Now, as to driving 8-10 hours without a stop, good luck. Worse, not even truck drivers are allowed to drive for that long without a break. In fact, they are required to take a minimum of a 30 minute break during any 8 hour period (i.e., they can not hit 8 hours of driving).

He didn't say he'd drive 8-10 hours without stop, just that he wanted to get that much actual driving in in a day. And IMO, that's short.

For example, take your trucker example. I'm not sure what that's supposed to be arguing, because 30 minutes every 8 hours is only even remotely approachable in the absolute best of conditions for the car (and awful conditions for the driver) -- 45 mph in 110 degree heat with no A/C running, according to Tesla's calculator. At 70 mph in a comfortable temperature, you'll barely be looking at 3 hours of driving off of a full charge. In that situation, even under unfairly favorable calculations for the Tesla, you'll be on the road about 85% of the time, which is about 3 times the breaks of the trucker.

The other problem is that driving conditions degrade the Tesla's performance dramatically. Conditions that would put the estimate at under 200 miles are reasonably common, and the most time-efficient way of driving is to only charge it partway, so you in poor-but-realistic conditions you could be looking at stops every 2 hours or less. (70 mph in even 32 degree temps with the heat on gives 196 miles. At 0 degrees it's 178. Let's say we're interested in 20 degrees, and guess 188. Increasing the speed by 5 mph decreases range by 10-15 miles, so let's say I'm interested in the range at 73 mph (this "may or may not" be my speed on the IN and OH turnpikes, for instance) and guess we're down to 180. Now multiply by 80% because of an incomplete charge, and you have 144 miles, or just a hair under two hours at 73 mph.)

However, how many ppl drive their car more than 250 miles/day constantly?...Tesla will have a supercharger every 100 miles in the USA, so that you do not have to worry about that.

You don't have to do it constantly, just on occasion. For example, do you live in a city or live alone and only have one car? I don't know about you, but at least I wouldn't make it an electric. Even that 100-mile supercharger interval doesn't make it sound appealing for reasons I've said in another post: even the superchargers are too slow for long trips. "Just rent a car when you actually need to drive somewhere!" doesn't exactly make a good advertising slogan.

I'm very excited about electric cars now for commuting and very short trips, but once you get to the point of needing more than one charge on the road (which could happen in as little as ~5 hrs of driving in very realistic conditions -- really, even less than that) I think it starts to look really unattractive.

Because that's really in their head, more than about any particular drive being possible.

It really isn't, at least from what I can tell, for long road trips. Even under the numbers from Tesla's range calculator you just can't make the same pace you can in a gas car even in reasonably forgiving conditions. In moderately hard but still very realistic conditions, it becomes even less favorable:

If you put in 70 mph and 32 degrees, you get 204 miles. And that's on a full charge. But that's not the most time-efficient way of charging -- better is to spend about 45 minutes charging to, IIRC, about 75-80% capacity. That drops you to 164 miles. So that's "drive for less than 2 1/2 hrs, charge for 45 minutes." That's making pretty poor time IMO.

And what about colder weather and, say, 75 mph (which their range calculator doesn't even go up to)? You could easily be driving less than 2 hrs between charges, even if the superchargers were placed perfectly.

I'm super optimistic about something like the Tesla for around-town driving and shorter trips. But for the longer ones... I think Tesla needs very good coverage with cheaper battery swaps than they are planning.

You know, having a few more managers with a solid background in science is probably not that bad a problem to suffer from. If you could also have a side effect of getting more people with science degrees into politics, then that would be even better...

It's a problem in the UK, that anyone competent in any computing or mathematical subject can earn at least double, sometimes as much as ten times as much working for a bank playing a huge zero-sum game as they can contributing to the economy. We used to have a brain drain to the US, now we have one to the City of London.

That's not true. Scholarships (in the UK, at least) usually come with a maintenance grant and so, as well as covering the cost of tuition, they will provide the student with money to cover their cost of living.

Individual researchers are less likely to make significant contributions, but small teams still do. Individuals have ideas. Small teams produce proof-of-concept implementations. Larger teams produce working prototypes. Big teams produce finished products. It's hard to compete with a large company when it comes to bringing products to market, but it's quite easy for university research labs to get things to the proof-of-concept stage. They then have the choice of spinning out a company to try to commercialise it or licensing their work to a bigger company who will do the prototype to product bit.

