Fox News is the largest Psyops campaign ever run on the american people. You have an entire channel (actually several) whose news and stories are being scripted by one of the political parties.
It's amazing to me how many people aren't horrified by this. The old FCC regulation about fairness wouldn't have allowed that, but it was sunk years ago, and rather deliberately.
How will ULA survive if the government doesn't force SpaceX to operate like a traditional defense contractor sucking at the cost plus fixed fee teet. The Airforce has to help them get there because this commercial competition non-sense will mean the loss of plenty of high paying executive jobs and ULA.
More dribble, little understanding and a continued insistence that you know it all.
The facts seem pretty clear here, and the fact is that it cost $3k for a random individual to hire a contractor, who in turn got all the necessary permits and permissions and ran the line. Therefore in the absolute worst case, it would have cost Comcast... $3k to run the line.
Said random individual hired a fly-by night contractor to install said line for $3K has very little bearing on what it would cost Comcast. You have no idea if the contractor followed any of the requirements or received any of the required permits or performed the required studies or even installed it properly (such as the pull weight limits for the type of cable installed). I would in fact wager against it having been done properly because the guy probably hired the contractor that gave him the cheapest price without any regard to following the rules.
Of course the beauty of doing what he did is that he now owns the entire thing. That contractor nicked a water line that's now leaking and will end up causing frost heave that ends up destroying the roadway, it's all on the homeowner. Or the water line nick floods his neighbor's basement, guess who pays to replace the neighbors antique furniture that's now ruined. He improperly trenched the roadway and replaced the pavement with inadequate drainage and improper material which causes the roadway to fail, it's all on the homeowner. There are a million things the contractor could have done wrong, all of which that could have catastrophic consequences. The first and foremost is that if that was installed without a right-of-way permit the local jurisdiction is probably going to make him remove that line in the future, or they will remove it and charge him for the removal.
Or even the simple problem of his internet connection stops working, Comcast will deny it's on their end and will suggest he replace that line he just installed and Comcast will likely refuse to do any troubleshooting because it's not their line and not their problem. Or some other company installs a Utility in the area and cuts his line because it's not properly marked, identified or in the one call system, all the liability is on the homeowner.
That homeowner took on some big liability by installing something into the public right-of-way. I hope it doesn't come back to bite him in the ass and end up bankrupting him and ruining his life.
The folks digging up our street were Comcast employees (or at least contractors working for Comcast, not some installer company). They drove Comcast trucks. They ran underground pipes that were manufactured specifically for Comcast, with their name printed every few inches all the way down the length of the tubing. Maybe you don't realize just how big a company we're talking about here.
They were independent contractors hired by Comcast with a Contract requirement that they badge their trucks and wear Comcast shirts. Comcast supplies the materials, there is an advantage to labeled conduit in that people digging utility test holes can easily identify the owner.
As for liability, there's a little thing called liability insurance. Companies doing that sort of work have to have it, and if they hire a company to do the work, the company they hire has to have it. It is usually required by law.
Yes Liability insurance can be purchased, and probably even cover 90% of accidents. Large companies choose to hire independents because if the independent contractor makes a mistake the small company can declare bankruptcy and clear all the liability while Comcast isn't material affected. No for profit company of Comcast's size would EVER dig in a utility with their own forces. It's economic suicide and the insurance they would need to purchase to cover them for all possible incidents would be so prohibitively expensive to basically make it impossible to build anything at all.
I ran into a utility once where the costs for any contractor that dug up and cut the utility were about $46K per minute the line was out of service. This was a cross country fiber with multiple strands. At the time, splicing a single fiber required a clean room standards and about 6 hours of time to cut, polish and splice the strand. The line was literally in the middle of no where, as is frequently the case it's more likely to run into these types of utilities in rural areas. Consider the cost of a break that took out all the strands where the fastest response time would be about 2 hours and that's just to locate the break, determine how bad it is and dispatch the repair crew. Then the repair crew has to dig up the line, make clean cuts, setup a clean room tent around the break and then splice all the fibers. Though communication cables can have some of the highest repair costs there are plenty of other utilities that a break can trigger other catastrophic damage including the loss of life. What does it cost if you cut a gas line and you end up killing an entire family, how about a whole neighborhood of families? What about the costs if you cut a high pressure oil line, kill several people in the process and poison the land and water for several thousand people?
