My thoughts are there must have been a reason that dealers franchises had to be protected from manufacturers. I suspect there were issues, and that is the reason in the vast number of cases, except for fly by night 'seen on tv' junk we as retail consumers tend to buy retail, not direct from the manufacturer. I have bought or been involved in buying a fair number of cars in my life. I never felt the dealer was pushing me to buy a car I did not want. I have generally gone in knowing the car that I want, and the back and forth is which car that is available is the car I am willing to plunk done some cash for. I suppose some people go into to buy a car that they have no interest in, and the dealer gets them to buy it, but I don't think that is the general case. Making money off service and not the car is no issue to me. That is how we keep cars affordable. It is called competition. What Tesla wants to do is charge an arbitrarily high price for a produce, like Mont Blanc. I am not a greedy person and have never been unwilling to pay for good service. Likewise is a car comes with a good warranty I know that there is a good chance the car is good, and a dealer network means I can get warranty repair. I am not saying that Tesla is not a good car, but if the car needed a repair not under warranty, and it cost money, and it was less than three years old, it is not a good car. There are a lot of cars that have limited production run. The Lotus Evora has production runs of about 2,000 a year, but I can go down the street right now to my car dealer, lay down $100K, and get one. A 2013. So Tesla is not unique there. I suspect that the franchise laws will change, and that Tesla will be able to sell direct. I also suspect that Tesla has spent too much time with the lawyers, and cheating tax payers out of 1.5 billion, and not enough time innovating, so they may not be able to bring the 25,000 electric car to the people, which is what we need. As it is the Asian car manufacturers are shipping real cars right now that get over 50mpg in the real world. Not all electric, but electric is simply a means to an end, not an end to itself.

Of course Astrophysics, even as the bastard child of real physics, is still very hard. Most people who are in it have had some major training and degrees by the time they are 30. Also, if you are like me you are probably making some good money after 20 years of work. I could probably go to a research job, learn what I needed to learn, but would probably me making half of what I do. I love research, but like the cash as well, and can do fun stuff occasionally and as a hobby. That said there seem to many contribution amateur astronomer make to the science. IT is a very general term, and can mean anything from repairing computers to writing web pages to developing analytical algorithms in C, but maybe there is something you could contribute to on that side, or a job with a firm that does work that might be an intersection of the two.

Just to mention, since many have probably never heard of it, the JIR was a great to read in college. My favorite collection was Druken Goldfish. I also particularly remember the study that sought to predict the date when National Geographics would trigger a world cataclysm.

So it closed last year, but you only just noticed and posted an article? It doesn't seem like it's going to be missed very much, if the corpse can decompose and start to smell before someone sends the police to check on aunt Mozlabs.

I don't expect to be a Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson, but I'd love to have enough knowledge in these subjects to research and experiment to the point where I could possibly start contributing back to the field.

Look up "Galaxy Zoo". You can start contributing today.

As for classes, start reading. Find out which books are used for the courses and buy the books and read them even if you cannot take the courses.

They tried to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing

Snowden released the files he had in 2013.

That's TWENTY YEARS where they would be using their old communication methods while we were hunting them. There should not be a terrorist left alive.

The PROBLEM is that we collect too much data. It is impossible to process into useful information. It is a mass of "dots" for 300,000,000 people that increases every single day.

And terrorists are so rare that they (and their communications) vanish into the mass of regular people. If you live in the USofA you are more likely to be killed by someone in your own family than by a terrorist.

Europe is larger than the US, with a comparable population. How come sparsely-populated areas of, for example, Sweden and Norway can have blindingly-fast internet, whereas similarly-populous areas of the US have terrible internet? Your argument is clearly nonsense.

I think he's hinting that internet connectivity should be a municipal service, as it is in some parts of the world (which offer better speeds than most US ISPs seem to offer).

Size has nothing to do with it. Each ISP has local networks connected to each other (and other ISPs) by larger connections. The exact same is true in Europe. If what you say is true, then US cities should have wonderful broadband, but that is clearly not the case. Europe is larger than the US, with a similar population, so your comparison isn't at all accurate, and the more you trot it out in discussions like this, the longer it will take to fix.

Slashdot needs to get out of the nineties and into the 21st century.

You can get your old account back if you can remember what your email address was. Send a note to help@slashdot.org.

I'd lost my account and they were very helpful about it.

As to your surgery, LISTEN TO THE DOCTOR!!! Helping that one person could prevent you from helping others in the future. Oh, and I empathize; I had a vitrectomy in 2008. Not the least bit fun.

Of course they're not as bad as ISIS, but to call the Christian Right "harmless" is not very accurate. The sheer number of people dying from back-alley abortions is a testament to that, and that's just one of their areas of "expertise".

But usually not capitalised, at least not since the late 1700s.

Also because we already betrayed them once and they're not necessarily our best friends because of it.

Mostly by changing allies the way other people change their underwear, yes.

Americans killed two or so orders of magnitude more civilians in the middle east than arab terrorists killed in the USA. Somewhere on that road, the justification became a cruel joke.