"2) Nissan has some nagware shit that makes you take your leaf back to Nissan to be reassured. For this the dealership must buy an expensive piece of specalized kit from Nissan and will then charge you, the car owner, for the workship equivilent of clicking the "Okay" button."
Most Nissans have this and in the past there's always been a way of clicking the "OK" button (even adding extra keys is a "nissan trade secret", but widely published). It's unlikely that such a method will remain secret on the Leaf for long.
Having said that, I wouldn't let any of my cars _near_ most stealerships, specially for a "minor service" where the apprentice is expected to change the oil and noone bothers to check he's done up the sump plug tightly (you can guess what happens next and my case wasn't an isolated instance. A friend of mine with a Mercedes had a similar experience at his stealership. A long time ago I had a GM car handed back to me with 3 loose bolts (out of 4) where the propshaft bolts to the differential and a mazda handed back with loose wheel nuts.)
Who produced cars which didn't need an ignition key (RF smartcard) and then tried to stomp all over everyone who pointed out the security of the devices was substandard.
Never mind, the French Govt will bail them out again when they go bankrupt.
(Renault are the 20st century Lucas(*) when it comes to car electrical systems.)
What was probably said was "we are all children of god", judging from attempts I've seen to backtrack to the original Amaraic (Which are generally tightly coupled verses that make any attempts at atmpering very obvious)
Various elements, just like various elements in the USA want various states to cede from the Union.
In the USA those elements are treated as domestic terrorists. In the UK they're tolerated and allowed to put their reasoning in public, where it can be torn apart in public.
Yes, the SNP has a majority in the scottish parliament, but that doesn't mean they'll pull off a referendum to cede from the UK. The vast majority of scottish are far too pragmatic about the economic consequences to even consider it.
Look at the history of ww2 - where inteligence services could have avoided a number of nasty defeats but didn't because Axis forces would have realised their comms were being decrypted and changed the methods used more frequently - every time that happened there was an effective 3 month blackout on breaking the keys.
Terrorism is all about asymetric warfare and cell structures to prevent knowledge of the structure being a weakness. They only have to suceed once, while the opposition has to spend massive amounts on trying to prevent them. The problem is that in trying to combat terrorism, the security services have completely gone over the line and their actions have been creating more terrorists.
Perhaps that was the intention - so that they're never out of work. But It's far more likely to be gross incomptence coupled with massive amounts of hubris.
FWIW: Whilst Huawei might be banned from selling to the US govt they're well represented in USA telcos. Several of them are virtually exclusively Huawei houses. (Level3's high capacity equipment as a f'instance)
That's why Cisco is running scared - and if you think the stuff in the US House was about spying, then look to see where the campaign contributions for the representatives involved come from.
Think less about spying and more about "trade barriers" and "protectionism" - both of which the USA has been particularly good at erecting in defiance of international treaties such as GATT.
"China is VERY interested in stealing all the trade secrets they can get their hands on, and passing them to domestic Chinese firms who will be happy to offer competing products at much lower prices"
There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that the USA engages in similar activities against "friend" and "unfriend" alike.
Doing that would cause internal economic instability and the chinese have plenty of recent experience with such things coupled with a strong will to avoid repeats.
War sells. Peace grows. The chinese have a vested interest in things NOT getting hot and they've never had overly ambitious world domination plans.
They may not care about Joe average singularly but they sure want to know about the collective Joes - simply from a commercial point of view if nothing else. How else do they get to anticipate what you might want and develop a market for it?
Which is why a lot of space science is done using fortran (despite the vast shortcoimings of Gfortran compilers)
A couple of branches of space science use IDL and other monstrosities for number crunching...... Which leads to such inanties as someone writing an IDL program to call WGET 200,000 times to fetch files from an archive when one wget command would do the job.
People write in what they're used to writing. It's very hard to break habits.
"If you host online services in Norway fx law enforcement have to go through normal official court proceedings and get a specific court order "
Same in the UK. The UK Police got around the problem by asking the UK spy agency to provide information. That agency asks the NSA, then feeds it back to the police and then the police use the information provided to get court orders authorised the tapping.
