Gas stations used to have service bays with oil change pits. Places like Jiffy Lube still operate that way. I can see those pits being repurposed for this function too, since easy access to the underside of the car and a drive-through bay may really help to keep the time down.

Well, it used to be common for gas stations to also have vehicle service bays for back when cars were a lot more finicky and in need of regular tuning, and part of that was the oil-change pit. Maybe those remaining stations with that setup will find that it's a good market to do electric car battery swaps with the old pits.

No, it's a place where tech people with realistic views of what tech can do and bring want to see the proof that it's worth their while.

I'm still waiting for the killer-app for a smartwatch. I want it to be a central hub of sorts for my personal electronics that anything and everything essentially tethers through, be it over bluetooth or some 802.11 variant, so that everything can have network connectivity. The watch itself shouldn't actually do much- make phone calls as a speakerphone or through a bluetooth headset, provide very rudimentary mapping and navigation, notify of text messages and maybe read text messages and e-mail via text-to-speech, and show task lists and calendar and stopwatch timer events.

Everything else, like having a nice handset for phone calls, or a really good dialer that can do advanced contact list editing, or web browsing, or any other enhanced feature should work on the tablet or other personal device on one's person.

If a car has no drain plug for a fluid service that has to be performed several times a year, or can't handle a simple battery replacement without squawking, then the manufacturer is doing something wrong. Either their engineering is terrible or they're assholes.

No dice, huh?

And replace it with what, exactly?

Seriously, how do you intend to manage all of the addressing, both the IP level and the human-readable level, without some form of central authority?

Happy Birthday to you!

And Happy Birthday to nineteen million other people!

This explains a lot! We're not posting on the real Slashdot at all! We're on someone's bad copy! The entire "beta" thing was just a hijack attempt!

Yeah, bad form, replying to AC that can't even figure out how to quote right...

Advanced service on cars is harder than it used to be, I will not dispute that. On the other hand, I don't have to have my ignition system or valvetrain or carburetor adjusted every few thousand miles anymore. I have to change the oil and filter regularly, lube the suspension, check the fluid levels for coolant, transmission fluid, brake fluid, power steering fluid, and top-off the windshield washer fluid and possibly change the wiper blades, change the engine air filter, and do a brake job from time to time, and after many years, change the brake fluid, change the transmission fluid and filter, change the differential gear oil, possibly change the power steering fluid, possibly replace the spark plug wires, possibly re-gap or replace the spark plugs, and possibly replace a passenger compartment air filter.

If more service than that is required in the first 80,000 miles then the manufacturer screwed up. There should be no need pull the valve covers, or to take the top-end off of the engine, or to pull the transmission out, or to do any of a bunch of other jobs to a car unless it's been subjected to something abnormal.

Electrics eliminate a lot of that. There's still chassis/suspension maintenance, cabin/passenger compartment stuff, and there could even be new tasks like re-lubricating electric motor bearings to prevent premature wear, but by and large, electrics have a lot less of those kinds of maintenance tasks to perform, and likely a lot of them could be self-service with proper documentation.

Except that a person has free will to self-identify, at least to an extent. There can be obvious delusion like Ugundan President Idi Amin, but it's fairly easy to say that a man born and/or raised in Scotland and who self-identifies with the culture of Scotland is probably a Scotsman, and even those men that don't self-identify but whose cultural perspectives derive from an upbringing in Scotland are still Scotsmen whether they want to be or not. Craig Ferguson holds American citizenship, but he's a Scotsman. John Barrowman is known as an American actor to American audiences, and even to most audiences in the UK, but he was born and raised in Scotland and speaks with a Scottish accent equally comfortably with his later-learned American accent.

If you RTF, the pictures are of 3D printed poop piles. Either it is joke, or a commentary about the utility of 3D printing. Either way, it pretty much sums up my opinion about most 3D printing hype.

At least it's not a giant CHA...

In the past the arguments that mandated the franchise structure had at least a little bit of logic in that by there being a local presence, the service that the vehicle needed could be performed by representatives with corporate connections. Back then, cars needed a LOT of service; rockers needed their lash adjusted, points needed changing and distributors needed to be curved, and lot of parts wore out faster. The majority of those maintenance tasks were internal combustion engine related though, with only a few, like brakes, applying to today's modern 100% electric cars. When cars needed that kind of maintenance it was easy to argue that without dealer support, the end consumer would be screwed-over with an unmaintainable vehicle.

As gas-powered cars improved they need less dealer-support for basic service, that already weakens the dealer-franchise argument. The new 100% electric cars require even less service to begin with though, and with the onboard computers' ability to report-back to Tesla when readings get out of normal the car can self-report small problems before they become large ones, assuming that Tesla has done a good job of determining what to monitor. Teslas simply don't need as much maintenance, and most of the simple maintenance (brakes, tires, even HVAC) can probably be performed by existing independent shops that can bill Tesla to do the warranty work.

This is a paradigm shift, and dealers are going to start to feel the pain if they're unwilling to actually add value, and honestly, there's not a lot of value to add when they're mostly unnecessary in this shift.

Then it's not a school bus. It might look like a school bus, it might even once have been a school bus, but generally to be a school bus it needs to be used for the purposes of hauling students to and from school, or to be frequently used in that capacity.

And there's still nothing preventing them from changing their attitude and discontinuing support, especially when by getting their software in-use, it's easier to migrate to their platform with the existing type of software than it is to change types of software while remaining on the existing platform.

Sure they do. And because they demonstrate some physical prowess they're usually better able to attract the attention of girls, even if they don't really have anything else to offer at all. Think, "Glory Days," by Bruce Springsteen.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I found dating as an adult to be a hell of a lot easier than as a minor, as post-high-school one isn't in this weird microcosm where all types of individuals are represented in small numbers with cliques avoiding each other, instead in the real world one is able to self-sort into whatever subculture one wants and will generally find more numbers there. I guess I was lucky, I wasn't allowed to be excessively chauvinistic or otherwise pig-headed as I grew up, so I didn't have trouble behaving correctly around women once I found my own niche where I could meet them on more even terms.

By letting the pathetic behavior so common in boys playing with tech perpetuate, we foster a system that causes women to avoid tech even when they could be just as capable as the men are.