And they make election equipment, to count votes. Sheeesh! ATMs I am less worried about because I get my money back when they screw up... If the theft amount gets too painful, the banks will look a better vendor. And switch to Linux...

sclero: A prefix added to the start of a word. Indicates that "hard" modifies the word. Created to expand meanings. Can be used with many words to form new words. http://myword.info/definition....

So it would be a bureaucracy, that thickened into a congealocracy, then hardened into a schlerocracy. i.e.: Functional as originally built, but inflexible now. Like my liver.

Thank Goodness Tesla is distracting Fox News. We Volt owners thought their nonsense barrage would never let up. At least Tesla has Musk to fire back pithy retorts.

"Solar gets cheaper and cheaper every year, regardless of government funding." I don't think regardless means what you think it means. ;)

The same way Velcro got cheaper regardless of government funding? Because Velcro always existed in mass on the market.

Or how vaccines get cheaper regardless of government funding? Everyone knows the smart money waits until you really really really need something before you pay a research lab to invent the thing you actually needed yesterday.>/p>

Thank goodness for those hippie scientists getting tax dollars, eventually becoming our very professional NREL, so that you (Joe Taxpayer) can install panels on your ranch style home for under $3/W today.

Please. Would you retrofit a car and test it? Air bags wouldn't keep the cabin from collapsing in on the driver, they would only keep the driver from bouncing around inside a cabin in some state of "intact". My Chevy Volt has 10 airbags, including knee airbags and ceiling rail bags that extends back into the rear seat. But they would be near useless in a decent crash without help from the huge pillars and crumple zones. Also, the 430 lbs of battery right between the wheels makes the car neigh unto untippable - and heavier where it counts than most other cars. Unfortunately for some. http://insideevs.com/video-owner-testimonial-shows-how-safe-chevy-volt-actually-is/ http://brightonhovehub.blogspot.com/2013/08/fatal-crash-occurs-in-brighton-twp-with.html

1959 Belair vs a 2009 Malibu in a modern IIHS crash test shows exactly, and in graphic detail, why modern crumple zones and air bags are WAY better than than having more raw weight and a steering column collapsing your chest cavity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xtxd27jlZ_g

Actually the Volt is more efficient on a KW/mile basis than the Model S. All things being equal. The Volt can easily get 5 miles per KWh, where you have to keep the Tesla under 40KW (ie: both cars driving slow and nice nice) to get to 4.3 miles/KWh. The problem is the Model S has much more load capacity, ie: much more performance headroom over the Volt. There is a reason why the Model S can do 0-60 in almost half the time of the more economy minded Volt. Just sayin'. :)

With regards to Hostess: The Union "burden" (of actually putting the promised amount into employee retirement accounts) was about 20% of the total company cashflow problem going into bankruptcy. So how exactly was that other 80% the Unions fault? The company was mismanaged, the union was raising red flags and so became the focus of management's ire. And then a Fox News' target. But still not the company's core problem.

Time to update your tropes, gentlemen. Point of fact: The government wanted GM to drop the Voltec program in exchange for bailout guarantees. But the GM executives fought for it precisely becuase it represented the long term future of the company. The government eventually caved and the Volt was allowed to reach production (since it had been in development for 2 years already). Calling it a bailout car is just, well, tropey.

Now that EVERY car manufacturer in the world has announced plans for electric models, some rather aggressively like VW, maybe it is possible that throwing out years of American investment would have been a loss to the country?

Thinking food... The Corvette was introduced in 1953, but it didn't turn a profit until 1958. The Volt is in it's 4th year and doing fine...
1979 was the peak for Corvette sales at 53,807, and have declined every year since.
The Volt just passed 53K units
The Volt did outsell the Corvette in 2012, and is doing even better in 2013... Volume with a profitable car, vs profit on few Halo cars?
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/06/volt-v-vette/ or http://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/

The car is all about efficiency. Only under certain, slim, circumstances can the gas engine divert some of it's mechanical output to the drive train through the ring gear.

