In the last ten days I've seen two articles which, IMO, spell the inevitable death of the electric car's resurgence. The first talked about a new process that breaks down normal plant cellulose into sugar, meaning that the entire corn crop can be converted into ethanol rather than just the second and the second talks about a huge breakthrough by Boeing. I can't find the link to the first, but here's the second:

http://www.energypost.eu/exclu...

The Boeing breakthrough basically means we can turn the Sahara Desert into a giant farm to grow ethanol crops. And unlike with conventional fuels or even electric, you can build inefficiencies into the system to absorb more CO2 than you expel back into the atmosphere. Better put, you can have carbon negative fuels.

I'm actually looking at this one to a degree as an example of how not to build scalable database systems.

Complete and utter BS. The only thing Tesla wants is a monopoly. Tesla isn't banned from selling cars in Texas; they can sell their cars in Texas through dealerships. Why don't they want to? Because doing so provides downward pressure on prices. When you have multiple dealerships, you can go to different dealerships and peg one against another and get the best price. Dealerships then pressure the manufacturer to sell them the car at a lower price so they can in turn get a higher profit off of the lower price. When the manufacturer owns all the dealerships, you lose all of your leverage -- every bit of it. You can't go to the dealership down the street and get a better price anymore, because Tesla owns that dealership as well. GM, Ford, etc. were banned from selling directly to the public way back when for a reason... because they were trying to drive up prices.

Twitter told them to go screw themselves. They can do the same.

I've frankly seen some very pretty and very elegant perl code. I've also seen complete crap implemented in other languages, and perl doesn't force you into boxes with a battering ram like a lot of other languages (Python comes to mind). Perl can be old-school function oriented programming, modern OOP or functional. Additionally, you don't spend hours on end trying to figure out how to fix typing issues -- something you will spend far more time doing than allowing bad types to fail in development. Javascript's primary problems come from never properly implementing objects and inheritance, something that would have been fixed had Microsoft not killed the proposal to use Flex/Actionscript as the HTML5 specification.

Why is a category 1 hurricane being called a superstorm? I live in Florida and we get these frequently. They aren't a big deal if you're properly prepared for them. Hell, we got the same winds level of winds from Sandy that NY/NJ got when it was a much stronger C2 (nearly a 3), though the C2 part was off shore. Perhaps a better name for this is a super failure to be properly prepared?

By losing the attitude, I've come to find that the core source of it was a few things:

* Not realizing that what's in my mind isn't necessarily in somebody else's mind
* Not realizing that just because somebody else doesn't know something, doesn't mean they're stupid.
* Being patient and respectful with somebody who is ignorant on a topic and taking the time to clearly communicate the concept to somebody does wonders. They grow and learn from you and you obtain their respect.
* Realizing that there are perspectives other than mine; losing the "I know better than you" attitude.

I've moved on to Waze. The directions sometimes make no sense, but knowing that there's a speed trap up ahead is just too invaluable.

> Define "Facebook transaction"

Posting status updates to my friends. Posting messages to my friends. Finding my friends via information that I choose to divulge.

I think this needs some work. Claiming Facebook doesn't collect information not necessary for the transaction? Isn't this the same company that is well known for raiding peoples contact lists and location data on smart phones? Meanwhile craigslist collects too much information? They only ask for your email address these days!

Or full-frontal nudity.

I'm tired of seeing everyone's wages go down because of it and places like it.

A nice piece of information for people in Florida: by law right turn violations are unenforceable by red light cameras. If you get a ticket for doing such, fight it. It won't stand up. Also, call your state legislator and senator. They're taking up repealing red light cameras after an enormous amount of backlash by the people.

I used to work there. There is no cutoff.

Verio offers unlimited bandwidth on their VPS servers. For the disk space you need today, it's $82/m. For 65GB of disk space it's $140/m. Either of those options beat what you're spending now, and you can set up a shared file system to group together the VPS servers to form a larger disk. You can get to them by
  going to www.verio.net.