The ~30k 2010 Nissan LEAF had a 23KwH battery, and the ~30k current LEAF has a 40KwH battery. https://www.in2013dollars.com/... says that the 2010 LEAF cost thus around $43k USD in today's money. While the battery is the most expensive component of an EV, not the only one. If you assume the battery is 1/3 of the price of the car, and using the inflation factor referenced above, you were getting around 2.3wH/$ then and you're getting around 4wH/$ now. Yep, not what the article says, though I think that the economies of scale that will come with the recent scaling up of lithium extraction, and all the many marginal additional efficiency gains in manufacturing (i.e.g Wright's Law) should mean that things continue to improve per dollar at a fair rate.

The loss of usable copper and neodymium in a world that is super hungry for those elements is nothing but deplorable. Aluminium (sorry, AU speaker here) much less so, but it still has a lot of embedded energy, and it would be preferable to recycle it also.

If you're a Mac / iCloud user, you can add a library of your favourite swear words to all of your Apple devices using: System Settings => Keyboard => Text Replacements. I spent an amusing 15 minutes doing this once, result, no more *duck*, just the other word.

The quote "Hyundai's smart enough not to try to compete in full-size electric pickup trucks, still the last stronghold for the Detroit 2.5, not least because they're largely unsellable outside North America" has clearly never been to Australia, where they seem to be the new must-have toy for the nation's Tradies (tradespeople).

... where you can't effectively fight emotive but nonsensical arguments with facts - witness the recent Brexit vote, all the Leave arguments were basically lies - but people still believed them, because they'd been convinced that they were "victims" (always a good populist tactic that). You can have all the facts and business and economic experts you like, all saying "Trump would be a disaster" (and I have no doubt that Trump with his I'm-so-smart egocentricity would be a disaster), but the people who are lured by simplistic nonsense like building walls and excluding Muslims won't listen to "elites". Calling him out as a fraudster (Trump University) or as an aggressively unreliable business partner (look for any number of interview on Youtube with poor guys that won a contract to design or carpet or wire up one of his property ventures and got screwed badly) probably has broader relevance, because there are a lot of small business owners and people who have been ripped off out there that might relate better.

There are self-encrypting tape drives and hard disks that satisfy FIPS 140-2: adequate for "sensitive but unclassified data".
If you have very high value data and are facing an APT style of adversary, your concerns would be valid. For "buy random hard disk and harvest blackmail and ID theft fodder", standard compliant crypto will be quite sufficient to make the attacker move on to easier pickings.

I for one have never heard of "Rickey's World Famous Restaurant chain" (Australian living in the U.K.) So it can't be *that* world famous...!

Or perhaps Google are selling a Camry at the price of a Camry, and the other guys who've been peddling Model Ts are now having to get competitive!

"Man has never really built a decent chicken" - Kehlog Albran, The Profit

Newer streetlights are usually orange / yellow light, because (as I understand it) our eyes are more sensitive at those wavelengths.

So why are car headlight beams still white? The idea is to see more, so shouldn't they be the same orange / yellow light as streetlamps?

Sorry, but I disagree. I work for an academic employer (a supercomputing centre), and the environment that now exists in that workplace is much as Dracolytch spelled out in his second post. We really want to work alongside people who are prepared to think about more than the immediate next step in getting a problem to go away. I'm not a manager, and barring something drastic happening, I will not be in the foreseeable future, but I really value being able to work alongside people who, y'know, care about getting to the root of problems and fixing them in ways that help improve the lot of other staff and our user base. As for whether this is really "passionate", I'd prefer to say something like "thoughtful, considerate, productive and interested in learning."

