An electric car makes total sense for me. I take maybe one trip per year where I'd need to charge on the road and everything else is just short jaunts for errands. However, how to charge? I live in Seattle and have a garage. That garage doesn't have a 220 outlet anywhere. My service panel, 200 amps, is 100% full. So, to get 220 in the garage I'm going to need to update my service and get 220 out to the garage through a finished basement. I figure 15-20k for that. Do I need TWO 220v outlets out there? Would need to ask. Electric cars cost more too at the moment. Maintenance costs should be lower, but if you do have an issue with the battery or the motors, then those repairs can be costly.

In established neighborhoods, many houses here don't have garages; if they do, then the garage is used for storage and not the car. So...then what? I see charging cables draped across trees, across yards, and even across sidewalks with cord protectors on them. A huge tripping hazard. Also, you can't be certain that when you come home that your "spot" out front of your house will be available as a neighbor might have visitors for a party or something. There is no assigned parking. How do you charge your car? Many apartment complexes and parking structures can't have every car plugged in, so how will those folks charge their cars? It's a really big problem.

I see plug-in electric hybrid cars (phev) cars the ideal solution: if they can do like 50 miles on pure electric, then that works for most of my trips. It can turn on the engine if needed to get me home and I can run the engine for any long-distance road trip. I helped a friend buy one recently. While not a high-mileage driver, she was filling up every 2.5 weeks, now she fills up every 2 months. That's pretty good. It can charge on a 110 outlet in the garage that is good enough to do a trip a day, which works for them.

In the mid 90s, I worked on the flight simulator computers in the lab. I asked one of the engineers how good the simulators were in simulating the performance of the aircraft. He said that they were really quite good and you can easily learn to fly a real plane by doing everything in a simulator.

I then asked if there are things that you can do in a simulator that you CAN'T do in a real plane. He smirked, then proceeded to demonstrate something that you CAN'T do in real life.

1) Start on the runway
2) Turn the wheel hard in one direction
3) Accelerate slowly and gradually ramp up the throttle
4) You're basically doing a tight doughnut, but the software hadn't taken into account how many Gs the wheels can take, so it is infinite.
5) You begin turning faster and faster until your ground speed is above take off speed.
6) Pull back on the column, and you go up...like a helicopter, spinning at ridiculous speeds that would cause you pass out and the airframe to fly apart.

Now, his simulation wasn't a structural one, just a flying one. It was amusing to watch the displays go round and round and then you could just ascend. So, simulations are only as good as the parameters they are designed to test.

Who has a hotmail account? Who would create a hotmail account. Older people have them, of course. I would suggest that even older people might have an aol.com account.

I don't think my bank or credit card company needs to know where I eat lunch every day. Sure, I use plastic to avoid dealing with a cashier (gas stations and parking) and of course for online shopping where you can't use cash. I find cash convenient for me and faster than a lot of transactions I see when people have to use a card, wait for it to authorize, some then fire up a printer, then they sign it. Dunno. My bank probably thinks I'm a drug dealer. My cash machine is only a few minutes away from the office, so it's easy to get more. Lots of point-of-sale machines at small shops get malware on them as well. We've had a few instances at work where a lot of people suddenly saw unexpected charges on their cards. In both cases, a nearby lunch place had their point-of-sale system infected and it stole their information. So, it does happen.

Get off my lawn...I suppose?

Everyone will agree that a vinyl record sounds different than the CD/Blu Ray/SACD. This difference is due to the limitations of vinyl. Everybody is in agreement with this so far. The divergence occurs because some people equate the fact that the mixes are different to meaning that one must be better than the other. It would be very interesting if you could put the vinyl master mix on CD and see what people think. If people think vinyl is better than CD, they will play both sources and proclaim that whatever they hear as different is inherently better. Instrumentation will show that the CD is more accurate, of course, but that doesn't matter.

This is true when shopping for loudspeakers or receivers. If you can hear a difference between two speakers in the store, you will invariably say that the more expensive one (or one with more prestige) must be the correct sound and that the other speaker is cheap. Measurements may indicate that the other speaker is technically producing a better representation of what is on the source, but the ears hear a difference then the eyes go about determining WHY they are different.

This applies to many things: vinyl/cd, speaker a/b, wine a/b, and many other things.

Buy what you like.

