Sorry if I offended you with my caps, being too lazy to use emphasis. The fact that they mention the Model S in the same sentence as such lesser cars is of course an affront. But the wording of your post clearly implies that the only reason to pay more than $50k for any car would be to get a higher crash test rating, which struck me as silly. For one, that extra cash gets you from the S60's 6.4 second time to the Model S's seat-plastering 3.9 seconds. Add in the zero-lag, zero-noise, zero-maintenance, zero-emission power plant, and Tesla's unique exterior and interior design, and you begin to approach the sum of their differences.

..then you're clearly not in the market for a luxury performance sedan, which I thought was implied by the fact that we were talking about the Model S at all. But thank you for making yourself clear this time.

...which is only true if you drive on routes without a Tesla supercharger, something that will become more difficult in the next 6-18 months. The rest of the time, you plug it in when you get home and it's full by the time you leave in the morning--assuming you actually drive 250 miles a day. An average American commute would only take an hour to recover from.

You're free to think what you like, I just hope that one day you actually get to drive a Tesla vehicle of some kind and have those prejudices shattered. Now that I drive electric (even in my poor-man's Nissan Leaf), it's hard for me not to lump all gas cars together, from Corollas to Cameros--they're hideously noisy, smelly, expensive to operate, and simply inelegant by comparison.

The actual answer to his question was given in the summary, the Tesla outscored every single car in every single category. Your question only makes sense if you ONLY care about safety ratings when buying a car, which would be just as dumb as ignoring them completely. The REAL question you should be asking is, "If I'm going to buy a $100k car, why would I buy anything but the best?" This is why Tesla is giving BMW/Audi/etc. a run for their money.

Astronauts spend a lot of time exercising, and the thinner atmosphere probably does something too. Probably doesn't make much of a difference.

Am I the only one who read this and thought, "What, is their food replicator broken?"

This is why no one ever reads patents before violating them. *ducks*

If you line up all of your straw men in a row, they will look like an army and scare your opponent away.

In spite of all their wailing about piracy, they know as well as the rest of us that the goal isn't to eliminate piracy, it's to maximize profits. Giving it away to everyone legally does them less good than ignoring a small amount of piracy and guilting the rest of us into paying for it.

Because all the consumer A/V equipment can only record in SD even if it gets HD input. 99% of people would rather download an HD rip than own an illegal HDMI decoder. Plus popular torrents can be completed in minutes or seconds on any computer, while setting up a recording system takes effort and maintenance and equipment they might not own.

But buying a VPN puts you on the NSA watch list. They don't care what you use it for, only who you talk to with it.

Exactly what I was thinking. The reason they want to pawn off the same system to competing ISPs is so they can turn around and sue them for knowingly letting their users violate Time-Warner's copyrights.

This is precisely the kind of attack I thought of when they started talking about auto computer security this week. These attack vectors will not be used by hax0rs to make a political statement or spam people's dashboards. They will be used by cartels and spy agencies for targeted assassinations and ransom.

Imagine getting a voice-scrambled message on your phone telling you transfer $50,000 to this account or your wife's car will go out of control on her way home with the kids this evening. Or a prominent diplomat dies in an unexplained crash, triggered by a chip installed months earlier when the car was in for maintenance. It's exactly the kind of thing they would do on the show Burn Notice, for example.

First thing the police would do is see if they could identify the same person buying spray tan, fauxhawk wig, and fake tattoos in the last month...

That is a hilariously false analogy. Owning a copyright isn't like owning a plot of land. If anything, it is like owning a piece of the minds of everyone who enjoys your work. We have your ideas in our heads, but can't express them publicly without your blessing. With terms of 70+life, this form of thought-policing persists for multiple generations, only serving to make society forget your work as soon as it goes out of style. Non-profit or low-margin organizations that preserve niche culture rely on public domain rights to survive, so they ignore orphaned work still in copyright or risk being sued into oblivion.

And another thing. If you find a creator, or even a company, who makes the bulk of their income off original works more than 30 years old, I would be glad to hear it. Until then, please do not mention starving artists in the same breath as excessive copyright terms.

If all we wanted was someone to keep the thing in the air, we wouldn't bother putting a person in the plane to begin with. When we give these guys billion-dollar planes with the ability to fly across a continent or level a town on a whim, we want them to be able to make intelligent decisions quickly when the situation changes. Being able to fly the plane is only a prerequisite to being able to use it safely and effectively--it's been a long time since being an Air Force pilot was as simple as "don't crash, shoot the bad guys". Maybe there are some bureaucratic hurdles keeping out good people, but as a citizen and taxpayer, I don't mind them being picky about who gets wings.

FTFY. It's the initial training investment, and continual air time to keep them sharp, that make the pilot more valuable than the plane, and harder to replace.