To the Republicans it isn't. To them, they believe their invisible man in the sky told them the entire Earth is theirs to use.

Not to all, or even most Republicans. That's mostly the Religious Right, and they have far, far more influence than their numbers say they should because the GOP needs their votes to win elections. Just because the far right extremists act that way doesn't mean that the party as a whole agrees with them.

If memory serves, he did use a fire extinguisher as a rolling pin to crush something (I don't remember what, either nuts or ice.) in a special to celebrate the show's tenth anniversary, but never on the show itself.

Inconvenience != terror.
Weird != terror.

Basically, you're redefining everything to be "terrorism" if it in any way results in an inconvenience to a government.

FWIW, Alton does admit to having one unitasker in his kitchen, although he's never needed to use it: a fire extinguisher.

1) LOL, if you believe less energy is consumed at higher RPM in an electric motor, I've got perpetual motion machine to sell to you. A transmission allows you to operate the car at highway speeds at a much lower engine RPM.

Yes, you can get slightly decreased energy usage at lower rpms because of lower friction and less slip on an induction motor (the kind used by Tesla), but throwing a multispeed transmission in there adds weight and complexity, and also increases drivetrain losses (transmissions are inherently lossy), though the amount of loss over a single-speed gearbox is probably not much.

As I've asked before, what other applications have an electric motor paired with a multi-speed transmission? Train locomotives like these? Dump trucks like this one? Ship propulsion units like these? No, these all have motors either directly driving their loads, or using a single-speed reduction gear. And trains at least have a much higher typical speed range than cars do (0-150+mph for Acela Express, 0-220mph or more for high-speed trains outside the US).

It was obvious. I appologize for being nitpicky.

Burning empty buildings and train tracks isn't "terrorism", it's "sabotage" and "arson". Messing up some train tracks to inconvenience people, and then calling it in so the train doesn't go over the tracks and no one gets hurt, isn't "terrorism", by definition, because there's no "terror" involved. This goes even more so for blowing up power lines, which rarely hurts anyone (unless it's in the middle of a heat wave or something, or cuts the power to a hospital).

This is like calling sit-in protesters "terrorists".

People taking their clothes off and marching to court? Are you kidding me? There's nothing remotely "terroristic" about that. That's a pure and simple protest. Protesting is not the same as terrorism.

Something similar. Took almost an entire ISP down. Had a few servers with about 200 domains running bsd located at thier "data center " which was more like a couple shelve and a long bench. Anyways, they where supposed to be running a script to verify two servers were mirroring the other two. I got lazy and stopped checking the logs for it and eventually they stopped running the backups or the script to verify it. One day a drive failed and about 50 domains were off line. I couldn't remote into any server and started getting a run around from their techs so i loaded up all the backup servers i had and a file share with copies of everthing and drove the 200 miles to the isp.

Turns out one of their techs tried to fix the problem by pulling a good drive from one of the other boxes but wasn't the one mirroring the bad drive. This then caused issues in the raid for the good box which he tried to rebuild by pulling the a drive from the mirroring box and ended up breaking all the configs. The worse part is that he thought he had the right tools to fix everything at home and instead of going to get them, he loaded my servers up and took them home.

So i show up, realize i have to start from scratch, set up a couple makeshift boxes that likely wouldn't survive a month, then i connected an old NetWare server. I enabled SMB on the two new servers and started transferring files from the NetWare server. Next thing i know, someone came in and started rebooting all the routers. I looked and jokingly said a reboot is not a fix.

Well, this went on for about two hours with about half a dozen people working on it, making phone calls and claiming they were under some DOS attack. My file transfer was finished, i disconnected the NetWare server, and it all magically stopped. I had misconfigured the SMB and created a packet storm that their routers and modems gladly repeated and multiplied to the point it almost melted their network.

My real servers finally showed back up so i loaded them up, built new ones and had a t3 ran to a commercial building near the house that became their new home. There was a lot of finger pointing and talk about compensation but it got dropped when i reminded them that the only reason i had access of that kind was because they failed to fulfill a contract obligations and then screwed the pooch trying to recover.

"Don't need" is highly debatable since even bicycles have gears for the sake of efficiency.

Bicycles are not powered by electric motors, and human legs do not resemble electric motors in any way at all. Human legs have a very limited speed range, just like gasoline engines; that's why transmissions exist.

Imagine driving your ICE car on the freeway in the 3rd gear -- that's going to cause a lot of engine wear and tear due to high engine RPM and drastically reduce mileage.

Electric motors are not like ICEs. Electric motors generate peak torque at stall (that's 0 rpm in case you didn't know). ICEs produce zero torque at stall, and don't even run that way, which is why they have clutches or torque converters, to allow them to idle. ICEs produce peak torque near the top of their speed range, completely the opposite of electric motors.

How many other applications can you think of where electric motors drive something through a transmission (I mean one with multiple gears, not a single-speed gearbox)? There are none. Train locomotives don't, ships don't, they all have direct-drive from their electric motors.

