Sure, but there's not a lot of incentive for the big auto manufacturers to not allow dealerships to continually renew franchise license agreements that are nearing expiry, because if they ever decided to not allow renewal, they would be taking quite a large financial hit from that point forward until they got any new direct-to-consumer system up and running in a self-sustaining capacity.... a large enough hit that it might even bankrupt them.

The manufacturers can't bypass them because the manufacturers sold the dealerships franchise rights in the first place.

Tesla hasn't sold any franchises to any dealers, so there's no dealership it actually competes with.

Now theoretically, big auto manufacturers could pull their franchise lciense renewals and wait for the existing ones to expire before selling direct, but they probably would take a large financial hit in doing so, and its unlikely to be in their best interest.

The big barrier (for other auto manufacturers) here is that all of the big auto makers have already sold franchises to dealerships, giving dealerships a right to sell their cars, so if the manufacturers of said cars started selling direct to consumers, they would be competing with the franchises that they sold to dealerships in the first place. This is unfair competition, and why it is illegal.

However, Tesla hasn't sold any franchises, and so wouldn't be competing with any of the dealerships in any kind of unfair capacity.

Ford, GM, et al would be competing with dealerships that they sold franchises to in the first place, it would be unfair competition.

Tesla hasn't sold any franchises, and doesn't compete with any dealerships.

Tesla isn't bypassing dealerships because no dealerships actually sell Tesla automobiles.

... has a precision tolerance finer than 2 microns... so it can be used for things where precision and fine detail reallly matter.

And where the material cost per item printed is cheap... and I mean cheap... like cheap as in cheap as dirt, cheap.

And I'll happily throw down a thousand bucks for something like that.

Right, but to say that one cannot do something, as the expression is commonly used, is to mean that one cannot actually succeed at whatever it is that they were supposedly going to do.

It is thus perfectly correct to say, matter-of-factly, that one cannot sue a person for reason XYZ, even if they can try and start proceedings against them.

Just as certainly as I could say that I can't play the piano, for instance... I mean, I physically can, obviously, any able-bodied person can sit at a piano and pound on keys, but I certainly can't play it to any measure that sounds like I am competent. Success is an implied outcome of any ordinary verb usage.

Verbs generally connote that you actually succeed at whatever the thing is that you are doing... and an inability to successfully achieve a task is often linguistically synonymous with the declaration of being unable to do that task.

Only if there is some level of raw access that bypasses the security. The security can, in theory, be enforced on the individual chip level and without the right password available to it, you can't image any of the chip's contents, raw or decrypted.

When you can't successfully complete something that you try to start, then you can't really say that you are genuinely able to do that thing in the first place, can you?

How do you clone the data in the first place if the hardware won't let you read it without the right password?

And how would you do step 1 or 2, exactly? Consider the possibility that the passcode protection could actually be enforced right down to the individual chip level, so trying to image the storage without the correct password would be futile, only giving you garbage at best.

If you genuinely have something important enough on the phone that you don't want them to know about, then time spent in jail for contempt of court might be preferable to the penalties that you would have otherwise incurred.

If you didn't want it to completely erase everything after a number of failed attemps, but the device could still be set up to block more than, say, 10 attempts per hour, then you're looking at closer to a month and a half, assuming you make 10 attemps every hour, night and day until you crack it... or on average, still more than 20 days to crack. In that amount of time, it's not inconceivable that one could have reasonably earned enough money to buy a whole new iphone, so the data would have to be of extreme importance to even want to go through with that. If you restrict it to no more than 10 attempts per 24 hours, then you're looking at the average length of time to crack being well in excess of a year. And again, it would have to all be done manually.... Who the fuck has that kind of patience?

If the passcode must be manually entered, then even a 4 digit password is not particulalry feasible to try and crack. Sure, it can be done by a determined enough person, but you're talking about sitting around doing nothing but pressing virtual keys on a screen for what on average would probably be at least half a dozen hours before they might luck out and get it right. Most people have something considerably better to do with their time... If that couples with a password count restriction, say, limited to 10 attempts to unlock per hour, then it's completely infeasible.