Except their supercharger roadmap shows a lot more than the 100 stations you criticize (admittedly some of those are in Canada), your post ignores the enormous solar panels on top of supercharger stations (they're using grid storage, IIRC) to defray electrical costs (Musk claims they'll produce more than they consume, although that likely depends on how many cars/batteries they charge each day), and you don't actual demonstrate how they'll require subsidies to do this.

They've stated the battery swapping stations are half a million each at the moment, and that fully equipping their planned supercharger network would cost $50-100 million. Tesla's got a rapidly rising revenue currently over half a billion dollars per year. They don't need subsidies to make a $50-100 million investment at this point.

I don't understand. I'm not a parser, but to my eye that means "assign." If you wanted to compare, you would do "if ($foo == 1 + $bar)", no?

Right, so now instead of having to carry gasoline in your car, you've got to carry around liquid nitrogen to keep your wiring superconductive, and instead of just stopping when it runs out of liquid like a gas car, now when you run out of liquid, your car will explode into a giant fireball because of the sudden introduction of massive electrical resistance. Brilliant!

http://montrealgasprices.com/ says current average here today is 137.290, which is $4.964 USD per gallon. So 15 gallons goes for $74.46 USD...

A bigger issue is that the range of the most expensive Model S is more similar to 10 gallons of gasoline than 15.

Idiots might park in the supercharger bays, but the battery swapping bays have rails to guide the tires in, so you'd have to be extra stupid to park your car over a big pit in the ground with your tires sitting on top of guide rails for the wrong sized wheel base.

It's clear that the battery pack is suspended from the undercarriage rather than being the undercarriage itself. In close-up videos of the swap, they lift the entire car up (if not off the ground, at least to take most of the load off the suspension) before doing the swap, because in the video, the whole car rises up and there's a lot of space in the wheel-wells during the procedure.

Why would you ever do 110 volts? US homes are hooked up at 240v (before splitting), and that's what Tesla's home chargers do.

The supercharger stations are 440v, since that's the industrial voltage provided by the utility in the US

As far as I know, they don't store any energy at the Tesla stations. They're using the electrical grid as their storage. The Tesla station solar panels dump power into the grid when nobody is charging, and pull from the grid when they are.

Assume you start at home, and are driving far enough to require multiple swaps. Your original battery will be removed at the first swap, the Tesla station closest to your home. After that, you're swapping around borrowed batteries, and don't have to care where you return those. As long as you stop at that one Tesla station on the way home that has your original battery, you're fine.

Is it? One megawatt is about 8x the current wattage. It's DC, so the cross-sectional area is what matters for resistance (the area of the circle needs to increase by 8x, not the diameter), so to get one eighth the resistance and push 1MW, you need a cable that is about 2.8x the diameter.

This also ignores the possibility of active cooling in the wire. With that, you could use a thinner wire.

That's how it works these days. I've been uncomfortable with it ever since I was on a bus in early 2001 (pre-9/11) in the Phoenix area and the Border Patrol or INS or whatever it was came through the bus asking if each of us was born in the United States. I briefly contemplated requesting a warrant and exercising my right to remain silent, but decided it would end badly.

The difficulty is going to be finding a plaintiff who can make a significant enough case to actually get it into court and take it to high enough levels without setting a bad precedent.

It's what I assumed. The Panny UI is sluggish where the Sony UI is speedy.

I found this really surprising considering how my Panny E80 DVD recorder always worked flawlessly and still works. Of course I don't use it much but I occasionally find something worthwhile SD to transfer to disc, thankfully the Tivo HD still supports analog/SD downconvert!

The law and its corollaries would not apply to discussions covering known mainstays of Nazi Germany such as genocide, eugenics, or racial superiority, nor, more debatably, to a discussion of other totalitarian regimes or ideologies, if that was the explicit topic of conversation, since a Nazi comparison in those circumstances may be appropriate, in effect committing the fallacist's fallacy.

That said, you are 100% correct about 9/11 having nothing to do with giving up liberty for safety. That is and always has been a bad argument that far too many people have accepted at face value.

Yes, using Tor is going to attract attention. That's why we need as many people as possible to use Tor, to decrease the signal to noise ratio. If you have nothing to hide, you should be using Tor to help protect those who do.