The problem is that Tesla promotes the car as a "0 emissions" vehicle, as if it runs on unicorn farts and pixie dust. While it certainly produces less CO2 than a gasoline vehicle, most of the coal plants in the US are notoriously filthy beasts and you can feel free to Google what other not-so-nice stuff comes out the business end of a coal plant.

Unless you're a tree hugger, the big selling point of an electric car is that it saves you money on gas. Right now, the Leaf is still too expensive and range-limited to attract the penny pinches, who will likely just gravitate towards an inexpensive gasoline car like the Nissan Versa, Hyundai Accent, Chevy Spark, etc.

The people who are buying the Tesla are doing so because it's a high-end boutique brand, as you said. It's a status symbol to show that you are successful enough to drop $50k on a car. Kinda like the same reason people pay $1.5k for Google Glass. Of course, if you do find yourself with a bunch of disposable income and can't decide between the two, I strongly recommend skipping Google Glass - the Model S is significantly more likely to get you laid.

Because, if you can afford a Tesla Model S, you can afford the gas for anything short of a Sherman tank (roughly 1.2 gallons per mile). Gas is still king for availability and speed of "recharging" your energy storage.

I realize people can't be bothered to do a Google search, but the USA has had a national IMEI blacklist since October 31st, 2012. See this CTIA press release. It's also not difficult to check if a phone is blacklisted, this site is one place that does ESN/IMEI checks for free.

We've lived with this situation long enough to know what the outcome has been. People still steal phones because they have value as parts. Also, they're bought up by scammers that re-sell them to people on Craigslist who don't know any better. It's also worth mentioning not all of these phones are stolen, it's generally a mix of phones that were lost, traded in without disabling the phone's lock, insurance fraud and some that are blocked by the carrier for a defaulted payment plan or wireless contract.

There's absolutely nothing stopping a criminal from forcing the person they're mugging to sign out/disable a phone's locking feature. Apple even has a helpful guide (ostensibly for people looking to give away, trade-in or resell their old iDevice) explaining the process. Are you really going to tell a criminal "no" when they've got a gun pointed at you? If your city has a mugging problem, then something needs to be done about the crime. If it's not cell phones, it will be good, old fashioned wallets, purses and jewelry.

Maybe they're just saving fire warnings for iOS 8.

Unlike personal computing, cell phones or flat panel televisions, electric cars are not a new technology. They have been around in one form or another, since the 1880s. Vehicle body construction and electric motor design are both very well understood disciplines, as most advances in these areas had significant applications outside their use in electric cars.

The technological limitation that's holding back electric cars has always been a lack of energy density in the batteries. Fixing that would be a holy grail for a number of different industries (imagine a smartphone that can last an entire week of heavy usage before needing to be recharged). Now, maybe it would be admirable if Tesla was fleecing the rich and dumping all the money back into battery R&D - but they're not. Elon has even said they're not much interested in pursuing fuel cell technology. They're buying off-the-shelf batteries from the same suppliers that build batteries for the rest of the portable electronics industry. Since batteries are a resource intensive product (they're made from commodity materials that must be mined and processed), there is always going to be a fixed cost associated with their production. Here's a free hint: more electric cars being sold will only put more demand on battery manufacturers, and I don't have to explain how supply and demand works.

Apple's products are affordable to a family making an average middle class budget. The fact that anyone considers Apple to be a high-end manufacturer with products that are a status symbol is just clever marketing. It's not uncommon to go to Walmart (yeah, those of us who didn't make a fortune on Bitcoins still need to eat), and see someone paying with EBT while texting/yapping away on an iPhone. On the other hand, a Tesla model S is 1/3rd to 1/4th the cost of the average American home and about equally as expensive as a low-end manufactured home.

Tesla's cars actually are just a status symbol. They're truly only affordable to people who otherwise would have no trouble buying gasoline and want the warm fuzzy feeling (or the arrogant smugness) that comes from knowing your car is running on 32% less fossil fuel than everyone else's 100% dinosaur burners.

Also, per percentage of fires per number of units sold, Apple's products are significantly less likely to spontaneously catch fire. Hey don't flame me, it's actually true.

