Quite true. Last spring I went to the US (Indiana and Texas) from Iceland with my then-fiance to show him where I grew up and went to school (he grew up in Iceland). It was too bright for him in Indiana, and in Texas it was downright painful for him.

We don't get much of that "sun beating down straight overhead" stuff here that you get in the states, it more sort of rotates around you, with really long sunrises / sunsets (sometimes with multiple sunrises / sunsets in a day as it moves past mountains).

Waaah. I live in Iceland, don't complain to me about a lack of winter sunlight.

I wasn't excusing anything - I don't support any geoengineering that works by increasing the albedo, for many different reasons. But it's simply fact that a large portion of the world's people live in areas that get proportionally little sun. And contrary to myth, they don't have higher suicide rates or anything like that.

The US (where many if not most slashdotters live) is actually an unusually sunny country, by first-world standards. Even Seattle is sunnier than Berlin, which is sunnier than London, which is sunnier than Glasgow...

Yeah, a lot of people already live in the sort of environments that they're warning against. This line got me:

And the sky is one of the few sources of that experience that's available to almost everybody

Is that a joke? People's ability to see the night sky varies vastly depending on where they are. In big metro area, all you can see are the brightest of stars. There's little to no majesty to it. It's when you get out into the deep, deep countryside and look up at the uncountable multitude above you that you feel little and insignificant compared to the cosmos around you. There's nothing universal about ready access to a dark sky. And it's getting rarer and rarer.

If they create an exchange with a current crypto currency and conver all their money to it except what is needed from day to day, then drop out of the Eurozone and create their own dollar, each crypto dollar will be the value of the crypto currency used.

Sorry, but unless there's hard assets behind it, it's going to float. And the float will be way down, just the same as any other Greek currency. Greece's creditors and exporters don't want New Drachmas, CryptoDrachmas, or anything of the sort: they want dollars and euros. To get dollars and euros, Greece has to make and export goods and services at a rate competitive with their rate of imports. For their government to get dollars and euros, they actually have to stamp out corruption, tax evasion, and so forth. Greece's inability to do these things is the reason they're in the bind they are today.

You mean this article? Albeit the summary was poor, but it covers the firmware hacking.

And FYI, if anyone actually takes the time to read the Kaspersky report they'd catch that the infection is believed to have been done on thousands to tens of thousands of computers, NOT "most HDDs". The firmware has the capability to infect most HDDs, but most HDDs are not infected - according to the very source report itself.

Which should be obvious. Because if you're the NSA and you're writing a super-infection to use against top-level targets, the last thing you want to do is have it on every last computer in the world, increasing your likelihood of being found by many orders of magnitude. The NSA's preferred method of infection is interdiction - intercepting objects while in transit to targets, such as CDs or hard drives, infecting them, then letting them continue on their way.

Once again, the NSA doesn't give a rat's arse if you're going to the Pirate Bay to download I Am Legend. It has far more important things to worry about, like people building atomic bombs and invading other countries.

Whatever they convert it into, New Drachmas or Cryptodrachmas, it's still going to devalue like crazy. Both, being backed by the same entity (the state) will have the same credibility problem. Except even moreso for the cryptocurrency because of all of the concerns that carries with for many investors.

You do realize that to import goods, you have to pay for them, right?
You do realize that without international trade Greece would resemble Somalia, right?

Yes, Greece can declare itself another North Korea and cut itself off from the world if it wants to give the global financial system the middle finger. But hey, good luck with that...

If I were an investor, I'd be glad to see the Euro kick out any countries that undermine the currency.

There's also this big lie that "Greece has been saddled with debts that they could never pay". Greece's state assets are worth an order of magnitude more than their debts. They could sell off a tenth of them and have all of their debts in the clear right away.

Obviously, they don't want to privatize everything, and I don't blame them. But the concept that this debt is impossible to service is simply a lie. They just don't want to. Heck, they could do it without excessive pain to the middle class or extensive privatization if only they'd go after their wealthy - there's a couple dozen Greek billionaires and countless more in the next eschelons. And these are the biggest tax dodgers who don't pay anywhere close to their fair share. But Greece is apparently either unable or unwilling to go after them.

It's easy for Americans who've never had to live with a weak, low circulation currency to say "EURO BAD!". But they've never seen the consequences. How even in a good economy your money steadily becomes more and more worthless because inflation of such currencies is almost always worse than that of stronger currencies. How you pay out the nose for loans because of the higher risk of inflation or currency swings. How many companies won't even work with transfers to / from your currency.

Big, strong currencies offer serious benefits. America has been given a *massive* economic boost due to the widespread usage of the Greenback. Their economy would be nowhere near what it is today if each state had its own currency.

The fact that the Troika hasn't been willing to give one iota on the Greece issue should be enough of a reflection on how little consequence they think an exit of Greece from the eurozone would be. Germany in particular doesn't want to give any ground (I imagine all of the nazi-name calling has played no small part), but they're hardly alone, many countries are taking a very hardline stance on Greece. Most parties feel that the consequence of giving way to Greece could be significant, but the consequences of their exit - while not completely painless - would not be that dramatic.

