No argument there, just arguing that the idea that capitalism always results in progress and communism never does.

The reverse is also true, when people pay all the countries tax they need to be paid that much more or don't have any spare money to support businesses.
Currently we have a compromise, good for business as they can write off expenses including the owners salary, money spent on upgrading, expanding etc and only get taxed on pure profit.Good for people as their taxes aren't so high and have enough money to meet basic needs and hopefully some left over to support various businesses.

Perhaps I'm not interested in the centralized broadcasting, err, "broadband" service, but rather would like to do interactive things. I know what I could do more than a decade ago, and what I can do now. The only thing holding it back is the abysmal upstream connectivity provided by 90+% of the providers. That's an arbitrary percentage allowing for the rumored FIOS and Google upstream speeds, here it's more like 100% of the provider(s).

Spoiled has nothing to do with it. A carrot was held out and a promise made about this wonderful internet thing that the US taxpayers plowed billions into. I'd like to at least see part of the promise fulfilled, rather than yet another cable style broadcasting service with some individual control over what gets sent.

Lots of species more violent and aggressive then us, we often co-operate while lots of other species never co-operate and just try to kill each other if they find themselves in the same territory. Siamese Fighting Fish is one example, put two males together and they fight.
We are better at violence then other species due to our use of tools.

no one should have to sell their product through a middleman.

Tell that to Section 2 of the 21st Amendment.

Throw in the food waste, I forget the figures but there is an amazing amount of food wasted between what people don't eat, what is wasted between farm and consumer and what the farmer wastes. Then throw in the inefficient crops including those that don't even go for food but rather things like ethanol at an energy loss and then eliminate cows from the food chain, some chickens, goats, pigs, or sheep are way more efficient resource wise then a cow and possibly we're up to feeding all those 4 billion, especially if similar things were done world wide, especially the wastage caused by warlords

One thing is that in most states the laws were written to protect franchises against the car manufacturers but in this case there are no franchises to protect to often these laws don't apply.

This podcast gives a lot of insight as to why the dealerships are so anti-consumer blood sucking parasites.

http://www.thisamericanlife.or...

One other thing to keep in mind is that the dealership model has changed significantly. It used to be a bunch of mom and pop dealerships throughout the country. These aren't the dealerships complaining about Tesla. Instead it's the huge dealership conglomerates that have gobbled up and consolidated many of the smaller independent dealerships. These are also huge political donors in many states, getting laws written to protect them, often to the detriment of the automobile manufacturers.

Part of it is the way the car manufacturers have the dealerships competing against each other, giving them huge incentives to sell a certain number of cars by the end of the month, etc. The dealerships also make a lot of their money off of service, whether it be warranty service or just plain service.

Tesla does things differently. The people who work at the showrooms do not earn commissions on cars sold. Their job is to show the car, not play all these silly games pushing cars that people don't want to get their numbers.

Also, Tesla generally does not maintain an inventory of cars. Every car is built to order with only the features the buyer wants. They don't have huge lots of cars that they have to push since every car is already spoken for.

Their service is also different. They have publically stated that their goal is not to make a profit off of service. I have had to have things repaired that were not covered by warranty (I broke some clips). The cost to repair was actually fairly reasonable and was much less than what the cost would have been had the same sort of thing happened to my Prius.

My biggest complaint about service is that there is often a long wait to get an appointment because they're having trouble keeping up with the growing number of cars out there.

Tesla took a cue from Apple with the Apple stores. They want to provide a consistent experience for their customers without all of the hassles and problems often encountered at dealerships. The company has also consistently bent over backwards in favor of their customers. When news of the fires hit they quickly extended the battery warranty to cover fires caused by hitting objects then actively worked on methods to mitigate it. They retroactively increased the drive train warranty to unlimited miles.

Ignoring how communism enabled Russia to go from feudal to space fairing in less then 60 years while making huge sacrifices to win WWII and suffering from totally nutty authoritarian dictators (is there any examples of really successful capitalistic dictatorships?), perhaps the biggest thing it did was make the capitalists share the wealth with the average worker so they didn't get killed in a socialist revolution.
Things were pretty bad under pure capitalism (think Dickinson England) with the exception of areas where land and resources were freely available to the common person for the cost of a bit of genocide.

So about the population of communist China.

How about bluetooth pairing? I have a bluetooth adapter and all I have to do is hold my phone up to it and it's automatically paired with it. I have a little bluetooth sticker in my car. I just hold my phone up to it and my phone reconfigures itself to how I want it in the car. The one on my keychain basically gives some contact info if found (i.e. email and phone number). There are a lot of interesting uses for NFC besides payment.

Single payer is where we should have gone for basic services. It relieves a whole set of current issues, including using the ER as your regular doctor for the uninsured.

How on earth (pun intended) can you know that you've found 10% or 95% of anything that you don't know the full set of?

Note also that most of these efforts looks at the plane of the solar system, what about extra-planar objects? Granted, most of those are comets, but then again, comets can be big too.

Old and ridiculous news. I'd say 10Mbps is actually too slow. 10Mbps up is a bare minimum, 50+ each way is closer to what needs to exist. If you don't think so, just try showing Grandma that 4K home movie you take in a couple of years. We shouldn't be looking at what the minimums should have been 5 years ago, but what they need to be in the next 5. 50-100 Mbps up is going to be a minimum, if we are to see real use of the internet. All those phones shooting 4K video will need to share it somehow, and going across a 4Mbps uplink (yeah, show me where I can get that reliably around here) you'll spend more time waiting on the upload than you did shooting, editing, and compressing it to try to make it smaller for the transit.

Honestly, 10 Mbps up right now is too slow for today's needs, if you're doing any of the related things just with a simple communication with Grandma. Video calls? You need a good upload link if you're going to make that work, or the quality is so crappy it won't be workable.

While I don't get snow where I live from everything I've heard the Tesla does quite well despite being rear-wheel drive due to how smooth the electric motor is. I also understand the 19" tires last quite a bit longer. The 21" summer tires are crap in cold weather and especially in snow. I had to drive from Reno NV to the Bay Area last March and hit snow coming down and it wasn't too fun, especially since the 21" wheels cannot use chains. The traction control on the Tesla is better than most cars since the electric motor is much more responsive. I read that the TC is able to monitor and control the wheels around 1000 times/second. My experience is my model S is a hell of a lot better than the Toyota I used to drive. That car would lose power for a good second if I so much as ran over a pothole and good luck if a tire slipped on snow. My model S P85 is able to keep the wheels just on the edge for acceleration.

When I was driving back the snow was starting to really come down. I had just beaten the chain requirement. It was not fun with my tires but none of the problems were due to acceleration or traction control, more just from the fact that the tires had no grip and given that fact the car still did fairly well. Driving up to the summit to try and beat the snow was fun though. That car doesn't seem to care if it's a steep grade or not :)