I get the gist of it but the summary is so mangled that it doesn't really make much sense.

Just for the record barrels were probably equally revolutionary in their time. And the ability for a person to roll them before machinery was quite an advantage.

I remember the days when the highest rated comment on Slashdot would be a nice summary of the salient point of the article with some insightful agreement or disagreement.

This is all BS. Apple didn't remove anything - iPods have always supported non-DRM music as well as Apple's Fairplay DRM music just fine. Apple doesn't care what you load on there. What they did care about was Real hacking Fairplay to sell their own DRM versions using Apple's proprietary DRM. Apple fixed their DRM impl and it broke the Real's DRM. That is all that happened.

It is *so* uncommon today that it is actively confusing and hard to read. And I believe it has always been wrong when applied to any modern concept of data. Data in the modern context is a fluid quantity, like water. The other usage is archaic.

Reboot for Windows updates. Yay.

The best.

Why do you assume there is a problem? It sounds to me like their analysis shows that the drive units are performing so well that they can offer a less conservative warranty now. The impact that Musk mentions is about increasing the cash they need to have on hand to cover warranties for something unexpected. None of this implies that there is a problem...

BTW, this is the second time that Tesla has increased the warranty coverage on the vehicles after they've been sold - When was the last time you heard of an auto company doing that?

We might live in a much different world today if Microsoft had not *deliberately* set out to kill Java in the browser in the mid 90s. MS saw Java and Netscape as a threat to their business model so they licensed the technology from Sun, put it in their browsers and then made sure that it would remain slightly broken and never be updated. Everyone in the industry saw this coming and at the time Sun talked about how great their lawyers were and how they had compatibility clauses in the contract, etc.... Microsoft's lawyers were better apparently.

Microsoft left a slightly broken and very early 1.x release of Java in their browsers for years and years. The motivation was clear in court documents during the antitrust litigation with quotes from people inside Microsoft saying things like: we have to ''pollute'' Java in the browser to keep it from being truly cross platform.

Imagine what the world would be like today if, instead of edging ever closer to a full fledged programming model in the browsers based on JavaScript (which was created to be glue to put Java into HTML, not to be a programming language) - if instead we had 20 years of browsers with native Java VMs, written in and extensible by Java... There is no doubt we would have had the kind of applications we take for granted today (AJAXy things like gmail and maps) 15 years ago... and a generation of developers would not have grown up with this mess that we left them in HTML and JS.

- Pat Niemeyer (Author of Learning Java, O'Reilly & Associates)

1) Your analysis accounts for losses in transmitting the electricity but does not account for getting the gasoline to the consumer. Gasoline is heavy and in the final leg is distributed in trucks that burn a lot of fuel.

2) Your guess at 80% efficiency of the charging devices is low. Tesla claims 90%+ depending on the voltage and Tesla charging stations can charge the cars with DC at 120kW with presumably much lower losses. (If they were losing 20% of that to heat they'd all be on fire :) )

The only reason that I can come up with for this focus on fuel cells is that Toyota and the other existing car manufacturers want to see a hydrogen distribution system put in place so that they can continue producing internal combustion engines using hydrogen instead of the fuel cells themselves. I think these car companies see their long term intellectual property investment as being in the internal combustion engines and drive train technology. My guess is that they fear the drive trains becoming commodity parts (how many ways are there to make an A/C electric motor) and then they are left simply styling auto bodies and being fashion statements...

I think that fear is unwarranted, as Tesla has shown just how differentiated an electric car can be and how much innovation there can be in the car cabin and features themselves... But history has shown that old companies cannot always change even when they recognize that a disruption is coming. And oh boy is one coming...

Tesla = iPhone
Gas cars = Blackberry at best

If we assume that the driver wasn't deliberately trying to wreck the car then technically that battery is still under warranty... even though it's been stolen, cut in half and set on fire. That's how good the Tesla battery warranty is.

I don't understand why Toyota would pursue this technology when we have batteries that are competitive with it currently and they get better every day... and battery technology is just manifestly better in that we already have electricity distributed to every location on earth... Why build a completely new, energy inefficient, liquid transportation industry just to add a middle-man to electricity distribution and make life less convenient for the the drivers?

It just seems to me like an attempt to keep hydrocarbon fuels relevant... or perhaps to see hydrogen deployed so that Toyota can keep their ICE engines relevant... It just doesn't make sense otherwise.

Yes, I'm sure there are special applications one could point to where hydrogen may make sense in some niche under some circumstances... but... for general automobile usage? I just don't get it...

Tesla has demonstrated that they can swap the battery on the Model S in 90 seconds... It weighs 1000 lbs. But they have also said that they will eventually get the charging time on their superchargers down from (currently about 20 min for half charge) to 5-10 minutes... If they can do that then not sure why anyone would care about swapping batteries...

There is a misconception among people who have not used electric vehicles that you need to go somewhere to charge your vehicle, like one would with a gas station. Imagine that you had a gas station at your house and somebody topped off the car for you every morning - how often would you stop for gas? probably never...

Your thinking about the engine noise will totally change after you drive an electric bike that is faster and better performing than any gas bike could ever be... You'll pull up next to someone with an old fashioned gas bike roaring and making noise and fumes and you'll just effortlessly smoke them while they are roaring and straining to keep up with you.... and you'll start to think of the noise not as power but as "poser"... like a fake strong man groaning to lift a tiny weight or a rock guitar player making that strained face as if it it takes physical effort to play. It will happen to you...