You need to read up more on economics. Maybe swing by a local college and audit some economics courses.

No, most (all?) of the current in use today is backed by nothing. Well, nothing more than the idea that it's worth something.

I have a $20 bill in my pocket. It's not worth anything. There is a perceived value of it, so I can exchange that piece of paper for goods and services.

If it were backed by anything, there would be an obligation by the issuing party to exchange it for the commodity it was backed by. You can't go to the federal reserve and say "I want to exchange my $20 note for $20 worth of gold". Best case, you'd get a smile, pat on the head, and be sent on your way.

We effectively work with a bartering system. The perceived value of one service or object, for another. You can barter drugs, ammunition, or sex. That doesn't make any of them a currency, even though they'd each be good examples in your description. Actually, I think I like my examples better than the ugly paper in my pocket.

RaidZ/raidz2 is your friend! No hiding failures, throughput is better (over enough disks) than an individual raid controller and all data is checksummed, encrypted, snapshotted etc

Consequences? Those are for poor people.

And you should also note that there has been some big changes in television technology too. That 19" flat screen television you are talking about bears almost no resemblance to that 13" Sony Triniton you were talking about other than it takes a television signal (which even that has changed) and converts it to something you can watch on a screen. That conversion from analog to digital alone is a huge deal, and getting rid of the cathode-ray tube is an even bigger deal.

Now try to come up with similar analogies to the automotive industry. Perhaps you could suggest that the switch from an internal combustion engine to a much simpler electric motor is going to make a difference. It very well might, assuming you could get the price of the battery storage technology cheap enough too. Perhaps there is some room for innovation and the ability to make things a whole lot cheaper, but economies of scale and changes in technology are not likely to get you as far with mass consumer automobiles compared to what can happen with television technology or consumer computers.

I still don't see how your edge case changes that pushing all that current knowledge into a massive wiki instead of millions of individual papers in journals wouldn't help for almost all other cases.

Good job on the thesis though.

Tesla has enough of the larger markets in America that they are selling their automobiles at (with states gushing about their products) that I think Tesla Motors as a company will be doing just fine. It will be odd that Tesla can sell there stuff on Manhattan and not across the river, but I guess that is one thing for the Mayor of NYC to gloat about in the future.

Eventually states like Texas and New Jersey will be made to be fools, and citizens in those states may even be pissed because their respective state governments are being such jackasses. This might be a temporary setback for Tesla, but it is something that in the long run is going to backfire on these state legislators as screwing around with mass consumer products is going to backfire eventually.

I don't mind Tesla trying to fight in this case, and they shouldn't let go of a market like New Jersey without a fight, but I think in this case time is on the side of Tesla and not the other way around.

I agree with you that Tucker should not have gone out of business and it was largely regulations that kept him from being able to sell his cars. None the less, Tesla Motors has already done far better than even the most wild imagination that Tucker could have hoped for in terms sales and market penetration.

A fairly large stack of laws have been developed with regards to auto dealership because they are a pretty significant part of American society. More important, they are mostly local businesses who have strong ties with local chambers of commerce (really trade guilds in every sense of the word designed to exclude commerce from people who aren't local and don't pay the squeeze to the local powers that be).

This isn't exactly something new for even just Tesla, but it is something very visible in this case. I have seen similar kinds of problems for other major companies trying to build in some small towns, with Wal-Mart being a good example of a company who has a hard time coming into some areas due to local governments getting fancy with the regulations permitting such stores being built. For example, I think it is still illegal for Wal-Mart to build stores in Vermont (and Wal-Mart has tried). I also know that Volkswagon wanted to build an auto manufacturing plant in the town where I live, and the city council actually turned them down with of all things an "environmental impact study" where of all of the boneheaded things I've ever seen, the complaint issued and recorded in that study which killed the plant is that the facility would "adversely impact the wages of the region by raising wages for other employers due to competition of the workers". Basically they were going to pay too much for the salaries they were going to offer.

It really is a situation where you need to develop local influence in order to be involved locally.

They were pretty specific about the whole thing. There are also notes from the debates during the convention when the clause was put into the document known as the Constitution, not to mention things like the Federalist Papers (and the Anti-Federalist Papers) where the merits of various parts of the Constitution were debated in terms of encouraging or discouraging people in various states to ratify the Constitution when it was going before each of the 13 original states.

