No, besides disliking competition in general, auto dealers and car makers have two big reasons to try to block Tesla sales

• - Tesla sells high-priced cars, competing with the other high-priced high-profit-margin cars that dealers like to sell. They wouldn't be as worried about threats to the low-profit-margin econobox sales.
• - They also threaten the whole business model that US car dealers have, affecting who gets what cut of the car buyer's money. This may bother the manufacturers less than the dealer, but it still upsets the whole value chain, especially if those evil Tesla car buyers then resell their old cars on Craigslist or some other Internet site instead of trading it in at the dealer or at least selling it to a used car lot.

I'd expect most of them are sensors for the various battery and motor things, or components to connect the sensors safely to the other electronics (opto-isolators, etc. to keep potentially high random voltages and currents from frying the whole system.) Once you've turned the analog data into bits, even with small-volume production it'd be fairly easy to use an FPGA or programmable microcontrollers to do the rest, rather than building lots of custom discrete parts.

My Garmin Nuvi had some cool features that depended on 2G, like using Google search instead of just built-in, and also checking movies, weather, etc. It also used that to get traffic data, instead of whatever other traffic data services are available. Now the 2G wireless is going away, since the carrier won't renew the contract, so there's no more traffic data :-( But at least it's a separate GPS, so I could replace it if I wanted to. (Instead, I use the AM radio you dislike to listen to Traffic Every 10 Minutes Radio.)

When the satellite XM radio free-with-new-car subscription on my current car ran out, no problem, that just meant there was one button on the dashboard that was no longer useful; the most likely interface to become obsolete is the Bluetooth cellphone support. There'd be a lot more risk of obsolescence if I'd gotten the hopelessly-overpriced navigation/radio/etc. console only that came with the fancy trim package (which also had the bigger engine that I didn't want, and the spare tire I really did need, and pushbutton combination door lock I'd also have liked.) While I like having a remote-control door lock, which is probably already insecure, it's built in to the keys, which means I have to carry a big clunky not-waterproof key system with me instead of a probably-waterproof slightly clunky RFID key like my wife's car has or a simple key like older cars - really annoying when I'm going surfing.

Digital speedometers might be lying; analog speedometers also might be lying, especially if there's a problem with the cable, or you've put on different sized tires.

Forgot to add ObXKCD

Look at this Kitteh! Just look at it! (For small/medium/large values of Kitteh.)

Mexican history considers Santa Ana to be one of their least competent generals over the years. But after he lost, the US rejected his initial peace proposals, which would not only have given the invaders the land they got, but also the states of Sonora and Chihuahua. While they were officially Mexican territory at the time, the local Native Americans had other opinions about whether they were interested in being run by the Spanish or Mexican colonialists, and groups like the Apaches and Comanches wouldn't have been much more cooperative to the US than they were to the Mexicans.

Any argument that only has two sides is a boring and overly limited view of reality. Texas was part of Mexico at the time, and there were a bunch of illegal immigrant gringos who came in and wanted to be able to own slaves.

But separately from that, during the various wars in Europe in the early-mid 1800s, there were a lot of German immigrants who moved to Texas and the rest of Northern Mexico. The Texas German dialect is dying out, but you'll still see a lot of German culture in places like New Braunfels, some of the cooking in San Antonio, and a lot of mariachi music is strongly German oompah-band stuff.

Perpetual Motion violates the laws of physics - can't be done, so any patent application is bogus, either wrong or fraudulent, not worth wasting time on.*

Cold Fusion might or might not be possible - the scientific community at large hasn't seen a valid description of the physics or chemistry, and without somebody understanding the science, it's extremely unlikely that they'll engineer a successful implementation by tinkering around, and unlikely that somebody who's keeping the science a "trade secret" has actually done real science, as opposed to waving their hands around in ways that seem pleasing to their scientifically untrained eye, and the mere fact that they haven't blown themselves up isn't proof that it works.

* ("Free energy" is a different case - it usually refers to quackery, but sometimes is used to refer to things like taking advantage of heat differences in the ocean or earth or other things that you might be able to engineer usefully into a long-term economically viable power source, but probably can't.)

I've read too many articles like this recently to keep track of who said what, but one of them pointed out that women especially get attacked by trolls when they're starting to become well-known and people are listening to their opinions. Kathy Sierra, for instance, started the Head First line of programming books, which I found useful, and got enough sexist trolling that she left the business. It's happened to other authors I know as well. And of course there are the trolls who hate having women in gaming.

As a guy in my 50s who now needs reading glasses, I'm finding digital displays increasingly frustrating, especially small cheap LCDs that aren't very distinct unless you're looking at them from straight on. I much prefer digital clocks, but if you can't tell a 3 from an 8 or 0 or a 1 from a 7, they're not very useful, and it's almost always easy to tell the big hand from the little hand. Similarly with digital meters, big numbers with fat segments are still easy to read, small skinny ones aren't.

It's not so much a flying car as an airplane that you can also drive. It's useful if you're a private pilot and want to be able to fly to a small airport and drive your plane from there instead of renting one. But it's still airplane physics, not cartoon physics, so you still need to take off from an airport instead of from your driveway like the Jetsons Flying Car my generation always wanted.

Any bets on when the first one gets to Burning Man?

The Constitution actually gave the slave states Congressional representation counting 2/3 of a person for slaves, even though the slaves didn't get the right to vote. It was a compromise between the Southerners who wanted to get 100% representation and the Northerners who mostly didn't want them counted at all. Effectively, it meant that a Southern white man's vote counted more than a free state man's vote, because it took fewer Southern whites to get a Congressman.

No, the point of being a telecom company is to connect your customers together, move their data where they want it efficiently, and get them to pay you for it. Telecom workloads not only include digging ditches for your access line and running wavelength division multiplexors across them, they also include things like routing IPv4/IPv6, firewalls, load balancing, intrusion detection, preventing and mitigating DDOS, hosting CDNs, routing lots of private networks that all run RFC1918 addresses and maybe VLANs, MPLS, maintaining really large BGP tables, fast rerouting around failures, etc.

We're virtualizing that stuff instead of buying big expensive custom-built routers for the same reasons you're virtualizing your compute loads instead of stacking up lots of 1U machines. Internet-scale routers are blazingly expensive, and we want to use Moore's Law to do the compute-bound parts of the workload cheaply and efficiently and let us build new services quickly because we only have to upgrade the software, while using expensive custom hardware only for the things that really need it, plus a lot of that hardware is getting replaced by things like Openflow switches and SDN, which we'd like to take advantage of, and buying expensive dedicated-purpose hardware means you're often stuck overbuilding because the scale of your different types of workloads changes faster than you can redesign hardware.

Also, the transition of lots of enterprise corporate computing from traditional data center structures to clouds means that the communication patterns change a lot faster, and we need to keep up with them. This stuff does seem to be driven a lot more by the needs of the users (telecom and data center) than by the manufacturers of virtualization software or traditional hardware.

And yes, every bit of business buzzword bingo does flow across our desks.