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This is even more stupid when you consider the only time the government might need to read someone's license remotely is when they're driving, but RFID won't work when you're surrounded by a metal car!

Maybe because the NAND will cost about half as much per GB when they move from 2nd to 3rd generation? If not that would leave the flagship 4GB model at around $1500. There won't be too many takers for that price.

My guess is the price of the flagship 4TB model will be more or less the same as what the 2TB model costs now, and the prices of the other capacities will be proportionately less. That should hopefully mean 500GB SSDs will drop under the $100 mark. The entire point of going from 2nd to 3rd...

+1 on that. I don't have a trainer but I use my mom's Schwinn 240 for indoor workouts when it's not feasible to ride outside. Even when the basement is 55°F in winter and I'm riding in my underwear the amount of sweat is unreal. This is with a fan blowing on me. Amazing how much cooling power...

I don't know if you followed the weather in the northeast last winter but we were getting piled on with snow on a practically weekly basis. No sooner had I cleared the sidewalks then another storm put the snow back. Cumulatively, this had to have been a bigger workout than helping someone move...

I've shoveled my next door neighbor's snow many times for the exact same reason. I figured with snow on the ground I wasn't riding, so might as well do something aerobic. After an hour shoveling snow, I felt like I had a better work out than riding.

It's hard to say what the cause of these insane housing prices are. NYC only has about half a million more people than it did when my parents were young. In terms of percentage, that's maybe 6% more. Real estate speculators are responsible for a lot of the price inflation. They buy a few houses...

It all depends upon how much you pay to rent versus what it would cost to buy. In NYC renting seems to be a losing proposition. Most decent apartments rent for upwards of $2,000 a month. For the same money once you include the mortgage interest deduction you can carry enough mortgage to buy a...

I tend to agree. There are loads of reasons '98 was replaced. There are better options now if someone has an older machine.

I had Windows '98 using 1 GB. I think all I had to do was put MaxFileCache=393216 in the system.ini file. Or maybe it was 524288. Don't really remember at this point. It definitely used the RAM. I recall seeing MS Train Simulator alone using over 512MB. That said, memory management in '98 sucks...

Sorry to hear about this. Cancer sucks. I really hope we find a vaccine for it in my lifetime.

This was all a nice walk down memory lane. It also makes me appreciate today's systems where we won't face another hard drive barrier until drives reach at least 144 petabytes. If we use 4K sectors then the next barrier would be at 2.3 exabytes instead. Pretty safe to say it's highly unlikely...

If I recall correctly Windows '98 will work with drives up to 128GB, provided your BIOS supports them. That's a hard limit though because Win '98 only supports 28-bit LBA. I remember having a 100GB drive in a Windows '98 system which worked just fine. Don't remember what I used to partition and...

Tubeless tires require a rim which have the spoke holes sealed to prevent air leaks. They also require adding a valve to the rim. Here's a good read on the subject. They sell sealant to seal the rim, and also valves to install on the rim. So basically the answer here is you can use tubeless...

Same here. I have yet to see a compelling reason to go with Windows 10 but lots of reasons not to.

Not sure about that. Back when I started with PCs in the late 1990s I remember drive sizes being somewhat limiting. My first machine had a 1.2GB HDD. Eventually I was at the point where I would have started needing to make decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of. Then I bought an...

STR is more or less proportional to the square root of bit density. If we managed to make 100TB hard disks, probably the STR would be in the 500 to 750 MB/s range. Still, your point remains. At those speeds it would take 1.5 to over 2 days to get the data in or out of the drive. In fact, I think...

Gas stations have to have electric, don't they? That makes setting up charging stations just about trivial if there's enough demand for it (and the station owner can make money doing so). When gas cars first came out there weren't gas stations everywhere. And yet somehow people managed. Here's a...

I have HDDs over a decade old which work just fine. However, remember those have much lower density than today's HDDs. As bit density goes up reliability goes down. That applies to both HDDs and SSDs. That's why the move to 3D NAND was a smart one. We actually moved back to larger cells, hence...

One more thing worth noting since I mentioned reliability. Eventually, both HDDs and SSDs will reach a density plateau. Right now the fact both are increasing in density means lifespan isn't super critical. If an HDD lasts 3 or 4 years that's good enough since by then you'll likely want to swap...

For consumer stuff they're pretty close to dying out. I'm not sure exactly what I predicted 7 years ago. It may have been HDDs dying by 2015 or 2017. I've little doubt in some third world countries they're still using 5" floppies as backup. But my point here is especially for consumer...

I think the hand writing is on the wall already. Samsung has shown that SSDs trump HDDs right now in terms of size with its 16TB drive. Had they bothered to make something similar in a 3.5" form factor, I've little doubt they could have achieved 50TB. SSD trumps HDD in speed. The final hurdle is...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/nyregion/07pothole.html?_r=0 http://nypost.com/2013/10/03/new-york-has-6th-worst-pothole-problem-in-usa/ http://www.sheepsheadbites.com/2011/02/how-to-reduce-the-number-of-potholes/ Maybe not a quarry, but some of those come close.

NYC streets will do just fine as a quarry substitute although I don't think you're anywhere near NYC.

Interesting. I didn't know Smart Cars came in an electric version. Looks like those would be great for Car2Go now that they're expanding in NYC. If I had to own a car, my tastes probably run more towards something like these. It would kind of natural for me leaning into turns given my decades...

