I don't know about your area, but here in the sticks of the east coast, gas station bathrooms are great. All the old nasty gas stations have been replaced by shiny new Wawa and Sheetsz mega-stations. Gas stations don't even make money any more, which is why they've all been replaced by these new chains: they make almost zero profit on the gas, and instead profit off of getting you to go inside and buy food and drinks (when you're using the nice bathrooms). They actually have really good selections and sell prepared foods (sandwiches, burgers, etc.), at lower prices than regular fast-food places like Subway, though the drinks and such are of course more expensive than Walmart.
Not likely. Even in the US where their marketshare is by far the greatest, Android still dominates the smartphone market (though Apple is a lot more profitable at it).
Personally, I don't see the problem here. Using Siri is not a requirement if you have an iPhone; it's an additional service you can use or not. And if you don't like Apple and their business practices (and I for one don't), then you don't have to buy an iPhone, you can get one of a huge multitude of Android phones instead (like I did), from various different manufacturers. Or you could get one of those crappy Windows Phones, or a Blackberry. Simply put, Apple just doesn't have a monopoly, and I don't think it's really even close to one. They're an 800-pound gorilla, but still not large enough that anti-trust becomes an issue. Interestingly, they're actually larger and more profitable than Microsoft (I'm pretty sure), but since they operate in such a big market, and in multiple markets (both phones and also computers still), and since their profitability comes not totally from volume but largely from having boutique prices and customers willing to pay them, they just don't meet monopoly status IMO.
Is anyone surprised? These big behemoth companies generally suck at innovating, and are really only good at integration and sales. Just look at all of MS's products; they were almost all purchased from somewhere else too.
In theory, a large organization should have a huge advantage in resources (and money) to do extremely innovative work, but in practice they're usually terrible at it because the internal processes and procedures and politics hamstring everything they do. It'd be interesting if someone could figure out how to structure and manage an organization to avoid this, but so far it seems to be endemic to human organizations.
Otherwise an unread open source is as superior as a completely closed source.
The superiority of open-source software isn't in the code quality; that's a misconception. It's in the openness. The code quality can be good or bad, just like with proprietary software. Code that's audited more heavily and managed better is going to have better quality, whereas code that isn't audited or inspected is going to be luck-of-the-draw (basically depending on how good a coder the one guy who wrote it is). The difference is that open-source is *open*. So if you're really interested, you can look at it to judge the quality for yourself. You can't do that with proprietary software. For all you know, Adobe Reader could be total spaghetti code, or it could be excellent. There's no real way to know since you can't see the code. And there's no easy way to see if it has backdoors or malware built in, except by black-box testing.
But to address your comment very directly, OpenSSL showed how slowly such systems actually get patched. With openness comes fragmentation. I didn't just have to wait for OpenSSL to fix the bug, I had to wait for my distro to release and update their specific version (which to their specific credit they did quite quickly, others not so).
I don't see how that's a problem, that seems like a strength to me. You picked a good distro, and they fixed the problem "quite quickly", so what are you complaining about? You're mad because some other crappy distro didn't? Then don't use that distro. With proprietary software, you don't have this freedom. MS has been known to not proactively patch problems in the past, and prefer that they not be publicized. What's your alternative if you decide you don't like the way MS manages its "distro"? You don't have one. You can abandon Windows altogether, or run it in a VM, or some other crappy workaround, but you can't find an alternative company with a slightly different version of Windows to run all your Windows applications on. With your Linux distro, you do. If you decide your current distro sucks and isn't handling security problems very well, you can easily switch to an alternative distro. Going from Ubuntu to Mint is easy, going from Mint to Debian isn't too hard, going from RHEL to Suse is easy, etc. Even going between the Red Hat and Debian camps isn't *that* hard. This isn't "fragmentation", this is competition. They were apparently all using OpenSSL, so it was just a matter of patching the problem and rolling out the fix. Fragmentation is when they all decide to make their own, incompatible versions of something. That's what happened with old UNIX, where compiling software to run on HP-UX was significantly different than compiling it for Solaris. Linux isn't fragmented that badly at all. It could use more standardization for sure, but it's really not that bad, considering how much diversity there is. Having the same kernel across all distros, and the kernel having a very strict policy of never altering or deprecating syscalls probably is a big help there, plus they all seem to use glibc.
