Sure, and if they wanted to they could sell gasoline-powered cars, too.

Tesla is taking a shot at modernizing the car industry, and not just with their choice of powerplant. The dealer system made sense when you needed local expertise, but information is much easier to distribute today. Dealers are an anachronism -- and they know it, which is why they're fighting so hard to retain the regulatory restrictions on direct sales.

There are lots of practical reasons why Tesla doesn't want to go the franchise route, but besides all of those, it's just not where Tesla wants to go. They may fail. Saturn tried to buck the old model, too, not by eliminating dealerships but by enforcing tight rules on franchises and requiring a set-price sales model, and they ultimately failed, first falling back to the old model of jerking customers around, and then ultimately getting shut down entirely. Maybe Tesla will fail, too, but I don't think so, and I'm glad they're sticking to their guns.

That's a rather strong statement. Do you mean that they don't compete right now, or that they never can/will compete? Because your statement sounds like the latter, and I don't buy it. Central generation clearly can benefit from economies of scale, but distribution is enormously expensive, both in terms of infrastructure cost and power losses.

You read wrong. HTTPS doesn't prevent advertising. I suppose it prevents ads injected by ISPs, etc., but very, very few ads that you see get there that way.

You've put your finger on the key point... corporate taxes are a way to hide taxes from taxpayers, so they don't realize just how much they're paying.

Personally, I think that's a bad thing, not a good one. People should know what they're paying so they can decide if they're getting good value for their money.

It's also extremely harmful to highly disaggregated supply chains and strongly rewards deep vertical integration. That's bad because it means supplies of materials that have multiple uses either get locked to a single use or else the companies that control those supplies become ideally-positioned to own huge swaths of the market. This is because if you tax revenue, the tax gets applied at every step in the supply chain. If it's a 5% tax and there are 10 steps in the chain (10 companies adding a bit of value and selling on to the next company in the chain, up until the last which sells to consumers), then the tax that must be build into the final price could be as high as 63%. In contrast, a company that buys up the entire supply chain only has to build a 5% tax into their prices. This translates into a huge competitive advantage for vertical integration.

I'm skeptical about the "not enough jobs" notion. We've seen at least three technology-driven revolutions that have wiped out nearly all the jobs that everyone worked pre-revolution... and yet each time we created all sorts of new jobs, many of which would have been either frivolous or completely inconcievable before the revolution.

In general, we're really, really bad at predicting the future. To me that says that while it makes sense to look forward and plan, we should be careful to avoid extremes, because odds are very, very good that our predictions are wrong, and therefore our plans are wrong.

People deciding not to pay to listen to you is far from the same thing as people silencing you.

Free speech means that you cannot be prevented from speaking your mind (within some limits, which Watson did not cross), but it in no way obligates people to listen to you, much less to pay you for the privilege of listening to you.

Well, assuming you don't know what "variation" and "median" mean, sure, why not call that a "yes"?

I can only assume from your response that you're a member of one of those "inferior" races, since if you were a member of the superior race you would recognize your own stupidity. Is there a racial analogue of the Dunning-Kruger effect... the stupidest races consider themselves the most competent?

My experience is that, regardless of country, the reporting of any news of which I have firsthand knowledge is wrong in all sorts of ways. Usually they get the gist right, but that's about it... and they don't always get that much right. I remind myself regularly that this cannot be an artifact related to my personal knowledge, but that all news reporting must be flawed.

Just take everything with a grain of salt. Or a pound.

The point is that the page rank algorithm just reflects the consensus of other sites on the web. If you don't like that consensus, you should take it up with all of those sources.

Boy? LOL.

Yes, the lack of detailed status information about init-managed process is something that is broken in traditional init systems, so it's fine to get excited by the fact that systemd fixes this brokenness.

Heh. Well, if your goal is to spread fact-less hype, you should be careful not to include blindingly obvious errors in your summary. As soon as I hit "Utah" in the summary, I stopped reading.

FTFY. I've been quite impressed with it.