If it came through the warranty period alright, I don't see that there's any problem. Tesla has probably just figured out this hits relatively few but heavy users and ambassadors who'll be happy to get a new battery instead of being hit with a $15,000 bill and continue driving sales. After all, 125,000/8 = 15,625 miles is more than the average US driver goes per year (13,476 miles) and Teslas have probably not been bought by those making regular long hauls.

It does create a rather perverse incentive to drive your Tesla to battery failure before the warranty is up though - say a coast-to-coast supercharger road trip or three on free electricity. I don't know if they'll replace it with a brand new or a refurb but either way it'll be worth more than with a 7.5 year old battery. As long as they're in massive growth sales 5-8 years ago are so much lower that it might not matter though, right now it's all about expansion.

That there's tribes living in the Amazon that aren't part of the economy aren't a drag on anyone else. If you fall out of the economy, that's more your problem than the economy's. In reality it won't come to that though, because the rich will want to have personal assistants, luxury housing, goods and services. They'll get a dress from a famous dress designer no matter what computers and robots could do. Those servants will again put money into a worker's economy. It might be severely diluted by the time it reaches you, but even in a third world African village there's a working market.

However, labor in general is like everything else in capitalism subject to supply and demand. Too much supply, too little demand and wages spiral downwards. The people who have capital may find that they're becoming richer and richer simply by doing nothing, while the workers find that labor pays less and less. On the other hand, that means those with money can hire other people to do things for them cheaply. And that's where I think his horse analogy fails, we prefer service by cars instead of service by horse. While I like some self-service, in many cases I'd prefer talking to an actual human being. It's just that personal service is expensive and so not worth the cost.

I think you're the one with too narrow a definition, for example I can very well imagine Democrats trolling Republican websites and vice versa. Not to make anyone go emotionally overboard, but to sow discord and disrupt their campaign. I can imagine people trolling Scientology forums to stop them recruiting members for their wacky sect. Competitors might go trolling in review sections posting false reviews and rumors.

Debating, even if you're playing the devil's advocate is not trolling as it's taking on a position that's not yours to enhance the debate. Preaching is also not trolling, even if your impervious to counterarguments or changing your mind that's your contribution to the debate. Everything else, everyone looking to disrupt, derail, destroy the forum or alienate individuals I consider a form of trolling, including abusing it for other purposes like spamming.

I'm not sure why you say trolls can't be contrarian then go on to show an example of a troll taking on an extremely opposite position compared to everyone else. What they won't do is play by any civilized or even rational rules of debate. But they will taunt you with bizarre, illogical points of view often with a side of personal snark to make you write a long and fiery diatribe pointing out all the flaws. And then keep baiting you until you catch on.

Or the TL;DR version: Trolling is the noise in the discussion's signal-to-noise ratio.

That there are so few goals is what makes soccer so huge. I played a different sport where the result might be more like 10-4, nobody really cares about a bad referee call or a few missed chances or the lucky goal it's obvious the better team won anyway. In soccer the result might be 2-1 and there's no end to the bullshit fans will make up about controversial decisions, missed chances, lucky shots and whatnot that meant that they could have, should have, would have won or drawn. It's somewhere between sports and Texas Hold 'Em, the poker pro will win on average but on a good day the worst team walks away with the victory. Fully deserved of course *cough*.

I'm about to horribly abuse this quote:

YOU: What if they don't take the bait? What if they don't react at all?
BULLIES: Do you still have your notebook? The function of bullying is to provoke response. And we will continue to provoke until they respond, or they have a mental breakdown. They are not in control - we are. That is the strength of bullying.

Bullies do not quit easily though feigned indifference. They're on a mission to break you and they know that deep down it probably hurt anyway. And shutting down your real emotional responses is so not a good idea for a number of reasons, it's practically inflicting yourself a mental injury.

You're being very dishonest when you leave this part out:

By those standards, airplanes have basically stood still for the last 50 years. Sure they get a bit lighter, a bit better engines, a bit better aerodynamics but they're not radically different nor faster. Already the very first commercial transatlantic flight Berlin-New York was done in 25 hours, like orders faster than a boat and still on the same order - 8.5 hours - today. Same with cars, they've come a long way since the T-Ford but it could do 40-45 mph with 13-21 MPG. What would you get today, 35 MPG? You don't drive cross country on a thimble, that's for sure.

We're not talking about that kind of improvements when it comes to computers. We're talking about that 30 years ago memory was measured in kilobytes, today it's in gigabytes. If computers double performance in 10 years, we think that's awfully slow progress. 30+ years for a 10x improvement? 100 years until a terabyte is last century's gigabyte? Let's be honest, the kind of marginal - or rather, normal - improvements you're talking about would only be scoffed at. When - not if - we hit that limit that the walls are so thin they can't be thinner they might be roughly as good as they'll ever get.

C++ is one of the most complex, inscrutable computer languages ever created. (...) Is that by intent, or did it just happen?

Yes and no, depending on how you look at it. Once upon a time like 40+ years ago there was C. While there was others, C was massively successful in the 1970s because it was a very good but really thin abstraction layer over assembler, which was very common at the time. That means you could write C and it'd run on many different kinds of machines, conversely if your platform wanted to go anywhere it had to have a C compiler. It was imperative and procedural, which was fine but computer scientists also wanted an object oriented language. How do you do that when you don't have a massive staff and budget? You extend C. Early C++ compiled down to C which then compiled on every platform with a C compiler. All the other very low level C-isms just came along for the ride. And any behavior that wasn't defined in C, well it couldn't be defined in C++.