Anyway, I went off on a tangent there. The other big strength with open-source is that you were able to get OpenSSL patched. With proprietary software, there's no such guarantee. OpenSSL was open-source, so if the maintainers didn't bother to fix it, or to do it quickly, someone else could fairly easily have done so, since everyone has access to the source code. With proprietary software, if the vendor decides they just don't feel like fixing the problem, then you're screwed. What do you do when MS says they're not making any more security updates for XP, but you have expensive network-connected industrial equipment built on it? Well, you're screwed, and you either get it off the network or rely on a bunch of firewalling or other workarounds. If it were built on Linux, you'd be able to patch it.
You people are stupid. No one is suggesting that car sales will go internet-only, this is a discussion about getting rid of independently-owned dealerships.
Have you morons never been to an Apple or Microsoft store? Who do you think owns that store? The parent corporation does. That's what would happen if manufacturers sold direct to the public.
It's unbelievable how many idiots here simply cannot conceive of an automaker owning its own store and repair center. Even worse is the fact that Tesla is *already doing this* (not to mention Apple in the computer market), so it's not like you haven't ever seen it before.
I recently bought a car like this. I wanted the top-end model Mazda3 in a particular color. The dealership near me got one on order, so I had to wait a couple months for it to get over by ship from Japan. Then when it came time to sign papers, they tried to get me to pay full price on it; I pointed out that's not what they claimed before and they adjusted it down. I got out my laptop computer, got on their website, clicked on "instant email price quote" and then showed them the quote their own website showed me (which was likely auto-generated based on the MSRP), which was lower than what I found at all the surrounding dealers' sites for that same model, and they gave that to me. This was from one of those dealerships where they claim to have no-haggle pricing (but not really).
Overall, I think it was a fair deal considering I got exactly the model I wanted. Like you said, if you want something very specific, and not whatever's sitting on the lot, you're usually not able to get such a big discount on the price.
American-built cars are frequently very high quality.
Cars sold by American-headquartered companies are usually crap. Not only that, they're frequently not made in America either.
You sound like the troll here. It's obvious that the GP was referring to the Big 3 American car companies: GM, Ford, and Chrysler. Of course, Chrysler is now owned by Fiat, but that doesn't seem to have helped it any.
It's really pretty simple. If automakers can sell directly, they'll just buy up the existing dealership networks (which are all regional now anyway). So instead of the dealership adding a bunch of extra cost so the owner can live in luxury, the carmaker will cut that out so they can reduce prices and be more competitive with the other carmakers who are doing the same thing. The employees will mostly stay there, but now the corporation will be able to exercise a lot more control over them, and set better standards for customer service (because now one dealership's bad review online reflects on the entire carmaker brand). And to really reduce costs, automakers will then eliminate many of the dealerships. The problems is we have **too many** dealerships for the number of cars being sold; all this overhead increases costs (plus the middleman aspect, plus all the local corruption). Direct automaker sales will result in a bunch of these being eliminated, so that you no longer have 2 Ford dealerships in the same small town, and stuff like that.
The important thing to remember here is that the USA is the ONLY country in the entire world which sells cars this way. Everywhere else, cars are sold directly by the carmakers. There's a reason for this.
Open source is superior only in that it provides an ability to do a code review. Clearly that has failed spectacularly in some of our most common and most depended upon open source components.
Huh? I never said OS was perfect; far from it in fact. It's also no guarantee that people are actually going to audit it. I don't understand why people keep thinking this. But if you think proprietary software is of higher quality on average, you're deluded. There's crap code in both camps.
It IS different. If the project's unmaintained, you still have the source code available and can fix it yourself.
You can't do that with a proprietary product. If the proprietary vendor doesn't feel like fixing it, you can't force them to, and you can't do it yourself because you don't have the source code.
If you don't see what the difference is here, I can't help you.
