Actually I got a quite different idea from reading that article. Burning coal, oil, and other hydrocarbons is going to look pretty silly a generation from now when you have the choice of rooftop solar, local or distant wind sources, and then possibly nuclear or fusion on top of that. It's going to be an orgy of electricity.

How can you say that rooftop solar that produces enough energy to sell back to the grid is "pretty disappointing?" You think making money is a losing proposition?

It's late, but reading that Wiki article 2 or 3 times has me saying "Bullshit." Basically what they are saying is that since normally you have infinite-density singularity, here is an alternative where some quantum phenomena pushes back and prevents that from happening.

Problem is, there's no such thing as the type of singularity they are describing. I know that now. So the black star "alternative" that is the opposite of a dumb idea (singularity) is probably meaningless.

Roger Penrose or whoever came up with the idea of a singularity inside of an event horizon was wrong. I'm not sure what you mean that black holes are "debatable," but if this is it, then we agree on that much.

Event horizons are not very debatable, they make intrinsic mathematical sense, even if they are extremely odd. Asymptotes tend to be odd. I'm not sure that anyone has ever had the balls to view event horizons as asymptotes or *cough* as singularities in an of themselves. It seems a great deal of mathematical gymnastics have been performed to avoid coming to such a simple conclusion.

There's more of course. I just want to be on record saying that Penrose is wrong and that Hawking is off his rocker. The best description I've ever gotten out of Hawking about the nature of the universe is that spacetime is like a closed system or loop, and that description is so vague as to be a dead giveaway that he's never come up with an actual, workable theory.

No, it's not "just another sedan." An internal combustion engine is going to suffer from being raced. Which means that your 7-8 seconds causes additional wear on the vehicle. Under normal commuting conditions, that acceleration is not available to you, unless you are willing to destroy the car.

Now you have an electric car that is basically frictionless, you can do 6 seconds whenever you want. How about at every stoplight on the way home from work? There's no law against acceleration, dude.

Also, get this: Electric cars don't smell like garbage. If you told me you were going to sell a bag of cherries that didn't smell like farts for 2x what fart cherries cost, I'd say you have a viable product.

>Linux has picked up a lot of mindshare

The problem with Linux on the desktop is that it's not very compelling.

Linux shines when the people around you are using it. That is, on your LAN or within telnet's reach. X is amazing, when used remotely. Why download and install a program when you can just telnet over to where its installed? Assuming the bandwidth is there (and it's a hell of a lot more there each year), the program will run. And it will be a lot faster than doing it the newfangled way, which is to make it a web service.

Linux makes a great desktop, if by "desktop" you mean network terminal. But we don't have a network. We have the web, which is a single graphical application (the "browser") that runs best on Windows. Just like a video game.

Linux won't, and probably can't, catch on until the network is there to support it. That includes small and large businesses, which have networks that would benefit from it, and are still using Windows. Businesses can use Linux the way it is intended, right now. But the "home desktop" is designed to deliver applications, not services.

Let's put it this way: The day some 14-year-old kid installs IIS for XP and hosts a webpage from his bedroom will be the first day of Linux's life. To my knowledge, nobody is hosting squat. Except on bittorrent, which doesn't quite count, because although BT is a protocol, people use it like just another Windows app.

My understanding of Hawking radiation is that the split virtual pair explanation isn't physically accurate, but that tunneling of particles through the event horizon is the more physically valid explanation.

Wikipedia's understanding is that nobody has any idea what it is.

Originally, I read in his book that a virtual pair would split, and the anti-particle would fall into the black hole, reducing its mass. He never said why with equal probability, regular particles wouldn't also fall in, though.

So then you get to quantum tunneling, which is the theory that any object can pass through any barrier with some probability. Over enough time, enough mass should tunnel through the event horizon to cause evaporation. However, I have noticed that the universe is pretty good at creating probabilities that are effectively zero.

Finally you have the Unruh effect, which is that an accelerating observer (like matter falling into the hole) should witness a sea of warm particles. If you think this is vague, well, everyone agrees it is.

What it comes down to, is that Hawking Radiation is based on the conclusion that a black hole is a perfect black body radiator. Forgive me for being skeptical that an object ruthlessly accumulating matter, that is unnaturally cold (black holes are near 0 Kelvin, below the vacuum average of 2.7k)...an object which very well may violate our common perceptions of entropy and thermodynamics radiates energy perfectly like a car on a hot afternoon?

Point being, Hawking's "perfect black body" is one hell of a leap of intuition. Or quantum field theory, according to him.