I never said electric cars were being marketed for Seattle only; I was simply pointing that it would, in fact, be practical for some people living in your particular urban jungle. Really though, climate is not as big of a factor for this as it seems to be since different people have a natural predisposition to different climates. I'm perfectly happy with temperatures in the low 60's and start to get uncomfortable at about 71; whereas I've also known people that prefer temperatures in the 90's and will start layering their clothes when it gets down to 80.

But I digress.

The reason I'm replying now is that after making three predictions about you, based on, as you put it, "unfounded assumptions", I hit the easy one dead on, came damned close on the second and, predictably, missed with the intellectual jab. You do recall, I'm assuming, that I said that you were not native to Seattle and went there for a job or education (true, since you moved for a job), you drive either a Chevy pickup or a 5.0 Mustang (you admitted to driving a Mustang but I guessed incorrectly on the trim level; this may be due, in part, to the fact that I was unaware of Ford producing a V-4 engine at all or placing anything smaller than a V-6 in the 4th gen Mustang line) and you didn't fully appreciate the size of the area prior to moving to Seattle (this was a cheap shot intended to insult your general level of ignorance).

I fail to see how guessing 2/3 correctly counts as being mostly wrong.

Roll down your windows and turn on the vent fan then. You're not going to get carjacked if you're in deadlock traffic. Seriously, if you can't move because of the traffic jam, neither will the carjacker.

If you're that paranoid though. Crack your windows. Car windows generally open at the top first and heat likes to escape through the top of the cabin.

Additionally. You live in Seattle. This year has been a freak year for temperatures, I'll give you that, but most of the time the outside temperature is pretty comfortable. If it's 70 outside and you roll the windows down, it might make it up to a blistering 71 in your car. If it's raining (BTW I've spent about a decade in the PacNW, I know you have rain) then roll up the windows, your car isn't going to heat up if there's no sunlight and the electric heat isn't going to have to work nearly as hard as an A/C compressor would be for someone stuck in a traffic jam in Arizona since once the cabin is up to temp, your body heat helps solve the problem rather than exacerbating it. (plus you can wear a jacket over a pullover, over a sweater whereas the person in Arizona can only get so naked)

Now if that's not enough thought in my rebuttal, maybe I can add some insight as well.
Dude, we get it, you moved to Seattle because you were accepted to a university or received a good job offer. You don't want to identify yourself with the other "hippies" living there so you drive either a 4x4 Chevy pickup with oversized offroad mud tires and a lifted suspension or a 5.0 Mustang. You live 40 miles from school/work because you went there for an education/job in the Seattle Metro area and subsequently found an apartment in the Seattle Metro area; you didn't really take the time to realize that where you chose to live and where you have to commute to were on nearly opposite ends of a 50 mile diameter area.

Outlets are generally easy to install. Metered outlets with credit card swipes will pay for themselves quickly.

And please no arguments on the practicality of putting credit card swipes on parking meters since some cities (Portland, OR for example) already have this.

The Billions of dollars you're talking about isn't as bad as you make it sound. Sure if it was coming out of just one pocketbook, it would be brutal. But to put it in perspective, retrofitting a residential home would be in the hundreds of dollars for the houses that do not have a garage and do not have an outlet by the driveway. Commercial parking lots will be in the thousands to tens of thousands depending on the scale of deployment; a small carpark would probably be pretty cheap whereas a large mall might be more expensive. Filling stations would be hundreds of thousands to build from scratch or a couple thousand to retrofit existing petroleum stations to have a few paid outlets. Municipal projects will be the expensive ones at several million per city to wire up the parking meters.

In all those examples, with the exception of the residential retrofit, there would be money to make on the upgrade either directly by charging for the power or indirectly by making the business more appealing.

The US already has a strong power infrastructure. Adding that last 10 feet to meter and dispense is not huge compared to the overhead and underground networks that are already there. The real trick for electric vehicles will be range and standardizing high amperage outlets.

The LEAF is a bit weak on range, I'll give you that, but for many people 100 mi. per charge is enough to get to and from work for 2 or 3 days. They're not targeting the people that live in Bellevue and work in Tacoma, they're targeting the people that live in Bellevue and work in Bellevue. (other regions will have different examples such as Gresham and Hillsboro a bit south of you)

Now for the two vehicle part of this argument. Many households with two people (i.e. married couples, cohabitating boyfriend/girlfriend couples and other domestic partnerships) have more than one vehicle per person. Usually there's a his and hers daily driver plus a joint owned family or utility vehicle such as a SUV, minivan or light truck. This is not the case for most single people that do not have a flexible enough budget to justify owning more than one vehicle.

