Very fast charge is also completely impractical for cars with any forseeable technology. To charge the (relatively small, with only a couple of hundred miles range) 85kWh Tesla battery in 1 minute would require 5.1 megawatts of power to be delivered by the charging cable. Even at 11,000 volts you'd be looking at over 460 amps to do that. The largest power station in the USA is 6800MW (Grand Coulee) and would only be able to simultaneously charge 1334 cars assuming no transmission losses.

Quick charging beyond Tesla's superchargers is never coming with current generation and transmission technology. It will require some yet to be invented technology such as room temperature superconductors and enormous fusion power stations.

It probably also demonstrates something about how energy profligate that personal motor transportation really is.

It's irrelevant if they do this anyway, because if you had a 100kWh car battery that could charge in 5 minutes, the voltage and current requirements would be so enormous to make it impractical, because you'd have to deliver 1.2MW to charge the battery in that time. At 11000 volts you'd still require a current of about 110 amps, so not only very high current, but very high voltage.

One of Britain's largest single generating plants is the Sizewell B PWR nuclear generator, rated at 1200MW. It would take just 1000 such cars all wanting to charge at once to completely use all the capacity of this entire large nuclear power station. How many cars are currently filling up with petrol in Suffolk (the county where SIzewell B is situated) right at this second? Probably well over 1000.

A conjecture could be: the big bang spawned two universes, and the sum of the parts of the two would be an equal amount of matter and antimatter, but one universe got all the matter, and the other universe going in "the other direction" ended up with all the antimatter.

You could have said the same thing about telephone 100 years ago, too, and the same thing about electricity at around the same time.

It is increasingly the case where you are excluded from participating in some parts of modern society if you don't have a decent internet connection. For instance, you're not going to be doing any MOOC courses if you don't have an internet connection that's good enough for video. You're not going to be able to find things out as easier as other people if you don't have a decent internet connection, and you can find yourself denied of many opportunities. It's not all about looking at cat photos. The internet has become embedded enough in modern society that you are now often at a disadvantage if you live in the US and don't have it, so just like the telephone became a utility, internet should also become available on a similar basis.

Unless it specifically says WiFi, it's not WiFi and not even remotely like WiFi. Most 2.4GHz radio control gear is quite different to WiFi. It doesn't use ethernet packets or the ethernet protocol, it uses modulation and packet protocols that are specifically designed for real-time radio control. Unlike WiFi it is designed purely for point to point with one end a transmitter and the other end a receiver (not bidirectional) and with only one transmitter and one receiver bound to each other at any one time. Short of jamming the entire frequency band it's not trivial to take over something like Spektrum DSMII (certainly a lot more difficult than WiFi since to bind a receiver to a transmitter requires a physical programming step using a programming 'plug').

Since I doubt that this sub-question will get through the editor, I'll give you my answer now. My objection was to the use of bitkeeper due to its license. This is not the same as being in favor of violating the license. What Tridge did (invoking the "HELP" command on a TCP stream connection to the bitkeeper server) was not a license violation.

It's up to the editor when they run the replies. But I promise to answer mine.

Yes, I will answer the interview questions as soon as the editor gets them together.

If you have a specific question, you can always reach me via email to bruce at perens dot com or phone 510-4PERENS. Email usually works better.

Just because the past ones weren't caused by humans doesn't also mean the current one isn't.

I hear bagpipes.

You're talking about the Dukes of Hazzard (an action/fiction show).
The article is talking about 60 Minutes which is supposedly a factual news programme, the two have different requirements. In a factual programme it shouldn't be necessary to dub in engine noise.

Greece did it to themselves, but the EU in its breathless rush to get the Euro under way also decided to ignore the fact that Greece didn't qualify for the Euro under their own rules and let them in anyway. Greece being allowed into the Euro has caused Greece a lot of pain (and caused the eurozone plenty of problems).

I wouldn't be after one of our managers managed to run up (without realising) a bill of nearly 2 grand's worth of roaming charges when they went to the UK. That was just their phone polling for email.

Nope. I'm not mentioning Texas because of the supposed legal right to secede, it was chosen pretty much at random.
Member countries of the UK do *NOT* have the right to secede, a special exception was made for the Scottish referendum so the UK parliament passed an act to allow this to go ahead. It took a new law to be made by the UK parliament to allow the Scottish referendum to take place. This act is called the Scottish Independence Referendum (Franchise) Act 2013. Scotland didn't have a right to do this until this act was passed. (The referendum is September this year, not in a few years, so your knowledge of the UK is perhaps not quite as good as you try to make out).

A state in the United States can do things such as set its own sales and income taxes (no member of the UK can currently do this), states can set criminal law and penalties to a much greater extent than parts of the UK can, for example, the Welsh couldn't suddenly decide to introduce the death penalty, whereas US states can do this. The UK can also impose direct rule on a member, which has happened more than once to Northern Ireland when the squabbling parties couldn't come to any sort of compromise. Until recently, Wales didn't even have its own parliament. The Welsh assembly didn't get its first election until 1999 (and Wales has less autonomy than Scotland or Northern Ireland).

I only mentioned the Crown dependencies because there is a common misconception that they are parts of the UK.

The European Civic doesn't share a single body panel with the Japanese or US ones either (it wouldn't entirely surprise me if it shared not a single common part number). It's not just about the engine size, it's about what the car looks like and the design of the suspension. They aren't the same cars despite both being called "Civic".