I don't see how it'd be any different for proprietary vs. open-source here. They're both going to have vulnerabilities; that's unavoidable with software of any kind. There's always going to be some time between when the bug is found and when it's fixed, during which it can be exploited (worse if black-hats find it first and sell it or use it). The difference between the two is how fast you get a fix, and if you get one at all. With proprietary, you're entirely at the vendor's mercy; if they're really good, you get a fix very quickly. If they're mediocre, you get a fix after some time, and hopefully you don't suffer serious consequences. If they really suck, you don't get a fix at all, ever, because they don't feel like it, and they tell you to just go buy their latest version. With open-source, you have multiple avenues: hopefully there's a community that issues a fix, otherwise you still have the ability to fix it yourself or hire someone competent to do it for you.
Only a complete moron would think that proprietary software is immune to problems and that proprietary vendors are proactive about finding and fixing security vulnerabilities.
This software absolutely should be open-source. The OpenSSL issue is an example of why open source is superior, even though it's obviously no guarantee you'll have no problems: when the vulnerability was discovered, it was fixed very quickly.
The problem with proprietary software is that there's no way to actually fix it, unless the vendor wants to. When the OpenSSL problem was found, a fix was made and rolled out, and everyone was able to install it.
When a vulnerability is found on your 5-year-old Jeep and publicized, what do you do when Jeep decides they don't feel like fixing it for you? Guess what, you're screwed! Now hackers can take control of your vehicle and drive you off a cliff, and there's nothing you can do about it because the vendor doesn't care and there's no way to upgrade the software yourself.
This kind of thing shows exactly why Stallman had the right idea about "TiVOization". Not only is it important that you can have access to the source code for your device so that you can modify or fix the code, but it's equally important that you can actually get the fix *onto* the device so you can use it. Otherwise you're at the vendor's mercy.
Luckily cars are so heavily regulated that my Jeep scenario above is unlikely, simply because of government regulation and also lawsuits, but this isn't true of other places where physical safety isn't a factor. With the current "IoT" push to connect every little device to the internet, having the firmware open-source is more important than ever because of the security issues, combined with the **proven** tendency of vendors to abandon support after a few months.
If we really have to eliminate fossil sources in one generation, only nuclear will make up for the massive baseload we now have in coal and gas.
Yes, exactly. I think I said this in my post above basically: that renewables + nuclear is a practical and relatively environmentally-friendly way to meet our electricity needs now and into the near future. Over time, we should be able to come up with more efficient and cheaper solar cells so that that can be used more and more, and older nuclear plants can be decommissioned, and maybe they'll finally figure out how to get fusion working.
The other sort of environmentalist answers, "All we have to do is get rid of energy-intensive industries and switch our economy over to software consultants and artisanal brewing?"
These fools can be ignored. They're not a significant part of the electorate. It's the same thing with conflating everyone who's left-of-center in this country with the far-left wackos who yammer about "social justice" constantly and tell people to "check your privilege". Don't confuse a vocal minority with an entire group.
Some places are sunny, others are windy, and occasionally you will find an old volcanic stump with residual geothermal heat.
It's true that windmills are not going to be cost-effective in many places because there's just not enough wind, and obviously geothermal only works in certain spots, but solar actually is useful in more places than people realize. Germany is generating a huge portion of its power solely from solar, and Germany is *not* known for being a warm, sunny place. Look at a map: it's actually quite far north; southern Germany is at the same latitude as North Dakota. If we deployed solar power in the southern US states (from California to Florida) to the extent Germany has, we probably wouldn't need any fossil fuel plants any more except for the pesky nighttime issue.
As the other guy said, you're confusing environmentalists with NIMBYs, but also, you're confusing two groups of environmentalists. The smart environmentalists are pro-nuclear, or at least, anti-coal and anti-fossil-fuel and in favor of nuclear as an alternative to those for the time being until better sources can be made more economical.
Yeah, unfortunately there's a bunch of dumb anti-nuclear people out there who don't want any nuclear power, but don't have any suggestions at all about what to do to make the electricity needed, and strangely seem to have little to say about fossil fuel (esp. coal) power, which has horrible environmental effects. Not all environmentalists are like this.
