Betamax was *not* "clearly superior to [its] competition". The sound and video was supposedly better, but it had an Achilles' Heel: the first generation tapes could only hold an hour of video. So any typical movie would require two tapes, and having to change the tape in the middle. VHS had 2-hour tapes from the start. Later, Beta made a 2-hour version, but it was too late.

I thought the article was talking about people who are early adopters of stuff which fails. If you buy something on sale, that usually means the product has already been around for a while, and the retailer is trying to get rid of it because it's failing.

No, he's exactly right. Who actually listens to music on a Zune or an iPod now? Smartphones have made standalone MP3 players completely obsolete.

I used to have not an iPod nor a Zune, but an iRiver H320 (which I upgraded to a 30GB hard drive). I haven't used it in years; I just use my phone for that stuff now. Any smartphone these days will hold my entire music collection easily.

What are some examples of things she's purchased and which got canceled this way? Or other choices she's made which have turned out to be duds?

Did she buy a Pontiac Aztek?

Unfortunately IMO, from what I can tell, GTK+ is easily much more popular in the Linux market than Qt, mainly because most distros use it (either with Gnome or with one of its forks). Qt is very popular in certain markets (especially embedded Linux devices), but if you're looking at the Linux desktop market it's all GTK+. Of course, there's probably a lot more embedded Linux devices out there than there are desktops running Linux...

As a programmer, Qt is far and away a much nicer toolkit to work with if you need to do GUIs with C++ (or even if you're just using C++, GUI or not). Why anyone bothers with GTK+, I have no idea.

I think the failure in the popular music industry is probably a pretty complex topic. I believe it comes from two big sources: the internet, and the whole Napster debacle in the late 1990s (and specifically, the music industry's response to it). I have two theories: 1) Basically, they killed the golden goose with Napster. People had a new way of sharing music and finding things they liked, and even despite all the "piracy" they were selling more music than ever before, but then the record industry whined and got it shut down, so people stopped buying much music at all. 2) With the internet and iPods (and later smartphones capable of holding your entire collection), people stopped listening to the radio and only listened to music they already like.

In the US, today, the "liberal" LGBT crowd are persecuting those who don't wish to do business with them.

Exactly. It's just like how the pro-integration people got away with persecuting those who didn't want to do business with black people. We conservatives all pine for the days when black people had to sit in the back of the bus and could be beaten to death if they got too uppity.

There's a few problems here: when they're integrated into general society, these peoples' ideas tend to spread. Plus, they're highly active voters, so they have a big effect on politics and on the laws the rest of us have to follow. And it doesn't help that they tend to reproduce much more rapidly than the rest of us. If we could isolate them in their own state, we wouldn't have these problems with them. As for their kids, you can't save everyone. What are you doing to save kids in various third-world hellholes? Are you demanding that their parents (who, in many places, are responsible for the bad conditions because of their screwed-up culture, as is the case in the middle east) be given equal voting rights in your country? Of course not. We'll send foreign aid over there, send doctors and such and try to help them from a safe distance, but that's it. That's all we should do with the evangelicals too. Put them in their own sovereign nation and let them do what they want; any of their kids who want to get the hell out we can accept as refugees.

You have no clue what you're talking about. The Wolfram page calculates torque given force and distance from a rotational axis, not rpm. I guess you've never turned a wrench in your life: when you have a long wrench on a stuck bolt, and it isn't moving, do you really think you're not exerting any torque on it?

Inconvenience != terror.
Weird != terror.

Basically, you're redefining everything to be "terrorism" if it in any way results in an inconvenience to a government.

1) LOL, if you believe less energy is consumed at higher RPM in an electric motor, I've got perpetual motion machine to sell to you. A transmission allows you to operate the car at highway speeds at a much lower engine RPM.

Yes, you can get slightly decreased energy usage at lower rpms because of lower friction and less slip on an induction motor (the kind used by Tesla), but throwing a multispeed transmission in there adds weight and complexity, and also increases drivetrain losses (transmissions are inherently lossy), though the amount of loss over a single-speed gearbox is probably not much.

As I've asked before, what other applications have an electric motor paired with a multi-speed transmission? Train locomotives like these? Dump trucks like this one? Ship propulsion units like these? No, these all have motors either directly driving their loads, or using a single-speed reduction gear. And trains at least have a much higher typical speed range than cars do (0-150+mph for Acela Express, 0-220mph or more for high-speed trains outside the US).

Burning empty buildings and train tracks isn't "terrorism", it's "sabotage" and "arson". Messing up some train tracks to inconvenience people, and then calling it in so the train doesn't go over the tracks and no one gets hurt, isn't "terrorism", by definition, because there's no "terror" involved. This goes even more so for blowing up power lines, which rarely hurts anyone (unless it's in the middle of a heat wave or something, or cuts the power to a hospital).

This is like calling sit-in protesters "terrorists".

People taking their clothes off and marching to court? Are you kidding me? There's nothing remotely "terroristic" about that. That's a pure and simple protest. Protesting is not the same as terrorism.

"Don't need" is highly debatable since even bicycles have gears for the sake of efficiency.

Bicycles are not powered by electric motors, and human legs do not resemble electric motors in any way at all. Human legs have a very limited speed range, just like gasoline engines; that's why transmissions exist.

Imagine driving your ICE car on the freeway in the 3rd gear -- that's going to cause a lot of engine wear and tear due to high engine RPM and drastically reduce mileage.

Electric motors are not like ICEs. Electric motors generate peak torque at stall (that's 0 rpm in case you didn't know). ICEs produce zero torque at stall, and don't even run that way, which is why they have clutches or torque converters, to allow them to idle. ICEs produce peak torque near the top of their speed range, completely the opposite of electric motors.

How many other applications can you think of where electric motors drive something through a transmission (I mean one with multiple gears, not a single-speed gearbox)? There are none. Train locomotives don't, ships don't, they all have direct-drive from their electric motors.

And if you're worried about speed, EVs don't run their motors slower, they run them faster than road speed, using a reduction gear. Go read your own link where that's mentioned. The Roadster only used a 2-speed transmission so they could get away with a smaller (lower torque, lower current) motor, but that really isn't a great idea because the complexity and weight of the transmission negates any cost, efficiency, or space gains you get from using a smaller motor. Higher speeds in an ICE are a problem because there's so many moving parts, and a bunch of them aren't rotating, they're reciprocating (think of the con-rods). This isn't the case in an electric motor, where there's only 1 moving part (aside from the balls in the bearings) and it rotates; higher speeds aren't much of a problem here, within reason.

What sort of an idiot makes a car where the battery cannot be changed at a service station?

What sort of idiot thinks it'd be a great idea for someone to exchange their brand-new but discharged $20,000 battery for an old, worn-down battery that's been recharged at that station, and is now worth about $5,000 because it's near the end of its life, or worse, has bad cells and is on the brink of outright failure?

Whose bright idea was it to force consumers to plug their cars in for charging?

Maybe someone who realized people who commute every day would rather recharge at home, which takes no extra time at all, than waste time taking a separate trip to a service station?

I'm currently looking into replacing my gas furnace with a heat pump, powered by a combination of solar-, wind-, and hydro-generated electricity.

The negative is that my winter heating costs will double.

Maybe, maybe not; it entirely depends on the relative prices of electricity and gas in your area. I used to live in NJ and the natural gas prices there were atrocious; it would have been cheaper to heat the house with electricity (and in fact, that's what we ended up doing after we figured out how much gas heat was costing us: we turned the house heat way way down to just keep the pipes from freezing, and then used portable electric radiator-style heaters, because it was much cheaper that way).