I'm not going to feed your obvious trolling, but I do want to make one thing clear - I work in the solar industry, but my company receives no subsidies. They're not worth the hassle and the control you give up to marauding beureaucrats.

Uh, no, it's based on actual truth, which in turn is based on the personal experience of my family and many others. You can whine about those older ways if you want, but the fact is they were the foundation of transforming Texas into one of the world's most dynamic and beneficial economies. There is good and bad with that, but overwhelmingly good.

First of all, your accounting includes lots of things as "subsidies" that all businesses get. It's ridiculous to count those as subsidies to the"oil industry".

Secondly, your premise is only remotely true if you blatantly lie with the statistics. In the US, the subsidy for renewables *dwarfs* that for other energy sources, when normalized to energy units. (This is really the only correct way to compare them - after all, why wouldn't one use an energy basis to compare energy sources, unless you're just trying to score cheap political argument points?)

Solar's subsidy is a whopping 1600X the subsidy for coal, oil, or gas, and over 300X that of nuclear. (Not that I'm complaining - I work in solar - but let's at least be honest about the fact that solar is really only viable if it receives enormous subsidies...)

Source Subsidy per kwh
Coal $0.0006
Oil/Gas $0.0006
Nuclear $0.0031
Renewables $0.0154
            Biomass Power $0.0020
            Geothermal $0.0125
            Hydroelectric $0.0008
            Solar $0.9680
            Wind $0.0525

Yeah, right - like I didn't spend a ton of money recently on brakes, steering, and air conditioning, which is not really optional in Texas...

Of course, a Tesla makes no sense in Texas unless you're an urban commuter, since until they build some supercharger stations, you can't reasonably take a day trip to another city. A base Model S will, maybe, just barely, make it to Dallas or Houston from Austin, but definitely won't get you around town much once you're there, and of course, there's no prayer of a return trip the same day....

Think I'll stick with internal combustion for a few more years...

Tesla has exceeded pretty much everyone's expectations. The car itself is a technology tour-de-force, and quite impressive. Tesla has invested well to acquire or develop world-class manufacturing facilities, design, and development, and it shows.

Will they succeed, given that the economics of electric cars are still a little iffy (expensive product in the midst of a depression, etc.)? The market will decide. If they fail, it probably won't be because they didn't build a good company around a good product. They at least have a business model that *can* be profitable, and it appears that they've been executing it pretty well.

Contrast this with Solyndra, which never had any chance of success: Their business model required massive cash infusions to build specialized manufacturing systems that couldn't be bought and can't really make anything else. Their product cost $7.00 a watt to make, and their business plan was trying to sell into a market where the highest quality conventional panels (e.g., Schott German panels) were selling for under $4.00/W (This was back from Solyndra's business planning days - it's worse now, since Chinese solar panel overcapacity has collapsed the price for crappy panels to well under $1.00/W!) Add on top of that the fact that Solyndra's panels were far less effiicient from an areal coverage point of view, and you can see it was always certain to anyone that had even a basic understanding of solar that Solyndra *never* had any prayer of making money. The government loans to Solyndra were Obama administration money-laundering and paybacks to contributors, pure and simple.

Gov't loans for technology dev. can be a good thing, but it would be nice if someone were looking out for the taxpayers at least well enough to avoid the blatantly corrupt ripoffs...

No, but the reality is that way too many of them do.

I work in the green energy industry now (and used to work in the oil industry). The "green" industry is far, far slimier (more corrupt)... Maybe this is because the oil industry evolved from the same people who ran the cattle industry, where a man's word was his bond and multi-million dollar deals were made on a handshake. Integrity was everything, and if you lost that, you simply weren't in the business anymore.

Government (and "free governemtn money") corrupts pretty much everything absolutely...

Hmm, you never watched Charlie's Angels or the Bionic Woman, did you? Can't think of anything more Armerican...

So, every one of those 650,000 people aren't drinking enough orange juice?

No, the reality is far, far worse than that - roughly *none* of the humans (or guinea pigs, oddly enough) currently living on this planet gets enough vitamin C.

All humans carry a genetic defect that cripples the mechanism nearly all other mammals use to synthesize vitamin C. I'm not in favor of genetic engineering of humans, but this is the thing that brings me closest to backing the concept.

A "homo sapiens ascorbicus" would be a real blast from the past...

Although it's little-known outside orthomolecular medicine circles (Linus Pauling and Albert Szent-Györgyi (the discoverer of the Vitamin C/Krebs cycle) were two prominent members of the orthomolecular medicine community), Dr. Fred Klenner successfully cured several many polio patients in the late '40s and early '50s, using megadoses of acsorbic acid (nominally the same as vitamin C). A good number of these were advanced enough that they should have died or at the very least been crippled for life by the disease.