Comcast chooses to use contractors in some places because they don't have enough work to keep full-time staff occupied, and/or because it confers tax advantages to use contractors instead of employees. The liability claim is just something they tell contractors so they don't realize how badly they're getting screwed.
No, Comcast uses contractors for anything that requires digging, and I have no doubt it's company policy. They more than likely use their own forces to pull the cables once the conduit is installed but they do NOT dig anything with their own forces that's not an emergency (and I have big doubts they would even do it in emergency, they retain contracts for emergency work for that just like everyone else).
Maybe you didn't read the original post. This was about a rural installation. In my experience, that usually means bare coax cables in the ground (no conduit, and probably not fiber), minimal utility mapping (relatively few houses with taps from the power and phone lines), minimal planning and engineering. I mean yes, you do have to do utility mapping, but it's a whole lot easier to map a rural street with a straight wire tha
You have no concept of what it takes to put a cable in the ground.
First, all Comcast construction is done by contractors for liability reasons. This isn't negotiable for a large company, a single improper process for a contractor digging a utility in could bankrupt even a company of Comcast's size if their employee's were directly involved in the right incident.
Second, though it may only cost $200 a day to rent it's rather irrelevant because Comcast pays the going Contract rate for installations.
Third, if you think digging the cable in is the only cost you have no concept. There is the planning and engineering costs, the utility mapping, the right-of-way access, the coordination with the local city and the compliance with the local building codes, the insurance costs, the contract management costs, the inspection costs, the quality control and quality assurance. Pulling and splicing cables through the conduits, power and other interconnection costs, splicing the cables, testing and validation, and plant hookup.
Verizon's pass cost (the cost to put a cable in front of the house) was about $1500 per house in a typical suburban environment. It probably costs about another $500-$1000 to dig the cable to the house install the ONT and pull the cable to the jack.
May I suggest you not comment about such subjects in the future. Leave construction and estimating how hard something is to the people that actually know.
Easier to Detect. The easiest to detect is great big gas giants nearly the size of their star orbiting very closely (hot gas giants). Those were the first discovered and comprise the majority of systems discovered so far because the bigger the planet and the closer to the star the easier it is to infer with the current detection techniques. We've never actually imaged one of these worlds, we've only inferred their presence for example by rhythmic flickering from a planet passing in front of the star.
As someone (I can't recall who) said, trying to find planets is like trying to see a mosquito in front of a 10,000 watt light bulb from a football field away. In other words is pretty difficult, in fact so difficult we can only find planets through inferred methods, not direct imaging. Unless we can find a way to completely block all the light from the star without blocking anything illuminated by the star and thousands of times more magnification (say a focal length of half the solar system) we aren't going to image a planet like earth. Space is really really big and the distance between stars so great that even when two galaxies collide there is very little chance of two stars impacting.
You pay nothing to install, the power price agreed to from the panels is often lower than the local rate (depends on local rate), the price is fixed for the contract lifetime (no inflation) and they maintain the system (except keeping trees off your roof, that's your responsibility).
Other than all those errors your post was almost totally inaccurate.
Companies like Exxon and Chevron spend billions drilling the ground to find oil. They then build collection systems on numerous wells, tanks to hold the oil and shipping facilities to load the oil into tankers. Then the transport oil around the world (with the immense logistics that requires), unload the oil into more tanks, process the oil through a distillation process to separate the different hydrocarbons (and keep in mind how hard it is to distill something that has more energy than thousands of tons of dynamite). They then collect and distribute those refined hydrocarbons into separate tanks, pump from the storage tanks to tanker trucks, distribute the tanker trucks to your local gas station which is probably also owned by them and includes additional tanks and pumping infrastructure.
I want the world to move away from Carbon as well but don't discount the challenge of doing what the oil companies do in finding, extracting, refining and transporting it to your local gas station. It is an immense job to do that they accomplish and they do it pretty much continuously to keep that spigot flowing.
