Tesla Motors, an electric car startup company, just published a pretty cool blog post on the future of electric cars.  Granted, you’ve got to take it with a grain of salt since it is coming from an electric car company, but the facts they present are great:

[Popular Mechanics] compared the cost of a cross-country drive for each of the cars, all of similar size. The benchmark drive cost is $212 in a Honda Civic. The VW Diesel Golf came close at $230. E85 ethanol (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline) came in at $425; methanol cost $619; the hydrogen fuel cell drive cost a whopping $804! Compressed Natural Gas looked pretty good at $110. And the electric car? $60. And the article wasn’t even about electric cars…

Holy cow!  Driving across the country for $60 in fuel costs!  That’s incredible!  Of course, I will have to see it to believe it, but I like what I’m hearing so far.

This article also responds to the lame criticism that so many people make about electric cars: “the energy has to come from somewhere, so they’re not saving the environment.”  Here’s what Tesla Motors had to say (and I agree, minus the advocacy for coal power plants):

As I expressed in an article I wrote recently about Net Neutrality, the concept itself is a little confusing. Fortunately, HowStuffWorks has created a page that makes it much easier to understand the whole issue of Net Neutrality. Check it out if you’re at all interested.

My views are still the same as expressed before. I believe the beauty of the internet is variety, and allowing broadband providers to have control over who has content delivered quickly will limit the variety on the internet. Allowing broadband providers to play favorites would give us fewer news and multimedia sources, fewer or no next big thing websites, and the near death of blogs. In essence, the number of varying opinions on the web would shrink dramatically. Thus, we need Network Neutrality to maintain a quality internet

Network Neutrality has become a very important issue recently. The basic idea, if I am correct (please correct me if I’m wrong), is that with network neutrality, companies that control broadband services cannot configure their networks so that some websites receive faster speeds than others. This of course is unrelated to the speed of the webserver hosting that website, but simply the download speed allowed by the broadband carrier. Currently net neutrality has become a major battle, with people pushing for laws mandating neutrality and those pushing for laws against it.

In essence, without Net Neutrality, larger websites, or those with plenty of money, could gain an instant advantage on the internet over those who don’t. Without Net Neutrality, what will probably happen is the internet will become like free road versus a toll road. If you’re willing to pay the toll, you can have your content delivered quickly. Otherwise, you’re going to have it delivered slowly. This means smaller websites, such as gimme-five, will be delivered very slowly, while larger websites, such as The Washington Post, will be delivered quickly. Furthermore, these larger websites will be forced to compete among one another (perhaps in a bidding war) for the “fastest lane,” giving broadband providers excessive profits that should be going to websites. This will also possibly force way too much traffic to one site that provides the fastest service (especially in multimedia-intensive services) and kill off all of its competition that provides slow, clunky multimedia due to not being able to put up the big bucks for a fast connection.

Probably not. I just checked out an article about the chances of someone being sued by the RIAA. Here are the statistics:

If we divide the total population of the P2P community (~12 million individuals), by the total number of lawsuits in 2004 (6,523), we get 1,840. In other words, your chances of being sued are 1 in 1,840 for all users (regardless of network) per year. How does that stack against all other odds of dying from an intentional or non-intentional injury? According to the National Safety Council, one’s yearly chances of dying from all external causes were 1 in 1,755 in 2002.
…
you then have a 1 in 45,977 chance of being sued if you do not use FastTrack

Moral of the story is, don’t worry about it too much. If possible, don’t share illegal downloads if you happen to have them, and don’t use Kazaa-esque file sharing. Try torrents instead…

I have always secretly believed that the world will procrastinate on the issue of global warming until it is out of control. People would much rather risk massive destruction of human civilization than lose money now. I used to joke with people that the world as we know it will end in 2011. But you know, with global warming, nuclear threats, terrorism, and more going on today, it’s not a certainty that civilization will exist well into the future.

Ok, I got a little off topic. If global warming turns out to be the threat that it seems to be more and more every day, we might need to resort to some emergency measures to save ourselves. Why? Because once the earth’s climate gets too far out of whack - second order effects occur and the climate heats up extra fast. For example, glaciers are good because they reflect light back into space. If the glaciers melt, then the light gets absorbed into the ocean and results in more heat on earth. Once too many glaciers melt, then we are in trouble.