iyulaev

Overblown, at least for modern cars. Girlfriend sometimes drives an ICE 1.5 miles to work, Gas mileage suffers ~30% versus freeway driving. When I did ~7 mile trips to work and back efficiency was <20% worse than freeway driving. Combustion chamber temps warm relatively quickly.

EVs have no problem "starting" in low temperatures. You might not be able to draw as much power for the drive train as the pack is heating up, but it's not a primordial "fuel-air-mix won't explode" problem.

In theory you're correct. In practice, ICEs will start and operate at temperature of -40F (perhaps with a bit of help heating the oil). The Tesla in the article was brought to its knees in temperatures within the positive teens.

And then this is mostly an issue of infrastructure; if there were at least 120V plugs at every parking lot, you wouldn't ever have to worry about these vampire loads.

Except now you have to convince everyone to install 120V plugs in parking lots, wire them up, figure out a way to bill for this or provided it for free, AND you have to remind the consumer to plug in every time they park their car.

For those too lazy to click, an excerpt

Having had the "honor" of attending class with Mr. Stephens, I would not say that this rebuff is uncalled for. It is one thing to hold a contrary opinion, it is another to act on the matter that Mr. Stephens consistently did: snobbery. [...] It is not as if Hendrix's opinion is not well known to Mr. Stephens, due to the dramatic and attention crazed way he departed the campus.

It sounds like he has quite a reputation there.

Yes, although at least in my view part of the selling point is that we have plugs everywhere, so you have electricity anywhere right? Well, hunting around for a 240V plug is a big harder than 120V.

Also, even though 99% (???) of the world is on 240V, I think the current rating on those circuits still limits power to around 2kW sustained.

http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/13633-NYT-arti...

From actual Tesla owners, the performance seen by the NYT reporter appears to be par for the course. To date most all-electric vehicles have struggled in the cold. The Nissan Leaf has a terrible time of it, with the range decreased significantly. I was honestly excited to see how Tesla S card would fare in cold weather, and how the Tesla engineers got around this problem. Disappointingly it looks like they didn't, and (anecdotally) the problem may be even worse on the Tesla S than on the roadster or even the Leaf. Bummer.

To everyone comparing the cold weather performance of the Tesla to an ICE: yes, ICEs do get harder to start and less efficient in the cold. But for an ICE, that kind of cold is significantly under 0 farenheit - most of the U.S. is at a low enough latitude that temperatures like this are rarely seen and modern ICE cars will start happily without the need for block heaters and other measures. The reporter had significant trouble at temperatures around 30F which even an air-cooled car from decades ago will shrug off. We're talking about maybe 10% of the population having to take special measures during especially cold times of the year (block heaters for temps < 0F) vs >50% of the population (plugging in overnight, every day, for temperatures <= 30F). HUGE difference

Another blog post which sounds a bit more horrific than the NYT experience, although the Tesla owner really takes it with a good attitude:

http://andwediditourway.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/the-not-so-ev...

Other interesting information gleaned from the thread - 120V is useless for electric cars, you really have to have a dedicated circuit for them. And did I mention they hate the cold?

I'm rooting for Tesla and for electric cars. But I do wish they were rated to perform at lower temperatures, and that everyone (Tesla and reporters alike) was more transparent about this. I'd rather see a few people turned off on electric cars and the rest informed and trained with the care and feeding of the cars during winter, than to see people stranded out in the cold because they weren't aware of their cars' performance envelopes.

http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2012/12/paper-towel...

Also have you ever tried to dry your face with an air dryer? Awkward is not nearly a strong enough term to describe it, let alone if there is someone watching you.

The cavity desk sounds like a more extreme version of the genal posture I find most comfortable.

Only barely. Modern FPGAs are made up of LUTs and flip-flops, which can be abstracted as "cloud of programmable asynchronous logic surrounded by D Flip-Flops". I think if you start by explaining the abstract notion of asynchronous logic, and the notion of gating a design using D flip-flops, you can get someone up the HDL learning curve really fast without going into the depths of what boolean functions are, what a mux is, etc. Boolean functions and muxes aren't a central component of modern programmable logic anyway.

I've been thinking about writing up "30 minutes to your first HDL design" at some point. Dragging a competent C programmer up the learning curve is pretty easy, as long as you don't start off with "it's like C but...". I've trained a few SE interns to write some halfway-decent CPLD designs in just an hour or two, and consequently I think that the way they've taught it at school is way too low-level for someone that's going to be working with modern programmable logic, and it needn't be so painful.

It's not. Even the worst, dirtiest coal plant is going to be more efficient than your car engine, since it converts much more of the energy (given of as heat) into electricity. Economies of scale definitely apply to power plants.

Generate conference-ready CS papers in seconds!

Not that I disagree with you, but even in companies of the same size, there is a huge range in strategies and outcomes for those involved. Small "family style" businesses operate under a very different model from VC-funded start-ups even though they are the same size.

At a company where I've worked, titles were completely 100% nominal and a few years in, what you were doing often had almost nothing to do with what you were hired for.

5 years ago, it was. Today, after the SOPA/PIPA thing, it's much more mainstream. People who 5 years ago thought I was weird for talking about Lessig, today are familiar with Sonny Bono and feel strongly against copyright extensions.

And also the internet.

At least one thing is certain - there is vehement opposition to any sort of copyright reform, and it is embedded deep into the political system. I don't think I've ever heard of a policy proposal being met with this kind of reaction. Really pushed some buttons.

Not to say I disagree with your post, but it's it more accurate to say that the natural sciences today explore models for the world in which we live? The models tend to be fairly obvious for things on the human scale, but when you talk about systems on the atomic scale, or on the cosmic scale, the immediacy of the models tends to break down. The result is that, just as for the abstract sciences (math, CS, etc), the usefulness of the models has to be justified. So, I feel that the line between purely abstract sciences and "natural sciences" is not quite as fine and well-defined as your post makes it to be.

What Tesla has done is made an electric car and marketed it as more luxurious and different from what's on the market. The Leaf is for hippies, the Volt is nowhere to be seen. The Tesla on the other hand is sexy.

A bigger concern is how Tesla will expand from this market. For most manufacturers, the high-end cars are not the major money-makers, and the quantities they move are just too small (Lexus sells over 8 IS/GS for each LS they sell). We'll see if they manage to expand from the niche they're in.

Mortgages and foreclosure documents come to mind. See "robosigners".

Eh, not really. Well, you can, but it's ugly, expensive, and usually only done for test fixtures and such.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoEEDKwzNBw

Logic errors are rare but not that rare. At sea level you can expect ~1 bit flip in 4GB of memory every 24 hours. Often it's in an invalid line or gets overwritten anyway, but for applications like this where one logic error can cost you your shirt, application of hardware-level error checking (ECC, SEU detection and correction, etc).

Yes, they're scummy. But they didn't force you to put your personal info or photos on there. Don't want the internet to know something? Don't post it on facebook.

Give me some more concrete advice. What do?