You're absolutely right. This car is not for everyone. Nissan actually had a questionnaire on their Leaf order site to determine if the car was the right fit for your driving conditions. If you didn't fit the profile, they highly recommended against buying one. I think that will change quickly as EVs get longer range and shorter charge times.
As for the winters, the first one was pretty mild, but the second one had some dips below zero. During the cold snaps the battery definitely lost significant range, but now that it's summer, the range is practically back to its original amount. There's been very slight degradation of battery capacity so far. I've got plenty of data that I plan to analyze in a future post, but that's for a future post.
A lot of people live life without a car at all. I'm sure there are quite a few people out there who could really benefit from a short-range commuter, but never have a need to drive a car beyond the range of an electric car. For people like that, a Leaf would make perfect sense as their only car.
I wouldn't do it, you wouldn't do it, but I wouldn't say that nobody would do it.
For people who do want to drive long distances, but not frequently, it could still be a good way to go. Cars are pretty easy to rent, whether from a place like Zipcar or a more traditional rental company like Enterprise. If you drive long distances rarely, it could easily be a win to buy something like a Leaf, then rent on the rare occasions you need more.
I find that people often try to imagine every possible eventuality when buying a car, and want to buy something that's capable of it all, no matter how rare these things are required. Well, they say, this car is perfect for our daily needs, but when the sister and parents come to visit once every two years, they won't fit, so we need something bigger. Or, it's perfect, except it won't handle that road trip we've always been dreaming of but never got around to doing. Buying for typical needs and renting for atypical needs is usually cheaper.
> I can't see anyone buying a Nissan Leaf as their only car. The range is a big inconvenience.
Remember that for some, it's no problem. I live in the UK, I have no intention of ever driving more than 100 miles in one go, and if I really need to travel long distances, trains, buses, trams, planes are relatively cheap and available.
I doubt a Leaf is what I would buy, but given that Tesla want to allow free charging, so ostensibly free fuel, I can see that as very attractive in the near future.
If you’re with Ecotricity in the UK (who peg their electricity prices to match the big 6) then you get free access to their network of chargers: http://www.ecotricity.co.uk/for-the-road
I've experienced the same issues. Some sites, like Udacity, is borderline broken for me. I applaud the effort to move off the Adobe plugin, but it's important to remember that to the end user, we just really care about how well it works. In the meantime, I've gone back to using Firefox.
I haven't tried AeroFS yet but this new feature is giving me the push to try it now. Being in control of my data and my costs is something I was looking for.
Something is bugging me though, what is AeroFS' long term viability if they don't charge for their services?
I think they're a P2P, 'cloud' storage service. Space is shared by users (or that's what I understand). You can also choose to upload (some) stuff to their own servers. And everything with strong AES encryption.
I haven't tried it yet, I still stick to the old fashioned solutions (Dropbox, Backblaze, Time Machine) as they serve me well, but sounds like something interesting with uses to explore (…maybe not the very same ones that have current services!).
"but wouldn't (or shouldn't) Boeing be careful about who their customers are?"
Forgetting for a second whether we are talking about Boeing or the used market that is what money laundering is all about. Taking ill gotten gains and putting into a legitimate business. It wouldn't be a stretch to form a legitimate air charter company and even get customers as a cover for buying an airplane. If you've got the level of money they have there are many things you can do. Obviously you are hiding the transactions even if some of the parties might know there is something wrong going on.
I was going to say the same thing, you see a lot of them parked on the tarmac in Mojave with out of business livery or sometimes just painted white.
There have been stories of folks laundering money in the middle east where there are apparently a lot of 'cash' jobs that take US currency, still the cartoon picture of the pallets of cash was pretty hilarious. I wonder if you could trade a pallet of cash for a check from a Saudi Prince?
I am most fascinated by the tunnels though. At some point these guys will be able to plan long enough ahead that they can buy a tunnel boring machine and starting south of the border have it end up in like down town San Diego. Maybe they could fund one of those evacuated tunnel trains we read about here recently :-). Given the work on quad copters I'm still surprised that there aren't semi autonomous groups of quad-copter mules carrying cocaine in swarms from point A to point B.