It's barely legal but utterly violates the intent of the law. The government is content to allow the practice to continue.
In New Zealand, the govt changed the laws to make it legal after discovering that the police were acting illegally by getting the local spy agency to spy for them without bothering to get court orders first.
The difference is that the ones from the early 70s are usually on film whilst the later ones are on tape, and tape deteriorates in a much more notiaceble way than film does.
The only place I've ever seen 4-way stops is in the USA. The rest of the woprld uses roundabouts where it's important and prioritises one direction where it's not.
"I may be just a little country shop guy but when my gamer customers have all experienced multiple failures when it comes to SSDs, and these guys don't go cheap"
Don't kid yourself about gamers. They're bleeding edgers for the most part and there's an old saying that "pioneers get arrows in their backs"
Having said that I've seen at least one consumer SSD which would shut down (*poof*) after a couple of hundred hours powered up and then stay dead if tried again. Leave it unpowered for a few days and the story changes: Power it up and it's fine for a while (subsequent uptime is proportional to a multiple of the powered down time) with no actual data loss.
This symptom appears to be more widespread than manufacturers realise (I've seen a lot of reports of this kind of behaviour across a wide number of makers) - and of course by the time such a dead drive gets into their hands it looks and runs ok, so it gets tagged "no fault found" and returned to the consumer (who finds the fault's not fixed and chucks it in a drawer vowing to never buy from that maker again)
Big, Fast, Cheap. Pick any 2 - that applies as much for spinners as SSDs (enterprise HDDs are generally almost as expensive as SSD)
If you're willing to compromise then solutions like ZFS help a lot.
Bear in mind that raid is no substitute and vice versa. (The best backup being the one you never need to use, but having to restore backups is painful - in our enterprise-scale academic setup 99% of restores are for material that was deleted over a week ago and is suddenly needed again.)
Some devices ARE arranged internally as RAIN (Redundant array of Inexpensive NAND), but most manufacturers just pack as much in as they can and use sparing to achieve reliability.
Unsurprisingly, like powerfail protection (PFP), It's more common at the top end/enterprise end than consumer drives.
As time goes by you'll see RAIN + Sparing + PFP + WriteVerify become standard on all but the cheap'n'nasties.
For exploration, robots trump humans by a wide stretch on flexibility(*), durability and cost. When you're focussed on the bottom line that matters.
For getting humans off the planet, there's nothing like manned flight to figure out the issues.
(*) A (wo)man in a suit is surpisingly un-nimble. Waldos or some other kind of ROV would work far better in cases where external fixed manipulatorsd won't do the job.
They're separate problems, with separate solutions. Yes there's a tieup further down the line but the best argument for manned spaceflight is that of getting the gene pool off-planet before an errant rock does serious damage - and that's not being taken at all seriously by those with the purse strings.
As hinted at in the article, airport congestion it is a big problem in Japan. Airports are mostly full because of domestic travel and 747s/other large widebodies are used on shorthaul flights of less than 500 miles simply because of their seating capacity.
I'm not in North America and I'm not using calling cards - these are my telco's rates.
The USA governement never owend the phone system in the first place, but they provide legalised monopolies for local service, which is what drives your insane pricing structures. I live in a country with a (mostly) deregulated environment where the incumbent telco is required to provide FRAND local loop - the line company is (imperfectly) separated from the rest of the telco to ensure there is a competitive market.
As a result I get unmetered 80/20Mb broadband, plus local loop, plus unlimited national calling, plus unlimited international calling as described for about $60/month - with $40 of that being the broadband (it can be had for $10/month with caps)
You can blame your government for the pricing - your state government - for protecting the monopoly of the incumbent LEC and regulating what prices they (and CLECs) can charge. It's amazing how you can justify high prices to the local regulators by fabricating charges all over the place insted of splitting off the incumbents into line company/"and the rest", then allowing true competition into the marketplace.
