative to easing into authoritarian government to enable the building of gulags that could encircle those unrepentant, those dissenting... as an alternative to this sewer of cultured dependencies and endless terrestrial wars...

We choose to broaden our horizons. This means space war.

We choose to meet this Lunar threat head-on and go to the Moon. And We Choose Mars also.

If it is war they want, such a war we shall give them.

If the Al battery is much more expensive than the Li-ion per km I would agree. However if it is cheaper per km that the Li-ion, or even slightly more expensive, who would not prefer an electric car which needs charging ~twice a year over one which you have to constantly remember to plug in?

I know it is Slashdot and the summary is misleading about it "adding 100kg over a Tesla battery" but if you actually read the article you would learn that the idea is not to replace the existing Li-ion battery but to have this as well as a reserve. As you point out most people only drive short trips for which a Li-ion battery is well suited. This is just to provide a power for long distance driving.

However, depending on the cost, since this battery is only 100 kg and the current Tesla battery is 500kg you could imagine completely replacing the Li-ion battery with five of these and having a 15,000 km range which would probably do most people for the best part of a year. This would only work if it is cheap to replace compared to the cost of a Li-ion battery which lasts for 100,000 km and costs $30k. So assuming the cost of electricity to recharge the Li-ion palances with the installation costs of the multiple aluminium battery packs you would require, the cost per aluminium battery would need to be $900. The cost of 100 kg of aluminium (which seems to be the principle component) is $180 for 100 kg so this does not rule out such a price.

Sadly the killer for this, and all electric cars, is that assuming an internal combustion car uses 6l/100km of petrol the price of petrol would need to reach $5/litre before it became more expensive than the cost of battery or about a factor 4 higher than it currently is in Canada. Still give it a few more years of declining battery costs and increasing oil prices and we will finally be there!

What a long way down to this.

TWENTY YEARS ago when a 1 megabit T1 cost $10,000 a month installed to the Caribbean -- with an equal measure of determination, deft grantsmanship and elbow grease we managed to bring Internet to the US Virgin Islands with the Virgin Islands Freenet. One day in September 1994 connectivity was available for ~40 cents a minute if you dialed long distance to the states, a couple thou a month for 56kbit or 10k for T1. The day after you could get an email address, access Usenet groups and browse the web with Lynx on 4 (and later as many as 12) local dialup lines.

So when the National Telecommunications Information Administration announced the first-ever roundtable discussion on the future of the global Internet we were there, and carried the newsgroups so our growing user base could follow and participate in this near real-time discussion. The issues were well presented, the discussion was formal and polite.

There does seem to be a general lack of civility and willingness to participate in process these days.

Now I do hold some measure of contempt for the Federal Government as a whole in its hubris over control of the Internet. The NSA is pushing net neutrality in its charter-be-damned initiative to listen to everyone, the president-du-jour tolerates 'Internet kill switch' dialogue throughout the Executive Branch as if martial law security checkpoints should be written into law, and let's not forget the peoples' hero Al Gore who lobbied for the government to hold our encryption keys in escrow. There is a large bullshit factor.

But attacking the FCC is sort of like going after park rangers. For better or worse (mostly better) it presided over the breakup of the Bells. It helped to ensure that even rural USA modernized its telecom to bring about modern access choices, the ones we take for granted today, to as much of the country as possible. And now they are charged with accepting comments on 'net neutrality' -- which will be as hard to adequately define in the modern context as it would be to discuss.

Now more than ever we need the real voices of people who aren't afraid to write their thoughts into multi-paragraph letters and opinions, no matter the medium, so say something about it. Just like my Freenet folks twenty years ago were eager to do. These folks are not wanting to know how to control, they are asking in what ways it may be best to regulate.

Control is what we generally try to avoid. Regulation that occurs with a majority of support that accomplishes useful goals -- such as the rural electrification and building of telecom in America -- is a necessary part of due process.

Time to try to recapture just a bit of the cultural restraint and intelligent determination of yesteryear, methinks.

Don't go blaming us Brits for treating American as a foreign language. I was in a Chicago book store several years ago and was amused to see that they had the Oxford English Dictionary on the shelves of the foreign language section.

The habitable zone only refers to the amount of heat radiation a planet receives it does not mean that every large rock there is habitable - just look at the moon. There are additional constraints for a habitable planet e.g. requires an atmosphere and liquid water. All this result does is to add an additional requirement near a red dwarf: you don't just need a gravitational field large enough to hold onto an atmosphere you also need a magnetic field to shield it.

thanks kindly, this route looks the most promising.

All; the other relevant details of my response including a sketch of how I could implement this idea are OMITTED because I am being harassed by Slashdot's 'Lameness filter' and rather than engage in some investigatory process (hint: it had nothing to do with CAPS) I said Fuck It. Time to move to Pipedot?.

