Battery life and cost are big factors only following range anxiety.

Often the 10 year + life is cited for many of the hybrids such as the Prius. The long life is only obtained through battery maintenance. The state of charge is kept between 50 and 80% most of the time.

In an electric, that would severely limit range to preserve battery life.

To get maximum range, EV's often top off the battery (100% charge) which shortens the life and deep cycles them, also shortening the life. Think about other devices you deep cycle on a regular basis with the same battery technology. How long does your cell phone, laptop, tablet, etc last on a charge the first year and after 3 years of use. Do you expect an EV to get the same distance after 3 years of daily commute? Give me an EV with a guarantee of >80% capacity after 8 years or 100,000 miles and I am so on it. Making it only 60% of the way to work after 3 years is not going to cut it.

Many years ago, I wrote an article on Arabic and Islamic themes in Frank Herbert's Dune. It includes many etymological info on terms used in Dune.

Hope some of you enjoy it.

I run a company, a tech company, and I actually insist that most passwords be easily sent to clients in plain text.

I'm not talking about credit card information, obviously, nor control of any nuclear facilities. We're usually talking about invoices, business-administrative panels, business reports, and even financial reports. And, believe it or not, even e-mail passwords.

It's certainly not more secure. Especially those last two.

But I drive very fast on highways with other cars driving very fast, and the only thing separating us from 50-car pile-ups and massive death is a yellow line of paint.

In all of these cases, no one dies, and no one directly loses large sums of money.

But it's more than just convenience alone. It's business. Business often comes down to service. And when a client forgets their password, nothing beats just telling them. Yes, telephone's a little bit better, but not always the better business solution.

In the end, you know something, it's up to the person paying the bills. If my client doesn't care about the security risk, then I'm not the one to force them onto the long road.

The front door to my house has a lock that is easily picked -- which doesn't matter because right next to the door. . . is a window. I don't want bars on my windows either.

It used to be scarily common, but I believe that it's slowly phasing out in favor of hitting a website where you can (re)set the password yourself after a couple of security questions.

I believe it's just a sign of old code (or an old coder) on the site. There may be cases where the guy writing the sitecode is inexperienced or incompetent, but I like to think that such cases are rare.

I think I only see a cleartext password sent via email like once every 10 requests now.

I pay $45/mo, no contract on Net10, I get unlimited data**. I bought my own damned phone already unlocked (the LG G2 GSM phone I bought a month or so ago cost me something like $215 brand-new off of Amazon.)

It only costs me $755/yr my way ($45/mo plus $215 for the GSM/international phone I bought separately) with no ETF at all...

...versus at least $1167/yr (for a typical $89/mo big carrier capped data plan plus $99 towards their shiny new subsidized phone), and a 2-year contract w/ a massive ETF whether you like it or not.

Oh, and I still get 4G speed on AT&T's network.

** at $45/mo, the first 3GB is at 4G speed, but anything over that in a given month is throttled to 3G, but there's no overage charges at all... I rarely burn more than 2.5GB though, so I'm fine with the terms given the rather massive discount.

I think I see the problem:

To put it bluntly, there's no such thing. The two ideologies' interests do overlap in places, but the libertarian ideology also overlaps with the liberals on others.

Basically, the libertarian mindset is socially liberal, fiscally conservative, combined with a strong distaste for governmental interference of any non-critical type. Their main goal is to take over the government, then promptly get the government out of everyone's way.

HTH a little.

As a guy who uses Net10 (TracFone's parent company), I can tell you that the phones they sell aren't exactly top-of-the-line. Most of the models are the really low-end stuff: Huawei, ZTE, some-off-brand-or-other, and on the Net10 side, obsolete models of Samsung and LG. The Net10 side does have a couple of flagship phones, but those are prices way out of the reach of their typical customer. this is a typical list of phones we're talking about here. Many of these phones (in spite of being overpriced IMHO) cost less than a trip to McDonald's for a family of three. Even the most expensive ones top out at around $200.

On my part, I usually buy my phone unlocked from elsewhere, e.g. Amazon, then I do Net10's "Bring Your Own Phone" plan, which means I don't have to give a shit what they think. It also gives me the advantage of being able to jump to whatever carrier I damned well please, and choose the cheapest plan I can find. :)

Dude, seriously... if you want evidence, see this article , and notice that the modded-up posts are mostly *not* conservative in ideology. While you're at it, see the posts about AGW.

Personally, I find /. to be center to center-left, depending on the subject.

QED: GGP's Weak troll is still weak.

Find and click on MongoDB. Then notice that "Database" is this tiny-assed little circle waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay off to one side.

