Is anyone aware of the fact that a 100% EV has no way to provide heat in the freezing cold northern dead of winter; besides using insanely inefficient resistive electric heating elements? Also, compound that with the fact that current battery technology does not perform very well in extremely cold conditions. We still have a ways to go on solving these technical limitations and honestly I don't see how they're going to pull it off without burning hydrocarbons directly in some fashion.

- if you shut down the highway subsidies right now, sell the assets to private companies and have ACTUAL costs of operation be transfered to the users of the highways, you will start seeing reduction in usage immediately. People would start moving in closer to city centers, leaving their suburban sprawls, moving closer to places were they work if they actually have to pay for they use of that impossible infrastructure.

Yeah, because people are going to just abandon their suddenly un-sellable, valueless homes and default on their mortgages in droves, to move to the closest city. That would be great for the economy, that would fix everything.

True that, but it's what most Americans want unfortunately. The Ranger has the worst sales out of all of them.

F'n A... because that's what diesels are champs at doing!

I have an 81 Datsun 720 diesel pickup, gets ~40mpg. To be fair, it doesn't have any modern heavy safety features, and it is woefully underpowered. I would love to buy a modern efficient small pickup, but there hasn't been one available for decades.

I would be first in line to buy a 4x4 compact pickup with a manual transmission and turbodiesel engine. Why the manufacturers can't seem to figure this out escapes me. The only reason the majority of people purchase a compact pickup instead of a full-size pickup is to save fuel. They've invested so much fuel saving technology now in the full-size models, that the compact pickups barely even get better fuel economy anymore; and they wonder why compact pickup sales are dwindling.

I believe Apple are now supporting OSX server in non apple hardware, or at least within some hypervisor implementations...

No, they aren't, VMware extended their products to offer support, the ball was in Apples court but Apple just fucked the enterprise over with 10.7's EULA. You're only allowed to run it virtualized on Apple hardware. Additionally, If you want the hardware to actually be supported by Apple, you're pretty much relegated to virtualizing on top of OS X using Parallels, Fusion or VirtualBox as Apple will not support you running ESXi on their hardware. Not to mention, the Mac Mini and Pro aren't even server class hardware anyways.

When they announced the discontinuation of Xserve, I was actually hoping that they'd change the EULA on 10.7 server to allow it to run on Hypervisors on the robust hardware of your choice. This is not the case, and is extremely disappointing. The mini and Mac Pro do NOT cut it as server platforms.

I long ago stopped using the GUI tools for anything that it wasn't required for. Simply because it was always happy to blast away any advanced changes that might have been made by hand

Yeah, this is extremely annoying, but in my experience, it's typical of most Open Source Unix apps. It does seem to be way more frequent on OS X than Linux though. Whenever the config file format changes, the package renames your old config files and replaces them with the new ones. It's up to the admin to interpret the changes and merge them back into the new config files as necessary, 9 times out of 10 you can get away with just putting your entire old config back on OS X, but it's probably a really bad idea on other Unixes, especially if you haven't reviewed what the actual changes were.

So if 10.7 looses half the GUI and in return (I'm hoping anyway, haven't installed the server version yet...) will simply leave files alone that are already configured, I'd consider that a welcome trade.

Yeah, we'll see about that. Apple's packaging system doesn't seem nearly that advanced at this point and I doubt they would invest time in changing it just to cater to the server crowd. Their GUI admin tools never worked right with custom config files, so this dumbing down of the GUI will at least eliminate that part of the problem.

Most definitely have a tested and working backup of your server before you attempt it.

I can tell you from experience, if you've customized any of the actual services outside of the Server Admin app by editing their config files directly via Terminal, you'll need to diff and manually merge your config changes back into the affected service(s) config files.

Also, you won't be able to upgrade directly from 10.5 server because it doesn't have the App Store.

I can tell you from experience, AFP support in 2003 server BLEW. We used it briefly after upgrading from a previous NT4 AFP server that worked great, we switched over to OS X server after that. I haven't tried AFP in 2008 server, and frankly I don't feel like dealing with 2TB of HFS+ to NTFS filename incompatibilities.

Linux, BSD or Solaris would make a much more suitable replacement, but you'd still lose all of your HFS ACL's.

What country do you live in?? I used to pay my Tmo bill in the US using both Firefox and Chrome.

While it is annoying that you can't get 32-bit windows to do proper PAE and support more than 3GB of RAM. It probably was for the best really, otherwise we never would've gotten the momentum behind x64 Windows to get x64 compatible device drivers from the damn manufacturers.

Currently fueled by oil. None of them need to be, indeed most of them haven't been for most of their history. They're currently fueled by oil because it's currently the cheapest way to do it, but as you yourself point out, that won't last forever. For a completely unexplained reason, however, you assume "we'll be back where we started" afterwards, as if going back is the only option. We can't stay where we are now, but I think most people would rather we go forward instead of going back.

How do you plan on making the plastic and rubber components needed to manufacture modern machinery without oil? How do you suggest we lubricate the machinery without oil? How can we mine for metals, develop and refine nuclear fuels or manufacture massive quantities of fertilizer without oil? How does all of this work in your oil-less fantasy world of the future, just wondering?

Oil is much more heavily tied to modern civilization than most people realize. Not only does it provide energy for transportation, it's absolutely depended upon for the manufacture of fertilizers, plastic, rubber, lubricants, etc. Massive amounts of people would starve without the fertilizers produced from oil, that's only the tip of the iceberg.

I'm not a social retard by any means, I keep a tight group of friends and I have a lot of acquaintances. I just care more about what people close to me, like family, that have a more direct influence on my life are doing. I could care less about what Lady Gaga or Linus Torvalds are doing, really.

I guess when I said that, I really was talking about the people who obsess over what celebrities are doing. The types of people that actually watch TMZ or MTV. The types of people that let these celebrities tell them what to think, what to buy, who to vote for, without even attempting to do some research, catch up on real current events and form their own informed opinions. It really is the dumbing down of America, we're fucking doomed.