all very deliberate abuses of the battery, not simply failing to plug it in or driving it until it dies.

A lawyer would have a field day with Elon Musk's statement. But I'm not a lawyer, and probably you aren't either. If so, we should just wait for real scenarios to unfold. What happened to the Roadster can be written off as ancient history. Will the new Tesla support their customers? Let's hope that it will.

Do you have sources on the Volt?

There are many news articles on the subject; some blame Volt in some cases, and some show that Volt was not a cause in other cases. I cannot say that Volt is responsible for all the ills of the humanity, but chances are that one or two fires are caused by it. We know that its battery self-ignited after testing (that had been fixed.) We know that Karma self-ignited, for one reason or another (don't know and can't debate the exact cause.)

I do not separate plug-in hybrids from EVs because from the electric powertrain point of view they are the same. Volt goes pretty far in that aspect - it is entirely electric driven, and its gas engine is only used to charge batteries and to provide additional current at speeds above 70 mph (IIRC.) It's a complicated vehicle.

Yes, both links about Tesla are about the same incident - the reporter was testing if a Tesla Model S is capable of a road trip. Winter played a trick on him; if only the car hasn't lost half of the charge overnight everything would be fine; if the reporter would have charged the car fully (and not, per Tesla's advice, as much as he needed, mile-wise) then he would be also fine. There are far more links about this incident than these two, and the mudslinging was going strong at some point between Tesla and NYT.

With regard to water, there are several unique dangers of an EV that do not exist in a gas car. As matter of fact, a gas car becomes entirely inert in water, even if it was burning just a moment before hitting the water. An EV presents the following additional dangers:

1) The high voltage can leak onto elements of the chassis via water bridges and electrocute occupants. It is hard to predict what parts of the car will become conductive first and second and third. This determines what gets energized. Firemen are slowly getting trained on dealing with "live" EVs.

2) The DC potential that is present in the car will cause the water to conduct current; this will separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen. This is an explosive mixture of gases.

3) Overloading of the battery due to high and uncontrolled discharge through water will cause Li-Ion elements of the battery to overheat and self-ignite. Lithium burns in water just fine.

There is only one advantage that an EV has over a gas car in water: the leaking fuel will not pollute the river.

The problem is that in practice you usually can't get a full definition of what a major project is supposed to do until after you've implemented it. It's simply too large, and there's too many things nobody thought of until they tripped over them during implementation. And worse, the longer you spend analyzing the problem to figure all those things out before-hand the more changes have to be made to the requirements because the problem you need to solve is evolving and changing over time. Your process is nice in theory, it merely fails to acknowledge reality.

Agile often goes too far the other way, though. Sometimes things are changing too fast to keep up at all, which is usually a sign that you need to be in R&D phase rather than trying to design and implement a production system. And there's usually a minimum amount of the system that has to be present for the system to function sensibly at all, trying to release anything before you've got to that point is an exercise in futility.

Steam bundles for older games.Nickel and dimeing downloadable content. Screw the customer copy protection schemes. Games released in a beta state. Rehased titles as new games. Very small scope games designed for sale of additional versions. The sheer amount of bullshit in game advertising. All of these have added up to the unpopularity of buying new games. Plus added competition from free to play MMO's like LOTRO which can suck up a huge amount of available gaming time.

Our most obnoxious neighbors were the ones who were worried about their property values. They were constantly siccing the city on all the neighbors, complaining about our yards not being mowed often enough, and not being neat enough, and our cars being too old and dirty. They would have prevented us from doing car repair in our own driveways if they could. Fortunately, this neighborhood was built before HOAs became popular.

They thought car maintenance marked us as low class losers, and they behaved accordingly. Here's some prententious yuppie, who never troubled to learn anything about the neighbors, sneering at us for being poor, when all along we had more money than he did. Our cars were fully paid for. He just couldn't see past the age of our cars. Seems to have never occurred to him that other people might have other priorities in life than keeping up with the Joneses' new car.

