"Infinitely weaker' would mean powerless.
IF the NSA were powerless then it should be dissolved. Since No-one in the NSA is saying THAT should happen, they must think they still have a lot of power.
I don't doubt the NSA's spying effectiveness has been diminished, but I think the implication they are impotent is a lie.

The parent company (Volkswagen) is. Their pickups (and delivery type) sell quite well in the markets where they are available.

If I follow: the jail-breakers, who want to get out of Apple's walled garden, are complaining that someone is operating outside their own walled garden and allowing software and services the jail-breakers don't approve of to be run on hardware they don't make?

care to cite some sources for your random statistics?

None of those are large connected systems. They are single user applications. Word doesn't need to access remote systems to get information about anything.
And it does matter. They're not hiring Microsoft, just a guy who worked there and knew how to buy companies; not how to build or repair large highly diversely integrated systems such as healthcare.gov.

The law wasn't the "specs". Specs are "how do we handshake with SSA to verify a SSN", "what format will NJ's DOVS return birth certificate data in?"
It took years to write the specs one the framework of the statute was in place.

What large connected software system has MS built without purchasing a company that was already doing the thing and re-brand it?

If you don't want to be forced to use more efficient lighting in your home then you should be forced to have a new power plant put in your backyard.
Simple fact: more people using more electricity means we need more power plants. Reduce per capita consumption of energy and you eliminate the need to build new power plants.
You can't have the energy inefficient lights and choose to fight against a new power plant down the street as everyone seems to do.

Show me an undetectable piece of firearm ammunition and I'll start to worry. A 3D plastic gun is useless if you can't get ammunition in to the building as well.

Fine, electricity is a product and there is a delivery service that provides the product. How does that negate my underlying argument that the man stole a service? He wasn't paying for the electric product nor its delivery service.

Forgive me, I was simplistic with my language. You can not store AC mains power for later use. You can convert mains power to DC then to chemical energy and store that in a battery (with resultant efficiency losses) then convert that chemical energy back to DC then invert back to AC to motivate your vehicle (with resistant efficiency losses).

In AZ theft of service is a felony regardless of cost. Jump out of a taxi without paying your $2.50 fare and it's still a felony.
So... is electric a service or a product?
Since you can't possess or store it I think the law considers it a service (You start and stop your electric service). If GA, like AZ, considers theft of service a felony then the arrest makes perfect sense.

Isn't as plain or old as you make it out to be. I'm about 2 miles from my CO but my phone line terminates in a climate controlled cabinet about 1,000ft from my house. That's the end of the line for my pair where the line is powered, digitized and bridged to fiber for the haul back to the CO.
Even without that the addition of DSL about 2 decades ago added a lot of complexity to the system with DSLAMs and other digital equipment. Much of that digital stuff was spliced in between the switch and CPE on the CO or line side, but it was still there.

The COs I've been in also don't use the card coded switches you seem to be talking to; they use gigantic digital affairs that are all basically computers and handle not only the line pair for voice, but DST, T and D trunks, interoffice signaling and such.

The reason this stuff is all so resilient is the power supply. Nothing in the CO runs on wall voltage; it's all -48vDC and runs from a battery bank the size of a small house. The batteries are constantly charged from mains at the rate of their depletion by the equipment. In case of power failure where they batteries are being drawn down a generator auto-starts and switches from mains to local power to re-charge the batteries. Note that in this setup the load equipment is never switched from one power source to another (a major single-point of failure).

That said... Im not against reforming or eliminate the last vestiges of POTS.Less that 1/3 of the population HAS it and I'd bet even less than that actually use it. By that I mean that I think less than 1/10th of the US population has a telephone in their house that will work solely from CO power on the line pair without a wall wart.

In a row isn't really the argument that reflects reality. The question is: how often to you drive more than 300 miles without being able to stop for a few hours at an out-of-the-way re-charging station that is compatible with your car. The answer to that (when you look at the slow re-charge rates) for me is: quite often. And that "few hours" could actually be a few days.

I don't know where you get the 300 mile range number, Tesla's own literature states up to 265 miles" EPA Certified", which if anything like EPA MPG then the way most American's drive means more like 200 miles of actual range. When you don't have access to your high current charger at home it takes an hour to get 3 miles of charge from a standard wall outlet. Every time I have a discussion with someone about these cars they produce these great sounding numbers, then you read the actual information and things have a much more grim look to them.

As for your specific question about why I drive 21 miles to the butcher: because I prefer buying locally sourced food whenever possible. The only butcher I know of in the Phoenix area that sells local meats is about 21 miles out of my way between work and home. I also travel out of my way to purchase locally roasted coffee and locally produced milk, eggs, veg. Generally the lower prices of the items I purchase offset the minor amount of diesel I run through my engine getting to those places in a consolidated trip. 21 miles for me is less than 1/2 gallon.

When I go visit my friends in northern AZ, that's a 140 mile one-way trip in mountains and I don't think the Tesla would make it that far on a cargo and there are no exits or services for the majority of the trip.

There are MANY use cases where pure electric just falls flat. So many that I think most people would encounter them fairly regularly or at least fret they would. That means that for most, or at least many, people an electric has to be an additional vehicle they use for specific tasks.

But that aside: why are you condemning someone's life choices just because they don't align with the marketing pitch of an all-electric car?

There's an interesting dichotomy that pervades this topic and the US in general. Christianity.
Most Americans ascribe to it so I'm told.

The basis of Christianity is to do right by your fellow human. To reject greed. To reject avarice. To be humble. To give away everything you don't need.
How the fuck does a Christian based nation allow a CEO to make enough money each year to buy a jumbo jet while the employees doing the actual work that earns the company the actual profits can't make basic ends meet on their salary?
How to the religious right... the conservatives... argue that capitalism (every man for himself, grab what you can) is an appropriate system when they state they believe the exact opposite?