Actually, it's probably still not a joke. I used to write ring-0 code in windows, and it never sleeps in power idle waiting for an interrupt to wake up (at least as far as I could tell, up to xp or so). It just spins in a while(1) {LookForSomethingToDo()}; forever, eating cycles for nothing till something happens - a huge polling loop. Which in turn, called the idle loop in all MFC apps, and so on and so forth. Eats lots of power doing that.

Self-fulfilling and more complex than that, actually. At your personal end-of-life, investing for the long term is, shall we say, stupid unless you're in it to have a large inheritance to leave someone else, and already have enough. Unless that's the case, you go for max gain/year, which is often, but not always, in stocks that have cap gains growth - and you become one of those evil stock (trader) holders - if it dips, you're gone and on to the next thing, no matter what you believe philosophically about the advantages of long stable growth and dividends. Most don't have anywhere enough money to live on divvies in this interest rate enviornment (thanks, Fed). We have to kill what we're going to eat next month or next quarter or year. With the prevalance of disruptive technologies - the internet is itself the most deflationary invention of all time - cuts out the middlemen - you'd better be on your toes out there. How did long term holdings of stable buggy whip makers work out for you? There is no set and forget sucess to investing, trading, or whatever you want to call it - never was, really, except a few who got lucky, and luck and hope are not viable invesment strategies. And letting someone else make all these "hard" decisions for you is a decision to be fleeced or your welfare simply ignored, as NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR MONEY AS MUCH AS YOU DO. Period. I'm 60 and trade for a living, if I don't do well, I run out of money before I die or SS kicks in (which won't feed me, even on a farm). Yes, I'm one of those evil traders, though I make most of my money out-trading a bunch of robots who are programmed by the young hooker+coke idiots, so I'm stealing my tax dollars back from those who stole from us all, or that's how I see it.

So, you weren't doing your job - anticipating the changes and writing general code that is easily adapted to change. You wanted to be a robot, your boss wanted human judgement.

Agree, there's a lot of power in a (correct) name, especially in code. swim hammers it here. I ran a uP embedded dev firm, the hardest part was getting customers to understand feature 1 doesn't happen on day one, two on two and so on. If we had a month, 3 weeks of it were design, a couple days coding, a couple testing. Once they learned that was best, we were turning down work because we couldn't keep up with demand.

Trader myself. Mod parents up - they are correct. Check the Knight trading debacle: http://www.coultersmithing.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=328&p=3924&hilit=knight#p3924
The deployed their test harness instead of their HFT bots for 44 min and lost half a billion in that time - now out of business. I made good money during that time using human judgement. You can often catch an accidental high bid or low ask from an HFT, when they screw up, which is fairly often, as well.

afraid of it's own people - not being voted out, but who'll bring on the guilotines. The surveilance is to nip any attempt to organize against it in the bud before it can catch on. If it's just crazy joe down the street who disapears, no one lifts a finger or raises an eyebrow. But...give me 6 lines written by the purest of men, and I'll find something in there to hang him - most of us have many more than 6 lines for them to work with.

The Volt design messes with all purists - especially by just working well. It can be either serial OR parallel hybrid - or pure electric. Pretty amazing design, and I'm saying that as a career engineer (and if you look on gm-volt.com, not a GM site, you'll find most other owners are engineers too at this point).

Another Volt owner here. The caddy isn't for me - but I love my Volt, even living in the mountains of SW VA. I regularly get nearly 50 miles/charge, which is nice since the nearest general store is a 27 mi round trip. I burn gasoline only very rarely, but like the option (largely imaginary after a certain age person) of being able to call "road trip", hop in and no worries about range at all. I also use the Volt to back up my home solar system - the power can flow either way due to my hacking an inverter into the Volt that will run a battery charger for my house batteries. Rarely used, but nice to have it there - and it's by far more efficient than any backup generator you can buy, even the inverter type (have one, did the tests, Volt wins).

. The Volt excells on twisty mountain roads, at least with the right driver. It's even more fun to smoke ricky rice racer with the Volt than it was with the 2010 Camaro SS I traded in for it. That low CG rocks on hairpins, this car leans less than just about any other I've driven. Maybe it's ricky who needs to learn how to get around a course faster, but this does just fine on the roads where I live.
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I'd love a Tesla too - if I could afford all that, but that's not reality. I don't go on road trips anymore, but I sometimes do need the range extender when going two major cities over, and it's nice to have. Putting this drivetrain into a caddy seems like an excercise in the ridiculous, though. I'm guessing GM did it to finally put it into a car they could charge more for (and actually make money), and because a huge fraction of Volt owners traded in a Caddilac, a beemer, or an audi for it - hint, they are run by bean counter marketing types.

