Or just will do massively better and faster - I just had to drill through 3 layers of masonry to run new lines at work. I'm sure I *could* have done it manually, but the hammer drill I had did it with a nice clean inch wide circular hole in only a few mins. The best tool for a job is the one that lets you get it done right, get it done fast, and move on. It's nice to make sure you have a manual backup around, but electric tools get the job done for most people.

because it's not *just* for the charging network, it's to stimulate growth of the whole industry - and that starts with having an install base of the *cars*. Get enough EV machines on the road and there will be a lot of third party things made for them. It's better to stimulate the primary driving force behind that than one specific aspect

Thanks for the link, didn't realize it was on steam, just picked it up - hey, with $10 in my steam wallet from selling those cards you occasionally get (seriously, who buys them?) it was actually free :)

You're wrong in this case, there needs to be a bigger install base to allow the roll out of supporting infrastructure, from charging stations to competitors on battery manufacture. That's what the subsidies are about.

Well, first of all, in that high a quantity you can get them even cheaper than what I quoted by buying at a bulk price. As to how to replicate them... dd or more user friendly duplication program if you want and then fill every available USB port you have with thumb drives. Faster and more parallel than DV burning actually /though gotta wonder.... how often are you handing out DVDs? //and the number of people who still have an optical drive on their main computing device to read 'em is shrinking, fast

They're not (yet) at the 15c range, but if you buy in a large pack and don't want the fastest drives or USB 3 you can grab 4GB thumb drives for ~$2 each (~$1 each if you in 100+ quantities)- and these days be more assured that the person taking the data can read it easily

I believe much of that cabling was actually replaced when the bridge was last rehabbed (not the current project working on the ramps and roads)

/they kept the substandard cabling in though because the bridge was built with several different support mechanisms, each one sturdy enough for the bridge on its own, Roebling was being paranoid with his design
//the cable crosshatching *is* because of the inferior wire however, though in the end they really are a just decorative feature since they aren't needed for support

NZ has the advantage of knowing that if another nation invaded them there are countries with big sticks, like the US and UK, that would defend them. It's easy to go light on national defense when you have other people willing to step in. When you're already the big fish there isn't someone else to rely on

What, pray tell, (ignoring all other effects for a second) do you think would happen to the economy if a)all defense contractors suddenly had their orders shrink by 80% (bearing in mind this cascades down the supply chain to everyone from small subcontractors like speciality machine shops to the delis that make their bones on selling lunch and coffee to everyone working on projects) and b)if we suddenly dumped all the people currently employed by the DoD directly in the labor market? Not that the military is really about to be drastically eliminated but if it were the economic effects alone would probably tank the US economy, and the world's right afterwards.

GPGPU is an important segment of the high end market these days...

/The machine I'm typing this on right now has an nvidia Tesla in it

RAM is cheap, most people who are planning to toss this card in their workstation can also max its memory out to a level that 16GB wouldn't make much of a difference if they needed a ramdisk. For the few remaining people there are better solutions.

Add to that that then you're competing on bandwidth on the PCIe lanes for access to the card's memory with anything you're actually using the card for and it makes no sense to bother.

I would bet that some the absolutely best technical coders around are completely unknown because all they know how to do is write code. This list I think isn't that, but it also isn't fame per se. I think it could be more called "high impact programmers" - and that you deserve to be on.

Also, comments like yours are why I still read slashdot :)

I think you're joking, because for a consumer that's not necessary, but when you have, say, whole office buildings with centrally controlled zoned heating and cooling they may not need *internet* but they damn well do need some some of sensor and control network. And once you have that making it at least monitorable over the internet can have some real benefits.

They'd claim they broke the encryption using some "Super Duper Top Secret Compute Cluster" and attempt to use it