Tesla doesn't seem to be having much of a problem in terms of market penetration because their factory has barely been able to keep up with the people willing to simply purchase them over the internet or through convoluted sales venues that make the customers travel across several states or even from other countries and continents in order to make a purchase. Only recently has the delay from making a purchase to getting delivery even approached the logistical limits of the Tesla supply chain rather than dealing with the customer backlog and even paying other customers to "move to the front of the line" to get the delivery earlier.

Simply put, if Tesla is charging what the market can bear on their product, they are simply practicing capitalism... something I didn't think was a crime in America.

As for the government missing out on interest income, I think they are going to more than make up for that loss through corporate income taxes and taxes on the wages of the Tesla employees.... and federal excise taxes on the vehicles themselves. It might be in some weird theory a slight loss to the government, but not much. What it really did was give Tesla some short-term operating capital that allowed the company to be able to hire the employees at the old NUMMI plant at a time when they weren't selling cars.

Elon Musk really is African-American.... born in Africa as sure as anybody else on that continent. That ultimately he has more distantly European ancestors is where the comment flies in the face of reality and I doubt he claims he is "black" on racial profiles... but by definition of the term he deserves that "title" as much as anybody who is an immigrant from Africa.

On the other hand, this particular loan program was available to any American automobile company who bothered to apply. Both GM and Ford applied as well for the same program (and I think GM got some of the money too). That not too many people bother starting their own automobile manufacturing company in America is besides the point I suppose. Indeed I think it came in as a shock that Tesla even qualified for the program as it was really one of those earmarks intended to subsidize some research on the part of GM.... but the law was written in a generic manner so technically anybody could qualify if they happened to be making electric automobiles. Why Fisker didn't bother with the program should say volumes about that company too.

Can't speak for the GP, but yes - I have tried it, and it's fairly common to do in international companies within Europe.

I work for the European HQ (based in Germany) of a large multinational with a Japanese parent company. On a daily basis, I deal with at least 3 or 4 different EU cultures plus Japanese culture. At least once every couple of weeks, I deal with India. Generally a few times a month, there'll be something I need to deal with in North Africa, Middle East, or Russia.

Yep, there's a lot of cultural differences, but the other side of the coin to remember is that most people in these situations are forgiving of cultural mistakes. They are aware that they and you are probably not 100% familiar with each others' cultures and there's a mutual understanding to politely ignore cultural faux pas.

Linguistically by the way, I speak around 5 languages with varying degrees of proficiency, or up to 15 if you count languages where I know some, but couldn't really talk to someone about any particular topic. Nevertheless, the people commenting that English tends to be the language used are quite right - it's our official language for business in my company (despite being, as said, based in Germany) and if I see a Frenchman and a Russian talking to each other, I'd put pretty high odds they'll be speaking English to each other. I personally even speak German at home with my wife, but English to my German colleagues at work...

Then again, what real benefit does a patent even on a mechanical device actually give to society? Supposedly what you have is a trade off of somebody publishing detailed information about a device (like a light bulb, an airplane, or a phonograph... all have received patents in one form or another over the years) in exchange for getting exclusive rights to manufacture that device.

As a practical matter, the patent system of today really doesn't help out in terms of helping a private individual to be able to have that sort of market exclusivity or even get their idea brought to market at all. The patent system itself if broken not just for software patents, for for patents of every kind.

The problem with your idea of fixing something in silicon is that anything which can be expressed as a computer program can be "fixed in silicon". I'm not even talking something like programmable logic such as FPGAs and such (which clearly are just as "programmable" as RAM), but that you could even take complex software like an operating system and convert it to purely AND/OR gates. Heck, you could even turn a Mozart symphony into nothing but gates and a speaker and sound better than a live performance.

This is sort of the point of Turing machines in general, as they are that malleable. That is what makes them useful, and substantially blurs the line between software and hardware.

If the device does something which can't be done in software.... you might have a point. There clearly are hardware concepts which can't be done in software except as a pure simulation, but the reverse that anything done in software can be done in hardware should be an axiom. The list of things which can be done in software is pretty large though, so you need to be careful even there.

Well that is why the phrase used is "Pinkie-Swear" rather than "Pinkie Promise". They do have lawyers for this sort of thing.

