Probably because they're the only car maker that is fully committed, and doesn't have any other competing product lines. It is in their best interest to make the most desirable EVs they possibly can, and to do anything less would be bad for their business.

What's weird with the Leaf is that while it definitely looks like an underpowered subcompact, its physically a good 30% larger than one. (Or at least that's been my impression, seeing a lot of them on the highway.)

I did some programming in DOS, never even came close to that limit. That's why I'm curious. Look up how much working memory the NES had some time, Duck Hunt clones wouldn't even need buffers for scrolling!

The movie didn't show us the alloy under a microscope.

I once programmed an arduino to move my mouse cursor in the shape of a square to keep my workstation from auto-locking per company policy. There's a slider control on the Arduino board that I have that I used more-or-less as an on-off switch. For fun I'd hook it up to my supervisor's machine just to hear him try to explain it to somebody.

What was so hard about making a Duck Hunt clone fit in that memory footprint?

'Common sense' and 'studies' are not interchangeable.

You're witnessing the failure of that philosophy.

How many models of Android phone do you think are available right now?

Yeah, you can go buy any other device that only has slightly less bloatware.

And should I also put the bigger screen, full size keyboard and mouse in my bag and carry it with me every time I visit a client on-site?

Taking a portable computer with a big screen with me is better than taking a portable computer with a small screen with me, for exactly the same reasons that having a big screen (or more than one) on my desktop is better than having a small screen on my desktop. Yes, it's balanced out modestly by weight and power issues, but carrying a bag that weighs an extra pound from the train/car to the client's office/facility is hardly a burden for any reasonably fit adult.

Sorry I didn't catch the joke, it was covered in the blood of a technician.

That'd be funnier if those stories weren't mainly about how the laws weren't really working.

Yes a Colony on Venus would have water and sunlight but they would still be at the bottom of a gravity well(same for Mars). It would make more sense to establish a colony in space where you could find water and minerals in asteroids. Supply ships would not need to overcome gravity and return flights could take back precious minerals that would help fund the expense.

I don't need to install an alternative shell. I've got one that works just fine out of the box. It's called the Windows 7 UI.

FWIW, it's not the start menu I'm bothered about. Since Win7 I hardly use it anyway, I just have my regular applications set out in the task bar and use jump lists probably 90% of the time I load one. This gets me to anything from a spreadsheet I worked with recently to a shell on a remote server I use regularly with two clicks and is one of the cleanest UI set-ups I've ever seen in an OS GUI.

The thing that annoys me about the Win8+ GUIs is how dumbed down and in-your-face they are. Huge areas of bright colours (yay for eye strain), boxy styles where you never quite know what you can click (sorry, tap) until you try, clumsy icons that don't really tell you anything anyway, and everything all spaced out so fat-fingered people with tablets don't accidentally reformat their disk instead of sending an e-mail. For someone using a keyboard and mouse with good screen(s), all of this is moving backwards. If I wanted dumb UIs for simple stuff, I'd buy an iPad and use web apps instead of desktop applications.

I do realise that some of this related primarily to what was then called the Metro UI in Win8 and some changes have been made since then. But from what I can see so far with Win10, it looks like they're pushing the overall UI theme even more in that direction, even if the default method of interaction looks more like a traditional desktop again.