That's because you're making two straw men and knocking them down. I guarantee you that folks like Alan Greyson on the left and Rand Paul on the right would support Tesla here and they're not the most extreme on either end - however, we're talking about super-corrupt NJ who still think bridgegate-Christie is a decent governor. You know, the one that gave out pieces of the 9/11 wreckage as political gifts to crony mayors (both Dem and GOP)?

Yeah, that's one corrupt state. I'm certainly not surprised they'd shut out Tesla, in favor of their political-machine-supporting good-op-boy network of car dealers and manufacturers.

In the end, it's all about the money, and NJ has a ton of money mucking with it's politics.

It's not *what*, it's *how* and *what for*. Microsoft had everything they ever wanted - complete dominion of the computer industry at the time. At the dawn of the millennium, no one made a move if they weren't sure Microsoft wouldn't or couldn't compete in that arena. A few years earlier, a stray remark from Ballmer brought the tech market stocks down 5% in a single day. They have everything to lose, and nothing to gain.

Apple, Google, and RIM were *hungry*. They each had a vision that didn't necessarily involve dominating the market and instead was more customer focused. They cared about the finer points of their customer's issues. They iterated rapidly.

Microsoft's attempt to grow the computer industry ran into their real desire to simply dominate what existed. If they couldn't dominate it they wouldn't grow it. And that attitude persisted for over a decade, so they became incapable of competing - they didn't have to for years. They still don't have to in their core markets. It's just that those markets don't comprise "all of computing" anymore.

What, WindowsPhone isn't good enough to qualify as that "3rd option"? Seriously, you can still get a blackberry, WinPhone or just a plain ol dumb phone that tethers really well (my TMO plan has free tethering) and run an iPod touch or equivalent.

Are you serious? It's a friggin hobby. You can wait a couple of days, hell, probably a couple of weeks without any real impact.

Sure, you can sell cables at outrageous markups, but honestly, those could be done without for a couple of nights unless you're an addict. It's very hard to compete with an online seller where the user can search, call, and/or chat with the vendor, and likely get it shipped the same or next day, with express delivery.

Retail does best when users don't know what they want, or want to be talked through their purchase (i.e., big ticket items do very well), but for people who know what they want, and don't need (or even want) to talk to someone to make a purchase, online is preferable.

I'm surprised they lasted this long - in fact, i remember seeing /. posts wondering how the hell they were making their margins with all this competitive pressure.

As long as the FIRE (finance, insurance, real-estate) economy rewards those who collect rents (literally and figuratively) over those who work to produce profit, we'll have these issues - the cost of having retail presence is not going down, and looks like it won't, absent another financial crisis when the government refuses to bail out the banks.

s/malicious crackers/the security state/

Well, disregard that, they're essentially the same thing.

1. Take some issue and blow it out of proportion
2. Get a pet legislator (preferably in an easily corruptible state) to introduce legislation mandating some feature or restriction
3. Introduce similar bills in the Federal space to "harmonize" the legal framework
5. ...
4. Suppression capabilities fully operational.

Source: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

This is what Zynga reported years ago (before the bloom went off their rose) [1] - this entire economy seems ... ripe for abuse as a mechanism for laundering money in my opinion. In Zynga's case, I told one of my friends who worked there that if I was an investor, I'd love to be funneling money to Zynga, while my stock represented 100x the value of whatever I "donated". That's just one use case, it could be used simply to launder money from "users" to "developers" (what if they're both the same) - going through an app store runs the money through an reasonably effective one-way function at a basic cost of 30% overhead.

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/ma...

No my beef is with Google/Android's weakness at letting users control their apps, I'll keep using my iPhone, thanks. While you look down on iOS users, you feel free to jump through all those wonderful hoops to lick the developer's boots or maybe I'll look down at you instead for simply rolling over and taking what the developers offer instead of taking control of your own device.

I gave actual examples of why I find Apple's privacy model better than Google's. Can you rebut that, or are you just going to go on about "Apple owning the user".

This just shows have zero understanding of basic economics. The lower hanging fruit is always the best bet unless you can justify that the more difficult is indeed far more profitable. And guess what - iPhone users are more valuable to advertisers and developers [1]... yet have only 1% of the malware. Nice try at sophistry.

[1] https://digiday.com/platforms/...

And that kind of attitude is why Android's privacy model is flawed. This puts the control of your options at the whim of the developer. Instead *you* should be able to disable the camera, or disallow access to your GPS for any given app. If I find out after the fact that I don't want an app to have access to that information, I shouldn't have to uninstall the whole app. Example: weather apps almost always (reasonably) ask for my location info. I deny them, because, I have all my locations already entered. They don't need to know where I've been, but I still like to get the forecast on my phone.

No, Blackberry got beat there, too, by Apple. You could just as well say "frozen OJ" is "concentrating on product". What matters isn't how hard you work, but what you're working on, and whether it has appeal.

Android being "open" and given away free to manufacturers and carriers wouldn't be worth a shit without their mimicking a successful design and adopting the iPhone look and feel. In 2006, Android devices being specced looked like a Blackberry copy, in 2008, they pivoted to become iPhone imitations.

If someone is still using Snow Leopard for software purposes, it's probably best done in a VM now. Lots of new features and performance in Lion and later assuming you have at least a 5 year old machine or later.

Where are you getting this information? I'd love to get a lower-end Tesla for cheaper...

Just as an aside, why didn't you buy a Tesla Model S? Lack of availability? Cost? Interested, as I'm in this stage where I'm considering my EV options.