Yes, the original poster isn't quite right, but you are ignoring the fact that EVs are basically designed to be topped off every night instead of only filled when it gets near empty, as is typically done with gas cars. GP should have said that you can charge it from empty overnight on household power (240V/35A). Even most US houses have this anyway because electricity is delivered on +120V and -120V wires, and it's just that most appliances that aren't electric ovens, dryers, and/or air conditioners, run between 120V and neutral while those large power appliances run between +120V/35A and -120V/35A.

Since most electricity at night costs ~$0.11/kWh and gas costs ~$4.00/gal, going 100 miles costs $3 in a Roadster (27kWh) or $8 in a Prius (2gal). I haven't ever bought electricity in another country, but I know the gas is sure way more expensive in the EU so I expect one would get the same result there.

So a one-car family probably shouldn't have an EV (until we get 1000 mile batteries), in case they need to take a road trip. But many American middle-class families have 2 (or 3) cars, 1 of which could be an EV.

I don't understand why we don't just build pyramids, but with radioactive waste instead of dead pharaohs. They've proven that they can last for 4500 years and counting. You can build them almost wherever you want (subject to only to fault lines, nearby human populations, and proximity to radioactive waste generation).

Also, by this point, I'm not sure Yucca Mountain would be able to hold all of our high-level radioactive waste anyway.

In theory, all we need is a sufficiently high carbon tax or a cap and trade system with a very low cap. The free market would then decide the appropriate amount of decreased consumption vs. increased efficiency vs. cleaner sources vs. etc. That said, such a solution is not really politically possible when we can't even convince people global warming is real/caused by us/a problem. From a more practical standpoint, we need to throw every little solution we can at the problem, and doing those in steps is why you don't often see a list of solutions that actually compares to the magnitude of the problem. But here's what I can come up with off the top of my head:

• Gradually increasing carbon tax (at fossil fuel extraction/import so that a few companies worry about it and then pass the cost along to the millions of consumers).
• Research integral fast reactors and then build them to meet baseline power consumption.
• Research algae & cellulosic biofuels until it's cheaper than conventional jet fuel/gasoline/diesel.
• Research cheaper solar photovoltaics systems.
• Make roads more bike-friendly so more people will bike to work.
• Improve public transportation.
• Insulate buildings more.
• Build high-speed rail up & down the coasts.
• Build solar thermal power stations in the southwest.
• Build wind farms in the central US and offshore the East Coast.
• Build wave power stations along appropriate coastline.
• Build energy storage (ie. pumped hydro).
• Increase transmission capability to transfer electricity across the country.
• Build a smarter electric grid to decrease demand when intermittent sources decrease.
• Once we have more carbon neutral sources of electricity, use electric heat pumps instead of natural gas or oil for heating.

Nowadays almost all camera batteries provided by (computer, camera, car, etc.) manufacturers are Li-Ion and almost all rechargeable AAs are traditional NiMH, so it sounds to me like you are comparing different chemistries and erroneously concluding that the result is due to the quality of the battery.

Li-Ion batteries and low self-discharge NiMH batteries discharge 2-3% per month. Traditional NiMH and NiCd batteries discharge15-30% per month. If you buy the low self-discharge NiMH batteries, you won't look back (unless you have applications where you change the batteries more often than weekly, then you're doing so much recharging you won't notice the longer shelf life).

To answer the original question: since EVs currently use Li-Ion batteries, expect them to discharge a few percent per month, which would add up to one full cycle every 3 years. Using the national average of $0.12/kWh, this would translate to a cost of a $0.64/year for a Chevy Volt (16kWh) , $0.96/year for a Nissan LEAF (24kWh), and $2.12/year for a Tesla Roadster (53kWh), so not much.

Too bad that a) Seagate's QC on the Momentus XT sucks and b) they don't give a shit about their customers and will gladly wait 3 weeks between confirming receipt of malfunctioning, under-warranty drive and actually mailing another one back to you, leaving you drive-less for a full month. But hey, who actually needs a hard drive? I regret not just buying a small SSD for more money but way less hassle.

