So loans to a company making a roadster is like . . . oh, wait, you're trying to get *me* to stumble into Godwin's law in a discussion about electric vehicles. Well played, sir. ;)

Since there has never been a successful government that declined to intervene in economic matters of import--whether for technology, societal or just plain politica onesl--an assertion that a government like that would do better than the market system we currently have is a huge leap of faith. Since I'm not a radical, I'd prefer to tinker with hours rather than trust people who just sort of make up wild claims about some new organizational system.

There's certainly no mainstream theoretical economic model that supports claims of zero government intervention. There are empirical arguments about rent-seeking and dangers of over-intervention, which are entirely legitimate and should be remembered. But there are also empirical cases of highly productive government intervention, so I'm not buying argument from first principles on Tesla. Whether these loans are good or bad will depend on the specifics of the situation and how likely they are to produce something.

The government isn't supposed to invest in these things to make a profit. It's supposed to invest in them, like DARPA projects, because the overall benefits might be good for the state.

If it were a good deal in strictly financial terms for the government, then it'd be a good deal for private investors, and the government shouldn't be involved.

Sorry, the fact is that major technology jumps in modern history have government intervention, from vaccines to biotech to railroads to the internet. I know it doesn't match the way some people want things to work, but not much I can do about it.

Private money goes mostly to short term, 3-5 year horizon projects. You don't need to subsidize those (not that we don't, through IP law), but any technology that has longer time to profitability needs help.

It's new technology; even if this model never takes off the expertise can spill over. It's not like giving money to Ford to keep more Mustangs on the street. It's a potential benefit even if the parent business fails.

It's a pretty good way encourage technology development. A lot of private people think they may be able to make it profitable eventually, they've put in their money, so the government leverages work that may prove valuable beyond the short-term by giving loans. No new government buildings needed, no new bureaucracy you can't kill.

I don't know enough about Tesla or the industry to say if this particular one is the best use of money, but it's not unique or anything. Corporations often get subsidies for new tech; basic research just doesn't get done at measurable levels these days in private industry. Bell Labs isn't what it used to be.

The "picking winners and losers" thing has really become a meme. Government policies necessarily determine winners and losers all the time, of course, with zoning laws, housing subsidies, mileage standards, public roads, wars for oil, leasing out of federal land, tarriffs, and so on.

If we (ie, the people through the government) chose to spend massive subsidies on electric cars, it would be because we thought the benefits (noise, local pollution, energy flexibility, global warming) outweighed the costs. We'd be saying that cars that spew out those pollutants are "losers," and it's worth paying for them to get off the roads. That is fundamentally a government business--making decisions about the common areas in communities.

Because, obviously, a good investment for the government is not the same as a good investment for a private investor. We don't expect corporations to identify candidates in kindergarten and pay for their schooling through 12th grade and college. They'd never get their money back, at least not in a free labor system, but society as a whole benefits.

Your points are really all cookie-cutter stuff, by which I mean they apply to any government intervention, not just Tesla, not just for putatively rich people. But even in freshman college micro-economic models, concepts like externalities might justify state intervention, and in the real world, actual or de facto subsidies for other industries require it. Given this specific intervention is a loan, not some recurring grant and not regulation, which will let the company live or die in the market (as evidenced by the actual story), do you have any actual reason to oppose *this one*, and not just all?

Actually, there are only a handful sources of similar content of similar quality, and the two that immediately spring (WSJ and the Economist) are behind pay walls.

God knows the NYT has its flaws (WMD and Whitewater, as high-profile examples), but in terms of original national (US) reporting it's way above the AP or the BBC. I think the WSJ is (was?) better, but their big stories (Enron, back-dating options, Vioxx, for example) are obviously business related. McClatchy seems to have an edge documenting issues with the 'official unnamed' sources, but doesn't do as much elsewhere. Most other quality sites simply do different things altogether.

Personally, I pay for the WSJ and browse the NYT free on line. This will probably make me switch to the NYT for a year and see how I like it as a daily news source. So, yeah, in my one case their strategy will work.

IMHO these complaints are overly fastidious, and not just because it's just a silly show.

