"...or she'll miss all the excitement." (Babylon 5, "Into the Fire")

There is a very active LEAF owners' group at mynissanleaf.com and folks have developed a battery-aging model based on formal tests and lots of user data. No one has reported anything like what you posit. How about some proof of that data?

Fine. Try this instead: at just over 4 miles/kwh, my retail cost for electricity would've run three cents per mile, or about $70 so far. That better? :-)

I'd suggest looking elsewhere than the right-leaning Wall Street Journal for an objective analysis of costs and benefits. And I've owned entry-level cars over the years ('76 Rabbit, '79 Mazda GLC) but to compare their level of features to a LEAF is simply bogus.

A little more information... the LEAF is my daily driver, but when I leased it I kept my paid-for Corolla for longer trips only. My annual driving comes to something over 15000 miles, and the annual mileage cap on the LEAF is 12000. I expect to put about 5000 miles/year on the Corolla including vacation driving. At that rate it'll last a good long while. Other EV owners have been known to rent cars for their occasional longer trips, and some lease deals even include rental credits.

Now I'll be sure to remember how impractical my LEAF is as I drive to a morning meeting, then the mall for some mallwalking, then the free charging station near the gym for half a "tank" while I work out, then... Silly me, driving 2300+ around-town miles over the past three months for a total fuel cost of $9 (because one of my city's free charging stations is inside a parking deck) without ONCE realizing how impractical it was! :-)

Both of these are surely compromised by the NSA by now. Certainly SSL is.

That is a really good point. The move to closed systems is a disease that is killing the internet.

This argument hasn't changed in twenty years, in spite of massive improvements in ease of use. Apparently, it's impossible to make it "easy enough" for the average user. I think this means ease of use actually has very little to do with the problem. The problem is with the average user's priorities. People value convenience more highly than privacy, and as long as people don't change those values, encryption will never take on. Typically people will only change their priorities under threat of dire and immediate consequences for them personally. Everyone will lock their door so they don't get burglarised. But email privacy is too abstract and invisible still. It's going to take some huge cases of identity theft, with real monetary loss, to get people to change â" and then people will probably sooner abandon email than use email encryption. Finally, the kind of convenience that you propose necessarily will render the whole thing insecure. Letting strangers (like Google) manage your private keys defeats the whole purpose.

How does this utter shit get modded up to +4? Heartbleed is an OpenSSL bug. It's got jack to do with Linux (or any other OS). That is just the worst in the parent message. Everything else is misleading as well.

...maintain an AI system of "waiting on better materials" projects while keeping abreast of materials research? Seems like they'd then know which startups to fund/acquire.

So you'd strip toddlers from the gene pool? Yeah, that's the ticket...

There is much, much more to the process of professional evaluation and diagnosis than what you describe. The process is a whole lot more rigorous than idle speculation.

This song might be shorter.

My Galaxy Note II can do that.

Fan noise would mask any user panting...