In the example in the article, they are using wind generated electricity to make the fuel. So, the process is...

Electricity -> Synthetic Diesel Fuel -> Combustion -> Power (to wheels of car)

While for an electric car...

Electricity -> Battery Charge -> Battery Discharge -> Electric Motor -> Power (to wheels of car)

So, for the Electricity -> ... -> Power efficiency, on the Roadster Tesla claims to be at 86% efficiency (they call it plug to wheel efficiency). Compare that to the Electricity -> ... -> Power efficiency of the synthetic fuel which I am assuming to be between 10% and 20% ( 70% efficiency for creating fuel * 35% combustion efficiency * probably about 90% mechanical efficiency for transmission and differential).

I am not trying to say that there won't be a place for this technology. I just think that in most circumstances electric cars will be a much better option.

** A normally fueled car usually has a well-to-wheels efficiency of around 14%, so as far as actual energy efficiency goes, this fuel is doing pretty well. It just looks bad next to the high efficiency of electric cars.

If Verizon is in fact breaking a contract it has with ESPN then all I can say is that it is a horrible contract.

I don't watch TV, haven't for more years than I can remember, I don't care for commercials and I don't care for the content. I have 0 (zero) interest in watching any sports on TV whatsoever, never had any interest in watching sports, never will have any interest in watching sports.

Just saying, forcing somebody like me to sign up for a service that provides sports information as part of the package is a 100% way to have me avoid that service.

Very true; though (on the whole) the end user has made the same choice when they'd either have to buy more hardware or spend more for software and/or make do with fewer features.

Even situations that are highly cost sensitive and have customers who bear the entire cost of the extra hardware or the extra software engineering (like embedded systems) have seen a fair amount of hardware growth. Cortex-M0 or a bunch of extra squeezing to get it into an 8 or 16 bit micro?

I'm no expert; but my off-the-cuff assumption would be that it could be made quite fast:

At least with Debian and derivatives, you have a locally stored cache of package data(not the packages themselves, but their metadata). Searching that is pretty fast unless you have a lot of repositories or a brutally slow storage system.

The obvious(and probably flawed in some less obvious way that I'm not thinking through) extension would be to add the VID/PID combinations (or device classes, for class drivers) to which a driver package applies to the existing metadata about the package. You might also have a 'driver package vs. 'non-driver package' distinction to reduce the search space). During the hotplug process, if nothing suitable is already available, apt-cache search for the VID/PID pair would be run, and a match downloaded, if available(the amount of security prompting would obviously be a matter of configuration: sometimes it would be desireable that admin authorization always be required, sometimes it would be better if downloads from already-blessed repositories are acceptable, depends on the use case).

The local search would be reasonably fast, barring very slow storage, the download and install obviously depending on the size of the driver and the speed of the connection. In the not-terribly-valuable opinion of a layman, it seems like it could be reasonably quick.

It is pretty much guaranteed that charging an electric car takes less energy than this. Internal combustion engines are only ~35% efficient, so even if the process of creating the fuel is 100% efficient (which it is not, it is probably in the ideal case about 50% efficient), you would still need 3x the energy to create the fuel.

Hydrogen is actually a terrible fuel. Because it is always a gas at any reasonable temperature, it is either extremely bulky, or expensive and dangerous to store (high pressure).

Charging batteries is usually very efficient, so this process is probably significantly less efficient. Also, batteries discharge very efficiently, while an Internal Combustion Engine is usually around 35% efficient. I would guess that overall in the ideal case it would be on the order of 10-20% efficient (or less), compared to the roughly 90% efficiency of batteries. But, it is only a guess.

Normally, diesel fuel is burned thus...

Diesel Fuel + Oxygen -> CO2 + H2O + Energy

So, I would assume the opposite would be...

