Don't worry, your human rights are safe, because this is about person rights, not human rights.

Perhaps there will be some report on Linux with a positive spin on it.

People are sick and tired of car payments and insurance payments.

A subscription service has to pay for these too. They're just hidden from you. Plus there is the additional overhead from the subscription service company. Total cost per mile is roughly the same, the savings come from parking costs and not having to deal with age related problems on the cars because you wear them out with pure mileage before they get old.

You don't have the upfront cost of owning the car, but you end up paying more per mile than people who own cars. There's a tipping point where car-as-a-service don't make sense anymore and a lot of Americans are well past that point. In fact most people who live in the suburbs and anybody rural are past that point. If you don't have ready access to good mass transit then you probably need to own a car. If you do live in a city, then you have to weigh the car-as-a-service option against just using mass transit and taxies, and traditional car rental for those rare occasions where you need to travel a good distance from the city.

Of course EVs in their current form are almost totally unsuited for a subscription model, since their usage model depends on being parked in places with charging support for a relatively long time and only being used on short to medium trips. They're amazing as commuter cars, but not a good idea for a Taxi. Supercharging is hard on the car and should be used sparingly.

Or you know, having to install the kid car seats every time you want to go somewhere would get old fast, especially if it's a different car every time and you have to figure out where the manufacturer hid the bars this time. Or if the car doesn't have the bars and you have to use the seatbelt method. Or the bars are there but spaced differently so you have to adjust the annoyingly difficult to adjust sliders on the seat to make it fit properly.

Ridiculous. Yet another "world changing vision" brought to you by an entitled, elitist cadre of the Bay Area who fail to understand that the rest of the world doesn't live like they do.

The opening premise "well, a lot of people adopted smartphones rapidly, so they'll adopt this too" already smells like snake oil: people adopted smartphones because they were BETTER in almost every conceivable way to the previous generation of phones.*
*would they have done so, if one had to charge the phone for 12 minutes for every 1 you talked? I doubt it.

Let me debunk the list of putative "improvements" individually: (I apologize to /. users for the stupid format characters, but /. still doesn't understand pasted quotes/apostrophes.)

"It's more fun to drive, with smooth, transmission-less acceleration. For most of us it is the fastest car we have ever owned."
- Maybe it's more fun to drive. A vanishingly tiny % of people in this world buy cars primarily based on their "fun". Nobody gives a flying hoot about 'transmissionless' acceleration, nor does 'fastest' really matter in a world with speed limits.

"Itâ(TM)s quieter at all times and nearly silent at low speeds."
- I've never once heard someone buying a new car based on how quiet it is. Never. (OK, I *have* heard of motorheads not buying a car because it's not loud enough.) Considering some of the instant off/on tech in the newest cars, they're exactly as quiet as the Magical Tesla while idling, ie silent/off. And aside from older cars which will naturally phase out of the system, the bulk of noise from a highway is tires, not engines.

"It is always âoefullâ every morning one drives it and you never need to go to a gas station."
- Simply, completely, thoroughly wrong. Well, unless you sleep 3 days at a stretch.Further, I don't know about you, but I drive more than once just in the morning.
According to (https://www.cars.com/articles/2013/11/how-quickly-does-the-tesla-model-s-battery-charge/) the nominal charge for a non-special installation (ie a normal outlet) is FIVE MILES PER HOUR OF CHARGE. That's ridiculous - 60 hours to "fill the tank" to the full range, or (roughly) needing to charge 5x the driving duration.
The average commute in the US is 25 minutes. Assuming highway speeds, that's 25 miles. That means to stay 'level' in terms of range, the car will need to charge 5 hours for each leg of the commute. Go to visit a friend in a city 250 miles away? Sorry, we can't go to a movie, my car needs to charge *four hours* for us to get to the cinema and back.

"It has a user interface - including, notably, its navigation system - as superior to that of other cars as the iPhone was to earlier phones."
- I can't really refute iphone-zealotry, that's religion, not fact. It probably does have a better UI than most other firms, as they really made the most of the newest touch-screens and systems (and had no aesthetic legacy to maintain), but this is likely to be adopted relatively soon by other automakers. Nothing particularly special here, except indeed being a little ahead of the likely curve.

"It is connected to the Internet."
Christ. You know that you should really be paying attention to the road, right? 4g works well enough for map updates, which is really all the driver should care about. And personally I find the modern paradigm of everyone sitting in the car watching their own movies, playing their own games, reading their own narcissistic social media addiction reprehensible. We already suffer from an atomized society generally, you're saying it's laudable to encourage this? I have an alternative entertainment that is perfect for trips in the car with your kids or friends: "conversation".

