Aside from the fairly obvious point that Tesla is going to stay relatively niche if they can't deliver something cheaper, how does any of this make sense?

So, Tesla is the niche-elitist-greenies car because it costs too much; but it doesn't want to 'play by the rules' because those rules would involve an expensive physical buildout and/or sharing profits with a lot of middlemen.

At best, these are two unrelated issues (Tesla's product line vs. their distribution model). At worst, this is internally contradictory nonsense: Tesla is too expensive; but doomed to be niche because they won't embrace a sales model that would make their product even more expensive? How does that work? If the product comes off the line too expensive, any additional friction on the way to the customer isn't going to help.

I wouldn't bet on it, at least not in the near to medium term. Car dealers have a surprising amount of local and state clout and skew heavily republican.

They aren't terribly popular, nor is catering to them a matter of principle(aside from the principle of scratching the backs of those who scratch yours); but crossing them is something that will be rather uncomfortable unless the pressure becomes inevitable enough that they can be deserted by more or less all their allies, all at once.

The idea that things would be fundamentally different because the internet was always rather silly(if any technology can claim to have fundamentally changed language it would probably be writing; but aside from that pickings are somewhat slim); but some less extreme variants are more plausible: the internet certainly has changed who it is cheap and easy to speak to relatively frequently, though not as much as either its biggest friends or its biggest detractors may have expected.

You do realize that the coinage of new words(indeed, more than a few new languages) predates whatever goofy persecution complex you've worked yourself into by millenia, right?

I suspect that the details differ(probably enough that what I'm about to say will cause any subject-matter-expert to want to punch me); but the third rail contact is essentially a consumable, like a heroic-scale version of the 'brushes' used in electric motors(except the brushless ones, obviously).

The material immediately below the leaf is going to be a steel rail, which takes some work to get burning; but this would seem to be a concern if the tracks have some leaves on them; but also leaves/brush/grass/trash/etc. gathered around the tracks themselves. Ablating a thin layer of leaf from a big chunk of steel isn't so bad; but you only have to get unlucky occasionally for bits of burning leaf to fall from the clearance site and land in something suitably tindery and start a decent little fire.

Maybe I'm just a terrible person whose sense of childlike wonder and love of lasers has shriveled; but isn't 'clearing leaves' the sort of job where a simple nozzle blowing compressed air(turned on and off based on sensor input if it turns out that you can implement a sensor system at lower cost than just running the compressor a bit more often) at the track immediately in front of the wheels would be more than adequate for the purpose?

My understanding is that some trains even have a compressed air supply already(for pneumatic braking and sundry other duties), and all trains, since they have to move, are going to have a fairly burly supply of either mechanical or electrical energy to run a compressor. Much simpler and likely more durable than a laser and optics high-powered enough for debris clearing, and less likely to cause amusing track fires.

Am I missing something here, or did somebody just fail to KISS?

I'm not sure how this is related to HTTPS. Are you saying that Verizon was previously running a transparent proxy that automatically munged the sites you browsed and made them smaller? Have you excluded the likelihood that they've just gotten even fatter over time?

Much of the daily-headlines stuff isn't encrypted anyway; but, even if it is, it is entirely possible to proxy, modify, and otherwise manipulate in-transit HTTPS traffic as long as your client(s) trust your proxy as a CA. It's not pretty; but it's entirely doable(and more than a few corporate firewall boxes do exactly that, with devices on the LAN side configured to trust them). If you want a box-in-the-middle to strip your morning headlines into lyxnvision, HTTPS isn't stopping you.

Some of them are even worse than advertising; but, yeah, "value-added services" is weasel speak for all the ghastly things that your telco would like to do to your perfectly good dumb pipe in order to charge you more for it. (In the same way that the recently revealed custom of injecting tracking IDs into the HTTP headers of traffic passing over some providers', like Verizon's, mobile data networks is called "HTTP Header Enrichment".)

Breaking that shit isn't a cost of HTTPS, it's one of the major reasons to use it.

There are certainly costs associated with ruggedizing things; but those ruggedization costs apply to any laptop(so if it's more expensive than a chromebook now the ruggedized version is going to be more expensive than the ruggedized chromebook); and there have been a variety of education-focused semi-rugged designs in cost-sensitive areas before.

Back when 'netbooks' were a thing, for instance, Dell had the Latitude 2100, 2110 and 2120, which were utterly standard netbooks in basically all respects; but more expensive and with thicker, rubberized outer shells and compatibility with the standard Dell AC adapter. They cost substantially more than consumer netbooks, as much as some cheap 'n nasty 15 inch units; but pretty much the only way to kill them was to tear off their keys often enough that replacements became uneconomic.

The journal "Nature" is indeed very likely. The various Nature Publishing Group journals, though, are a much longer list and a much more expensive one; and some of those are also pretty prominent and likely to contain things of interest that Nature the journal doesn't.

I don't see why his statements would even be seen as contradictory: He said that humanity needs to spread into space if it wants to up its survival chances. It's pretty hard to argue with that(though you don't have to see that as important), keeping all your eggs in one gravity well isn't a good diversification strategy.

Now he says that a strong AI could threaten humanity's continued existence. This hardly seems implausible: something that is smarter than us and needs resources does seem likely to be a potentially bad neighbor. Opinions vary widely on how purely theoretical this concern is, given AI research's stellar record; but it's not exactly a terribly radical position.

Unless this hypothetical AI is singularly focused on some inscrutable but unobtrusive goal, or so vastly intelligent that various inconvenient physical laws are cleverly bent, I'm not sure why 'ignored' would even be on the table.

I'm not saying that an AI would have to immediately either glom on to us and try to understand what it means to love, or build an army of hunter/killer murderbots; computers require space, supplies of construction materials, and energy; and so do we. Again, barring some post-scarcity breakthrough that our teeny hominid minds can barely imagine, where the AI goes merrily off and builds a dyson hypersphere of sentient computronium powered by the emissions of the galactic core, there isn't too much room for expansion before either the AI faces brownouts and a lack of hardware upgrades or we start getting squeezed to make room.

You don't have to feel strongly about somebody to exterminate them, if you both need the same resources.

Thanks for the clarification: do you know if the type certification can be handled as part of the process you'd go through for a Part 15 'incidental radiator' (or local equivalent) or does having an active radio, even a pre-approved module just tacked on to an internal USB or serial header or similar, always mean greater scrutiny than a mere electronic device?

There certainly is some terrifying dodgy stuff on the market(you don't even have to fleabay it yourself, plenty of the slightly downmarket stuff in your average big box store or mall may or may not have been properly looked over, 900MHz analog baby monitors used to be great fun, along with analog video blasters).

I'd also be curious to know if South Korea's location makes them more nervous than usual. I've been told that the Israelis' FCC-alike can be pretty sensitive because the country is hours from people who hate their guts on essentially all sides, so if a device might interfere with radar systems that is considered to be A Problem. Korea at least only has a major problem in one direction; but there may well be some RF gear that is taken pretty seriously because of that.

I was mostly quibbling; because there really isn't much you can do when in the presence of such staggering hubris. "Yeah, our business is basically selling scientists' work to themselves and getting paid coming and going while people beg for access. Anyone who opposes this is probably a commie who hates all knowledge."

They aren't as big, thankfully; but they do a pretty good job of making the financial services sector look downright humble, hardworking, honest, and useful.