Until recently, production electric cars cost way too much, even when you figure you're saving most of the cost of gasoline over the lifetime of the car. (A 50-mpg Prius will use about $20k in gas over 200-250k miles; a 20mpg minivan will use about $50k, so I guess you can justify that Tesla if you were going to buy a gas-guzzler and didn't need the space.) Hobbyist electric cars can cost a lot less, if you want to do all the labor to retrofit a very used car with electric motors and batteries, but I don't.

But even now that prices are coming down, the range on the lower-cost cars isn't enough for me. It's fine for going to the grocery store, but my office is 40 miles away, and so is The City, so on the days I'm not telecommuting or want to go into the city for something, I need a guaranteed range of over 100 miles so I'm not worried about having to coast home on electron vapors or stop for half an hour at a charging station if there wasn't one near my destination. Battery range declines as the batteries get older, so that means I'd probably need a 150-mile range when it's new to be sure I can get to work when it's older.

Maybe a couple of years from now it'll make sense to buy an electric car; we'll see how long my wife's car lasts, and whether it's worth getting an electric when we need to replace it. The real cost includes adding an extra electric meter and 240v power to my garage space and the cost of storing the stuff that's currently in my garage, because Silicon Valley real estate is too expensive to actually use a garage for putting cars in...

Unfortunately, most lower-cost electric today talk about monthly lease prices, and hide all the other costs; one of the ones that was advertised on the radio did mention something around $5K up-front and 25 cents a mile if you drive over 10,000 miles a year - the reason I'd be buying an electric car is to make my commuting cheaper, and my gasoline car currently costs about 25 cents a mile (10 cents amortizing the purchase price over 200k miles, 15 cents for gas.)

I just bought a Ford C-Max Energi; but I bought it strictly for the green carpool-lane sticker.

In California, if you live in a big house, your marginal cost of electricity is shockingly high. For me, it's $0.33/kilowatt-hour.

My Energi goes 20 miles with a 8 kWh charge. That's $2.64 On gas, it gets about 35 mpg. If gas is $3.50 (current price) that's $2.20.

Now, during mid-day on a sunny day, I can charge it much cheaper on our solar panels (currently we are selling power back to PG&E, but at $0.11/kWh) and I do that. I also charge it at work, where it's 'free'; but I live 50 miles from work so I can't keep the car charged just at work. The 'free' power at work won't last forever, either.

You may ask "why not get a Tesla?" Good question. It turns out that there are (at my company) 3x the number of electric-ish cars as there are charging stations, so we have to swap them out after just a few hours. The Tesla would take all day to charge. Also, the Tesla is such a lumbering overpowered beast that it gets substantially less miles-per-kilowatt-hour.

Thad

>I'm building useful skills,

useful???

The overwhelming majority of the population gets through their entire lives without finding jumping out of a perfectly good airplane "useful" . . . :)

hawk

Snowden deserves asylum - he's wanted for a political crime, he's clearly guilty of violating US laws, and the US government doesn't accept a necessity defense when they're the ones he blew the whistle on, and even if he got a jury trial they'd make sure no juror who supports him would be picked.

Assange is a different case - the US wants him for political reasons, but Sweden wants him on trial for rape. There's a significant risk that if he goes back, gets a fair trial, and is found not guilty, the US will kidnap\\\\\\extradite him so they can try him for political crimes, and asylum would be appropriate then. But it's not appropriate now.

Somebody I know started taking antidepressants some time ago, and they helped the depression quite a bit. One curious thing, though, is that once she is taking them, she assumes that I can read her mind; that I obviously know what she is thinking. She stopped taking them for a while, and it was immediately apparent that she no longer felt that way, then when she started taking them again, it was back.

Take SSL/TLS. Are they going to demand both parties stash the session key, or do their handshaking through a proxy logging each packet?

Probably not. You're thinking like a geek instead of a politician. Politicians don't get their way by understanding technology. They get their way by finding people who do and forcing them to obey their will.

In this case, what Cameron means by banning encryption is passing laws that say something like, "If your website is used by people in the UK, you must always be able to comply with a warrant demanding data and you must provide all data, even if it is encrypted". The exact details of how that works is neither here nor there to them.

Now of course the interesting thing is how this interacts with jurisdictions, and whether it would be enough to make GCHQ shut up (probably not). The UK may or may not be able to force the hands of Facebook/Google/etc because the UK is such a huge market and they all have offices there, but China was a huge market too and Google walked away from that anyway. So it's hard to know how things would play out. For companies that have no UK exposure it's not clear what they'd do - probably use ad-hoc blocking of any website they suspect might be used by The Evil Terrorists if it doesn't comply. Could be a mess depending on how heavily they enforce it.

All those figures say is that birds of a feather flock together. Tory voters tend to live near each other and because the UK has a political system designed a long time ago for resolving local issues, not surprisingly it doesn't translate votes to seats directly at the national level. As local politics becomes less and less relevant, of course, people feel this system no longer works well for them.

However, as you note, it would not have mattered if Labour had won, or any other party. There are NO parties in the UK that believe people should be able to keep secrets from the government. It's just not something that fits into the political worldview. And because the voting system collapses thousands of decisions down to just one every so many years, surveillance and encryption is simply not democratically decided at all. Basically the wheel of power is decided by the economy, and that's about it.

Unfortunately this is not specific to the UK and is true nearly everywhere, France is even worse for example, and the USA pretends to care but realistically lots of Congressmen would very much like total surveillance of Americans .... and only feel they can't demand it openly because of that darned constitution. That won't stop them doing it in secret though!

Ha ha, did you think he meant warrants?

He meant warrant. Unfortunately as is often the case with the Tories, they use words differently to how ordinary people do. By warrant he means a ministerial rubber-stamp. For instance Theresa May last year alone "signed" nearly 2,800 warrants, a number that clearly shows zero attempt to investigate their legitimacy and indeed almost certainly means some anonymous flunky is signing them on her behalf.

Wrong. The LGPL license of free Qt allows you to keep the source code to your program secret.

I think it was GPL in the long past but they changed at least 10 years ago.

I've been writing code like this since 1985. Then, it was in LISP.

It's actually trivial to me at this point. You end up with a meaning trie with differential probability vectors, and some of the roots wither away as you go down. Making a machine decision is harder, but not entirely impossible.

I get incredibly annoyed at people like Lazlo Bock who want to put everyone's resumes into a form that basically allows Google (Lazlo Bock works for Google) or other companies to magically allow you to come into a new job under the horse collar of a performance review of your previous job which they were in no way involved with.

The whole "HR metrics" industry... uh... kinda pisses me off? I pick companies based on criterion other than standard metrics. If they pick me that way... they do not deserve me. Mostly they stumble into me, I fix them, and then I exit.

I understand the "OMG we need people who know what they are doing and not recent graduates!" panic. Does not mean I sympathize.

No problemo

I miss subtle stuff all the time. I rely on really strict semantics in place of "not trusting people", which I have a hard time doing (data is data).

And then he opened the SPARCStation pizza box to reveal... a Zilog UART!

For my 22K of code...

Yes. 3 bugs.

Errors are less of a problem than revisionist history.

I spent 4 weeks thinking, and then I coded 22,000 lines of C++ in about two weeks.

Ended up in wrist braces.

The code was worth it.