A lot of it is simply the result of C++ paving the way, it was often the first C-derived language to do it and a lot of it turned into ungodly kludges, but you were pretty much committed to keeping that syntax working. So you keep adding and adding but never subtracting, never cleaning up. It's easy to say "lets start over and do a clean rewrite" but hard to achieve the necessary momentum, many have tried and failed. And with locked down devices it's now the device manufacturers that control if a given language will be available, you can make UltraC but if you can't make an iOS app in UltraC then the value is more limited. Outside Apple, Google and Microsoft I don't see who can pull it off, Sun could once but Oracle could never make a new language. Not counting web server languages like Perl/PHP/RoR, but local end user software.

That depends on whether you think it's fundamentally inequality or some absolute threshold of poverty that causes people to rebel. When you have like no job, no money and you're short on food, shelter and healthcare for you and your family, then I can imagine becoming an extremist. But the fact that there's people like Bill Gates who have so ridiculously much more money than I'll ever have doesn't really bother me. I have good place to live, a working car, food and drink on my table and sure I could have fun with a billion dollars, but I'm not hurting myself either.

Of course I know I'm very well off myself, globally speaking. But the number of living in extreme poverty is dwindling, illiteracy is dropping, some 99.9% don't starve - the big scary numbers are from malnourishment enhancing the effect of other diseases, almost 90% have clean drinking water and it doesn't mean the last 10% drink poison. Trends on life expectancy are good, even in Africa. In short, even the poorest are moving out of the "nothing to lose" category to where they might have a shitty job for shitty pay to make a very modest living, but it's not nothing.

It's one thing to think your minimum wage job at McDonald's suck and barely pays enough to make a living. But it is really enough to want to start a revolution and throw the world as you know it into chaos? I don't really think so.

Unless the future is the cloud, web services, central game servers, always-on DRM and remote attestation where essential bits of the code don't run on your machine. Any "Secure Boot" Windows 8 machine now comes with a TPM chip active to support this, in a generation or two I'm sure they'll make it a requirement. If you've tampered with your PC, no Netflix/Spotify/Steam for you. Same with Android, install AOSP all you like but it won't be able to fake the signatures.

It's certainly running on entirely different hardware with a completely different programming model. Instead of one CPU or even a couple thousand steam processors you got 100 billion neurons operating in parallel. We have artificial neural networks but we're struggling real bad to program them effectively - to really more like train them, compared to von Neumann machines it's like programming with the lights out in braille wearing oven mittens.

If you sue under US law there's statutory damages, the kind that lets the RIAA/MPAA charge a $750 minimum (that can go down to $200 if you're an innocent infringer) and $150,000 maximum per work. Make that $250,000 and up to 5 years in prison if you can show it was for profit, which shouldn't be a problem in this case. If they can hire a lawyer to get a $10,000/song verdict for a 99 cent product, surely you can make up some imaginary numbers of lost commercial licenses too. However that's got nothing to do with the customers of the infringing party as they didn't violate copyright. That part is about patents, basically as a result of taking this GPLv2 code but not getting a patent license, they're in violation of patents. Just like I can download and use x264 but still infringe on the H.264 patents.

The catch here though is that they're trying for an estoppel defense, because XimpleWare is the one with both the code and the patents. That may or may not work as the GPLv2 still means you can distribute it freely except in countries where it's patented - like the US - and if you bring it to the US and use it there then you're on the hook for patent infringement. I don't see the very big principal implications though.

If it was so simple to send applications everywhere, people would. It doesn't cost them anything, but it costs you time and/or money to have someone process them. If you make them jump through a few hoops, you'll at least filter away some of the worst spammers who can't be arsed unless they can email their generic application letter and CV. If it's a job you genuinely want, what's taking 5-10 minutes out your day to apply? Personally I've spent much longer tuning my application and CV to show I've read the advertisement and made a good effort to show what skills I have that's particularly relevant to that job. I suppose if I was out of a job it's different, but I don't need to carpet bomb the market. I look for jobs I'd really like and make a few, but serious efforts.

The only thing you'd be likely to find is gas and rock. And Germans, where they can tank their cars and listen to heavy rock there'll be Germans.

YOLO is just the modern day equivalent of carpe diem - seize the day, but Latin is no longer in fashion. It doesn't mean you shouldn't study to your degree, but those years as a student aren't just a means to an end you need to get through they're your life. Same goes for your job, if all you live for is career and promotion then life is passing you by. If you want to go on safari in Africa, do it. If you want to try sky diving, do it. If you want to hit on that girl you fancy, do it. If the sun is shining outside and you can, take the day off and walk outside. No really, that's YOLO too. It's not about going the most extreme and crazy and dangerous things, it's about living in the moment. Yes, it probably means there'll be a pile of work waiting for you in the morning but it's not going to ruin the rest of your life. And whatever shit comes your way tomorrow, you had a good day today.

No, it was utter necessity. For 30 years ago I hadn't even gotten my C64 with all of 65536 bytes of RAM yet, 38911 of which would be left available once BASIC was loaded. Store one uncompressed screenshot of the 320x240x4 bit (16 color) screen and 38400 of those was gone. If you tried storing the Lord of the Rings trilogy in memory - compressed to ~12 bits/word, you'd get about halfway into the Fellowship of the Ring. True, today we waste space but back then we lacked essential space. Every corner was cut, every optimization taken to avoid using any of our precious bytes. See the Y2K problem.

For a more modern but similar issue, I used to have the same attitude to my bandwidth. It used to be slow, costly (pay per minute) and it was important to use it as a precious resource. Today I might end up downloading a whole season of a show after watching the first episode, go bored after three and delete the other twenty. It's there to be used, not to sit idle. I've got 16GB of RAM, there's no point to waste but there's nothing to be gained by hiding in a 1GB corner. If it makes life easier for developers to pull in a 10MB library than write a 100kB function, do it. If you can get it working, working well and working fast then maybe we'll get around to the resource usage.. someday. It's not a big deal.