Have you ever tried to reason with a 3-year old? There are times when the "Argument from Because I Said So" is literally the only option left. Finer points of logic are completely lost on a person with an undeveloped frontal lobe who is in the middle of a temper tantrum.

Right, but if your company comes up with an elegant solution that gets 10x better performance out of a given piece of hardware, and your competitors cannot (or do not) do the same, then you've got a cost advantage over your competitors and can use that to get customers to choose to buy your product rather than theirs.

That will always be true, no matter how fast and cheap the hardware gets. Either your customers will be able to do 10 times more work with your product, or (if there isn't 10 times more work to actually do), they can get the job done with 10 times less hardware (and thus 10 times less expense).

There is a whole world of software out there that runs in the background and doesn't require much (if any) UX. Think of the software that generates your credit card statement every month.

That suggests a possible YouTube advertising model -- you start the video and a 30-second ad pops up, along with a "click here to pay 10 cents to make this ad go away right now" button.

I wonder how many people would click the button?

I think the government has a legitimate national security interest in developing a transportation system that does not completely grind to a halt the day someone sets off a few nukes in the major oil-producing areas of the world.

Hybrid and electric technology is what could make the difference between an event like that being a serious problem and it being a complete disaster.

There's also the small issue of global warming; I think the government also has a legitimate interest in keeping Miami above water and crops growing in California.

Why stop there? Let's burn all the coal today, and thereby reduce CO2 emissions to zero in the long run!

Less facetiously, I agree that improving peoples' quality of life to reduce population growth is a good idea. However, I think we can find better energy sources than coal with which to make that happen.

I used to think the same way; now I realize that I was too optimistic. All of the consequences you mentioned above have already happened, and it hasn't been enough.

My new prediction is: people will still be denying global warming even as they are bailing water out of their living rooms.

Ever since web browsers started enabling auto-correct, Internet comments have become very surreal.

Despite what you may have heard, it was never about who is "superior" -- that's a deliberate misrepresentation and a distraction put forward by people who prefer to criticize other people (which is easy and fun) rather than to confront the actual problem (which is difficult and expensive).

If you were on a boat in the middle of the ocean, and the boat was leaking, and someone suggested that the leak should be fixed as quickly as possible, would you call that "changing the subject"?

Of course the entire point of this article (and others like it) is to give right-wingers are an excuse to feel superior to "those hypocrites on the left". So let's not get too self-congratulatory about our own ethical honesty, shall we? It amounts to the same thing in the end.

The thing is, there is a difficult problem to be solved. Finger-pointing and denunciations aren't going to solve it. Expecting the bulk of humanity to spontaneously reduce their carbon footprint -- simply because it's the right thing to do -- is clearly not a viable strategy either. If we really want to solve this problem, it will take hard work, determination, and ingenuity, of both the technical and political varieties. And it will take seeing other people as thr fallable-but-well-meaning human beings they generally are, not as cartoon villains to fear or paper targets to take pot-shots at.

A little more constructive dialog, and a little less demagoguery, please. I'll start: a revenue-neutral carbon tax would be a good way to tilt the market away from carbon usage without restricting it to any pre-ordained solutions that might or might not be sufficient.

Even potatoes are valuable only in situations where there are people around who are interested in owning/obtaining/consuming potatoes.

Given that it's a Tesla (and a dealer-owned one at that), was a chase necessary at all? I suspect that Tesla Corp could have given the police a live feed of the car's GPS co-ordinates at any time?

There aren't that many quality goods and services to spend your ransom money on in prison -- my understanding is that the selection is mainly limited to cigarettes, cell phones, drugs, and "protection".

While I share your pessimistic outlook for the foreseeable future, forever is a really long time. Are you willing to say that absolutely nobody will be living in a permanent space colony in 100 years? 500 years? 10,000 years? If so, what makes you so certain?

And how did you learn to write good code that's efficient and make sense to others? Maybe you're the rare case of a person that can just intuit what is good code and what isn't, but I think most developers (including myself) learn how to write good code by first writing lots of bad code, and then suffering the consequences until they learn from experience what works and what doesn't.

Thanks, "Assmasher". I value your learned input.