Either way, you didn't meet the standard definition...

You're "weightless" in a parabolic arc, just like on on NASA's DC-9 "vomit comet", and you get more "zero g time" on the Vomit Comet than you will in Branson's carnival ride.
 
Second, Branson is redefining "space". The generally accepted edge of space is 62.x miles. Virgin Galactic is having trouble meeting 60.0 miles and is looking at switching fuels at the last minute to meet that more limited 60.0 goal. If 2.x miles doesn't sound like much, Mt. Everest is 5.5 miles high. This is like getting a 68% and calling it a C grade average.
 
Probably best to wait 10 years and hitch a ride on a Dragon v2 to a Bigelow inflatable Space Hotel for a night for a cool half-million.

I doubt there are many similar industries, cars are the second most expensive item most people will buy in their lives, after their house. Cars also need specialty tools and parts (and with them a specialty parts warehouse).

In particular, Reno/Nevada offered this because it was beneficial to the state over the long term. Other states were also competing for this long term heavy industry by offering similar deals. The factory would have gone to another state if they had not offered this deal and then they would not be the national leader in battery manufacturing + all of it's cottage industries. The building the road part is genuinely a good idea as it adds value to their industrial park and is a good long term investment.

In the case of the "Exciting Choice", Astronauts will be riding in the same basic design as what Commercial Passengers will use, which means more flights and (theoretically) higher reliability due to a continuously refined manufacturing process, plus the loss of commercial passenger dollars. Going with the "Safe Choice" means you're riding in one of perhaps only four or five of a series that will ever be produced. The loss of commercial dollars is a big deal to SpaceX as it represents a much larger market than Government spaceflight will in the next five decades.

And yet if sales follow their current upward accelerating trend, by this time next year 1% of the world's population will own a copy of the game. What would you suggest hitching your wagon to instead? Second Life? Because that's worked out so well.

EA tried to buy them for $100 million a couple years ago, they let the CEO in to the office and shortly after showed him out. At that point they'd already made enough to all comfortably retire and it's not surprising that they would turn down a billion dollars (that's what, $100 mil each per employee?) before caving at the $2 billion mark? It's hard to turn down that kind of money.

The battery on the Model S is replaceable by robots, surely you could put a rooftop battery on there, and then just swap them out at large bus stations near neighborhood substations for charging? Who on earth builds an industrial grade public bus without swappable batteries in this day and age?
 
Propane and natural gas powered buses have had their fuel tanks on the roof for decades now. With hooks and simple optics it wouldn't be hard to lift an old battery pack off and swap it for a fresh one in under 5 minutes.

Imagine you can leverage off of their existing user base, your minecraft character becomes your xbox equivilent of a "Mii", and now you have a 3D avatar in a 3D world you can legitimately interact with. Did you not read Snowcrash? This is Snowcrash. Someone bootstrapped the 3D virtual world we've been promised since the 1980's (and failed at with Second Life) and now Microsoft will own it. And will integrate it in to your living room and cell phone.
 
P.S. Go read Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson

This thing left Earth space six hours ago! It'll be closer to Mars than us by the time I make my first pot of Coffee on Monday.

What's it like, flunking high school physics?

There's two sets of numbers, I'm using the lower set... fish ladders are only useful for going upstream, all sorts of crap gets sucked through the turbine and it's not like the fish can read a big flashing sign that says "FISH LADDER THIS WAY, TURBINE OF DEATH THAT WAY. SWIM TOWARDS THE SURFACE IF YOU WANT TO LIVE". Which is kind of counter-intuitive if you've ever seen an eagle pluck a fish out of the water with it's Talons.
 
Although if fish could read, that would be pretty cool.

Three humans die each day due to obesity-related health reasons within 3500 of the McDonalds by my house. They say humans are attracted to the site by the brightly-lit golden arches which some say is a food source for the species.

Mortality rate of fish through the turbine is close to 10%
 
Except fish are slimy, scaly and make weird mouth shapes when you pull them out of the water to look at them. They look pretty awkward.
 
Birds on the other hand, are beautiful creatures flying through the air, truly, beautiful, feathered friends, God's own creations.
 
But if 3 birds die in a 3500 acre site per day, heaven help us all for destroying nature. I can go out in my back yard and shake the six to eight trees on my half-acre and watch at least four birds fly out.

They're still incredibly useful... it's just that people stopped buying them because Intel stopped making Atom processors faster/more powerful to choke the life out of the 0% profit margin netbook segment... only to have them revived as "Chromebooks" and are again eating up Microsoft and Intel's bottom line. The only reason Netbooks aren't trendy is because Google wasn't a market disruptor when Wintel made the decision to stop updating Netbook hardware. Now Google is.