The supercharged version was actually more fuel efficient, but it raised the cost of the vehicle. They could not compete with the Chrysler minivan using such an expensive engine and had to introduce the Sienna, which had a normally aspirated engine (and 20 or so more horses).

The Previa couldn't get out of its own way. That's why the had to make the Sienna. Maybe you could get a more powerful electric engine in the same space, though. But it's a pipe dream for now - they can barely make affordable batteries for tiny economy cars... a minivan is out of the question.

I found $159 with no money down, but it's only for 7500 miles. If you only drive 7500 miles, you use far less than 250 gallons per year in gas in a Golf. Maybe less than 200 if you are on the highway. Even in a state with $3 gas, you are talking about $750 per year in fuel costs. Not worth it.

The comparable gasoline lease gives you 10,000 miles, so you are also getting less miles in the lease. I don't know what beelsebob's terms are, but it is very rare that a lease would be a better deal than a purchase.

I don't know what tricks your lease is pulling, but an eGolf is in the mid-30s and a regular Golf is at in the low 20s. That is a lot of gas money. If you live in CA, it would probably be worth it if the government is paying for much of the delta. In other parts of the country, you would need to see how long it would take to burn $3000-5000 worth of gas. For my little 20 miles a day it would never be worth it. For a longer commute, it would pay off sooner but the range would become an issue. That means you need a bigger battery, which increases the cost and then makes the payback longer.

It will happen, but it will take some more time for battery prices to come down. ICE engine costs will also go up as efficiency standards become more stringent. If the government removes the subsidy we are a long way off yet.

We shouldn't have to design things to prevent this kind of act.

That's debatable. But in the real world you do have to design against the random mis-placed back-hoe bucket, a truck going off the road and hitting a relay cabinet, a sperm whale attempting to mate with your undersea cable and good old lightning strikes. Which are sufficiently random that protecting around - or designing around - random damage is still pretty much necessary.

I suspect that there has been insufficient paranoia in the people choosing the topology and physical layout of the cables. Putting all of your 100% redundancy in the same cable bundle doesn't give you redundancy against gross damage to that bundle, whereas running 50% of your capacity in a bundle down Main Street and 50% in a bundle going down Cross Boulevard provides service level protection up to events that take out both Main Street and Cross Boulevard. But that does increase your cabling installation, maintenance and repair costs appreciably, so I understand why PHBs do the Wrong Thing, even if their Dilberts tell them what the Right Thing is.

"Tap to click" on a touchpad is one of the stupidest things ever invented.

I think it's really well designed, and excellent at achieving it's purpose.

It's purpose is, of course, to really fuck up any users who are not touch typists intent on RSI, and any users who are touch typists by forcing them to take their hands off the keyboard.

Me? I carry a mouse. For the work's laptop. And a mouse for the client's laptop. And a good, left-handed mouse for my laptop stays in my locker when I'm not on the boat. And there's a spare mouse in the locker too. Beats using a touch pad. Using a clit-stick beats using a touch pad. Using a keyboard accelerator beats using any of the above, but most applications seem to be working hard to make that impossible these days.

. the first point being that this is an internet chat forum and a certain amount of latitude is expected in this context

Wrong.

read what the site's sub-title is : News for Nerds.

I don't see any reason to lower the expectations I've placed on other users for the last 17 or so years (I've forgotten when I signed up. I know I was still on dial-up ; Slashdot was one of the things that persuaded me to get an automatic dial up account instead of manually dialling up). If you're a nerd (which you self-identify as, because you're here) then you should be able to handle a level of technical discussion far higher than the jock in the stadium.

Nonetheless you do seem to have some severely distant-from-reality ideas about the biology of corals. That's a general point. Perhaps you'd like to explain how long it takes a coral to die due to increasing water temperatures, and then reflect on what windows that leaves for remedial work? In general of course. The impression you give (obtained by, uh, reading your words ; I may be under the misapprehension that you chose your words with more consideration than a "normal" person. Because you're, like, generally here, man.) is that you think that it is an instantaneous reaction, for all corals in an area in a very short period of time?

In general, how long do you think it would take a new coral growth to spread from a thermally resistant survivor to at least partly replace the corals lost in a bleaching event? It's quite an important question because, in general, it affects things like shore line stability for considerable areas, and so affects how much expenditure will be needed for protecting harbours, approach channels etc for shipping?

Just to put things into context - the last time that the planet had this level of ocean acidification and greenhouse gas dumping, it was done over a period of about (+/- 50%) 6 thousand years (compared to the couple of hundred years that we've done it), and it took about 120 thousand years (compared to the 10 thousand years we've had agriculture) for the effects to be absorbed back to something approaching normality. That's one of the reasons that it's geological marks are a useful signpost. The question is less one of whether or not corals will survive, but more of whether human civilisation will survive to ask the question of the corals.

... that's more than a little pedantic.

If you want a scientific discussion, then get used to pedantry, and saying precisely what you mean using precisely the technical terminology of the field, unless you want people to think that you mean what you say, instead of what you mean.

For example, you say Change the temperate of the water? Coral dies. / Touch the coral? The coral dies. / Change the ocean chemistry in anyway? The coral dies. I suspect that you mean "Change the temperature of the water too much and too fast and the coral dies" (and appropriate other changes). Because if that isn't what you meant, then you are implying that every single day then every coral on the planet dies as the thermonuclear radiation of the rising Sun sears the water. (The deep water corals would die on a less predictable time scale. I see about 0.16 centigrade variation on the well I'm just writing reports on, though that's isolated from the global deep water circulation. But that's an easily measurable change, which you imply is fatal. If only the seabed wasn't lethal, so that there could be corals to die.)

You seem to be thinking that all species of corals are interchangeable. Which I find incredible, having to spend some parts of my working life writing reports on corals at the bottom of the North Atlantic (well, 2km below surface ; below the photic zone by over a km, and in water temperatures of 1-2 centigrade) and other parts of my life monitoring for contamination of coral reefs in the intertidal zone and 25-30 centigrade water. Somehow, I don't think that one of those species is going to be able to colonise an empty niche left by the other.

Rate of change is very important. The global temperature rise in the Lower Cretaceous didn't lead to a significant extinction event. That temperature change took place over several millions of years. A similar magnitude of temperature change in the Late Eocene (the PETM "blast in the past" as we call it at work, using it as a geosteering datum) took place over about 6000 years and led to one of the largest mass extinctions outside the "big five".

The effect of humans on the seas is significant, important, and growing. But personally, I'm slightly more concerned about the pH changes than the temperature changes. Not because I think corals are robust to temperature changes, but because the symbiont algae are probably more amenable to rapid evolution (human directed, if necessary) and experimental recharge of the corals. Which is work-in-progress. But that won't be by the sort of mechanisms that you seem to think will happen.

Pressure differentials do nasty things to seals. Particularly with nasty chemicals around.

Getting the floating level correct may give a reasonable environment. Multiple floatation bags - hydrogen being OK in an oxygen-free atmosphere - provide plenty of redundancy. It'd be fun trying to land the first few rockets to start building the base.

Occupy the base with a plant (machine, or biological) that turns CO2 + water into carbon dust and plastics construction material, and that you can von Neumann your way to habitability in a relatively short period of time.

Terraforming Venus has always struck me as being a more approachable tactic than terraforming Mars. The big question would be - is there enough water? And with 90-odd bar of atmosphere to work with, you can throw dirty snowballs at it with the fair expectation that they'll not blow back into space.