Got a pretty good laugh out of it. :)

To be fair, there is a vast difference between intelligence and wisdom; an intelligent and man may know/deduce everything there is to know about thunderstorms, but may not be wise enough to get his ass in out of one.

The State of Utah did this back in 2000 -ish, by converting their technical (ATE) schools into campuses for the then newly-formed Utah College of Applied Technology. UCAT is fully accredited and on the state Board of Regents, but focused exclusively on 2-year Associates' degrees in vocational fields - CompSci (basically programming and systems/network administration), Nursing (up to RN licensing), Diesel Mechanics, Culinary Arts, a basic Business degree, CAD/CAM, and even a Cosmetology certificate (and subsequent state license).

You could then take that AAT degree, and convert it to a 4-year degree at any Utah state college (in fact, each UCAT campus was partnered with the nearest state college - The campus I taught at was allied with Weber State University in Ogden, and I was considered to be faculty and taught a few courses there, albeit while still on the UCAT payroll).

The cool part was that high school students could attend as early as their Junior year, and could, if they applied themselves, have a 2-year degree less than 6 months after graduating high school - all on the government dime, gratis. The classrooms were a mixture of AP-level high school kids and adults, and held day and evening courses.

Have you actually priced these guys? My ex-wife used them back in 2001-2003 to finish up a BSN degree, and paid an obscene amount of cash each month to do it. They also adopted that neat little trick the state colleges have of requiring 'bridge classes' and of discounting certain courses taken (in favor of pricier ones they provide), so sometimes you're taking superfluous classes and in some cases re-taking classes you'd already taken.

One thing I do wonder about though... most of the oft-touted 'free' community college courses are more towards getting an Associates' degree, whereas Phoenix' big advertising push is for folks who want to convert their 2-year degree into a 4-year one, or to convert a Bachelors' into a Masters'.

Personally, I think their biggest competition is the recent growth of small state-accredited colleges going online, expanding their presence, and pushing to provide the same thing Phoenix does. Many of these colleges have provided this sort of thing remotely (albeit not online, but by 'traveling prof') to military members for decades, but have recently decided to get a piece of the civilian market now.

So let's you and I try to come to a consensus here and now as to the next effort to be undertaken in this regard.

I think you've pointed us in the best direction with that current HUD article. It is this: what's with all of the focus on visual information?

A human being is way more than floating eyes; in fact, the eyes are the most cognitively expensive feature. Overlosading it is easy to do, even by accident.

The thing is, a human pilot doesn't need to see most of the gauges. Most of them show numerical information with far greater resolution than is usually necessary. For example, altitude to the foot is not necessary outside of landing scenarios. Being able to see through the plane is completely useless when nothing is there.

But I see a human being sitting in a chair. Not walking, not running, not smelling, not tasting, not feeling a temperature, not being hugged, not being caressed by a loved one. There are so many human faculties -- most of which are wired directly into the human spine, and one wired directly into the human brain -- going almost completely unused. Why not tap into those?

A pilot could easily know where the bandit is by a simulated caress (or vibration) on the relevant part of the body -- upper back, lower back, left shoulder, right shoulder, et cetera. Visual HUD information can be the detail upon request. Here's a thought, how about a gentle pull of the neck towards the bandit. Easily felt, easily overcome.

I've got one of those non-fan heat dishes for my grandmother. It's basically an IR heat-ray. Altitude could certainly be conveyed by the localized temperature in the cockpit, or in the helmet. A ten degree range would be easily understood, and a twenty degree change even more so. Colder at high altitude makes sense.

There are myriad tactile sensory inputs to be used, including a gently squeezing of the upper arm as a fuel gauge. The really amazing thing about any such system is how the brain adjusts memory as a result - with different memory banks for high vs low altitude because of temperature sensation -- something a numerical altimiter can never provide.

In any event, to summarize, I see a few dozen inputs into the human brain, and I see only the visual cortex being used.

Interesting. But my point surrounds situational awareness without invasive technology. I doubt any crop-dusting biplane pilot has any trouble with situational awareness -- it's all wide open. It's the enclosed jet, and the crazy number of jet systems that remove the mind from the situation. That's what I'm saying needs to be addressed -- technologically.

Doing some some PCI compliance certification stuff and a scan shows that the site is not compliant, the reason being that TLSv1 is supported. Turning TLSv1 off kills off support for a number of older browsers, all types of browsers.....

(nginx)

    server {
        ssl on;
        #ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
        ssl_protocols TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2; .....
        }
    }

Now I am trying to figure out what to do about this problem, how to detect the clients that do not support TLSv1 and to redirect them to a simple html page instead of the clients pretty much receiving 'connection reset by server' error.

No dice so far, but I thought this was only supposed to happen a year from now (June 2016, not 2015), oh well.