Because Klenner was only a backwoods Southern doctor, his remarkable success was largely overlooked for many years. (He wrote his experiences up and had them published as an article titled ‘Virus Pneumonia and Its Treatment with Vitamin C’ in the Journal of Southern Medicine and Surgery . This was followed up by many other articles over the years, mostly on megavitamin therapy for a variety of diseases, including tuberculosis and multiple sclerosis.

Google for the details - you'll be amazed...

And Firefly was a bit higher on the scale, while Max Headroom may actually have been the zenith...

No doubt, the 2009 Trek reboot was rollicking good action fun with a bit of insider snark thrown in. What I've never understood, though, is how Spock managed to turn out so differently - clearly the "new" Spock has little control over his emotions, and apparently, little desire to control them. It was always that tension that made the half-breed human more human than the real humans in some circumstances. And although the new Kirk is a bit over the top, he was always meant to be - Roddenberry intended him as an exaggerated Horatio Hornblower. (And, to the point of the reviewer, StarTrek was deliberately intended as a "space opera" twist on the "horse opera" genre - he pitched the show to network execs as ""Wagon Train" to the stars"...)

Although I enjoyed the original, the idea of the Spock/Uhura lustfest just doesn't work for me at all. (First of all, did Uhura happen to just fall into Spock's seventh year rutting season? We'll never know, apparently....)

  Anyway, it seems Spock's lust handily outstrips his logic, and we're left with the most improbably romance in history. (In the immortal words of the Trek take-off Galaxy Quest (which may well be the best "StarTrek" movie yet), "That's just *wrong*...)

The "science" behind this ridiculous "97% of all non-corrupt, progressive scientists agree" paper is even worse than the "science" arguing for AGW in the first place:

Note this excerpt from Anthony Wattts' blog on Cook's more-than-a-little-suspect claims:

(Emphasis added by /. poster)

I do a lot of technology development and R&D. That requires lots of research and lots of learning, sometimes over a considerable period of time.

Tabs provide something that bookmarks don't - most notably, more context and state. Think about it, just the order and placement of tabs conveys additional dimensions of information beyond what a simple bookmark would. I would ideally have these scattered across a desk sized, high-res display, but since those don't exist, I use a bunch of tabs.

Flipping back and forth and finding what you want becomes very easy with powertools like TabMixPlus - I use three rows of tabs, set to scroll - with a scrollwheel mouse, this makes finding the tab I want very quick and easy. This keeps the tabs from squashing down to nothing, but I never give up more than three rows of precious vertical space on my damned mail-slot HD widescreen display. This becomes even more useful when you set default behavior to open a new tab after the present one rather than at the end - this creates a sort of virtual piling system for tabs, so things that are related wind up being fairly close to each other. With TMP's excellent replacement for the Firefox native session manager, and a bit of custom tab color coding, it's really not hard to know what's where. None of this is necessary, but it saves me hours (and more importantly, lots of frustration) each week. It *does* mean, though, that you begin to get paranoid about losing your tab sessions, since there's a non-trivial amount of state info in them...

Now, admittedly, I may be a pathological case when it come to tabs, but I currently have two computers in from of me (one "work" computer, the other my personal laptop, used for my day job as as well as personal business, consulting, and my own product development) - On each computer, my main browser, Firefox, is open with more than 137 tabs and 122 tabs, respectively. Those are largely different tabs, although some, like work gmail are open on both for convenience. This setup is not for everyone, but it works extremely well for me. I almost hate to admit it, but one of the computers also has Chrome up with another several dozen tabs...

By the way, I'm not against bookmarks - in fact, somewhere, I have an email from a member of the Mozilla development team thinking me for helping them debug very large hierarchical bookmarks files (many thousands of bookmarks, which was really a lot back in the early 2000's...) I use the crap out of bookmarks, too, but tabs are a great way to hold all the "working on it" stuff until it finally gets done - Just this weekend, I closed out a project and killed off a few dozen tabs related to it - turns out I only needed to keep tttttwo or three actual bookmarks, but the other tabs all had information that was valuable and relevant as I was researching...

Oh, and to address the comments of a poster below, I do all this on Windows 7, and it's quite acceptably stable for this sort of thing. I will say, though that only Firefox is really stable at more than about 100-120 tabs, and even it starts to run out of steam somewhere between 150 and 200 tabs. Chrome fails or flakes for me right around 100 tabs. Oh, well...

Kinda thought facial tattoos were always applied to the face, regardless of maleness...

This is dismaying. Even if we found a bottle on the beach and wished every gun on the planet to be turned into kittens and cheese burgers, we will still have them appear, but now not out of predicable venues, but out of thin air as far as any system is concerned. Let's face it, bad people will have reached their weapon production zenith, while the rest of us flounder around in inept, corrupt politics.

