Wouldn't it be great if someone would start a pay-as-you-go scheme for electricity? Or long-distance telephone service? Or gasoline?

Flat-rate services rely on light users subsidizing heavy users. If the rates are fair, pay-per-use is a good idea -- certainly better than arbitrary data caps that might get enforced god-knows-when.

And yes, people with lots of money can afford to buy more stuff. That's how it works.

If you get 100 miles per charge, you'll be looking at renewal after 600,000 miles. 300,000 if you only get 50 miles/charge.

Either case is an awfully optimistic lifespan for any combustion engine-based car currently on the market. You'll certainly spend more on repairs over those half-million miles than you did originally on the car.

Wouldn't it depend on how close the screen is to your eye?

And indeed, after Masten's third attempt, their rocket was damaged badly enough by a fire that they really thought they wouldn't be able to fly the next day, regardless of the judges' decision. It was the help of volunteers from other competing teams that got them off the ground the next day. In addition to fixing the problem that caused the fire, they essentially needed to replace all the wiring on the rocket.

And the next day, a bunch of Masten's team members drove up to FAR and helped Unreasonable Rocket to troubleshoot their rockets -- even though success by Unreasonable could only cost them prize money.

The members of these teams are not only ridiculously talented, they're also ridiculously open and supportive of each other. It's a bit humbling to watch.

OK, I'll bite. As someone who runs a SaaS product (http://gimlet.us, in case you care), I can assure you that we're not trying to nickel-and-dime our customers. We're trying to provide useful software at a reasonable price — nothing more, nothing less.

I've run a very similar open-source project, and found that by far, the most frequent question from people was "how do I get this running?" I talked to many people who wanted to try it, only to find that their IT department was an obstacle. One person told me — no lie — that their IT staff would charge $26,000 to install a small PHP/MySQL app.

Offering our software as a hosted service means we can provide it to nontechnical users without needing the help or approval of their sysadmins. It means that deploying patches is relatively straightforward, and that installers and packaging are things we just don't need to worry about. Instead, we can spend our (limited!) development time making our app better.

Will we, at some point, offer our code "for sale" as an installable, locally-run product? Almost certainly. However, the demand hasn't been there so far, so our efforts have been focused elsewhere.

Yes, there are some real concerns about putting your data up in someone else's cloud. But the idea that we're offering our app as a service to fleece people is simply not accurate.