Slashdot Mirror


User: ledow

ledow's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
5,597
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 5,597

  1. That's what happens when you no longer want the cheapest, but only want "American". All the American companies bow out because they can't profit from it.

    That's also what happens when Apple screw over their suppliers and go looking for another partner "out of spite"... the other suppliers take you at your word and believe you'll do the same to them, so they ask you to pay upfront and design *EXACTLY* to your specs and then quote you a price for that.

    I thought Apple were going to do everything "in-house" anyway? For sure at the moment they appear a long way from having the first commercial 5G phones. And, if Samsung/Huawei use their brains, they'll have the technology first and can lord it over Mr MA5GA Trump, thus questioning the decision to block foreign products.

    Apple don't have any pull in a market that they don't control. They're just a big customer, like anyone else. But when that customer starts falling out with the biggest suppliers, this is what happens.

    Aren't Apple the people who couldn't find an American company that could make screws for their cases in time for production? Excellent supply chain management, procurement, logistics, etc. there.

  2. Re:Makes sense on Immune Cells May Play a Role In Causing Cavities (newatlas.com) · · Score: 1

    Surface area and contact time.

    If you literally gulp down Coke, it barely touches your teeth.

    If you swill it around your mouth, you've increased the surface area and contact time by orders of magnitude.

    If you chew a sweet for five minutes, holy hell, that's a lot of contact. If that sweet is sticky and can adhere to your teeth, even worse... it's literally inserting sugar into every tiny microscopic gap with the force of your tongue and can be in there for minutes and minutes and minutes. And that's *ONE* sweet.

    Stop telling your kids off for gulping their drink. It'll do absolutely no harm to them. However, if they do the usual kid-thing of "huge cheeks full of drink, pouty lips to contain it all", they are slowly destroying their teeth.

    And if they have sticky toffees, sticky gum-based sweets, etc. then they are doing orders-of-magnitude more damage than a whole can of Coke with each one.

    Of course it's cumulative over time so many people are just fine, but it's better to have almost zero sugar cumulatively than lots of sugar, for many minutes, stuck to your teeth, cumulatively.

  3. Re:Brits Know This on Immune Cells May Play a Role In Causing Cavities (newatlas.com) · · Score: 1
  4. Those companies won't compete in such a tiny market.

    They know there's not much profit in it, and that what profit there is will be shared among them all, and be at the expense of their ICE engines for the next few years (at least).

    When people *stop* buying 10-20 times as many ICE cars each year, then they'll roll out the models they have on standby and ramp up production, and likely not before.

    It's a niche market, an expensive market, and a profit-less market at the moment, and as soon as one jumps on the bandwagon, they'll all end up fighting for it.

    Much better to hold back, let Tesla run themselves into the ground (buoyed up by investors and Musk, and nearly gone bankrupt several times already), and if they ever do make profit then they can own the market in a year.

    Their choice at the moment is "invest in R&D" (which they already do an order of magnitude or more than Tesla ever could), "put out to a niche market" or "do nothing". You can be sure that none of them are "doing nothing" given that many places are making noises about banning ICE car production.

    Once those kinds of bans start to hit the bottom line, then it's worth paying to move all the production over once and for all, and not before. At that point, 10-20 times the R&D, production capacity, and market instantly open up and Tesla are small-fry.

    Musk will say "that's what he always wanted". Which I'm sure will interest his investors who poured all their money into a company which then just disappears overnight when the big boys come in.

    Think back 10-20 years. Hey, you can sell me a incandescent lightbulb now and make thousands of them for pence. Or you can sell a tiny percentage of the market an expensive CFL bulb. Sure, people will buy them. Sure, legislation will be put in place to work against them. But until then it pays to get the absolute most out of your existing production facilities, make and sell as many incandescents as you can, while you can, and then wait for the slow tilt in favour of CFL products. Because... hell.. let's hope you don't have to change technology in the meantime to something like LED, eh? Wouldn't that be a mistake, to bet the farm on CFL only to have your business go to some LED producer?

    That's what the big boys are doing. If there was a battery breakthrough tomorrow that made everyone realise that there's no reason NOT to go electric now, who do you think would be snapping up the patents and rushing out models with it... Ford , or Tesla? The one with 10 times more R&D cash and production capability.

    They hold back, let Tesla throw their money away testing the market, use their flops/successes as indicators for their own market research (i.e. I bet nobody will be calling them anything even close to Autopilot), and wait until the market is at the point that they can tip all their investments into it, while selling off the last of their ICE models.

    Tesla is an order of magnitude out in production numbers, investment amounts, etc. from any of the big names. They just don't see the point in moving yet as they are making huge profits on every car they sell still, and electric wouldn't give them that, except in luxury models (which is where hybrids etc. are priced).

