I test-drove a Leaf in Michigan this summer and the car was awesome. It accelerated faster than my Honda Fit and was totally quiet. If I lived in the suburbs and commuted the average distance to work everyday, I would spring for one in a second. But we live in Brooklyn, and the lack of charging space, limited range, and higher price point are still sticking points for us. If I could afford a Tesla Model S I could get around the first thanks to its high range. So we're waiting until we can either afford a Model S or Tesla puts out a mass-market model we can afford now. After the gas shortages after Hurricane Sandy I am itching to ditch the ICE.

The day terrestrial laws apply to extraterrestrial space is the day humanity curls up into a little ball and dies. Space is vast, and the ability of dissidents and frontiersmen to charge out into it and carve life from cold balls of rock gives hope to all those who despair of the cause of freedom here on Earth.

And if I'm the intrepid guy who makes it to Mars and builds a sustainable colony there, the last g*damn thing I'm gonna worry about is filing paperwork with retard bureaucrats in Washington DC or the UN. They can all go hang. In fact, I would post a sign on the outskirts of my settlement: "Lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats shot on sight."

I think a makerspace in every school makes more sense. No, fossils, a makerspace is not the same thing as shop class. Teaching kids to code, work with CAD programs, and see the result print out on printers not only teaches STEM more effectively to the kids who are wired to like STEM anyway, but makes the process more accessible to kids who are, say, arty or sporty. So putting 3D printers like Fab@Home's would make more sense than MakerBot because it's more versatile, and gene-sequencing machines, centrifuges, autoclaves, and such for biohacking because future manufacturing could well be bio-based. CnC machines and lathes come into the mix as well. Lastly, dedicating a significant portion of instruction time to the makerspace rather than as an option for "kids who aren't nerdy" is the only way to cement America's place in the technological future.

My favorite part of Blackberry's troubles is that it will cripple the federal government. All the politicians and their lackies run around with Blackberrys sutured to their hands, texting each other in meetings and rudely breaking off in mid-conversation to answer texts because they're incredibly important people and you're not. It's not intentional of course, but Blackberry's failure will do more for productivity in Washington DC and to bring the people living in the Beltway bubble back down to earth than all the NGOs, PACs, and citizen action groups combined.

With the NSA revelations, government shutdown, plummeting approval ratings, and now Blackberry's shutdown, DC is teetering on the edge of collapse (thank god). I'm wondering what will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Student loan bubble bursting?

The next retail model to go belly up are GameStops and the like. When Steam is fully up and running there will be no reason to buy your own copy any more, which means the lucrative secondary market many game stores rely on for profit margins will go away.

Incidentally when Steam is fully transitioned to Linux it will have an effect on prevalence of MS in the home, too.

They are the slow-mo collapse of an Age. The very idea of paying for content has become passe for anyone under the age of 30. My wife and I pay for Netflix because it's convenient. Everyone I know younger than us goes to the movies on Bit Torrent. Yes, that's anecdotal, but larger socioeconomic trends lend credence to personal observation.

Student loans and massive unemployment for millenials has put severe pressure on their disposable income. And it's been going on for at least 7 years. That's the formative years of the generation's early adulthood spent in penury when their predecessors have formed brand attachments and gotten started on careers making increasingly better wages. Check the news articles about how car ownership among younger cohorts is declining steeply, or how student loan default rates are rising sharply.

That means that those age cohorts are learning how to live differently than their older siblings or parents because they have to. They rent instead of own, they bike instead of drive, they torrent instead of paying. It all goes hand-in-hand, and the longer our system insists on beggaring them, the less likely they are to change even if/when conditions improve.

Of course, there's also the possibility that our system will not stop beggaring them and will move up the age cohort scale to completely beggar others too. Reverse mortgages are off to a great start to nuke the traditional wealth transfer that occurs when one generation leaves this earth to its descendents.

No clemency for Feinstein, Rogers, Obama, Bush, Cheney, Clapper, Alexander, or any other the hundred or more other people who swore oaths to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. They are the rankest, vilest of traitors and have done more damage to our country than anyone else in history. They deserve the death penalty.

Yes, China's 5 time zones operate on a single time zone, which works great if you're in Beijing, but sucks balls if you're one of the poor schmucks in Urumqi who has to get to work at 3am.

They're reporting this evening Sen. Feinstein is backpedaling on surveillance after defending the NSA's crimes all summer. Did one of her grandchildren chew her out for turning the country into a police state? Or is she so stupid that she hasn't actually paid attention to the issue and its implications til now? Or is it a dodge to deflect the criticism until the public forgets and moves on and all can return to status quo ante?

