Before arguing fatuous points, go visit fueleconomy.gov. 2013 Mercedes-Benz E400 Hybrid gets 26 mpg. Still 15 tons of gasoline.

More snide comments about other drivers. What happened to you?

Bringing up financing just introduces more flaws in BP's model.

Leasing an EV is a good idea, if you have a regular 40 mile commute get a Volt or Leaf right now and you may save money. But Better Place didn't lease you "your" battery, because it regularly gets swapped for something else. They sold you electric miles (Shai Agassi made it sound like he was freeing you from that expensive battery pack, you'd just pay to drive around cheaply on electricity). But that means buying a car becomes a messy three-way between you, the car manufacturer, and the "provider of a charged battery". And since most people can (and want to) recharge at home for most of their driving, BP had to stop you from plugging into a wall outlet for cheap kWh in order to make their finances work. Others here allege they used a unique connector, my understanding is they would meter your home EV charging station separately, and you could only recharge at Better Place's public stations. It was a complete mess. The genuine benefit of a quick swap during a long trip costs big money to deliver, and BP's model could only do it by making all your regular recharge and driving much more expensive, eliminating the "cheap running costs" benefit of EVs. A few hundred people in Israel found the tradeoff worthwhile, but it was always going to be a tough sell.

More importantly, he's selling his second-generation made-in-USA car to thousands of buyers, and winning awards.

The Model S chassis is a thing of beauty. A compact high-power motor and reduction gearing, and a flat battery pack fills the frame because there's nothing else down there. No muffler, catalytic converter, oil pan, etc. Why not use the lot for batteries instead of taking away trunk space?

Don't oversell your straw man. The $95,000 S Class is more expensive and quite a bit more luxurious.

Tesla just repaid its $465M loan under the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) Loan Program set up under the G.W. Bush administration; Ford and Nissan received billions under the same program. If you're referring to the $7500 tax credit, it lets buyers keep more of their money for the worthwhile goal of "ending America's addiction to foreign oil", as every Republican president since Nixon has intoned. Tell me again why my tax dollars should be subsidizing your home mortgage, or any other tax rebate?

Your sneering tone about "appearing green" ignores the genuine increase in efficiency from an electric drive. No doubt you'll bleat about coal powered cars, ignoring the increasing role of cleaner natural gas in USA's electricity generating mix, and that many buyers will install solar PV to reduce their carbon footprint further. Meanwhile a Mercedes E-Class (is everyone driving that a "limousine whatever" too?) is a lot slower and at around 25 mpg will consume 15 tons of gasoline over 120,000 miles. Plug in cars are definitely better for the environment.

EV batteries are big, but adding swap capability only adds minor additional space.. The Model S pack is swappable. The problem is standardization. Better Place burned through all that money for only one battery design that only one car adopted, and even then the Renault Fluence had to have its trunk extended to make the Z.E. version fit BP's QuickDrop pack. BP hoped that customers would demand swap capability so other car companies would adopt it, but it didn't happen, and car manufactures have instead adopted many different chemistries, layouts, placement within the car, air vs. water cooling...

EV batteries are built up from multiple slabs or sheets. Already if your battery breaks, you only replace the defective module. You could imagine swapping the individual modules for charged ones, but each still weighs around 40 pounds and has be reattached to high-voltage high-current wiring and the cooling system. It's an order of magnitude harder than prying out 8 D cells from your boombox, and again there's no "D cell" standard for EVs.

Maybe there could be a standard for a battery extender, a cage in the trunk where you can add several of these modules to your city EV for a long trip. That avoids the problem of swapping your $12,000 pristine battery for a clapped-out beater. But all the cost-time-weight-safety-standardization tradeoffs work against it. Skip the hassle and rent a long-range car for those trips, or use the other car that's already in the garage of most American households.