And if you're worried about speed, EVs don't run their motors slower, they run them faster than road speed, using a reduction gear. Go read your own link where that's mentioned. The Roadster only used a 2-speed transmission so they could get away with a smaller (lower torque, lower current) motor, but that really isn't a great idea because the complexity and weight of the transmission negates any cost, efficiency, or space gains you get from using a smaller motor. Higher speeds in an ICE are a problem because there's so many moving parts, and a bunch of them aren't rotating, they're reciprocating (think of the con-rods). This isn't the case in an electric motor, where there's only 1 moving part (aside from the balls in the bearings) and it rotates; higher speeds aren't much of a problem here, within reason.

What sort of an idiot makes a car where the battery cannot be changed at a service station?

What sort of idiot thinks it'd be a great idea for someone to exchange their brand-new but discharged $20,000 battery for an old, worn-down battery that's been recharged at that station, and is now worth about $5,000 because it's near the end of its life, or worse, has bad cells and is on the brink of outright failure?

Whose bright idea was it to force consumers to plug their cars in for charging?

Maybe someone who realized people who commute every day would rather recharge at home, which takes no extra time at all, than waste time taking a separate trip to a service station?

I'm currently looking into replacing my gas furnace with a heat pump, powered by a combination of solar-, wind-, and hydro-generated electricity.

The negative is that my winter heating costs will double.

Maybe, maybe not; it entirely depends on the relative prices of electricity and gas in your area. I used to live in NJ and the natural gas prices there were atrocious; it would have been cheaper to heat the house with electricity (and in fact, that's what we ended up doing after we figured out how much gas heat was costing us: we turned the house heat way way down to just keep the pipes from freezing, and then used portable electric radiator-style heaters, because it was much cheaper that way).

Chevy volt, nissan leaf, i3, etc are all pure POS in which the car sales have been going down, not up as expected. In general the leaf and i3 are too weird looking and offer equal or less performance to ICE cars BY DESIGN. Interestingly, all of the electric cars could EASILY blow away ICE cars. Why do they not? Because it would gut the sales of ICE so, none of the car companies want that.

This seems like BS, I'm sorry, at least if you're referring to range. On an EV, range is solely dictated by battery capacity. Batteries are expensive; they're easily the most-expensive component on a Tesla. If it weren't for the battery cost, we'd all be driving EVs now, because everything else on an EV is either the same or cheaper or not needed, compared to a gas car (brakes/steering/suspension: same; radiator/transmission: not needed; electric motor: cheaper than complicated ICE). Tesla's pushing down the battery costs, but it's taking a while. Unless I'm missing something, it simply isn't economically possible to build an EV under $30k with 200+ mile range, and it's all because of the batteries. Tesla has good range, but their car costs over $100k too.

You could be right about them being a top 5 carmaker within a decade, though, since they have a first-mover advantage, while the other carmakers have been doing little to nothing with EV technology. It's hard to say, though; it wouldn't be that hard for an existing company to jump on the bandwagon, since so many parts of a car are the same with EV propulsion (just not the engine). And IIRC Tesla gave out free access to their patented technology so that'll make it even easier.

How long does it take to recharge to get that range back?

Not very long. You can plug the car in overnight at home so it's ready to go the next day for your daily commute, or you can go to a Supercharger station and recharge in 30 minutes. You do need to stop and use the bathroom and eat, don't you?

I take 2 or 3 trips a year touring

Simple answer: if stopping for 30 minutes at a Supercharger station is a problem for you, then rent a car for your rare trips. Or, use your other car. You do have two cars, don't you (assuming you're married/in a relationship)? Anyone rich enough to afford an EV of any kind, and who isn't single, has two cars in their family.

which gets about 200 miles per tank

What kind of shitty car do you have that only gets 200 miles per tank? Any decent car these days can go 3-400 miles per tank. If all you can afford is a 1975 AMC Gremlin, then no, an EV probably isn't in your budget.

And there's a problem with your concept too. You do not know god doesn't exist. All you know is that you have not been convinced that one or more God's exist or existed at any time. And no, saying if god exists do X to prove it does not mean one doesn't exist when X doesn't happen any more than i wouldn't exist if you demanded i took a dump on your door step while you sleep as proof i exist and i didn't.

The worse part. In your fervor to proclaim a scientific untruth (science cannot prove a god doesn't exist, only that one is not needed ), you miss the entire point of the clause. However you were created, a common inborn desire of man is to strive for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness which is not limited to a select few born into the right families or royalties , or bestowed upon by some king or whatever for the success or pursuit in those goals.

All through human history, this is a desire of the human race. Choices and ideas on how to achieve it varies, but it has been present. People naturally desire it. The fact that they were created (in however that came about ) means this exist.

No, the transmission needs no modification; EVs don't need a transmission at all. The Model S only has a single-speed gearbox.