Mr. Leonard, your column is one of my favorites in terms of content, but could you please try two things:

1. Stop referring to yourself in the third person whenever you have an opinion. Your name is not "How The World Works," it's annoying, and we all know that this column consists of only you. (Thanks for not doing it in this column, it was a relief.)

2. Your column is not a press release newswire. It's great to report on exciting new technologies, but cheerleading every new development as a game-changer that will change our lives "just around the corner" is a recipe for embarrassment.

Incidentally, solar power price parity has nothing whatsoever to do with the viability of plug-in hybrids. Don't make up connections where they do not exist. Yes, it would be an emission-free power source for such cars, but as far as plug-in technology goes from either an engineering or economic standpoint, it doesn't matter if the electric source is nuclear, coal, or solar.

Not too surprised to see the hordes of naysayers bemoaning the risks of unsupervised pills and the lack of doctor's attention that is sure to follow.

Sorry, this dude's not buying it. It's always recommended that everyone get an annual checkup, or at the very least see a doctor every 18 months if you are a healthy, unmedicated young adult.

That doesn't change when the pill is offered sight unseen. But for a variety of reasons, some people just won't do it. Maybe they can't afford it because they have no health insurance, maybe they have an unreasonable doctor phobia, maybe they are lazy, maybe they can't get the time off, whatever.

The fact is, medically responsible people will continue to see a doctor annually if they can find a way, while these pill-by-mail programs will provide access to the rest who are denied it now. Yes, some women may be harmed by side-effects, just as they were already at risk due to not seeing a doctor. But the result of additional prevented pregnancies will undoubtedly be a net positive, both in terms of health impact of unwanted pregnancies, and the priceless social benefits of not introducing unwanted children (or needless abortions).

In other words, with proper informed consent, everyone wins with this option being available. In fact, let it be sold over the counter, a pharmacist could provide this information just as well as a doctor.

And does anyone see it being ridiculous to go to a doctor for the sole purpose of getting blood pressure checked? This is the kind of thing that really denies those without quality health insurance access. They can get a free screening from one of those machines at the mall and call the results into their pharmacist. Or enter it into the web order form.

Brightstar chimes in with some more misinformation. There's no cars that "run on water." There do exist motors powered by hydrogen in various forms. Right now the cheapest way to get hydrogen is extracting it from hydrocarbons. It can be produced through electrolysis in water. Since there's no free energy ride, it takes at least as much power to split H20 into H2 and O2 as you get back out by burning the H2 to produce H2O again. The real world being what it is, you lose a lot of energy in the process. It has to be said again and again, hydrogen is not an energy source, it is energy storage. And no cleaner than the ultimate source of the electricity.

As for digesting "ANY organics" into fuel, that's been around in prototype for a while, and is an exciting technology, but it's an energy reclamation/recycling/efficiency/waste management technology, NOT an energy solution. Again, no free energy ride; you can't live off of eating your own excrement, no matter how good you get at it.

@ikuiku, your snippet mischaracterized what I said and did not address it. I acknowledged that you need renewable electricity for the plug-in hybrid to be a truly clean car. But the fact is that clean electricity in no way "enables" the plug-in hybrid. It has been developed independently, and the same technologies and economic incentives to develop it exist independently.

And WHZ points out an obvious point that even the industry numbers from iSuppli that "as many as" 400 plants producing 1MW of PV cells per year may exist by 2011 (which of course means that there will be less than 400), means that even on the optimistic side PV will be a drop in the energy bucket. He also doesn't mention that 1MW of capacity means peak output, e.g. when the sun is shining at its brightest, what the cells are rated to produce when everything works. You can never get that output since it is dark half of the time, and weather is at least somewhat variable the rest of the time. So this really means something like 150MW on the high side of PV capacity coming online per year in 2011 (ignoring the PV cells that are going offline), in the whole world. When a single coal plant can produce 1500MW.

Sorry to be the curmudgeon, but I'm not too optimistic.