It's not automated, but yes, jack the car up at a dealer, detach the battery pack, attach a charged one. Tesla Motors has been vague on the details. Since owners own the car and its expensive warrantied battery pack, most likely a dealer will give you a loaner battery as a courtesy for a long trip, and you'll later return to pick up your original. Obsessive fans at Tesla Motors Club debate more elaborate swapping networks but as yet there's no evidence that Tesla will go for it. Musk has shown he'll do whatever it takes for his EVs to compete, but it seems Tesla is busy building out the Supercharger Network (relatively fast DC quick charge stations spread along major routes, unless you're a dumbass New York Times reporter).

BP's intellectual property includes their outdated battery pack design (Tesla's flat sheet is better), the QuickDrop technology for attaching the battery (Tesla's is better), and automating the battery swap with robots. The last seems only worth a few million, unless evil patents are involved.

Batteries are the way you get a decent boost to the efficiency of burning anything in an inefficient combusion engine, viz hybrid powertrains. Keep dreaming that ethanol from anything will become so cheap that you don't care about efficiency. Meanwhile plugging in is the cheapest, most efficient, and least-polluting way to make a car go the first XX miles right now.

I'm not against ethanol from biomass, though it's a far less efficient way to get energy from an area than covering it with solar panels, and the processes all require substantial energy inputs. If and when ethanol from anything is cost-effective it'll serve as a fine fuel for the range-extender engines of plug-in cars that mostly run off their batteries.

Nobody is making a hydrogen-powered internal combustion engine. BMW only made 100 7-series hydrogen models in 2006, and the Mazda hydrogen Wankel (2008) was never produced in quantity. It's tough to store a lot of it hydrogen a car, so you need a more efficient powerplant than blowing up a fuel to make heat and a little forward motion. That powerplant is a fuel cell, essentially reversing electrolysis to drive an electric motor. Fuel cell vehicles are out there, Honda has leased a few dozen FCX Claritys in Southern California, the only place in the USA with a handful of public H2 refueling stations.

The latest optimistic date for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to be finally really genuinely truly here is 2015, and Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz and maybe Toyota are most serious about offering models. But the relative success of the Volt and the Ford and Toyota plug-in vehicles shows far more people are happy to plug in at home for their regular commute and use a conventional gas engine as an occasional range extender. "Early adopters ready to spend big money" will mostly buy Teslas with huge battery packs that can recharge (slowly) anywhere. The market of rich environmentalists who don't have access to a plug and live near the handful of H2 refueling stations and who regularly drive long distances is TINY, and will remain so until fossil fuel becomes vastly more expensive.

Mod AC parent up! Here it is again

"At least some at Google [cnet.com] want to embrace a Mozilla-backed project to speed up Web apps written with JavaScript -- even though it competes directly with Google's own Native Client and Dart programming technology. "

Why? Because you're in a browser right now and it's the most popular software platform ever.

Where's the controller/joystick API for the web browser?

https://wiki.mozilla.org/GamepadAPI

WebGL is just VRML version 2.

No it isn't.

We have too many layers of cruft/abstraction layers/API's to deal with.

WebGL sends shader programs to the GPU which executes them. There isn't a layer underneath it.

A properly designed "world browser" that actually starts in the 3D environment and perhaps renders flat 2D web pages as such would make a lot more sense instead of trying to shoehorn 3D into a 2D "web page"

People had no interest in such world browsers, several companies including Microsoft offered them in the 90s and they all died. Microsoft's 1997 technology was called Chrome (yes, really), and they promised "Chromeffects would turn a web browser into a rippling, 3D space with audio and video playback".

Meanwhile people do like 3D games, they do love running things in their browser, and the fullscreen API lets the game canvas go fullscreen. Enjoy your lawn.

With luck there will eventually be a push for a standardized tablet platform that is open enough to permit users to select their own OS.

That standard platform is the Android kernel.

porting Ubuntu touch:

To rapidly support a wide range of devices, our architecture reuses some of the drivers and hardware enablement available for Android.

porting Firefox OS:

Boot to Gecko (Firefox OS) uses a kernel derived from Android, with a Gecko-based user interface on top of it.

