Depending on where you live, anti-social can be a strong survival trait.

Sure there are. But not sold by Tesla. Tesla will remain a fringe manufacturer until it moves the sort of volume that mainstream brands move, not the tiny volume that rich-boy toys move. And that, after all, is the goal of the Model 3.

Somehow this seems doubly relevant. "After a few such run-ins, when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic terror." - so much software right there.

Ahh, the "we just need to educate our users" school of engineering. That always ends well.

Clearly the solution is to put a fountain in the security exit corridor to trap screen-lookers before they can cross the security line!

Eventually. But for now, he's right - Tesla is currently a niche company, only selling expensive vehicles. Most such brands like, say, Maserati, are just brands within a larger mainstream company - Maserati is just the mid-priced Fiat brand. Tesla though only sells the expensive cars, and so remains on the fringe for now.

If the Model 3 succeeds, this could all change. And while Tesla's stock price already assumes the Model 3 will be a resounding success and Tesla will become a mainstream company, it hasn't happened yet.

Heh, seems I'm wrong about the fungi - randy little buggers.

Technically, "evolution" is the change in statistical distribution of alleles in a genetic population over time. There's little uncertainty about that happening - every genetic change over time is absolutely evidence of evolution, in the technical sense, because there's nothing more to it than that.

Any uncertainty is about what shaped the emergence, then dominance, of certain traits among species that survived today. But of course in the case of sexual reproduction with distinct sexes, it's still a reproductive corner case only used by a small percentage of the biomass of the planet (and heck, only plants and animals do it in any form, while most of the biomass is found in the other kingdoms).

How is this not crapware that you are apologizing for? It was the scourge of the PC industry, we should not be welcoming it in mobile to a greater extent than it exists already.

I agree with you that the requirement to ship recent Android versions is absolutely needed, but 20 different applications sounds awfully overbearing.

Is that really much of a mystery? Gene exchange as part of reproduction has obvious advantages for speed in adaption to changing conditions. There are plenty of hermaphrodite species that show the stepping stone to specialized organs for gene exchange. Splitting into 2 sexes, each with just one set of reproductive organs, is just a cost savings, reducing the amount of otherwise unneeded organs to maintain.

Apple pays a huge amount of tax in the US.

They ALSO pay a lot of tax in the EU.

The fuss form the US government is that UNLIKE ANY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD we like to double-tax foreign revenues for which tax was already collected.

The fuss from the EU is that the tax Apple pays they consider to be too low, because Apple has money and the EU does not.

That's the simp truth. Apple found the place that collected the lowest taxes and based international operations there. Doing something legal and having a huge pile of untouchable money angers bureaucrats (and irrational Apple Haters) to no end.

Until either the car doesn't start because it has no 3G signal to "Authorize" it.

Again, that's a technical issue, and if I can figure out how to avoid starting the tracking module why not also how to bypass that...

so you can't even work around it withot ripping out the ECU

As if that's even a slight issue, lots of people reprogram or replace the ECU today.

Relying on your wits to outsmart an organised group of people is hard

History has shown it to be ridiculously easy in most cases.

Far better to nip the problem in the bud

History has shown THAT to be impossible.

Your driving history only consists of the times you got caught.

And in the future my driving history will consist only of the times I've allowed the monitoring device to activate.

The future belongs to the technically inclined because we will be able to do ANYTHING without repercussion.

Apple bills its latest product as a premium phone and brags endlessly about the supposed build quality

So does Samsung, and HTC for that matter,

Care to show me where any of the Android makers explicitly state they build crap?

But don't you think it's kind of crappy that the iPhone 6 is so flimsy, especially for the price?

If it were flimsy, perhaps , but in reality it's not - some Android phones are worse, and if you pick one up you can tell "flimsy" does not describe it at all.