That's great, except for the extra distance you have to walk just to continue straight down a street.

Given where our energy situation is going in the west, any idea that forces people to walk farther to improve car traffic flow is plain stupid.

I moved to Seattle pretty recently. I've lived in Chicago for longer. Chicago has many "crosstown" bus routes, going north-south along major streets like Ashland, Damen, Western, etc, and not through downtown. So you can get from, say, Pilsen to Wicker Park really easily. You can also get east-west in straightforward ways.

Seattle's situation is totally different, though. The hills and waterways have a major influence on how major roads are laid out. Even in a car most cross-town trips take you on 5 or 99, either near or through downtown. There's already a minor cross-town type route on 23rd/24th Ave. It's not super-long like the Chicago ones, but those aren't necessarily all that useful -- often it's faster to take the L and transfer downtown than ride the Western Ave bus for 10 miles (I used to do this every so often and timed it out at different times of day). I don't think you'll find a place where it's the norm to make long cross-town trips on mass transit without transfers.

The link on the text "lost a domain" points to Mr. Sunde's Twitter feed, providing me with one sentence in his own words stating exactly what the summary did. That's pointless. The whole reason I'd click a link is to get more information about the situation described, preferably from a neutral source (or one that acknowledges its bias). Similarly, a link on the text "suspicious of ICANN for a long time" suggests a resource indicative of that long time, not one stupid tweet.

I actually sort of like Twitter, but you're using it wrong, /. blurb writers!

I have a feeling bombing a store on Black Friday wouldn't stop people from shopping. At the Wal-Mart in suburban New York where the doors were literally "busted" and people trampled to death (this was Black Friday 2008 IIRC) the shoppers just kept shopping. The police tried to clear the store for an investigation and were unable to do it. Not one of humanity's brighter moments.

Point being, if one of those crowds was bombed it probably wouldn't even stop people from shopping at that store. Enterprising family members of the dead would be out in the parking lot auctioning off their newly-unneeded vehicles. Black Friday is a scourge more evil, and more powerful, than terrorism.

Modern Linux desktops have no problem with WPA. But instead of actually showing people the connection settings they need they tell them to log onto some unencrypted network and then run some binary blob, then tell them (incorrectly) they can't connect with OSes the blob doesn't run on. In this particular case you can't blame Linux. It offers a perfectly reasonable way to enter the parameters but the admins won't tell you the parameters.

I don't know for sure, but I've thought about this a bit and I'm pretty sure you're exactly right about this -- unless there's some other reason the Volt pollutes more than the plug-in Prius it should probably be treated the same.

Let's see exactly how much gas that is. $12k buys you about 4,000 gallons of gas where I live today (Seattle). That's probably about 120,000 miles in a Civic (it's about what I get in my 2000 Focus). And that's about a vehicle-lifetime.

If the electric vehicle had no fuel-related costs then the two vehicles would have about equal total costs. Now clearly grid power does cost something (this varies place to place), and today's electrics may require more costly maintenance over their lives, and they have various disadvantages -- lots of space taken up by battery packs, limited range, long charging times. So currently in the US market gas cars are a better deal.

But, you know what, given the relative maturity of the technologies, I've got to give the electric vehicles some credit -- they're getting pretty close. Hybrids are already a straight-up good deal for some people. Just imagine if our economy didn't suck at dealing with externalities. We'd all (we being people in the market for new cars) be looking pretty seriously at electrics. And these are the first mass-market vehicles. So although electric cars can never be a total solution to any real problem, I think they're already more than just a statement, and I'm pretty impressed with that.

I agree. We need to be better at preventing this sort of thing. But it has done us some good. BP's financial strength has meant that instead of going bankrupt and leaving the government with the whole cleanup bill it's actually covering some of the costs. It probably won't cover them all. But it will do better than a smaller company would have done.

Obsolete? The engine can still pollute more on a cold start, and the Volt is likely to have to cold-start often. It's hard to determine what overall emissions of the Volt will be, and that's really what CARB is concerned with.

And, really, that's as it should be. The air is the public good they're concerned with. The societal costs of energy production ought to be baked directly into energy costs.

Problem: in game design you get to ignore all sorts of real-world constraints you can't ignore in the design of an economy.

For example, yeah, it's incredibly hard to get a business started. If, in an RPG, to get a character past level 1, you had to out-compete all the established characters, a lot of people would fail in the early stages. It's hard to find a fair way around that in the real world. Things like economies of scale and interest weren't designed into the economy. They developed for good reasons and have helped us become more prosperous and use resources more efficiently.

It's true that there are some cheaters, people that use their powerful position to influence the admins and change the rules. And there are some rules that hurt small businesses beyond what's necessary. Employer-based health insurance, for example, benefits large employers over small ones to a stupid degree. But I think you could fix all the problems that can really be fixed, and even simplify some laws, and it would still be hard to start a business.

On the other hand, seriously handicapping large enterprises in some industries might have awesome consequences. I'm thinking agriculture and mining here, with the consequences being more local agriculture and more efficient use of the land that's currently wasted on exurban subdivisions.