IMO, we as a nation should be moving to eliminate most if not all fossil fuel electricity generation, and only use nuclear and renewables (solar, wind, etc.). Solar power is getting cheaper all the time, and is highly versatile: you can put panels over parking lots, on commercial rooftops, etc., which is also very close to the point-of-use which greatly reduces transmission losses (unlike nuclear where the plant is generally far from where the power is consumed). However, solar of course doesn't work too well at night so it requires a storage method, such as hydroelectric (pump water uphill during the daytime when you have surplus capacity, run it downhill through the dam at night to generate power). But realistically, we probably can't generate all we need with renewables just yet, so nuclear is a good solution for generating large baseline loads. This will be even more important as we move towards more EVs on the road, which will mostly be recharging at night.
Sure, but it runs Windows 10. Only a complete fool would run Windows 10 with its integrated spyware. So this alone makes the device completely worthless.
Compare the US to cops in other **developed** nations (rather than failed states) and it looks pretty bleak. The cops in Germany, Finland, the UK, France, etc. all put ours to shame.
Blue uniform? It seems like cops weren't quite as bad when they actually wore blue. Nowadays they just seem to wear black. I seem to remember about another group of thugs who used to wear black shirts...
I've also seen cops wear brown, especially here in the southeast. I also remember another group of thugs who used to wear brown shirts...
There's a difference between laws which regulate an industry, and just a general sales tax. Obviously a government needs taxes to operate, though there's plenty of room to argue about what it should be set at, and what exemptions should apply. Personally, I'd argue that sales taxes should be greatly reduced or even eliminated altogether, as they're generally regressive, though I guess it'd be OK to keep them on luxury cars (>$50k), yachts, etc. Income tax and capital gains taxes should be the primary form of taxing individuals, not sales taxes on retail transactions. Stock-trade transactions would be a good thing too.
Other include roadworthyness, it's not just what you appear to expect of using a personal vehicle for commercial purposes since that's more of a problem for insurance companies here than the government.
With Uber at least, they won't even let you drive a car that's too old; they're all about making sure their drivers have nice, newer, generally luxury-ish cars, not old POSes.
But there's pretty much no evidence that roadworthiness is something the government should be inspecting. There's states which do annual vehicle inspections (like mine, VA), and lots of other states which do not (like most other states I've lived in). There's absolutely no obvious improvement in the roadworthiness of cars in states which have inspection. In fact, there's all kinds of POS cars driving around me here in VA. This isn't the 1920s any more; cars these days last forever, except the engines maybe, and inspections don't look at those. Even if your engine dies, who cares; you just pull over. This isn't aviation.
Using a vehicle for commercial purposes is all on the owner of the vehicle, as far as the mechanical aspect goes. It's really none of the government's business, and the insurance company doesn't care, they only care about claims. Insurance does care how many miles you drive though and if you're more likely to be in an accident. That's pretty much a function of miles driven, and taxis are worse because they make lots of short trips in urban areas usually, rather than logging lots of boring miles on rural highways with few turns or speed changes.
Windows 10 is widely acknowledged to have a keylogger. Even Microsoft admits it. It's not about closed-source software, it's about Windows, which is the only other viable OS on commodity hardware besides Linux. And it's not just Windows 10, the keylogger was added into Windows 8 and 7 with Windows Updates.
So, it's a really simple choice: either you use Windows and have a keylogger with all your passwords being sent to Microsoft, or you use Linux. (Or you spend thousands for a Macbook.)
I got tired of the pointless "Year of the desktop" nonsense, and outgrew my need to have a loyality to any one OS, understanding that some things are better for different purposes than others. Something most of the FOSS community hasn't matured enough to realize.
Hey, if you like having all your keystrokes sent to Microsoft, knock yourself out. But to say that it's "immature" to not want a keylogger installed on your system is rather asinine IMO.
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1985 is calling and wants you back.
