What does movement have to do with anything? Do you even know what torque is? Here, let me help you with that. In a nutshell, it's force. There's all kinds of forces in the world that don't result in movement. Lucky for you. You're sitting in a chair, aren't you? Demonstrating an instance of force without movement all by yourself. Amazing, isn't it. Forces get applied before movement starts.

Tesla P85D 0-60 mph 3.2 s
Audi S8 0-60 mph 3.9 s
Yes, the sports cars can beat it. It's a SEDAN. A five door liftback sedan. For crying out loud... And for the record, the curb weight of the Audi is 4685 lbs. The curb weight of the Model S is 4647 lbs. The Model S is lighter than the gasoline car in the same class and price bracket.

Really? Truly? Sorry, those links are probably too hard for you. They require you to calculate the efficiencies yourself by dividing. Here, let me help you.

2012 Coal 33.8%
2012 Internal Combustion 32.8%

Coal is more efficient. Not a lot, but it is. It's definitely not radically worse, or even slightly worse. So shifting from petroleum to coal for transportation is a gain, made better by the fact below about the efficiency of electric motors in transportation applications.

Really? I guess you haven't made it to high school yet. I'll just describe the graph for those who won't follow the link. At 10% load the tested 25 horse power premium efficiency motor hits 80% efficiency. At 40% load, it hits 97% efficiency and it never drops below that, all the way out to 160% of its rated load.

My infernal combustion car is 14 years old, thanks. Right now, if you care about pollution, and can afford the gasoline-competitive electric cars (either of them), you can also afford to cover your roof in solar panels from one end to the other. I can't, just yet, but someday I will. At which point I won't care what "industrial power production" is doing.

I replied with links. With numbers. You didn't. You should stop typing now.

And watch how the posting counts on Slashdot stories are triple that of Tesla stories, with the most vicious pro-electric commenting and moderation you've ever seen. It'll make Tesla supporters look like lazy, staid, boring old people. You hear me? OLD PEOPLE!

Everybody will HAVE to have the new hotness. If they don't, they'll just DIE.

Obviously you have never actually looked at the Model S specifications. The performance edition of the all wheel drive version has 691 horsepower. The rear motor alone has 443 ft lb of torque at zero RPMs. Can you get a more powerful internal combustion engine? Sure. But where? The 2015 Corvette tops out at 650 horsepower. The 2015 Mustang tops out at 435. The 2015 Camero tops out at 580. And none of those seat 7. The 2015 Cadillac XTS tops out at 410 horsepower. The 2015 Cadillac CTS tops out at 420. The 2015 Audi S8 tops out at 520 horsepower and it is NOT cheaper than a Model S.

And then in the same paragraph, you start talking about efficiency. You do realize that high performance and high efficiency simultaneously is ONLY possible in electric vehicles? Internal combustion can't do it. When you punch an electric motor, it stay 98% efficient. When you punch an internal combustion engine, its already miserable efficiency drops into the single digits. When an electric vehicle recharges, it's power source is NOT being pushed to the performance limit. It continues to operate at its best efficiency.

Most importantly, the energy source to recharge an electric vehicle is 100% fungible. If you live near a nuclear power plant, recharging your car is already producing 0 CO2. Zero. None. That is never possible for your fossil fuel car no matter how efficient your car gets. It will ALWAYS produce more than zero CO2. Build more nuclear power plants, or solar plants, or windmills, or all of the above, and the more electric cars there are, the less CO2 is produced by transportation. That's physically impossible with a fossil fuel fleet.

You must try really hard to be wrong about literally everything you said.

My money is on the raccoons. They already have the opposable thumbs.

It was a little weak, I admit. My muse failed me, what can I say.

In the case of the ongoing collapse formerly known as SOE, they buy it for the trademarks and copyrights. Watch for bastardized bundles of patheticness bearing the EverQuest name showing up on mobile phones by this time next year.

In the case of Nokia, that was done for the purpose of utterly eliminating and destroying a Windows Phone competitor, in the certain knowledge that Windows can and does "succeed" when it has no surviving rivals. Because they've done it before.

It was Ballmer being Ballmer, doing the only thing he knows how to do. He is, was, and ever shall be a monopolist, and he only knows the plays of a monopolist. The fact that he can not treat Samsung and Apple the same way no doubt wrankled in his sodden breast, but he took some solace in extorting patent royalties for every Android-equipped device.

It's inexplicable to anyone as innocent as yourself, who thinks all that guff he was fed in school about playing fair, and level playing fields, and value for money, and benefiting the customer is actually real. It isn't. None of it is, as exhibited by the behavior of every large multinational corporation, which are universally dominated by sociopaths. Those phrases are for other people, to such minds.

It's easy to understand, as long as you can understand a certain special kind of insanity.

And the one before him and the one before him, right back to.... Reagan! Mr. Deficit Spender himself. Practically invented it in the modern era.

So, yeah. Really? Reaganomics? Why is the trickle on my head yellow?

When the Air Force says, "You can land anywhere you want, except you can't land here, and you can't land here until you land somewhere else," you build a barge and take your chances with the waves.

Unlikely. MBAs persist in the foolish belief that programmers are fungible, short term. The former SOE has 100% software products. The MBA is going to lay off everybody who knows anything about those products, hire a bunch of Chinese engineers, and wonder why the next 4 projects fail.

Or possibly they've just decided that EverQuest should be a trading card game. Fronted by a cartoon.

When encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will have encryption!

When privacy is outlawed, only oligarchs will have privacy!

When free speech is outlawed, Tor is "an anonymous network to commit crimes"!

And last but not least...

In Soviet Russia, VPN watches you!

Completely false, but necessary for collecting all of those Emmys.

SpaceX may build a local radar site for the launch site itself, but you can bet the Air Force will still be involved, since the launch trajectory for equatorial orbits crosses Florida. It's unlikely that purely FAA-run radars will be considered acceptable for covering rocket launches any time soon, if they ever are. Their mode of operation is such that they don't provide updates quickly enough to be useful during an orbital launch, and it doesn't seem likely that the FAA will want to change that.

Nobody has yet been mad enough to suggest that a private company should have sole responsibility for tracking their own ICBM-ish vehicles.

SpaceX is quite good at giving launch times in UTC in their own press materials. They tend to run their software systems in UTC too, since there's no point in trying to use a "local" timezone for a vehicle that is going to be crossing multiple timezones in a few minutes. It's just the press who are lazy about it. The SpaceX webcast page just gives a countdown in hours and minutes on the day of a launch, so you don't have to do the math yourself.

Considering how far out it is, the entire hemisphere facing the sun should be able to receive its signal. Can the hams among us tell us if it's feasible for an individual to receive and decode the signal directly? Without falling afoul of dish size restrictions?

Well no, nobody in the world burns the animal alive on the barbeque. The animal starts out dead. Burning alive is something humans reserve for other humans.