I always thought it was obvious, to science fiction nerds, that if you're writing about telekinesis or similar nonsense you simply assume that the bulk of the force is between the victim and some object (like the ground, or a wall) and that the energy comes not directly from Sylar's biochemistry but from some ability to tap into other energy sources. A normal human, as an analogy, can bring down the side of a mountain--by starting a landslide. Looked at simplistically, it "violates" the principles you mention (where does the energy come from? how does he exert the force?) far worse than tossing a guy across the room, but obviously if the conditions are right and you understand what's really happening it's not just plausible, but trivial to explain.

Good, fun hard SF for me is coming up with inventive, lively explanations of why the conditions are right for whatever cool thing they want to have happen. Not that I have any desire to have a good writer waste time on psychic powers these days, which are overdone, old and cliched, but there are other things just as superficially unlikely should still make appearances.

What makes Heroes non-science fiction is not any one example--which could hand-waved quite adequately by a good SF writer. The Heroes problem is their utter indifference to *any* explanation, which is partly tone and also leads to wild inconsistencies in logic and consistency.

Is anyone writing SF like that these days? It seems to have stopped in the '70s or early '80s. Maybe it's just what my reading habits are these days, but I'd love a writer with the approach to science (and a better approach to plot and characters) of a vintage Larry Niven.

Indeed.

Also, never before in the history of corporate America, has a small company make a predictable copy of product and then sued a bigger competitor for it's equally predictable product. This is all thoroughly uncharted territory. ;)

Absent a lot more information, there's really no way to figure if B&N is remotely guilty of anything at all. Talks about licensing do *not* prevent you from working on a similar product yourself; the practice is routine. If your internal project fails or is delayed, you want a backup--that doesn't commit you to buying or licensing before you've signed a deal. And Slashdot, of all places, should be sceptical of claims that a company "deserves" some space in the IP world just for itself because they thought about something similar.

Are they misrepresenting it? That would be the key question as to whether it is or should be illegal.

If they just say "These are customer reviews," there's no claim about completeness. Any more than review excerpts that appear on the inside covers of books purport to be a scientific sampling of critical opinion. Or audience snippets about some new musical that appear on TV ; they aren't really just broadcasting what everyone said.

This is plain caveat emptor; I can't believe anyone is surprised let along indignant about it. Do people really believe they don't need to visit a third party site to do research these days? Consumer Reports has stayed in business for a reason; I do my research on-line but the principle is the same. You can't expect someone who profits from making a sale to try and talk you out of it.

They are trying to sell you something, it clearly states it's their site, and you should probably be skeptical about everything you read on it. Especially for an electronics retailer, where "anti-advertising" existing stock presumably means eating a considerable loss (unlike, say, Amazon.) You can also hold it against them and choose not to shop there if you don't like it. (In my case, untrustworthy reviews give me an active reason to leave a site and do research, so vendors that post more-or-less unfiltered reviews get more business from me.)

If they are telling you anywhere it's "all user comments," then you have a case, but I've never seen that claim even on Amazon. And if they are telling the would-be poster that his comments will be posted independent of content, the poster has a claim. Otherwise? There are tons of review sites, aren't there?

If a sensitive package got delivered, by mistake, and it wasn't returned, and the resident of the house didn't respond to reasonable contact requests and showed no sign of being home, you might well see some analagous action. Not "burning down the house", but a court order to retrieve property that didn't belong to him. It certainly doesn't seem unreasonable to consider such action.

The "burning down the house" analogy, is vastly overstating things, as are most other posters. This is hardly a permanent deactivation--the account is down, you call Google, they explain the situation and you get it sorted out. If the gentleman did nothing wrong, it'd be a nuisance, but quickly resolved. If the account is one of the many abandoned or semi-abandoned ones floating around the internet, sealing it off is I think very prudent.

In both the analogy and the actual case, context matters a lot. I'd certainly hope the judge grilled the bank about other options and how they'd tried to contact the account owner, and asked Google to try and contact him on the court's behalf first. Ask Google if any of the messages have been read. Plus the actual legal standing, how harmful the information could be, and a dozen other factors not described in detail.

