Mine is 20 years old. At this point I'm paying whatever it costs to keep it in shape. I never even blink. Fortunately the local dealer is very good and never cheats me on repairs or price. I never want to lose this car.

It probably differs between countries.. but around here it's not legal to talk in your hand-held phone, not to mention texting, if you have merely stopped your car. You need to park it and turn off the engine. Using the phone while waiting for a red light is illegal, because you're not watching what's happening around you while you're stopped. So, ads? Which isn't only distracting, but as far as I'm concerned introduces rage. No way I'll ever buy any kind of Jeep, or from any other car maker doing something similar.

The only real misjudgement by Sinclair was the microdrives. There were also technical problems at launch, but that wasn't uncommon. But not choosing (the more expensive but, at that time already standard) 5.25" floppies was a fatal mistake. Especially when Sinclair had the idea that he could sell those machines as professional office computers.

You say ".. but they could go hard on rooftop solar". Why do you believe they don't?

Japan has in fact been doing that for many years now. Where I used to live there wasn't a single new house or apartment block which was built without covering the whole roof with solar, and every refurbished home got solar panels added as well. Every single one. In addition to that, they utilize undeveloped land in between shops etc. for arrays of solar. This was well ahead more than a decade ago, at least (before that was before my time so I don't know). And it's the same everywhere. Tokyo has now mandated solar panels on every new home. I don't know why they see the need to mandate it, as everybody is doing this anyway.
(They also, in fact, have on-shore wind farms. But, as was already mentioned, land space is limited. Wind farms are in mountains, but most mountains in Japan are very steep.)

"Even Fukushima didn't fail until a tsunami destroyed some backup power systems that were incorrectly placed, and even THEN no one died."

You severely underestimate how close this was to total disaster. "Incorrectly placed" - Yes, the power plant was placed close to the sea, and not in the mountains as engineers 40 years earlier had planned. But still way higher than any presumed tsunami. Then a double (two geological faults) whammy happened at the same time and you got an unprecedented tsunami. So yes, the diesel engines were drowned. As to "no one died" - you forgot to include those who died within as close to two years later, from cancer. People who went into highly radioactive areas, preparing to die.

So what happened then? People had to go in ("go" as in very difficult) to manually turn on and off valves (where not even protective "space suits" could stop the radiation), in an effort to lead high pressure out through a water filtration system to avoid pouring radioactivity straight into the surrounding air. Due to the failing power pressure increased rapidly inside every building, soon going way above the limit and buildings started to explode, despite manually pumping water in to try to cool the reactors.

So, what happened in the end was that at one point they couldn't prevent pressure going up in one particular building, it went twice as high as the design limit and hadn't yet blown (unlike the previous ones which blew at a lower pressure), and at that point this was game over, if that happened it would be Chernobyl all over again just ten (10) times worse, the plant would have gone into total meltdown. They didn't see any way out of that and looked at evacuating 50 million people, all of east Japan including Tokyo, and as far south as Nagoya. An impossibility.
Then a kind of miracle happened. One single plate in the building blew out, and the pressure aired itself out (spewing radioactivity into the air), and prevented the failure. Something which they couldn't actually do manually. To this day nobody understand how or why, but that incident saved all of Japan as we know it at the very last moment.

So, I then told my wife (who is Japanese, and absolutely horrified by what the government is doing right now) that "Fukushima was more than 40 years old, nuclear plants are not meant to be that old, of course there's better safety in newer plants, and they get decommissioned after 25 years I'm sure, or at least 30 years, they should never get that old". And then this comes up. 60 years? That's insane.

When I learned what really happened at Fukushima, and how insanely necessary it is to actively control a standard nuclear reactor at all times to prevent meltdown, I firmly believe that the only type of future nuclear reactors allowed should be ones where you actively have to run the fission, e.g. Thorium reactors. The ones where, if you do nothing (e.g. turns of the electricity), it simply stops. Not the other way around, as in Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island. If a fraction of the effort which was put into the research which achieved today's reactors (which were, after all, a particular design choice made because it could produce plutonium for military purposes), then Thorium reactors can surely be developed.

If you want to learn what really happened at Fukushima I recommend the film "Fukushima", which gives a fairly good overview (though with a tight focus on a few aspects of this).

It's not about being a role model, even if some external observers think so. It's much simpler than that: Some people started to buy EVs in Norway for various reasons, some of them probably the incentives in place at the time (free parking, reduced import taxes etc). Then people started to notice that EVs are nice, and over time this has become the norm - people *like* and *want* electric cars. And that's why nearly every new bought car is now electric in Norway. It's not about Norway being a role model, it's simply that in Norway it makes sense to use electric cars and therefore most people buy electric cars.
1) Grid infrastructure already in place - this goes way back. Norway has relied on electricity for close to 100% of its energy use, and the grid was originally scaled up for heavy electric industry, a century ago
2) It's easy to set up charging stations, as the grid doesn't have to be upgraded as a rule
3) The country isn't that big - although north to south *is* somewhat like going from Norway to Rome
4) Roads generally pass through populated areas, not through desolate woodlands etc
5) Though the population isn't large, it's spread around so that there aren't generally large stretches of nowhere along the roads - small settlements are spread around along nearly every major road, so it's not *that* far between shops, the occasional gasoline station etc - and that's where you put charging stations
6) Shopping malls etc started to set up charging stations nearly from the beginning, to attract customers, so the switch to having charging stations available happened very early on, which fed into what I wrote at first - people wanted to buy EVs as they saw few hurdles to that.