I don't know about your area, but here in the sticks of the east coast, gas station bathrooms are great. All the old nasty gas stations have been replaced by shiny new Wawa and Sheetsz mega-stations. Gas stations don't even make money any more, which is why they've all been replaced by these new chains: they make almost zero profit on the gas, and instead profit off of getting you to go inside and buy food and drinks (when you're using the nice bathrooms). They actually have really good selections and sell prepared foods (sandwiches, burgers, etc.), at lower prices than regular fast-food places like Subway, though the drinks and such are of course more expensive than Walmart.
Not likely. Even in the US where their marketshare is by far the greatest, Android still dominates the smartphone market (though Apple is a lot more profitable at it).
Personally, I don't see the problem here. Using Siri is not a requirement if you have an iPhone; it's an additional service you can use or not. And if you don't like Apple and their business practices (and I for one don't), then you don't have to buy an iPhone, you can get one of a huge multitude of Android phones instead (like I did), from various different manufacturers. Or you could get one of those crappy Windows Phones, or a Blackberry. Simply put, Apple just doesn't have a monopoly, and I don't think it's really even close to one. They're an 800-pound gorilla, but still not large enough that anti-trust becomes an issue. Interestingly, they're actually larger and more profitable than Microsoft (I'm pretty sure), but since they operate in such a big market, and in multiple markets (both phones and also computers still), and since their profitability comes not totally from volume but largely from having boutique prices and customers willing to pay them, they just don't meet monopoly status IMO.
Is anyone surprised? These big behemoth companies generally suck at innovating, and are really only good at integration and sales. Just look at all of MS's products; they were almost all purchased from somewhere else too.
In theory, a large organization should have a huge advantage in resources (and money) to do extremely innovative work, but in practice they're usually terrible at it because the internal processes and procedures and politics hamstring everything they do. It'd be interesting if someone could figure out how to structure and manage an organization to avoid this, but so far it seems to be endemic to human organizations.
Otherwise an unread open source is as superior as a completely closed source.
The superiority of open-source software isn't in the code quality; that's a misconception. It's in the openness. The code quality can be good or bad, just like with proprietary software. Code that's audited more heavily and managed better is going to have better quality, whereas code that isn't audited or inspected is going to be luck-of-the-draw (basically depending on how good a coder the one guy who wrote it is). The difference is that open-source is *open*. So if you're really interested, you can look at it to judge the quality for yourself. You can't do that with proprietary software. For all you know, Adobe Reader could be total spaghetti code, or it could be excellent. There's no real way to know since you can't see the code. And there's no easy way to see if it has backdoors or malware built in, except by black-box testing.
But to address your comment very directly, OpenSSL showed how slowly such systems actually get patched. With openness comes fragmentation. I didn't just have to wait for OpenSSL to fix the bug, I had to wait for my distro to release and update their specific version (which to their specific credit they did quite quickly, others not so).
I don't see how that's a problem, that seems like a strength to me. You picked a good distro, and they fixed the problem "quite quickly", so what are you complaining about? You're mad because some other crappy distro didn't? Then don't use that distro. With proprietary software, you don't have this freedom. MS has been known to not proactively patch problems in the past, and prefer that they not be publicized. What's your alternative if you decide you don't like the way MS manages its "distro"? You don't have one. You can abandon Windows altogether, or run it in a VM, or some other crappy workaround, but you can't find an alternative company with a slightly different version of Windows to run all your Windows applications on. With your Linux distro, you do. If you decide your current distro sucks and isn't handling security problems very well, you can easily switch to an alternative distro. Going from Ubuntu to Mint is easy, going from Mint to Debian isn't too hard, going from RHEL to Suse is easy, etc. Even going between the Red Hat and Debian camps isn't *that* hard. This isn't "fragmentation", this is competition. They were apparently all using OpenSSL, so it was just a matter of patching the problem and rolling out the fix. Fragmentation is when they all decide to make their own, incompatible versions of something. That's what happened with old UNIX, where compiling software to run on HP-UX was significantly different than compiling it for Solaris. Linux isn't fragmented that badly at all. It could use more standardization for sure, but it's really not that bad, considering how much diversity there is. Having the same kernel across all distros, and the kernel having a very strict policy of never altering or deprecating syscalls probably is a big help there, plus they all seem to use glibc.