    The man on the street will likely never own a Tesla. By the time Tesla make something he can afford, the others will have flooded the market with their own, while he's still trying to retain his old ICE car against the bans.

  5. Yep... especially MHT which is just HTML, in effect.

    If you're aren't already blocking that file format at your email server, you're in trouble anyway.

    Though it would be nice occasionally to get a 2019 email client that doesn't just open attachments and execute them in the general user context.

  6. No it's not.

    It's a visual representation of WHAT WAS RECORDED by an Earth-wide telescope (standard practice with radio telescopy) from photons whose paths were last warped by a black home 53.5m light years away / ago.

    It's not a rendering at all. It's not a simulation. It's not a representation of received data. That conforms almost exactly to expectations made under assumptions that - up until now - we did not know were actually true.

    It's quite literally what light the black hole has sent our way 53.5m years ago, which has arrived at Earth pretty much unmolested in all that time/distance.

    It's a picture of a black hole in exactly the same way that your last holiday photos on your smartphone are a picture of your family standing in front of a beach.

  7. Which happens to look exactly how we'd expect to see the simulation that was done for Interstellar to look if we saw it from where we are, and with the equipment we have.

    Honestly, you're directly getting photons for which the last thing they touched was a black hole 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun, in the middle of another galaxy, 53.5m years ago, 53.5m light years away.

    The picture isn't photographically beautiful because it never would be at those kinds of distances. That it even *exists* and produces anything at all is astounding.

  8. You say Google+ is history - it still keeps getting pushed down to my phone whenever I try to remove it (which you can't do completely without rooting the phone).

    You'd think they'd have the brains to forcibly remove the app if it does nothing.

  9. Re:"a likely image of the black hole" - LOL on The Black Hole Image Data Was Spread Across 5 Petabytes Stored On About Half a Ton of Hard Drives (vice.com) · · Score: 4, Informative

    Erm...

    I think you miss that this is a "real picture" of a black hole. It's black. That's the hole.

    It bends space, time and light - correct. Anything past it's event horizon is lost forever, correct. But anything on the periphery isn't and arcs rounds and is fired back into space at random, almost... like a mirror. Light acts like a planet in orbit around the object, which means you can see all kinds of artifacts not caused by anything else, and can see light focused, diverted and spread from behind, in-front and the side of the object in question, producing bright halos of light - maybe from our own side of the galaxy - that orbited around the hole and came back our way.

    And it's doing that in all dimensions. And depending on the tilt of the accretion disc, you'll see parts of that disc caught up in it / blocking light, which is why the halo isn't even - the accretion disc is tilted from our viewpoint.

    Black holes are "invisible". But their presence makes everything near them go really weird and not like a standard piece of space at all.

    You can even measure the Schwarzchild radius from the size of the haloes because parts of it will be directly related to certain multiples of the radius.

    The black hole is only a point to us because it warps space, too. Whether it's actually a "point" in its local reference frame is another matter entirely.

  10. Re:No kidding! on Ford CEO Says the Company 'Overestimated' Self-Driving Cars (engadget.com) · · Score: 1

    Golf carts.
    Shopping trolleys.
    Fairground rides.

    All kinds of things operate in geo-fenced areas, can be made to run in a very constrained environment, where computer vision is easy, speeds are low, decisions are few, obstacles are few, and the end-result of a mistake is a bruised ankle not a dead kid.

    But they ALL skipped such stages.

  11. Re:Time for Assange haters to eat shit on Wikileaks Co-founder Julian Assange Arrested in London (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    When the Mueller report is published in full, unredacted, then you can be that smarmy.

    WMD were NEVER present - we all knew that. No evidence was ever presented, and it was used as an excuse.

    And nobody every said the US wouldn't extradite. They said they aren't going to extradite him just to try to assassinate him or imprison him indefinitely (which is what Assange-fans believed).

    Here's a tip: Break US law, encouraging people to break into US security systems to obtain top secret data, and then publish everything you find on the US in that data to the world... it's gonna hurt. No country in the world is going to just let that pass, wherever you're based. If you're American, it's treason, if you're not, you're a spy. It's quite simple.

    If the only way to "win" your argument is to polarise the opinions of others to the extreme edge and pretend that's what "everyone" said, then you go on enjoying winning.

    P.S. At least one of the Sweden charges is still open, still within its statute of limitations, and could now be re-opened. Whoops!

  12. Re:Thomas Crown Affair would've saved his ass on Wikileaks Co-founder Julian Assange Arrested in London (theguardian.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Because that could variously lead to a charge of contempt of court, obstructing justice, aiding and abetting, etc.?

    And, to be honest, even if it worked, everyone involved would be in even bigger trouble than they are now.

    Fact is, nobody cares enough about him to get arrested. Not after the loyalty he showed the people who put up his bail money.

