Please consider running for office as a GOP candidate -- you've got that special je ne sai quoi.

Really, no electric car needs more than 100 pounds of this backup battery. That would be more than enough to drive for a full day. In fact, 50 pounds might be enough emergency backup for any real use case -- as described, 50 pounds would give you about 600 km of extra emergency range.

Anyone who wants to drive 12 hours a day for multiple days ought to just rent a gasoline or diesel vehicle. Electric cars are for more normal usage, in which a battery like this gives you emergency flexibility.

Well, you might filter out a lot of people with false confidence. You'd also filter out Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Maybe you don't think that's a bad thing -- and, yes, they might make terrible employees. You might think about sharpening your analysis just a bit, though, huh?

It's not just Google,now, is it? Silicon Valley is a strange place, as is much of the programming "computer science" community. It's as uniform as the top of the financial industry. There's this pretense that it's one big meritocracy and, as with all lies, there's a kernel of truth to that. Smart people come up with a new idea and are able to bring in other smart people to implement it. That's the end of the meritocracy story. Then comes the larger part of the cycle. Not-very-smart people -- but people who have a lot of unjustified self-confidence and excellent salesmens' smiles -- are brought in to run things and market the "dog food" and do "strategic planning." For a few years -- it used to be a decade but it's probably a shorter time frame now -- their association with the great name their company built when it was young hides the fact that, mostly, these newcomers are spectacularly incompetent. Then, the company, founded by smart people but running on reputation, eventually disappears.

This sounds so reminiscent of things like the Mandelbrot set, where there are always adjacent points with different outcomes, no matter how far down you go. Who knows if it really is related?

I find "what a load of shit" to be a very apt and useful expression in many circumstances. Rudeness and eloquence are not incompatible.

I also think the CIO's point is valid, and fear that whatever percentage of CS professors received their training from MIT may still lack a college education, as I do. (Certainly MIT does not offer a college education, instead diverting people into excellent technical training.)

I've often wondered what the results would be of a poll that compared long term outcomes for students who matriculate at a given university with students who were accepted but went elsewhere. To my knowledge, no such poll has ever been conducted.

$1,000 in road enforcement fees per driverless car.

This model's already being proposed for electric vehicles, on the grounds that they aren't paying fuel taxes. It's idiotic for EV's, since they serve an important purpose. But it's ideal for driverless cars.

...which if then followed by Alexander and Clapper explaining how they stole your privacy, but it's Al Queda's fault

Coming up next -- investment bankers on why investment bankers deserve billions of dollars.

A spymaster asserts spying is important! Details at 11.

I have never even seen Antarctica, and I don't recall anyone talking about it twenty years ago. If 97% of geographers say Antarctica exists, I'd just like to point out that I've driven 50 miles in every direction but up and haven't seen no sign at all. And I'm pretty sure that my brother's boss once heard that geographers are telling us about this mythical Antarctica to take money from people like me and give it to themselves.

No continent I've ever seen is going to make me worry about sea-level rise, so keep yer commeenistic plots off of Slashdot.

German pranksters? They've mastered the Orwellian English of advertising to people who think they're smart. Bravo and brava!

You will never lack validation, BrendaEM. Ignorance is infinite.

I've stopped searching on the word Constitutional.

Yeah, I can even imagine an enterprise that harvests animal flesh and sells it to humans.