This is only dismaying if you believe free citizens have no right to fashion weapons for their own defense. The printable gun, in a way, just takes us back to where we were a century or two ago - anyone with a little technical knowledge and patience can make a reasonably effective weapon. Civilization didn't fall back then - in fact, you could argue that it reached its zenith at exactly the time that weapons production became achievable by any sufficiently motivated group with moderate wherewithal. There's a reason that the first use of interchangeable parts was in the firearms industry, paving the way for the machine age at large.

BTW, I've got enough experience with 3D CAD/CAM and the fiddliness of various rapid prototyping methods to recognize that it's actually considerably easier to get hold of conventional machine shop tools like lathes, gun drills, and milling machines and make much more serious weapons than DD's plastic pistol.

(If you're not averse to breaking laws, then history is full of good model weapons - the German MP3008, was a 9mm submachine gun designed to be easily fabricated with minimal tooling and expertise. Note that for resistance purposes, even the most basic of firearms can give you a shot (literally) at a better-armed enemy, allowing you to then take his (far more effective) weapon: witness cheap (a few dollars!) single shot pistols like the Liberator or "Deer Gun"...)

My point was that this exact thing has been tried before, and the market clearly decided it wasn't worth the trouble and expense. This is no different.

Rhombus Tech is building EOMA-68 as a duplicate answer to a question no one has asked in years. By any reasonable standards of modern embedded hardware (I've been working with deeply embedded hardware for my own company for the past few years), EOMA-68 is poorly designed, not tightly integrated, and does not even begin to match the capabilities of many of the embedded modules that are already available at good prices from a wide variety of manufacturers. RhombusTech seems only interested in trying to create and push a "proprietary open source" form factor just to be different. BTW, the Casio/Epson/whoever PCMCIA CPU cards also redefined pinouts, too, but at least they had the good engineering sense to use different specific keying (and to get the PCMCIA consortium to register it as such) to avoid plugging them in where thy could not work, or where they could damage or be damaged by other PCMCIA equipment. Relatively cheap and available (if huge) connectors are about the only thing PCMCIA/CF has going for it in today's world: there's a lot more working against it, starting with lots of wasted packaging space (it was great 25 years ago!), compatibility issues, heat dissipation difficulties, I/O limits, etc.

that's why we also created EOMA-CF which, surpriiise, re-uses Compact Flash. however that's *really* small
No, sorry, wrong. Bzzzt. Thank you very much for playing.

As modern embedded electronics go, CF is simply enormous, rather than absolutely gigantic, as PCMCIA is. Have you actually taken a look inside a modern phone to see the scale of tight integration in these devices? Sure, you can chain yourself to PCMCIA/CF, but you can't do it without also chaining yourself to an anchor wedged firmly in the mid 1990's.

Like the earlier attempts, this attempt to dictate a "standard, open" CPU card form factor will fail - even with "Sparkly Magic Open Source GPL Sprinkles! (TM)" The market moves far too quickly for this - look how hard it is for AMD and Intel to even stick with their own CPU pinout and bus standards for more than a few years! By your logic, I should be able to buy a Core i7 plugin for my old Socket II Pentium computer, and somehow, magically, expect it to deliver all the goodness of a Microsoft Surface Pro despite the fact that everything that surrounds that processor (for input, interaction, communications, interfaces, etc.) has changed even more than the processor itself. Really, what you are proposing (and building!) makes that little sense!

That said, I think standard CPU form factors (even as pluggable modules) are a good thing, but the market has shown that only the most open and flexible ones have any chance at adoption. VIA is arguably the most successful here, and look a their success rate: MiniITX = Hit, NanoITX = meh, PicoITX = meh++, other attempts = Can Anyone Even Remember What They're Called?

Even the well-engineered schemes (RhombusTech's engineering is joke like, at best) that have significant industry backing (I'm thinking Qseven, here) have a hard time getting the required traction, and the pace of innovation and technology advancement makes it really hard to have a standard that's still relevant by the time it's developed and in production. Likewise, something will someday replace the hoary PC-104, but with modifications, it still clings to life as a contender. (And you could easily argue that the Arduino shield implementation is a non-standard "standard" of sorts, although it is not well-engineered, either...) Saying you have a fallback to Cardbus ("we have a plan, here, if it all goes to hell in a hand-basket: we use Cardbus", from your own comment below), is simply admission that you have no bloody idea how to do this right in the first place. CardBus is only slightly less antiquated than PCMCIA, and was itself superceded by ExpressCard a full decade ago!

IMO, even something as simple as a Mini-PCI CPU module would be considerably more attractive than the kludgey and ponderous EOMA-68. Never have I seen such a poor idea with such poor engineering execution manage to grab so much press. When "Sparkly Magic Open Source GPL Sprinkles! (TM)" really are the only argument you can make, you've already lost. I weep for our technology future if anyone actually buys into this steaming pile of crap - As Scott McNealy once famously quipped, "You can put whipped cream and a cherry on a cow patty, but I still wouldn't want to eat it!" EOMA-68 is definitely a cow patty!