I've never understood this one, a blockbuster is a great movie while a bomb is a bad one. But a blockbuster is a bomb. WTF?

Historically speaking, defectors from the Soviet Union were most utterly shocked and amazed by grocery stores.

The idea that there could be SO MUCH FOOD that people could browse around, pick and choose, pass up fruits or vegetables as not quite pretty enough, and that the stores would routinely throw out unwanted food was simply unfathomable.

Do you not remember people comparing Bush to a chimpanzee?

I remember that well. It was extremely insulting -- to chimpanzees. Chimps are highly intelligent creatures.

The monkey thing is only racist if a white person calls a black person a "monkey".

However, this incident has North Korea comparing Obama to a monkey, so it can't be racist. Many people here in the US believe it's impossible for non-white people to be racist.

"low-ID"? WTF are you talking about?

How is he stereotyping anyone besides the general populace? He never claimed that average American users were any more tech-savvy. The idea that average phone users in any country are going to be savvy enough to use technical means to bypass these roadblocks is just silly.

It's a great point: people who don't have an emotional investment in the Department of X can easily see that the people who make up the Department only care only for improving their own power and financial position, and are making X even worse both by getting in the way and also by consuming valuable resources that could be used to actually provide X instead.

The difficult part is realizing this is true for all X, even the ones which are your personal favorites.

You don't think they could have filtered that stuff out of the mails?

I know, it's a stretch, I just put it out there as a remote possibility. Conspiracy theories aren't always wrong, every once in a while they turn out to be true.

But isn't transsexual part of the larger set which is transgender? It seems like you're just being redundant.

From what I hear, the movie is crap anyway, so Sony is likely making more money off of it because of all the hype and press surrounding it. (They're selling it as pay-per-view on their own website.) The whole incident may have even been orchestrated by Sony as a giant publicity scheme, who knows.

Lotus also retooled the production line that Tesla was using, which is another thing that killed the Roadster. Lotus didn't have a problem with Tesla continuing their relationship (well, sort of), but that would have also required some additional engineering effort to retool the customized components that Tesla was using.

In short, like you said... it would require a whole new redesign from basically a clean sheet of paper that only superficially looks like the original Roadster. The battery technology would still be largely the same, but even that has evolved over the years.

Summary: Lots of improvements in a number of areas can make a big, big difference.

Since ~2008 I know they've increased the energy density of their 18650 cells by 20-30%, which would correspond to a 20-30% increase in range no matter what. After that it starts adding up quick.

I wonder if they might end up restarting roadster production. For a small car manufacturer that could even be fairly logical - produce as many as you can for a relatively short period of time(few years), then shut down production for a few years to let the demand recover and grow.

Perhaps more importantly, increasing the range of a car from 250 miles to ~400 also means that you could put a smaller battery pack in that costs nearly half as much, making it more affordable.

It also helps show the longevity of Battery Electronic Vehicles. Though it's only been two years since they stopped producing it, they're still producing not just maintenance parts, but serious upgrades.

Having looked at the XML files they provided, while some are marginally useful, about 1.4 million reply comments are simply dumped into CDATA sections without any consistent formatting or separators. After much regex splitting, it was readily apparent that the downloads they provided were missing about 700k comments. Glad to see they're actually admitting it and may even remedy it.

Even if it was sold for a penny, there may still be contract restriction on resale as well as criminal and civil restrictions on what other things they can do with such things. North Korea in particular is banned from the sale of munitions (including computer software in some cases), so I think ITAR would definitely apply to a used but functional aircraft carrier. At the very least, a "right of first refusal" clause could be put into any sales contract where the DOD would need to be offered and informed about any resale in anything close to its current form. Historical easements might also be applied by the various historical organizations that could further complicate any resale or even use by anybody except for demolition without having those easements being cleared.

I would agree with you that turning it from a sale into a contract does make some legal distinction though, as it can mean that the DOD would be required to address issues like asbestos found in compartments that weren't documented, classified documents that weren't properly removed before the contract, and a few other minor issue of mainly liability that the Department of Defense would need to address in a demolitions contract that instead would need to be held by the company doing the demolition work.

What on earth makes you think that NK has to have the native talent? The didn't figure out how to make nukes on their own either. They didn't home-grow their substantial currency counterfeiting operation, either. They likewise don't design and build their own military equipment. But that doesn't stop them from having nukes, from doing big business in phony currency, and sinking other people's ships.