Meanwhile Plasma Active, Salifish, and Tizen are based on a traditional Linux platform, and the Mer project hopes to be the common core distribution for them.

For the tiny fraction of users who "select their own OS", device popularity and an unlocked bootloader matter far more than standardization. If you buy an unsuccessful phone, it won't have a community providing images for it and jailbreaking its bootloader if necessary.

The standardized platform is vital for all these also-ran OSes to get lots of apps. Aaron Seigo's post about standardizing the QML compontents across KDE Plasma, Jolla Sailfish, BlackBerry 10 and Ubuntu is a good sign, but they still suffer from inconsistent device APIs and different packaging requirements. That's where Firefox OS has a theoretical edge: apps for it are just web pages with a manifest. The number of web developers (incuding "app" developers who just put a wrapper around an HTML app) is orders of magnitude more than QML developers.

The Mozilla Open Web Apps project proposes some small additions to existing sites to turn them into apps that run in a rich, fun, and powerful computing environment. These apps run on desktop browsers and mobile devices, and are easier for a user to discover and launch than Web sites. They have access to a growing set of novel features, such as synchronizing across all of a user's devices.

Most likely this will come from the second tier Chinese manufacturers who would benefit most from a common reference standard.

They don't push for anything. They ship Android.

There's a big difference between going to a web site and being able to run it offline, vs. downloading then running a setup.exe (and re-installing the Java or .NET runtime you got rid of in 2011). HTML5 delivers a universal zero-install runtime that eliminates any "installation" step, and when the user is connected there is no "upgrade" step either. It ought to be the future. I may never get a Firefox OS phone, but I'm looking forward to its app stores and Mozilla's advocacy to make any web page an app.

Forget the clickbait question posed. As the one (!) commenter on the Slashdot Business Intelligence post asked,

What advantage does QuickOffice have over the existing Google Docs?

Google Docs already runs in the browser that's the central focus of Chromebooks/ChromeOS. Offline Google Drive/Google Docs editing has been available on any computer running Chrome since version 20 last year and works well,

So why is Google screwing around with Native Client (which will never run in other browsers), developing a separate codebase and another UI? There's a part of Google that believes in the open web, and then there are all the groups doing Android and Native Client and Dart and whatever. Either upper management is too weak to corral all the divisions, or they're happy to develop proprietary ecosystems just in case one succeeds the way Android did.

Offline use of a notebook stops you from using web-based applications.

An HTML app can run fine locally. Use an HTML5 app manifest to cache the app code, and LocalStorage to cache the content.

And yet apart from the venerable TiddlyWiki and some Firefox extensions, neither of which uses HTML5, none of the browser-based apps I use do this. The problem is no longer technical, rather it's that every bloody company with a web application (including Google) wants you to connect and sign in, so they can abuse your privacy, monetize your personal information, and sell ads.

Replyer cusco said "[people] need a real computer with a standalone operating system." That describes Chromium OS and Firefox OS. They don't somehow fail to boot when you have no network access, any more than a phone does.

I work in an educational setting and we use Google stuff. Everyone hates it. Teachers have MacBook Pros and kids have MacBook Airs with Google Apps. No one likes Google Apps. No one. People want traditional installed MS Office or Office 365.

I really doubt that "Everyone" part. Kids don't give a damn. My nieces and nephews are happy using Google Apps/Google Docs to submit homework, and as they acquire tablets they love just having the documents available on all their devices.

In fact everyone I know I've shown Google Docs to is happy with the features. But if they're over 25 they've got File > New / File > Save As... and saving to an overstuffed disorganized mess of a Documents folder (or worse, the Desktop folder) ingrained in their hind-brains, and struggle to evolve past it.

Companies can evolve. I was in a meeting yesterday that was getting off-track and several managers began editing a Google spreadsheet replacement for the chicken scratches on the whiteboard.