Tesla has made an electric vehicle that doesn't make anyone with a sense of style want to puke, and that's a very good thing, but there's just a handful of things they need to do, IMO, to really knock the ball out of the park for electric cars:

1) One needs to be able to charge it quickly, perhaps with an upper limit of about 10 minutes or so, sufficiently to go approximately as far as one could expect go on a tank of gas in a typical car of today. I would not expect to be able to charge it this quickly on conventional house current... it probably would require a dedicated type of charging circuit. But this would make recharging a car at such places not significantly more time consuming than filling up a car with gas, and would make owning an electric vehicle vastly more convenient than it currently is.

2) Charging infrastructure needs to be ubquitous, so that if you can drive there in a regular vehicle, you should be able to get there and back in your electric car as well.

3) The pricing structure for an electric car should be comparable to that of an otherwise similarly equipped gas-powered vehicle... and should not carry a premium cost that is almost equivalent to buying an additional automobile. Making them affordable, in addition to the other two points, will mean that there's no reason for people not to drive one.

If or when Tesla, or any electric vehicle manufacturer, can hit all three of the above points, I'd dare say that the writing will finally be on the wall for the age of gasoline, and I think electric cars could outnumber gasoline vehicles on the road within a decade.

Why do you figure that actually having life should be a criteria for being earth-like? Like does not have to mean "exactly the same as".

Actually, at near light speed, time slows down, so a person who embarks on a journey in a spaceship capable of moving near enough to the speed of light could conceivably reach a destination many hundreds or even thousands of light years away in their own lifetime.

Of course, everyone that they left behind and ever knew will be long gone.

Probably no human will ever reach another solar system

I think that depends on whether or not you think that creatures who have human beings as evolutionary ancestors would count as human.

... Leaving aside the irony, of course, that the above post itself is rather full of gramatical mistakes (most notably, a spelling error, and inappropriate usage of commas), I'm still correct about the issue of whether or not it is acceptable to use 's' to pluralize lego. (accidentall hit the submit button instead of preview)

As I said, it's no more correct using an 's' to pluralize LEGO than it is to pluralize words like sheep... other examples of such words are deer, moose, swine, and aircraft. Putting an s on the end is gramatically incorrect, the word is both singular *and* plural. (most correcty, in fact, LEGO, when not being used to refer to the company itself, is actually a mass noun, and is comparable to words like 'snow', where the notion of "pluralizing" it doesn't even make any sense).

They aren't the same literal acts... but both are violent acts perpetuated solely by a difference in belief. Whether you kill or simply beat up, both are ultimately violent acts spawned from nothing less than the exact same hatred of things that are different.

The all-caps usage is acceptable... but in addition to being the company name, Lego (or LEGO) is a word that refers to any number of individual pieces, Adding an s on the end to pluralize it is about as correct as putting an 's' after words like sheep.

I'm not saying that people don't have every right to be pissed off about having their privacy invaded.... I'm saying that when violence is *ever* the defaut response to simply being angry about something that is not physically threatening in any way, shape, or form, then there is already a problem with the emotional maturity of that particular person.

I'd be inclined to not include Buzz Aldrin in that category because the person that he assaulted was physically stalking him, and deliberately creating a situation where Mr. Aldrin did not have the physical freedom to ignore him or walk away (since he and his camera crew simply followed him when he tried). That said, I think Mr. Aldrin should have told them to leave him alone, or he would place harassment charges on them if they tried to follow. It's not like he wouldn't have had a legitimate case against them.

Anyways.... supposedly, human beings are a civilization... so maybe people should try acting civilized. Your neighbor being an asshole should never be any justification for you to be one. See ethical vigilantism (point 12) on the ethics scoreboard.

Also... I'm hysterical how, exactly? Because I compare the threat of so-called "acceptable" violence today that would caused by what ultimately amounts to a mere a difference in beliefs (one person places more value on their privacy than another person places on the same person's privacy) to an example of violence in history over what also fundamentally amounted to a mere difference in beliefs?

Your stats are wrong... there are 30 firearms per HUNDRED people in Canada.

A (slightly) higher percentage of Canadians have firearms than Americans, but the difference in statistics comes from the fact that most people in the US who are armed in the first place possess multiple firearms.

I'd dare say not so much "hopeful", but perhaps "morbidly curious" would be the more accurate term.

Obviously such an overreaction would be wrong on every level, but when a person has actually attempted non-violent means to deal with a problem and only faced grief over it, doesn't that indicate that there's something already wrong with the system?

Pennsylvania is a two-party consent state, so by my understanding of wiretapping laws there, what this kid did was illegal.

Now, this isn't something I would want to see, but I am morbidly curious about what would happen if somebody tried a mechanism like this after being a victim of being bullied, got charged with wiretapping... and then when it happened again, the victim decides to simply kill the bullies in retaliation.

Now clearly, homicide would probably be considered "excessive force" as a means of dealing with bullying, but I think that this hypothetical scenario also shows that two-party or all-party consent requirements for recording might be broken. If a person tries non-violent means to get the matter dealt with, and only gets punished for it... then what difference should it make, in that sense, whether they resort to violent extremes anyways?

In Pennsylvania, if you secretly record somebody who is committing a crime, then instead of being considered helpful to the police by providing it as evidence, you would be be considered guilty of another crime yourself (which would then suggest to me that the video could not be used as evidence.... which would strike me me as pretty amazing if the crime that was recorded were heinous enough).

Someone who is so easily enraged that they would resort to physical violence over what ultimately amounts to a difference in beliefs over an intangible issue like privacy is no better than those who have, in the past, gone around killing nonbelievers in the name of God.

That's perfectly fine, but in practice, the HR people are the only ones that you are ever going to have a chance of seeing until you've done something to get yourself noticed by somebody higher up.

If you have connections that can get you past HR without any hassle, that's all very well and good... but not everyone is so well connected.