Their "classic" offering is a solid tool. I was unimpressed with one of their early cordless models. I'd buy them again if I were replacing my "classic."

This might be the most consumer-friendly-name company providing a device, and being able to buy one at Home Depot means it's likely returnable at Home Depot -- at least once it makes it from the website to the stores.

The price point is almost meaningless, since to most, every other company is going to seem like a nerd toy, while Dremel(tm)(r)(c)(sm) Brand Tools sounds like something trustworthy.

Because CocaCola doesn't provide their vending machines. An small army of vending machine companies servicing every city in America service vending machines, and put in bill readers and credit-card readers if it makes sense for them to do so.

Most new credit card readers for vending machines already take NFC.

Unless Apple is going to partner with CocaCola and send every one of these mom-and-pop vending machine companies a pile of readers and then pay them to go swap them all out, don't expect change there soon.

We silly Android people can "Send to" all we want.

It's still vastly easier under in the right situations to just tap two phones together to share a complex URL or map location. Beats "highlight," "select all, "copy" start IM or email, "Pardon me sir, what's your email address? Can you spell that?..."

Bumping to exchange CONTACT INFO precludes private sharing.

You almost answered your own question. Keying behavior on NFC tags is the big one. Triggering a sequence of events based on an NFC tag is pretty common. Oh? I'm in the cup-holder in the car? Turn off WiFi, turn on BT, start playing Pandora. I'm on my desk? Turn on WiFi, turn off BT, dim the screen, and start syncing my backups.

My extended family all has NFC-enabled Android devices. Bump phones to quickly exchange a contact or photo or long URL? Done.

Beyond that, it's mostly dorking around reading other NFC tags out of curiosity :)

For a level 2 charger, you'd already need to have spent $500-$1000+ on a home kit (and possibly installation, and/or a new 220 outlet), and the grandparent could have charged his Volt in two hours tops, giving him ample opportunity to charge during any window he'd like. Unless you've bought the absolute bottom-end of the home chargers, delayed/timed charging is generally an option on residential level-2 chargers. The only way to not charge timed on a level 2 charger is to buy the absolute cheapest ones on the market and put no forethought into your install.

That said, almost all electric car owners just use 110 and charge overnight, with the "dumb" charger the car manufacturer provided.

There are plenty of 15A fish tank timers that are suitable for togging the provided charger.

BBC:

EBay has been compromised so that people who clicked on some of its links were automatically diverted to a site

Are you fucking kidding me, the BBC 'journalist' is a moron, links take people to other pages, what the fuck did you think they do mr "Leo Kelion Technology desk editor"?

Clearly something is afoul, yes?

If they can get malicious links and viruses, they can hit the web.

If they can't hit the web, and they only get port-25 email, and they can only open the attachments they're sent -- why not just give them a mail client that drops the attachments?

I suspect the last republican alive in 1860 died by the mid 1900's, yes.

That's because you're a curmudgeon. :)

Obviously the people we work with can be distractions, but there's value in being in proximity with the team you work with at least some of the time even if that time is spent just building a sense of being a team.

I have the ability to WFH about 1 day a week now, and previously could do about 2. But I'm not sure even I'd want to do 5 if it were offered. My wife, who does sales, works out of our home (another reason not to be there, amirite!), but even she treks into the corporate office to get face-to-face with her team and visits clients face-to-face after initial video conferences.

Again with this "blow past tiers" nonsense.

Software on the car or not, a fish-tank timer is rated high enough and can turn your plug on at midnight when your cheaper rate kicks in.

Why would you "blow through" usage limits?

Your numbers are nuts.

If you drive an electric car a thousand miles a month (remember, it has a short leash - if you drive much more, you're depending on public chargers at your destinations to supplement your range), you're still only using 256 kWh, since the Leaf and the BMW both get about 3.9 miles to the kWh. With the minimal charging inefficiencies not withstanding, that means you've got $38.90 in extra power each month for a thousand miles of electric driving at the CA average of 15.2c/kWh. [Aside, with the national average cost of gasoline at about $3.60/gal -- more in CA -- you should be getting about about "100eMPG" in converting cents on the electric meter to cents on the pump.]

Your Volt looks like it has a 16.5kWh battery. It should cost you $2.50 a day (on average) to charge --- especially since anyone with a fish-tank timer on their charging plug can get 11 cents/kWh charging from midnight to 9am.

Of course you CAN pay more, but why? Your corner case with overages and daytime rates are atypical.

If your monthly power bill doesn't have room to some artificial cap for $1.29 a day in electricity, then you might want to consider unplugging your toaster.

Well I thought that was insightful, I see some complete cocksucker modded you down.

What promise? No-one promised me anything.

Technology in it's infancy fails to wipe the floor with technologies that have had literally $Trillions of investment. Not really surprising.

Less is more than more. Less is better than more.