CO2 + H2O + Energy -> Diesel Fuel + Oxygen

The reason why diesel engines have problems with NOx emissions is because the high temperatures and pressures in diesel fuel cause the nitrogen in the air to react with oxygen. Nitrogen is not normally a component in diesel fuel.

Along the same lines, cars burning this fuel would probably still have NOx emissions.

What's blindingly obvious is that both sides are horrible. I was only saying that I could see why the Catholics wanted to prevent commoners from doing their own interpretation, because it leads directly to fundamentalism; I never said the Catholics were models of virtue themselves.

The best answer is to not have any "holy books" at all, because as soon as you believe something like that, you get all kinds of twisted logic and justifications for stupid and horrible things. ("It says XYZ here, and we can't question that, so it follows from that that we need to do ABC in this situation.")

This wouldn't be the kernel's problem; but it might be kind of neat to make the package manager aware of the hotplug process; in order to allow largely automated hunting of the repositories for the appropriate modules for a newly inserted device; but the amount of space saved may just not be enough to be worth the trouble. It'd arguably be more elegant than preloading more or less everything, or having the user grovel around with VID/PID combinations looking for helpful advice on Google; but storage tends to be cheaper than any human labor you'd want touching important software...

I don't find it to be annoying, evil collectivists/statists use anything to oppress individuals more with legislation (and all legislation is against individual freedoms by definition, that's redundant).

Hey, if you want to screw hairy-legged women, go right ahead. Don't pretend it's normal though.

A few points:

The 2A argument is a bit different. Personally, I can see both sides. Some of that may be my American (and southern) upbringing and environment, but to me, I can see both sides. One side argues that society is safer with guns because police can't be there in 5 seconds and you can protect yourself with one, the other side argues that a proliferation of guns is what makes society unsafe and that adding more guns to the mix just makes it worse. Both are valid points. Both sides, from what I've seen, have made valid points at times, and stupid points at others. This to me makes me think that the whole issue is far too complex for a simple binary choice, and also that our society's problems are a lot more complex than whether people have easy access to guns or not. I could go on and on about this subject, but at the very core, both sides have the exact same goal: a safe society for everyone. Neither side wants a society plagued by crime and violence, they just disagree on whether having legal access to guns helps or hurts this.

Gay rights is rather different. At its core, it's about equality: should homosexuals have the same rights as everyone else? Should they be allowed to live their lives peaceably, or should they live in fear and hide their orientation for fear of being ridiculed, harmed, or murdered? I honestly don't see how it's any different than civil rights for minority races. The only justification for oppressing gays is purely religious, and not based on anything rational at all. People hate them because they're different, and that's it.

That said, as for various smart people you listed, everyone does stupid stuff from time to time. I like to believe that we should *try* to be smart in our actions and beliefs, rather than being content to be dumb, but even the smartest of us do stupid things sometimes. Also, not everyone is smart in every subject. Being good at math for instance doesn't mean you've seriously thought much about ethics.

Saudi Arabia isn't the #3 country by population in the world. America is. It doesn't matter what the rest of the world's Christians are doing, America has a huge chunk of them, and quite possibly a majority of Protestants. Most of the other heavily-Christian nations in the world are Catholic (Latin America plus the southern European nations like Spain and Italy). The other Protestant nations aren't very religious for the most part; Germany for instance is the birthplace of Protestantism (Luther), and most Christians there are probably Protestant, but Germany is not a highly religious country these days. America is. America is also the country where its fundie/evangelical Protestants are sending missionaries to Africa and converting everyone there to their brand of Christianity, and as a result, African nations are trying to pass laws legalizing murder of homosexuals.

Wrong. It isn't some "tiny subset", it's a huge number of Christians in America who are like this. Look how many American Christians believe in the Rapture. IIRC, that's based on one tiny passage in Revelations. But probably about half of Protestants in this country believe that and watch Christian movies about how the end is near. One such movie is in Redbox kiosks right now. You don't get your movie in a Redbox kiosk nationwide without having a huge number of potential viewers.