-- This factory will represent 3% of the states economy.

Really? Wow, I didn't realize Arizona was that bad off! Seriously though, even if it seems to help in the short term do you really want a whole state to be dependant on one single factory for that large a piece of it's economy? Arizona, just go ask Michigan about that and then have a long, hard thinking session about the future.

-- Why does his company need a huge pile of tax breaks to succeed?
It has to compete against every other company which also sit on huge piles of tax breaks.

-- If I open a company tomorrow, how can I get away with not paying taxes?
Build a factory. Promise to hire lots of people. Take government officials out for a series of expensive dinners where you talk about all the tax dollars your employees wages will bring. Do whatever else everyone else does.

-- Why are Tesla's debt bonds in Junk status but he continues to get freebies from states?
I don't know. Maybe if you can be too big to fail you can also be to small to fail?

-- Why is it that a guy with a big mouth and political friends on all sides gets so much tax subsidy, loans, breaks and deals?
Nah, I'm sure the "big mouths" are just getting a drop in the bucket. There are plenty of tax subsidies going to bigger fish discussed only behind closed doors.

-- Why are guys who run factories employing tons of US citizens in US based factories (like Toyota) who produce super reliable
-- product with great mileage get slapped by the media when a bogus story about a gas pedal getting stuck?
Was that entirely bogus? If so then I missed that. I was aware it was over-hyped. What isn't? News people are trying to make money too.

-- Not sure why people need a super-hero.
Do they? I didn't notice. Don't get me wrong, I think Elon Musk throwing away his cue cards in a press conference and anouncing "I am Iron Man" to the anoyance of his army buddy a day after kicking some bad guys ass in a flying suit he built himself would be AWESOME! But I for one don't NEED that. My life will be complete even if it never happens.

-- 3.8 million priuses have been sold and cab drivers will tell you they easily go into the 300K range and even if the battery runs out
-- the car is still useable.
So the pinacle of human technology has been reached! We need develop nothing more. Let's pull all of our kids out of school and go have some fun in our shiny new Priuses!

-- But instead we continue to give money to the cartoon guy.
LOL. Sure.. we give money to LOTS of cartoon guys. Many are doing much worse things with that money than trying to perfect an electric car. Let's pick just one and bitch about him so that all the other ones can keep up the status quot!

Considering all their competitor's factories benefit from huge tax incentives you are trying to put Tesla at a big disadvantage! How are they supposed to compete?

Patent trolls aren't small inventors. They are groups of rich people hiding behind paper corporations. They buy their patents from others. Then they do nothing with them. They only sue those who later come up with the same idea. The whole point of the patent system was to act as an incentive for people to come up with, make use of and ultimately publicize their ideas. This was to keep technology progressing to benefit us all. The whole point of a patent troll is to extract money from people who actually try to make a product. Patent trolls hurt us all.

If YOU are a small inventor and you have a good idea you cannot implement yourself then by all means, sell it to someone who can and will. Don't feel entitled to become instantly rich. The hard work is going to be in testing, implementing and marketing the idea. We already established that you will not be doing that. If it's good then you should be able to expect a nice pay day though. If you think the world owes you free lunch for life just because you came up with an idea which you will now jealously gaurd and make sure the world (now paying your way) doesn't benefit from that idea for the next 20 years... well screw you then!

Ok, easy answer. You don't HAVE to build anything. But if you don't you have to at least make your patent available for licensing to someone who will. If you go too long without doing either you risk losing the patent. (you do get to appeal the loss of the patent, if there are special circumstances that delayed you doing something with it) Rather than patent trolls waiting to sue someone we should have patent houses with open catalogs that anyone can browse and buy licenses. Actually, I was tempted to say that having your patent available for someone to buy licenses is enough to show you are doing something with it and therefore you get to keep it. I don't think that would work though because trolls could just price the license too high on purpose and go back to pouncing and suing.

No armchair lawyers, I know this isn't how it works. I am speaking hypothetically about how it COULD work, maybe even how it SHOULD work. Hell, anything is better than how it actually "works" today!

"For years, I had all email for my vanity domain forwarded to my gmail account"

That's how I do it

"and gmail lets you send email out with the Reply-to header set as your vanity domain"

Yeah, sort of. I set my defauly from address to be my "vanity". It still seems to default to my gmail address sometimes if I don't watch it. (I rarely think to look before hitting send). It sucks because it seems like as soon as someone receives something from my gmail address that's the only address they will send to. I want them to use the "vanity" one so that I can switch it any time I like! I guess people just like gmail addresses, maybe because they are more familiar.

" The best you can hope for with most of them is to use a dedicated email service like gmail rather than what their ISP gives them"

Yes. That would be the sensable thing. Non business don't NEED domain names but it is pretty dumb to lock yourself into an isp by using the email.

"Paying to renew the domain name, as well as paying for a hosting service to handle your email isn't fee.[sic] "

No. Good things rarely are. But it IS pretty cheap if you shop around.