Honestly, you know we're in for it the instant you start seeing names of so-called movements that outright refuse to provide coherent definitions of themselves.

Actually, looking at you, Occupy Wall Street.

The poor treatment of Uhura was strictly a result of the network and not Roddenberry. Roddenberry had his faults, and he was as sexist as they come in many regards, but it was the network that pushed back against the idea of a black, female command officer. As a matter of fact, they specifically allowed Uhura to take command in one of the animated episodes to make up for the fact that they weren't allowed to do so in the live-action series.

I find it interesting you call me arrogant and then claim to know things about me. At no point did I say, "it is xyz", I just said, "I think it is FAR more likely that xyz". As in, based on the evidence and available knowledge, one cause seems more likely than another. If there were more evidence in favour of another cause, I'd happily change my mind to that.

I doubt that you'd deduced it would explode through any special knowledge, as you say you yourself. But - based on the evidence thus far - I also doubt it was precognition that would turn our understanding of the universe and physics completely on its head. It seems more likely to me that you thought, "I wonder what it would look like if it explodes" and then after it did, your memory altered itself to make you think you had thought something slightly different.

No, I can't prove it, but there is plenty of evidence of memories changing themselves like that, and none whatsoever for the kind of precognition you're describing. It's simply a matter of probabilities.

That might not be the case - maybe you said it out loud to someone who also remembers you saying it, in which case the chance of it being changed memory is lessened significantly.

But to me, even the chance that you spontaneously thought it, then it happened, and it was just "dumb luck" is significantly higher than the chance of this kind of precognition being a phenomenon that exists in our universe.

Conventional wisdom can often be wrong; but it usually has a basis in reality since otherwise it wouldn't be considered wisdom of any kind. We know we don't know everything and we know that in many cases we know "damn near nothing" about a lot of things. But we do have a reasonable picture of the basic functioning of elements of the fundamental properties of the universe and from our understanding at this point in time, precognition of any kind seems very unlikely. That might change in the future - maybe someone will discover something really new and interesting about time that turns our ideas on our heads; but until such a thing happens, there are two things to do:
1) Continue to study and refine our knowledge
2) Focus on things that we believe are wrong
Perhaps you should consider studying in the field of neuroscience, or perhaps deep in to the fields of physics dealing with time (depending on whether you think the precognition might be a property of the brain; or of the universe), or even both if you've got the time and the smarts. Maybe you'll come up with something really interesting.

If you look at my post history, you might get a somewhat different picture of me than you currently seem to have. Yes, I'm scientifically minded and consider Occam's Razor to be a fairly reliable guide in many situations (but of course, it must be used appropriately). However I'm also a strong advocate of the use of psychedelic substances for self-discovery; a fairly "unconventional thinker" in general; and don't hold any stock in the idea of believing something just because everyone else does (mostly, I'm quite anti-authoritarian, which includes holding the concept of arguments from authority in extremely low regard).

If you really can't put aside technobabble, you need to check out the Turbo Encabulator. Technobabble can get much worse. (See also this Aviation version that seems to be just as good).

The sad part about some of the "technology" in Star Trek is that real phenomena and scientific theories can be used to explain at least some of those concepts (such as quantum teleportation and 3D printers) that should be at least correctly referenced in the current series reboot rather than pulling BS out of their hind end. At the very least, I don't expect to be seeing somebody on Star Trek mistaking parsecs as a unit of time instead of distance.

As bad and as cheesy as Star Trek (in any of the series of that franchise or the movies for that matter) got, it was by far and away better than the standard "science fiction" fare that was produced and arguably is still being produced in Hollywood. Classics like "Plan 9 from Outer Space", "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians", and "It Came from Outer Space" were more typical and the real standard that Star Trek needs to be compared against as those were contemporary (at least when Roddenberry was running the franchise).

Film science fiction has always been inferior to the depth and soul searching that happens in print and is a general problem with the medium.

I fail to see how you consider these things to be increases in complexity. When we moved from "fire, earth, air and water" to "atoms" and the initial subatomic particles, we simplified from four types of things down to three (protons, electrons, neutrons). The structure of how these three come together makes up elements and the structure of how these atoms come together makes up molecules.

