You have got it all wrong. This is not "racing to the bottom", but not having Windows bloatware frees you from the need to buy a "personal mainframe" to run it. Strip the chrome and install your favourite flavour of gnu linux, and you have got yourself a very capable ultrabook for under $300.

As long as you can hold the cable companies punishments up to your high standards. So far it is only the little people who get years in jail for spam.

7 years in prison for spamming? What's wrong with some community service and monthly visits from a parole officer?

I am sorry to say this, but spammers from China and Russia have instantly replaced him, and you cannot send them to 7 years of prison without starting a nuclear war. Spam is terrifically easy to stop by technical means: either use spam filters or don't disclose your main email to any corporations, who sell your email as well as your full bio + SSN to anyone who cares to pay anything and are NOT subjected to any prison term for it whatsoever.

... and execution by a firing squad for stepping on your toe? Because that's the best way to ensure that he is "not likely to commit future crimes"

People who text while driving get punished by getting into accidents. Cops are on the lookout for:
- People talking on the phone while driving. Totally safe yet illegal.
-People using phone while parked and on red light
-People using GPS on phone

It's like enforcing speed limits -- everyone breaks them but cops are there to pull over the unfortunate ones

No matter how deep we get into finer details of of total cost estimation, or how good the model is, you cannot claim that price of gas vehicle can be compared directly with price of EV, as you stated previously. When the price is the same the total cost difference is still in the ballpark of 2X the original price!

I will. For those who won't -- they recoup most of it as resale value.

And your car price is $xx.xxx, and the mileage is xx mpg, yet there is still a significant fuel cost markup

Gas also becomes more expensive with time, we can assume that present value of future gas spending = present price of gas.

But your car lives longer if you drive less. You will recoup EV markup over a longer time period, that does not affect my formula.

Cost to Drive 25 Miles $0.96

That knocks down the difference from $4 per 25 miles to $3 ($3 to $2 in your case) , but does not make it insignificant.

This is a topic of a separate research, but you might never need to replace one.

It looks like you are not an EV backer, because you forgot to include

1. Tax rebate and

2. Much lower maintenance costs for EV, such as oil changes, etc.

This one is my favourite!
2. If Obama builds 25 nuclear power plants, electricity will become dirt cheap.
3. If oil reserves dry out, gas cars will become landfill
4. if WWIII starts, you will get to drive a tank for free, all the way until #3 happens!

According to the article about an anti-EV Times journalist, cold temperature decreases auto-projected range of Tesla, but as you drive the battery pack warms up and the range reverts back to normal.

My $25,000 car is expected to live until it accumulates 150,000 miles. That is an additional 150000 mi / 25 mi/g * $4/mi = $24,000 over its lifetime. You cannot honestly expect an EV sale price to match when the total cost of a gasoline car is roughly double the purchase price?

Best schientific dance I have seen

It has been 170 years since the famous petition to French Parliament to protect candle maker from unfair competition from a certain celestial body. Did they learn nothing? Why prop up an obsolete and failed industry at the expence of taxpayers, consumers and competitors?

Maybe use that money to preserve some outstanding paper book editions? Or poll that money to create a free e-book repository to educate the masses who don't have the resources to pay for books $60 a pop? Today we have the technology to bring literacy and education FOR FREE to every ghetto and remote corner of the world, yet a certain Mikey Mouse character prefers and inifinite copyright, and universal as well (Thanks, WTO!)

I can play my old games on Dosbox on Linux. Once this happened I expect to play them in 40 years on the hardware of the future, because dosbox is opensource all that is needed is a trivial recompile.

With non-DRM'd books this is not an issue at all. I just opened an epub book with Emacs and it is human-readable even in raw data format.

I currently have my metric ton of paper books dumped in a storage somewhere I cannot easily reach. Most of them are obsolete textbooks and some are priceless physics and calculus books in a language my children will not be able to read. On a rare occasion I need one of them but it is now too difficult to fetch them at will.

To avoid repeating this situation I only buy ebooks now, and unlike their dead wood counterparts, yes, I will have all of them in 5 years, taking up 0 living space, in a searchable format.

On a side note, I only buy non-DRM or books where I can rip DRM. Don't feel like renting books disguised as buying.

Ok

Where did you get these numbers? Where are the numbers for combustion engine manufacture?

This chart claims it is 5% at best, 10% at worst.

I suspect losses for shuttling around gas tankers is above and beyond ~7%. Care to factor that in?

One of those tin cans on wheels? Economy cars in US get 30 mpg, and cars size/power/luxury class of Tesla get 18 mpg

This is very old, but in some wierd way relevant. In fact, #10 already materialized.

If cars were like computers
If General Motors had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. 1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. 2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. 3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason, you would simply accept this.
4. 4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. 5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive -- but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. 6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "General Protection Fault" warning light.
7. 7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.
8. 8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. 9. Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. 10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.

Against other world currencies. Looks like it happened around 2001