Fourthly,

A DVD? Really?

Do android dogs dream of electric mailmen?

This is partially a problem of Trademark law. Any affected developer should be able to get an temporary injunction from a judge saying Apple doesn't have enforce the claim until the suit is settled in court. However, Apple still has the right to enforce it if they want, just like they can remove apps that use the work "Green" in the title if they really wanted to.

This is very worrying. Just as we've seen 1st World manufacturers replace their labor with automation and cheaper offshore labor, now we see that cheaper, off shore labor being replaced by automation. What does a world with an Chinese structural unemployment rate of 10% look like? It's hard to suss out, but it's possible that we will see an even larger income inequality, with a permanent underclass.

The subtle point of my response was that you can't price internet connectivity the same way you price a physical commodity. There is a real cost associated with purifying water or generating electricity that is easy to measure. The cost structure associated with connectivity is very different. For the physical utilities, you have a significant fixed cost and a relatively large marginal cost. For something like connectivity, you have an significant fixed cost and a relatively small variable cost.

If I leave my tap dripping all month and use 100 gallons of water, the cost to the utility is the same as if I used that 100 gallons all day. The same is true of internet connectivity, except that bursts of usage can have a much more dramatic impact on the end user experience (both for me and for other customers). That doesn't appear to be the case for water/sewer utilities, and only seems to affect the electricity market during periods of extreme weather or extreme manipulation (e.g. Enron).

Sure, as long as they price it at the marginal cost to push that bit down the pipe. ;)

I would argue that a SMB is probably well served by having one copy of the backup (or a part of it) in the cloud for true DR. Yes your live data and one full copy of your backup should be in your control, but you can fairly cheaply have a 2nd backup in the cloud.

In my case, I did it for certain key executives (owners, HR, CFO) laptops. They have secure folders on the server which they'd never use, so I created both local external HDD mirrors in their offices as well as cloud back-ups using a well known backup solution who would use Han Solo as a spokesman if they could. The server backup was a rotation of external HDDs stored in a data-rated fire safe.

97% of the income tax. There are a lot of other taxes. For example, payroll taxes, which amount to about 7.5% of an employees first $105k in income, (so it's actually a regressive tax. That is paid by every employed person, regardless of income. Sales tax is another one not included.

And then, if you want to talk about the larger issue of funding the government, there are loads of fees (nearly) everyone pays, from car registrations, to fees on your telephone bill, etc. To mention only the income tax as OP did, is disingenuous.

But the whole point of the Supercharger is that it's using clean technology to recharge the "zero-emission" car. An electric vehicle isn't zero-emission if you recharge it with electricity generated by a coal plant.

People's Front of Penguinia.

It is. The press release states that these charging stations would be a (slight) net contributor to the grid over the course of the year.

What GPP was suggesting was to create a parking lot full of these things in order to avoid the long lines (it takes 30 minutes to get an 80% charge). Space-wise, I don't think that works, as the square footage required to generate the required energy is probably much larger than that of a parking spot. Of course, given time, the efficiency of the cells will increase so the idea may eventually have merit.

This is true (proportional to the efficiency of the transmission grid over distances).

My original point was to the G...GP who said:

If we take Tesla's statement that the supercharger is a net contributor to the grid as a constraint, I don't see that happening without vast improvements in solar cell technology - cells slightly larger than the footprint of the car would need to generate enough energy to recharge the car. My guess is that such an arrangement would probably need several hours of sunlight to do it.

So, to have a parking lot recharge station we'd either need more efficient cells, or we'd need to accept the fact that the charger would be a net drain on the grid. This is fine of course, but then we're back to the original complaint that EVs aren't zero emission if they are drawing from a grid that generates most of it's energy from coal. (Of course, as you point out, we could set up solar power stations and hook them to the grid, but if it were economically efficient to do so we'd be doing it more already.)

But it does matter what the average output of the solar cells are over time, versus the average amount of charging of cars they are doing. TFA says that the station will provide slightly more energy in a year than would be required to charge cars, but they don't specify how many, or how often, and I didn't see where they talked about how big the charging station was.

What if it takes 10 m^2 or panels to run it, and can only support one car of average usage? Then it doesn't scale up as easily. You'd need a football field sized Supercharger to maintain ~50 cars.

In 2009, there were 254m passenger vehicles in the US. In 2007 there were 164k gas stations in the US. That's an average of 1548 passenger vehicles per gas station. This doesn't count commercial vehicles and semi trucks. My assumptions about the charging station up above are surely conservative, but it's clear that on-site solar generation is not going to scale up the same way as conventional gasoline stations.

Now, distributed power generation certainly is the way to go, and so it would make sense to proceed with this strategy, but I don't think it will continue to a net contributor to the grid as volume ramps up.

But it was his money that broad the cars to market.

I don't disagree with your politics, but let's face it, without the current quasi-capitalist system and resultant extreme inequality, Musk would (likely) not have had the money to start Tesla in the first place.