Perhaps Tesla is starting to learn what PR is about. However Elon Musk's response to the last road test was defensive and rude. Elon Musk may be a genius and a useful slave driver when it concerns production, but in PR he is an idiot who cannot be allowed to speak publicly. Many excellent engineers have the same trait. The later analysis done by others is more cool-headed.

Regardless of all that, the exit clause of "deliberate abuse" of the battery is pretty open-ended. Who determines if the battery was abused? I should actually rephrase: who is the only person|company on the planet that can come to such conclusion? In other words, I do not trust Tesla because for all their company history they attacked the messenger and stuck him with a bill. To compare, a Prius's NiMH battery is unconditionally, short of a crash, warrantied for 10 years. Very few batteries ever went bad, and in each case the batteries were replaced by Toyota under warranty. I have reason to trust Toyota in this aspect because they do what they promise.

It's interesting to note that concerns about longevity of Prius's battery were also voiced on the Internet, just as they are now voiced about EVs. There was only one process that alleviated those concerns, and that was personal experience of millions of car owners. For example, without those owners we would have never learned that the heat in Arizona significantly hurts Leaf's performance. Per Nissan, it would be all peachy.

Seriously? You recommend this much overkill?

Well, of course that's not feasible. But an EV in the garage, plugged into 240V, 100A circuit is a dangerous thing. There were several fires caused by a plugged Volt (and more that were not caused by a Volt that was in the same garage.) There was even fire in a parking lot, with Karma. Batteries are dangerous things; one of my friends charged batteries for radios, and he had to do it in an enclosure that protected everyone from explosion if it were to happen. Boeing got hit with battery fire, as were several notebook manufacturers. Gasoline fire, on the other hand, is rare, unless the car is destroyed in a wreck - then all bets are off. Gasoline will not self-ignite; but a battery can; a plugged charger that is capable of 100A charge current is just one p-n junction away from a spectacular failure; and there are many of those junctions in a charger, and they all were made by the lowest bidder somewhere between Taiwan and Philippines.

checking to see that the car is still charging once a month would be more than sufficient.

I'm not so sure. If the power fails one week after the caretaker checks it, the battery in a Roadster will be a brick by the next visit. As you say, Tesla may have fixed this, I don't know, but that's what killed those Roadsters. Tesla is adamant that their EVs must be always plugged in, hell or high water. (BTW, how do all these EVs react to being submerged? If a car falls into a river, what happens? A gas car just stalls.)

Actually that was before that time. The days of company scrip were the first days when companies considered workers an interchangeable commodity to be used up and replaced. Then government regulation came in and forced companies to treat workers decently and provide certain benefits. That forced companies to change, because the best way to recover the cost of investing in an employee became to keep that employee for a long time. Give them time to learn, become more productive, contribute value that came only with accumulated experience. Like the shift foreman who knows all the tricks because he's worked all the jobs, who can bring new workers up to speed in half the time and whose shift is half again as productive because he knows what to do to stop problems from happening in the first place. Or the general manager who's been with the company for 30 years, knows every department inside and out, can spot problems starting and head them off while they're still minor.

But then along came the MBAs, whose religion is that companies exist only to make money, not to operate a business. And now we're heading back to the bad old days. The only problem for the MBAs is that the first time around the jobs were manufacturing and the cost of going off on your own was high. Now the jobs are information and services, you don't need a large physical plant, you don't need a large number of employees, and you mostly don't even need to be physically present. Or they're jobs where the MBAs can't get a foothold. Think your local mechanic or plumber.

If my employer considers it important enough to have production problems addressed on the weekend, then they'll prepare for it. They'll hire enough people to have staff to cover things on weekends. They'll assign an on-call rotation. They'll provide the beeper or cel phone to contact the on-call people (since the device goes with the role it can be passed from one person to the next). And they'll provide compensation for working that time (either as part of salary negotiated at hire or as additional compensation for additional work beyond what was agreed upon at hire). If they don't consider it important enough... well, it's their business, it's not my place as their employee to dictate to them how they should run it.

