you might be right, but it won't come soon enough to help this generation.

You're both just ranting unless you ask the people she supposedly helped, most of whom are presumably now dead. If they were happy then she did a good job. If they were unhappy then she did a bad job. There is no other metric which is meaningful but happiness per dollar or whatever other number you're measuring effectiveness by. (Man-hour? It pretty much always boils down to dollars or hours, and hours can be converted into dollars.)

If you're going to come over all logical, I have to ask, where is the grain coming from? I mean, you're not proposing that they print bread from PLA, are you? Just because you can theoretically eat it doesn't mean it's a good idea.

I got my first webpage at 15. And there wasn't a lot of content around at the time.

Suffice to say, if I ever entertained notions of running for political office, they were long since dashed.

This is much of why I feel so free to share my feelings here. My attitude is already well-known and a matter of public record. (Although since the internet archive operates based on the current robots.txt, our once-significant site is not available to the public...)

There are two kinds of noise in the car which are insulated for, the road noise and the engine noise. If you run any kind of fancy rubber for performance reasons, road noise will be considerable at high speeds. Of course, most EVs and hybrids run LRR tires which produce less friction and thus less noise... but in a luxury performance vehicle, you want some decent rubber. You really need it if you want to actually use the car.

"a Tesla" will soon include a $30k model and, hopefully, will later include a lower-cost model. If a family can't afford to buy a $30k car on credit, then there are deeper problems afoot in the nation which you simply cannot pin on Tesla, and which are not adequately explained by the Government granting them a loan which has now been paid back.

How amusing. Solyndra is what you're asking for, and Tesla is what you're complaining about, but we've been paid back for Tesla, and not for Solyndra. You really have no clue what you're on about, or even what you're saying, have you?

It wasn't until the auto companies bought up and shut down profitable public transportation systems nationwide (including both local and long-range transport — streetcars, buses, and trains) and shut them down to increase demand for their product. When coupled with the development of the interstate highway system which was allegedly intended to promote national defense but which was actually unnecessary for that purpose (expanding a rail network provides for the same function, but delivers more transportation efficiency) this forced citizens to buy automobiles if they wanted to remain relevant members of society. I grew up in Santa Cruz as the child of a single mother who refused to buy a car. Some of our buses ran every fifteen minutes but that still resulted in adding hours to my day every day because of the dominance of cars and the ineffectuality of the bus system — again, a situation which was deliberately created by auto companies nationwide.

You're looking at history through typically rose-colored glasses. The fact is that it wasn't the price coming down that drove acceptance of the automobile; that was a result of acceptance of the automobile that was forced upon the populace, due to the deliberate removal of the systems which had naturally evolved to fill actual consumer need.

That's a massive change. That's several of the most failure-prone systems removed and replaced with something less failure-prone than anything that's currently on the vehicle. It basically reduces the vehicle to body, suspension, and electrical work, because statistically nobody is actually going to work on the motor or controller (which will be replaced as a unit) and many of these vehicles don't even have a transmission. Vehicles with regenerative braking also reduce the wear on the brake system, extending even such a trivial service. The fact is that EVs built to the same standards will require significantly less maintenance hours than vehicles with ICEs in them. Dealers are already hurting (primarily "big 3" dealers) due to the loss of service revenues which came with American automakers finally electing to compete on quality and not simply based on being made in the USA, which is mostly a lie anyway since so many major parts (including castings!) have been coming from China since the 1980s.

You offered a false dichotomy. It's not a choice between "a new car for $10K and $1K in gas fees every year for 20 years" and whatever, because of the massive externalities from gasoline-powered vehicles. As long as people are driving them, we all suffer and we suffer by loss of environment and due to health impact. Petro-fueled cars have a cost in lives. Those who drive them are murderers, myself included. Hyperbole? Bullshit. We're killers for nothing more than convenience.

EVs have the same problem, but not inherently. Of course, we could run even our gassers on biofuels (i.e. Butanol, a direct 1:1 replacement) if not for legal malfeasance designed to keep us from producing and burning them, thanks to Butamax, a shell company owned by BP and DuPont. They are leveraging patents produced at public universities, partly with our tax money to prevent production of Butanol as a motor fuel, which would make the world a better place.

An open statement, not to be misconstrued as any accusation against the parent poster: If you work for BP or DuPont, fuck you. I hope you die in a fire.

Well, you're just wrong. They don't need to do that. They can be profitable with a $30k car.

Why are you still prevaricating about luxury cars when we're talking about the $30k model?

It's really not that much effort any more. The engines are quieter now. You know what they do to make your luxury car quieter? They add more asphalt. The bulk of the difference between a Honda and an Acura, or a Toyota and a Lexus, or a Nissan and an Infiniti, is more asphalt and of course more carpet padding. They're not using antinoise or exotic materials to damp the engine sound. They're using 4 liter V8s instead of 7 liter V8s, that is all.

If we had PRT, you could both load the vehicle up with groceries, and you could save your own personal time by avoiding traffic caused by stupid humans and the traffic lights that they need to avoid running into each other while driving because they are inconsiderate, selfish assholes.

The problem with your idea is that with the nVidia driver you get a slider, even on Quadro cards, and you can drag it towards performance. At which point, even the Quadro cards will compromise visual quality and let you play a game just fine. I certainly got good frame rates (for the number of processors, anyway) with both QuadroFX GPUs I've owned.

My phone runs Linux, too. The stock kernel is abysmal crap, so I run an upgraded kernel. Since it's a superbitch to build new kernels for many Android devices, I let someone else do the dirty work. Back in the early days of PCs I would just build my own kernel at the drop of a hat, but now I literally cannot build a new kernel for my phone. I can't even get an Android source tree because git is shit. So I've gained convenience, but I've lost flexibility. Don't pretend that nothing has been lost.

With that said, Android is pretty damned mainstream.

Who is this "we"? Ubuntu is not referred to as Ubuntu Linux, it's just Ubuntu. RedHat Linux is still called Linux, but we just call Fedora Fedora. Slackware. Hey, there's Linux Mint, that's another one we call Linux. But the truth is that most distributions are simply called by name by most people.