"If you aren't willing to put your own personal assets on the line, and nobody else is willing to put their assets on the line, then yes, it's probably either a bad idea, or the people starting it are incompetent."
Kickstarter is the very definition of 'other people willing to put their assets on the line'. Whether funded by kickstarter or a loan from a bank any idea that gets funded by definition has people willing to put their assets on the line.

Or is it only big name bank assets that count in your worldview?

"That's normally called "selling" a product or service. Begging for money before there is a product or service and promising to deliver (maybe) is called a hand-out."

Or a pre-order. You know, the thing businesses have been doing for decades. I've pre-ordered plenty of games from big companies before they were ready to ship, same thing.

"Apparently you're unfamiliar with American suburbs and urban sprawl. Running errands to the city or other suburbs can easily be 60 or 70 miles round trip. Going into the city for entertainment, drinks or dining is hardly a rare thing. "

If you're regularly making 100+ mi spontaneous trips then you're an outlier and you know what, all you have to do is not buy an electric car. Problem solved.

You're arguing against scientific research with hypotheticals and anecdotes.

"More likely: drive to work for 9 am, park, plugin car and charge [along with everybody else] just so you can get home in it"

You work more than 20mi from your home? Last I heard the min mileage for these things was about 40mi per charge. So if you work, say, 15mi from your home you have 10mi a day for running errands before you have to consider a mid-day charge. Other than that allowing people to program their cars to charge only when certain circumstances are met (say, 1-6am OR battery is at 30% charge) would put most of the load on nighttime.

Really now, saying you'll have to charge for every trip is just silly. Batteries don't magically lose their charge if they sit for more than 10s...

Oh yes, because the fact that someone far removed from the problems doesn't know the details of it prove that no one could possibly already know the details. I mean, it's so obvious, no security issues exist, because I don't know about them, so if I don't know about them, then no one can, because they can't be well known. IT'S PERFECTLY REASONABLE LOGIC! /sarcasm

*citation needed*

Probably not. It's kind of hard to arrest and prosecute someone for doing something you don't even know is possible...

Ah yes, the great 'there will always be problems, so why bother fixing them' argument. Remind me never to work with you, you're the worst kind of person for working on technology. Will there always be issues? Probably, though not certainly. Should those issues be fixed as quickly as possible (prioritizing bigger issues of course). YES. Period. Not fixing the problem and silencing people to keep it hidden is the worst kind of security that exists. It's like sticking your head in the sand so you can't see the bad things happening around you, and it's bound to cause more issues than just fixing the problem would. But heck, if it's never going to be perfect, why not just open the thing up so that people can steal money whenever they want?

It seems to me that the people who understand the issue here the most have been intimidated into inaction by people who might or might not understand the issue but understand that revealing any flaws in their methods would mean less profit for them, and that's all they care about.

And if you stop drinking coffee your body will adapt to waking up on its own with no need for it. I used to drink tons of soda (even more caffeine than coffee) and always had to have a can in the morning to wake up, I stopped drinking it (well aside from about 2 cans worth a week) and suddenly it was significantly easier to get up in the morning, to the point where, going to sleep at the same time, I was waking up an hour earlier and feeling much better.

Caffeine is not a good way to start your day off, no matter what folgers may say. It's a useful drug for maintaining alertness every once in a while but used daily it reduces your overall alertness, which is bad.

The basic idea isn't that the 'simpler' theory wins (relativity >> newton in complexity) but rather the simplest model that explains all the data. A model that adequately explains everything we've observed without resorting to special cases (i.e. "the universe does X unless these extremely specific conditions are met, in which case it does Y') is far more likely to be true than a model that resorts to special cases, since the universe doesn't exactly check to see if the planets happen to be aligned when determining the gravitational attraction of an object.

Occam's razor is less about simplicity and more about elegant simplicity, if your theory has X rules and mine has 2X but mine explains all the data without special cases and yours requires a dozen special cases mine is more likely to be true. By the same merit the odds that massless particles obey the standard model unless they happen to be neutrinos in which case they oscillate is less likely than either the assumption that neutrinos are massless or the assumption that massless particles in general can't oscillate is incorrect.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 was released with full DRM. It's currently the most pirated game of all time with millions of copies pirated. DRM is code for "easy to pirate" as well.

DRM does absolutely nothing to stop or even slow piracy. It does a lot to hurt legitimate consumers however. That's by DRM-free is the way to go.

Alright then. Let's say I release a song with no copyright, public domain. Would you download it? What if it was actually another person's song, that they had full copyright on, and I was mis-attributing and mis-tagging it? Well if the innocent infringer clause doesn't work you're responsible for the fines, regardless of the fact the song you got was tagged public domain. This case is about more than just one person having to pay fines.

"you should probably assume that you have no permissions"

'You should' and 'You have to or you'll be hit with millions of dollars of fines' are two different things. Common sense says to treat music without an attached copyright as fully copyrighted (though that does open up the question of what happens when you get a song tagged with a free copyright type that is simply mis-tagged and should be illegal to copy, then what happens?) but common sense != the law.

Copyrighted and illegal to download are two different things, or more specifically copyrighted + illegal to download doesn't apply to all copyrighted songs. Independent artists and even some major artists release songs for free all the time.

The existence of a single free to download mainstream song renders the argument that 'all mainstream music is illegal to download' invalid, and there's plenty of songs on torrents that are actually legal to download and listen too.

How do you know that? I know of at least two major artists* that have released songs for free download themselves. Did I miss out on getting the 'immediately sense when someone somewhere has claimed copyright to something' sensor when they were being passed out? Or how are you telling the 'free to download' songs from the 'not free to download' songs when both are posted without copyright?

*Jonathan Coulton and Weird Al

Well here in AZ she'd be looking at a fine of about the retail price ($10*number of cd's, let's assume 10 for the sake of argument) and a fine of either $100 or $250 on top of that depending on whether you're a minor or not. So somewhere in the ballpark of $200-$350 dollars if you steal the music from a store, >1 million dollars if you pirate it.

Hmm...I wonder what cd's the borders near my house has...(kidding, kidding :P)

Actually as a petty offense I don't think you can be forced to pay more than $300 for a minor shoplifting incident, like stealing 10 CD's (mind you that's ~120 songs, which is way more than the million dollar fine was for)..

IANAL, just grabbed the info from my state law.

"So, perhaps they mean you can be online an unlimited number of minutes at high speed, but you just aren't allowed to do much."

Well if I hit my bandwidth cap and can't send any more data (assuming that's how the cap works) then I'm no longer online by any definition of the word, so it's not unlimited even by that definition.

"The assumption is that one of them has no cut..."

That's a ridiculous assumption. Cuts are ridiculously common.

Not to mention that your premise is flawed and dangerous. What if the guilty one got a nosebleed on the job? And the innocent one has a small papercut from a week or two ago on the job. Presence of a cut != Guilty in this case.