At a whopping 10cm, couldn't one devise a way to send the data over a tesla-coil arc? Tremendous energy available, unclear about bandwidth available in a "controlled" arc of electricity.

Have a Volvo and it has the Sensus 3.0 stuff in it, which includes apps such as Pandora and a few others. The tech package came with a 6 month trial for everything, but that has since expired and I don't drive enough to make it worth it. What's frustrating is that it won't even let you pair it with your hotspot phone to use those apps, so it is just a complete waste of money to have it in the car. The tech is also slow, interface created by committee, and NOT car friendly. Give me Google Maps with a Siri interface and that's it. I should be able to say "find the nearest Arby's restaurant" and that's it. Garmin Nav or any iPhone/Android navigation app is much easier to use.

The main issue is that people see the technology as a way for car makers to extract more money from you AFTER you've already shelled out 20, 30, 40, or 50k for their car. That is just crazy. Car manufacturers need to include these as actual features instead of a way to get money out of your wallet.

This would be akin to giving you free air conditioning for 6 months, but if you want it to work after that then you have to pay a monthly fee. We bought the car, I don't want to keep paying for that. If you can't do that, then take it out of the car, reduce the price of the car, then people will be happier about it.

While man-in-the-middle SSL connections sound like something everyone should be against, those in the corporate environment rely on using an in-line scanner to check for malicious/virus files going in/out the corporate environment. Those entities need to be able to block/report on where those file originated and their final destination. To do that, they rely on the scanning device being the SSL endpoint in order to decrypt and inspect the content. I would hope that this ability will be configurable via AD policy to allow the corporate MitM certificate to be considered trusted; however, there are an increasing number of sites that have javascript which verifies the SSL connection and checks that there is no MitM SSL occuring. While it sounds safe, it actually HELPS virus/malware authors if browsers block MitM connections to ssl sites.

An SSL cert is like $5 from Comodo, so if all browsers checked for MitM connections and prevented access, then corporations can't protect their networks from content on an SSL connection and would have to trust all content from the interwebs.

There are security ramifications to increased security.

As an admin, I'd love to see the actual technical aspects of the breach. How did they get in? How did they compromise your security? How long were they in the system before being detected? How did you detect them? Were you logging information that did catch them, but some oversight caused that data to be missed? How do you KNOW they are out of the system without flattening the entire infrastructure?

Knowing this data can help security professionals add more security layers to keep the evil-doers out of the network.

Here's your main reason:

If ONE person is injured/killed within a 10 mile radius of a theater and the person doing the killing proclaims any notion of it being done because of the release of the movie, the relatives of the one shot will sue Sony for millions of dollars due to the release of the film that Sony KNEW could unleash terrorism. Imagine if it happened at 5 locations? What about one nutjob in one theater ala the Batman movie a few years ago? Sony would be put at fault for blatantly disregarding public safety by knowingly releasing a film. It's the same reason newspapers won't print an image of Mohammed or that South Park had to pull an episode that was going to show Mohammed.

Hyper-sensitivity to everything for fear of litigation.

The NSA likely has keys from all the major SSL cert vendors, rendering this "spamvertisement" moot. HTTPS does not mean that you're secure from everybody. It means you've added a layer of security that will thwart MOST prying eyes, but those that really want to know what you're doing WILL know what you're doing.

What a silly thing to appear on slashdot.

Knock knock.
Whose there?
It's the government.
It's the government, who?
It's the government and we're here for our GPS units. Hand them over or be labeled a terrorist.

Look, some high up government person is going to read this, realize that some national security breach has potentially occurred, then send in the troops to reclaim those units. This won't take long.

Some people need to feel important.

If it is light flashes, what's to prevent someone from snooping it from afar? Convenient technology often means insecure technology. Weird to develop a product just because one of the major phone vendors don't support a protocol. Seems like that vendor should add that feature to their phones, rather than re-invent a new protocol.

Just because some of us are older and don't have time to finish games, what about the kids out there that don't have full-time jobs and families? There are way more gamers under 18 than when I was a kid. The answer isn't simply that we have jobs and families now, the answer is probably that kids today have tons of things that demand their attention and so finishing games is low on the priority list.

Facebook profiles, "farming", city-building, etc. all are time sucks that prevent even the kids from dedicating the necessary time to finish a game.