Hate to break it to you but California is not the only geothermal site within the US, there are MANY. Hell if you just include the ring of fire we've got, Cali, Oregon, Washinton and Alaska. Throw in the other sources and you add hawaii, utah, wyoming, idaho, montana and many many others. There are lots of spots where there is enough thermal energy close to the surface to make geothermal energy not only economical but cheap and clean. The magma ball under yellowstone is so large that it alone could probably generate all the power the US needed if you could get enough water for the generation.
It's always sunny somewhere, it's always blowing wind somewhere. And often when it's not sunny it's windy and vice-versa.
The solution to renewable power fluctuation is an interconnected grid at to make it feasible and profitable to time shift power. That's it. Germany is proving very effectively that solar and wind don't need huge backup generation capacity. Renewables can provide all the energy we need and the energy companies hate that idea (it will mean dramatically less profits) so they spend a lot of time and money on propaganda, some of which you've fallen for.
There is a pretty simple rule in life that you figure out about the time you hit middle age. Anything you think is cool, actually isn't. More often than not cool means doing stupid and irresponsible stuff to prove you are daring and fun. It proves neither, takes a lot of years to realize that.
And it will be used against you the moment you try to provide any character testimony.
"The defendant is so evil and capable of this action that his own parents on the announcement of his arrest proclaimed his guilt. The two people in the world that should love him unconditionally believe he's not only guilty but that he deserves whatever you the jury will do to him."
Playing such a tape in court would pretty much guarantee a conviction in most peoples mind.
People predicted that this is exactly what would happen with Secure Boot. The initial support would be optional and after a time and the phasing out of older hardware the support would become mandatory. Microsoft moving to a mandatory secure boot would fall right in line with these predictions.
The next gambit in secure boot is to disallow the user putting in their own signing keys. From that point forward the only way to get an OS on a computer is with Microsoft's signature. Secure boot could be a good thing if the user was allowed total control, but microsoft shows their true goal here, which is to take total control of the PC market. Many forget that secure boot was devised at a time when Microsoft was first facing a new Linux OS challenger that they couldn't defeat with their traditional tactics. Many people don't consider this timing to be coincidental.
I seriously doubt they can ever be completely secure. That's the problem with running unknown code at basically random. That's what javascript is these days, a full blown programming language that your browser will execute code automatically when visiting a hosting site. Everyone should be running a script blocker that lets them selectively whitelist trusted sites.
It's easy to blame the US but we didn't create most of the problems facing the world. Europe did with colonialism. Though the US is responsible for the rise of ISIS, the political boundaries that aided the creation and much of the problems of the middle east are related to the divvying up of the middle east by Europe after WWI and the subsequent colonization that took place later. The problems Europe created will haunt us for a long time to come, probably several hundred years.
Up until WWII the US was neutral and outside the fucking around in the western hemisphere pretty well minded their business. We didn't create the problems, we've just been dealing with them. And you should fear greatly the day people like me get our way and turn this country back neutral and start looking out after our own and stop caring about everyone else. Europe, Canada and many others will be in for a shitstorm when they have to start paying for their own defense.
Part of it is their tie to dealers IMO. When you create a car like the Tesla Model S you've eliminated all maintenance and destroyed the entire service division of your dealers. People seem to forget, with an electric car you will never change the oil or coolant, replace a belt or change a starter motor, you won't need to have 90% of the maintenance activity that a gas car needs.
About the only maintenance item on a Tesla is new tires and windshield wipers.
They have only denied it will be subscription only. That would be a true denial if they retained their current business licensing and subjected the retail market to SaaS.
I don't trust them, they want SaaS to even out their revenue flow and Windows IS going to go that way. 10 might be a stepping stone where they offer both, but I have no doubt in mind SaaS windows will arrive with windows 10.
Because GM can never really innovate they are simply too large. They've come up with a LOT of really cool ideas that they totally submarine because they made more money selling gas guzzling SUV's.
They actually sold the first electric car, developed the whole platform, leased them out then refused to sell them to the people that wanted to buy them and crushed all the cars when the leases were up. The GM culture is next quarters profits, not innovating the next revolution in the automotive world. Toyota is in the same game these days along with almost everyone else. It wasn't until Tesla started to eat the high end luxury market that BMW and Mercedes were forced to acknowledge electric.
Tesla is going to drag the automotive market into the 21st century kicking and screaming. When they start selling 100K plus cars a year GM and Toyota and the others will suddenly start spending money and dragging stuff they invented 20 years ago out of the closet. But they aren't going to do it willingly and Musk isn't someone they can just smear into oblivion like they usually do with innovators.
