Until recently, production electric cars cost way too much, even when you figure you're saving most of the cost of gasoline over the lifetime of the car. (A 50-mpg Prius will use about $20k in gas over 200-250k miles; a 20mpg minivan will use about $50k, so I guess you can justify that Tesla if you were going to buy a gas-guzzler and didn't need the space.) Hobbyist electric cars can cost a lot less, if you want to do all the labor to retrofit a very used car with electric motors and batteries, but I don't.

But even now that prices are coming down, the range on the lower-cost cars isn't enough for me. It's fine for going to the grocery store, but my office is 40 miles away, and so is The City, so on the days I'm not telecommuting or want to go into the city for something, I need a guaranteed range of over 100 miles so I'm not worried about having to coast home on electron vapors or stop for half an hour at a charging station if there wasn't one near my destination. Battery range declines as the batteries get older, so that means I'd probably need a 150-mile range when it's new to be sure I can get to work when it's older.

Maybe a couple of years from now it'll make sense to buy an electric car; we'll see how long my wife's car lasts, and whether it's worth getting an electric when we need to replace it. The real cost includes adding an extra electric meter and 240v power to my garage space and the cost of storing the stuff that's currently in my garage, because Silicon Valley real estate is too expensive to actually use a garage for putting cars in...

Unfortunately, most lower-cost electric today talk about monthly lease prices, and hide all the other costs; one of the ones that was advertised on the radio did mention something around $5K up-front and 25 cents a mile if you drive over 10,000 miles a year - the reason I'd be buying an electric car is to make my commuting cheaper, and my gasoline car currently costs about 25 cents a mile (10 cents amortizing the purchase price over 200k miles, 15 cents for gas.)

Snowden deserves asylum - he's wanted for a political crime, he's clearly guilty of violating US laws, and the US government doesn't accept a necessity defense when they're the ones he blew the whistle on, and even if he got a jury trial they'd make sure no juror who supports him would be picked.

Assange is a different case - the US wants him for political reasons, but Sweden wants him on trial for rape. There's a significant risk that if he goes back, gets a fair trial, and is found not guilty, the US will kidnap\\\\\\extradite him so they can try him for political crimes, and asylum would be appropriate then. But it's not appropriate now.

Yeah, the secret hacking method turned out to be "roll two 6-side dice, if you get over 10, you break in, under 6 and you're BUSTED."

Can't tell your boss you made that dumb a mistake, so you've got to escalate the charges somehow.

I've never had the original game, but I acquired various expansion cards over the years. It was sort of a Magic the Gathering with cards written in the style of Robert Anton Wilson, the X Files, and random paranoid conspiracies. Don't let them immanentize the Eschaton!

Your own front yard, or back yard, or the street, of course, preferably with illegal fireworks. Or the beach. As a friend put it, for any holiday celebrating the overthrow of the government, the question of whether your fireworks are legal simply shouldn't come up.

Most of California's way too dry to allow the things, but there's one town near San Francisco (Pacifica) that's always wet enough they're not worried about moderate levels of fireworks, so the local fire department sells them, and you're allowed to set them off down on the beach, and in practice locals also set them off on the street. Several friends have lived there, and we've had a few good July 4th parties and a Canada Day party (too foggy, but lots of fun; it's July 1, and it was the weekend that year.)

My town used to have a freeway exit that was closed for construction, so there was a big pile of dirt twice as high as the bridge is now, and the neighbors would all take our lawn chairs up to the top to watch fireworks, including the official town shindig (minus the traffic), and the amusement park down the road, a couple of towns north and south, and the illegal backyard fireworks. Another place I lived was on a bay, and for some big firework years we could go down to the dock and see fireworks from a bunch of different towns across the water.

A few towns I've lived in had fireworks that involved driving somewhere to watch them, which might or might not involve horrendous traffic going there, but always involved horrendous traffic leaving. Not worth it.

Thanks to the Internet, the nearest hippie is only a few milliseconds away. What was it he wanted to ask, again?

Almost everybody's on 2.4 GHz, and the bands overlap with each other as well as with your microwave oven. If you can run your Wifi on 5 GHz, and don't have distance problems, it's really what you want.

