Wow, what's your occupation? Even being a software developer, my budget and retirement asset numbers are almost exactly an order of magnitude lower than yours...

How long it takes you to retire is a function of only one variable under your control

You mean 2 variables: savings rate and asset allocation. If you want a 50% savings rate to get you retired in 7-8 years, [most of] that money needs to be in the stock market or a real estate portfolio, not under your mattress.

Loss of a lot in the 401k in 2008

The only people who lost money in 2008 were the people who did something stupid with it (i.e. who pulled out of the market and locked in their losses). Everybody who stayed the course made all their money back a couple of years ago, and is now way ahead.

What does "social security" have to do with anything? I'm a "20-something" and plan on retiring 10-15 years from now on just the assets I save myself. If I eventually get social security, well that's just a bonus.

(The hard part is not the lack of social security; the hard part is the shitty job market. Since my wife and I graduated college 5 years ago, at least one of us has been unemployed at almost any given time. We've learned to live on less than a third of our fully-employed income -- which is coincidentally why we'd be able to retire so quickly if we remain fully employed!)

she gets $1600 before taxes.. After taxes, she is at $1100 a month

Bullshit. Even assuming the worst-case scenario (that all of her income is taxable, which if it's Social Security and a pension then it almost certainly isn't), an Adjusted Gross Income of $1600 * 12 = $19200 means her taxable income would be $19,200 - $6100 (standard deduction) - $3900 (one exemption) = $9200. The federal income tax on $9200 is $930, which means her real after-tax monthly income would be $1522. (And before you say "what about state income tax," remember the example is in Texas where there isn't any.)

As for the rest of it, $1522 - $600 - $400 = $522 for food, telephone and car which (given that she's not racking up a bunch of miles commuting) is plenty.

FYI, it's possible to live well surprisingly cheaply in the US. My average spending over the last year has been ~$1700/month, and that's for 2 people living in a 3-bedroom house in a nice, walkable neighborhood about 3 miles from the center of a major city.

How much do you expect to spend per year in retirement? Take that number and multiply by 20 (assuming you think a 4% safe withdrawal rate is OK; or multiply by 33 for a 3% rate, etc.). Note that the safe withdrawal rate also depends strongly on your asset allocation.

See also: http://www.firecalc.com/, http://earlyretirementextreme.com/, and (my favorite) http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/.

The intention is to convince the reader that they can't sue for the dead rat they found in their canned corn, so they won' t try.

A former employer shipped rat-enhanced corn once, and was both sued and fined for doing so. They became very thorough about warning the employees to watch out for furry critters in the plant (;-))

Tesla has made an electric vehicle that doesn't make anyone with a sense of style want to puke, and that's a very good thing, but there's just a handful of things they need to do, IMO, to really knock the ball out of the park for electric cars:

1) One needs to be able to charge it quickly, perhaps with an upper limit of about 10 minutes or so, sufficiently to go approximately as far as one could expect go on a tank of gas in a typical car of today. I would not expect to be able to charge it this quickly on conventional house current... it probably would require a dedicated type of charging circuit. But this would make recharging a car at such places not significantly more time consuming than filling up a car with gas, and would make owning an electric vehicle vastly more convenient than it currently is.

2) Charging infrastructure needs to be ubquitous, so that if you can drive there in a regular vehicle, you should be able to get there and back in your electric car as well.

3) The pricing structure for an electric car should be comparable to that of an otherwise similarly equipped gas-powered vehicle... and should not carry a premium cost that is almost equivalent to buying an additional automobile. Making them affordable, in addition to the other two points, will mean that there's no reason for people not to drive one.

If or when Tesla, or any electric vehicle manufacturer, can hit all three of the above points, I'd dare say that the writing will finally be on the wall for the age of gasoline, and I think electric cars could outnumber gasoline vehicles on the road within a decade.

Actually, at near light speed, time slows down, so a person who embarks on a journey in a spaceship capable of moving near enough to the speed of light could conceivably reach a destination many hundreds or even thousands of light years away in their own lifetime.

Of course, everyone that they left behind and ever knew will be long gone.

Probably no human will ever reach another solar system

I think that depends on whether or not you think that creatures who have human beings as evolutionary ancestors would count as human.

I forgot to put in there that I'm running an Nvidia GeForce GT630 & using the proprietary driver.

I've been using it since the beta & it runs very well. Netflix & Steam install very quick & easy & run well.

This is my longest experience with Unity & I've found it's not too bad, either. Experience with OSX helps get used to the non-menu way of selecting a program but in use it's really like a menu, anyway. (click the Ubuntu logo thingy [or super-a] -> apps -> internet -> firefox) And at least when you bring up the program selection it doesn't cover the entire desktop.

I also like that they are trying to conserve vertical space by putting the launcher on the left edge instead of the bottom and eliminating the menu bar on windows. Moving the menus sounded odd 'till I learn why and , again, experience with Macs helps get used to it.

But Unity is slow compared to other desktops, and very difficult to customize.

I may still go back to XFCE just to get the 'right-click on the desktop for a menu' back. (or I could just install Windowmaker... hmmm)

But overall Ubuntu 14.04 has been very stable & runs quite nicely.