In short - it's not about trying to be a role model, it's only about a country which happens to switch to EVs simply because people like to, and find it easy to drive EVs.

Do you know *anything* about electric infrastructure in Norway? Anything at all? FYI, Norway needed a high-performing electric infrastructure long before oil. Norwegian energy is all hydro electric, as far as the citizens are concerned. It's cold, there's a long winter, and all heating is electric. In addition to that there's huge industry based on the availability of hydro electric power plants, like iron melting, aluminium, fertilizer. All of that required investments in electric infrastructure as more than a century ago.

The net result is that there was *no need* to do much about the infrastructure in general just to install charging stations here and there. There is no governmental investment program in place to facilitate the building of charging stations. It works just like anything else - a company sets up something requiring electricity, and works out the details with the local electric power provider.
If you want numbers: The total of charging stations in Norway uses some 0.5% of the total electric consumption in Norway. It's absolutely *peanuts*.

Now, who's the imbecile here?

Infrastructure? Roads etc? And that has to do with charging stations just what?
In any case, the income from oil exports is for the most part pushed into a future pension fund. Only a tiny percentage of the oil income is directly used by the government each year. And you only have to compare to Sweden, with no oil, where you see a very similar development w.r.t. infrastructure and just about everything else. Oil is not the deciding factor and not why Scandinavia at large is moving to electric vehicles. As for 2025, you don't need a government plan for that - the car companies of Europe basically stop making new non-EV cars around that time ( https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dmv.org%2Farticles%2Fn...)
And, as I said previously, electric cars are the new natural. That's what people buy, buying a gasoline car is anachronistic at this point. And I say this as a gasoline car owner.

That's been phased out. There's already a ceiling in place, affecting the more expensive cars. Soon it'll all be gone. People aren't cancelling their orders even though the waiting list for some cars is so long that they'll be affected by the change. People don't *want* gasoline cars. The reduction in toll costs isn't more than about 20%. Investment in charging stations isn't paid for by the government, it's business as usual for companies providing them. Why do you think the government is involved in that? They never were. Heck, there are charging stations at work.. paid for by my company. Simply because so many employees have electric vehicles.
Cars are expensive in Norway. Always been. People don't look at the price when choosing one car over another, as long as it's not above their personal limit - be it 300k NOK, 500k NOK, or 1M NOK. People buy electric cars instead of gasoline cars for the same reason they don't buy landline phones anymore. Gasoline cars are outdated.

"And the reason they can afford to do that is they are a massive gas and oil exporter." Explain. What is it to afford? Electric cars aren't subsidized, they're just taxed lower than gasoline cars (and that incentive is now gradually being phased out) but then again Norway has the highest taxing on cars in the world, only behind Denmark. Now that those economic incentives are getting removed people still buy electric cars. Nobody wants to buy an old-fashioned gasoline car. Every new car owner I know buys electric. Even with increased tax levels and long waiting lists. The last time a friend bought a gasoline car must be more than three years ago as I recall.
Again, there's nothing to "afford".

"Paid for" how? What's necessary to pay for? The driver needs to buy electricity instead of gasoline. There *is*, or has been, an economic incentive in place for making electric cars attractive, they're already being phased out. The only problem with buying an electric car is that there's a waiting list - still people buy them. In fact I don't know a single person who've bought a gasoline or diesel-powered car the last three years. They all buy electric cars. Simply because that's what people want to drive. Buying a gasoline car at this point feels a bit like buying s landline phone.
Norway exports oil (and gas), that fact isn't affected at all by Norwegians buying electric cars. Electric cars aren't "paid" for by oil exports. Electricity isn't made from oil or gas in Norway.

I don't believe it's interactivity that's the problem. I've found that if I play a lot of guitar before bedtime, maybe with singing, I sleep very well indeed. Better than I would if I didn't do anything that evening. And making music is interactive, I'm not passively sitting there like if I'm watching TV.
However, if I work on the computer before bedtime it may be that I won't be able to sleep for a while, that typically happens when I'm working on an interesting programming issue and my brain keeps popping up new ideas when I'm actually trying to sleep.

OpenVPN runs fine on the N900 too (I use it a lot), and as the author has the N900 already he should be all set up.

>On top of that it's virtually guaranteed that your ISP explicitly
>forbids running services on your home Internet connection, and
>probably even mentions email as a service you're not allowed to
>run. Most large ISPs also block all TCP/25 traffic going through their
>networks that is not aimed at their own email servers (which is why
>TCP/587 is so popular for SMTP submission with third party email
>providers), and you HAVE to use that port for server to server email
>traffic.

The reason ISPs block TCP/25 is _not_ part of their 'no email service of your own' policy. Blocking of TCP/25 stems from the early days of spamming, when spammers would first relay through, and later hijack consumer PCs for spamming. This was often combined with relaying through a company's mail server, but even when companies got wise to this and changed their setup to not relay, the home PCs could still continue sending spam. Blocking outgoing port 25 put a stop to this (and many companies also block their outgoing port 25, except for their mail server, simply because if an internal computer got infected they don't want to get a spew of spam coming from their network. Just like how the ISPs are thinking). Port 587 requires authentication and in practice only allows you to connect to mail servers you're known to, and there's no reason to block this so the ISPs don't.

As another poster mentioned below: If you show that you know what you're doing, i.e. that there's little risk your computer will be one of the infected spam-forwarding PCs, you can often get your ISP to remove the TCP/25 block.

Well, if it's supposed to be a General Products hull they could install an automatic stasis unit as well. Wouldn't be so bad:
("Warning: Nearing impact." ..discontinuity..)