They supply steering wheels for the Model S.

I still don't understand why he went to Russia. Iceland is a much more liberal, democratic country and welcomes whistle-blowers. He would be fairly safe from the US there.

Of course it is. Mercedes missed the boat, despite trying to be cutting edge (e.g. with the F1 engines). Tesla came out of nowhere and made the best car in Mercedes' traditional market, the luxury sedan class. They are so far ahead Mercedes are years away from even producing something comparable to the Model S.

The problem with tape is the cost of the drives. Most people don't have more than a terabyte or two of data, so even if they bought two external USB hard drives and rotated them it would be much cheaper and pretty much just as reliable. Tape is good when you need to keep backups for a long time, not so good for most home and many business users who just want to protect the data they have now.

All true, but the author is saying that the price gap for a given volume of data storage won't go away. In other words while SSDs will continue to get bigger and cheaper, so will HDDs.

Have a look at the Tesla implementation. Works with gloves, very responsive and easy to use. There are physical buttons on the steering wheel that can be configured to control different things (radio, climate, navigation etc).

Realistically you can only remember the position of so many buttons, so end up looking for more obscure functions even if there is a physical switch to control them. The Tesla implementation is no worse than that.

Not getting a serious illness that your insurance won't fully cover is luck. Not being sued into oblivion by some asshat is luck. Not retiring during a major world recession is luck.

Also, if you hadn't noticed, there are a lot of rip-offs, scams and ponzi schemes going on in the investment market. Supposedly skilled and knowledgeable investors fell for them because the crooks are good at what they do. Would be nice if you could get by with just safer, guaranteed return investments rather than having to become some kind of financial expert.

Do most people expect to carry on earning the same amount in retirement? Usually by that point your expenses are much lower, since the kids have left home and the mortgage is paid off. No need to commute five days a week, and you can take holidays outside of peak times when everything is cheaper. You could downsize your family size home to get a lump sum too.

Dude, I can only dream of buying a house and paying it off in 30 years! In the UK the average wage buys you a kennel. I'm on well above that, but even so I can only afford a fairly shitty 1 bedroom flat on a 35 year mortgage and a government "help to buy" scheme.

We reached the point where to buy even a small house you need two people earning a well above average wage.

It goes by many names, most common the American Dream or Thatcherism. The idea that you can make it big if you work hard, and should only support policies that will be good for you when that time comes. Of course for most people it never comes, but it doesn't stop them voting against their own interests.

Most of the local discussion groups seem to have moved to G+ or Facebook. You can always sign up with a pseudonym if you really want to participate, but yeah... Nothing like the good old days.

What make and model? Why withhold these details?

Many modern Japanese cars offer MirrorLink support so you can use your phone for navigation. For a long time some have offered two double DIN slots (older Nissans for example) and I can't think of any that integrate AC control into the head unit. I've been looking at new Japanese cars myself recently so I'm keen to know which one has this deficiency.

We tried a simplified version in the 60s with tower blocks. Shops at the bottom, flats on top, all the amenities anyone would need within walking distance. They quickly turned into ghettos where no-one wanted to live. Turns out that for a successful community you need space, diversity and people travelling around to interact with outsiders. Otherwise it turns into a medieval village pretty quickly.

You may be productive but your houses suck. They are poorly insulated and you waste a lot of energy heating and cooling them. Compare them to German homes that need only a fraction of the energy to maintain a pleasant environment.

The reason for this is that the US hates socialism. Germany mandated that new homes are well insulated and low energy, and provided improvements at little or no cost to existing ones. In the US such things are expensive extras and since energy is extremely cheap most people don't seem to care about them much.

Just do what the EU did and demand better quality. We introduced RoHS for a reason, and now are looking at ways to make manufacturing cleaner in China too. They need to sell to us, we are massive market (bigger than the US) so what we say they have to abide by. If we say only so much CO2 and PM2.5 per product they have no choice but to clean up and meet those requirements.

Just to be clear, RoHS wasn't just about protecting us from harmful stuff, it was about eliminating it from the manufacturing process and from recycling/landfill (which also often happens in China).

In the end prices haven't really gone up due to it, they just fell at a slightly lower rate. Very slightly lower.