One of the very few electric vehicles sold in the US, including the first one that was sold in the US (as a daily driver, not a 20mph neighborhood car) was the Nissan Leaf, a Japanese car company.
Not all the Japanese are going fuel cell. They are expensive, hydrogen storage is a nightmare and they are only doing it because they get more CA pollution credits for them than they do for electric vehicles. Fuel cell cars aren't going anywhere, they will never be sold outside California and will likely never sell more than a few thousand of them.
For all their innovation with hybrids Toyota has really screwed the pooch with electric vehicles. Tesla and Nissan are going to leap frog them and they will be playing catchup. Anyone that's driven a pure battery electric vehicle like the Tesla or Leaf will tell you it's the future of cars in the US.
Those things those other EU countries are doing to attract business are ILLEGAL under EU rules. The double Irish violates some pretty major EU rules and what Luxemburg was doing was grounds to throw them out of the EU.
What the EU has discovered is that a united monetary and economic union doesn't work when individual states get to set tax and spending policy. Something that people have been warning about since it was founded. Almost all the EU's fiscal problems can be tied to this problem. Greece violated EU rules (and lied about it) while spending far more than they were allowed to. Ireland allowed companies to setup business and declare themselves not tax resident anywhere. The overspending in Portugal, Spain, Ireland and others that caused the huge bailout and austerity was precisely because of this problem.
The funny thing is that none of the solutions they've taken are actually solutions. They are band-aids over the problem. Until the individual nations are willing to hand over some significant banking and monetary control to the EU they are going to continue to have these problems. A system where Greece can basically create debt for German citizens isn't a workable solution in the long run and you see the problems it creates right now, which is a deep resentment between member nations.
They haven't done this kind of thing before. The rumors are this is SaaS in that you can download and install it for free and even use it for a year for free but after a year they hold the whole thing hostage and demand money from you. SaaS in the retail non-business market is just insane, I hope the rumors aren't true but I suspect they are given the success they've had with office365.
The original story is just unbelievable. Namecheap is pretty generous, they allow a grace period after expiration that all you have to do is pay the reg fee to reinstate (no penalty). But they have no obligation to do so and I don't blame them in the least if two weeks into the expiration they decide to auction the domain off. If you intend to keep a domain you shouldn't be paying yearly. Take advantage of lower prices today and register it for a decade.
You don't get rich wasting pennies. If there is a legitimate difference between the services that makes one better than the other then that can be factored in, but wasting money for the sake of wasting money is foolish.
Slashdot Mirror
Fox News is the largest Psyops campaign ever run on the american people. You have an entire channel (actually several) whose news and stories are being scripted by one of the political parties.
It's amazing to me how many people aren't horrified by this. The old FCC regulation about fairness wouldn't have allowed that, but it was sunk years ago, and rather deliberately.
How will ULA survive if the government doesn't force SpaceX to operate like a traditional defense contractor sucking at the cost plus fixed fee teet. The Airforce has to help them get there because this commercial competition non-sense will mean the loss of plenty of high paying executive jobs and ULA.
More dribble, little understanding and a continued insistence that you know it all.
Said random individual hired a fly-by night contractor to install said line for $3K has very little bearing on what it would cost Comcast. You have no idea if the contractor followed any of the requirements or received any of the required permits or performed the required studies or even installed it properly (such as the pull weight limits for the type of cable installed). I would in fact wager against it having been done properly because the guy probably hired the contractor that gave him the cheapest price without any regard to following the rules.
Of course the beauty of doing what he did is that he now owns the entire thing. That contractor nicked a water line that's now leaking and will end up causing frost heave that ends up destroying the roadway, it's all on the homeowner. Or the water line nick floods his neighbor's basement, guess who pays to replace the neighbors antique furniture that's now ruined. He improperly trenched the roadway and replaced the pavement with inadequate drainage and improper material which causes the roadway to fail, it's all on the homeowner. There are a million things the contractor could have done wrong, all of which that could have catastrophic consequences. The first and foremost is that if that was installed without a right-of-way permit the local jurisdiction is probably going to make him remove that line in the future, or they will remove it and charge him for the removal.
