So you're not going to be satisfied until some arbitrary, indefensible requirement is met?

For comparison: The Nissan LEAF alone sold more in its first four years than the Toyota Prius in its first four years. EVs in total have sold roughly a third as many vehicles in four years as the *total* Prius sales in the past eighteen years. (536K[1] vs ~1.4M[2])

I don't think anyone could make a credible argument that the Prius was/is a failure, and EVs are on a trajectory to overcome them in market share despite naysayers, FUD and lack of availability.
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[1] http://insideevs.com/monthly-p...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

A multispectral data processing program I wrote back in my college days: Part of launching it was giving it the date the data was collected. This was sanity checked against the system clock. Dates like before the construction of the scanners we usually used had a reasonable error message, asking if you were sure and giving a chance to reenter.

The message for a data collection date later than the data processing date was: "WONKITY! [name of institute] processes TOMORROW'S data TODAY!"

This was a reference to an incident in a humorous science fiction novel: _Bill the Galactic Hero_. The protagonists are sneaking around and are discovered by a cleaning robot and challenged as security breaching interlopers. One of them "bashes the robot on the braincase with a spanner", causing it to say "WONKITY!" and stagger away, rather than reporting them to security.

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When I was working on a typesetting system for newspaper publication, I heroically refrained from having it very occasionally insert "fnord" into the text. (See _The Illuminatus Trilogy_ for the joke, which is FAR to complex to explain here.)

Yes, PLEASE.

Or you could look at it as your employees doing [long list]

Tell management it's a "watermark" to detect copied code. (It's obviously not an open-source project. B-) )

Seriously: Suppressing easter-egg hiding means the best programmers are likely to look for a happier shop and move on, leaving the anal manager with the cream skimmed off his pool of talent.

On the other hand, a professional programmer will not spend substantial time on such things.

(An easy way to do it without substantial cost is to build it initially as part of a scaffold or a test suite component - with the easter-eggyness being a way to make it obviously a side issue and not corrupt the mission-critical output. Then the incremental labor cost of building it in as an easter egg is small - or may even be negative, by not taking it OUT of the version to be shipped as the product. B-) )

If you want to beat a Democrat in California, you need a fiscal conservative who is socially somewhat liberal.

Sounds like the Liberty Wing, Libertarians, and the Tea Party.

Solar generation can be had, for reasonably sunny sites, for abut $/kW, which puts it ahead of grid. Wind, since the advent of neodymium permanent-magnet alternators in kWish sizes, is also becoming competitive (and a solar/wind combo tends to balance nicely against available load. Alternators are electronics and the Moore's Law improvements are also bringing them down (though the economy of scale isn't there, yet.)

The big missing piece has been a high-capacity, long-lived, low-toxicity energy storage system, to cover calm nights and other weather variations. (Thee days of storage, in halfway-decent renewable energy sites, means you only have to run the backup generator a couple times a year - which you have to do, anyhow, to keep it from rotting internally.)

So these battery improvements should be enabling for off-grid housing, as well.

Won't kill the grid, though. Because all these electric cars will need charging - at several times the consumption of a house. Even in the good sites, adding an electric car to the load bumps the generation's capital cost up again, big time. Win some, lose some.

There are no 2-dollar iPhone batteries because you can't (officially) replaces the iPhone's batteries :)

You're also dealing with different types of batteries here. The chemistry used in consumer electronics isn't the same as those used in (most) electric cars... only Tesla uses commodity cells.

An EV battery is also pretty much the equivalent to buying in bulk. If you purchased 500 iPhone batteries (~27kWh worth) at once you might possibly get them for $2 each.
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About 3% US market share of similarly-priced vehicles ($25K+) in just 4 years, despite many models being unavailable outside a handful of key states.

That's a far cry from "utter shit" for market penetration of a product that's significantly out of the norm and facing strong opposition.
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Tell the people who lead the California Republican Party to pick candidates who are closer to the center.

They did. They still do. That's most of why they keep losing.

If they pick a "centerist" (alias "democrat lite") why would anybody on the right bother to vote?

Companies - at least in the US - try to keep their engineers from looking at other patents, because knowing you're infringing triples the damage awards.

I hate the keyboard and trackpad on this Toshiba Satellite S75. (It's just as bad as the ones on the Lenovo Z710, too.) Overly-wide, ultra-thin, chicklets, with no clearance for fingernails. Brush the trackpad while typing and half a sentence is highlighted and instantly overwritten by the next keystroke, making it disappear. Typos up the wazoo. In nearly a year I haven't been able to get used to these designs.

The vast majority of patent trolls are typically very small entities that like to sue BIG companies for one obvious reason: Big companies have deep pockets.

It's not just patent trolls.

When a big technology company is in trouble, one thing they may do to try to stay alive is go through their portfolio of patents and sue everybody doing anything related to them. This is in the hope that they can pull in enough cash to stay alive a few more months, by finding actual infringement on discovery, or just provoking a patent cross-licensing-and-balancing-cash deal to make the suit go away.

About a decade ago I was on the receiving end of such a suit: My project had done some chips that included some new SONET functionality. Nortel was getting desparate and went after everybody doing SONET, so my project (and a few others) were related. I got called in to advise the lawyers on how what we did was different from the claims. (It was - drastically.) I hear that one ended up in a "swap and we pay some cash" settlement.

This was the only time I recall actually being asked to look at another company's patent on what we were doing. Companies - at least in the US - try to keep their engineers from looking at other patents, because knowing you're infringing triple. So we get to reinvent various wheels rather than raise the risk. That means one of the claimed advantages of patents - releasing recipies for the neat technology to general use after the patents expire - is about as bogus as the ever-extended copyrights.

http://fiaformulae.com/en/live...

You're welcome.
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Maybe, some day, Congress will actually fix some of the real fucking problems we have, with having a pseudo, tech. intergrated Government. And maybe, Hell will actually freeze over!

I hear Hell already froze over - several decades ago.

It was a particularly cold snap during winter in Michigan, with sub-zero (farenheit) temperatures. The expanding ice blew out a small (millpond-ish) dam. The water under the ice rushed down the river and overflowed it, pouring down the main street of the little village of Hell, Michigan. It was several inches deep when it slowed enough that the extreme cold froze it solid.

Since then a lot of the stuff that was waiting for Hell to freeze over has been happeng. That explains the last several decades nicely, eh? B-)

Then perhaps they're not really a fan of racing as such, but a fan of noise and foul odors.

For those people, there's always going to be monster truck rallies.
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