And it's perfect to acclimatise your ears to the next heavy metal concert you attend, too.

When looking at comparative efficiencies and pollutants, you have to look at the whole chain. From hole in the ground to rotating wheel. Even burning "Dirty" coal, Electric Vehicles have a distinct advantage. The losses and energy use involved in drilling/mining, transporting, burning and generating, transporting (considerably less loss) and finally turning wheels pales in comparison to the ICE requirements of drilling/pumping oil, transporting crude, upgrading/refining to petroleum (Which takes HUGE amounts of energy and is almost never mentioned), transporting petroleum, burning it and finally using it to turn wheels. For an ICE, you can generally only find information about the latter stages, and that is less than 40% efficient. Electric cars are 90%+ efficient with power from the wall, and the whole chain comes in at around 60-75% (So far, this is getting better all the time). Electric cars don't have, or need, cooling systems (in fact, the opposite is often the case, where heaters have to be installed as there is no "Waste" heat generated to warm the passenger cabin).

But, even if that wasn't the case, and pollution from both methods was exactly equal, it's much MUCH easier to introduce measures to clean up the products from 1 smokestack (recirculation/sequestration etc) than it is to do the same thing with hundreds of thousands of tiny, mobile, tailpipes.

Of course, as renewable resources come online in the power grid, the Electric car gets greener automatically (as it's power is being produced in a more green manner) without the owner having to do a thing about it, and that's also not considering engine oil changes, transmission fluid etc. Try doing that with your gas-guzzler.

Batteries for electric cars aren't perfect, they do require some digging in the ground and a little bit of chemical work to make them (Though ICEs also need batteries, along with the odd and rare elements they require for durability and longevity) but once made they are 99% recyclable. And even with that, they're still cleaner than the parts and ancillary equipment needed for ICEs

You didn't with the previous spec MS had put out for the XBox One. Now that they've executed their peer-pressured 180, that's not an option any more.

They were. You also now need the disc in the console to play the game at all times, which you didn't before. The DRM/Phone Home was entirely to enable the sharing features, including the "Play on a friend's console with your library". If the console can't verify you own a game, it won't let you play it (obviously). That stops you installing a game on your (connected) console, then giving the game to your friend to play on their (offline) console. Now the "Ownership" of a game is tied inexplicably to the disc the game comes on. So instead of "Digital Rights Management" you have "Physical Rights Management". Which is the step forward/backward is up to you.

Because there would be no trust to that key. Sure, it means your message would be encrypted, but so would all the spam you receive, 'cause there would be next-to-no incentive. And where would you distribute that key from? Who is in charge of that key server? What happens with forwarding? How about mailing lists?

Because of laws making it a federal offense to tamper with postal mail, it's considered more secure than electronic communication. It's also required in some cases, as electronic communication is not considered a legally binding document, contract or receipt.

Yes. Store a salted password hash, not the password itself. When someone requests a password recovery, ask them some pre-defined security questions, and mail them a one-time-only password reset link. Which is generally speaking the "Usual" mechanism. Anyone that isn't doing this should not be trusted with your details.

Microsoft Outlook and Exchange have supported S/MIME (Publicly-usable technology) out-of-the-box since at least Outlook 2000. So please stop trying to Microsoft-bash here.

Oh, and I have heard of "Carnivore". I've also heard of ECHELON and the Illuminati. If the government wants my address, there are a LOT easier ways of getting hold of it. The IRS, for example (as you seem to be using the US government), or the census bureau. Please adjust your tin-foil hat, or better yet, remove it completely, as it only helps the mind-control rays work.

Why would anyone use RFC1149, when it's been essentially superseded by RFC2549? I mean, really!

Generally speaking, retail sites (Ones who have the really important information, like credit card numbers and the like) also only store hashed passwords. So asking for a password will get you a temporary link e-mailed (usually requiring further security questions) to set a new password. Other personal information, your name and e-mail address, are not considered worth securing, as you automatically send them out with every message you send, and all your mail is invariably addressed to you with your full name by your other contacts.

Postal addresses are generally something of a grey area. On the whole, they're not particularly secured (Anyone who was determined to find out could find your address from the phone book, electoral roll, or other public list). Credit card numbers are typically secured by removing/obscuring all but the last 4 digits, and items ordered are again typically treated as "Better to include with a receipt, as a double-check, than to exclude".

There is, as always, a fine balance in the "Privacy is required" to "more information is better" debate, but leaving that aside, while SMTP is a plain-text transfer medium, it generally requires quite a lot of work to actually get someone's details. For instance, you have to:

• Poison a DNS record for a particular host (To point mail traffic at your server), or somehow spoof an IP address/routing record on the open internet

  Note, this will have to be done for the SMTP server(s) of the particular provider's message you want to intercept

• Intercept the particular mail message you want (There's going to be a lot of mail coming through, most of it inconsequential)
• Forward all the mail you've received on to the correct host (Which will be tough if you've grabbed their IP address(es)).

  If you don't do this, the provider will quickly notice they're not getting mail anymore and try to find out why, which'll get you discovered quickly

• Find some way to actually use the mostly useless information you have gleaned.

  So Mr. John Smith lives at 1234 Anyroad, Someville, KY, and bought a can of compressed air and a USB mouse... So what? Start flooding him with ads for compressed air products? Offer him hot USB on PS2 action from waiting serial mice in his area? That'll get you some sales... NOT. Oh, and you can buy that kind of information already, from his credit card company or bank (who make a very nice profit selling those details anyway) for considerably more cheaply and easily than poisoning the entire internet.

This isn't easy, or practical. Sure, if you want to, you can do it, but what is the point? If you're stalking them, there's much easier methods (going through their trash, trawling public records, google searching their name). If you're selling to them, there's easier ways (Buying details lists from credit bureaus, mass mailing).

The problem of secure e-mail has been around for a long time, and many solutions have been proposed for the problem (S/MIME, PGP, Domainkeys), but it's largely a chicken-and-egg problem - Secure mail systems are not universally supported, so it's not used/Secure mail systems aren't used, so they're not supported. Solving this problem is left as an exercise for the reader. Obviously.

Burn him!

If you go back far enough, you'll find that you are related to Charlemagne, or Ghandi. The higher you go up your family tree, the more parents, and parents' parents appear, in an (almost) exponential spread. Well, unless you're part of the royal family, or in the deep south of the US, where family trees tend to be a lot... slimmer...

And you probably won't see it rebroadcast. Fortunately there are some archivally-minded individuals that have made all 4 series available at a certain Privateer's Cove.

Well, The Model S has a 300-or-so mile range, which gets filled completely by one of their "Supercharger" stations in an hour. So let's do the math.

300mi / 55MPH = 5.45 hours.

So, if you leave at 8am, that has you travelling on the road until 1:30pm or so. Time for lunch, and an hour charge!

After lunch, you do another complete drain, taking you another 300mi. Now the time's 8pm, and time for supper. Oh, and another hour charge! Or you could call it a day there, and let the vehicle charge overnight, while you do the same. You've just driven 600 miles, after all! That's enough to get you from New York to Cincinatti, OH.

Even with only a 200mi range, you'd be on the road 3 and a half hours or so. So you leave a touch later, and have an early lunch.

Apparently, the logs also showed he took a lengthy detour through Manhattan, rather than a direct route.