I'm a pro trader - but only with my own dough. It was the machines reading headlines. The guys who program the algos are ignorant, and wouldn't have passed my college DSP course. In fact, they mostly have physics degrees, but couldn't get a "real job", and semantics and stuff like that would be way past them anyway. Real debacles like Knight trading accidently deploying their market trading test horse rather than their real algos - now there's a huge chance for humans with a lick of sense to make real money - they bought high and sold low for 45 or so minutes, losing about half a billion, and I got about $3k of that myself. The NYSE didn't bust the trades as Knight had just pissed all over them about the mangled FB IPO.... Nanex documented this trade by trade, as did a few others, and I copied some to my site under "trading markets" back when it happened. Nice day for humans...not so nice for Knight, out of business now. Had it been Goldman Sachs (and it has been, recently) - the exchanges would have "busted" the trades so Goldman didn't lose a dime (and that's what happened just the other day over a similar amount of money). It's not only crooks out there - it's politics too(!).

First, they suck. I buy a camera, like it, don't return it, yet am then bombarded by ads from the vendor - for the same camera/accessories. WTF?
Two, I'm an inventor by trade. I get a lot of traction by seeing things I didn't expect/want and figuring out how to synthsize these found things into new inventions.
Targeted ads fail on both, horribly.

I'm well aware of all this, and it's why I don't full-cycle my off grid house batteries (off grid since '79 except for phone/inet). As luck would have it, by the time the Volt's warranty runs out, I'll be 68...and might not care. Till then, new batteries are free to me.

The losers are the ones who locked in losses at the bottom - changing a risk into a sure-thing loss. If you had the right stocks, you're up now, actually. If you had a really good money manager (I do this for myself) you sold near the top and bought back in - much more shares - near the bottom, and are WAY ahead. I pulled off a couple "5 baggers" myself. Go check BTE for example.
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Some things are less risky if you're competent. A lot more people think they are, than actually are, of course.

Full cycling of ANY battery kills it quick - not sure what Tesla does with theirs but they'd have the exact same set of issues. FWIW, A123 batteries more or less went out of business due to quality control issues and Fiskar's failure. No, what happens with the Volt is that you wind up putting in a little more to get the 10.5kwh out again. That's all. Eventually, it'll not have the 10.5 left over. Some Li winds up lost to the process, so even that first isn't anywhere close to as bad as lead-acid - and I know - I run solar and have since 1979. I'd KILL to have a battery as good as the Volt one for my home (actually, 2-3 would be nice). Too bad that though GM only charges you $3k for one - you have to turn one in to get that deal. They're keeping mum on what they actually cost.

Yes, the Volt uses much larger cells. It has strings of 96 in series (about 360v) and three strings like that in parallel. There are ~~ 120 small embedded processors controlling the thing. There's a cooling fin (and a whole battery cooling loop that's separate from the rest of the car) for each set of 3 cells, resistors that can be switched in and out to balance the charge among each cell in the three strings, a bunch of fancy stuff in that box - along with relays that shut it off to the outside world the instant anything trips the alarm; the relays run from the 12v system the Volt also has (with a 175 amp switcher off the big guys to keep that charged) because it cost less in $ and weight to use standard 12v accessories for - power steering - hydraulic brakes (yup, it has a pump) heat, A/C, and anything else that would normally be dependent on shaft power, because tthe engine doesn't run often (I'm showing 209 mpg on my 2012 so far, and the electricity is ALL coming from my solar system).
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Yes, the Volt has a dinkier battery capacity than the Tesla. For one thing, for longevity, they only let you use 10.5kwh out of a nominal 16 kwh. That's why they think they can afford an 8 year/100k mile type warranty on it. But duh, you can make it bigger, use more than one, and so on. The Tesla actually gets more miles/kWh than the Volt unless you're racing, as well - the Volt is a heavy, solid car, not the latest greatest no money spared lightest car you can make, like the Tesla is.
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(Yes, I'm a very serious electronic engineer {Hence the Volt}...but one who will never buy a car I can't just buy the one I just test drove. When Teslas hit the real street and I can just write a check and drive away - one of them is going to be mine - too much danger putting down that much money and hoping to get one of the "good ones" rather than the "hangover monday" cars - and the wait is excruciating).

Just use the design for the Chevy Volt. Had mine two years, beat the snot out of it - and it's as good as new, or actually, slightly better in range. GM has that all worked out re temp/charge/balancing control - and as a result, both would get cheaper due to volume. And yes, I'm about to test-drive a Tesla, since my solar system has the extra juice to handle both.