Private corporations are concerned with immediate success. They need to show something in their next quarter report or their stocks will fall. Things like investment in future endeavors is rare, and only risked if there's a chance to gain some sort of perpetual patent. But why bother with high investments in basic research when it's far more profitable to whip up some trivial patent of something even a dumb fuck in middle management could come up with?

No, basic research, the research that actually does lead to groundbreaking results and exciting new technology is NEVER conducted by companies. Never. Remember the laser? You know, the thing that drives your DVD and BluRay drives? Think that was what the idea of Einstein when he whipped up the theoretic basis for it in 1917? Hell, even current patent laws don't allow you to milk it for a century. And no, this is NOT the suggestion that we should extend patents beyond the insanity copyright has already reached. But I ramble.

A lot, and I really mean a LOT, of theoretic and practical research was necessary, from great minds like Ladenburg, Kastler, Basov and Maiman, and still it took the last one 'til the 1960s to produce a working laser, more than four decades after the theoretic foundation.

You think any company on this planet would think in terms like this?

You think any investor would invest in something that could take half a century to produce results you can market?

Hell, it took 'til the 1980s to produce consumer grade lasers. And 'til the 1990s and even 2000s to make them cheap. Today, though, they're everywhere, from consumer electronics to cutting edge science, from micrometer distance measuring to touch-less cutting. And of course playing DVDs and BluRays.

Think we'd have any of those things if we left innovation to the market?

So you're that Nigerian prince who keeps sending me investment opportunities?

Yes but... look Malvinas!

Tesla warranties their batteries for 8 years/125k miles.

That's about the break even point for a $30K car (Model X?) But even then the warranty is good only if you don't need it. If the battery becomes bricked because you, the owner, made an unforgivable mistake of not religiously charging your vehicle every night (say, the power is down in the whole region after a hurricane,) Tesla will not honor this warranty. Per Jalopnik:

As I said before, sometimes you are not in precise control of your future. People get sick and become hospitalized; they get delayed in another city for urgent work; they cannot return because of a storm; the car is plugged in but the GFCI breaker disconnected it, and there is nobody in the house to notice. There are all kinds of reasons why care and feeding of your expensive car may be not the top priority of a responsible human being. Tesla's cars cannot survive this very common situation. In essence, if you buy a Tesla car then you also need to hire a chauffeur, so that he will be always on duty. Anything else is like playing with fire - as if we don't have enough excitement already. Tesla cars are just not trustworthy yet. They are cool when they work, but you must always be prepared to learn that they don't. We don't have that with standard cars; and short of pitching it over the guardrail into a ravine, a standard car will not hit you with a $32K bill.

the engine power necessary to maintain a given speed to goes up exponentially as your speed increases due to wind resistance.

The road noise also increases with speed. The noise of the engine is linked to RPM, but not to the output power. It doesn't take too much power to propel the car at constant high speed either. As you can see, the formula is not that obvious.

Testify.

it sounds like it is easy to uninstall the Facebook from the First and make it a stock Android phone

Why would one buy a FB phone just to start hacking it? If you want a stock Android phone, there is no shortage of those; perhaps even a stock phone can be had at a better price because stock phones cannot claim some unique feature in them. The HTC First is special, and it can command a premium price. This is orthogonal to how many people want it.

If words of pretty smart people are insufficient, here is a formal mathematical proof.

If a person has a gun on him, the probability of that gun discharging is non-zero (regardless of how small it is.) If a person has no gun on him, the probability of that gun firing is zero. Therefore, it is infinitely more likely that if you carry a gun it will fire at some point.

One could argue that in some cases shooting a gun is beneficial. It may be so in the USA, where some semblance of self-defense still remains in the law - though that may be not very obvious to George Zimmerman. However there are several "more enlightened" societies, such as Australia and UK, where this right is essentially nullified. You would be better off being robbed and beaten by the robber - he won't rob you of your freedom. The government will do that.

Plusnet concern me because they have abolished all their IPv6 trials and rolled out CGNAT instead. Its certainly looking like they have no plans to roll out IPv6 at all.