Posts by Scott

Detroit does mass-market e-car deal with Proton

Solipsistic, or just overly egocentric?

re:

"Still useless

By Jeff "

You can't do that drive in a gas-powered car without refilling, either. Obviously, charging tech and battery life need to improve before electric cars are competitive for your specific, isolated purpose. However, there is no point in holding back production of viable products simply because they do not meet the needs of certain edge cases. The vast majority of potential customers DO live in urban areas. Further, most long trips occur along coridors with substantially more infrastructure support than a particlarly isolated stretch of the Australia.

Hardly useless, just not sufficient to your unusual needs, yet.

Google disguises capitalism as civil rights

Get over it! Worst Argument Ever

The repeated argument that ISPs should be able to charge Google et al a premium to transport their packets is patently ridiculous.

-I- pay my ISP for access to whatever-the-hell-I-want-to-access. Why should the ISP be able to double dip and then charge conteet providers who are NOT their customers? The cost of transporting that packet is paid for by the ISP customer who is downloading it. Google, MSNBC, and gamerfansite.net pay their own IPSs for access.

It's easy to blabber about the billion dollar variety of content provider. Us hoi polloi are required by statute to rail against them. However, the reasoning is not one whit different whether the ISP is attempting to extort Google or your mothers knitting circle. If an ISP is tampering with the content available to me by selectively racketerring content providers, I'll take my business elsewhere.

NASA inks deal for ISS plasma drive tests

Slightly Misleading?

The article seems to imply that this is a new technology. While the specific engine in question is new, the ion drive technology was in operation 10 years ago aboard Deep Space 1. The old engine was referred to as NSTAR and was reportedly developed at a NASA research facility. Perhaps Ad Astra and the VASIMR engine are descendants or spinoffs of that project?

It's Time that Google forgot

No, Google should NOT be Pretending to know this detail

It is the newspaper company which provided the article which needs to provide the date. It is the user who bears responsibility for looking at the date. Google can not attempt to parse the article for the date. Misrepresenting the date, for whatever reason, would be worse than leaving the responsibility where it belongs: with the reader and with the provider.

This is a non-story from Google's perspective. The issue is with irresponsible actions on the part of the reader.

Big Climate's strange 'science'

Comforting Words?

We are in an ice age right now. What hollywood portrays as ice ages are glaciations within ice ages. The Earth is much warmer than this current state, otherwise, with higher sea levels and no ice caps. We are not necessarily "coming out" of this ice age, as a previous poster suggested. We are in the midst of an interglacial period, where the glaciers have receded. This is by it's nature a transient state, but it is the state in which human civilization has risen.

Whether or not the current, relatively rapid, climate change is anthropogenic, it should be of concern. We have over six billion humans on this planet, in fairly precarious circumstances. If the world were to get substantially colder or warmer it would pose a serious problem.

Too many people get caught up in the debate over the cause of climate change. The results of the change are what matter. We know that we can affect the climate. We know that the climate is changing. We know that a much colder or much warmer Earth would likely prove disastrous for current population levels and distributions. Therefore, we know that we need to act to constrain climate change.

Blind optimism is often comforting, but perhaps the author should pursue a regimen of education on the subject before pontificating further.