Well, except for the "cheap" part :)

When a Leaf is $14,000 like the similar Versa, I'm in.

(In all fairness, the build quality is better and the performance is maybe closer to a $16,000 Sentra but with more low-end grunt. But you get my drift...)

It's still pretty outrageous to claim that they survive on the few percent they are saving by not collecting in the few states so small that they don't have a presence there.

OK, so then on to point 2 - unless you think they will be building coal plants in downtown LA.

Just because they were bailed out on billions, it does not follow that they are going to get a bail out for a thousand dollar credit card fraud.

No. A bank is not going to be insured against these kind of small day-to-day losses. That would make no sense, since they would pay more for the insurance, than they would receive in reimbursements. As much as possible, the bank tries to push the losses onto the merchant, which is often legitimate since the merchant is responsible for checking that the CC actually belongs to the holder. If you have been shopping in the last few decades, you would know that that is rarely done, but for big purchases, like an iPhone, it is inexcusable for them to not check.

We really need to move to chip-and-pin, which will go a long way to stopping CC fraud. Many countries have already done that.

I don't think a car needs to be all things to all people - we have hundreds of models and sub-models available to us. As it stands right now, no single manufacturer has even 20% of the market - individual models are in the single digit range.

In my family, a cheap electric car with perhaps 40 mile range would be ideal. My wife's commute is 5 miles, all congested local roads. The headroom on the battery would only be necessary for heat/AC while sitting in traffic and to account for decreased range with age. Such a car does not yet exist, but there seems to be progress. We would still have our minivan for my slightly longer commute and long trips.

A couple of things:
1. Coal power is a declining percentage. Stepping up the electric car infrastructure now as coal is declining seems to make sense. In any event, it is much easier to regulate a handful of power plants than thousands of individual cars.
2. Even "dirty" sources of electricity are beneficial in certain areas. Los Angeles is constantly suffering air quality due in large part to the number of ICE vehicles on the road. Even if a coal plant supplies the power, the coal plant can be located somewhere more suitable.

617-34-2135

Funny, they collect tax in PA. (And in 23 other states.)

Just because someone has a right to say something, doesn't mean you have to "support" what they say. Publishing names, addresses, and names of children is legal, as long as it is not done as part of a credible threat. Disclosing someone's SSN may or may not be illegal depending on what jurisdiction you are in, and what the judge had for breakfast.

Personally, I think disclosure of SSNs should not only be legal, but should be encouraged. Then we can get rid of the idiotic notion that "knowing" an SSN is somehow evidence that you are the person it belongs to.

If someone cannot read a few simple sentences, it was not "college" that failed.

It is a general purpose scripting language.

An object-oriented general purpose scripting language with a number of features that makes system administration easier.

One example is DSC. It is a scripting language that can use the DSC *platform* to make sure that target systems are all configured the same way, albeit each with different parameters.

Another example is workflows. Wake me up when bash or python can start a script that can survive system restarts and pick up and continue from where it was when the system restarted, complete with state, variables etc.

Nah. In PowerShell:

iwr "http://server/path/to/file.zip" -outf "${env:TEMP}/file.zip"

You can try to make it look more verbose. But expect to be called out on it.

You can accomplish almost any task with fewer keystrokes in PowerShell compared to bash - and the resulting command will still be more readable.

Desired State Configuration (DSC) that FTFA was about, is definitely one such thing that PowerShell has that python has not. DSC is a *declarative* description of the configuration you want for a target system. You should think more in line of Chef or Puppet than Python. PowerShell DSC for Linux actually *uses* Python.

The idea is that you use PowerShell to define a data structure (much like a Ruby hash) that describes the configuration of the node. DSC will itself resolve dependencies. If you require a feature DSC will ensure that the feature is installed - much like a package manager - but it actually interacts with the package manager. What package managers do not do is to configure the products once they are installed. This could be connection strings, IP addresses, user accounts.

PowerShell DSC for Linux has "resources" for file system, user accounts, text file content, package managers (Yum, Apt, Zypper), scripts, daemons, ssh keys and more. You use those resources to describe how you want a system to look - like a Chef recipe. The resource description can be parameterized (it is just a PowerShell function and can take parameters like PS functions) so that the same resource description can be used for multiple targets with slightly different values.

Once applied, DSC will ensure that the target is set up so that it matches the target. From there on it can also report on drift (e.g. more users created, files deleted/changed etc) and can warn about it and automatically bring the node back to the desired state (undoing the drift).