So is there anything to stop a cop from saying, "I'm your court appointed lawyer now tell me everything"?

The lawyer isn't under suspicion and so need not be afraid that the cops are trying to build a case against him.

A lawyer that is under suspicion should only say "I wish to remain silent and I want a lawyer" just like anyone else.

The main problem with your cynicism in this case is that if the product were to be mainly marketed to imbeciles then why does it have any pretense at privacy protection at all? Such people don't care one whit and so in the previous system they would just always click "accept" and "install" and there wouldn't be a problem (for Google).

The problem instead seems to be that there is in fact a sizable portion of users out there who do care at least a little about their privacy and who do get nervous about it every time an app asks for more permissions on an update. This is why they are (apparently) now changing the permissions system, to give an appearance of privacy protection while not really offering it: they want to sell to people who actually care about their privacy and who are prepared to take reasonable steps to safeguard it, such as click "Hell No" in an installer/updater.

(I don't know why I can't get proper umlauts but you can.)

The main issue is that the public has had hundreds of years to learn that Champagne is a particular type of bubbly alcohol, and now that specific public awareness gets thrown under a train in order to co-opt a couple centuries of goodwill into money into the pockets of local special interests. This is exactly the opposite of what trademarks are meant to be: this explicitly deludes the public as to the nature of the goods that they are buying so that they are tricked into not purchasing the item that they actually wanted which may have been bubbly from California but they can't have this anymore because they're searching for Champagne which no longer means what they thought it meant.

The public perception will correct itself within a couple decades but this shouldn't have been necessary. Trademark laws should help preserve the public awareness, not randomly undermine it.

(Of course these aren't actually trademark laws, they are localised protectionism, but in my opinion proper trademark and consumer protection concerns should trump such shenanigans.)

Give the pilots an Oculus Rift headset with images fed from cameras mounted on the headset. Make sure you don't get a high-end headset "now capable of accurate reproduction of laser beams". While you can still blind the cameras with a laser you cannot burn out the pilot's retinas.

(I do hate myself a little for plugging a Facebook product.)

If you don't buy it then you are part of the problem.

(Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week!)

The first half of the topmost speculation is probably correct, and the last half is probably not.

It is a mark of the great strength of human culture that we have been able to so effectively suppress our barbaric animal nature.

They very well might, you cannot know that they will not.

Which indeed it is for the vehicles themselves. Now it's time to start working on the power grid.

No you are mistaken, European CO2 caps on electricity generation guarantee that the switch from gas guzzler to EV will cut CO2 emissions to zero for your car use. If you are in Europe, of course.

Meh, "organic" foods is modern voodoo, not interested in the debate.

Again you are demanding an absurd and impossible standard. However green your national power grid is, there is always going to someone somewhere using a diesel generator for something or other. This cannot be the yardstick used for moving towards a greener economy because all progress would be impossible.

It remains a fact that anyone exchanging their gas guzzler for an electric vehicle is causing a reduction in CO2 emissions equal to what the gas guzzler used to produce. Simple arithmetic then reveals that the electric vehicle is in fact zero emission even at the power plant. And this is even before we start considering the various steps an individual can take to make sure that his own electricity use is completely emission free in the first place.

I would consider a food fat free even if the people working at the food manufacturing plant do have fat in them. You could have picked a better analogy however because I don't see why I would ever want to mandate that employees in the food industry should be fat free.

The choice between having a life and not having a life, is no choice at all.

Only if those power plants actually do produce CO2, which is often not the case. Your assumption that all power generation always emits CO2 is over one hundred years out of date.

You are mistaken. Europe has a cap on total CO2 emissions in electricity generation, but no cap on total CO2 emissions from vehicles. It follows that every fossil burning car that is replaced by an electric one reduces CO2 emissions from the vehicle pool, and that the extra electricity that must be generated to power this new electric car will come from non-CO2 emitting power generation. That is the law. Your region may or may not have similar regulations, but of course, if your politicians have decreed that there shall be CO2 generation then the problem is with them not with the vehicles that enable emission free transport.

This is not a property of the vehicle, it is a property of the power plant. There definitely are electric vehicles that get their electricity from emission free sources such as wind, solar, hydro or nuclear. Norway, for one, is full of them.

There could be power plants that produce electricity from burning little babies for all I know and if there are then this does not reflect negatively on the vehicle that ends up using that power because it doesn't really have much choice: once an electron enters the grid it goes where it goes. It does of course reflect negatively on the power plant itself (and perhaps you'd be able to buy pink certificates to ensure your power comes from non baby burning sources).

You are trying to hold the term to an absurd and impossible standard. By this standard you will find that in fact no human activity can ever be zero emission because if there is just one single human involved in the activity then that human breathes oxygen in and CO2 out, and this is not zero emission.

The term "zero emission" was not invented just so that it could never be used and so a much more reasonable interpretation of the term "zero emission vehicle" is that the vehicle itself doesn't emit CO2 in operation. The fact that its electricity production, and marketers, and fanboys, etc., may emit CO2 in their various activities has no impact on this.

Rules of thumb that seem to be used in connection with Tesla is 90% efficiency battery to engine, and 90% efficiency engine to road, for ~80% efficiency battery to road. Then regenerative braking goes through that twice: once from road into battery and once back from the battery down into the road, and so gets 80% x 80% = ~60% efficiency overall for regenerative braking.

http://www.teslamotors.com/blo...

A supercharger isn't necessarily powered by its solar panels, the current idea seems more along the lines of it being powered by some solar farm somewhere. And then there are plans to roll out more solar panels to each actual station at some time in the future.

It seems to me to border on the religious to believe that if such a great filter exists then each species has one and only one of them. Much more likely, to my thinking, there is a number of great filters and while we may have put some of them behind us there are others yet to come.

We may have dodged the asteroid extinctions, the numerous disease vectors, and nuclear annihilation; but how will we deal with overpopulation, environmental collapse, and the corruption inherent in our increasingly large political constructs? To think that we're out of the woods just because we had one or two close shaves in the past is to be blind to the perils that still lie ahead of us.