The Leaf has 107 HP, the BMW 170. The Leaf weighs 3300 LB, the BMW 2630 LB. Based on those two numbers alone, they are on two completely different levels of performance, even if they look similar on a checklist of included options.

I think the BMW is ugly but it is revolutionary because its frame and body are carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic.

It is better to err on the side of over-inflation. The centrifugal forces of high-speed driving are pretty extreme (even 100 mph) and you'd have to over-inflate a LOT to replicate them, so they'll take a lot before bursting from pressure alone. The problem with under-inflation is the tire is racked by vibrations that cause extreme forces, and also cause it to overheat.

Here is a cool page, evidently 225 mph at 20 psi below the optimum is a bad idea.

No the trend actually is the same in application development - away from clean sheets, and towards lashing together complex components that can made to sort of work together, supported by complex development tools.

It sucks, but I'm intentionally throwing more of my time now into learning the latest languages and development environments. Are they better? Not really. But you will never, ever convince anybody that fuddy-duddy is actually cool. They'll just think you're irrelevant. Every career has some drawbacks, and spending your life chasing fads, coupled with others' disdain for everything you did or learned over a decade ago, is a drawback of this one. (Heck, why didn't you start a successful startup or at least move into management by now, anyways?)

Cars are generally not designed to be resistant to 'hacking' by their owner/operators, and should not be. Yes, you can drive without a seatbelt if you snip the little blue wire. You can disconnect your airbags. You can cause your tires to explode just by letting out most of the air and driving on the freeway.

Presenting this as some sort of coup fosters the notion that he system ought to be idiot-proof. No sudo rm -fR / for you! We'll put a thousand annoying and ultimately useless obstacles in the way to doing any little thing!

Don't blame the car for not protecting itself from you.

Does nobody remember this headline from a few months ago? Tesla could start on Gigafactory in 2 states, then cut 1:

"We are going to proceed with at least two locations in parallel, just in case one of them encounters some issues after breaking ground," Musk said. He said Panasonic was likely to be Tesla's partner in battery production.

The fact that construction started and then stopped makes it sound more like this is that - who else would do such a thing?

I was going to write something snarky about the silliness of getting excited about this one factory, of all things. But it really does hit all the right points, doesn't it: (1) the manufacturing industry in the US, (2) the geopolitics of our oil addiction and resulting involvement in the middle east, and (3) environmental harm from fossil fuels.

Morgan Stanley is excited about the potential use of gigafactory batteries for home energy storage and grid independence, and thinks they might make more on that than on cars. (I would have thought good old lead acid car batteries were cheaper for this?)

You could just leave your vacuum cleaner running I guess... (even Shop Vacs have HEPA filters available, and they move a lot of air!)

But it makes more sense to filter the air at the inlet if you can, or at least as it recirculates through the HVAC system already built into your home. Check your air filter once in a while, people!

What you are missing is that ratings are assigned relative to the competition that existed when the rating was assigned. Go over to gamespot and check out the graphics of a game that got the top rating for graphics 8 years ago. Are those graphics still 10/10? Not even close. Go over to Amazon.com and search SD Cards by "Average Customer Review." Many of the top-ranked cards are little 8 and 16 GB cards that were rated up years ago.

There are various "dreams" of course, but the Gold Rush mentality has always been strong in US culture. Our current top marginal tax rates certainly support that assertion - average people pay dearly in real money to protect their fantasy future-self.

Any marketplace of infinitely scalable production is a lottery!

Before music recordings, if you wanted to hear music, somebody had to play it. A more popular musician could make somewhat more than an average musician - maybe substantially more - but the top handful couldn't entertain the entire planet singlehandedly. Now they can. The economy of agrarian farmers - where a 20% more productive farmer makes 20% more money - is over. Now it's winner-takes-all.

I liked your post right up to the last sentence when you said the real problem is our tendency to not check everything. That is simply not possible. Life rolls forward on a vast number of assumptions every moment, and most of them are correct, or good enough to get by on. (False assumptions that don't matter and cannot be observed - like this Amelia Bedelia thing - can linger indefinitely).

Which part do you find suspect? Tesla wants to make a major launch of a $35K all-electric car, which will require a huge number of batteries, above and beyond the current supply. The word "allegation" sounds as if you think the new Telsa model won't use batteries? Or that there's already enough production to support the new Tesla model, presumably going straight into a huge hole in the ground? Or what?

This being slashdot, it would be nice to have the article on "gotcha" licensing accompanied by at least as much information what it actually is, and when it would be worth paying for. (And not just some snarky comments about how cheaper databases already have in-memory tables, unless that's really all it is!)

I am a bit unusual in NOT having started drinking coffee until almost the age of 40, and had the same experience of hyper-concentration the first time! Now I can hardly feel anything, if at all.

I think growing tolerance to drugs is practically universal. I've known several people who started Prozac etc. and told me, "wow, so THIS is what I've been missing! Life is so great!" But fast forward a year, and they don't seem that much happier. Yet they still have a costly prescription for the rest of their lives.

Sigh, I must be on slashdot. "Unlimited" doesn't mean "free from the laws of physics." It means it isn't limited by the carrier. (If I told you there was no speed limit on the autobahn, would you honestly think I was hoping to drive faster-than-light?)