That's an idea that predates MIPS. You'd do better if you claimed MIPS heritage because AArch64 removes the PC as a GPR, but (unlike MIPS) it does provide PC-relative addressing (MIPS does PC-relative memory accesses by forcing the calling convention to make every function call in position-independent code a JALR $25, so that $25 is guaranteed to contain the PC on function entry). MIPS also lacks the complex addressing modes of AArch64 (and AArch32). Unlike AArch64, it has branch delay slots, doesn't have the store/load pair instructions, condition code registers (all conditions in MIPS are stored in GPRs), bitfield manipulation instructions, and so on. ARM and MIPS are both derivatives of Berkeley RISC, but they have diverged a lot from that common inspiration.

Great for assembly programmers, not so great for pipeline designers. One of the weaknesses of the ARM design is that making the PC a general-purpose register meant that every instruction needs a little bit of extra logic in the decoder to tell you whether it's a branch, which then complicates the branch predictor. It's fun being able to do a ldr with the pc as the destination register, right up until you have to implement a long pipeline with that instruction. This is why ARMv8 makes the pc a special register (but still provides pc-relative loads and stores).

This is part of ARM's strategy with ARMv8. They intentionally delayed their own designs so that they wouldn't compete with their partners. Now, if you want to license a 64-bit core from ARM, they have a low-power in-order design and a better-performing out-of-order superscalar design, but several of their partners also have their own ARMv8 implementations that were built with advice from ARM engineers but are independent implementations. They will each have different power/price/performance trades, helping to diversify the ARM ecosystem. Between multiple independent implementations of the core designs, and multiple potential companies to fab them, the ARM ecosystem is in quite a strong position.

...WinKey+Q brings up a nifty search overlay

No need to press Q in that... just press the Windows key and start typing, just like in 7.

The nVidia drivers on FreeBSD are pretty solid, but they got a poor reputation for their open source drivers in the early releases. I was running a room full of Linux boxes about 10 years ago, and they'd all kernel panic about once a day, typically while running nothing more strenuous graphically than the log-in screen, and always with a backtrace in the nVidia drivers. The open source ATi drivers of the same era (R200) were a lot slower, but were very stable.

nVidia also had that embarrassing incident where a crafted image could cause arbitrary code execution in the kernel, which turned out to be exploitable by just putting a picture on a web page, and didn't fix it until about two years after they were first notified of it. For the last 4-5 years, their proprietary drivers have been pretty reasonable though.

Is Amazon shipping more expensive in the US? I can't remember the last time I bought anything from Amazon that didn't come with free shipping. The only difference is that Prime gives you next day, whereas their super-saver free delivery gives you 3-5 days (typically closer to 3). I've found that if I need something very urgently then I will go into town and buy it - there are few situations where tomorrow is soon enough, but in a few days time is not.

There are two things wrong with your post. The first is that the electricity cost just from the CPU is significantly higher than the value of the BitCoins created. The second is the assumption that there are a lot of spare cycles on EC2. The entire design of datacentres like this is to ensure that the computers are used efficiently by ensuring that there is always some job ready to run.

The point of the broken window fallacy is that it assumes that causing work to be done will not cause other work to go undone and it therefore ignores opportunity cost. The glass maker in the story will be employed making the glass to replace the window, which increases economic activity on the assumption that the glass blower would otherwise have had no work to do. The point of the story is to highlight the fact that this assumption is usually untrue. It is very often misused, however.

In particular, it does not apply when you're talking about subsidies / investment that is required to produce a demand that will cause economies of scale to lower prices to the degree that would increase real demand. If, rather than one window being broken, a few thousand were, then that might cause the glazier in the story to invest in machinery to produce glass in high volumes. Once all of the windows have been replaced, the glazier is still able to produce glass at significant volumes and lower costs, and so reduces his prices to stimulate demand. This then triggers the development of industries that depend on the cheap and ready availability of glass.

That's stretching the story a little bit, because the production of glass is very well understood and there are few changes in the process that are more than small incremental improvements. It is very different in a comparatively new field, for example the production of solar cells, where new processes regularly produce 50% better (more efficient, cheaper, etc.) technology. It would be true of microprocessors, if not for the fact that this market has already moved on to the stage where there is sufficient demand to drive investment without needing external priming.

The motivation is largely irrelevant. The broken window fallacy would apply to the TSA if the TSA is hiring people who would otherwise be employed doing something productive. It is, of course, not the only way in which the TSA costs the economy. On my last trip to the US, I spent a total of around two hours in queues for security theatre, which could have been time spent in the airport lounge working. The same is true of most business travellers.