But I strongly dispute that, in the sense Dracolytch seems to be using it, it means "enthusiastic to the point of being exploitable". We *did* see that sort of boundary violation in our organisation with one manager who was thankfully moved sideways to other responsibilities: key people were being poached from other teams and grossly overcommitted to an endless series of new projects, expected to take on way-out-of-hours problems on office hours pay, with absolutely no formal overtime or on-call provisions (how wonderful it was to receive a text from that manager at 12:30am offering me the root passwords to a storage service the manager wanted to see brought back online when the main admins were on leave, having previously been actively ignored and excluded from that part of the business by the same manager), and generally jerked around like marionettes in a hurricane as the manager pursued his strange agendas of trying to take on any data storage job that would bring in some bucks without any detailed capacity planning or workload modelling. People had to learn on the fly to get things running ASAP; testing was minimal, mistakes were made, and the resulting services were slow and unreliable. It was a very demoralizing time, and everyone was glad to finally see a manager appointed for operations who started planning, listening to his staff and concentrating on delivering a core set of reliable, well-managed services. Even so, everyone still needs to bring a decent level of enthusiasm for fixing problems, building well-engineered systems, looking at the bigger picture, and learning new things. Petaflop-scale HPC and storage is not a turnkey operation, and it's not advisable to kick back and coast along if you are planning to be around when the chickens come home to roost.

This.

Murdoch has been seriously wounded in the UK, and cannot now command political power in the way that he previously enjoyed.

So now, despite not actually being Australian any more (he gave up his citizenship to become a US citizen), Australia is pretty much the only place left where he wields significant power, due to News Corp's ownership of the majority of the commercial media in this small market. So now Murdoch has crowned his victory (deposing a decent government whose main flaw was a megalomanical ex-leader after a 3 year smear campaign) by protecting News Corp's cable TV interests as well.

It was always too good to be true - a government program that would really empower people - in an age of neo-liberal so-called free market economics (what we really have is subsidies for corporates and plutocrats - not a "free market"). Once again, the wowsers have won, and Australia can go on with being the backwater dirt factory it has been told it should be.

A pox on Murdoch and the Coalition.

"Following the fashion of HPC" is a bit harsh. It depends on whether the research group gets money (which they could spend on exactly the sort of compute that would suit them) or in-kind funding with grants of time at an existing large HPC site, and how much data they expect to produce, and where/how long they intend to store it. For instance, Australian university researchers had to pay ISP traffic charges on top of Amazon's own charges to download data from Amazon until November of 2012, when AARNET peered with Amazon, and then only for data downloaded from the US-WEST-2 region.

Also, if the research group is small, it depends a lot on who handles their IT support. If (because of the in-kind funding) they are depending on the expertise of the HPC site for support, then a lot is down to the particular HPC site and whether it has as much depth in supporting cloud workloads as traditional HPC workloads.

...will find this the sort of thing they like. For people/groups who have SETI@home or Folding@home style workloads - the type that the HPC community call "embarrassingly parallel" - and some money, this is useful. But it's sad that there is no mention made in the article of Condor - a job manager for loosely coupled machines that has been doing the same kind of thing since the '80s - essentially, since there has been a network between a few sometimes-idle computers in a CS department. Cycle Computing itself has used Condor as part of its CycleServer product. Jupiter is their own task distribution system which goes to larger scales than Condor can reach.

It's cool that Cycle Computing have packaged up this cycle scavenging approach into infrastructure that lets people easily deploy and farm work out to EC2 spot instances. But as they make those instances easier to use, the demand will go up, and the spot price of compute capacity will likely go up too. Which is nice for Amazon, of course, but harder on groups that are trying to make a budget forecast of what their simulations will cost to run. The free market grid computing cheerleader types will be over the moon at the opportunity to write papers about spot instance futures markets on a service that actually got popular. But, as another poster points out, it's High Throughput Computing, not HPC, and the very thing that makes it amenable to spot markets, which is the fungibility of loosely coupled EC2 instances, also restricts it to loosely coupled workloads, especially ones that don't produce a huge amount of data for each separate run - although a couple of years ago Cycle were already looking at ways of improving this last restriction.