Only if you can fill them at all. If Toyota actually wants to sell these things, they're going to have to pony up the $1 billion for fueling stations the way Tesla has installed chargers.

I forgot to mention satellites and missile guidance systems, which experience extremes of temperature and vibration. All those problems are technically solvable. The main problem is, as you say, price: Making the perfect smart gun system will be expensive. Regulations would have to ensure that substandard smart guns are unavailable, or just as illegal as dumb guns, if that were the case. Of course, if cheap guns are outlawed, then only outlaws will have cheap guns.

But fly-by-wire airliners, military radios, targeting systems, medical implants, even Internet backbone routers all have absurdly high reliability stats and are all based on electronics, sensors and firmware.

So don't buy your smart gun from a factory in China producing crap for Comcast or Sony. Buy it from someone who knows how to build high-reliability electronics for the military, like Siemens or ATK.

Would you leave your house unlocked all the time because you might lose the key while you were being chased by a mugger? No, because on the other 30,000 days of your life burglars will come and go as they please. It's the same with a gun, where it is easily stolen or grappled from you before you use it, or worse, found by a child.

Unfortunately, most of those that do would like to continue doing so. But nice try!

Sounds to me like Level 3 does peer with ISPs, but the ISPs are failing to upgrade their side of the pipes so the peering suffers, just like it did with Netflix. But unlike the Netflix case, the ISP has no "asymmetric traffic" argument as to why Level 3 should pay disproportionately for peering.

Troll fail:

(1) Entitlement spending doesn't make one bit of difference. These days, NASA gets less than 0.5% of the federal budget. The Pentagon wastes more money in a month than NASA spends in a year. The only reason Congress doesn't double or triple NASA's budget is that they see no political gain in it for themselves without earmarking the money for projects that will never be finished.

(2) Don't know how this is relevant. We knew all along that making ourselves beholden to Russia for manned spaceflight was a bad idea, but Bush and the last Congress did it anyways. If Ukraine hadn't happened, something else probably would have sooner or later.

(3) is flat-out wrong. If you hadn't noticed, the NASA Chief Administrator is a former astronaut himself--not some lawyer who was handed the job on a silver platter for ass-kissing. NASA managers are probably the most competent team in the whole federal government (not least because so many of them are actual rocket scientists), which is why we are able to do so many amazing projects in spite of the idiotic budget cuts that get thrown at us.

Thud's response was far more accurate:

(0) is an accurate characterization of the SLS-Orion project, the official successor to the shuttle and informally known as the "Senate Launch System". This is why we had to contract SpaceX to actually build a rocket, as opposed to pretend to build while distributing pork.

(-1) is really the same thing as (0).

To resolve your confusion: Time Warner won't throttle *your* bandwidth, they will throttle *Netflix's* bandwidth getting into their network. So even though you have 15Mbps from Time Warner, and they're only trying to push you 3Mbps, if 2 million Time Warner customers all try to get 3Mbps from Netflix through a single 10Gbps pipe, most of them will be sorely disappointed. Netflix would then have to pay Time Warner for a 100Gbps pipe.

And to be straight about this, none of it is about hardware cost. ISPs could perfectly well let Netflix co-locate at Netflix's (presumably smaller) expense and get faster speeds inside their networks without added interconnects. They just don't want to.

You're right. Tesla's legal team is just trying to keep the doors open wherever they can. There was a bill in Arizona to legalize them but it died. I don't think Musk is going to commit to building his factory until one of them goes through with it.

Ah, here it is straight from the horse's mouth: http://www.teslamotors.com/ser... Pay $2400 for four years and you get unlimited valet service, and all consumables (brake pads, tires, fluids, etc) are included in the price and checked/replaced at the yearly appointment. Considering the price bracket and bleeding-edge nature of the vehicle, it's not unreasonable, but does add to the cost.

Be that as it may, I still don't get the cause and effect relationship of "bigger factory" => "higher prices". They only sell product for what the market will bear, and if the market will bear a higher price then obviously they want to sell more items at the higher price. But Tesla is not a big company squeezing margins while growing market share. They are still trying to establish their core product range--not upgrading a factory at consumer expense, but building one in the first place at investor expense.

The Model S was available for pre-order for something like 3 years before manufacturing actually started. During that time, less than 10% of customers pre-ordered the 40kWh battery, with the rest opting for the 60kWh and 85kWh batteries. Shortly before production started, they determined it would be cheaper to drop the 40kWh offering and fill the existing orders for those cars with software-limited 60kWh vehicles. Those customers now have the benefit of higher motor torque and faster charging, as well as the option of paying the extra $15k to get the full battery unlocked.

Software problem: They diagnose the problem over the air and push an update without you lifting a finger.

Hardware problem: If their local service center is not convenient for you, they send a tech in a loaner Model S to your location and either fix it on the spot or take your car back to the service center for repair.

This model will probably change when they have more cars on the road, but by then they will have more service centers as well. But if their propaganda is to be believed, by that time their cars will be so reliable maybe the individual service model will still work.

Umm, yes. They have won suits in New York, Washington, Massachussets, and Ohio, to name a few. Not all of those rulings were permanent, but this map is pretty recent.

Exactly! That's why every time a manufacturer builds a bigger factory so they can make more product to sell to more people, the price goes up and up and up. It would be so much cheaper if everything we bought were made by hand laborers working out of their homes.

Elon Musk has personally and repeatedly said that (a) His definition of SUCCESS for Tesla is when it gets put out of business by other automakers making better electric cars, and (b) He REFUSES to use any existing dealer infrastructure to avoid conflicts of interest when making gas versus electric sales. This position is exonerated by experiences with numerous other brands, where absurdly few dealerships actually bother to stock, or even know anything about, their manufacturer's electric offerings, making buying one unnecessarily difficult.