Not only do you have to plan your driving based on where you can find a suitable outlet,

Give them a little bit of time to develop, and they'll be everywhere. They'll get the infrastructure developed even faster, since it just requires existing power lines, and little no-maintenance boxes at the corner of regular parking spaces.

waiting for half an hour every two hours isn't very competitive

I'd say that's about half-way there... Maybe a bit closer. You're already likely to stop every 4 hours or so, for food and restroom breaks. There just needs to be a charging station next to a few of those parking spots, and you'll get fueled up with zero waiting. You sure won't have to go hunt down a gas station and stand around like an idiot, waiting for it to fuel-up.

Saying how wonderful and convenient gas stations are, is like complaining that nobody runs their own steam boilers anymore... It's so wrongheaded and backwards that I can't even process it.

One of the biggest advantages of EVs and plug-in hybrids is that you can fuel-up AT HOME, overnight, drastically reducing the number of times you have to suffer through stopping at a gas station.

Replace all the cars on the long-distance highway with EVs and you'll need a service station about an order of magnitude larger in size (i.e. your typical 12-pump gas station becomes a parking lot with over 100 chargers).

Complete brain-damaged nonsense. With fossil fuels, you HAVE TO fuel-up at a station, every single time.

With electric, MOST people will fuel up, slowly, overnight, at home.

In addition, gas stations MUST be large and separate facilities you have to go out of your way to drive to/from.

EV charging stations can be (and ARE) just regular parking spaces with a small device at one corner. That means you just stop for your normal food and restroom breaks, and incidentally, your vehicle is getting fueled up with no extra time or effort from you.

It took 11 days to install the six charging stalls in Goodland, Kansas. If you thought it was a quick process to build a Supercharger station, you were clearly wrong.

And for comparison, just how long does it take to build a gas station?

Well - the only data players where I live are Verizon FIOS and Cox. Both of which will charge you $70 per month for data only.

I had Cox at pretty good speeds for about $30/month.

That was true of FIOS, but they currently have a $30/month option with 25/25Mbit symmetric service with 2-yr contract. They also force a $5/month router rental on you, but if you do things right, you can send it back right after installation:

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/ind...

Blame your government. They allowed the merger, and their screwy "culture" laws are the only thing keeping you from signing-up with other DBS services in the first place.

. I'm less than 30 miles from one set of towers and about 40 from the other, and I have far fewer dropouts from DirecTV than from antenna.

I didn't say crap TV antennas don't exist.

Buy a Winegard 8800 and a Boost XT preamp, and that distance should be no problem. I happen to be 50 miles away from the towers, with mountains in the way, and lots of local interference, and still get very good reception.

That's patently false. The digital switch was a knife to the back of anyone using an antenna.

No, it was a huge improvement. I use an antenna, and there was no knife in my back.

I can tell you first hand at our cabin - we got about 20 channels. Since the digital switch, none of them work.

Is it a VHF-only antenna? Did all your local VHF channels switch over to UHF where your antenna doesn't work?

Or was it an indoor set-top antenna with a little tuner knob on top of it, that badly distorts the signal and makes it impossible to pick-up digital signals, where you just need a $6 replacement?

Or are you using a very old 1st gen ATSC tuner? They get better every few years, better at picking up weak signals and better at rejecting interference.

With digital, you either get it, or you don't. There's nothing in between. That means if you were remotely on the edge of the signal before, you're getting nothing now.

No, it goes the other way. When you were getting a mess before, that could barely be distinguished from the background static video and audio, now you can get a crystal-clear picture.

And I can tell you at least where we're at, the broadcast signal strength they're using for digital is significantly lower than it was before.

I find it hard to believe that 20 different channels all reduced their broadcast power. Maybe one or two would do that, but it's more likely you've run into some other reception problem that you haven't figured out.

One ISP in my area that provides anything beyond DSL speeds.

DSL isn't dial-up. I don't see why people act like 5Mbps internet access is unacceptable, substandard and inhuman.

Besides, they know people want better, and keep their prices low to compensate... That should help you negotiate a better deal with your cable company, who doesn't know you really want the higher speeds.

most of us don't have a choice. It's Comcast or no TV.

TV antennas have worked since the 1940s. With the digital switchover is the 2000s, people even further out can get a digitally-perfect picture in higher quality with less artifacts than any cable or satellite provider offers. And you probably have several times more TV channels available to you than you would expect, possibly several good ones that are not even carried on cable.

Since the 90s, direct broadcast satellite has been an option for the overwhelming majority of people. If you've got any way to put a tiny dish where it'll have a view towards the equator, you can get subscription TV while avoiding your local cable monopoly.

And today, with high speed DSL and FIOS, you may be able to get more content than you can watch, for under $10/month. Even if you choose not to go this route, the threat of it is likely to keep your cable co in-line and behaving themselves.

call your supervisor over, I'd like to speak to them immediately. Inform them that if THEY can't disconnect my service, I'll be asking for their manager as well

There's no legal obligation for them to transfer you to their supervisor. You can ask a dozen times, and the "supervisor" or "manager" you get, will keep being the guy in the next cubicle over.

http://www.icmi.com/Resources/...

If that's true, plankton might be found all over the solar system.

"My God! It's full of plankton!"

They may be the "dark matter" we've been searching for.

Took 5-seconds to find:

http://www.zdnet.com/the-true-...

http://www.biznix.org/whylinux...

"[W]hite western women" are not "the most privileged creatures on this planet", as things like wage disparity

What wage disparity exists, comes as a result of what career paths women choose to take. So says a number of studies. Giving women the same wages as men, despite them being in less demanding jobs, is pure man-hating, women-are-perfect, political correctness gone completely awry.

sexual abuse

Huge populations of men are doing long jail terms and then being made unemployable and homeless for the rest of their lives, due to ever more strict laws that conflate rape with any and every other legal infraction that happens to have any minor sexual component.

access to healthcare

Men pay considerably more for health insurance, specifically to subsidize the higher cost of providing health care for women. Whatever the problems with the US health care system system, women aren't being disproportionally affected by it.

Why is it that sexism is only banned in one direction?

Who said it was? Rape jokes directed at men are banned now, too.

How it'll actually pan-out remains to be seen, and I can only hope it doesn't turn into the man-hating women's club everyone is expecting.

It wasn't that long ago that Fark stopped posting nudie pics every day, and spun that off to a separate Foobies site that next to nobody visits.

No, that's completely different than the scenario I described, and completely useless and unnecessary.