On the other hand, in Greece, there's only one route for exit, and that's capital controls (or a rapid conversion over the weekend) where everyone's assets are converted to some kind of new-drachma, which instantly devalues to half its value or less. Which is why everyone is taking their euros out of the banks, they're not stupid (unfortunately, thieves aren't stupid either, breakins have become an epidemic as they look for people hoarding money at home).

I can't see a cryptocurrency helping in any way... if anything I'd guess it'd only serve to unnerve markets even more and lose even more value as a consequence. I could picture it maybe as a simultaneous and rate-locked currency to a physical New Drachma, maybe. But it sounds IMHO like an incredibly risky move even then. I mean, one presumes for example that there's a government-controlled master key to "print" more cryptocoins? Then that means that your entire economy can be crushed overnight by someone hacking, physically stealing, misusing, cracking, or whatnot your master key. Isn't that an unnecessarily big risk to take? And on an individual level it seems full of problems as well...

Don't get me wrong, I don't think cryptocurrencies are inherently an evil or shouldn't exist. But I would have serious second thoughts about such a massive nationwide rollout on a country that's already in chaos.

Yes, aluminum is slowly becoming more adopted - although "slowly" is the operative word. Corvettes are not mass manufactured (tens of thousands per year) and are made of single-layer e-glass with polyester, which kind of sucks. Supercars are built better but are in much smaller quantities. And the point of needing to make them affordable and scaling up, that's my point. :)

You're joking, right? Before Tesla the stereotype of an electric car was a nerdy thing with the performance of a golf cart. They completely changed the public perception of electric cars, built vehicles with double the performance and range of the previous best electric cars, getting some of the highest car reviews and satisfaction ratings *ever* given for *any* type of car, and managed to start a brand new car company with a huge valuation, the first new US car company to make it big since the 1930s. Give them some F'ing credit.

Right, I cant imagine how Apple could possibly manage figuring out mass production of exotic materials...

Because that's clearly their field of expertise?

This might allow a competitor such as apple to completely end run the industry because all those years making gas driven drive trains

You mean, like Tesla already did?

complexities in making a great steering system all vanish in this transition.

Wait, you're talking self-driving cars with *no* manual override? Okay, that's going to be permitted first thing, in the year 2047... ;)

a legacy of factories not suitable for modern materials

A widespread transition to composites (which I really, really hope for) could do that, in a way that a switch to aluminum or other metals couldn't (working with aluminum isn't the same as steel, but you still have the basic principles of stamping, cutting, molding, welding etc, which all get thrown out the door when working with composites). But someone needs to find a way to make the composites competitive in a mass-manufacturing, non-niche environment. And preferably when I say "composites" we're not talking single layer E-glass and polyester here.... at the very least it needs to be foam or honeycomb cored with a vinyl ester resin to give the strength and longevity desired. Carbon fiber and epoxy would of course be even better if a good price point can be met. And hopefully in the future we'll be able to affordably get rid of more and more of those hydrogens in the structure... reinforced graphene/ta-C would probably be pretty close to the ultimate manufacturing material one could get, combining the highest known tensile strength with the highest known hardness and compressive strengths.

No, the GP is correct. The requirements for vehicles are radically different for portable electronics, and this leads to very different design choices. Tell me when was the last time you saw an iPod with an air conditioner just to cool its battery pack (which sometimes runs even when the iPod isn't in use), or a heater for cold weather charging? When was the last time you saw a iPhone with a battery that was warrantied for as much as a decade? When was the last time you saw an iPad that was rated by the manufacturer to have no problems after sitting out every day every winter in temperatures of -20C, summer temperatures of +40C with no shade, etc? When was the last time you saw any sort of portable electronics that broke its batteries up into separately sealed canisters that prevent fire from propagating from one to the next, or that can withstand a highway-speed collision? Portable electronics generally don't even do any charge balancing, let alone the sort of "be able to handle the loss of entire clusters of batteries" sort of management that vehicle packs have to be able to do (eg, rather than single cell or a couple-cells-in-series like consumer electronics, the Roadster has 6831 cells clustered into "bricks" of 69 cells in parallel to minimize the effects of individual failures, 9 bricks series per sheet, and 11 sheets, with moderate monitoring and control at the brick level and heavy monitoring and control at the sheet level).

The requirements are not similar, and as a consequence, neither are the packs.

Wrong again. Energy density is of critical importance in both applications.

No, you are the one who is again wrong. EV battery packs are generally significantly lower energy density than portable electronics battery packs, AND they generally run at lower DOD ranges, not charging up to full and not being allowed to even near total discharge. Often a lower-density chemistry is used as well for the same longevity reasons, such as a phosphate or manganese spinel (although a couple manufacturers, Tesla being the most notable, currently use cobalt 18650s). This sort of careful charge maintenance and lower density chemistry election, plus charge balancing, temperature maintenance, and fault isolation and tolerance are necessary to meet the sort of longevity demands of vehicle consumers, which are very different from the longevity demands of users of portable electronics.

The two top demands of EV battery packs are longevity and cost, and these far outstretch the importance of energy density. People could give a rat's arse if their car is 50 kilos lighter if they can't afford to purchase it or have to swap out the pack after three years. Don't get me wrong, weight is an important issue (mainly in terms of ride quality, and to a smaller degree efficiency), but it's not on the same order of magnitude of effect in terms of marketability as longevity and cost.