A broad reading of this clause was never intended when it was originally reading, and this much more strict reading of this clause is very clearly what was intended. It was supposed to stop tariff wars between various states, not to regulate the quality of the meat in a McDonald's Hamburger in Des Moines.

You claim that you don't care about people doing stuff like BASE jumping, mountain climbing up Mt. Everest, or doing other potentially life threatening things, yet you complain about people going into space on their own dime.... with or without voluntary sponsorships from others. Yet here you go and say precisely the opposite.

It is the same thing for those who want to go into space.

As for Mars One, I think those guys are full of it and don't know what they are doing, and legitimate engineers and even fans are trying to offer help yet it is being rejected in favor of fluff and pomp. That is why Mars One is going to fail, not because they are trying to attempt something foolish. I'll also agree that there will be scam artists and people with less than honorable intentions who are trying to milk those with a dream of someday working and living in space, some of whom have some serious money to offer as well.

Still, what you fail to realize is that there is a good chance that with enough effort, brains, and attention to details that some of these project which are being proposed can succeed. I can't say if Elon Musk and his crazy idea of going to Mars is going to succeed or not, but one thing that certainly distinguishes him from Mars One is that he has put stuff into space, vehicles are orbiting the Earth right now that have been put there with his companies, with several billion dollars worth of money from people who do not lightly spend that kind of money already committed to sending much more into space on his rockets. I think that should count for something, which seems like you are casually dismissing too.

Again, I am not asking you for anything explicitly other than to suggest if you want to help, work with me and others who want to go into space. If you think it is stupid, move along so you don't get in my way. And please, give me the permission and opportunity to do this kind of stuff instead of holding a gun to my head and telling me I can't go into space. It doesn't matter if you do it personally or have laws enacted and a government thug does that instead... it is the same thing in the end.

I don't want to rob you through taxation as I think this can be done completely with private funds and without the government's help. I do know there are some in the space advocacy community, notably Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who want to point a gun at you and force you to pay for activities in space... so know that not everybody even has the same attitude about how to get there either. For myself, if the funds to do activities in space can't be found, that sort of is a "vote with wallets" to show that it may indeed be a futile effort but if the means to get this done can happen with private funds it is something that should be permitted to happen too.

I am not asking for your faith. I am merely asking you to shut up and get out of the way in terms of trying to stop those who want to do this kind of thing with their own dime. If you think this is a foolish task, don't bother participating and I will leave you alone to do whatever it is that you want to do or think is a better use of your time and resources.

It pisses me off when people like you are forcing me to think this is impossible and are actively preventing me and others from even trying. It may be that such endeavors will fail, that people may even die in the process of trying. I just don't want to live in so safe of a world that even the attempt to reach out and do such things has been driven from humanity. I certainly can't stand having a gun placed against my head telling me to forget about this stuff and that I must conform to some dogma that the world is flat and that I need to shut up and be a faithful factory worker churning out your wonderful hunk of plastic crap.

Define farmland, and note that Mars has more surface area than all of the land on the Earth, and millions of metric tons of water as well that is even visible from modest telescopes on the Earth. It will take technology to make the water usable for farming, but it isn't that hard, and flat land capable of being farmed is also possible.

You might be surprised at how much farmland can be created on Mars. One very likely view of what farms on Mars will look like can be found here:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4UgDFk5Mego/UkRCQ1TG5SI/AAAAAAAAC8U/f9Ku2VzmGqQ/s1600/MartianOasis01-signe2000.jpg

I happen to agree with you, but it is a thought provoking thing that smacks against political correctness when I bring the term up with regards to Elon Musk. He deserves to be proud of his South African heritage, and it should be pointed out that any kid from Africa likely could have achieved the success of Elon Musk if they shared his passion and drive (with a bit of intelligence thrown in). Family connections in Canada certainly helped, but it should be an inspirational story to everybody on that continent who deserves some local heroes as well.

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Last I checked, a simple threat of violence isn't a reason enough to take away someone's liberty this long.

So is prison rape. Does that make it okay too?