Well, what should happen when you lift off the accelerator? In a conventional car, the engine brakes the car, and engine braking increases in lower gears. So GM has reused the concept to adjust the amount of brake regen when you lift off. Other electrified cars coast, or apply a set amount of regen. I don't know what VW's new plug-in hybrids, with a conventional dual-clutch transmission, do.

Tesla hooks brake regen up to the accelerator pedal, so as you lift off more more brake regen increases, turning it into an accelerator/decelerator control. One-footed driving sounds like a blast.

You made sense until your last word. Ultra-capacitors aren't happening. As batteries steadily get cheaper, you can use a bigger battery. A bigger battery can handle more power, so it can cope with more braking regen and recharge faster (and deliver more horsepower); and it's not cycled as much as a smaller battery, so it lasts longer. That reduces the fast-charge and longevity benefits of ultracaps, which are still far more expensive and heavier than a lithium-ion battery of the energy. Ionova claims 10 Wh/kg for their ultracaps while li-on is over 100 Wh/kg. In theory you can recharge an ultracap in seconds, but the future fast charger to recharge a Model S battery in a minute has to deliver 7000 amps at 500V instead of ~240 amps, so it's going to cost a fortune.

Ultracaps still have a chance in hybrids, the Prius only has a 1.3 kWh battery. Only price keeps ultracaps from replacing that battery. But again, as batteries get cheaper, more people will expect to be able to plug in.

Others have commented how this will lead to dumbed-down movies with videogame features and Mario/Angry Birds franchise tie-ins, such as

But this would actually be fantastic if if the movie watcher got to control the remix. There are cut-scenes in Red Dead Redemption that are rival anything in a movie (Marston's last encounter with Bonnie, so polite, so suffused with longing!) and then you can enter the world as one of the characters. Why limit your favorite characters to one setting, legal threats from George Lucas notwithstanding?

In a marvelous talk 10 years ago to the Director's Guild of America (read it!), William Gibson explores the long past of movie-making as storytelling, and predicts the future of it.

Any linear narrative film, for instance, can serve as the armature for what we would think of as a virtual reality, but which Johnny X, eight-year-old end-point consumer, up the line, thinks of as how he looks at stuff. If he discovers, say, Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, he might idly pause to allow his avatar a freestyle Hong Kong kick-fest with the German guards in the prison camp. Just because he can. Because he’s always been able to. He doesn’t think about these things. He probably doesn’t fully understand that that hasn’t always been possible. He doesn’t know that you weren’t always able to explore the sets virtually, see them from any angle, or that you couldn’t open doors and enter rooms that never actually appeared in the original film.

Or maybe, if his attention span wavers, he’ll opt to experience the film as if shot from the POV of that baseball that McQueen keeps tossing.

Somewhere in the countless preferences in Johnny’s system there’s one that puts high-rez, highly expressive dog-heads on all of the characters. He doesn’t know that this setting is based on a once-popular Edwardian folk-motif of poker-playing dogs, but that’s okay; he’s not a history professor, and if he needed to know, the system would tell him. You get complete breed-selection, too, with the dog-head setting, but that was all something he enjoyed more when he was still a little kid.

But later in the afternoon he’s run across something called The Hours, and he’s not much into it at all, but then he wonders how these women would look if he put the dog-heads on them. And actually it’s pretty good, then, with the dog-heads on, so then he opts for the freestyle Hong Kong kick-fest ...

Because I see Johnny falling asleep now in his darkened bedroom, and atop the heirloom Ikea bureau, the one that belonged to his grandmother, which his mother has recently had restored, there is a freshly-extruded resin action-figure, another instantaneous product of Johnny’s entertainment system.

It is a woman, posed balletically, as if in flight on John Wu wires.

It is Meryl Streep, as she appears in The Hours.

She has the head of a chihuahua.

What you said, definitely. DVD extras (the best part of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith) show preproduction steadily evolving. Nearly all movies are story-boarded before production, and animation houses have always made animatics showing the key frames and shifts of the camera. Nowadays effects-heavy movie scenes are pre-visualized on a computer: someone builds a 3-D world for the scene, puts some 3-D character models in it, animates the models, and then moves a virtual camera around to create a computer animation of the sequence of shots. The result is a clunky computer videogame cut-scene version of the sequence.

Which raises the interesting prospect that as computer graphics continue to improve, film makers will stop at the pre-visualization and declare victory. Why make a movie at all when it already exists? Five years ago after watching the "making of" featurette for the effects-heavy movie Hancock I wrote

You see Charlize Theron watching the pre-viz on a Mac notebook, watching her 3-D character to learn what she's supposed to do in the shot! ... The cameramen, the actors, even the director, all watch a movie that already exists that dictates what they need to do.

So record the actors at the table reading of the script, lip-sync the existing character models with their voices, and you have the movie. Perhaps if the real-world actors can do a better job emoting than the pre-viz animators (a big "if" for some actors!), film them and composite into the existing movie.

Bloody university PR departments presenting every research project as if it's some Eureka moment.

"For over a decade, cookstove experts and enthusiasts have gathered at Aprovecho [Research Center]". In 2009 The New Yorker had a long article about stove enthusiasts designing better stoves, what's changed since then? The Chinese are already cranking out Rocket stoves in volume; other commenters have linked to www.cleancookstoves.org, Biolite, etc.. The problem isn't engineering, it's economics and cultural.