Anyway, I went off on a tangent there. The other big strength with open-source is that you were able to get OpenSSL patched. With proprietary software, there's no such guarantee. OpenSSL was open-source, so if the maintainers didn't bother to fix it, or to do it quickly, someone else could fairly easily have done so, since everyone has access to the source code. With proprietary software, if the vendor decides they just don't feel like fixing the problem, then you're screwed. What do you do when MS says they're not making any more security updates for XP, but you have expensive network-connected industrial equipment built on it? Well, you're screwed, and you either get it off the network or rely on a bunch of firewalling or other workarounds. If it were built on Linux, you'd be able to patch it.
You people are stupid. No one is suggesting that car sales will go internet-only, this is a discussion about getting rid of independently-owned dealerships.
Have you morons never been to an Apple or Microsoft store? Who do you think owns that store? The parent corporation does. That's what would happen if manufacturers sold direct to the public.
It's unbelievable how many idiots here simply cannot conceive of an automaker owning its own store and repair center. Even worse is the fact that Tesla is *already doing this* (not to mention Apple in the computer market), so it's not like you haven't ever seen it before.
Yes, but the owner of Best Buy does not play golf with the city mayor or state governor.
I recently bought a car like this. I wanted the top-end model Mazda3 in a particular color. The dealership near me got one on order, so I had to wait a couple months for it to get over by ship from Japan. Then when it came time to sign papers, they tried to get me to pay full price on it; I pointed out that's not what they claimed before and they adjusted it down. I got out my laptop computer, got on their website, clicked on "instant email price quote" and then showed them the quote their own website showed me (which was likely auto-generated based on the MSRP), which was lower than what I found at all the surrounding dealers' sites for that same model, and they gave that to me. This was from one of those dealerships where they claim to have no-haggle pricing (but not really).
Overall, I think it was a fair deal considering I got exactly the model I wanted. Like you said, if you want something very specific, and not whatever's sitting on the lot, you're usually not able to get such a big discount on the price.
American-built cars are frequently very high quality.
Cars sold by American-headquartered companies are usually crap. Not only that, they're frequently not made in America either.
You sound like the troll here. It's obvious that the GP was referring to the Big 3 American car companies: GM, Ford, and Chrysler. Of course, Chrysler is now owned by Fiat, but that doesn't seem to have helped it any.
One year old used cars basically don't exist anymore.
Where did you get that wacky idea? Go to any used car sales site and look, there's plenty of them.
You don't think anyone ever gets their car repossessed any more?
It's really pretty simple. If automakers can sell directly, they'll just buy up the existing dealership networks (which are all regional now anyway). So instead of the dealership adding a bunch of extra cost so the owner can live in luxury, the carmaker will cut that out so they can reduce prices and be more competitive with the other carmakers who are doing the same thing. The employees will mostly stay there, but now the corporation will be able to exercise a lot more control over them, and set better standards for customer service (because now one dealership's bad review online reflects on the entire carmaker brand). And to really reduce costs, automakers will then eliminate many of the dealerships. The problems is we have **too many** dealerships for the number of cars being sold; all this overhead increases costs (plus the middleman aspect, plus all the local corruption). Direct automaker sales will result in a bunch of these being eliminated, so that you no longer have 2 Ford dealerships in the same small town, and stuff like that.
The important thing to remember here is that the USA is the ONLY country in the entire world which sells cars this way. Everywhere else, cars are sold directly by the carmakers. There's a reason for this.
Open source is superior only in that it provides an ability to do a code review. Clearly that has failed spectacularly in some of our most common and most depended upon open source components.
Huh? I never said OS was perfect; far from it in fact. It's also no guarantee that people are actually going to audit it. I don't understand why people keep thinking this. But if you think proprietary software is of higher quality on average, you're deluded. There's crap code in both camps.
It IS different. If the project's unmaintained, you still have the source code available and can fix it yourself.
You can't do that with a proprietary product. If the proprietary vendor doesn't feel like fixing it, you can't force them to, and you can't do it yourself because you don't have the source code.
If you don't see what the difference is here, I can't help you.
