Just look at the usernames in slashdot. They all make very good passwords. Take my username, please. It is a damn good password. If I can casually waste it as user id, imagine how many more goodies where it came from. 263Bhaskar 264Kuppa 261Shyam 260Thomas 259Raghu 258Siva ... Passwords just make themselves...

Thanks, I stand corrected.

The apocryphal story goes, the fountain pens with ink did not work well in zero gravity. So NASA invented the pressurized ball point pens. Russians switched to pencils.

Someone has to say it.

Give us model E, the 40 K sedan. The rich people have paid enough money and you have built the credibility. Continuing to make play things too expensive for the masses is not how you are going to have long term impact or create disruptive technologies.

If you think your security appliance is bad, wait till the management hears about the tech support appliance used by your IT. It seems to consist of posting a vague statement to Slashdot and hoping to get a solution. It is not how IT is done, buddy.

May be now some of those candidates would know what it means to be on the receiving end of racism and look with some sympathy and understanding when black, brown, yellow Americans complain about it.

And Soylent Green has been trade marked.

You are right in saying the electric part actually reduces efficiency, the only reason to have it is to eliminate the gear box/transmission. But once the technology is in why did it take 60 years to scale the system down to handle trucks? While the automotive engineers spent all that time designing gear boxes to couple the diesel to the 18 wheel truck's wheel, why did not think of going electric? The greatest advantage would be in removing the low end torque requirement. Diesels have better low end torque than gasoline engines. But electric motor has the best torque vs power profile. Using an electric motor to remove the first gear alone would allow them to optimize the engine better for fuel economy, freed from the low rpm torque requirements.

Well we have the benefit of hindsight.

I specifically said, don't rail road some low level schmuck and go after the big guys who have lot more to lose. As long as corporations can blame low level employees and let the big fish get away free, these things will keep happening. To prevent recurrence, big guys should lose big. Otherwise we don't mean it and they wouldn't care.

The diesel-electric locomotive took over from the steam locomotives at incredible rate of adoption. Many steam locomotives pf Baldwin Loco Works, Philadelphia, made just one run from assembly line to scrap yard. It was that fast, technology changed before the order pipeline was flushed. In just 10 years, between 1950 and 1960. But even very large earth movers, even those that needed lots of electric power on board, stubbornly stayed with diesel instead of diesel-electric.

This conversion of diesel trucks to diesel-electric or gas-turbine-electric trucks is long over due. In the case of steam locomotives, the efficiency went from 6% for steam to 15% diesel-electric. But coal was much cheaper than diesel. Here the efficiency boost is probably from 20% to 30%. Going from expensive fuel to slightly cheaper fuel. It might not beat the speed at which steam was made obsolete. But it could come close.

The posting-wallah is deliberately saying wallah to drive his filthy rich relatives crazy.

In cheaper hotels the guests are paying for their own stay. Most swanky hotel guests are too rich to care or their corporations are picking up the tab. All the company executives carefully look at the bills. As long as the porn bill is not identifiable, they shrug and sign it off.

There is no honour among thieves. Set up proper ways to rat on their bosses, throw in some incentives for them, you can find enough evidence and witnesses. If the politicians let it happen and if the government goes after them, they can be sent to jail. But the politicians will never will let it happen.

Yes, India and Bangladesh became polio free. In Pakistan it was confined to one slum of Karachi. Just when victory was about to be had, the terrorists accused the doctors and workers of being American spies and killed an aide worker. The progress stopped. Then the virus spread to the hinterlands of Wazirstan and NWFP. Then the Haj pilgrimage brought it to Mecca and it spread to Nigeria and Indonesia. That is where it stood last year. Not sure where it is now.

[I was clearly wrong to have used the phrase "Right now". I should have said, till about 10 or 15 years ago]