That's very true, but we're a long way from that sort of market penetration at the moment. Nor is it likely to help me the next time I go car shopping. Despite paying for pools, tennis courts, playgrounds, and other such features I never use, I find it doubtful I'll convince the other members of the association to hook up plugs for electric cars in the parking lots anytime soon.

Well, if I was wrong, at least I already apologized for it in my first post and all my yous after the first paragraph were universal yous anyway. As I said, I mostly wanted to rant. Anyway, I won't go in to much detail, because others have already done so in reply to you. But I will summarize that, while the source your electricity may vary by region, electric cars are at least, on average, significantly greener than gasoline cars. They also have the potential to become even greener as, presumably, more renewable power sources are going to be added to the grid.

Forgive me if I'm being a bit presumptuous about your own beliefs, however, I feel the need to rant a bit here. I am simply sick and tired of people seemingly determined to attack or attempt to discredit anything related to green policies. I find it ridiculous that so many climate skeptics want to turn it into an 'us versus them' game where you have to tear down everything the other side supports.

I'm a climate skeptic myself. I'm skeptical that man has as much to do with climate change as many seem to believe they do. I'm skeptical of their models for the future. I'm skeptical that climate change will be as damaging to the world as they predict if it does continue unabated. I'm skeptical that policies such as carbon taxes will have a significant impact on preventing climate change even if all their models are right, much less enough to outweigh their economic cost.

Even with all of that said, you seem to be putting down the buying of electric cards. Okay you could go after the tax credit, but that's not the fault of the person buying it. No matter what happens to be true regarding climate change, it's hard to argue against reduced pollution and less dependence on foreign oil. If the market can support electric cars, then that's great!

Just because you're a skeptic, and against government intervention on the climate change front, doesn't mean you can't support a green personal lifestyle and try to promote such behavior in others. If anything, you should be more inclined to do so. That way, at least you'll have something to assuage your guilt over being obstructionist with climate policies in the case it turns out you were dead wrong.

Don't forget that electricity isn't free. I think you'd be hard pressed to end up in the black as far as simple dollars went even if it's only $10k less. Still, it's nearing the price point where I'd be interested if it weren't for one critical point. I live in a condo and park in the parking lot outside. There's simply no place for me to plug it in there. For the many people who live in apartments/condos, this is a deal breaker.

It can become a bit of a catch 22 as well. The apartment owner/association isn't going to pay to wire up the parking lots unless there's a lot of demand for it from those living there. There won't be demand for it from those living there unless a lot of them own electric cars. And very few people are going to buy an electric car if they can't plug it in overnight.

Sadly, even skimming the article I didn't see any data by manufacturer of android devices or, even better, by individual model. That information would have been quite useful.

If they want new revenue, they should offer a service where you can pay to not receive any mail that isn't addressed to people living at the address. I can guarantee you I'd pay more to never have flyers, local news, and coupon booklets stuffed into my mailbox addressed to 'Current Resident' than they'd be losing in my share of the revenue. It'd be better for the environment too with less wasted paper.

I don't have any statistical data, but I find it unlikely that most people go their entire lives without losing anything. Unless I'm just the extreme outlier who has had tons of bad experiences with USPS. It's hard to verify exactly what is lost, but between mail that never showed up that people swore they sent, mail people tell me they never received that I know I sent, and neighbors mail that I've received, I estimate I'm up to around 20 something lost.

I've also more than once had mail that had clearly been opened and looked through. I've twice had mail show up more than a month after the postmark date (hey at least they found those pieces that they lost.) Nor is this just one bad mail carrier. I've had these experiences spread across 6 different addresses, in five different cities and two different states. Every one of those six addresses had problems.

I follow the policy of not sending anything by USPS that I can't afford to lose. If it's important, I stick it in a box and send it UPS. It's more expensive, but I've never had a single problem with them. That's why I would be thrilled to see private competition for letter delivery, was the final nail in the coffin of the post office as we know it.

'Will not' might be a bit strong. Unless there's a significant change to plan costs, I think it's all but inevitable that texting will die out. Wireless data dead zones are only going to become rarer. In addition, some people are in areas that already have rock solid data access. Plus, most people don't like spending more money for something than they have to. Once enough people figure out they can use email like text messages, many are going to want to cancel their text plans.

And even if some people resist, if their friends start telling them to stop texting them because it costs them money, or even figure out how to block them completely, they may be forced to adapt. I'm not saying texting will die in 2012, just that we may very well start to see it go into decline in the years to come.

I do wonder how much longer it will bear texting. Now that larger and larger percentages of the cell phone market have smartphones, why pay for a separate text plan when email can do everything texting can better? I get a sound on my phone whenever I receive an email just like a text. I also can view and search all my emails from the gmail client and enjoy the use of a keyboard for replies whenever I'm at a computer (which is a rather significant percent of the time.) All this, and it doesn't cost a cent more than the data plan I have anyway.

Of course I've never had a texting plan to begin with. Too much cost for too little benefit. I'm sure I'm not alone here in being in front of my computer the vast majority of the time. For the few times I couldn't be reached via email, a phone call was still possible. The hardest part was teaching friends/family that if they text me, I'm not going to get it, because I do have text messages blocked.

You know what violent protesting accomplishes? A lot of publicity yes, but negative publicity. There's hardly a faster way to alienate potential supporters than acts of violence. I know I'm far less interested in helping their cause than I was prior to the riots in London. Now I'm rooting for them to find the people responsible for the riots and throw the law at them to hopefully discourage such acts in the future.

I've never had a land line. The only reason I can see to keep them is wanting to hang on to a number everyone knows. Even then it's probably worth biting the bullet and getting rid of it. If you have a family and want a shared line that's always on, it's probably cheaper to add another number to your cell phone plan and just have a cell phone that stays at home 24/7.

I, on the other hand, would never even dream of getting a rescue dog. Although in all seriousness, I wouldn't dream of getting any dog. As a single guy who spends a lot of hours each week at work, it would hardly be fair to my canine companion. Besides, no kids and no pets does more for the environment right there than all but the most extreme actions environmentalists would propose I take.

Hopefully, eventually the technology will get good enough that it's far safer than a human driver and they'll require everyone use it. Not to mention that if everyone meticulously obeyed the speed limit, they might be able to raise the speed limit. I know there are people who drive what they safely can in an area, but there are other people who just always drive X MPH faster than whatever the speed limit says.

Besides, as much as some people feel the speed limit is arbitrarily kept too low, if a situation becomes dangerous because some people are following the speed limit and others aren't, it's those who aren't following it that are at fault if anything happens.

My site uses a simple substitution cipher. With the characters I allow for a password there's over 80! possible keys. I'm confident my users all use sufficiently random passwords that no one would be able to analyze the cipher based on the data they hacked.

Your math for the distance is spot on, but I checked quickly and even for a compact, the average length of a car is nearly 15 feet according to http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2007-07-15-little-big-cars_N.htm. That makes 88 feet less than 6 car lengths. Regardless I'm nitpicking a bit. More importantly, you don't need to wait a full three seconds after the person in front of you moves.

That would be true if you accelerated at exactly the same rate as them, but if you do so a bit more slowly, you can start much sooner. I do follow the three second rule and recommend others do as well. I've never rear ended anyone, but I have had more than one situation where someone slammed the breaks in front of me and I would have had I been following as close behind as most other drivers around here do.

On the most recent occasion, the person behind me came about as close as you can get from hitting me. If I hadn't inched up a bit more at the last second, he probably would have hit me, and I didn't stop nearly as quickly as the car in front of me did, which I had no trouble avoiding.