I don't see how it'd be any different for proprietary vs. open-source here. They're both going to have vulnerabilities; that's unavoidable with software of any kind. There's always going to be some time between when the bug is found and when it's fixed, during which it can be exploited (worse if black-hats find it first and sell it or use it). The difference between the two is how fast you get a fix, and if you get one at all. With proprietary, you're entirely at the vendor's mercy; if they're really good, you get a fix very quickly. If they're mediocre, you get a fix after some time, and hopefully you don't suffer serious consequences. If they really suck, you don't get a fix at all, ever, because they don't feel like it, and they tell you to just go buy their latest version. With open-source, you have multiple avenues: hopefully there's a community that issues a fix, otherwise you still have the ability to fix it yourself or hire someone competent to do it for you.
Only a complete moron would think that proprietary software is immune to problems and that proprietary vendors are proactive about finding and fixing security vulnerabilities.
This software absolutely should be open-source. The OpenSSL issue is an example of why open source is superior, even though it's obviously no guarantee you'll have no problems: when the vulnerability was discovered, it was fixed very quickly.
The problem with proprietary software is that there's no way to actually fix it, unless the vendor wants to. When the OpenSSL problem was found, a fix was made and rolled out, and everyone was able to install it.
When a vulnerability is found on your 5-year-old Jeep and publicized, what do you do when Jeep decides they don't feel like fixing it for you? Guess what, you're screwed! Now hackers can take control of your vehicle and drive you off a cliff, and there's nothing you can do about it because the vendor doesn't care and there's no way to upgrade the software yourself.
This kind of thing shows exactly why Stallman had the right idea about "TiVOization". Not only is it important that you can have access to the source code for your device so that you can modify or fix the code, but it's equally important that you can actually get the fix *onto* the device so you can use it. Otherwise you're at the vendor's mercy.
Luckily cars are so heavily regulated that my Jeep scenario above is unlikely, simply because of government regulation and also lawsuits, but this isn't true of other places where physical safety isn't a factor. With the current "IoT" push to connect every little device to the internet, having the firmware open-source is more important than ever because of the security issues, combined with the **proven** tendency of vendors to abandon support after a few months.
If we really have to eliminate fossil sources in one generation, only nuclear will make up for the massive baseload we now have in coal and gas.
Yes, exactly. I think I said this in my post above basically: that renewables + nuclear is a practical and relatively environmentally-friendly way to meet our electricity needs now and into the near future. Over time, we should be able to come up with more efficient and cheaper solar cells so that that can be used more and more, and older nuclear plants can be decommissioned, and maybe they'll finally figure out how to get fusion working.
The other sort of environmentalist answers, "All we have to do is get rid of energy-intensive industries and switch our economy over to software consultants and artisanal brewing?"
These fools can be ignored. They're not a significant part of the electorate. It's the same thing with conflating everyone who's left-of-center in this country with the far-left wackos who yammer about "social justice" constantly and tell people to "check your privilege". Don't confuse a vocal minority with an entire group.
Some places are sunny, others are windy, and occasionally you will find an old volcanic stump with residual geothermal heat.
It's true that windmills are not going to be cost-effective in many places because there's just not enough wind, and obviously geothermal only works in certain spots, but solar actually is useful in more places than people realize. Germany is generating a huge portion of its power solely from solar, and Germany is *not* known for being a warm, sunny place. Look at a map: it's actually quite far north; southern Germany is at the same latitude as North Dakota. If we deployed solar power in the southern US states (from California to Florida) to the extent Germany has, we probably wouldn't need any fossil fuel plants any more except for the pesky nighttime issue.
That won't work for the stealth sharks which remove their lasers before assaulting a beach.
As the other guy said, you're confusing environmentalists with NIMBYs, but also, you're confusing two groups of environmentalists. The smart environmentalists are pro-nuclear, or at least, anti-coal and anti-fossil-fuel and in favor of nuclear as an alternative to those for the time being until better sources can be made more economical.
