If anyone should get 41 months, it's the ATT folks responsible for letting anyone with an IP address pull the private data out of a public server.

Coincidentally, 31% is how much I'd like to pay for my medical services, relative to my cost today.

How about not giving money to ISPs like that in the first place? Out here we have sonic.net, one of the last remaining great independent ISPs (especially since Speakeasy sold out). They treat their customers like adults, and on the rare occasion that I've needed technical support, a knowledgable real person answers the phone on the first ring.

(Disclaimer--no affiliation other than as satisfied customer, blah blah blah.)

I enumerated some of them above, in the comment you replied to. Are you actually suggesting that hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") has no external costs?

I can see this is going to be an intellectual debate...

Less severe than what? Sure, natural gas releases slightly less CO2 than, say, burning coal, but remember, the comparison was to wind, here.

Are you actually suggesting that no one has studied global warming before?

And by what means does that calculation include the external costs of burning fossil fuels such as natural gas, releasing CO2, and the hydraulic fracturing that made the gas artificially cheap to begin with?

This is conflating unrelated things (internal combustion holdouts with "cloud connecteness" and other user interface aspects).

Electric drive is coming, like it or not, and it's a great thing. As for the other, there are good and bad ways to execute, and it's healthy to be wary of change.

Software UI (a la what Tesla is shipping on the model S) can be a great thing, and there are also plenty of ways to do it poorly. I don't want to have to re-learn the controls every time the manufacturer hires a new UI designer and pushes out a software update, for example.

Ditto for connectivity. There are amazing applications for vehicle connectivity, and many that have not yet been conceived, but there's also a bad potential for orphaned products (dangerously close to "planned obsolescence"). Instead of losing content when a game service goes poof, you could lose a big piece of your car's functionality at the whim of the automaker (or a partner third party).

The NYT and Musk are both missing the point. EVs aren't well suited to road trips, and it doesn't matter because that kind of driving represents a tiny fraction of the driving we humans do. (Save your personal anecdotes to the contrary--they have no bearing on the facts.)

EVs can accomplish long distance travel if you're patient and determined, and Tesla's supercharger network has dramatically lowered the bar, but it still sucks, and fixating on it ignores all the aspects of EVs that are so much better than the alternatives.

Chelsea says it better than I can.

AT&T tried this on me, twice in five years. The first time was immediately after I accidentally launched the "browser" in my ancient Treo 650.

Each time a simple phone call was all that we needed to have them undo it. Annoying, yes, but probably not even on the top 20 list of things I hate about AT&T.

That's a long-winded way of saying that they're stopping a lot of people from running red lights. : )

Quoth TFS:

Where can I find a copy of that data? Without exception, the "studies" I've seen condemning red light cameras have been woefully biased and flawed. Even then, they often conclude that red light cameras "only" trade side impacts for rear impacts, which is actually very much a net win for safety, as the latter cause fewer and less-severe human injuries.

Many of the studies contain irritating circular references back to a handful of cases where suspect yellow timing was supposedly employed to increase revenue. While reprehensible if true, none of that would discredit red light cameras in general, but people generally dislike the cameras and are all-too-happy to suspend critical thinking.

Ultimately, safety-based arguments against cameras reduce to arguments against any red light enforcement. I'm a fan of evidence-based decision making, and there are plenty of reasons to be wary of the cameras (such as the fact that they are usually administered by private companies that also share in much of the revenue) but I call BS on the safety argument unless someone can produce some un-flimsy data.

Is there some explicit "no unlocking whatsoever" clause in the DMCA? As far as I'm aware, the only thing that's happened is that the explicit exemption for unlocking has expired. While I'm not volunteering to be the test case, it seems like there's a good case to be made that the generic DMCA language doesn't forbid unlocking.

In most cases, I'm not altering the software on the phone by unlocking it. I'm merely entering a code, and the phone already has software onboard specifically for the purpose of unlocking that phone when I enter said code.

...and that's a false dichotomy. No one is defending a need for incorrect or misleading comments.

I'm not impressed with "most people". 256k is a waste of bandwidth while still being a far cry from lossless. I can pack 60-70% more Vorbis tracks on my player, and the codec is entirely transparent on the portable player at those rates.

Good one; hadn't thought of that. All the more emphasis, then, on whether those mp3s are actually legal or not.