It doesn't strike me as a scam as much as a sincere attempt by a group of moderately accomplished yet fairly typical geeks to take their best shot and go as far as they can.

I look at their plan and my thought is that it's more-or-less what I would do if I really wanted to launch a mission to mars. The big asterix is cost and technical expertise. They say they need 6 billion which might be feasible, big Hollywood blockbusters can run $200 million and Olympic broadcast/sponsorship would be enough to cover the budget, so if they get something credible (or at least entertaining) going then the networks might get interested. More likely might be some eccentric billionaire willing to dump a large percentage of their net worth into a vanity project.

For me the big thing is the technical and organizational expertise, I suspect they're massively underestimating the difficulty of the technical challenges and it will be a very long time before they've built up the organizational expertise to even address them. And because they're underestimating the technical difficulty I also suspect the budget is massively underestimated.

I suspect the best case for the project is a moderately successful media venture that either sets up the organization for a proper attempt in 20+ years, or spurns a government to action.

I think it explains half, mostly the trolling half.

The other half is the fact that people speak up when they're passionate about something, and there's nothing that makes you as passionate as thinking you know the truth when everyone else is wrong.

Personally I think the solution is to speak up even when you don't care that much. You can't convince the fringe players that they're wrong, but you can demonstrate to them (and others) that the fringe viewpoint is a minority one.

Assuming they can find a way to avoid people scamming them off widescale all they have to do is bake the price of the new battery into the car.

Car rental companies have built a business around lending people a very significant asset, I don't see why electric car manufacturers couldn't do the same with batteries.

Why buy Tesla when you can hire them for a lot less:

Musk also said Apple has been trying to poach Tesla employees, offering $250,000 signing bonuses and 60 percent salary increases.

“Apple tries very hard to recruit from Tesla,” he said. “But so far they’ve actually recruited very few people.”

So is Apple making those offers because they think those employees are that valuable to Apple, or to Tesla?

You own the car but the auto-maker owns the battery and automatically replaces bad batteries free of charge.

You go up to the charging station swap out the spent for the new, the spent goes to a charging station that runs a diagnostic during charging, if the battery fails the diagnostic the attendant sets it aside, then once a week they call the automaker who sends someone around to pick up the duds and drop off replacements.

Since owners don't need to buy replacement batteries there's less of a market for counterfeits, and if you can make the verification works the only extra labour is the weekly exchange.

Fine in theory until the officer opens with "can you please hand me your phone so I can check your license information".

People have trouble saying no to completely unreasonable and unnecessary requests from cops, how many people do you think will start a police interaction by rejecting what sounds like a reasonable request for a standard procedure?

The same could be said of Tesla Motors.

Established car companies have a brand in that market to maintain. Google has no such burden, consumers have far lower expectations of a Google car and if it does fail it doesn't really affect Google's other offerings.

They can if you set them up.

If I want to search youtube I just type 'y search phrase' into the URL bar, same with wikipedia, imdb, etc.

I think this is less the case of "we found a bug in package X" and more like "we've been getting a lot of attacks from phishing group Y, we've been doing Z to stop them".

That's not the kind of info you can disclose publicly since it tells attackers where you're vulnerable, if you're going to do this kind of thing you're going to have to make it a small circle.

As many have suggested, no duh.

So that is legitimately worrying, if the anti-vax situation has gotten so bad that half the schools don't have herd immunity.

It suggests the null-hypothesis, that one of the smartest regions on Earth is utterly typical in this respect.

That isn't a refutation of the claim that Sparc is dying, it's just an explanation of how it happens.

Sparc users are the same as any other group, the exodus starts with the fringe and then moves to the core. Casual low-profit customers found it easy to switch platforms so left a long time ago. The big high profit customers have high loyalty and massive sunk costs, it's hard for them to switch platforms so they'll be the last to go. If Sparc is dying then that's exactly the pattern I'd expect it to follow.

An interesting idea but I don't think it's practical.

Setting a pre-committed value for an asset like that is extremely difficult. Particularly if it's linked to a legitimate business that might grow rapidly in value.

How foolish for the government to base nutrition advice on an insufficiently verified hypothesis!

Everyone should follow my nutrition advice based on an insufficiently verified hypothesis!!

I agree that a certain level of fluff is essential, but some also comes from the language itself. Getters/setters are a great example, that's a lot of fluff that almost vanishes in a language like python without detracting from maintainability or stability. Errors are a more subtle example, what kinds of errors are possible given the language and API? At what level does the API want you to handle errors? How much code do you need to handle those errors properly? This can greatly influence the volume of necessary fluff.

I think the best choice might be none of the above. I listened to Larry Wilmore on WTF and he referred to Stewart as one of the best straight men in the business, and I think that's an important perspective. Jon Stewart is basically an advocate for the audience and the correspondents are usually his foils.

Colbert's foil character was strong enough that he was able to build a show around it, but the other two correspondents who went on to host were the ones who were able to flip the tables have Jon be the foil to their reasonable outsider perspective (Oliver as the Brit and Wilmore as a minority). I don't think any of the current correspondents aside from Williams are really doing the same, and even Jessica Williams still goes into caricature when doing non-racial reporting.

Bill Mahr could probably do it but he's a bit too controversial and he's a bit to eager to run out on things like anti-vax nonsense. The best bet is either giving one of the current correspondents a straight man role and seeing if they can pull it off, or taking a somewhat known and established comedian and giving them a go.