"While lowend cars then would have struggled to reach 70mph if they could at all"
Referring to history, the limit was set at 70mph on motorways in the UK as it was the maximum attainable of the small cars of the time (Mini, VW bug, Ford Popular, Austin A40, etc) and they were rattletraps at those speeds. The M1 was originally designed for 100mph traffic and it shows in the radius of most bends.
Speed limits were imposed in the 1960s after a spate of 150+mph crashes on the M1 involving high end sports cars (Mostly things like AC Cobras), usually in poor visibility. Prior to that there were no open road limits in the UK. If limits were reset to the 85th percentile then they'd have been set at 85mph between 2000-2005., but recently there's been a real effort by the govt to clamp down on speed (mostly as a revenue raising exercise - motorways are the safest roads to drive on) without paying attention to the myriad other factors behind road deaths.
The British driving license test is hard, but most drivers still don't understand the laws of newtonian physics and there's no active safety taught (such as how to get out a skid, how NOT to steer into a crash, etc). The amount of poor driving I see in the UK is on par with, or slightly higher than I ever saw in the USA. There's a strong argument for periodic retests but the newspapers would be up in arms if this was ever raised by a politician or the safety authorities.
Actually it's 30mph over the speed limit to automatically qualify as dangerous driving and it _is_ jailable, plus there's a long license disqualification on top and there's the option of confiscating the car. Many countries have similar rules.
It's not speed that's the problem, it's speed spread. 70mph is fine when everyone is travelling at troughly the same speed (50-70mph) but as the spread increases so do the crashes. That's why a lot of EU roads have _minimum_ speed limits. Go below them without good reason and you'll find yourself explaining why in a roadside police station.
Slashdot Mirror
"2) Nissan has some nagware shit that makes you take your leaf back to Nissan to be reassured. For this the dealership must buy an expensive piece of specalized kit from Nissan and will then charge you, the car owner, for the workship equivilent of clicking the "Okay" button."
Most Nissans have this and in the past there's always been a way of clicking the "OK" button (even adding extra keys is a "nissan trade secret", but widely published). It's unlikely that such a method will remain secret on the Leaf for long.
Having said that, I wouldn't let any of my cars _near_ most stealerships, specially for a "minor service" where the apprentice is expected to change the oil and noone bothers to check he's done up the sump plug tightly (you can guess what happens next and my case wasn't an isolated instance. A friend of mine with a Mercedes had a similar experience at his stealership. A long time ago I had a GM car handed back to me with 3 loose bolts (out of 4) where the propshaft bolts to the differential and a mazda handed back with loose wheel nuts.)
Who produced cars which didn't need an ignition key (RF smartcard) and then tried to stomp all over everyone who pointed out the security of the devices was substandard.
Never mind, the French Govt will bail them out again when they go bankrupt.
(Renault are the 20st century Lucas(*) when it comes to car electrical systems.)
(*) Prince of darkness.
MiFare _IS_ a NFC card.
Most of the problems I see with them revolve around operators not even bothering to use encryption in the first place.
is ONE suicide bomber at a TSA checkpoint.
Armed guards aren't going to help much and it's already happened in Russia.
BTW, what happens if you put some putrescene or corpscine in your shoes before going to the airport?
"The Canadians could probably defeat the US in the state the US military and it's leadership is in."
If they do, will they burn the white house down again?
What was probably said was "we are all children of god", judging from attempts I've seen to backtrack to the original Amaraic (Which are generally tightly coupled verses that make any attempts at atmpering very obvious)
Various elements, just like various elements in the USA want various states to cede from the Union.
In the USA those elements are treated as domestic terrorists. In the UK they're tolerated and allowed to put their reasoning in public, where it can be torn apart in public.
Yes, the SNP has a majority in the scottish parliament, but that doesn't mean they'll pull off a referendum to cede from the UK. The vast majority of scottish are far too pragmatic about the economic consequences to even consider it.
