The oil industry likes fuel cells (have run advertising showing off their benefits in the past) - i.e. big money wants this to keep fuel cells going and happen.

Unsubsidized hydrogen is more expensive than gasoline (to go an equivalent distance in a fuel cell vehicle) at this point.

Electricity out of the plug, for a battery electric vehicle, in the U.S. averages $1.25 per gallon in gasoline equivalency (sometimes much less at night).

Actually this isn't silly. Intel has compromised CPU instruction set due to NSA influence (whether that was via a secret order or just because they bend over when asked is unknown). Just look at what this Google engineer said:

https://plus.google.com/+Theod...

So given the option of getting a back door inserted in the SSL protocol used by a huge chunk of the world - the NSA will try to corrupt it.

If served with a secret order, from a secret court on the desire of the NSA for "national security" reasons with orders to, of course keep it secret, Google would have no choice but to comply. The fact that it'll be open source would allow for the possibility of it getting caught (but only the possibility), and I doubt that would keep the NSA from trying to corrupt all 3 SSL protocols as they are being reworked currently. JMHO...

After the Snowden revelations it is now assumed that Intel compromised their CPU's extra instruction sets that are useful for encryption (making things much faster for encrypting things if used). The NSA then has Co's etc. pushed to use this capability via outside experts and "experts" from college's.

Although many are too old to remember, we had this debate in the 90's over the clipper chip (allowed encryption via a chip with a NSA back door) and it was roundly rejected by the American Public - in the end the NSA has put that capability into our chips in Secret and urged industry to use those compromised capabilities of those chips through "experts" the industry depends on for good advice.

Here's a great quote from a discussion on encryption software - "Remember how an intel employee was pressuring Theodore Tso to only use CPU hardware random, but he couldn't explain why entropy mixing was worse? Funny how that happens.... https://plus.google.com/+Theod..."

This is quite reasonable of Russia (and basically any government that doesn't want the U.S. to have access to their secrets), they should consider all current generation Intel and AMD CPU's to be shot through with U.S. Govt/NSA required exploits and weaknesses. But they should also consider that all the supporting chips used are compromised as well (particularly the ones handling IP communication - if designed by U.S. corps or companies friendly to the U.S.). This is a tall order, but one that needs to happen (saying that as a U.S. citizen who doesn't want to live in a total surveillance world in perpetuity) - not that I'd trust the Russian version, either.

Not specifically Tesla, but electric cars don't have alot of things that car dealers make money with (oil changes, engine work, transmission work and on and on). Alot of dealerships make much of their profits from such things, so what Tesla represents is scary change - of course that change is coming whether driven by Tesla or someone else.

So the dealers have alot of money, alot of friends and will do what they can to gum up the works for (or kill) Tesla and what it represents if they can. JMHO...

I think we're getting someone's attention. (Hopefully the judge makes them public)

The NSA thinks it makes sense.

Just awesome to see the Canadian legal system still has its eyes open. Now the political/intelligence system has been in lockstep with the U.S. on the surveillance of everything/everyone program - but maybe there's hope up in the great north. I wish our (U.S.) legal system was so clear sighted on these issues.

This one is easy to fix though - if the White House doesn't want him in Russia (home of the KGB), just "un" suspend his passport so he can move on to a "safer" (for extraction of secrets) 3rd party territory, which is what he was originally trying to do.

The only fly in the ointment of this possiblity, is that it was the Obama Administration that suspended Snowden's passport on his flight to South America that connected through Moscow (while in flight from Hong Kong to Moscow), stranding him in Russia (obviously with intent to politically smear him - which has worked with alot of not informed people).

The shortsighted political decisions of the Obama Administration to do this (locking someone like Snowden in the home of the former KGB) for political gain seems like one of the premier examples of cutting off your nose to spite your face. Obviously the Obama Administration made the political calculation (up at the executive level) that it was worth stranding someone with all his knowledge there. Seems ridiculously shortsighted.

So well said rabbin.

It brings up a troubling question, in this day and age of our surveillance state intelligence angencies - who'd want to sign their name on that list, which would obviously be passed over to the "watchers" as "potential troublemakers".

Great article but this part isn't correct:

"Nowadays, that means nearly everything besides face-to-face communication, or paper shipped through the world's postal systems."

As shown here - every single piece of 1st class mail in the U.S. is photographed (and probably handed over to the FBI or NSA or whomever started this stupid program up in the first place to get the Post Office to do that):

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07...

Short of radical political reform, which seems a long shot in the U.S. in the near term - technical solutions coming from open software will be the few ways we can restore some privacy to communications.

Snowden showed that all of the big European governments went along with the U.S. as it rolled out its secret total surveillance of electronic communications. Of course there are the really close co-operators (Britain, Australia and some others), but they all went along with it. Of course Europe had trains blowing up etc. to push them along.

From what has been shown, not a single big government didn't run with the U.S. down that path to where their govts can know everything about the general population - just like East Germany wanted.

This was one of the goals of Bin Laden, destroying the freedoms inherent in the west...he succeeded here. The sad thing is not a single government realized having a total surveillance state is incompatible with have a true Democracy (mid to longer term) where privacy and freedom are required. Europe has the best chance of turning over this garbage.

After all the reports of Chinese based hackers penetrating every nook and cranny of Federal and Commercial Defense assets over the last couple of years this seams a case of closing the barn door long after the horse has left...

It's sad seeing this, but its also good to keep in mind - this standard was pushed by Microsoft, Google and others. As such its already "live" in Chrome (as of Release 25 if memory serves, current Chrome release is 29 I believe) as its in WebKit (so ad Safari and Opera as well). Microsoft will add it to IE if they haven't already - leaving Firefox and its slowly dwindling user base. Since 75% of the PC web and nearly all of the mobile web will be making use of this - it'd be a market share death sentence for Mozilla to take a stand and say we just won't implement these "standards" in Firefox - (JMHO, but most general users would notice that what they want using this cgap works with Chrome, IE etc. and not with Firefox and just stop using Firefox making the Firefox user base melt away faster). I don't like Mozilla doing this, but I can easily understand why they are.