I'm actually a huge fan of the idea of an electric car with an external-combustion range extender under the hood. High-efficiency turbines (of the sort they use in industrial power generation, not the sort in aircraft and the M1 Abrams) are very durable, but also quite heavy. However, if we're talking about a 40 HP generator in a 400 HP car, it can afford to be 3x as heavy per HP as a normal car engine. Doubling the efficiency is worth something.

Not, dealers don't charge you for recalls - ever. That's why they're recalls. They charge the manufacturer, and usually make a bit of money in the process. Some things they won't fix unless you complain, but there's a list of things they'll fix the next time they see your car, if it needs them (because they're fast and the dealer makes a little money doing them). There's often a non-descriptive line buried in the invoice somewhere that lists some recall numbers or just mentions them obliquely, with no charge associated, so most people never notice.

How much this varies by brand, I don't know, but certainly the luxury dealers do this, and for safety-related recall everyone does (for the safety ones you'll probably get a postcard about the recall, but the dealer will still just do it automatically). It's not like they hide all this, they just don't call attention to it.

That is hilarious. And it's so bizarre I can't even take it seriously as a troll.

Except that an S-class is actually good, while Whole Foods is explicitly a sort of scam designed by a conservative to separate foolish hippies from their money (this isn't a secret or anything). While WF didn't invent the "call it organic and charge twice as much" idea, they sure did capitalize on it.

They've really nailed the presentation of goods to fool hippies (well, more accurately, middle-class, middle-aged people who still think hippies are cool) into paying more for food. The model doesn't work so well for young hipsters though, which is why the corporation is creating a new chain of stores just to have a different presentation to target hipster suckers separately.

You live in a city, don't you. And anyhow:

Most cars get "automatic updates" from the dealer whenever you bring it into service. There's usually a long list of non-critical recalls that neither the manufacturer nor he dealer is keen to tell you about, but if you get service at the dealer all the fixes will be quietly applied. More and more, these are firmware patches.

So, to answer your question "so commonly that most people never realize there was an update". Tesla is somewhat unique in adding new features this way, but fixes are quite common.

They can potentially be powered by unicorn giggles, but there's still a lot of coal power in the US, and coal-powered cars aren't great by any measure. Worse, the only "renewable" (what a BS buzzword) power that scales is solar, and that's a poor choice for the mostly-nighttime load of charging cars.

There's no energy shortage in the first place to be worried about: the only good reason to buy an electric car is if it's a better car for the price. The Tesla Model S still isn't really, at the price, unless you're buying for 0-60 times (which I might well do), but for the first time it's close. The real test will be the Model 3 - potentially revolutionary, but so are a lot of things you can't actually buy.

Ah, sure, lots of things are called "warp drives" I guess. Yeah, that sort of drive seems wildly impractical for all sorts or reasons.

What I'm talking about is somewhat different: it's an asymmetric warping of spacetime in just the same (smooth and continuous) way that all mass distorts spacetime symmetrically, such that you "fall" in some chose direction. It doesn't require the same exotic material as a wormhole, but I think it requires soemthing equally exotic (it's been a while, but I vaguely remember there are 2 different kinds of negative mass).

No argument there. But if someone were really demonstrating a drive with unexpected properties, not just stage magic, that's an experiment worth repeating.

We do, but then we see what else that math predicts. Most of the really crazy-non-intuitive stuff in QM has come from very unexpected consequences of the math that later proved out in experiment.

Heck, the whole crazy idea that the universe once had an additional field that certain particles couple with, preventing change in spin polarity without energy input, but then that field "condensed:, and now those same particles can spontaneously change spin - that's all just seeing where the math led. Until the Higgs Boson was found, a big chunk of electroweak theory hadn't been directly confirmed by experiment.

What you are talking about already exists, and has existed for decades, and is in use on tens of thousands of households across the fruited plains.

Do you live somewhere with an unusually high concentration of stupid people?

I used to walk home through a park. Except on cloudless nights with no moon, you got enough reflected light to be able to see quite clearly across it. Then there some some hysteria about the potential for being attacked (triggered by a flasher, who only exposed himself to people in broad daylight) and they added a row of streetlights along the side of the path. If you stood about 10m from the path, you were completely invisible to someone walking along it, but they were clearly visible to you for their entire trip across the park (as were any potential witnesses on the path). If someone actually wanted to attack people crossing the park, the lights made it a lot easier. It would only take a few seconds to hit someone and drag them out of the visible area.

It is a discrete laser that can emit three distinct wavelengths.

So city slickers need something to piss on?

Any farm boy can tell you all you need is the wind at your back and you're good to go. Literally. :P

Even "Blue Chip" companies like IBM are a pale shadow of their former selves. Microsoft has lost billions on failed acquisitions and "new technology" that never took hold of the market.

The point is, former success and profit are no guarantee of the same in the future. Companies come, and companies go.

Expecting to be employed by one single company for an entire career is a fools game in the internet age. The sooner you wake up to the fact that even if you do save a company from itself, you're not going to be appreciated nor rewarded for your efforts, the sooner you can start planning a career of moving from one interesting job to the next.

Anyone who is targeting the executive levels of business knows damn well they are going to get their next "promotion" by jumping ship for another company, leveraging their current skills and position as the experience needed for a higher level position. You just flat out don't get promoted into those positions by companies any more, because they don't want you to leave your current role if you're doing a good job. And if you're not doing a good job and are replaceable, they're going to replace you anyhow with someone who isn't replaceable, or they're going to farm out the work of your position to some agency that uses cookie-cutter staff to fill the role.

Companies don't owe you anything, and you don't owe the company anything -- especially not "loyalty."

Get over the idea of "saving" the company. Do your job, do it well, find a better position, and get the hell out while the getting is good.

That's not been true for a very long time. Current MacBook Pro trackpads (i.e. the ones that TFA is about) use one finger tap for left click, two finger tap for right click, two finger drag for scroll, and four-finger drag for some system-wide gestures. The 'Mac mice only have one button' thing is a decade old (and even before that, Macs supported multi-button mice, they just required that UIs be designed to work well with one-button input devices).