Or even the simple problem of his internet connection stops working, Comcast will deny it's on their end and will suggest he replace that line he just installed and Comcast will likely refuse to do any troubleshooting because it's not their line and not their problem. Or some other company installs a Utility in the area and cuts his line because it's not properly marked, identified or in the one call system, all the liability is on the homeowner.
That homeowner took on some big liability by installing something into the public right-of-way. I hope it doesn't come back to bite him in the ass and end up bankrupting him and ruining his life.
They were independent contractors hired by Comcast with a Contract requirement that they badge their trucks and wear Comcast shirts. Comcast supplies the materials, there is an advantage to labeled conduit in that people digging utility test holes can easily identify the owner.
Yes Liability insurance can be purchased, and probably even cover 90% of accidents. Large companies choose to hire independents because if the independent contractor makes a mistake the small company can declare bankruptcy and clear all the liability while Comcast isn't material affected. No for profit company of Comcast's size would EVER dig in a utility with their own forces. It's economic suicide and the insurance they would need to purchase to cover them for all possible incidents would be so prohibitively expensive to basically make it impossible to build anything at all.
I ran into a utility once where the costs for any contractor that dug up and cut the utility were about $46K per minute the line was out of service. This was a cross country fiber with multiple strands. At the time, splicing a single fiber required a clean room standards and about 6 hours of time to cut, polish and splice the strand. The line was literally in the middle of no where, as is frequently the case it's more likely to run into these types of utilities in rural areas. Consider the cost of a break that took out all the strands where the fastest response time would be about 2 hours and that's just to locate the break, determine how bad it is and dispatch the repair crew. Then the repair crew has to dig up the line, make clean cuts, setup a clean room tent around the break and then splice all the fibers. Though communication cables can have some of the highest repair costs there are plenty of other utilities that a break can trigger other catastrophic damage including the loss of life. What does it cost if you cut a gas line and you end up killing an entire family, how about a whole neighborhood of families? What about the costs if you cut a high pressure oil line, kill several people in the process and poison the land and water for several thousand people?
No, Comcast uses contractors for anything that requires digging, and I have no doubt it's company policy. They more than likely use their own forces to pull the cables once the conduit is installed but they do NOT dig anything with their own forces that's not an emergency (and I have big doubts they would even do it in emergency, they retain contracts for emergency work for that just like everyone else).
You have no concept of what it takes to put a cable in the ground.
First, all Comcast construction is done by contractors for liability reasons. This isn't negotiable for a large company, a single improper process for a contractor digging a utility in could bankrupt even a company of Comcast's size if their employee's were directly involved in the right incident.
Second, though it may only cost $200 a day to rent it's rather irrelevant because Comcast pays the going Contract rate for installations.
Third, if you think digging the cable in is the only cost you have no concept. There is the planning and engineering costs, the utility mapping, the right-of-way access, the coordination with the local city and the compliance with the local building codes, the insurance costs, the contract management costs, the inspection costs, the quality control and quality assurance. Pulling and splicing cables through the conduits, power and other interconnection costs, splicing the cables, testing and validation, and plant hookup.
Verizon's pass cost (the cost to put a cable in front of the house) was about $1500 per house in a typical suburban environment. It probably costs about another $500-$1000 to dig the cable to the house install the ONT and pull the cable to the jack.
May I suggest you not comment about such subjects in the future. Leave construction and estimating how hard something is to the people that actually know.
Easier to Detect. The easiest to detect is great big gas giants nearly the size of their star orbiting very closely (hot gas giants). Those were the first discovered and comprise the majority of systems discovered so far because the bigger the planet and the closer to the star the easier it is to infer with the current detection techniques. We've never actually imaged one of these worlds, we've only inferred their presence for example by rhythmic flickering from a planet passing in front of the star.
As someone (I can't recall who) said, trying to find planets is like trying to see a mosquito in front of a 10,000 watt light bulb from a football field away. In other words is pretty difficult, in fact so difficult we can only find planets through inferred methods, not direct imaging. Unless we can find a way to completely block all the light from the star without blocking anything illuminated by the star and thousands of times more magnification (say a focal length of half the solar system) we aren't going to image a planet like earth. Space is really really big and the distance between stars so great that even when two galaxies collide there is very little chance of two stars impacting.