The cheap options all evaporate as soon as you want a router with the same features as the Time Capsule or the $180 AirPort Extreme (plus BYO external drive); Simultaneous Dual Band and USB looks like it'll run you $120, not $50, from non-Apple brands.

Oh, and "you’ll need to use a little hack [13] to force the new drive to appear in Time Machine. Once it appears, however, your cheap-and-cheerful DIY Time Capsule should function in exactly the same way as the real thing."(emphasis mine) I'm sorry, but what is the point of a backup that should work?

I want a backup that I am confident works; saving $60 isn't worth it.

Or maybe people (our grandkids) should have the liberty/freedom to decide if they want to live in a polluted/warmed environment instead of other people (us) making a nonreversible decision for them. We could force conservation and sustainability on 6 billion people now, or can force it on ~10 billion of our descendants (and maybe more) later by virtue of leaving no other options; which leaves the most people with the most freedom?

If you've really looked around a MagSafe you'd see there is a bit more to it than attaching a magnet to a power cord. The pins are spring-loaded so that the circuit cannot close unless they are depressed, preventing you from accidentally shorting it out and causing a fire. Sure, no one cares about this feature with the typical coax type connector that is held in by friction, because the powered wire is recessed, but you can't really do that if you are trying to get rid of the whole friction thing so it can come undone safely.

You realize that not all radiation is the same right? For a simplistic view of photon radiation, there are high energy photons (x-rays and gamma-rays) with an absorption length of several meters of human tissue which distribute an even dose throughout your tissue and then there are relatively low-energy photons with an absorption length of about a millimeter of human tissue which are consequently absorbed predominantly by your skin, concentrating the dose there.

The TSA claims to be using the low-energy kind that concentrate the dose on your skin which would likely cause skin cancer. (I haven't looked up the absorption spectrum of melanin, but I think it drops off before we get to the soft x-ray region so dark skinned people may be just as susceptible as pasty white /.ers.)

I used a printer to print my last few tax returns because I'm too cheap to pay $15 for TurboTax state filing when I can print it and mail it for $0.42 + a few drops of blood^H^H^H^H^Hink (which annoyingly did give out 1 page into my tax return this year) and I'm not comfortable printing it out at work or in a public library.

Look up Americium in a Table of Isotopes; there are a decent number gamma rays that it emits at 60keV or 73keV depending on the isotope (Am-241 or Am-243) after it alpha decays. That said, smoke detectors vary a lot depending on the amount of Americium inside and you're always better off with a long half-life calibration source.

You necessarily don't need lots of rare earth elements to make an electric car. Sure, when Toyota was designing the Prius in the mid 1990s, they chose to go with rare-earth magnets in their motors because they were the latest, fanciest, lightest magnets you could buy. On the other hand, Tesla Motors (and other companies) in the 2000s took a more cautious direction and built their propulsion motors without permanent magnets, therefore using no rare-earth elements there (the power windows probably still have rare-earth magnets, just like in every other modern car). Instead, Tesla Motors went back to the induction motor, originally invented by, you guessed it, Nikola Tesla in 1888. Rare earth problem solved.

References: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/04/induction_motors

If we pumped our own oil at the rate we are consuming oil, we would run out in ~10 years and then we'd either be out of oil or need to import ALL our oil instead of 2/3rds of it.

Last I looked, the plants in Japan survived the earthquake and aftershocks with no major damage. However, the fault lines in questions near Japan are in an offshore subduction zone and therefore produce tsunamis, which can cause major problems if systems are not designed properly. The fault lines near the California nuclear plants are slip faults and generally onshore, meaning they can no more produce a problematic tsunami than a wind farm. Also, the power plants in California were designed for an earthquake 15 times stronger than what geologists believe is the maximum possible earthquake locally (remember, since neither plant is on a fault line, the earthquake magnitude is not the local magnitude). On the other hand, nuclear power plants in the Midwest were built without earthquakes in mind and could suffer damage from geologically routine earthquakes in the region --- so I'll take earthquake-prepared California.