Tunnel boring machines are extremely difficult to buy and more difficult still to run without oversight. They're just incredibly complex and hard to maintain machines. It's not impossible mind you , I mean, the cartels have all kinds of expertise available to them, but consider that the cartels have access to humans enslaved by their drug habits. Many people, fueled by cocaine, with picks and shovels can make short work of a tunnel like those described in the article.
You are much more practical than I am Chris. Looking at what humans, motivated by gold, did to the Sierras I'd have to concur it would be far simpler to do it your way.
If that day were to come, as a hacker, how do you turn down a chance to work with a well-funded customer that want you to build a evacuated tunnel train, but on the other hand, this is essentially blood money. A passion vs moral dilemma...
You are completely missing what the cartels are. They aren't gangsters in mountains with bales of cash. They are hundreds of businesses, thousands of people in everyday life, part of the law, justice system, etc.
Having a 747 isn't that much of an accomplishment when you consider that the Google guys have 7 planes and their own NASA airport.
Airlines in the developed world almost never own planes, especially in the dimensions of any typical commercial airliner. The other problems that plane ownership brings (besides routine maintenance, which the airlines do own) are outside the desired core competency of airlines. The leasing of aircraft to commercial airlines is quite an industry in itself, and the transactions often involve complex, multilateral bond financing. There are almost always complex financing arrangements involved. Few buy a 737 with a bag of cash anymore than one buys a skyscraper outright. It is done by some of the world's less creditworthy airlines, and American has a penchant for owning, but it is increasingly not the normal industrial practice. Investors go in on planes just as they do on any other massively expensive capital goods.
Thus, the key for a drug cartel would be to get the various intermediaries involved in the aircraft leasing and financing process (some of which are surely quite corruptible) to lease one to ShellCorp, or buy on the secondary market, as some have suggested.
The bigger mystery for me is how they manage to fly in the context of overall international airspace control and air traffic control. Like someone else said, a 747 can't take off and land on a desolate patch of grass. Law enforcement and intelligence aren't stupid; they know how much money is in the "air charter" business, and it definitely won't pay for a 747. Charter companies use much smaller aircraft.
Edit: Unlike airlines, drug cartels actually do have the cash to buy a $138m plane outright, yes. But that would set off enormous alarm bells, because nobody otherwise obscure does that.
It means that the data from one user has no relations to the data from another user. So most if not all their queries only query the data of one user.
This is really useful for things like sharding, where you can split a database table onto more than one machine, because there will be few queries that will stall fetching data from one machine to another.
Why not have a database for each user? Evernote's data is partitioned perfectly for that. Notebooks and notes are accessible to one user or are public. There is no sharing notes between users.
Actually, his idea of a database for each user could still work, even though there is sharing of data between users. Take each database, and turn it into an executable object, which reads/writes its own data, and which communicates with other objects for sharing. It's like taking the actor model of computation, and orienting it for database use. I don't know of any working example of where this has been done, but I don't see why it wouldn't be feasible.
I was too young at the time to be aware of this blackout, but I am grateful to the ones that protested this bill. The internet would not have been the same if people are scared to express their ideas/opinions/arts.
I wonder about the world we would be in if the bill had passed as it was presented.
Part of the reason it passed is that it was an amendment to the Telecommunications Reform Act, the biggest change in telecommunication regulation in the last 1/2 century so no matter what we did, it was bound to pass then.
Being involved in fighting it was a whole education in how Washington works and part of the reason I suspect we're going to have to continue fighting SOPA/PIPA for a long time to come, even if it's on the back burner right now.
Kudos to VMWare for open-sourcing this, it'll be interesting to see how they leverage this product. Google open-sourced Android because they wanted to have people to search using Google on their mobile phone.
I am also quite amazed that a team of 6 was able to build this seemingly complex product.
That wasn't the entire team. The original team was only 3! It grew to larger than 6 before Cloud Foundry launched in April (I'm talking specifically about Engineers). If you add other people the team is far, far larger.
It's great that he came to the realization that coding isn't something you can do for 15 minutes, in between meetings. Most of the managers at big corporations don't seem to understand how meetings can just kill off a day's productivity for a programmer.
I can't see anyone buying a Nissan Leaf as their only car. The range is a big inconvenience.
I am curious to see how the battery will handle the cold winters in the long term.