Tesla got a copy of the script for Top Gear - written before they drove the car - and it had pre-planned a battery disaster. That was the major beef - it was a fix, a fraud. (Top Gear is not a auto review show - it is entertaiment) I think that on trial the matter of the fake-drained script simply wasn't considered. The judge simply ruled that the TV show was a known bender of facts and that the show, even doctored as it was, didn't hurt Tesla - no libel, no financial harm. He simply ruled that the audience knew it was fake, more or less.

And here's Jalopnik: http://goo.gl/AdRdN

Of course, Top Gear admitted the car they pushed wasn't out of batteries but that it was done for effect and that it is completely true that the car would have run out at 55 miles of track time. Producer Andy Wilman defended their actions by basically saying "Duh, it's a television show" and accusing Tesla of trying to use them for press.

From Treehugger: http://goo.gl/ILrHB

...

As Mike posted in November, however, it was looking unlikely that Tesla could actually prove that any substantial harm had been done, and indeed that's how it ended up, with the judge throwing out the lawsuit arguing that TV viewers are savvy enough to know that not all is as it seems. Jalopnik has a pretty decent summary of the rejection of the Tesla lawsuit (complete with gloating Top Gear fans in the comments):

The judge today dismissed this as unreasonable as motorists are aware that cars will perform different under different conditions, such as being on a racing track.

Justice Tugendhat also made mention that what Tesla appears to want is a legal ruling saying Top Gear is a bunch of lying liars who lie, but that "rectification of inaccuracies is not a function of the courts unless that can be achieved in the course of proceedings properly brought to enforce a recognized course of action."

Of course what is legal, and what is moral, are not always the same thing. And the Top Gear script writers and presenters had made up their minds to highlight the shortcomings of the vehicle, even before they got their hands on the thing. ...

Banks and entertainment giants. "And such". It was originally a longer list, but I'm trying to self-edit my wordiness.

The entertainment giants had cable - dedicated lines. They should have stayed there. Once they get into the standards, we've lost the open web.

Freedom, when it comes to such as browser code, is an absolute. You cannot be just a little bit unfree.

Well done. If profits are all that matter, then corporations are all that matter.

During the hours of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, taxis and other cart drivers were charging enormous sums of money to carry people and their goods away from the fire. They would then drive a block or two, and dump the cargo and order people off - and return and repeat. Robbery - free market robbery.

Until, according to one eyewitness, a passenger pulled a revolver out of his coat, pointed it at the driver, and told him to carry them out, as agreed, or die on the spot. The Free Market died at the instance, and the people got away.

Not only the vicious lies the drivers told, and got away with, were the evil here. The point is they were charging people hundreds to get away in the first place. A free market paradise, in what Naomi Klein calls the Shock Doctrine mode, will rob you down to the bare bones and dump you on the side of the road, possibly alive if they've no time to finish you off, anytime a fire or a volcano or a tsunami hits. Ask the people in New Orleans who are still trying to get their property back.

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Market. In its pure form, those who have money have an overwhelming information advantage over the common schmuck, and will always win more money. We are seeing what happens in a real world experiment in the US right now, when wealth absorption becomes an infinite curve.

There MUST be a balance between what a goods producer can charge and what a common human can pay, or else we are all mostly be doomed to living in Styrofoam boxes some day, when rents become ten thousand a month for your average studio. That balance cannot be supplied by a free market in the real world, because such a market is impossible. The wealthy control information, prices, costs, media, their own government officials - you can't beat them at that game. They have to be controlled, by force, at some point, because they do not recognize limits. Or science, for that matter. Only immediate advantage.

China is the ultimate capitalist paradise. You'd like it there. If you're rich. If not, well, get ready to work twelve hour days and sleep in a room with seven other people for the rest of your life. The worker's paradise. As visualized by Ayn Rand, I guess.

Our browser engines will now become secrets. Cracking those secrets will be a felony worldwide.
This is the end of the world wide web. The network is now a commercial sanctuary, guarded by businesses for businesses.

I never understood why banks and such were even allowed to be on the web. It was obvious then, and now, insanely obvious, that they would envelope and digest the protocol, and make it their own. They should have stayed on their own closed lines. The web was not designed for secrets.

Except now, it will be.

