Nah. It's a software issue. They're perfectly reliable when you don't mess with them. I think they may have got to the point where they've gotten pretty good, one last try.

I have a RasPi already and consider it a novelty, I wouldn't use it to serve my phone service. Money not well spent. So yeah, I'd use the beaglebone if I were going that route.

I'm not going to pretend that $50 is a lot of money, but it's five times as much as a pogoplug mobile, if you lurk and hit the right auction. Or brand new, a pogoplug v4 with SATA and USB3 is twenty bucks. Hence my interest in them to begin with. I got two mobiles and a normal v4 for $44 or so, shipped. The normal unit is running my HDD, the two mobiles are going to be redundant asterisk servers. Right now I have plugpbx running on one of them, but I got inspired by that so I'm going to try again to roll my own again starting from bodhi's latest debian image. I have installed a debian VM as a distcc host. plugpbx is a little out of date.

Great. Call it six. If they last for twelve, it's still a good investment, not least because they provide power when you need it most.

It doesn't just give it to you, although it may let you find it.

These are not the people who are the problem. The problem is the entrenched utilities — why aren't they adding more "alternative" power generation? Many organizations and even individuals are still happy to pay a premium to say that they're using renewables, that is not yet a tapped-out market.

It's totally understandable why the factories aren't adding solar. The issue is selling the power you're not consuming. In a lot of states they pretty much steal it. The infrastructure needs to be decoupled from generation, that would make net metering more viable.

They drive like shit.

Toyota is not nicer than Toyota. VAG cars are unreliable heaps of electrical failures, just like a Chrysler.

Yeah, if you want something that will be in the shop extracting one to two thousand dollars out of your pocket every few thousand miles, by all means, buy a high-end Audi, BMW, or Mercedes.

Ah yes, Lexus, we take a Toyota and add asphalt and sell it to you for a jillion dollars. Or we make one of the best supercars ever, but we have to sell it at a loss because we can't manage cost control in anything other than shitboxes.

Yeah, most of those are shit, too. I'd prefer a good Toyota, or a Nissan Patrol. Toyota has fucked up all their trucks, though, the last good one was the T100. And you can't buy a Patrol in the USA.

You'll have less maintenance problems with an F150 than you will with any of that German shit you mentioned. There's a reason why the F-Series is the most popular vehicle in the world.

Yes, as always they would rather legislate than innovate.

Look, I believe in imports too, but they suck now as well. Renault has taken the reliability out of Nissan, the brush with Chrysler ruined the last vestiges of reliability at Mercedes, BMW is probably the best of the lot to be honest but they're not precisely known for being cheap to maintain either, high-end VAGs require massive piles of special tools (heh heh) and if you go to the dealer you will get raped. I think they have a special room for that in the Audi dealers, though, with quality German leather furniture. The kind that will hold up while you take a really good reaming.

The best cars of which I am aware all-around are the mid-nineties Subarus, Hondas and Nissans, before they got really big and heavy but after they discovered advanced engine management. The Subarus and Nissans in particular have a lot of the same Hitachi parts in common, which as it turns out were really quite good. They even shared a pretty good slush box with a lockup TC and auto rev matching. I don't fit in Hondas, so I have less to say about them. At 6'7" I have bought German cars, so I well know what that's actually like — nowhere near as rosy as you suggest.

Ah good, working in a chemical plant. That's good for the ol' biology.

He could even go work in a refinery, every so often they release toxic clouds that require communities downwind to evacuate, so they must be perfectly safe to work in

If you wanted a cohesive argument, what are you doing on slashdot?

Nonetheless, the argument is that we've long had the technology to do much better, but we're fucking off on greed and waste. If that's not obvious to you, then you've been spending too much time here, he said ironically.

"Do not track" is dead because the meaning is so obvious that they couldn't find a way to gut its meaning while pretending to give it lip service.

I think you're being way too pessimistic, while jumping the gap in one generation might be too much artificially introducing a handful of mammoth genes per generation would surely produce some viable offspring that are closer to the real thing than the last generation. Think of it as a very specific breeding program where we aren't just choosing the traits we want we're actively pushing them through genetic manipulation. It's not a matter of natural selection, it's unnatural selection all the way. If you look at for example domesticated animals, you'll see that's a strong force and with direct genetic manipulation it's on steroids.

It decreases the quantity of waste but does not eliminate the waste, and we have not actually demonstrated an ability to store waste over a five hundred year span as of yet.

So just to be clear, your educators and government are against it, but you think it's wonderful that we have no long-term viable plans to deal with our waste?

This isn't about ludditism. This is about what year is it? We can fly the planes on biofuels, but we should replace all air within a nation with high-speed rail. Which we should fucking have already, because what year is it? We should be running our planes on biofuels already, because what year is it?

We've had solar panels since the 1970s and they could repay their energy investment in seven years back then. Now it's three. What year is it?

Sigh. You're underthinking this. Predictable, in someone caught out by them already. They're not just looking for new idiots, they're also looking for new laws. Fracking is bad, mmkay? They wouldn't have been allowed to do it without a peak oil scare.

One doesn't necessarily mean the other.