quote: "One big problem with netbooks was that people assumed that could MS Word, and when they found out they couldn't they returned the computer."

Did this actually happen or is it just an urban myth? (or Microsoft/Intel FUD?)

The way I remember things, there was a lot of buzz about a wave of ARM+Linux netbooks that were supposedly coming soon, and I wanted one, and none of them ever actually made it to market.

You can hate that term all you want, but it's been widely used for decades, and the rest of us aren't going to change our terminology because you posted a comment on Slashdot. Better get used to it.

As for the whole "long tailpipe" argument against EVs, that's so ten years ago. Come back when you get caught up with the debate.

I don't understand your maths. The article says they are aiming for 3.3 million vehicles. How did you arrive at 100 million?? That would be roughly a third of the cars in the USA! Nobody is expecting EVs to be adopted on that scale within that time frame.

As for the strain on the electrical grid... It may lead to some regional problems as the usage patterns change, but electric cars should not drastically increase the total national demand for electricity. Gasoline consumption will be reduced, and it takes a lot of electrical power to refine gasoline (especially as more low-grade crude continues to come onto the market).

The first six items in your list also apply to the huge amounts of electricity consumed by oil refineries in the production of gasoline!

You're totally right, and I think the industry is keenly aware of this, and they are working on how to address it.

Gasoline cars have been mass-produced and cost-reduced for decades. It's really quite amazing to look at the cost of an internal combustion engine and see just how cheap they are, considering the materials, parts and tolerances that they require to produce them. The same can and should happen to electric cars, but it just doesn't happen overnight, and it won't ever happen without them being in active production.

The Tesla Model S is Tesla's second car, and it's a huge advance over the Roadster. The Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf are first-generation products. We're just at the beginning of this change, so be patient!

Couple of points to make...

Coal is already on the decline in the USA, being squeezed out by cheaper (and much cleaner) natural gas. The Chinese, on the other hand, are building coal plants like crazy.

Many people don't realize that those magic oil refineries are most likely connected to coal burning plants too. Oil refineries use enormous amounts of electricity. I've seen an estimate that refining a gallon of gasoline requires as much electrical power as you need to move an electric car the same distance, given typical efficiencies.

IF you have your car in a garage and charge it overnight, then you may rarely ever need to charge it away from home -- only for road trips, really. Depending on your driving habits, you may go months without visiting a charging station.

Even then, if you have a Model S and stop at a Supercharger station, you'll have the option of paying for a battery swap, which can get you back on the road in about two minutes.

Finally... Remember that even 3 million cars is only about 1% of the cars in the USA. Today's electric car technology can't meet everyone's needs, but I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine it meeting the needs of 1% of the population. Things can grow from there as the technology continues to improve.

We had a long journey to get where we are now, with HDTV and large, flat screens, and surround sound in the "home theater". It was a worthwhile journey, because now we can watch the entire back catalog of movies, going back many decades, pretty close to the way they were meant to be seen. That was the destination, and we've finally arrived, and there's really nowhere else to go from here. The technology is a solved problem. 3D and 4K are answers in search of a problem.

From now on, it should all be about the content. Movie making, as an art, was largely perfected by the 1970s -- and yet, somehow a lot of bad movies (to say nothing of TV shows) still get produced. Putting them out in 3D or 4K won't make them good.

I've never understood how there can be any kind of debate about free will. To me it's like debating whether gravity exists. Maybe it's all just an illusion -- some sort of mass hallucination, perhaps? -- that leads us to think we're clinging to the surface of this orb in space?

To me, free will is demonstrated by every mark we make on the world. I mean, consider my house. It's not a natural formation; it didn't get here by accident. Somebody chose the site, drew up the plans, and decided to build it. That's free will. If there's no free will, then what is my house? A mirage? A dream?

People arguing against free will remind me of the philosophers Douglas Adams described in the Hitchhiker's Guide -- coming up with elaborate proofs that black is white, and then getting run over at the next zebra crossing.

My favorite film is Kodak Ektar 100, the modern wonder-film. It has super-fine grain, scans great, and produces vivid in-your-face colors. It makes everything look good -- except white people! Caucasians generally come out looking pink and sunburned. Well, I guess that's why Kodak sell Portra film too.

I feel just the opposite. I loved Myst but never really got into the sequels, and all their accumulated lore is just confusing to me. I'm sure it would be confusing and daunting to new players too, who haven't done any of the old games -- and many, many of today's gamers weren't even born back in the Myst days. It's sort of like going into the comic shop and seeing Fooble's Adventures #50 and thinking, "Neat cover... But do I even have a hope in Hell of understanding what's going on, if I haven't read the first 49 of them?"

A new world means no baggage, no preconceptions, a fresh start. Anybody can dive into it without misgivings.

Yeah, let's keep the government out of it... except, of course, for the massive distortions of the market that you happen to favor and advocate. :P

If you RTFA, it does mention the Unicomps and give a reason for preferring the CM Storm Trigger. To wit: "Because, let's be honest: the Model M is not a pretty keyboard, and its Unicomp successors also won't be winning any beauty pageants. None of those keyboards have the same array of gamer-friendly features, like macro keys, as Cooler Master's offering, either."

I have a recent Model M here (in the black, Mac-optimized version) and I like it a lot. I'm no die-hard gamer, don't need macros, and I don't enter my keyboard in beauty pageants. It would be nice if they could build a USB hub into them, though.

This idea should be easy to test, statistically speaking. If he's right, then the populations with the worst mental degradation and more emotional instability should be found in those parts of the world where civilization first took root, while those populations who lived as hunter-gatherers until relatively recently (or even up to the present day!) should have a big intellectual advantage.

I am not aware of any such effect being measured and documented.

If there was ever any thought of wanting the game to run on Linux or Mac, why did he base it on CryENGINE to begin with? Isn't that sort of stupid? Really, isn't that all kinds of stupid? I should think that developers would have learned better by now.