On the range.... give it a few years. The Tesla already has a 200+-mile range (though not when racing, obviously), but it'll get better. It's also worth pointing out that the Tesla Model S in that video is not a sports car. It's a nearly 5000-pound luxury road sedan. The fact that it's even remotely competitive with a Viper which weighs 2000 pounds less, and has a monstrous engine, is very impressive.

As for sound... in the real world I really like the utter silence of my LEAF.

Sissy? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLCdP6sMN9k

:=)

+1

It's certainly not in his management style.

You were probably going for funny, but if I had mod points I'd call this insightful. It really is shoulders all the way down; no one accomplishes anything of significance without relying on many, many others.

That's fascinating. Thanks.

Looking at his presentation, that seems to be his point. He concludes that power efficiency is going to become the limiting factor driving design decisions, and that since the power cost of increasing FLOPS has been so much lower than the power cost of moving larger quantities of data we're heading into an era where connectivity costs will so dominate the cost of cycles that cycles will be essentially free.

Hes's then basically arguing that it won't be cost-effective to build data transmission architectures that can effectively utilize exaflops, so no one will bother to build an exaflop machine.

He didn't state it, but if the rest of his arguments are correct, perhaps we're going to see the definition of a new metric for HPC, one that somehow captures the ability of a machine to distribute data to its computation nodes.

I'm interested, and I learned of it here.

We don't have an ever-growing population. Worldwide, we're already basically at replacement level reproduction, and the industrialized world is at less than replacement level when you remove immigration. Europe's population is declining, period. In Hans Rosling's terms, we have reached and passed "peak child"; there are just shy of 2B children in the world and that number is not increasing and -- based on current trends -- not going to increase.

Assuming we maintain a constant level of 2B children, that means that there will be 2B people in each living generation, putting us at a steady-state population of about 10B. Actually, barring significant changes in current trends, that won't be a steady state, it will be a high water mark. As wealth and -- more importantly -- female education levels continue to rise around the world, the birthrate in what we now call the developing world will also drop below replacement and the population will gradually decline.

Rosling explains it well: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html

Actually, I think that's what has happened, and it's what's caused Google to acquire the bad reputation you speak of. When Larry Page took over a couple of years back, he immediately started demanding more focus on "world-changing" projects (at Google success is measured more by impact than by dollars; the assumption is that if you have a big enough impact there will be a way to make it profitable), and cutting the long tail of projects that weren't getting enough usage.

In your terms, Google is becoming an "adult" company, which is why they've been gradually canceling all of the non-hits which were introduced during the "throw anything and see what sticks" era -- like SMS search, assuming it's actually been cancelled. Google still does (and I hope will continue to do) more ambitious, speculative stuff than any other company out there, but there is definitely much more focus on demonstrating first that a project is going to be successful (i.e. hundreds of millions of users) than there used to be.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but these are my own opinions, not official company positions.)

Take note of the italicized portions of the GP's post and yours.

It's a government project, entirely overseen and operated by the Department of Energy. There's no private corporation to blame here, sorry. Insurance isn't even relevant since the government itself would hold the liability -- if it weren't exempt from civil liability anyway.

No, that's a good idea, and exactly what you should do. Yes, it means that an attacker who manages to get your password and your wallet can get into your account, but that's still far more secure than a password alone. If your alternative is not using a second factor because you're afraid you won't have it when you need it, you're far better off using two factor and keeping the list of backup code list in your wallet.

Google offers SMS messaging as one of the methods for second-factor auth.

"you'll be asked for a code that will be sent to you via text, voice call, or our mobile app." (http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=180744)

There are actually a couple of other options as well, including a code via e-mail and a hardcopy list of pre-assigned one-time-use code, though they're mostly intended for recovery, in case you lose access to your phone. And you can also provide a backup phone number.