There's no such thing as a free market. There isn't a single market in the world that has zero barrier of entry, perfect competition, perfectly rational consumers, and so on and so forth. I hate it when people keep bandying about that term. It's just a hypothetical academic concept, like "frictionless surfaces" in high school physics.

Enforcement of greenhouse regulations actually forces corporations to invest more money into capital spending, which creates jobs.

Sigh. You idiots... regulation forcing private corporations to comply with stricter pollution laws would force those companies to invest more money into capital investment. This creates jobs, which are sorely needed in our current recession.

I think this is a response to the underwhelming hardware Sony and Microsoft are rumored to be planning on releasing. If those companies' greedy executives get their way, we'll end up with a "next-generation" of consoles in 2013 with underpowered 2010 hardware, which they'll sell at a hefty hardware margin. They're probably also unwilling to allow Steam to operate on their consoles, so rather than be locked out Valve is going to go forward on its own.

The batteries aren't the problem. Even in the Leaf the battery costs around $6000. The rest of the car is infinitely easier to produce than an ICE. The insanely high cost of EVs can be attributed to manufacturers requiring extremely high margins to "recoup investment", and a lack of mass production and economy of scale. Once China gets involved EV prices should drop off a cliff.

EVs won't be more expensive forever. The Leaf batteries are around $6000. The rest of the car is infinitely easier to produce than an ICE. The insanely high cost of EVs can be attributed to manufacturers requiring extremely high margins to "recoup investment", and a lack of mass production and economy of scale.

Considering the Leaf's battery costs around $6000-7000, and the rest of the car is infinitely easier to build than an ICE-carrying car, in 5 years mass production and falling battery costs will make 150-200 mile cars quite cheap.

It's also useless since it costs so much. Why not just remove the ICE and add more battery? For $50k you could get massive range.

Of course if it's just for textbook reading or even basic tools then a tablet is far more useful.

I think what's more important is optimizing textbooks to be as easy to use as possible. It seems like everyone misses this point. One author writes a book, releases a few new editions, and that's the end of the lifecycle. Each author has his or her strengths and weaknesses, and rather than combining the strengths of various textbooks to make one super book, you can a bunch of separate and unrelated books.

You hit on a major point. They had momentum, and they blew it. After all they're run by engineers who are completely out of touch with mass cultural social trends. I think the only company who could possibly dethrone facebook is Apple, but with Steve Jobs gone I don't think even they could do it right anymore.

Actually, yes there are more numbers between 1 and 3 than between 1 and 2 or 2 and 3.

The extra cost is absolutely minimal. Seriously. The % of devices that fail within 2 years but not within 1 year is absolutely tiny. Once you've gotten past the "infant mortality" prone stage of 3-6 months, the chances of your device surviving in the long term is much, much larger.

He even capitalized "free market". He must've been a troll. He couldn't possibly be serious, could he?

Is there a term for the psychological condition of being a pathological liar?