"Most home users are far more likely to forget to renew their domain name and have it snatched up by a domain squatter"

What?!?! There is a pretty large grace period before a domain is available to be bought by someone else. Yes, I have let my own lapse a couple of times. It's never come close to going back on the market though!! If you are actually using email you will notice within a day or two. Then maybe you will set a reminder on your phone calendar (or on paper if you are old).

If you can remotely disable it then why not just remotely blow it up?

Hey, there's a new strategy... remote control bombs disguised as other sorts of weapons. Sure.. raid this depot... I dare ya!!

Huh.. I thought Apple strictly disallowed emulators in their store. My iPad is the only device I didn't have an HP emulator on. I know what I am doing when I get home now...

Don't bother. If you aren't in school anymore just use an emulator on your computer or smart phone. Believe it or not HP released the ROMs to those older calculators. It's legal! They have a website with free download. Go get the 48SX ROM, pick the emulator for your platform and it's exactly like the real thing. Did you keep the manual? It still applies. No new learning curve!

I grew up with a 48G and this is what I do now. Another cool thing is on the Android emulator there are two views. One has all the buttons and looks just like the real calculator. There is also a second view that cuts down on the available buttons but enlarges them and gives you a bigger screen than the real calculator ever had! You can switch back and forth without losing your work if you need those other buttons. You don't really need that on the desktop emulators because there is so much more screen to work with anyway.

You can do this with TI too but you have to steal the ROM, not so nice.

My school was pretty open about us using other types of calculators. They only taught TI but if you were willing to take it upon yourself you could use any kind you wanted. My parents bought me an HP 48G (RPN). I liked it b/c I had dreams of programming it to do stuff (kind of like today's smart phones). It was more capable than TIs. I never got around to programming anything. I became comfortable with it so I stuck with it even though figuring out how to do the more advanced functions all by myself made class much more painful. I would not recommend going counter to the rest of the class to any current students.

While in a perfect world schools would cater to the student's or parents' choice but it isn't practical. I can certainly understand educators not wanting to learn 10 different kinds of calculators. Even if the teacher already knows them all, individually teaching students to use their calculators would slow down the class. I also undertand them not allowing general purpose devices such as smart phones. I'm not so convinced about the distraction argument (they only hurt themselves). I do think the possiblity for cheating makes them unusable.

What really sucks though is the resulting TI monopoly. Of course they are over priced and under-evolved! Why wouldn't they be??

What I would really want to see is a STANDARD generic calculator that anyone can produce. TI of course is never going to allow their own "IP" to be used that way. Unfortunately even if someone designed such a thing and made it free it will go nowhere because educators do not care about this sort of thing enough to make the switch.

The only solution I can see (unfortunately) is government action. I think that the government should be the LAST option for solving any problem but what else could ever break the monopoly? It's self-sustaining!

It could be made law that all school switch to an open calculator. Or... I've never heard of this happening but doesn't copyright law have something written in about eminent domain? TI could be forced to allow others to produce TI-like calculators. That is an ugly solution! Any time government takes private property, that is a horrible precident. It might be a bit more "fair" to TI though. At least making TI-like calculators TI would still have a head start. Also eminent domain usually requires some sort of compensation. What value is that "IP" to TI after some other open design has been mandated?

Ultimately I don't see either of these things happening. The current political situation is way too pro-corporation, anti-consumer to ever do anything like that and it shows no signs of changing. At least my own story has a somewhat happy ending. My old HP calculator died (screen cracked). But.. HP released the ROMS, free and legal! There is an emulator that let's me use it exactly like I used to. And.. since I am no longer in school I can even run it on my cellphone! I could do the same with TI but I would have to pirate a ROM.

Is there any danger of this getting into anyone's intestines and living there? I wouldn't want propane farts!

Does that mean that the Transmeta Crusoe wasn't anything special?

Short of real-time sending the data to a remote location not under control of the local police department you can't realy eliminate the problem. I think that would take too much mobile bandwidth.

The problem could be minimized through procedure or even law. Standard procedure should be that the data never gets manually erased. (Actually, don't even put controls on there to do so). Let it roll over. If no-one complains about the officer within a week the week old data deletes itself to make room. If the officer delete's his/her own footage, that should be a punishable offense all by itself. If it lines up with a time when the officer was acused of something... the fact the officer deleted something itself becomes evidence. It's also a case for a destruction of evidence charge.

"What if the police got to the scene of a crime after..."

The same point could be made against the officer giving any testimony of what he saw.

"but it would still require a massive database and supporting infrastructure"

If this happens I don't know how it will actually be implemented. Maybe lawmakers will mandate some huge infrastructure. I don't think that is necessary though.

  I think the camera should probably send it's data wirelessly to a box in the police car. That box should be made from heavy gauge steel with a lock the officer does not get a key for. Any tampering would be a federal offense punishable by jailtime. Inside is a computer that stores the data and automatically deletes anything older than some arbitrary age (How about a week?). So long as nothing funny happens that's as far as the data needs to go.

For a little more robust of a system the car could sync it's stored footage with a computer at the police station. This would happen wirelessly and automatically. The syncing process would NOT delete anything from the car's own box.