1) car must be running on gas already becuase of:
A) battery is "empty" or
B) user selected to use gas, despite range still on the battery (ie: "hold" or "mountain" modes)
2) You must be cruising at high speed within a very limited range

Since the car is electric, it is basically ALWAYS running off the battery. When the gas engine kicks on to generate electricity it is clutched into the smaller of the two motors, the larger motor is connected to the ring gear to drive the car. SOMETIMES it is more efficient (in this special tiny window) to bypass the energy conversion (mechanical->electrical->mechanical) and use some of the mechancial energy directly. Note I said "some" as the car is still generating juice as well. Friggin genius that they can balance everything that way.

Just as in the Prius and other parallel hybrids, the high torque electric motors provide the short duration boost on acceleration so that the gas engine doesn't have to ramp up to provide it. But in the Volt's case, the gas engine isn't MADE to be able to pull the car entirely by itself anyway, so if you floor it the gas engine just disconnects and goes back to generation duties. The car goes to native 100% electric propulsion and just zooms away without you ever knowing all the machinations going on under the hood.

I got my Volt in Dec '12, a model year 2013, and I friggin love the car. Basically, if you haven't even driven one... why are you talking like you have any experience? How can the company making the best selling EV on planet not be relevant?

The volt is a GREAT car. The amount of engineering they put into it boggles the mind. Take the NFC brake rotors that don't rust. They bake steel rotors in an oven the size of a bus, with all the air evacuated and replaced with Nitrogen at about 500 degress for a 24hr period. Why does that matter you ask? Because with the industry-leading regenerative braking efficiency my first brake pad replacement should be around 100K miles.

Also, you can see the Thermally Managed battery pack evolve in the new Spark EV, and the Cadillac ELR, the first of many more EV models coming out. Nissan thought they could get by with the Leaf but has had to replace entire car packs in extreme climates like AZ. GM did it right and warranty their packs for 8 yrs/100K miles. Longer than most transmissions! Solid engineering - the reliability stats on the Volt are off the charts. Volts have racked up nearly 200 MILLION miles, the experimental phase is over.

The Volt has all the advantages of a battery car: quick, responsive, quiet, cheap - 25% the cost to run, no stupid serpintine belts, super low maintenance..
And it fixes the BIG drawback to EVs... range anxiety. I drive it from Dallas to Amarillo multiple times a year, did Austin in the summer.
Also, EVs benefit from modern design and are SUPER safe compared to almost all gas cars. 10 airbags (including knee airbags) in the Volt.

While I go all electric as often as I can, I still do buy 8 gallons of gas about every 6 weeks due to my new job commute. Before that I worked closer to home and I went almost 3 months without burning ANY gas at all! Still on track to save $1,200 year in fuel costs (I have avoided 420 gallons of fuel in only 9 months).

Are great products relevant? Poor advertising is one thing, but sales are ramping up year-on-year so I'm not worried. Go drive one for a day, spend hours on the internet reading up on the tech, then maybe you'll have a better perspective on relevancy.

Did you know the averaged amount of energy (US) for the cleanest type of oil to be drilled, transported, refined, distributed and pumped is 6.6KWH per gallon? For Canadian tar-sands, which is near the dirtiest type of oil we can use, is it closer to 13.3KWH per gallon produced? So when you burn a gallon of gasoline, and go ~30 miles on it, remember you have both your car's direct emissions AND all the emissions used to generate the electricity needed to get it into your tank. So basically your car is twice as smoggy as you knew. Or... you could just put that same electricity into a EV, drive ~60 miles with no added emissions, and leave the oil in the ground. An EV uses a form of energy but an ICE car burns a finite resource. We can do better, why are we even arguing about the need to?

"including the ability to directly cut and paste document items directly into emails and have it fully handled and look and behave perfectly".

Sorry, but I can't stop laughing at this to post long enough to post a real reply. Let's just say that hasn't been my experience. Especially when you remeber microsoft's definition of cross platform is it works on both Vista AND win7. Maybe if 100% of all servers, clients and OS were all the same versions? I guess that rules out macs, iphones, androids, etc. PLEASE. The larger the enterprise the worse the fragmentation gets.

In my situation I used visio diagrammes in jpg with a client side image map. This did multiple things simultaneously: grouping and hierarchy. Geolocation and service clusters. Plus the CFIO could even drill down for her research! All the while retaining the full text search, etc., that the wiki provides. Good luck!