This is relevant to nerds and technology how?

Some of us are eco-nerds.

Seriously. Planets and space habitats will need ecological engineering - the real stuff, not the eco-wacko knee-jerks.

Examinations of how this horrendously complex system works when tweaked are definitely "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters".

There are lots of different sorts of nerds, and lots of nerds geek out on many different technologies each. If you sometimes see nerd-fodder that isn't on one of YOUR subjects on Slashdot, suck it up and shut up, while the nerds of THAT topic finally get to have THEIR conversation.

We get enough of that disruptive raining-on-our-parade from the jocks.

Sure, and if they wanted to they could sell gasoline-powered cars, too.

Tesla is taking a shot at modernizing the car industry, and not just with their choice of powerplant. The dealer system made sense when you needed local expertise, but information is much easier to distribute today. Dealers are an anachronism -- and they know it, which is why they're fighting so hard to retain the regulatory restrictions on direct sales.

There are lots of practical reasons why Tesla doesn't want to go the franchise route, but besides all of those, it's just not where Tesla wants to go. They may fail. Saturn tried to buck the old model, too, not by eliminating dealerships but by enforcing tight rules on franchises and requiring a set-price sales model, and they ultimately failed, first falling back to the old model of jerking customers around, and then ultimately getting shut down entirely. Maybe Tesla will fail, too, but I don't think so, and I'm glad they're sticking to their guns.

That's a rather strong statement. Do you mean that they don't compete right now, or that they never can/will compete? Because your statement sounds like the latter, and I don't buy it. Central generation clearly can benefit from economies of scale, but distribution is enormously expensive, both in terms of infrastructure cost and power losses.

That the list contains people without convictions means that you can be added, and your sentence affected, by things you haven't been proven guilty of: Due Process Fail.

That stuck out like a big sore thumb to me. It's police and prosecutorial misconduct, pure and simple. (I'm appalled that this wasn't brought up until this far down in the discussion.)

Other items, just from the little bit quoted here:
  - 'people whom the D.A. considers "uncooperative witnesses,"'

One of the big differences between the US and English systems is that in the US you are NOT REQUIRED to risk your own life to do the police department's work by testifying about what you've seen. (You aren't allowed to lie, but you are allowed to be silent.) The police often can't, or won't, provide you with protection against criminal retaliation for your testimony, at the same time that they block you from obtaining or using the means to protect yourself. Don't want to be a martyr? Just say nothing.

But these guys are turning that principle on its head: If they decide you're an "uncooperative witness", into the database you go, to be harassed and minutely scrutinized from then on, threatened with arrest at any slip-up, treated differently, and far worse, than other citizens. That's selective enforcement at its worst, and denial of civil rights under cover of law.

Then there's "gang members". If some policeman don't happen to like you and the friends you hang out with, they he can define your group as a "gang", regardless of whether you've committed any crime, and treat you and your group as they would big-time repeat offenders. Any bets on whether this gets used against political opponents of the prosecutors' party?

You read wrong. HTTPS doesn't prevent advertising. I suppose it prevents ads injected by ISPs, etc., but very, very few ads that you see get there that way.

You've put your finger on the key point... corporate taxes are a way to hide taxes from taxpayers, so they don't realize just how much they're paying.

Personally, I think that's a bad thing, not a good one. People should know what they're paying so they can decide if they're getting good value for their money.

It's also extremely harmful to highly disaggregated supply chains and strongly rewards deep vertical integration. That's bad because it means supplies of materials that have multiple uses either get locked to a single use or else the companies that control those supplies become ideally-positioned to own huge swaths of the market. This is because if you tax revenue, the tax gets applied at every step in the supply chain. If it's a 5% tax and there are 10 steps in the chain (10 companies adding a bit of value and selling on to the next company in the chain, up until the last which sells to consumers), then the tax that must be build into the final price could be as high as 63%. In contrast, a company that buys up the entire supply chain only has to build a 5% tax into their prices. This translates into a huge competitive advantage for vertical integration.

I'm skeptical about the "not enough jobs" notion. We've seen at least three technology-driven revolutions that have wiped out nearly all the jobs that everyone worked pre-revolution... and yet each time we created all sorts of new jobs, many of which would have been either frivolous or completely inconcievable before the revolution.

In general, we're really, really bad at predicting the future. To me that says that while it makes sense to look forward and plan, we should be careful to avoid extremes, because odds are very, very good that our predictions are wrong, and therefore our plans are wrong.

People deciding not to pay to listen to you is far from the same thing as people silencing you.

Free speech means that you cannot be prevented from speaking your mind (within some limits, which Watson did not cross), but it in no way obligates people to listen to you, much less to pay you for the privilege of listening to you.

Well, assuming you don't know what "variation" and "median" mean, sure, why not call that a "yes"?

I can only assume from your response that you're a member of one of those "inferior" races, since if you were a member of the superior race you would recognize your own stupidity. Is there a racial analogue of the Dunning-Kruger effect... the stupidest races consider themselves the most competent?

My experience is that, regardless of country, the reporting of any news of which I have firsthand knowledge is wrong in all sorts of ways. Usually they get the gist right, but that's about it... and they don't always get that much right. I remind myself regularly that this cannot be an artifact related to my personal knowledge, but that all news reporting must be flawed.

Just take everything with a grain of salt. Or a pound.

The point is that the page rank algorithm just reflects the consensus of other sites on the web. If you don't like that consensus, you should take it up with all of those sources.

I'd even say there has been very little fundamentally new stuff for the last 100 years.

Depends on what area of technology, and what you consider "new" as opposed to a "technical refinement" or "manufacturing advance". Does the transistor count, or is that just an incremental improvement on vacuum tubes? The physics required to build, say, an iPhone were mostly understood by the 1920s, and I don't think there was any theoretical work suggesting that it was impossible. On the other hand, the concept of ubiquitous handheld multi-functional computing and communication devices connected by a global network containing nearly all human knowledge required levels of technology that couldn't even be guessed at.

If you consider the life sciences instead, our background knowledge is as far beyond 1920s biology as the iPhone is beyond the telegraph, and revolutionary discoveries and technical advances are still being made.

Boy? LOL.