Not in Tennessee either. We have a rich history of insane alcohol laws and political opposition. For example, a former Speaker of the House, Ned Ray McWherter, who owned a beer distributorship at the time, cleverly crafted the tax schedules for keg beer to exclude, for example, Guinness, which came in an odd-sized keg compared to the domestics which McWherter's distributorship sold. No tax schedule for that size meant that it was not legal to sell here. IIRC it was about a decade after his tenure before the tax schedules were amended to allow for other sizes of kegs.

Even today a liquor license is required to sell beer > 6% ABV. This, of course, applies to wine as well. This means that we get nothing but the low gravity beers in our grocery stores and no wine at all. And the prices at the liquor stores for high gravity beer (what little you can find) and wine are much higher as a result than, for example, in Georgia. Grocery chains like Trader Joe's and Publix are just now making inroads into our great state, largely because of the lunacy of restricted alcohol sales.

Really?

This is the kind of inartfully worded rhetoric that continues to fuel the distrust of nuclear power.

Unless you consider the cost of flying his dog back from Hawaii for a photo op a couple of days ago. That cost we US taxpayers plenty.

The fix is to not install spyware on the phones in the first place. How hard is this to understand?

In regards to the Nissan LEAF, the base price is just over $35,000. There are tax incentives that bring this figure down somewhat ($7,500 federal, plus possibly state and local tax breaks - yet more government subsidies), but add back the $2,000 home charger and you're back into the $30K range for a compact car (typically a ~$20K segment) that would only seat 5 smaller individuals comfortably for short distances. In this regard, the very limited range of the car is a blessing.

And I just love how the technological limitations of EVs have been magically transformed into a new psychological condition known as "range anxiety". Sub 100 mile range, reduced range in intemperate conditions, reduced range at night, severely reduced flexibility with route planning, virtually no supporting infrastructure for not-at-home charging, long recharge times, and a 50% initial price premium do not a neurosis make.

I'm glad that the LEAF works for you. It just doesn't work for enough of us from a variety of angles to draw the kind of investment that it would take to overcome many of these issues. There's approximately $1T in petroleum refueling infrastructure in the US alone. That's a lot of J1772 and JARI/CHAdeMO charging station investment (money that could go to improving battery/fuel cell R&D instead of feeding a handful of 1st gen plug EVs), not to mention the upgrade to an aging, outdated electrical grid to support the additional load. Even then, patience and significant planning will be necessary within the limits of current battery and charging technology.

Please don't take this wrong. I'd really love to have an EV (Fisker Karma - drool, drool). The instantaneous torque, reduced fuel costs, potentially reduced negative environmental impact, and various other advantages of an advanced EV would be exciting. But, for me, it's got to have at worst a 300 mile range and at most a 15 minute recharge available nearly anywhere I travel to have a broad enough appeal to justify the additional investment that will make a battery-based EV viable. The EV price premium has to be significantly cut as well. Nothing on the horizon that I've seen comes close to this.

Simple answer: the government, any government, is addicted to money - our money.

In math terms:
Money = spending. Spending = votes. Votes=reelection. Reelection=power.

I just read posts from three digit /. IDs. Lights the ol' wayback machine for me every time!

It's not an issue of data in flight. It's a matter of data at rest on the smart phone itself. BlackBerries have strong encryption that covers everything stored on the phone itself, including the removable media. No other smart phone comes close. It's FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) 140-2 blessed, which is good enough for sensitive but unclassified information storage by US Federal government users. It meets several other governments' requirements as well.

FIPS 140-2 certification is the only reason I'm still on a BlackBerry. iPhone 4 has crypto hardware onboard, but doesn't seem to use it for much of anything. No Android phone has crypto hardware AFAIK and there's nothing until Gingerbread in the Android specs that even comes close to what the BlackBerry has in terms of locally encrypted storage.