Well, then, if they build it, and it works, then the debate is done. If they can't, the debate is done. The best argument is a working engine. Let's see if they can do it.

If we are ever getting off this death trap before the next killer asteroid whacks us, we need lateral thinking. Good to know someone is trying something new, instead of recycling 1960's rocket designs. Rockets just aren't going to cut it. There's a loophole in the rules somewhere, and eventually, slowly, painfully, we will find it.

Probably won't be Americans that do it. We are too in love with our old successes. When we visualize radical change, it usually involves self-parking cars. Weird solutions will come from people who have no past to gaze back on.

They ain't laws of physics, they're just rough guidelines. We're not through warping the universe just yet. Just 'cause it doesn't exist doesn't mean it can't. The universe didn't have smart tweaky bags of carbon trying to change things before.

They have been saying "one system, one exploit!" for over eleven years now - and OS X still stands, unbroken, a Unix with a happy face on.

iOS has been out for five years, and still stands, unbroken.

You have to concede at some point that Apple built unbreakable OSes. Sure, at some time in the future, quantum computers could crack all the locks. And an asteroid absolutely must hit at some point and kill us all. But. Windows exploits number in the millions, Android is barely keeping clean - they are demonstrably broken.

If you want a clean Android phone, get the Google Nexus 4 - it's updated by the originator of the standard, who has a market to uphold.

As for Windows- my God. I won't let a Win box on my network. It's Patient Zero through Ten Million.

Cattlemen in the US graze on public lands. Those are commons. Commons is an ancient principle. Private ownership of tiny plots of land is rather rare in history.

But the fact remains - letting the banks fail and jailing the bankers worked, and worked big. The countries which slashed spending, sold their citizen's property to international investors, and bailed out the banks collapsed into depression.

Iceland didn't bail out their thieves - they voted nationwide not to do what the Very Serious People believed they should have done, which was to slash spending and bail out their thieves, lending Confidence to the International Investors Who Would Provide Jobs.

Instead, they let the banks fail, and refused to provide a penny to the international investors who wanted a bailout. And they are jailing their thieves.

And guess what! They are the only recovering economy in Europe. They are BOOMING. The Very Serious Chicago School Economists were dead. Wrong.

Let them fail.

I approve. Hell, it's one of my pet ideas. Simple! Take a bit of TV frequency, and let people use it for wifi, just as they do now. Except that it goes through walls. Buildings. Neighborhoods. Set up the ol' mesh network idea with a frequency band that actually works, and you have ISP independence. The bandwidth of a TV channel is huge, so streaming video might even work on a shared network such as this. If we ever lick the "interference" problem, which is a software limitation, not a physical one, we could transform the world. No hyperbole. Add encryption, and the old internet is back, baby.

Is your collective Puritan hatred of freeloaders really worth turning the entire internet into a police state?

Yup.

No proof. No evidence. No names, just you gone. No penalties for lying - and who would you penalize? Some third party security company that won't name themselves?

What they've always wanted.

Next step: encryption violates terms of service.

This is about power, not movies. To monitor the internet is to control everyone, eventually. We will have to be Good Children, for ever and all.

The current one. And the next one.

Schools are basically jails, and train kids to accept prison conditions - look at it objectively. Tracking devices in the phones. Recorded calls, recorded messages, emails. Soon, tracking built into the computers in cars, unkillable. Ebooks recorded, times, dates. Anything that flows in packets, recorded. Your movements, recorded, even if you ditch a phone and a car, 'cause cameras will watch you - and listen, too. The cameras and trackers and mics are shrinking, and with zero societal will to stop it, will be everywhere.

Yes, this generation. It starts in the schools, the acceptance of strip searches, phone tracking, drug searches, notebooks with cameras that watch the student... come on, the new crop of adults have been in jail since they were born, figuratively, and have been trained to accept it.

The next generation? Just keep exponentially increasing the surveillance, and the acceptance. Police states are not, historically speaking, unwelcome. People trade freedom for safety all the time, always have, if they are scared properly. The few who become bullied and targeted by the people behind the cameras and trackers are not interesting to people. "They" are by definition criminals, anyway.

I ain't afraid of evil bastards half as much as I am afraid of a population that doesn't understand what freedom actually means, and what they give up to be "safe". They has been zero effective backpush against this era, and it will get worse.