I actually consider the fact that Tesla continues to upgrade the software to be a bonus. There is of course the added minor risk that they will make a change that I don't like but the only example I've seen of that so far was the ride height change.

Mid Model changes is a valid complaint I suppose but it isn't unprecendented in the industry. I owned a 1985.5 944 once, which meant that every time I bought a part I had to double check to make sure it was the correct part. Hopefully as they improve their design skills we will see less and less of this. Currently though they are selling relatively few cars, so it isn't a big deal. As they sell more and more making these changes will become more costly for them and they'll cease to be so frequent. On the positive side the very nature of electric cars means that there are a lot less parts to wear out or break.

The Used market is of course much smaller than it is for ICE powered cars. But that will change with time as more are produced. And if Electric cars prove to last longer than ICE cars, other than eventual battery replacement, they may end up retaining value much better. There really isn't a whole lot to wear out on an electric car when you compare it to an ICE.

That's because they count hours differently. For Certificates the hour count is typically a real count of hours spend being instructed. In Colleges and such they count hours based on how many hours a week you spend in class, although there are a huge number of variations on this that differ a little.

That I said I went and looked up the requirements from the state for the Certification that I received. The actual state requirement is around 600 hours. The course that I attended though was done as part of my last two years of high school and amounted to over 2,000 hours of training. So I actually have two certificates, one for the Peace Officer Training and another from the school that is for all intents purposes my graduation certificate.

It is a pretty rigorous course all said. Most academies that teach it are dedicated to that purpose and have live in students for six months straight.

While open carry is largely legal in much of the US there are still places that it is usually illegal to take a firearm anyways. Banks, Federal buildings, and Bars are the three that I can think of right off the top of my head as usually prohibiting firearms by state or local ordinance.

And you are correct that ignorance does not grant a person new rights. However information is power and you don't have to have a "right" in order to have power that another lacks.

Well there is the obvious loss of potential productivity that others have pointed out. More directly though is the counseling that various friends, family and aquantances(sp) will partake in. I suppose that there is a whole hosts of costs, both real and imagined for a suicide.

I don't feel that any of that should outweigh a persons right to self determination as regards suicide. But I can see why a society would want to prevent it where possible.

"They have no more power than any normal citizen."

No always accurate. I spent some time as an armed guard when I was much younger. The State actually had a certification course for "Peace Officers" that weren't actually law enforcement officers. It required a couple thousand hours of classroom instruction and an actual exam in order to get the certificate. It didn't give you any actual powers per se but it did signify that you should be a lot more competent in regards to knowing the law. What it did do though was make it a lot easier to find work wherein you had a lot more responsibility. I ended up working for a company that owned a lot of commercial and residential properties, and was empowered to represent the owner when it came to stuff like tresspassing. That isn't a power that any other person wouldn't have if on their own property but the scope is obviously different when comparing a private home and several city blocks of commercial properties.

The only real extra "power" that I had as an armed guard was the additional certification to carry a sidearm, including while operating a vehicle. I'm not actually sure that it was legal to carry my sidearm a number of the places that I did, but I never had to find out because nobody questioned it at the time. Had I entered those places not as an armed guard but as civilian I would definitely have been stopped and probably arrested.

Our current liquid fuel transport system is not all that efficient. It is largely shipped via large semi trucks, which are definitely using up fuel to deliver fuel.

Despite constant improvements in the efficiency of electronic devices we are using more and more of it every year. We have to continually upgrade our grid infrastructure constantly regardless of whether or not cars are drawing power from it.

Ditto, I've never had a car that actually needed a Cat replacement. And I've driven my fair share of cars that were decades old and obviously still using original equipment.

It's a class issue all around. Just because a poor person can afford an inexpensive compter doesn't mean they will have the time and money to attend college. Degree's aren't strictly necessary but you need some combination of experience, education, and genius. A degree is something that is more and more considered a given for young adults from the middle class. Meanwhile the minorities that are frequently of the most concern when talking about diversity in the work place are over represented among the ranks of the poor.

I guess the bottom line is that just because you can afford the money for some technology doesn't mean you'll be rich enough in other critical resources to move past being simply a technology consumer.

What kind of fantasy bollocks is this?

There are certainly a lot more people living on the Earth today than in past millenia. But we also know how to sustain way more people on far less land than was necessary then. Remember world hunger problems are not actually a food production problem, it is a financial and political problem. In fact here in the US one of our more energy and land intensive crops to farm is subsidized heavily to prevent over production and we still turn a lot of it into Ethanol pretty much just for a feel good effort.

There may not be any unclaimed land left, but there is more than enough space to resettle every single coastal city futher inland. And that isn't even taking into account the extra land area that would be made more habitable in every way by the rising temperature.

Maybe we'll end up with wars between nations which have extra dry land and those that need to relocate entirely, but I don't see any reason that this has to be the case.

If you run out of battery juice the vehicle is likely to stop moving forward long before the gyro's spin down all the way. Besides which it would be trivially easy for them to implement a kill switch for motor power at some low battery level to make sure you still had enough power for control mechanisms and such.

Alexandria, Ohio.

Unmetered use could definitely lead to abuse I guess but how many people actually try and limit their use of water in serious ways to lower costs? Maybe I've just got really cheap water, but I've never given a crap about the cost of my water bill. My usage has stayed pretty much the same for nearly a decade and the cost is so low that I would have to halve my water usage to save the cost of a lunch. I don't water my lawn because I give nary a shit about my lawn and watering it would just mean having to cut it more frequently.

Anyways an easy way to help curb wasteful use could just be to install valves that automatically shut off whenever you surpass the authorized usage. Although I suppose that might cost just as much as metered billing to maintain.

I don't really know other than that they lost their police department and probably couldn't do much of anything for several years. We're talking a very small town, actually a Village by state law I believe.

Like I said though, bases in Afghanistan and Iraq are far more heavily fortified and protected than bases within the US. And the military simply does not have the resources to quickly and effectively defend those bases. Every military installation I've seen in the last decade has spent resources fortifying the gates a bit. But has largely ignored the miles of perimeter fencing. Even if the perimiter was well fortified most bases simply don't have the equipment you might need to defend it. Most of the armories I've seen had gear for maybe a few dozen troops.

In the case that a base is actually too hard to take seiging it is perfectly acceptable. If all the bases are effectively seiged or overrun where exactly are you going to fly in the resources you need from? In the guerrilla wars of this century we've never had to fight an enemy that numbered more than in the thousands or tens of thousands, in countries of about 32 million each. In the USA you'd probably be facing millions of enemy combatants among a population of more than 320 million.

A small town where I grew up was infamous in the area for always having a cop hiding in the immediate vicinity of a 25mph speed limit sign. They would ticket anybody and everybody that was going above the limit when they passed that sign. It was well known that the only reason they could have a police department at all was that speed trap, and it was their main source of revenue for the town. That went on for more than a decade until one day they ticketed the wrong person, he turned out to be a lawyer that knew state traffic laws pretty well. He recognized that they had illegally reduced the speed limit on a state route. the law being they couldn't lower it below 35 without an extenuating circumstance like the presence of a school. So he took them to court and forced them to repay over a decades worth of speeding ticket revenue. He managed to completely bankrupt the town government and no one has to fear a speed trap there anymore.

There is a city about an hour away from where I live now that has a reputation for speed trapping though they haven't done anything illegal that I can tell. They've just lowered the speed limit on a 15 mile stretch of interstate from 70 to 55, for no apparent reason other than to have a ready supply of speeders whenever they want. I have to drive through there periodically and I refuse to stop and conduct any business in their municipality. And I go out of my way to bring up the whole thing whenever someone mentions that town.