That's based on the premise that the model T was less expensive than a horse

No, it's based on the premise of the Model-T being the cheapest possible automobile.

It's not obvious that the automobile would take off, though the piles of horse feces in city streets should have been a hint. But it is obvious that the best chance anybody has, starting a new market, is to go for the least-expensive possible vehicle.

otherwise Ford wouldn't have been the only one in the USA doing it so cheaply/successfully for the better part of 10 years.

Ford found a way to do it very cheaply, that had escaped all others. There were plenty of other car makers out there, and once they adopted the assembly-line model, they started competing with Ford, too.

It could also refer to the price of the factory, which will be well over a billion dollars.

> I suspect that the name is also a bit of an homage to Back to the Future, but given that Musk is of South African origin and didn't move to North America until three years after the movie came out, I'd like to hear it from the horse's mouth to be sure.

Back to the Future 1 did 45% of it's box office gross internationally ( http://www.boxofficemojo.com/m... ). I assume South Africa had movie theaters in 1985. Most reasonably developed countries did.

Obviously the time is right for someone to invent a little portable keyboard (possibly with its own battery) that plugs into the phone's USB port and lets you type like a normal person, instead of like a demented monkey chasing termites.

(Which is what I feel like when I use a stylus, but it's still better than fat-finger syndrome.)

Have you looked at animal samples too? Seems to me it would be easier to get those upper gut samples...

Is it human-host only, or opportunistic wherever its favored bacteria thrive?

Has any of this virus been incorporated in our DNA?

Completely OT, having been preconditioned by the crAss cracks, my brain decided to parse your username as "robed wards" which made no sense. :)

Well, on the subject of pedantic, I stream a fair bit of my music over a frequency modulated signal transmitted in the electromagnetic spectrum. Most of my combined audio/visual streaming is on a hard connection between some sort of random access memory to an output device after appropriate signal processing.

Or, stepping the pedantry up a notch, I stream most of my video and text between approximately 400 nm and 650 nm in the EM spectrum and audio via molecular vibrational wave propagation between 50 Hz and 20,000 Hz - both of which use biological systems for final processing.

Definitions could help, but clarity begets pertinence - and who want's that?

The old Henry Ford saying goes (not that he necessarily said it) "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses".

Of course faster horses weren't an option. And what were the early cars, other than bare-bones "horseless carriages"? It's not as if the Model-T was a Ferrari in an age of wagons.

Consumers almost always choose "cheaper" when the price is significant. Designing the cheapest possible car, within the confines of the engineering of the day, seems like an obvious choice, and basically what they did.

Half of your customers buy the iPhone. All those people who said, "Oh, I'm going to buy QWERTY," boom, take them out of the equation."

Funny, because Sprint has pushed the iPhone harder than anyone. The cut-rate prices with the iPhone, even on already-cut-rate services like Sprint's Virgin Mobile, are tempting. They practically PAY YOU to take an iPhone. There were articles about how they were contractually required to sell X iPhones from their deal with Apple, but it sounds like they had to undermine the rest of their business to get it done.

I also specified Android, since almost nobody wants feature phones or Windows, which returned just EIGHT. Then I required LTE, which brought it down to just FOUR:

LG Enact (Available on Verizon)

LG Mach (no longer available, Sprint)

LG Optimus F3Q (Available on T-Mobile)

Samsung Stratosphere / Galaxy Metrix 4G (For sale on Amazon, not listed as available by Verizon. YMMV)

and, despite the findings of your rigorous "informal online survey", there actually ISN'T that much demand for such a device.

Sliders made up 30% of US phone sales, a short time ago. There's no mistaking those numbers. There are a large number of people who want them. Perhaps they, like me, are reluctantly sticking with older sliders, waiting for a compelling device to come out. Maybe a few are reluctantly accepting non-sliders, with no other options from work or their preferred carrier.

Hell, I'd have switched to Republic Wireless, or Ting, or others, if they had a compelling Android slider available with their service. I never even considered an iPhone, for their omission. Lots of companies are losing decent chunks of money, for ignoring this market.

I was planning to sign-up with T-Mobile, too, and delayed for being unable to find a slider for myself, and the plan isn't such a good deal with fewer people on it. I later realized they had just one, but their website doesn't have it classified correctly, so you get no results when you narrow it down to Android and Qwerty, but I find their service less-compelling today, so several potential customers were lost.

Not sure where this rant came from, but...

Coke and Pepsi both have sold mini-cans, about 8oz, for quite a few years. It's up to the convenience stores you visit to choose to stock them, or not. And if they determine that they can't make a profit on them, they shouldn't stock what YOU happen to want.

http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

Of course you also have the option of throwing an ice chest in your car, stocked with whatever sizes of soda you prefer. You could save tons of money, and entirely eliminate waste, by buying 3 litre bottles of generic sodas for $1, and using whatever size cup/bottle you prefer.

Or you could just drink water... Cold water and crushed/cubed ice in the door of my refrigerator, with a 5 year filter to eliminate the bad chlorine taste, is easily the best and most convenient option for drinking I've found.

For some flavor, drink powders (iced-tea, lemonade, hawaiian punch, tang, gatorade, etc.) are far cheaper than buying water that's been trucked across the country, and can be mixed into drinks in whatever sizes or strengths you happen to prefer. They even sell "stick" packs to be dumped into bottles of water, though you're far better off if you reuse and refill any water bottles you buy.

How does traffic generated within verisonz ASN, and exists within the same verizon ASN, even need BGP to function?

This discussion is all about data going from: Netflix --> Level-3 --> Verizon

How are you getting Verizon --> Verizon out of this, and how is that relevant to Netflix?

the nature of peering agreements should change

I don't have any problem with that argument, as long as those who espouse it are honest and up-front about it, instead of claiming peering disputes are something new, and a criminal conspiracy, or other such utterly baseless bull.

You've decided to throw logic and facts to the wind and just go off on an I-hate-RMS-so-I-hate-GCC-by-proxy rant.

Funny you say that, just after dismissing all the facts I mentioned.