Sadly, the evolution of media distribution away from cable TV to direct streaming is going to cause growing pains like this. While I'm sure it's lucrative for them to be in everyone's "basic" package, the fact that you have to pay for channels you don't watch is exactly why cable TV is on the decline. What ESPN needs to do is to get on the ball and get with the 21st century. There's plenty of revenue stream out there for them selling a streaming service and bypassing broadcast TV altogether.

There are always limits when you're not a pure [insert government type here] in every sense. Sure, the US has oligarchical tendencies that are pretty strong. But it's not an outright oligarchy. The people with money can't just pay people off directly in the US. They have to do it under the table which adds a layer of complexity.

A secondary consideration would be competition from other interests who are "lobbying" against this merger. The bigger bribe wins. Or at least a competing bribe works to negate the initial bribe. Charter may be spreading money around to scuttle the deal so it can gobble up Time Warner on the rebound.

Yes, but we have to agree the way I want to agree! ;)

I was agreeing with you.

My point was really that electric cars are only one part of the solution. If you don't look at the whole system, you may be just exchanging one kind of pollution for another. If you can get clean energy to power your electric car, then you're doing it right. But if you're exchanging gasoline for coal to power your car, you're not helping as much as you think you are.

It's like all of those people claiming ethanol is such a great fuel because it's clean burning and renewable. What they don't understand is that many of the new ethanol plants in the heartland burn tons of coal to produce that ethanol. So the ethanol they produce isn't what I would call as much of a "net positive" as other alternatives.

Until we can get cleaner electricity generation, exchanging a gasoline burning car for one powered by coal/natural gas fueled power plants doesn't really solve the problem. In fact, it may make the problem worse, at least in the short term given the fuel they burn.

That being said, we do need to have better alternatives to gasoline in our cars. And Tesla is a part of moving the technology forward. This is a very good thing. But it's only one small part of the solution.

If anything, Rand Paul is a shill to keep the right leaning libertarians occupied through the primaries before coming out in favor of whatever corporate bought stooge actually gets the nomination.

Did you read the article?

I found an interesting article about autism. And I'm treating it just like the anti-vaxxers. I found it on Facebook. I'm applying no scientific analysis of the contents. I'm spreading it around without putting any real thought into it, expecting everyone to just mindlessly forward it to as many people as they can find.

No worries.

How many studies do you need? Every single legitimate study shows not only that vaccines do not cause autism, there isn't even any correlation between the two at all.

Sure. A lot of the younger programmers (like myself at the time) were excited about it. But many of the old timers were very resistant to it. A lot of people complained that if it just compiled to C, why not just write it in C and save a step. And there was much bitching about how everything was so indirect and hard to figure out exactly what was going on. Of course, this was before there were good debuggers and direct compilers.

But it's like so many other things. Old folks get set in their ways. Young people want to change everything. I find myself starting to get the "get off my lawn" attitude now that I'm past my prime. But I do go out of my way to learn new things and try new ideas.

At this point, almost every other car on the road is full of safety features. Every place you could run into anything has a big impact absorbing safety barricades. Why worry about it? You are my crumple zone.

"They" are all of the programmers who have come before you. The computer engineers bemoaned COBOL because it let non engineers make programs to run on computers without knowing what was going on under the hood. Same with FORTRAN.

As languages have progressed, each generation provided more abstraction and let people get farther away from the hardware without having to understand what was going on at lower levels. And every time a language provided a new abstraction, the old guard pissed and moaned about how it was destroying programming by making it so the next generation wouldn't have to know all of the lower level details they knew. Object oriented languages were yet another in a long line of language advances that were decried by the previous generation who didn't want to learn the high level abstractions and were mad that the low level details they know well were no longer important. They claimed that the people who just wanted to program at a high level were "incompetent" and how it was leading to a "general cretinization of programming, and consequentially programmers."

Funny thing though. Most modern day programmers have no real clue what's really going on behind the scenes and they're pretty clueless about what happens once their source code goes through the compiler. And that's my definition of "incompetent". So when you say "Swift is for the incompetent", I say that incompetent people can write code in pretty much any language because I've seen them do it for decades over many generations of languages well before anyone knew what Object Orientation was.

Not only that, the old-timer "get off my lawn" types have been spouting the same nonsense since the 50's when it comes to newer technology. Sure, some languages are targeted at making tasks simple so they're easier for simpletons to use. And, of course, some languages are more poorly designed than others (*cough* *cough* C++ *cough* *cough*). And there are many languages that are more difficult to learn and master than others for no good reason. But people have been deriding next generation languages since the first generation. And that's why I laugh at your characterization of Swift.

That's what they've been saying about every new generation of languages since COBOL. They even said it about C++ and Objective-C when they came out and all the C programmers didn't want to learn it.