Meanwhile, any stove still requires spending hours collecting firewood, contributing to deforestation and CO2 emissions. As an adjunct people can put food in a black pot in an insulated container heated by a cheap solar reflector. But now you've got two $20 purchases per family, one of which only works part of the time. Meanwhile the U.N. spends millions trucking fuel into refugee camps. Again, the problems are NOT engineering ones.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/13/review_zte_open_firefox_os_phone/ [theregister.co.uk]

Ouch. I wonder what the experience is like when you build and install Firefox OS on a decent Android 4.x smartphone.

The scripting is all html/css/javascript using the Enyo framework.

It's cool that they open-sourced the webOS calculator, contacts, email, notes, etc., but it's not the complete phone image, I couldn't find the system settings, dialer, etc. The APIs that the published webOS apps use seem disconnected from any standardization efforts, and some apps seem to contact a local nodejs server instead of making simple JavaScript function calls. If it's all HTML/CSS/JavaScript, why is there a copy of Qt in the tree? Google suggests "much of the actual webOS GUI is (in webOS 2) Qt-based". The best explanation of Open webOS development I've found says

* JavaScript applications with HTML5 and CSS3 using cross-platform Enyo framework
* PDK for native C++ applications using OpenGL/ES, typically for games
* JavaScript services implemented with node.js
* System services implemented in either C++ or Javascript (node.js)
** Web access vs. performance
* Standard applications use Enyo framework
* User interface is a series of Qt C++ applications, libraries and services with some QML

That's one way to do it and Tizen is similar, but compared with Firefox OS's everything in JavaScript calling web APIs, it's far more elaborate and less in the "everything scriptable" approach that TFA wants.

Unless the phone's system apps are all open source and written in JavaScript, so necessarily there are Web APIs to everything. Firefox OS walks the walk.

PhoneGap will shrink to be a compatibility shim on decent standards-compliant smartphones; the problem is Apple will always favor native IOS over web apps because Apple Inc. wants the resulting lock-in and can get away with it while they have market dominance.

Surely Dave Winer can't be that out of touch. Firefox OS nails it.

In Firefox OS everything is written in JavaScript, the most widely-deployed scripting language that developers already know. Unlike all the other also-rans to IOS and Android, its system applications — calendar, on-screen keyboard, music player, etc. — are likewise written in JavaScript. To permit this, and unlike BBX, OpenWebOS, Tizen, Windows 8, and everyone else saying "Write apps for our failing platform using HTML/CSS/JavaScript", it has Web APIs to most phone features (battery status, Bluetooth, camera, SMS, etc.), all on various tracks towards standardization. Like lots of phones you can run your apps on the desktop in an emulator; unlike lots of phones the Firefox OS Simulator runs in your browser. Unlike any other smartphone many of the apps you write for the phone will also run and install unchanged as apps on desktops (and Android) running Firefox, many will also work as Chrome apps with minimal effort, and anyone can run an app store, you just put an install button for your app on a web page on your site.

Unlike Slashdot commenters, most Americans live in multiple-car households. If your regular driving is less than the range you're set, because you use the family gas hog for those occasional journeys, or Zipcar.

From the surprisingly favorable Top Gear review, "BMW reckons nearly all i3 buyers will use it as a second car so won't be doing long journeys, and it's optimised to make them efficient and fun."

The Tesla Roadster was the first and for a while the cheapest car to use all CFRP body panels, but Tesla's site talks of its "monocoque chassis, constructed of resin-bonded and riveted extruded aluminum."

From TFA the i3 is "the first mass-produced auto with a carbon fiber-reinforced plastic passenger cell mounted onto an aluminum chassis"

So you're both correct.

You don't dispose of lithium-ion, you recycle it. CFRP (Carbon fiber reinforced plastic) isn't recycled much, though there are initial plants that can recycle the fibers into a lesser grade.

But you're focusing on the wrong thing. A 1.5 ton 35mpg car is going to burn through 10 tons of gasoline over 120,000 miles, and that gasoline is very polluting to produce, spill, refine, and deliver before it all goes up in smoke. All reputable studies find that 75-90% of the pollution from a car comes from operating it, not manufacturing it.

As to whether you should ditch your 39 mpg car for an i3, so long as you sell it to someone who junks their gas guzzler then it's a win for the environment. The average fuel efficiency of the automotive fleet goes up.

Sure, everyone thinks they know what that better language is. There is no consensus, there never will be, and other browser makers will resist attempts like Dart and NaCl and pNaCl by one vendor to impose a new language or runtime. So realistically, how will it occur? Every web site has been free to send <script type="text/python" src="foo.py"> or <script type="bin/mybytecode_x64" src="foo.llvm"> pages for close to 15 years now, but no one does because it's a complete non-starter to require end-users to install a special browser or hack in support for a new language module.

Meanwhile in the real world JavaScript (+ HTML + CSS + Canvas + SVG + WebGL + audio processing + sensor support + notifications + real-time communications + ...) keeps improving, despite calls to "stop hijacking" it and to "stay off my lawn".

No, let's keep advancing JavaScript.

Let's compare
* find web site promoting some application
* go to download link
* find it's not available for Mac/Linux/your phone/Windows XP
* or it is, but you need to download a different Qt/GTK/SDL/DotNet/JDK runtime
* but that's not available for your machine, or it's 32-bit not 64-bit
* now download, save, run installer, wait for virus checker
* now finally run the bloody thing
* (Windows-only) wonder why there's another task running, it's the %^$#! Check for updates service
* A week later. Yay, there's an update. Repeat all these steps.

vs.
* find web site promoting some application
* click link
* you're running today's build. It just works.

You have to be a clueless, blind, future-fearing Luddite, yet simultaneously have the skills to master the download-find-install-run-maintain loop to find the former preferable. The 0.1% of the world population who fit that niche all hang out on Slashdot and vote up "bloated browser" comments.

Comic facepalm.