But the outrage level over this seems *way* too high. There's this attitude around the internet that it's a rank injustice to be inconvenienced by anything that wasn't your fault. (Not attributing this to you, but many posters certainly channel this feeling.) Meh. Try out another analogy, some days you wake up and find your driveway blocked by firetrucks helping out a neighbor, or your street blocked off because police are investigating a crime. We live in a world with other people, sometimes their crises are more important than our daily routine. It happens.

Technically, "net neutrality" refers to the traffic being completely agnostic about what a packet is--phone, video, http, etc.

Most of the insidious scenarios painted by the loss of neutrality do relate to content filtering--ie, Comcast makes a deal with Amazon and gimps the connections to, say, Powell's dodgy enough customers just think Amazon is the place to shop.

If it's really as described in this case, for bandwidth management, I personally don't think it's all that scary. There are issues about transparency, and for some users this might mean their ISP isn't providing sufficient bandwidth anymore. But IMHO it's not automatically different than simple changing the maximum bandwidth available to a customer.

On the other hand, if a AT&T gimped VOIP to knock Skype out of business, or Comcast filtered video so you needed their cable services, you could get filtering-by-protocol that was just about as evil as the content filtering.

You may need to work on your interviewer mind melding skills.

Just ask yourself it that's what you'd think as a manager interviewing an employee. "I have two candidates, one who will understand what's going on in the workplace around him, and one who won't. I obviously need to hire the clueless one, since the smart one will recognize that I am an incompetent who will do nothing but feed him projects are destined to fail." I imagine probably not? Then why do you think anyone else would think that way?

You may be confusing a candidate's being able to distinguish good and bad projects with a candidate who's just a prima donna. The guy who projects a sense of entitlement, who will only want to work on the central aspects of high-profile projects, yeah, he's not going to get an offer. As I said in my grandparent post, you want to make sure you're not coming off that way. Explain why the project failed. Don't explain why it was "beneath you."

Also, this is distinct from concerns about someone being overqualified. Overqualified (ie, should be running a team on paper but is applying for a grunt job) is a concern. Then you're worried that they might leave; but you're also worried that they're apparent "underperforming" is because actually quite incompetent, so exuding cluelessness will not help.

"I wanted to work on a project that was going to be successful, and I left when I became convinced that I couldn't contribute effectively given the current set up."

Showing you know the difference between a good project and bad project, especially ahead of time, is a plus in an interview. Showing you care enough about the end result, and not just a paycheck, is a plus. You should be able to communicate both of these things pretty convincingly if you left a high-profile disaster ahead of time. Make sure you're professional enough to talk about these things without badmouthing co-workers or sounding like a legend-in-your-own-mind, but other than that you're fine

Even if a project was successful, interviewees should be able to explain what they learned from the things that didn't work well. If it was unsuccessful, they should have a long list of mistakes that they now recognize first hand--and if you're going to claim you recognized all these things at the time they were happening, why did you stay?

I'd be just as interested in hearing the answer to that question. It's not like either situation would make you start with a presumptive strike against you--both should be pretty easy to explain. But there should be some level of awareness demonstrated, shouldn't there? If someone's attitude is "I did what I was told, my section worked fine," you know (at best) you're dealing with someone who has a pure grunt mentality and will never take responsibility for the overall product quality. I'd find working on a project like that very frustrating, and would be suspicious people who didn't.

Well, we could also start cutting up death row inmates for organs, which is a much more certain benefit than what you describe. In terms of utilitarian logic this makes more sense. One of the many reasons not to be a strict utilitarian, IMHO.

Ignoring ethics, the proposal is, I suspect, pretty weak practically. I don't know enough to do hard numbers. But the number of death row inmates (especially with exhausted appeals) in the US is pretty low, HIV transmission rates are naturally low, and if you try to make up by lots of sex (or even worse, direct injection) your experiment environment wouldn't model the real world system at all.

So it's quicker result, but not a quicker answer. Barring a very strong signal, and possibly not even then, you'd have nothing until you do the full size study anyway, and actions taken on interim results from prisoners could cause harm (by, e.g., encouraging risky behavior in recipients, or exposing people to side effects that have no benefits.)