Being a prepper of sorts, and seeing the Gub'mint positioning itself to hijack DNS in order to exert control (or potentially just shut everything down by attacking this low hanging fruit) I've been looking around for a very specific type of resolver, which can be placed manually into one of several modes:

NORMAL: all lookups are resolved with network queries (as a standalone resolver OR as a 'thin' resolver which just forwards to some upstream DNS server). The results are returned as a real-time resolver does, but are also cached permanently to disk in a database that will inevitably grow over time.

FALLBACK 1, fill in the blanks: when a real result is received yet it is a fail (NOERROR,SRVFAIL,NXDOMAIN), as might be the case in a hypothetical shutdown attack, a stored query that had a positive result is returned.

FALLBACK 2, DNS network down/disabled: all queries are returned from the database and network lookups are not attempted.

So while we are resolving normally a database is being created for emergency use, yet if some disruption to DNS occurs it would be possible to switch to one of the fallback modes to surf -- if not completely, at least with some reasonable level of success...

A desirable feature would be to store a maintainable list of 'poison' ip/net masks of known DHS/ICE webservers, so any A records matching this list are NOT treated as real results, and trigger fallback action. Another desirable feature would be explicit (and implicit via matching of results) recognition of wildcard DNS schemes such as gobblegook.realdomain.com so repeated resolves of these do not overwhelm the database. But there might be some gruesome heuristics behind this.

I realize OpenDNS is in itself a step in this direction, but the local fallback resolver would also give you options for cases when OpenDNS itself is not reachable, such as a hostile/draconian ISP that rewrites DNS packets to point to its own servers.

Perl Festivity Level 1: Developers and users have gathered to nibble hors d'oeuvres and chat amiably with each other about the Modern Perl Renaissance. With every sip of their drinks Perl seems ever more striking. Some are gathered around the upright piano improvising songs that proclaim how it is faster, neater, and sharper than ever before with its asynchronous APIs.

Perl Festivity Level 2: Everyone is talking loudly -- sometimes to each other, and sometimes to nobody at all. Perl seems even better. Perl Monks are patiently explaining syntax and style to potted plants and other nearby objects. Around the piano people are feeling fun and flexible, just as programming in scripting languages used to be. Someone is crooning a bawdy ballad where a couple of inexperienced DOM and CSS selectors encounter a very supportive bundled development server.

Perl Festivity Level 3: Monks are arguing violently and defrocking one another over nested do...until loops that bail on exceptions. People are gulping down other peoples' drinks, placing hors d'oeuvres in the upright piano to see what happens when the little hammers strike as everyone bawls "Got my Mojolicious workin' ... but it don't work on Python!" They have lost count of their drinks, and the world is harmonious with blissful adherence to modern interfaces and standards.

Perl Festivity Level 4: All the guests, hors d'oeuvres smeared all over their naked bodies are performing a ritual dance around a burning heap of tables and chairs in celebration of postfix dereference syntax, subroutine signatures, new slice syntax and numerous optimizations. The piano is missing.

~~ with apology and deference to Dave Barry

Correct. However I have an ethical problem with requiring someone to undergo a medical procedure for someone else's benefit because where do you stop? If it is shown that having your tonsils removed reduces the spread of tonsillitis do you mandate that everyone have their tonsils taken out? Taken to an extreme do you mandate living organ donation e.g. lobe of a liver, one kidney etc because you can survive quite well on a single kidney or reduced liver and it would save someone else's life.

The problem with taking away people's choice about which medical procedures to have is not something to be done lightly. A better approach is to immunize people from idiocy by "vaccinating" them with a good education. Like a vaccine education will never be 100% effective but if you can inoculate enough of the population you will get a herd immunity that will be proof against more than just anti-vaccine stupidity.

I know autonomous cars will be "oh so safe". At the moment I'm just as worried about what these things will make people do to people.

[OPENING OVERATURE]

Your driver liability insurance policy has come up for review. We have been recently been acquired by AAAA, the quadruple-A company -- the "Autonomous AAA of the future" and what that means for you as a member is -- it has never been easier to upgrade to an a-car! Financing is available! [link] Due to increasing pressure in the political, legal and underwriters' arenas, we regret to inform you that the cost of your driver policy will be rising this quarter in order to begin collection of fees for the Federal National Driver Insurance Pool, and rising at a steady rate thereafter. It will continue to rise over time despite your [good to excellent] driving record. Now that the Autonomous Vehicle Safety Act is law, and blanket liability accident investigation procedures have been approved by Congress, the legal liability of autonomous vehicles is capped nationwide. While this grants the manufactures freedom from risk of direct criminal penalty and potentially unlimited civil liability, it places human drivers in a difficult position. Most a-car accidents will, of historical necessity rather than actual circumstances, be "no-fault". Since human drivers and any victims claiming injury from them are still obliged to use traditional law enforcement and legal means of redress -- and the cost of these continues to rise -- underwriters are pressuring insurance companies to drop human drivers altogether. We do not intend to do this, but we can no longer provide policies for extended periods. Your new maximum policy period is now [one month]. Thank you for insuring with AAAA.