Please forgive my ignorance, as I've never had a need to buy contraband online, but why does Silk Road hold users' Bitcoins? My understanding was that the point of Bitcoin was ostensibly to enable users to send and receive money without going through a payment processing entity. I'd assume Silk Road is acting like some sort of escrow, where a buyer has to confirm that the seller made good on their end before releasing funds, but in an "anonymous" marketplace you're just as likely to be screwed by scams on either end of a transaction. Hell, on eBay I've had my fair share of buyers who filed fraudulent chargebacks and "not as described" claims and they all ended up being covered by PayPal's seller protection or postal insurance. I can only imagine how bad things must be when you're dealing with shady types.

If you ask me, it's the same shit in a different package. Throughout most of early history, man had a pretty bad understanding of scientific principles and "God made everything" was an answer that fit what was observable at the time. As advances in scientific understanding were made, we've come up with theories as to why we're here that are have a higher likelyhood of being true based on observations (the Big Bang, for example). It's also just as likely we were observing some advance's alien race's fireworks show that predated our known universe, but just because that fits the observation, does not mean it's true.

For example, if I put you in a completely darkened room and you heard meowing, would you know for absolute certain that there was a cat in the room? It could've been a recording of a cat, a person making a meow noise or even a parrot that was trained to meow. You could've said that "I heard a cat, so there is a cat in the room." and it would've fit your observation, but it could still be entirely incorrect. Likewise, these scientists may believe "the universe is a simulation" fits their observations. Just remember, until you can turn on the lights and see for sure - all that meows may not be a cat.

So, it's an "external combustion" car? I see what you did there, Mr. Musk.

The gist of what I get from Slashdot lately is that if you made a fortune on Bitcoin before MtGox crashed, don't spend it on a Model S because your earnings will burn like your eyes when you look at the beta.

As others have stated, this is exactly how Apple's iCloud lock works. If the owner of the device remotely locks it or it is factory reset through iTunes, it will be useless except for displaying a screen prompting for the owner's Apple ID and password. So far, all it has really accomplished is giving some extra headache to businesses that accept phone trade-ins and slightly lowering the value of lost/stolen iDevices on eBay. We also already have a national IMEI blacklist, which mostly seems to have succeeded only in increasing the number of scam artists re-selling unusable phones to gullible people (in most cases, they're generally not stolen - the sleazy cell phone companies here in the US are happy to block a phone's serial number if the phone was associated with a service contract or handset financing plan and the previous owner defaulted on it).

Besides, what's to stop a thief from taking a page out of the trade-in services' books and simply demanding you turn off/sign out of your phone's remote kill switch feature? If they're threatening someone at gun/knife point, it's not exactly like the victim would have much choice in the matter.

If people are being robbed, your city has a crime problem that needs to be solved with good, old fashioned police work.

Clearly, this was the work of the devil. He's pure evil, so clearly he has no problem with "downloading" a few cars!

Google's and Bing's image search return completely different photos with "safe search" disabled. Of course, Google's explanation is that you have to explicitly search using pornographic terms if you want porn to be included in the results. IMHO, their image search censorship makes their results broken, since they do not accurately depict the content of the Internet (which we all know, is for porn).

Sure, it sounds like I'm a troll spouting a line of scroogled pro-Microsoft BS, but I honestly just feel it's a sad state of affairs for online freedom when Microsoft is the company with the balls to let people search for fapping material and Apple actually sees something wrong with letting a mobile app developer have access to every piece of personal information on your phone.

A fiat currency derives its value from the faith placed in the entity that issued it. The US government, for example, has an undeniably substantial role in the global economic market. Bitcoin has no central issuing authority and plays no crucial role in any major economic system. Bitcoin is not a commodity, either. As they exist as an intangible concept, they have no intrinsic value (whereas physical coins can be melted for scrap). Their scarcity is also an artificial constraint, as the numerous "alt coins" that have sprung up have demonstrated.

1BTC is worth X amount of USD for the same reason Justin Bieber is presently "popular". Bitcoin is the current pop idol of the crypto currency scene. However, the will of the mob is a fickle thing and history has shown, popularity can vaporize almost overnight.

Apple recently pulled all Bitcoin wallet apps from the app store and it doesn't take a genius to see where this is heading...

This was the scene today at Mt. Gox as people frantically tried to withdraw their Bitcoins. Err, no wait, that's a scene from Mary Poppins. Seemed legit.