Except that 'in orbit' is a state, not a place.
It's like doing the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs.

Technically, a non-lifting body could be "in orbit" 1" off the ground (assuming the earth were a sphere).

My point is that Tesla has a low douchebag factor.

Rather than pushing others down, they pull others up by creating jobs and demand.

It takes two people to create a job: one to offer the position, and one to accept it. Otherwise, the job hasn't really been "created." Proponents of trickle-down theory usually seem to ignore this fact.

Meanwhile, those who offer the positions are greedy and are always trying to pay as little as they can get away with, so I wouldn't consider them to be any more virtuous than those who accept the positions.

"But, guess what, the people can decide."

Guess what, the people have already decided: it's called capitalism. It's the French government that's standing in the way, by decreeing (essentially) that books are only for the wealthy.

I haven't owned any of the current generation of cellphone-accessory smartwatches. The ones I have owned:

-- Casio GPS watch - It was a gift from my wife, back before GPSs had taken over the world. It was big and clunky, got me all kinds of geek cred at work, didn't work very well as a GPS but the fact that it worked at all was amazing.

-- TI EZ430-Chronos watch - programmable, using their MSP430 microprocessor set, had a reasonably flexible display. It didn't have a lot of sensors, and I didn't end up hacking it very much, but it was a lot of fun. It had a low-power radio link that let it connect to a heartbeat monitor band, so you could use it for things like watching your heart rate while jogging.

-- Watches with various other functions built in, like moon phase, tides tables for surfing, that kind of thing. One of them had a screen saver for entirely no good reason, just because it could.

In practice, I find that almost all of the time I'm either in front of a computer screen with a clock display in the corner, or in an environment with clocks around, or carrying a cellphone with a clock display on the main screen, or in an environment that's not very friendly to watches, or in a social environment where I don't really care what time the clock says it is, so I've stopped wearing watches most of the time.

When smart-watches get smart enough to be the phone instead of being a peripheral display for the phone, maybe. But is a smart-watch phone that needs a Bluetooth headset and needs reading glasses to use more convenient than a cellphone with big text that can use a wired headset? For me, it's really not.

And Iron Dome hasn't been doing anything to protect the Palestinians from missile attacks.

Mira Grant sleeps with a machete under her bed, and highly suggests you do the same.

It's not the cold that kills you - it's the cure for the common cold. And not everybody dies. Or stays dead.

In Tucson 10%ish of the drinking water comes from reclaimed water (aka filtered sewage). Makes sense in an area with not a lot of fresh water resources. Also in those areas you can have different kinds. You can purchase a non-potable (not for consumption) water source for irrigation. Again, reclaimed water, but it undergoes less filtering and thus is cheaper. Plenty of larger places get a hookup to keep their watering costs down.

It is a very sensible way of doing things and you actually have more control of purity than water that comes out of the ground.

I didn't express any hate for the people using the illegal explosives. As a friend of mine says, on a holiday celebrating the overthrow of a government, the question of whether your fireworks are legal or not really just shouldn't come up.

Oh good, now we can get that vital VMS, DOS, and MacOS 7 support so they're not stuck on OpenSSL.

I think the real message here is that Tesla's stellar safety record is due at least in part to its exclusivity and high price tag. The kind of people who can afford it are generally safer drivers. It's not a used Dodge Charger that some 16 year old asshole with a shiny new drivers license and Dad's credit card can buy off of the lot for a few thousand bucks.

Hopefully not yet.

Why not?

Because the FCC hasn't been completely bought by the industry... yet.

I understood it to be the entire reason they have to pay fees to rebroadcast the material: because they were denying ad revenue to the broadcasters.