You pay nothing to install, the power price agreed to from the panels is often lower than the local rate (depends on local rate), the price is fixed for the contract lifetime (no inflation) and they maintain the system (except keeping trees off your roof, that's your responsibility).
Other than all those errors your post was almost totally inaccurate.
Companies like Exxon and Chevron spend billions drilling the ground to find oil. They then build collection systems on numerous wells, tanks to hold the oil and shipping facilities to load the oil into tankers. Then the transport oil around the world (with the immense logistics that requires), unload the oil into more tanks, process the oil through a distillation process to separate the different hydrocarbons (and keep in mind how hard it is to distill something that has more energy than thousands of tons of dynamite). They then collect and distribute those refined hydrocarbons into separate tanks, pump from the storage tanks to tanker trucks, distribute the tanker trucks to your local gas station which is probably also owned by them and includes additional tanks and pumping infrastructure.
I want the world to move away from Carbon as well but don't discount the challenge of doing what the oil companies do in finding, extracting, refining and transporting it to your local gas station. It is an immense job to do that they accomplish and they do it pretty much continuously to keep that spigot flowing.
Hate to break it to you but California is not the only geothermal site within the US, there are MANY. Hell if you just include the ring of fire we've got, Cali, Oregon, Washinton and Alaska. Throw in the other sources and you add hawaii, utah, wyoming, idaho, montana and many many others. There are lots of spots where there is enough thermal energy close to the surface to make geothermal energy not only economical but cheap and clean. The magma ball under yellowstone is so large that it alone could probably generate all the power the US needed if you could get enough water for the generation.
It's always sunny somewhere, it's always blowing wind somewhere. And often when it's not sunny it's windy and vice-versa.
The solution to renewable power fluctuation is an interconnected grid at to make it feasible and profitable to time shift power. That's it. Germany is proving very effectively that solar and wind don't need huge backup generation capacity. Renewables can provide all the energy we need and the energy companies hate that idea (it will mean dramatically less profits) so they spend a lot of time and money on propaganda, some of which you've fallen for.
If people stopped caring about body modification and tattoos they wouldn't be "cool" anymore.
There is a pretty simple rule in life that you figure out about the time you hit middle age. Anything you think is cool, actually isn't. More often than not cool means doing stupid and irresponsible stuff to prove you are daring and fun. It proves neither, takes a lot of years to realize that.
And it will be used against you the moment you try to provide any character testimony.
"The defendant is so evil and capable of this action that his own parents on the announcement of his arrest proclaimed his guilt. The two people in the world that should love him unconditionally believe he's not only guilty but that he deserves whatever you the jury will do to him."
Playing such a tape in court would pretty much guarantee a conviction in most peoples mind.
People predicted that this is exactly what would happen with Secure Boot. The initial support would be optional and after a time and the phasing out of older hardware the support would become mandatory. Microsoft moving to a mandatory secure boot would fall right in line with these predictions.
The next gambit in secure boot is to disallow the user putting in their own signing keys. From that point forward the only way to get an OS on a computer is with Microsoft's signature. Secure boot could be a good thing if the user was allowed total control, but microsoft shows their true goal here, which is to take total control of the PC market. Many forget that secure boot was devised at a time when Microsoft was first facing a new Linux OS challenger that they couldn't defeat with their traditional tactics. Many people don't consider this timing to be coincidental.
I seriously doubt they can ever be completely secure. That's the problem with running unknown code at basically random. That's what javascript is these days, a full blown programming language that your browser will execute code automatically when visiting a hosting site. Everyone should be running a script blocker that lets them selectively whitelist trusted sites.
It's easy to blame the US but we didn't create most of the problems facing the world. Europe did with colonialism. Though the US is responsible for the rise of ISIS, the political boundaries that aided the creation and much of the problems of the middle east are related to the divvying up of the middle east by Europe after WWI and the subsequent colonization that took place later. The problems Europe created will haunt us for a long time to come, probably several hundred years.
Up until WWII the US was neutral and outside the fucking around in the western hemisphere pretty well minded their business. We didn't create the problems, we've just been dealing with them. And you should fear greatly the day people like me get our way and turn this country back neutral and start looking out after our own and stop caring about everyone else. Europe, Canada and many others will be in for a shitstorm when they have to start paying for their own defense.