Look at the history of ww2 - where inteligence services could have avoided a number of nasty defeats but didn't because Axis forces would have realised their comms were being decrypted and changed the methods used more frequently - every time that happened there was an effective 3 month blackout on breaking the keys.
Terrorism is all about asymetric warfare and cell structures to prevent knowledge of the structure being a weakness. They only have to suceed once, while the opposition has to spend massive amounts on trying to prevent them. The problem is that in trying to combat terrorism, the security services have completely gone over the line and their actions have been creating more terrorists.
Perhaps that was the intention - so that they're never out of work. But It's far more likely to be gross incomptence coupled with massive amounts of hubris.
FWIW: Whilst Huawei might be banned from selling to the US govt they're well represented in USA telcos. Several of them are virtually exclusively Huawei houses. (Level3's high capacity equipment as a f'instance)
That's why Cisco is running scared - and if you think the stuff in the US House was about spying, then look to see where the campaign contributions for the representatives involved come from.
Think less about spying and more about "trade barriers" and "protectionism" - both of which the USA has been particularly good at erecting in defiance of international treaties such as GATT.
"China is VERY interested in stealing all the trade secrets they can get their hands on, and passing them to domestic Chinese firms who will be happy to offer competing products at much lower prices"
There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that the USA engages in similar activities against "friend" and "unfriend" alike.
The USA is china's biggest single customer.
Doing that would cause internal economic instability and the chinese have plenty of recent experience with such things coupled with a strong will to avoid repeats.
War sells. Peace grows. The chinese have a vested interest in things NOT getting hot and they've never had overly ambitious world domination plans.
They may not care about Joe average singularly but they sure want to know about the collective Joes - simply from a commercial point of view if nothing else. How else do they get to anticipate what you might want and develop a market for it?
Which is why a lot of space science is done using fortran (despite the vast shortcoimings of Gfortran compilers)
A couple of branches of space science use IDL and other monstrosities for number crunching... ... Which leads to such inanties as someone writing an IDL program to call WGET 200,000 times to fetch files from an archive when one wget command would do the job.
People write in what they're used to writing. It's very hard to break habits.
"If you host online services in Norway fx law enforcement have to go through normal official court proceedings and get a specific court order "
Same in the UK. The UK Police got around the problem by asking the UK spy agency to provide information. That agency asks the NSA, then feeds it back to the police and then the police use the information provided to get court orders authorised the tapping.
It's barely legal but utterly violates the intent of the law. The government is content to allow the practice to continue.
In New Zealand, the govt changed the laws to make it legal after discovering that the police were acting illegally by getting the local spy agency to spy for them without bothering to get court orders first.
The difference is that the ones from the early 70s are usually on film whilst the later ones are on tape, and tape deteriorates in a much more notiaceble way than film does.
The only place I've ever seen 4-way stops is in the USA. The rest of the woprld uses roundabouts where it's important and prioritises one direction where it's not.
"I may be just a little country shop guy but when my gamer customers have all experienced multiple failures when it comes to SSDs, and these guys don't go cheap"
Don't kid yourself about gamers. They're bleeding edgers for the most part and there's an old saying that "pioneers get arrows in their backs"
Having said that I've seen at least one consumer SSD which would shut down (*poof*) after a couple of hundred hours powered up and then stay dead if tried again. Leave it unpowered for a few days and the story changes: Power it up and it's fine for a while (subsequent uptime is proportional to a multiple of the powered down time) with no actual data loss.
This symptom appears to be more widespread than manufacturers realise (I've seen a lot of reports of this kind of behaviour across a wide number of makers) - and of course by the time such a dead drive gets into their hands it looks and runs ok, so it gets tagged "no fault found" and returned to the consumer (who finds the fault's not fixed and chucks it in a drawer vowing to never buy from that maker again)
Big, Fast, Cheap. Pick any 2 - that applies as much for spinners as SSDs (enterprise HDDs are generally almost as expensive as SSD)
If you're willing to compromise then solutions like ZFS help a lot.