You're right of course. 110°+F is definitely "must get out of the heat now" hot even with low humidity. High humidity just lowers that threshold. 77°F right now but probably close to 100% humidity. My shirt is soaked after walking about 1.5 miles to run some errands.

Weight is about 500 grams per tire. That's about 100 grams heavier than my previous airless tires or the inner tube/air tire combo. It's most definitely not noticeably heavier. The balance is decent also. I spun my front tire up to 100 mph with my Dremel two days ago to check. Just a slight...

I bought a pair of these last year and have put about 1300 miles on them since. I think we finally hit the holy grail here as far as airless tires go. Rolling resistance and ride quality seems to be just about on par with regular pneumatic tires. Compared to my last set of airless tires, these...

I agree 100%. The safety standards are what is mostly responsible for vehicle "bloat". Get rid of those, and you can make vehicles half the weight. If you do that the mileage and emissions will take care of themselves. I also tend to think vehicles which are less safe in crashes might tend to...

If you give them viable alternatives you'll get them to switch. That's the problem here in the US. We don't offer any alternatives at all in most places, even places where they would work. To show you how warped our priorities are, we have no plans yet to supplement two aging rail tunnels under...

Why would they be next to truck lanes? If enough people adopted them, you would have a physically separated lane, much like the bike superhighways in the Netherlands. No issues of being sideswiped by 18-wheelers there. Often they're buffered from the car road by a line of trees or something...

The real estate taxes do have to be paid, don't they? My original point (which still stands) is that housing in NYC, other than Manhattan, isn't particularly expensive, especially if you're in a paid for house. Besides, salaries tend to be more here, so that kind of absorbs any difference. There...

Why would they be on the same road as 18 wheelers, not that you're any more likely to survive a collision with one being in a regular car? You can have separate infrastructure, just as many places already have separate bike infrastructure. I'm thinking of these being useful more in terms of 1...

I guess cool is a relative term. At least that's dry heat. 80°F with the normal humidity levels we have is stifling.

On what planet? I'm getting $1,052 a month at a 4% interest rate on a 15 year loan of $100K using this calculator. Upping the term to 30 years, even though 30 year mortgages are a major scam, only drops the monthly payment to $790. To borrow $200K with a monthly payment of $1,000 would require...

All because I had earlier made a valiant attempt to (unsuccessfully) steer Merc to a car-free lifestyle. Granted, he may have valid needs for owning a car, but I thought it worthwhile to at least give him my thoughts on the matter. Even Merc thinks cars are a scam but unfortunately for whatever...

THEY BOTH SUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! By the way, "expensive shoebox sized apartment in a city with bad school and a high crime rate" is rational? If you don't like cities it's your prerogative but please don't start in with all the stereotypes.

Real estate taxes are about $5K annually. Utilities include electricity, cable, and heating oil. My sister lives in a suburb and here taxes are close to $10K. My aunt's taxes in NJ are $12K. So yes, this is inexpensive compared to many suburban places. Factor in not needing a car. That saves you...

Does your dinner conversation also include talking about the niggers in the big city because you hit on just about every other stereotype? There's a big problem with "work in the city and live elsewhere". It's the fact the city has to have highways going through it, and parking for all these...

Baloney on everything costing more. Most things in stores cost less here than many other places because of competition. As for housing, once you own a private home it's not bad. Taxes and utilities are under $1,000 a month. It's not just about money, either. Driving is slow, stressful, and...

It's a lot more complex than that. Right now there's a glut of suburban and exurban housing and a shortage of urban housing. On top of that, government at all levels directly or indirectly subsidizes auto use more than other modes. Despite these subsidies, owning a car is still hideously...

I'm sorry to hear that, Sed. It's funny but I have an ongoing dream (nightmare?) where for some reason I end up back in high school. Don't know the exact reasons but I think it's something along the lines of the school retroactively telling me I never met the graduation requirements. It's...

My aunt had one of those once. My uncle hated driving it. In his own words, it was "like driving a sofa".

I would try to chew them down first before worrying about financing. Good price or not, most people are amenable to negotiation if they have something they just want to get rid of. I would also keep the old Element as a parts car given that things will eventually need replacing if you plan on...

Most of those conditions would preclude a person from safely driving as well, particularly dementia, MS, MD, heart disease, and ataxia. It's a complete misnomer though about "exertion" being an issue. It's not necessary to use any more energy riding a bike than walking if you so choose...

Supposedly there's enough gold in the iron core of the Earth to cover the planet in a layer about 12-13 feet thick. Of course, if we were able to get at it that would make gold practically worthless. Along the same lines of thought however we may well start mining asteroids within our lifetimes...

The idea of living in a big city would be to dispense with a car altogether, meaning limited parking wouldn't be a concern. A car is hands down the worst way to get around in a big city anyway. Average car travel speeds in Manhattan are something like 7 mph. I average more than twice that speed...

I've heard this elsewhere. It's moot even if true because the "refill" time for oil fields if the theory is sound would be on the order of millenia. That's not even accounting for the pollution or global warming issues of continuing to use oil. We're better off transitioning to a non-fossil fuel...

Cargo bike? That would seem to be the answer here. They even have versions with electric motors in case you live in a very hilly area (or just don't feel like pedaling). Given your travel habits, if not a cargo bike it's sounding to me like you might get by with an electric scooter. Just...

Glad you're OK, Merc. Regarding getting another vehicle, it might be worthwhile to carefully examine your usage patterns, perhaps see if rentals and/or using services like Uber would be more cost effective. The hard fact is the economics of owning a motor vehicle have always been horribly...