I was in the new Tesla dealership in the Roosevelt Field Mall in Long Island on Sunday. The Model S is a good sized sedan. I did see 5 grown adults sitting in it. The car itself looks great, like a Bentley, I thought. I learned of the constellation of supercharging stations there, which put in a nail in the coffin of range-anxiety ninnies.

But letting you recharge for free? That's genius. A swift kick in the nuts to both the oil and traditional auto industries. More power to Tesla! God how I'd love to see the fossil fuel people utterly collapse in a year in the face of such disruptive vision.

You're living the dream. Thanks for posting such a strong testimonial. I keep saying, "What if we stopped shipping $365 billion/yr overseas to buy oil and spent the money here?"

Have you posted info about how you went off-grid? I've been thinking about doing the same thing but there's not much cut-and-dried info out there that I've been able to find.

We live in Brooklyn, in Park Slope. We have a car, because it's vastly easier to move our small children around (plus their strollers and diaper bags and toys and snacks, etc, etc) in a car than it is to heft all that up and down the stairs in the subway and ignore the glares of other riders because you're taking up too much space in the car. Same goes for the bus. Once a kid is old enough to carry their own backpack, sure, the need for the car drops a lot. But as someone who has traditionally been anti-car, there are legitimate reasons to have one even in NYC. Now, if you don't want to lose your mind on an on-going basis, you ought to pick a car that is small so you can find more parking spaces you can fit into.

I visited the new Tesla store in Roosevelt Field Mall in Long Island yesterday. According to them, you can fully charge the car overnight from a regular outlet. A full charge will take you 300 miles. Americans drive an average of 29 miles/day, which means in one night's charge you can drive for 10 days.

Tesla is building a network of supercharging stations across the country along interstate highways, too. So for your daily commute, you're covered. For your Thanksgiving trip to grandma's house, you're covered.

As far as everything else, there are these big cables running everywhere that carry the stuff called electricity, which happily is the same stuff you fill your batteries up with.

Oh. I see. So, when the Bridgestone tires I bought fail catastrophically, then you would jump up and point your finger at me, saying, "Aha! See?! You ought to have done your research on the expansion coefficient of steel-belted radials *before* you bought those tires. Well, I did, because I'm a know-it-all Poindexter, so I. have. no. sympathy. for. you."

OK. In the real world, in technical fields you have to run 24/7/365 just to stay even with the people in *your* field. You don't have time to micro-manage every step of the chain between what you do and the end market (whatever that is). So saying that, gasp, a cancer researcher might have not fully vetted a mere domain registrar like GoDaddy before paying for their services and therefore it's his fault is puerile at best.

You didn't try very hard to get the lay of the land, if you're saying those things about NY. NY is a great place to raise kids. Lots for them to see and do and be stimulated by. The neighborhood I live in is bursting at the seams with young families. They have phenomenal playgrounds to play at, like the sort of stuff I used to dream about as a kid. They have massive parks to play in, classes to take, activities to do. If you prefer lower-density neighborhoods, there's always Staten Island, Far Rockaway in Queens, Riverdale in the Bronx, or NJ.

And for adult interests like art, culture, and cuisine I can walk to world class cuisine, any kind of cuisine, in less than 5 minutes from my house and pay less than you would at McDonald's. And the art and culture you can usually get for free, especially in the summertime when they have free concerts and performances galore.

I grew up out West in the 70's and I know all the stereotypes about the big, bad city, and I can tell you that not one of them is true.

and they want their stereotypes of cities back. Dirty, filled with crime, derelict neighborhoods, etc. etc. Thanks to the meth epidemic I'd say that suburbs and rural America have inherited that rap.

I live in Brooklyn. Yesterday I took a break from programming and went for a casual walk through the neighborhood, swung past the cafe on the corner where there was a full-fledged ceilidh going on, then went up the street through a block party where the kids were drawing with chalk on the street and playing in the fire hydrant they had opened a bit as a sprinkler. Through Prospect Park where people were playing cricket and eating tandoori BBQ. Then around through the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens where they were having a bonsai exhibition. Out the north entrance and sat and watched the mathematically patterned dancing fountain in front of the Brooklyn Museum of Art for a bit. Then swung back through the green market at the top of Grand Army Plaza where I picked up some of the finest organic veggies on the Eastern seaboard for dinner. There was a bluegrass/folk trio jamming just inside the GAP entrance to Prospect Park, so sat and listened to them for a while. Then walked back home past artists selling works that would be hanging in a museum in the rest of America.

That wasn't a special festival day, just an average summer day in New York. Didn't have to plan to see any of those things. Just did, because they're just there and they're just happening like that all the time, everywhere here. Had I walked in a different direction I'd have seen plenty of similar things that way.

None of any of that sounds anything like the weird, dystopian picture you painted of the big, bad city.

For me, being around that degree of refined creativity and passion is incredibly inspiring as a human being and as a technologist. So, yeah, because the suburbs are the opposite of that sort of density and complexity, they are soul-crushing.