Then we discovered more kinds of subatomic particles, giving us a further array of "more types of things" again (thereby THAT is a complexity increase). However string theory, if it pans out to be more than just a bunch of very pretty maths, would simplify this down to one. To me, it seems like the complexity of HOW it all goes together is increased, but the complexity of WHAT there is is reduced.

I never said our understanding of physics isn't more complex - of course it is. What I said was that "complex things are usually just made up of a LOT of very very simple things behaving in very very simple ways". So I was really only talking about physical matter and not the interactions of it. That said however, it also seems apparent to me that the interactions of things is also simple when you're talking about sufficiently small areas of interaction and time slices. It's only when this gets extrapolated to larger areas of interaction or longer time periods that things become complex. Or, to put it another way, "complex interactions are usually just made up of a LOT of very simple interactions".

My reason for using the drug induced mystical experience as an example was to show that the mind can "lie" to itself. You're coming at it from the wrong direction by saying, "I experienced precognition, what does that say about the nature of the universe?" when you should be saying, "I experienced something that appears to be precognition, what are the possible causes?"

I think it's FAR more likely that your mind lied to you. You experienced a waking dream; later an event happened; as the events were over a particular threshold of similarity (threshold depending on many other factors of your mind and personality) you now remember those two events as being identical and believe that you saw the event before it happened.

We have very many examples in psychology for the mind playing tricks. We have no evidence anywhere for the competing theory is that it is possible to be aware of specific events that have not yet happened. It therefore seems clear to me that without evidence, it makes more sense to assume the former than the latter.

And for that matter, when you wake up after a deep sleep, is the guy that wakes up really the same as the guy who went to sleep at night?

This is the reason I don't fear the idea of transferring my brain in to a machine should it ever become a reality. If it remembers being me, thinks like me, and the other "me" isn't there anymore, then it IS me. Fearing the "loss of self" would have to mean I'd fear dreamless sleep or comatose states in the same way, and that wouldn't make a lot of sense from a practical standpoint...

To me, this sounds too much like an argument from desire. You would find it "disappointing" and therefore do not want it to be true, and so have a hard time imagining it to be true. The universe however does not pander to your desires, and what is, is. It may be that something more complex is needed, however so far we've time and again seen that in reality, complex things are usually just made up of a LOT of very very simple things behaving in very very simple ways. I see no reason our brains should be any different.

I once (well, more than once) experienced the sensation of the universe cradling me in its arms; being spoken to by gods; pulling the fabric of the universe in to my heart with my bare hands; and crystal clear visions of events happening far out the scope of my vision. These experiences were brought on by having taken LSD, but that doesn't make them any less of an experience than your precognition. I can however clearly say that despite the extremely positive changes that these experiences have brought about in my personality, I do not attribute them to any kind of mystical "external" forces - the insights that lead to these changes were simply brought about my own brain figuring things out in a drastically altered state from what it is used to.

While precognition may appear to stand at a different level to these sorts of changes, it's a numbers game in the end. Had your precognition been wrong, you probably would've forgotten about it by now. Many people experience clear and "startling" visions of events that have not yet come to pass. They're nothing more than a kind of waking dream. Very rarely, the event does come to pass (more common when the event is mundane of course) and when it does, people can almost (but not quite) be forgiven for assuming that something "magical" has happened.

The telecommunications access points (usually at central offices) and forced engineering of telecom equipment standards that required ease of monitoring are things I remember happening in the Reagan administration and certainly were encouraged under Bill Clinton and Bush Sr. as well.

I'm just saying dumping all of this on George W. Bush when there was ample evidence of this kind of thing happening well before he became president is uncalled for.... even though the "war on terrorism" did provide plenty of excuses to expand efforts that happened. It was by far more than just a few phone calls that were monitored on a case by case basis. All that really happened is that the U.S. federal government no longer even bothered to pretend that ordinary citizens had privacy on electronic communications.

As for that Data Center in Utah County (well... part of it is in SL County).... I still shake my head even thinking about what it is that they are doing there.

Strangely, one way that you can evade the government prying into your personal communications is through snail mail.... primarily because nobody bothers to use that any more.