Part of it is their tie to dealers IMO. When you create a car like the Tesla Model S you've eliminated all maintenance and destroyed the entire service division of your dealers. People seem to forget, with an electric car you will never change the oil or coolant, replace a belt or change a starter motor, you won't need to have 90% of the maintenance activity that a gas car needs.
About the only maintenance item on a Tesla is new tires and windshield wipers.
They have only denied it will be subscription only. That would be a true denial if they retained their current business licensing and subjected the retail market to SaaS.
I don't trust them, they want SaaS to even out their revenue flow and Windows IS going to go that way. 10 might be a stepping stone where they offer both, but I have no doubt in mind SaaS windows will arrive with windows 10.
Because GM can never really innovate they are simply too large. They've come up with a LOT of really cool ideas that they totally submarine because they made more money selling gas guzzling SUV's.
They actually sold the first electric car, developed the whole platform, leased them out then refused to sell them to the people that wanted to buy them and crushed all the cars when the leases were up. The GM culture is next quarters profits, not innovating the next revolution in the automotive world. Toyota is in the same game these days along with almost everyone else. It wasn't until Tesla started to eat the high end luxury market that BMW and Mercedes were forced to acknowledge electric.
Tesla is going to drag the automotive market into the 21st century kicking and screaming. When they start selling 100K plus cars a year GM and Toyota and the others will suddenly start spending money and dragging stuff they invented 20 years ago out of the closet. But they aren't going to do it willingly and Musk isn't someone they can just smear into oblivion like they usually do with innovators.
One of the very few electric vehicles sold in the US, including the first one that was sold in the US (as a daily driver, not a 20mph neighborhood car) was the Nissan Leaf, a Japanese car company.
Not all the Japanese are going fuel cell. They are expensive, hydrogen storage is a nightmare and they are only doing it because they get more CA pollution credits for them than they do for electric vehicles. Fuel cell cars aren't going anywhere, they will never be sold outside California and will likely never sell more than a few thousand of them.
For all their innovation with hybrids Toyota has really screwed the pooch with electric vehicles. Tesla and Nissan are going to leap frog them and they will be playing catchup. Anyone that's driven a pure battery electric vehicle like the Tesla or Leaf will tell you it's the future of cars in the US.
Those things those other EU countries are doing to attract business are ILLEGAL under EU rules. The double Irish violates some pretty major EU rules and what Luxemburg was doing was grounds to throw them out of the EU.
What the EU has discovered is that a united monetary and economic union doesn't work when individual states get to set tax and spending policy. Something that people have been warning about since it was founded. Almost all the EU's fiscal problems can be tied to this problem. Greece violated EU rules (and lied about it) while spending far more than they were allowed to. Ireland allowed companies to setup business and declare themselves not tax resident anywhere. The overspending in Portugal, Spain, Ireland and others that caused the huge bailout and austerity was precisely because of this problem.
The funny thing is that none of the solutions they've taken are actually solutions. They are band-aids over the problem. Until the individual nations are willing to hand over some significant banking and monetary control to the EU they are going to continue to have these problems. A system where Greece can basically create debt for German citizens isn't a workable solution in the long run and you see the problems it creates right now, which is a deep resentment between member nations.
The catch is it's software as a service (SaaS), you only get the first year for free. After that it's a yearly or monthly fee.
They haven't done this kind of thing before. The rumors are this is SaaS in that you can download and install it for free and even use it for a year for free but after a year they hold the whole thing hostage and demand money from you. SaaS in the retail non-business market is just insane, I hope the rumors aren't true but I suspect they are given the success they've had with office365.
The original story is just unbelievable. Namecheap is pretty generous, they allow a grace period after expiration that all you have to do is pay the reg fee to reinstate (no penalty). But they have no obligation to do so and I don't blame them in the least if two weeks into the expiration they decide to auction the domain off. If you intend to keep a domain you shouldn't be paying yearly. Take advantage of lower prices today and register it for a decade.
You don't get rich wasting pennies. If there is a legitimate difference between the services that makes one better than the other then that can be factored in, but wasting money for the sake of wasting money is foolish.