There are an estimated 26 million streetlights, and even if a fraction of them were modified to have single- or dual-car chargers, then we would not need to replicate the hub-and-spoke infrastructure of today but have something decentralized instead.

Obviously, that would require engineering the grid and rewiring of existing infrastructure. It is also something that would need to be done otherwise to accommodate the charging needs if we really want to transition from ICE to electric, and although the barrier to entry with repurposing existing infrastructure might not be as high as if we were starting from scratch, it would still take many years and actual commitment from governments across the world that are squarely in the pockets of big oil, so I remain skeptical that we will pull it off in 10-15 years.

I own a short-range electric car (bought dirt-cheap second-hand, 5 years ago) that I use as my daily commuter and a very long-range diesel car that we use for the occasional road-trip or when rarely driving beyond the range of our electric car. There is not a single "long-range" electric car that is sold today that I can even afford even 5 years from today (based on how much these cars cost today second-hand) can replicate the range that I get out of my diesel, so there is a use-case for each of them. We also do not intend to get rid of the diesel car anytime soon unless there were a comparable option at a similar price-point (it is nowhere near that today), and a really compelling reason to do so, since we do not put many miles on it, and well-maintained diesel engines last practically forever.

I am an Android user, and have used Google Now, but had not tried Siri until very recently, when it was bundled with the latest macOS Sierra release. So far, I have been less than impressed with both Google Now and Siri, and after trying Siri for three days on my computer, I turned off that functionality altogether, because it was not as helpful as I had expected a voice interface to be. So, I would like to know who's building a better, open source voice interface (as opposed to merely recreating Siri or Google Now, which are both mediocre at best)?

It depends. In Colorado, for example, DUI/DWAI are clearly strict liability offenses, which do not require mens rea. A court in New York previously concluded that DWI is a strict liability offense, and does not contain the element of mens rea.

Sadly, Congress can actually overturn FCC rules, and this Congress, with its Republican majority may succeed where their predecessors failed.

And here is the author's disclosure from the article, available on PubMedCentral: "Author disclosures: J. M. Rippe, consulting fees from ConAgra Foods, PepsiCo International, Kraft Foods, the Corn Refiners Association, and Weight Watchers International." Still think the study is credible?

According to http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/publications/fs-nator.cfm it seems like prohibition from workplace discrimination based on national origin extends to hiring. Unfortunately, the most likely outcome of a lawsuit like this one would be a fat settlement for this indivisual, after which, it will be business as usual at Oracle and at other companies with similar hiring practices.

Well, the Indian economy has slowed down considerably, investor confidence is down, and years later, many of the problems noted in the posts above still remain to be solved. While this mission had been previously reported in other sources, the linked article was published on August 15--Indian Independence day--so the official announcement by the PM sounds more like the kind of feel-good pitch that one can expect in any 'address to the nation,' in most places in the world. The Chandrayaan mission was similarly announced 9 years ago during an independence day speech by a former PM, and completed 5 years later, although the costs ($90 million) were substantially higher than initially announced. Given that track record, it seems highly unlikely that this project can be pulled off in $100 million, although I suppose like any government initiative, the project probably has a better chance of getting funded if the scientists asked for that amount than what it might actually take (say, 10 times as much?), and then ask for more later! :-) At the end of the day, any kind of government investing in science is a good thing, and the recent Mars Curiosity landing is more evidence that a space mission captures people's imaginations like nothing else. Hopefully, this mission will have that kind of effect on the next generation of students in India.

There has been at least one bill in recent years--HR 3012--which would have made legal immigration easier for highly skilled workers, and which was passed with an overwhelming majority in the House (389/15), only to be placed on hold indefinitely by Sen. Chuck Grassley in the Senate. The way I see it, 389 votes in favor of such reform suggests that the majority of Americans support such a move, but there seem to be many (largely) political hurdles to overcome before anything concrete actually gets done about it.

According to this article, Google is estimated to bring in $4 billion in mobile Ad revenue in 2012. Even if these estimates were off by (a generous) 25%, that still sounds like a lot of money. What exactly am I missing here that led the Forbes author to predict Google's demise? I must admit I don't know much about where Facebook stands in this regard.

I recall reading about these sort of opinions before with regard to both climate change and evolution, and the common thread seems to be the amount of attention given by the American news media. Differences of opinion, although common in every field, don't quite seem to get that kind of attention unless someone conveniently benefits from giving them press. Would be interesting to find out years later, if this latest opinion-piece was somehow published in response to the recent interest by the NCSE to start educating people about climate change, also explained further here.

Apparently, their naming policy is still very much geared toward individual users. Upon trying to create a page for my non-profit, we were first required to update our profile, and then warned that our name was not consistent with their naming policy, so I had to update it. After doing so, it allowed me to create a page, but the profile has a warning saying that it has been disabled because our name was flagged as being inconsistent with their policy. I understand that this is in an alpha stage, but the process needs to be significantly simpler, without imposing unnecessary restrictions on names and such.

The software download itself is free, although upon running the tool, it brings up the following message on one of the dialog screens, "During the upgrade process, you will enter the PIN number from the upgrade card you purchased," which suggests that they are charging for it. Sadly, my computer is not upgradeable by this method.

In my field, I have noticed that the grant writing cycle often drives researchers to propose doing things that are inherently difficult to do outside a particular setting (e.g. an academic medical center), but which is helpful in getting funding for research. One of the undesirable consequences of such research then is that it is either difficult to reproduce the exact setting (and consequently the results) elsewhere, and it can lead to findings that have limited external validity.

I have serious doubts about how they came up with that number. Data captured once can be stored in a data warehouse and analyzed and reused in many different ways for analytics and reporting, so I am not sure how they estimate that 90% of data is never used again (unless, of course they meant that it is not pulled up again on the frontend application side, which would still make no sense at all).

At our hospital, they have replaced the inpatient electronic medical records system at least 3 times in the last 20 years, and our data warehouse, which has been around for more than 15 years, contains a large percentage of that clinical data from the different (current & historical) systems. A lot of this data is still used pretty actively for retrospective research, recruitment of patients for clinical trials, operational and financial resource planning, forecasting, cost-accounting, etc. In other words, at our institution, most of our data is used all the time, but for different purposes.