But I'm glad you like it there. Please stay.

The cops and firefighters have their own dedicated coms. So why do they need another? Citizens, however, do need an emergency system if the government decides it wants to begin censoring communications, monitoring them, or shutting them down. Having a mesh network that could spontaneously form would be especially useful in that case. Rather makes the prospect of cops being able to confiscate cameras and other devices recording their misconduct rather futile, doesn't it? As in, sure, take the guy in the front's phone or camera, but all the thousand people in back already have the footage and are uploading it to the broader internet, plus they have footage of the exact officers who are confiscating the guy in front's camera.

Loved the Stainless Steel Rat. It influenced my life in 3 key ways. Jim di Griz's mastery of judo inspired me to earn a green belt and stand up successfully to the bullies in my junior high school. And if it weren't for you I wouldn't have known Esperanto existed. Never learned much of that, but it kicked off a life-long love for languages that has led to mastery of five others. Lastly, it began a life-long quest for a real-life glass of Syrian Panther Sweat.

I have grown heartsick, just down- and dog-tired, of the cottage industry in the public discourse of setting everyone at each other's throats. Pundits spend so much time and energy inciting riots while real problems go unaddressed.

So when this fellow comes along and tries to stir up the same nonsense among programmers it gets my goat. Didn't we learn anything from lasting damage of the vi vs. emacs Holy Wars of the past? TIMTOWTDI, people. Don't buy into this guy's screed.

Do we need a public awareness advertisement of a field of nerds at each other's throats while Stephen Hawking looks on, a tear running down his cheek?

My natural geek bias is coming out, but this defines team sport and puts the Olympics to shame. Phenomenal achievement--congratulations to NASA and JPL!

To see anyone working themselves into a lather over an irrelevant OS. Everyone who develops for real does so on some *nix variant. The tools available on Windows are neither free nor meaningful.

I have been off MS for 15 years. I stopped having regular contact with its variants around Win2K.

No, no, I understand that many users still live in Windows-land. I understand that many Baby-Boomer CIO/CTOs still accept everything that MS says as gospel. But those people are not long for this world. And everyone from Gen-X to younger who is building for the future, does not use Windows in any way, shape, or form.

So I look on this whole Windows 8 discourse as I do on Kabuki, that is, as something that might be quite meaningful and relevant to the culture in question, but still quite alien and quite irrelevant.

Shine on, you crazy diamonds...

Please, the really creative thinkers will find much better things to do with additive manufacturing. Yes, you *could* employ your 3D printer creating objects that the established powers-that-be know how to defend against. But that's a futile exercise. The brighter lights will understand that asymmetrical warfare (if they're so inclined) is the way to go, and they will design accordingly.

The time is not far off when someone bright within the 99% will figure out that they can enable a quantum leap in human progress by designing something that disintermediates the entirety of the 1%.

Those times are terrifying. They're also terrifically exciting. And they're waiting for you in 6 months.

I can't spare a moment to watch the advertising debacle that is the Olympics; I won't waste a second of my time to endorse or support the corruption of the IOC by watching; I can't be bothered to weather 25 minutes of backstory, 30 minutes of commercials, to see 5 minutes of competition quick-cut between 15 different events, none of which NBC will ever let me witness the beginning or conclusion of; and furthermore as much as I can appreciate supreme human effort in pursuit of a goal, these athletes are the very class of people we geeks were neglected and abused for in school, while we tried to solve the problems that plagued civilization and tried to improve mankind's lot, so I don't have a whole heck of a lot of sympathy. Sorry.

But for all that, the Olympics are about *games*. That is, they don't matter. They produce no outcomes that advance the human species, beyond tertiary considerations.

The Mars landing, now, that represents a new frontier. Everything we do within our solar system or the universe to understand our place within it matters. Our grandchildren will wonder that we found the time to explore other worlds while most of the world's governments' attention was absorbed with worthless things like the Olympics. They'll shake their heads at the unfathomable naivete of beggaring the future to satisfy the momentary, ephemeral impulses of manufactured demand.

It's like pooh-poohing Columbus's discovery in favor of the local bull-fighting results.

I, for one, will be awaiting this landing with the ardor that others watch football. Football doesn't matter. This does (tm). Hope all you other /.-ers are there with me.

But if you do have decent insolation and greater than 2mph average windspeed, you have options. If you can only do a roof-mounted wind turbine, then there is this:

Honeywell Wind Turbine

If you have an average windspeed of greater than 8.5 mph then you could also do one of these units, which can be mast-mounted for greater than rooftop-level windspeeds:

Windtronic Wind Turbine

Whatever works for you, it's worth considering that traditional, fossil fuel-generated grid power has and will continue to rise a lot for the forseeable future. For example the cost per kwh in the Pittsburgh increased 10% in the last year alone. In NYC, it's currently greater than $0.30/kwh for the end user. It doesn't take much of that to get your personal break-even under 5 years (not that long when you consider most people own their homes for 30+ years).