Bear in mind that raid is no substitute and vice versa. (The best backup being the one you never need to use, but having to restore backups is painful - in our enterprise-scale academic setup 99% of restores are for material that was deleted over a week ago and is suddenly needed again.)
Some devices ARE arranged internally as RAIN (Redundant array of Inexpensive NAND), but most manufacturers just pack as much in as they can and use sparing to achieve reliability.
Unsurprisingly, like powerfail protection (PFP), It's more common at the top end/enterprise end than consumer drives.
As time goes by you'll see RAIN + Sparing + PFP + WriteVerify become standard on all but the cheap'n'nasties.
For exploration, robots trump humans by a wide stretch on flexibility(*), durability and cost. When you're focussed on the bottom line that matters.
For getting humans off the planet, there's nothing like manned flight to figure out the issues.
(*) A (wo)man in a suit is surpisingly un-nimble. Waldos or some other kind of ROV would work far better in cases where external fixed manipulatorsd won't do the job.
They're separate problems, with separate solutions. Yes there's a tieup further down the line but the best argument for manned spaceflight is that of getting the gene pool off-planet before an errant rock does serious damage - and that's not being taken at all seriously by those with the purse strings.
As hinted at in the article, airport congestion it is a big problem in Japan. Airports are mostly full because of domestic travel and 747s/other large widebodies are used on shorthaul flights of less than 500 miles simply because of their seating capacity.
Why a profit? Because this is a _private_ transport company.
I'm not in North America and I'm not using calling cards - these are my telco's rates.
The USA governement never owend the phone system in the first place, but they provide legalised monopolies for local service, which is what drives your insane pricing structures. I live in a country with a (mostly) deregulated environment where the incumbent telco is required to provide FRAND local loop - the line company is (imperfectly) separated from the rest of the telco to ensure there is a competitive market.
As a result I get unmetered 80/20Mb broadband, plus local loop, plus unlimited national calling, plus unlimited international calling as described for about $60/month - with $40 of that being the broadband (it can be had for $10/month with caps)
You can blame your government for the pricing - your state government - for protecting the monopoly of the incumbent LEC and regulating what prices they (and CLECs) can charge. It's amazing how you can justify high prices to the local regulators by fabricating charges all over the place insted of splitting off the incumbents into line company/"and the rest", then allowing true competition into the marketplace.
"While lowend cars then would have struggled to reach 70mph if they could at all"
Referring to history, the limit was set at 70mph on motorways in the UK as it was the maximum attainable of the small cars of the time (Mini, VW bug, Ford Popular, Austin A40, etc) and they were rattletraps at those speeds. The M1 was originally designed for 100mph traffic and it shows in the radius of most bends.
Speed limits were imposed in the 1960s after a spate of 150+mph crashes on the M1 involving high end sports cars (Mostly things like AC Cobras), usually in poor visibility. Prior to that there were no open road limits in the UK. If limits were reset to the 85th percentile then they'd have been set at 85mph between 2000-2005., but recently there's been a real effort by the govt to clamp down on speed (mostly as a revenue raising exercise - motorways are the safest roads to drive on) without paying attention to the myriad other factors behind road deaths.
The British driving license test is hard, but most drivers still don't understand the laws of newtonian physics and there's no active safety taught (such as how to get out a skid, how NOT to steer into a crash, etc). The amount of poor driving I see in the UK is on par with, or slightly higher than I ever saw in the USA. There's a strong argument for periodic retests but the newspapers would be up in arms if this was ever raised by a politician or the safety authorities.
Actually it's 30mph over the speed limit to automatically qualify as dangerous driving and it _is_ jailable, plus there's a long license disqualification on top and there's the option of confiscating the car. Many countries have similar rules.
It's not speed that's the problem, it's speed spread. 70mph is fine when everyone is travelling at troughly the same speed (50-70mph) but as the spread increases so do the crashes. That's why a lot of EU roads have _minimum_ speed limits. Go below them without good reason and you'll find yourself explaining why in a roadside police station.