Tesla is following its plan nicely. Knowing that developing the initial platform technology would be expensive, they started with a car that people are typically willing to pay a lot for: a high-performance roadster. Next, they are approximately halving that price while increasing the versatility to expand the potential market. There are many cars in the price range of the Model S that sell well to upper-middle-class customers, especially those that can serve as a primary vehicle such as this 5-door. The work on the Model S will ultimately allow Tesla to bring down the cost of the next model still further with a more mass-market vehicle. Each step furthers the technology and brings in revenue to fund the next step.

No more so than making assault illegal is a violation of your personal right to punch someone. Personal liberties stop where they infringe on the rights of others. Plus, noone is being held down at needle point, just being denied privileges that they can be replaced with private sources. When an individual forgoes a vaccine, they're increasing the chance that you and I will encounter and be infected with the disease (since vaccines aren't 100% effective and since prevention is a combination of reducing exposure and boosting immunity).

It makes far more sense for private industry to focus on where they can make money - transporting cargo such as satellites into orbit. That is, they become orbital trucks. This frees up NASA to work on visionary projects that aren't currently commercially viable: we the people funding, though tax dollars, the learning necessary for our long-term futures.

Stratolaunch: Launch from the stratosphere. Seems apropos to me!

How you do pay "a lot more" for an iPad? A 10.1" Galaxy Tab is the same price as the iPad as of this moment on a reasonable site such as Amazon.com. And that's without Apple's excellent customer support (phone and retail store), without the ability to extend the warranty an extra year and without the high resale value which reduces total cost of ownership considerably.

An individual site doing its own investigation and coming up with a conclusion that they don't know exactly what's going on (and even stating that their speculations don't fully make sense) is hardly a reason for people to get all upset. Withhold judgment until there's an actual story to judge.

Those food scraps in the landfill become permanent volume. Ever higher mounds. At one point, the Fresh Kills Landfill near where my folks live was the largest manmade object in the world. The small amount of attrition that occurs is into methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas. In contrast, composting breaks down the food into constituent organic components, some of which become soil enrichers and come of which are turned into CO2 (which is released back into the air from which it recently came and so isn't a net climate change contributor). What would you rather have? A big, permanent pile of stuff taking over your land and releasing undesirable gases or a much smaller static pile that gives off helpful-to-benign byproducts? Put another way in terms of purely animal matter, would you rather that all the dead creatures of the earth pile up until we're hip deep in them or that they break down naturally for their materials to be reused?

Pretty true for most cases such as typical bus mass transit, but large cities with subways can be an exception. The average New York MTA average consumption per passenger mile is 2000 BTU, which is less than 5500 BTU for a single-passenger car, 3,500 BTU for a car with average passenger load and even less than the 2,300 for typically-loaded car under a 35MPG CAFE standard.

iTunes Match does, yes. And tracks with under 256kbps that exist in the iTunes store are replaced with 256kbps AAC versions.

The original iPad racked up 100,000 preorders per day upon announcement, without any real preexisting tablet market to have stoked demand. The fact that it sold 1 million during the first month indicates that fulfilling these levels of orders for a complex product is tricky. Hopefully, since the Fire is based on the Playbook, they've been practicing production for a while.

Yes, but the first Intel Macs weren't released until January 2006. There was barely any time between the hardware being Windows compatible and Apple not only supporting it but actually supplying the enabling drivers. So, the "finally" sentiment is very misplaced, as it implies a long period of unfulfilled demand as someone dragged their feet.

This makes perfect sense to me. With Android, Amazon doesn't have top-to-bottom vertical integration and control, since they still rely on Google to do the core Android development and thus need to either be beholden to Google's timing or continue to work with forks of older versions. If they buy WebOS, they now employ all the programmers and can coordinate all the pieces that go into their tablet. Then could also further develop their EC2-assistance technologies and extend them beyond Silk to further enhance tablet performance. Buy making their forward-facing UI software completely custom, it's independent of Android from the customer point of view, especially customers buying the device for media and not for Android app compatibiility. This should make it easier to transplant the UI onto a different core OS without confusing customers who've already learned the UI. They could eventually exposure more of WebOS over time and offer a fully-controlled app store for it. I even wonder if they'd create a special build for $99 TouchPad firesale customers, allowing them to transform their tablets into large-screen Kindle Fires. In effect, HP would have subsidized putting Kindle software into many more Amazon-media-consuming hands.

Although I'm only one datapoint, my Optimum Boost (Cablevision) service north of NYC almost always hits the 50d/8u Mbps that I'm paying for ($15 over base service for the higher speeds). When I've had issues, they've always been catastrophic ones (no signal due to bad connector on the utility pole, etc.) rather than just slowdowns.

Not really. The equivalent would be if your power company charged a flat rate for unlimited electrical use, based on the tacit assumption that there were only so many gadgets and appliances that a regular house would ever run. Then, you go and install a huge cable from your house to your huge office park across the street in order for that park to take advantage of your house's unlimited power plan. The problem is all the assumptions either implied or in fine print. Companies shouldn't be allowed to offer unlimited service at a flat rate. Such things are untenable, business-wise, since networks can't handle infinite traffic. If a company means that you can use as much data as a given device can consume, that's what the plan should say. The restrictions against another device tapping into that plan's data allotment should be spelled out clearly in advance of a customer signing the contract. Better yet, offer a metered plan that is device agnostic and perhaps which has an escalating cost for the highest monthly data caps as needed to keep network congestion reasonable.

Even when you enforce official APIs for apps, the OS itself must of course use undocumented APIs. That's merely separation of user functions from central system functions. Apple isn't using private APIs in its apps sold through the app store but rather in the implementation of a new OS capability. iOS already has USB sync. Apple just implemented the means to cut the cord. This isn't something an app can do because a central principle of iOS apps is that they are sandboxed and see only their own data. This is what allows users to feel free to try any app without worry of ever corrupting the phone or data from another app. A sync app must obviously see beyond its own sandbox and is thus impossible. That's why Apple made it a central system service. Note that there is no concept of a system tweak in iOS. You can only buy apps, never any software to customize or modify the OS function itself. Perhaps Apple will one day create APIs to allow this, but the sandboxed app model is the only one right now. By the way, another reason many private APIs is because the developer, whether Microsoft or Apple, isn't prepared to lock them down or support them. They are subject to change as the functions they implement are refined and co-optimized with the rest of the OS.