I disagree. I think they (meaning the dealers) understood this possibility perfectly which explains some of the current fighting. They just never had to worry about it much because starting a successful new car company is damn near impossible. Plenty have tried but it takes very deep pockets to get into that business, particularly in mature markets like the US. Tesla is really the first company to try.

Regulation does not require the use of a mandatory middle man. Particularly one that adds as little value as most dealers do. The reasons we have the dealer system we do are largely historical and anachronistic. Regulations can come in many form and pretty much all (legal) transactions are regulated to some degree (see the Uniform Commercial Code). I have no problem with states requiring manufacturers to play nice with their dealers but I have a HUGE problem with states requiring me to buy a car through a dealer even when it makes zero economic sense for me to do so.

First off, just because something is the law doesn't make it right. There are plenty of unjust, cruel or even just stupid laws out there that deserve to be ignored.

Obsolete laws and business models deserve to go the way of the dodo. Furthermore it isn't obvious that Tesla is skirting any law and even if they were I REALLY do not care in this case. Independent car dealers provide me not a single service I genuinely need. They have a very well deserved reputation for behavior that borders on criminal. I would much rather deal with Ford or Toyota or BMW directly than most any independent dealer.

Same conclusion. It's too easy to feel that precarity from the early computing age (not enough storage! not enough cycles! data versions of things are special!) if you were there. I think there's some of that going on here on Slashdot a lot of the time.

People in love with old Unix boxen or supercomputer hardware. People that maintain their own libraries of video, but all that's stored there is mass-market entertainment. And so on. It's like newspaper hoarding.

Storage and computation are now exceedingly cheap. 8-bay eSATA RAID cases run a couple hundred bucks, new. 4TB SATA drives run less than that. With 6 raid ports on a mainboard and a couple of dual- or quad-eSATA port PCI-x cards, you can approach petabytes quickly—and just for four digits. The same goes for processing power—a dual-processor Xeon setup (in which each processor can have core counts in the double digits) again just runs $couple thou.

And data is now cheap and easy. Whatever you want—you can have it as data *already*. Movies? Music? Books? Big social data sets? They're coming out our ears. The investment of time and equipment required, all in all, to put yourself in a position to rip and store a library of "every movie you've ever rented," and then actually do so, is much larger than the cost of simply licensing them via streaming. The same goes for music, ebooks, and so on.

There's just no need. Even my desktop is now starting to feel obsolete—for the work computing I do, there's a good chance I'll just go to Amazon cloud services in the next year or two. At that point, an iPad, a wireless keyboard, and a couple apps will probably be all the computing power I need under my own roof. If I have a desktop, it'll just be to connect multiple monitors for screen real estate.

This isn't about a 1959 Corvette. It's about a 1959 garbage truck.

with 20 cores, 128GB RAM, 48TB online storage, and gigabit fiber coming in.

Yes, I use all of it, for work. But it's definitely not a "data center." These days, I don't know why anyone would want one—even moderately sized enterprises are increasingly happy to pay someone else to own the data center. Seems nuts to me to try to bring it into your basement.

If you just need the computation and/or the storage, desktops these days run circles around the datacenter hardware from just a few years ago. If you need more than that, it's more cost effective and reliable to buy into someone-or-other's cloud.

I sort of don't get it. White box PCs with many cores, dozens of gigabytes of RAM, and multiple gigabit ethernet ports cost next to nothing these days with a few parts from Amazon.com. If the goal is just to play with powerful hardware, you could assemble one or a few white box PCs with *many* cores at 4+ GHz, *tons* of RAM, gigabit I/O, and dozens or hundreds of terabytes of online RAID storage for just a few thousand, and plug them straight into the wall and get better computation and frankly perhaps even I/O performance to boot, depending on the age of the rackware in question.

If you're really doing some crazy hobby experimenting or using massive data storage, you can build it out in nicer, newer ways that use far less (and more readily available) power, are far quieter, generate far less heat, don't take up nearly the space, and don't have the ugliness or premium cost spare parts of the kinds of gear being discussed here. If you need the features, you can easily get VMware and run multiple virtual machines. 100Mbps fiber and Gigabit fiber are becoming more common and are easy to saturate with today's commodity hardware. There are an embarrassment of enterprise-ready operating systems in the FOSS space.

If you really need high reliability/high availability and performance guarantees, I don't get why you wouldn't just provision some service for yourself at Amazon or somewhere else and do what you need to do. Most SaaS and PaaS companies are moving away from trying to maintain their own datacenters because it's not cost effective and it's a PITA—they'd rather leave it to specialists and *really big* data centers.

Why go the opposite direction, even if for some reason you really do have the need for those particular properties?

It's not really extraordinary, but here you go:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.g...

parts of the world relate to each other? who would have thought?

"They are dangerous with high amounts of crime. "
not really.

"They discourage innovation"
  false.
More innovation happen becasue there is more communication.

" little room for building things"
depends on the city. Cities created to support manufacturing usually have a lot of ware housing, and older building; both of which are perfect for start ups.

" They have nosy neighbors who try to mandate what you can do in your own home."
when the byproduct of what you do leaves your walls, then they have every right to do that, and visa versa.
There are also nosy neighbors in the suburbs.

I'm no against suburbs. In fact, I love the suburbs, and hate living in cities.

The problem is not waste, it's distribution. Even with the current level of waste, everyone could eat 3 meals and snacks, everyday.
Getting it to people is a lot harder.

If we ended all food waste right now, there would not be 1 less person going hungry.
Hell, we can't even get food to people going hungry in the US without a political shit storm happening from people who think it's the same thing as communism.

An untested theory, with almost most no supported tech even discussed is not ' Figured out'.

"Another hint: your windows are made of sand, so are the chips in your computer, so are solar panels, the glasses of your glasses ..."
no, they aren't. You might want to look it up.

The Sahara isn't a desert because of sand.

"(and the water being overexploited)

There is no such thing."

Yes, there is. Using more water at a rate then aquifers can be refilled is one example.

" that would make much more of Canada hospitable"
briefly.
It's not like the warming will stop just because Canada is more habitable

The CO2 being produced through breathing is a net neutral.
Plants are carbon neutral. They have been since the carboniferous era.
CO2 from using power will be the issue, unless we start a aggressive plan to stop using CO2 emitting technology for power.
By aggressive, I mean 75 years.

we need global encouragement for people to not have more than 2 children. I nice slow draw down to 3 billion over many decades.