[INTERMISSION]

Meanwhile...

Dear editor: DRIVERS cause accidents. A-CARS prevent them. That's what the billboard says -- and if Howard County Referendum passes this September manually operated cars will soon be a thing of the past here. What started as a discussion at a hearing after last year's tragic accident grew into a full heated debate, and to think it all started with the parents who provide their children with a-cars pinning the blame squarely on other peoples' children. But then, after co-opting the national campaign with its slick literature and canned answers for everything -- NOW the fault is with human drivers themselves. And then in an astounding feat of lunacy they claim that it's only fair to place the blame on everybody. Not just the drunk, the aged or infirm, the inexperienced, the distracted or the just plain stupid. But no one's stupid in their book, we're just behind the times is all. They are like the drum majorettes of some utopian humanist parade. I say, SAVE US from these rich hippies, their weird toys and their broken ideals. Now I know a lot of these people, even like some of 'em, but aside from this national 'sideline the humans' campaign they're pushed at us (and WHO is paying for those TV spots I wonder) let's not forget that this debate started around kids. Kids who need to learn to drive as surely as they need to learn to push a pen and spell their name. It's like swimming, who would discourage their own children from practice in swimming, to become expert swimmers, because water is dangerous?? Every kid will need to drive some day, or suffer harm or hardship by not knowing how. These a-car parents even forbid their kids from riding in cars being driven by folks they've grown up with, trusted for years. At the parent conferences we even sit on opposite sides of the table, we can barely be civilized even, because this crap has gotten so deep. Well I say they are making a big mistake and don't seem to get it. It's not just that everyone who cannot afford these a-toys will be walking or begging rises on a-buses or buses with 'professional drivers' (and where do 'professional drivers' come from? Elsewhere? This sure sounds like a caste system). Save your a-car pools and charity, we're not buying it. Truth is, I don't like the message this sends to the children. And come September if this abomination passes you can bet we and our kids will be making our way OUT of Howard County. By horse-drawn covered wagon or by foot, heads high, in search of America as it was, as it should be. Respectfully, a four-on-the-floor hoofer.

[INTERMISSION]

Meanwhile...

The Need4speed mod was first developed in Central America. A software firm had been hired by a wealthy client to develop the ultimate suite of functions for "emergency kidnap evasion". It took the design limits of the vehicle to the edge, implemented spin and bump tactics for armored cars and the 'bootleg turn', re-ordered the evasion pragma to sideline small object/animal/child avoidance. A complete new class of stratagem for high speed pursuit where pursuing vehicles are recognized and evasion condition escalates until autonomous pursuers are left behind as safety overrides activate, or pursuers with human drivers are evaded by a series of maneuvers that strain physics to the limit. For a fee, the company would also perform detailed surveys and spatial analysis along the actual routes, devising clever 'custom' moves which, they claimed, would even evade vehicles running the stock software. Though they maintain that the product they did provide was a best fit for their clients, employees of this firm have since scattered or have been extradited to other countries to face manslaughter charges. Reverse engineering revealed not just a casual intention to erode safety features -- but stratagems to draw pursuers and bystander traffic into deliberate collisions with objects and each other in spite of other vehicles' documented collision-avoidance logic -- in fact, it actively 'games' that logic to ensure that the destruction of other vehicles, achieve its desired result.

Though we sympathize with your family's loss, we regret to inform you that Need4speed mods were discovered installed in a family vehicle registered in your name, as well as two others involved in the accident. It appears that the deceased and others were performing a "rabbit run" to test their illegal modifications. Pursuant to Federal law you should expect a formal indictment under the Autonomous Vehicle Safety Act.

[FINAL INTERMISSION] BBC Connections Ep1: The Trigger Effect

See you in some sorry-ass future. I'll probably be walking.

And you've been everywhere and seen it all -- and have come back to tell us how you've been everywhere and seen it all -- and have come back to tell us how you've been everywhere and seen it all -- and have come back to tell us how you've -- been.

Sorry to hear it. Get a leg up into the world of wonder and whimsy. Join us!

Great thanks has nutria recipe on that site to feed hungry family. We wait so long to find first from 404 page and then Slashdot people are quiet not help us. Many goods to you.