Unfortunately, while my Linksys WiFi router can use both frequencies, it can only use one at a time, and I've got a few 2.4GHz-only devices in the house, so I'm stuck with 2.4. Occasionally it gets tempting to switch it to 5 GHz and drag out its dumber predecessor to run 2.4 on. (I bought the newer one because I needed 802.11n to compete with all my neighbors' 802.11n drowning out my wimpy 802.11g system. I was also surprised to find that it didn't support IPv6 sigh.)

Sorry - anybody who works for Rachel from Cardholder Services or Fake Microsoft Technical Support or Fake IRS is a scammer, and knows that their job is to rip people off. Thieves don't rate the "just doing their crappy job" excuse, unlike the people who call up trying to sell me legitimate services when they know (or should know) that I'm on the Do Not Call List so I'm not interested.

Look, it's one thing for spammers to call up and waste my time. But more than half of them these days call up and don't ever play a message or put their agent on the phone so I can waste their time. I don't know if they're just badly understaffed (at least they could play a recording), or their equipment is broken, or their call center is checking my number against the Do Not Call List after I answer instead of before (presumably because of how they charge each other for various services.) And lately I've been getting people with bad VOIP systems calling up and playing crackly versions of the "Rachel from Cardholder Services" tape - at least they could use a higher bit rate.

I work from home most days, and my wife usually get up a couple hours after I do, so I answer the phone on first ring to avoid having it wake her up if I let the answering machine get it. Real calls at that time are usually the pharmacy's robot saying there's something ready, or the gas company robot saying they're still going to be digging up the street; other calls are usually spam robots.

I've had some interesting conversations with them, when they called my cellphone instead of my home phone. One of them was telling me how stupid Americans are, we only speak one language while he speaks lots (I asked him in French, German, and Spanish if he spoke any of those languages, but he was on a rant.) Eventually he decided to just start insulting me, thinking that telling me I was a "black n-----" would be a useful insult. Since I was in the lobby at work, I didn't go into a long rant about how racist that was and how he probably didn't get along with the various colors of people in his country, but hung up on him. The other guy was mainly bragging about how I'd never be able to trace his call, and he was using Magic Jack for VOIP, and how he could break into my mobile phone (which he demonstrated to me by calling with his caller-ID set to my number), and was at least more amusing to talk to, for a shameless thief.

My mom was amused by those scammers. She's used Macintoshes for nearly 30 years, and her Mac is only on the internet when she tells the modem to dial up her ISP. (Her vision's not good enough to use the web, and modem's plenty for email, much to the frustration of my siblings who don't like using sub-broadband speeds when visiting her.) So the "Your Windows machine is sending out viruses!" got a very quick hang up.

I've kept some of them on line for over an hour, when I've had time; eventually the caller's boss came on and yelled at me for wasting his employee's time. Other times I've told them I didn't have time for their lying bullshit right now, and got aggressively cursed at.

Apparently there was a period of a couple of weeks when I could have gotten the upgrade from 2.1 to 2.2, but the carrier didn't actually push it, just made it available if you noticed and asked it to download, and soon after that, when Google Play came out, my Locked-To-Android-Market phone could no longer do any updates. I couldn't find a smartphone that small to replace it (sorry, but smallness is a feature for something you carry in your pocket), and eventually replaced the phone when apps I wanted were only running on 4.x anyway. I suppose I should go back and Cyanogenize it.

If you love America so much, buy goods made there instead of China. Oh, wait, you're not doing that? Pretty lame for a jingo troll!

If the Commies (more likely Russians than Chinese, for economic reasons) had cracked Snowden's document cache, they'd be able to throw lots of people at reading them all quickly and correlating them, and they'd need a month or so to recall any spies that were outed, or give them good false information to spread, and bust any US and other countries' spies they can (or give them even more disinformation.) But after that, they'd be free to start releasing documents embarrassing to the Obama and Bush Administrations and the permanent NSA/CIA/DIA/FBI/DEA/TLA/etc. agencies, totally tanking most of their composition here and throwing the US into chaos, along with GCHQ, UK Parliament, and probably some Canadians or the Deutsche Bundesfoo..

They haven't. This either means they haven't cracked the document cache, or that they're a really devious conspiracy, blackmailing US/UK politicians or waiting until after the election or something. (Maybe they want the Tories to trash the UK, for instance.)