Honestly, I'm kind of to the point where the situation won't be made right until the people at the NSA responsible for this are in prison, the NSA is dismantled, and everyone in the Whitehouse and Congress are impeached and thrown into the deepest, darkest hole we've got.

So Gen. Alexander releases a propaganda video saying he believes the journalists releasing the stories ought to be silenced, and now the UK is echoing that? It seems to me that we are well on our way to the point of no return.

The thing about all this is, the speed of the reaction is inversely proportional to the size of the truth. When a reality star is caught with drugs, the reaction is instantaneous. When Congress self-destructs, it takes months and years for the reaction and its consequences to fully unfold. What we're talking about here is the ripping away of the entire illusion under which we've been living the past 60 years. It's big, and most people don't even want to try to wrap their heads around what it means; but denial won't make it go away. This is a turning point in history, mark my words.

From here, more forward-thinking people and groups will begin moving in different directions than before and when the changes come they will be breath-taking. Recall the fall of the Berlin Wall. Glasnost and Perestroika had been going on for years at that point under Gorbachev, and suddenly in the space of a few weeks the Berlin Wall fell, and nearly every country locked away behind the Iron Curtain was free. It took another two years for Romania and Russia to sort themselves out, but they did.

What shape will those changes take, exactly? Who knows. But eventually Washington DC must fall and its masters brought to justice. We may suffer through a true police state with gulags before then, but eventually we will have a new social compact. I hope that the reset is clean, with none of the old masters surviving into the new system. Those sociopaths threaten the entire species.

I've been reading Der Spiegel for 25 years. I've never seen them get angry about anything, not even when Russia shut off the natural gas pipeline running to Central Europe to mess with the Ukraine and whacked Germany in the process. They're white hot mad about this. The German Interior Minister is talking about bringing the NSA to justice. The SPD is pushing to drop trade talks with the US unless Washington does something real about it. Meanwhile, Obama wants to talk about immigration and fly off to visit schools in Crown Heights rather than deal with this directly. Caught in lie after lie after lie about the NSA he owns this now, and he owns the consequences for the entire world if he doesn't deal with it.

Consider, fellow Americans, what goes if Germany goes. That's NATO and the EU. That's all our happy European client states cheerily playing along when Washington wants to force the President of Bolivia's plane down and search it. That's an economy bigger than ours, a continent whose population is much bigger than ours, suddenly not playing ball with us any more and pushing back hard on everything. That's a profoundly different world for American geopolitical power that will have material consequences for every American.

This, the government shutdown, the near default, the promise of more of the same in February, it all has everyone who has been on our team the last 50 years looking for the exits at once. The American government has proven it can't even get a website right; there's no way in hell they can deal with all of this at once. A fat, happy American middle class would have been a bulwark against it, but the elites have spent 20 years scraping out their substance. Most of us are running mighty thin. The risk of a trigger event, like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand or the Rodney King verdict, bringing it all down is growing.

Pity they don't piggyback public wifi onto the lights with those LED wifi bulbs in the news a couple days back. It nicely resolves right-of-way concerns and power supply requirements.

This is exactly what is required. We all need to out these people, all of them who work for the NSA and CIA, and subject them to constant surveillance, harassment, and ostracism. Perhaps an open source project to map and publicize the personnel of these agencies, as an exercise in democratic resistance to creeping tyranny. Heck, we can even enlist the assistance of kindly freedom-loving people around the world to ensure it will be impossible to shut down. The American government needs to understand the American people are onto them and deem them the enemies of freedom they are. Whether further, more stringent measures are required remains to be seen.

The science and the math behind the tools of control are not classified. There is no classified physics, chemistry, and math. You and I can access them and learn. The components and sensors and knowledge required to build resistance measures are open source. You and I can see them, understand them, and employ them. In Today's--though perhaps not in "Tomorrow's"--America, you can still acquire the tools you need to resist and defeat Tyranny.

Take stock. Search your own heart. Can you live in a world where you are not free? Most of you will choose controlled comfort. You will cede control over your very existence to some remote, faceless drone within a bureaucracy, be it government- or corporate-controlled. Still there are a few who would rather die, no matter how much they have to lose, than acquiesce to petty, stupid tyrants.

I have a wife and kids. I love them dearly. I want to live a long life with them. But if I could trade my life for their freedom, I would do so in an instant. Those of you who are like me, assess and consider. We have been in a bubble of denial, but now that time is over. We all must choose whether to stand and be counted, or to kneel and submit. Choose the former and you're an American, choose the latter and you're a slave.

Decide.