Yeah, unfortunately there's a bunch of dumb anti-nuclear people out there who don't want any nuclear power, but don't have any suggestions at all about what to do to make the electricity needed, and strangely seem to have little to say about fossil fuel (esp. coal) power, which has horrible environmental effects. Not all environmentalists are like this.
IMO, we as a nation should be moving to eliminate most if not all fossil fuel electricity generation, and only use nuclear and renewables (solar, wind, etc.). Solar power is getting cheaper all the time, and is highly versatile: you can put panels over parking lots, on commercial rooftops, etc., which is also very close to the point-of-use which greatly reduces transmission losses (unlike nuclear where the plant is generally far from where the power is consumed). However, solar of course doesn't work too well at night so it requires a storage method, such as hydroelectric (pump water uphill during the daytime when you have surplus capacity, run it downhill through the dam at night to generate power). But realistically, we probably can't generate all we need with renewables just yet, so nuclear is a good solution for generating large baseline loads. This will be even more important as we move towards more EVs on the road, which will mostly be recharging at night.
Sure, but it runs Windows 10. Only a complete fool would run Windows 10 with its integrated spyware. So this alone makes the device completely worthless.
What kind of moron would want to buy something that runs Windows 10?
That's a really, really low bar there.
Compare the US to cops in other **developed** nations (rather than failed states) and it looks pretty bleak. The cops in Germany, Finland, the UK, France, etc. all put ours to shame.
Blue uniform? It seems like cops weren't quite as bad when they actually wore blue. Nowadays they just seem to wear black. I seem to remember about another group of thugs who used to wear black shirts...
I've also seen cops wear brown, especially here in the southeast. I also remember another group of thugs who used to wear brown shirts...
There's a difference between laws which regulate an industry, and just a general sales tax. Obviously a government needs taxes to operate, though there's plenty of room to argue about what it should be set at, and what exemptions should apply. Personally, I'd argue that sales taxes should be greatly reduced or even eliminated altogether, as they're generally regressive, though I guess it'd be OK to keep them on luxury cars (>$50k), yachts, etc. Income tax and capital gains taxes should be the primary form of taxing individuals, not sales taxes on retail transactions. Stock-trade transactions would be a good thing too.
Other include roadworthyness, it's not just what you appear to expect of using a personal vehicle for commercial purposes since that's more of a problem for insurance companies here than the government.
With Uber at least, they won't even let you drive a car that's too old; they're all about making sure their drivers have nice, newer, generally luxury-ish cars, not old POSes.
But there's pretty much no evidence that roadworthiness is something the government should be inspecting. There's states which do annual vehicle inspections (like mine, VA), and lots of other states which do not (like most other states I've lived in). There's absolutely no obvious improvement in the roadworthiness of cars in states which have inspection. In fact, there's all kinds of POS cars driving around me here in VA. This isn't the 1920s any more; cars these days last forever, except the engines maybe, and inspections don't look at those. Even if your engine dies, who cares; you just pull over. This isn't aviation.
Using a vehicle for commercial purposes is all on the owner of the vehicle, as far as the mechanical aspect goes. It's really none of the government's business, and the insurance company doesn't care, they only care about claims. Insurance does care how many miles you drive though and if you're more likely to be in an accident. That's pretty much a function of miles driven, and taxis are worse because they make lots of short trips in urban areas usually, rather than logging lots of boring miles on rural highways with few turns or speed changes.
Windows 10 is widely acknowledged to have a keylogger. Even Microsoft admits it. It's not about closed-source software, it's about Windows, which is the only other viable OS on commodity hardware besides Linux. And it's not just Windows 10, the keylogger was added into Windows 8 and 7 with Windows Updates.
So, it's a really simple choice: either you use Windows and have a keylogger with all your passwords being sent to Microsoft, or you use Linux. (Or you spend thousands for a Macbook.)
I got tired of the pointless "Year of the desktop" nonsense, and outgrew my need to have a loyality to any one OS, understanding that some things are better for different purposes than others. Something most of the FOSS community hasn't matured enough to realize.
Hey, if you like having all your keystrokes sent to Microsoft, knock yourself out. But to say that it's "immature" to not want a keylogger installed on your system is rather asinine IMO.