It may make sense financially to ditch one of the daily driver cars for the electric and use either the other partner's car or the shared vehicle for road trips to out of town concerts. This, of course, depends on several factors that would have to be honestly calculated from real numbers and not pulled out of some slashdotter's ass based on conjecture and a marketing press release. These factors would include (but are certainly not limited to) distance and nature of commute, cost of the electric vehicle with or without a trade in of a prior vehicle and/or possible government subsidies, cost of maintenance in comparison to a traditional IC powered car (electric *should* be a lot cheaper to maintain), cost of the power to charge factoring in possible electric company discounts for using power during off peak hours and etc. Some people will weight their decision in favor of getting an electric vehicle due to a bias for a green image, others will weight their decision (as you appear to already have) against getting an electric for reasons of convenience or practicality.

Nissan is aiming for a targeted group of people that will benefit from this type of vehicle. Those that are in the group that could benefit from having this as a commuter vehicle might find this car to be enormously useful. Just because you're not in this group is no reason to knock the platform as generally useless.

I'm sorry but all your talk of military formations and heavy weaponry suggest a level of open war that does not sit well with your talk of civilian apathy.

As for the distribution of civilian weaponry. The fact that not everyone is armed is made irrelevant by the fact that anyone could be. Hunting riffles are, with the right ammunition, capable of piercing body armor. Further, hunting riffles are often owned by people that hunt and can hit a moving target from a respectable distance. The civilian snipers will be defending and therefore have the terrain advantage. Given the wide variety of terrain types in this country, (compare Montana, Oregon, Nebraska, Florida, Virginia) local terrain knowledge will be enough of an advantage to nearly offset the disadvantage in training and equipment.

I have no doubt that civilian casualties will be higher than military casualties. But if the US military ever turned on the general population, the result would make the Vietnam War seem like a grade school shouting match.

Hey! I'm one of those genetic freaks you insensitive clod.

Seriously 5'11" @ 275Lb. I can push a mid 70's Cadillac uphill and my normal level of physical activity is categorized as "Computer Programmer".

I started doing that ages ago. Currently I have an Athlon 700 emulating an i7 at 4Ghz.

And if you have other things in life that cost money, you might look at performance / dollar and buy something that performs at 80-90% of the best of the best flagship at 25% the price.

Yes an i7 975 will run circles around a Phenom II 955 in raw number crunching. But the i7 is $1k while the Phenom II is $250. Going with the Phenom, you have enough CPU to keep your GPU fed and $750 to keep yourself fed.

Are they putting this on just the busiest stoplights or all three of them?

I believe removing one's offspring from the gene pool still qualifies for a Darwin award under some circumstances. Perhaps anyone following such advise to the point of actually attempting to plug a 3rd party module into their children should be left to the methods and devices of natural selection.

 

//Only use OEM modules and plugins on children under 8.

$30 and a $5 Little Caesars pizza if you find the right geek.

Overclocking is still a gamble. And given that we don't actually know how many chips are binned down artificially vs. the number that are binned down for a reason, there's no way to know the odds of taking that gamble. Getting your hopes up on buying a cheaper chip and overclocking it is just setting yourself up for disappointment.

That being said, why do I never see anyone reviewing an overclocked system report on the actual ambient temperatures during the test? I'm sure there's a difference in what speed you can hit depending on whether you're in a 70 or 100 degree environment. Unfortunately, I cannot finish this paragraph without leading into a rant filled with run-on sentences.

Let me just say, if you're trying to build a budget PC then there's a good chance you don't have the extra cash (or the inclination to spend it) to replace a burnt out system. However, if you have time and money to burn and a spare computer to get you on Newegg to replace the one you're screwing with, go for it.

Yeah, there really needs to be a wooden table involved in there somewhere.

If you look at Egosoft's X-Universe series you'll find 2 capitol ship classes, destroyers and carriers.

When you head into a big fight you'll usually ride in a destroyer with a handful of corvettes (light capitol class) as your escorts. Once you're in sector and a few km from the jump gate, you'll bring in your carriers with lots of heavy fighters (scouts and medium fighters go splat too quickly). All in all you can coordinate a fight with 60-80 ships under your control.

I would love to see something like this on an MMO. The player flying the destroyer could control a half dozen escort corvettes while the player flying the carrier could control whatever fits in the carrier. Something to make it a little more interesting would be if there was no way to know what enemy fighters are PC or NPC piloted until you see one break formation and lay waste to the AI ships on your side (Alternatively they could also break formation and fly into an asteroid, depending on the pilot).

Balancing the system would probably be a nightmare though.

Avast has a bootable offline scanning CD product called "Avast! BART CD".

Be warned, the price is a little steep if you're just looking to use it on one system. The licenses that they offer (administrator at $150 and serviceman at $300) are more intended to license people or business entities rather than systems. That is an administrator license allows you to use the software on any machine in the possession of the license holder (be it a person or business entity) so long as only one instance of the program per owned license is running concurrently. A serviceman license removes constraints regarding the ownership of the machines using the software while keeping the concurrency constraint intact.