> When electric cars make sense by the numbers, when they are overall cheaper than their fossil fueled counterparts, they will be built and bought by the millions and charging stations will show up everywhere. Until then, the totally electric car will be a fringe market limited to the rich and hobbyist. I expect that Tesla's will continue to be hugely expensive toys, and not much more than that, for a LONG time yet.

I have a feeling that without enormous government intervention electrics will never be viable. Increases in fuel efficiency in cars decreases demand for gas and lowers its price, which decreases incentives for further improvements in feul efficiency. So unless there is a really huge technological breakthrough in batteries, or a big government commitment i think electrics will remain just 10 years out of reach.

But Elon is crazy enough to put giant pilons all over the country (http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/25691610), so who knowns.

full disclosure, I got a chance to drive a performance model S, and its f**king awesome. the dash is awesome, the interior is awesome, the handling is awesome, the insane acceleration (sub 5 seconds to 60), but its definitely a 90k luxury car.

samsung s3 with LTE use a dual core snapdragon, clocked at 1.5ghz with 2gb of ram. how come they didn't compare apples to apples?

profit == 0.15*X, hmm, how do i increase X? i think the worst part of this bill is that everyone involved has the incentive to increase the amount of health care provided.

i use it with unity2d + xmonad. but chromium is the only non terminal application that i use. I mostly use vim, make and a collection of compilers and debuggers, so i am not sure i am a "power user". I do really like the fact that all my hardware just works, it installs missing plugins and codecs. Ubuntu One is a pretty simple way to make sure you have the same .*rc files across all your machines :). I know I can do this with other tools on other distros, but the whole draw of ubuntu to for is that basically everything is preconfigured and ready to go without me having to do my own administration. I've used and loved Gentoo for 8 years, and it was a lot of fun to be completely in control of every aspect of my workstation, but I just stopped caring less about the machine i am working on and more about the code i am writing. What i would love see them do is more default cloud integration, like making sure that anything you install on one machine is available on all your instances, remote desktop access/vpn for all your machines etc...

i always found the "linking" part arbitrary. I can interface with a gpl program over a browser, and thats considered a service that i am providing to someone, so not a derivative work, even though it could easily be a programmable api over http.

I think open software licenses should be more fine grained, and specify what "interfaces" to the work are ok to leverage without your work being considered derivative. so a library can specify the api's that it exports, a program can specify its inputs and outputs as non derivative, etc...

If its using the same X session (the same user login), then this is possible. I have 2 monitors, both running 2 different "deskstops". The wm lets me switch workspaces on each one seperatly. xmonad so does enlightenment 17. I bet there are a few more wms that can do this as well, those are just the two that i've tried.

BTW, i can't believe this made it to the front page, its really a question that just belongs to your favorite distro's forums. Since we are on the topic, does anyone know how to get printers working in linux :)?

try these http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/

are you kidding me? on any project with customers (open source or commercial) it would take less then a year for you to starting writing more emails then code. forcing outlook is just as bad for efficiency as forcing visual studio.

its an exponentially harder problem to do performance analysis at the compiler level then at the application level. Plus firefox + wine runs over 10% faster then firefox on linux, so very likely its not the tools. My guess its just because there are more windows hackers working on firefox since its a more important platform (to mozilla) then linux, so more optimizations are done.

and build some windmills to generate electricity. i thought those take care of birds pretty handedly. or is it just the endangered ones?

It depends on how much ownership society gives you to the works that you create. We collectively descided to give some protection to creators of intellectual property, be it books or music or patents. Ideally the amount of ownership should maximize the amount and quality of works created.

Too much ownership will stifle innovation, too little doesn't give enough insentives to create. So its not really your choice, and the laws that we have chosen to be in effect at the moment aren't very clear. Like the previous resposne said, libraries are not opt in or opt out, why should it be any different for digital libraries.

I more or less agree with your point of view. But, i would like to add that a complete "free" market health system is virtually impossible. If we had no regulation, what is likely to occur is that one insurance company can offer lower rates for those who are healthy, reducing its risk, an in doing so it will increase the risk for every other insurer causing them to either cut benefits for the sick, or go out of business.

What I would like to see is a "healthy" market for health care. I would like to be able to see what prices each doctor charges for each service, regardless of how i pay for it. I would like to be able to limit the doctors malpractice liability, by my choice, in exchange for a reduced cost of service. I think this would promote some healthy competition for doctors.

I would also like to have every insurer required to charge the same cost to everyone that they insure (this can be teared by deductible and doctor liability, or limits on treatment costs), and require them to except everyone without any prerequisites, and have no control over the doctors that i want. I think this would promote some healthy administrative cost reductions from the insurers.

Both of these together would encourage the consumers to be healthy, doctors to cut procedure costs and insurers to cut administrative costs, which is what we want.

The end goal should be a that everyone can afford some level of healthcare, maybe with limited liability for malpractice and a high deductible, but would still be covered for most life threating things that they couldn't pay themselves. ultimately the country needs to realize that we cant afford to put everyone in the US on a dialysis machine when they get diabetes. someone is going to have to make the decision to let that person die, and i believe its up to that person to make that choice with the lifestyle that they live.