Unless you fly a lot, how exactly are you supposed to know whether you'll fit comfortably into a seat or not? It's not like they have some seats set up in the airport that you can try sitting in to see if your knees will fit or not; you just have to wait until you get on and are stuck there before you find out you don't physically fit when the asshole in front of you decides to recline.

Stallman's a bit of an extremist, and wants all software to be open-source. Remember, it all goes back to when he was trying to get a printer working, and couldn't because the driver was closed-source. That's why he invented the GPL, which just requires you to make source available to anyone whom you distribute software to.

But you're right: some parts are far more important than others. The platform being open-source is much, much more important than any high-level application being open-source. When the platform is closed and proprietary, you have all kinds of problems: you're locked in by the vendor, it's harder to write and debug applications, the platform vendor can have secret APIs to give them an advantage over third-party application vendors (we saw this with MS many times), you're stuck with drivers that vendors provide you and can't upgrade your platform software if the driver providers don't want you to (we've seen this with Windows upgrades, where older but perfectly functional hardware can't be used because the HW vendors didn't feel like updating their drivers for the new OS, since they want you to buy new HW), etc. Whereas if some random application is closed-source and proprietary, that doesn't affect anything at all except that one application.

>If the purpose is to give people a useful / fun / powerful / cheap piece of software, it is a strength.

It's a strength, but it doesn't do that much good if no one except a few statistical outliers actually bother to use it, and 99.9% of people prefer to genuflect and empty their bank accounts.

Say what you will, but the middle class needs work. We need something for the vast majority of people who aren't scientists, engineers or politicians to do.

Oh please. We can just put everyone to work in retail sales and real estate. We'll all get rich selling houses to each other!

Well then, somebody needs to tell the media, because they sure do like treating it as a common noun.

Today's media can't even spell words properly or use proper grammar; it shouldn't be too surprising that they'd screw up Tesla's factory name.

Factories need industrial engineers, not just assembly-line workers. No, you don't need a ton of IEs to run a factory, but still, there's some there. You also need engineers to do the design, testing, etc. (though some of that may be at their main location in California).

110V is annoying to work with because it has so many restrictions. It's no safer than 230V and coupled with more lax wiring regulations you have a much higher rate of electrocutions in the USA than in the EU.

Correlation =/= causation. The higher electrocution rate is probably just because Americans are stupider than Europeans....

More seriously, I imagine electrocutions have fallen greatly with the mandating of GFCI outlets in bathrooms and kitchens, with the problem being that only new construction has these unless someone has gone to the trouble of retrofitting them in older homes. Perhaps in the EU they were more aggressive about getting these upgraded. In the US, it's basically impossible to force people to upgrade anything; you can probably still legally use knob-and-tube wiring if that's what your house came with.

It's also substantially more labour cost to install, test and maintain.

I don't know about your house, but I've never, ever, ever had to do "maintenance" on house wiring. It usually stays in there for decades without being touched.

FWIW, the wiring in your "high power" circuits is much heavier than is used in most european circuits

Yes, but not only that, it's usually aluminum wire.

>With camera following them all the time, they will have to leave their humanity aside

Ferguson plus other recent incidents (NYPD on Staten Island, LAPD pursing Chris Dormer) have proven that they don't have any humanity.

>f special tools mean making your own OBDII cable, and loading one of the dozen or more software packages onto a PC or laptop to interface with the onboard computer..

You can probably buy the appropriate OBDII cable, but what software packages are you talking about? This probably varies enormously by automaker. Doing anything advanced on my Volvo requires buying a "VIDA" unit; you can get Chinese-made clones for $150-200 on Ebay, but there's still a bunch of procedures and updates that seem to require an online account with Volvo which costs a fortune.

>No I think it's a strength. When MS forced Me, vista, Win8 on it, we recoiled and puked, but some people were forced to use it because they lacked options.

And did that cause Microsoft to lose their desktop monopoly? Nope. People kept using it anyway, despite the puking. The only thing that's put a dent in MS's desktop market is MacOS, which is basically the same thing (single-source, proprietary) only worse, and the iPad (also single-source and proprietary).

>For people getting work done, we need choices, we're willing to suffer a little to avoid suffering a lot.

Apparently, most people are perfectly happy funneling their money to MS and Apple, because those two have been highly successful with the consumer markets, while Linux has not. Regular consumers do NOT want choices; they want to be told what to do and buy.

You're wrong about that. There's lots of Gnome3 users. I see them in message forums all over, like /r/linux, and of course /r/gnome. Of course, I can't explain why anyone would want to use it, but there really are a lot of people who do. Similarly, there's a lot of people who use and like Windows8/Metro, despite the fact that it's total crap.

>Ignoring the very real problem that putting so damn much in PID 1 is dangerous for system stability and security,

From what I've read, this isn't true, but I don't have an authoritative source for it. But, here's the really dumb part of your response:

>Last, the dependency system absolutely screams for a GUI interface to be able to follow and configure it, but when one finally is created (if it hasn't been already), it'll be useless on servers, because nobody with brains installs a GUI on the server.

Maybe you haven't heard of the X Window System, introduced over 25 years ago. It allows you to run graphical applications remotely, so the system with the application does not need a GUI at all.

Teslas, from what I've read, are pretty open compared to other carmakers. You can connect an Ethernet cable to them and access the main computer's Linux prompt pretty easily. Most other makes require special tools to do anything at all involving the computer.

No, of course not. However, in America, HR runs the company, so there's no way around this idiocy.

It's worked fine for me for 16 years (mine was the very first model, not the later touchscreen models), except for the big mold issue (which after a couple years they did a factory recall and sent a technician to my place to install a bunch of new, redesigned parts in the door and front area), and the water pump failed a couple years ago which I replaced myself. There haven't been any electronic issues. I have read of some people having problems with the wax motor (the thing that controls the door locking) control circuit.