"It continuously gets better with automatic updates and software improvements."
The Tesla is comparable to a fixed-hardware console. Ever bricked your Xbox360? In any case, electronic systems in petro-cars also get better with updates and software. Nothing new there at all.

"Itâ(TM)s more roomy and has a trunk in the front (the âoefrunkâ) AND a spacious back."
Now you're just trying to be silly. Who gives a crap where the trunk is? It has ample storage space, indeed. But then again, so does a minivan. By that logic, minivan sales should be skyrocketing?

"It comes with an app that allows you to manage the car from your phone.
It allows you to drive in the carpool lane and to sign up for a cheaper energy usage plan at home (obviously these incentives wonâ(TM)t last, but they will help get us to the tipping point described below)."
I tend to prefer sitting IN my car when 'managing' it, so the convenience of a smartphone app is moot (how secure is that, by the way?).

Setting all that aside, the Model S is $70,000. The current US new vehicle average purchase price (and let's remember that the US is pretty much the wealthiest country on the planet, ever) is $31k. As Car and Driver noted: "Logging 630 miles and conducting performance tests in this 70D required 14 plug connections versus three or four stops at the pump for the most fuel-thirsty luxury sedan driven the same distance. In exchange for the loss of convenience, you do reap substantial savings in operating costs. We spent less than $30 for the Teslaâ(TM)s electricity versus the $100 in premium gasoline a conventional luxury sedan would have consumed driving 630 miles."
FOURTEEN fill-up stops (they politely didn't mention how long those took) and an average upcharge of $40,000 ....to save $70? Woo.

Not to mention ongoing and - as far as I can see - unanswered concerns about performance, longevity, and resale PARTICULARLY in climates less benign than Palo Alto...ie everywhere. (I LOL'd at Tesla blogs talking about the bitter cold of below-freezing temps. I live in MN where winters routinely hit -40F. Ever try to turn on a flashlight left outside at that temp? Further, Car & Driver noted some troubling cooldown-demand in relatively mild warm conditions while driving aggressively as well.)

The Teslas service such a tiny, boutique market (you know, the 1%), it's hard to understand these bigger-picture items that will come to the fore when the market for them scales up to real numbers. (Tesla's monthly sales are in the 3k units range; real car sales are in the 600k (and light trucks/suvs, etc are around 800k). Tesla might as well be hand-building them for as fast as they're selling.

To suggest from this Pollyanna view that somehow electric cars are going to suddenly take off? Nah, it smells more like someone bought some Tesla stock recently and is hoping to generate enough buzz to unload it without taking a bath.

On it's own merits? It's a decent car, certainly, if you live in a benign climate and idle enough that you can live 'around' its charging-time demands. But no, I don't see consumers DEMANDING this at all.

I watched an interview, this kid is AMAZINGLY mature.

Seriously, he gave better, more cogent and thoughtful interviews than most NFL or NBA players.

Back when my niece was a young teen, she and her school friends used Facebook, but would wipe out their profiles every year and build new ones with new pseudonyms. Protected their privacy that way, and automatically fixes the "erase dumb stuff you said as a kid" problems.

If programmers are left to their own devices, no code will ever get released, because complex systems have too many variables to test, take a long time to code, by the time you get to the end you realized you could have done the beginning better.
There are so many times I go back to my old code and say to myself what was I thinking? There is a much easier way to do this.

Sometimes it is cheaper to leave the bloat and use more hardware to compensate.

I have a lot of half done apps in production. There are thing I want to do to make them better, however I probably won't get to them by EOL because the customer is generally happy with it, and I have other higher priority projects in my queue.

There is a risk to profit sharing as well. As your paycheck is linked to the quality of the others. Bad sales or marketing dept can fail to sell the best of ideas, and hard work.

In the mean time you are working with below average salary.

Sorry to change the subject here, but I see a trend recently, where posts - like the one I am replying to - get modded down unreasonably. Modding down simply because you are annoyed that somebody makes a joke about your pet fetish, is petty and immature.

I know there is a feature in /. called 'meta-moderation', but it is too long-wided to use, or it was when I looked last time, so could we have a button beside all posts that have been moderated (up or down), that would allow logged-in users to agree or disagree with the moderation? And then you could use the stats on how people's mods were agreed or disagreed with to affect the standing or karma of modders.

Good to hear from somebody in a position to know, which I am not, unfortunately. Still, I got my impression from a discussion in a book written by professor Nick Lane: "The Vital Question"; maybe I didn't understand his words. Have you read his book?

I see. You're saying it's okay to do it because it has been our goal all along. That logic is circular.

Are you saying that because the problem already exists, it's okay to make it worse? Or are you saying that making crops resistant to pests won't make them more invasive?

It sounds like you want to give crop plants some of the attributes of invasive species. At what point would doing so start to become a bad thing?