In the past the arguments that mandated the franchise structure had at least a little bit of logic in that by there being a local presence, the service that the vehicle needed could be performed by representatives with corporate connections. Back then, cars needed a LOT of service; rockers needed their lash adjusted, points needed changing and distributors needed to be curved, and lot of parts wore out faster. The majority of those maintenance tasks were internal combustion engine related though, with only a few, like brakes, applying to today's modern 100% electric cars. When cars needed that kind of maintenance it was easy to argue that without dealer support, the end consumer would be screwed-over with an unmaintainable vehicle.

As gas-powered cars improved they need less dealer-support for basic service, that already weakens the dealer-franchise argument. The new 100% electric cars require even less service to begin with though, and with the onboard computers' ability to report-back to Tesla when readings get out of normal the car can self-report small problems before they become large ones, assuming that Tesla has done a good job of determining what to monitor. Teslas simply don't need as much maintenance, and most of the simple maintenance (brakes, tires, even HVAC) can probably be performed by existing independent shops that can bill Tesla to do the warranty work.

This is a paradigm shift, and dealers are going to start to feel the pain if they're unwilling to actually add value, and honestly, there's not a lot of value to add when they're mostly unnecessary in this shift.

Then it's not a school bus. It might look like a school bus, it might even once have been a school bus, but generally to be a school bus it needs to be used for the purposes of hauling students to and from school, or to be frequently used in that capacity.

And there's still nothing preventing them from changing their attitude and discontinuing support, especially when by getting their software in-use, it's easier to migrate to their platform with the existing type of software than it is to change types of software while remaining on the existing platform.

Sure they do. And because they demonstrate some physical prowess they're usually better able to attract the attention of girls, even if they don't really have anything else to offer at all. Think, "Glory Days," by Bruce Springsteen.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I found dating as an adult to be a hell of a lot easier than as a minor, as post-high-school one isn't in this weird microcosm where all types of individuals are represented in small numbers with cliques avoiding each other, instead in the real world one is able to self-sort into whatever subculture one wants and will generally find more numbers there. I guess I was lucky, I wasn't allowed to be excessively chauvinistic or otherwise pig-headed as I grew up, so I didn't have trouble behaving correctly around women once I found my own niche where I could meet them on more even terms.

By letting the pathetic behavior so common in boys playing with tech perpetuate, we foster a system that causes women to avoid tech even when they could be just as capable as the men are.

At the risk of being labelled "Troll", maybe that's not so bad. The folks with social skills move on to positions that require unscripted social interactions, the folks who are really good at the technical aspects of the job keep on doing their own thing.

If those positions really did include social aspects to them then maybe you'd have a case, but more often than not the differences are between entry-level, mid-level, and senior-level technical positions where the job doesn't supervise and doesn't report to people significantly higher up the org-chart.

I've also seen people put into supervisory roles that had no technical ability whatsoever, and had to consult their staff on every single decision that had to be made, to the point that it became buck-passing rather than a leader consulting the staff.

Actually, historically it was the Secretary of State that benefitted the most. Seeing VPs become President is a relatively recent occurrence with any real regularity, and even then, not all have managed to get two terms out of it.

...so they consider "embracing" the movement from within, with the potential to further fragment it by only supporting some distributions and by making their stuff hard to use on the distros that they can't influence, then they eventually discontinue support for that distro while showcasing their commercial product that does something not entirely unlike what was done through that distro before.

I'm sorry, how is sending humans to Venus, already a long flight, to experience conditions significantly different than those on Mars, going to help us more than say, sending a crew up to ISS for eight months, then transferring them to a craft to send them to the moon, to have them live on the moon for a few days or weeks, to then send them back to the station for eight months, to then send them back to earth?

We could send a rescue mission straight from Earth to the moon a hell of a lot faster than we could send one to Venus, and we already have experience with landing on and taking off from the moon, so developing craft to do that mission would be much easier, and could be part of a greater set of missions to the moon in general.

If we really want to test sending humans outside of the region of space protected by Earth's magnetic field, how about sending astronauts in a solar orbit, to end up at the moon? If we have existing lunar missions, we could even have a short-flight team waiting for them when they arrive, to study their physiology from the long duration flight and recovery in a lower-gravity environment, without those doing the study necessarily being subject to it themselves.

Experience has taught me that capability and knowledge takes a back-seat to being liked by the people making the personnel decisions. Drinking buddies, flirts, camping cliques, fellow sports fans, all move up faster than those that have the best technical knowledge.

Okay, a fundamental question then... What's the mission?

I don't see a mission for humans hovering over Venus. This isn't like a possible geology excavation on Mars where it might actually be easier if humans are on-site to direct or operate machines for specific applications.

I believe that humans should go explore space, but I also believe that with only finite resources and commitment to doing it, the effort should be focused on places where humans can actually be boots-on-the-ground to rove, to explore.

Honestly I don't think that this is viable, mainly because the airship is a pretty damn big single point of failure without an option to fail-safe, and if astronauts can't roam the surface of the planet then there's not a lot of benefit to sending humans as they'll effectively be cooped up inside of the craft the same as if they're traversing open space.

This isn't Empire Strikes Back, some glorious cloud-city.

Uh, you know that students are together for perhaps six hours a day, and that differing class schedules means that the students don't remain as a cohesive group for more than an hour at a time, right?

It isn't like we're putting them in barracks together.

Chrysler's minivans have been purpose-designed from the wheels-up, even when they shared drivetrain engineering with the K-cars. Having worked on, restored, and junked-out cars, I can state, definitively, that Chrysler's minivans share very little, outside of the drivetrain, with any of their other vehicles.

The Town and Country we last rented got around 27 miles per gallon. It handled just fine.

CUVs are often based on the mid or full-sized sedan from the company, with a mostly-same floor pan with height extended suspension to boost it up a bit.

A lot of the boys that become interested in computers also have problems relating to other people, epecially to girls their own ages. Given that they probably also don't have 'the right stuff' from the perspectives of a lot of the girls around them, they might become slightly embittered towards girls due to a lack of relationship success with them, and when these boys are grouped together, as it is cheaper to educate several students at once, the environment is generally hostile towards girls, so those girls that are actually intersted in computers are driven away both by their notions of the boys and by the boys own actions.

Unless you can find a way to break this cycle, I don't see anything else working as much more than a band-aid to the problem.

I'm actually in favor of gender-segregated junior high. Give the kids a chance to learn how to deal with their new hormones when there's not really much option to showboat for the other gender.

Plus the driver from the sedan service probably has a lot more experience and is paid to be professional, the car is well-maintained, and the company has proper commercial insurance. The fat guy in the prius may as well be, "ass, gas, or grass, no one rides for free."