abhimishra

IMO the sign-off culture would be a problem at MS with or without triads. When you have such a large middle-layer (especially ones with ranks like 'partner' who seem to mostly be faking it) there are going to be loads of people whose chief role is to be a gatekeeper who needs to 'sign-off' on something. There are going to be layers of management who want to perform that filtering and relaying you mention, even though it does nothing for the company. And until some kind of purging happens, that won't change.

And of course, we can expect that Ballmer will still be around...

Oh I definitely can agree with the notion of renting a car for the edge case. Others have also suggested that families could have two cars, one electric for daily use and the other gasoline-powered for road trips or tasks that require more utility perhaps.

But my point simply was that purely electric technologies cannot satisfy all needs (yet?) and that the range capabilities of electric vehicles is not on part with fossil-fuel vehicles (which is what was seemingly claimed by the parent post). And yes, this might mean that fossil-fuel vehicles don't disappear entirely, but simply play a smaller role in our future society.

I'm glad you are skilled at being snarky and rude, but it has no place here on Hacker News (or really anywhere).

Now onto your post: Writing off something as DOA because of current technologies is not a good argument at all. People made similar arguments about electric cars just a few years back (as shown in 'Who Killed the Electric Car'). A long time ago, no one ever thought computing would be cheap enough to be inside consumers' homes. There is always the possibility of a break-through technology, of a reduction in cost, increase in efficiency, etc.

The quote above cherry-picks some statements in 2008 regarding GM and Toyota's views at the time on fuel-cell vehicles. However, there is a long list of companies who have publicly talked about their investment (and upcoming production vehicles as well) in the fuel-cell space just this year (2012!). A quick search through fuel-cell news this year brought up the following: Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz aka Daimler, Audi aka VW, Toyota, GM, BMW. There are probably others as well, but that already covers the vast majority of vehicle manufacturers.

Secretary of Energy and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu reversed his view on fuel-cell cars and noted recently (mentioned towards the end of your quoted text as well) that there may be a higher feasibility for fuel-cell-based vehicles now.

There is ample proof that fuel-cells deserve more attention and research before closing the discussion. It is worth investigating this space if only to have alternatives - electric vehicles have some issues (range, cold weather performance, environmental impact of producing batteries) that perhaps other technologies could address.

> Hydrogen vehicles are just plain stupid from an efficiency stand point - where are you going to get the hydrogen exactly? Purifying it is too expensive - and since it's lighter than air - there is no economical source of hydrogen on earth. It'd be cheaper to fuel your car with coal.

No, it is expensive _today_. Which is different from saying it would be expensive at scale.

How does the Model S solve the longer trips issue? On a road-trip I might drive 500 miles in a day. The priciest Model S gets 300 miles at 55 miles an hour. And with climate control on that is likely to be less in reality. If this trip were in cold weather (ski trips and such) the range would be SIGNIFICANTLY less.

As a comparison, my gasoline-hybrid can squeeze out over 500 miles on a tank at 55 miles an hour. And I never worry about being 'stranded' as I might with a fully-electric car.

Another issue I have with battery-based solutions is the potential lifespan of the batteries - they are warrantied only for 8-years. A new pack costs ~30k (pulled this unofficial figure from discussions in the Tesla forums).

What about for IDE features that are 'non-intrusive'. A lot of the editor features Visual Studio (+ Resharper) or IntelliJ provide don't get 'in my way'. To be honest I can't think of many ways in which tools get in my way to be honest, except perhaps initially having to define a 'project' that the IDE understands (versus just files on disk).

I don't agree that it stops the language from advancing. What is your definition of advancement here, exactly? Lots of successful, productive languages pay attention to tooling as well. I see it as just weighing the costs and benefits of various trade-offs.

I always used Java with Eclipse or IntelliJ personally. But in the Microsoft world it is not uncommon for coders to use tools that are very 'plain text' and 'ungraphical' like WinDbg even with languages like C#, alongside other tools like Visual Studio.

Out of curiosity, why don't you like the idea of language developers spending time on tools?

I am not sure that carbon taxes NEED to be regressive - we could definitely use some of the revenue from carbon taxes to offset lower-income groups, as is sometimes done with other regressive taxes.

Another way to look at this is a simple cost-benefit analysis: is the cost (I mean more just than the monetary face value) of having a regressive tax more than the cost of potential issues that result from not addressing emissions? If so, we should do it anyways.