  13. Re:Advocacy For Freedom on Wikileaks Co-founder Julian Assange Arrested in London (theguardian.com) · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Shayler died whilst arrested under these laws"

    Eh? I think you might want to check that. He's still around.
      And Machon was dating Shayler at the time.

    The other you mentioned is a dubious telling of her tale. It's almost like you cherry-picked three people, two of whom acted together, the other of whom is mentally unstable but quite clearly still around and airing her views on Russian TV, and held them up as a beacon of hero worship.

    As an outsider, with no real interest or research, I'll happily write all three off as credible witnesses. The first two are 9/11 truthers, claiming all kinds of nonsense, despite the fact that neither have worked for government since the mid 90's. Shayler's a bit of a nutter, who represented himself in court (always a tell of a true idiot) and failed miserably. Hell, he follows David Icke, ffs.

    Just because you "worked for intelligence services" does not mean that you are credible... Hell I know someone who can say exactly that... they book flights for Middle East diplomats. That's their entire job. It's literally just an office job, with a security badge. And they're still subject to the Official Secrets Act just the same.

    Sorry, but you've failed at the first hurdle... associating yourself with people less credible than my local barber. There's a reason why, when a whack-job scientist makes stupendous claims, reputable scientists keep their distance. This is no different.

    I have no doubt that laws are cracking down on this - we're in a different world, technologically, the last 20-30 years. I'd be disappointed if there *wasn't* 2400 pages of technology laws formed in the last 18 years. I'd seriously question what the courts and ministers have been doing otherwise. But that these people are wandering around still talking tripe shows you one thing - the government really doesn't care and isn't at all afraid about you hearing what they have to say. The reason for that is clear... they are all just a bit screw-loose.

    I don't doubt there are violations. I don't doubt that there's stuff to be whistleblown. I don't doubt that there's a lot we don't know and wouldn't approve of it we did. I'm certain of all those. I guarantee you that there's something hidden which, if revealed, would cause absolute uproar among the populace, and even myself.

    But I'm equally certain that not one thing from Wikileaks, Assange, Manning or Snowden, or any of those you mentioned has done anything at all whatsoever to reveal something horrifyingly terrible enough to make people revolt. It was all stuff we either knew, suspected or inferred. All they did was show you that such public whistleblowers are all from the same mindset, and that what they sacrifice their freedom to whistleblow just isn't worth it in the end - nobody is up in arms about any of it.

    A credible whistleblower would strive to be as anonymous as possible, they would not make public appearances, they would not harp on about things they have no personal knowledge of, they would provide evidence which - on its own - does not need explanation and which generates shock and outrage just by its mere existence.

    You know what I want? ANYONE involved in the government side of the Guantanamo stuff to come forward and speak against the government. Even one person. The detainment, justice procedure, behaviour and continued presence there is unbelievably illegal. The general populace? Meh, they don't even care any more. Half of them don't even realise it still exists.

    There's plenty of stuff to get disgusted about. But I can't say that *anything* the people mentioned here ever revealed was worth all that uproar, years of detention, fleeing to Russia, etc. for them, let alone for them to do it so I could "hear" about these things.

  14. Re: "No one is above the law." on Wikileaks Co-founder Julian Assange Arrested in London (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    The only UK crime that has definitely been committed is jumping bail.

    This was caused by someone promising a UK court that they wouldn't run and would turn up when requested. That person then *DIDN'T* abide by that.

    You might say the Swedes or the US might have political motivations but literally the only UK crime is being punished.

    There is an extradition request. Which will go before a UK court. And be treated like an extradition request.

    Painting the UK as the bad guy is a really dumb idea. Hell, we sent the Swede's request forms back to them THREE TIMES because they were improper.

    And when one of your allies - in law as well as politically - says "Hey, we have an extradition request", it's not your part to question whether that partner, a member of certain legal agreements which prevent them doing certain things, is going to do those things and withhold your co-operation - at least without a TON of evidence that things are improper.

    We don't extradite to the US if people are facing a death sentence, we ask for it to be commuted to life imprisonment. Beyond that, we don't ask questions, and have no need to. If the US or Sweden choose to lie and break their agreements, that's on them. We can't try and convict them and withhold co-operation based on the *suspect's* hearsay that they might do something illegal with him. That's not how it works.

    Assange will face trial and - based on the prima facie evidence that he skipped bail - be convicted of skipping bail. Then the extradition request will be handled in a court, quite publicly I should think. Then if all the i's are dotted and t's crossed, and we have no cause to think the US will break their legal agreements, then he gets extradited. Then it's the US's problem. And no doubt we will sanction appropriately if they do something they shouldn't.

    But you can't lay the blame at the middlemen who *definitely* 100% certainly had a crime committed against their justice system by him.

    Hell, if you want to blame someone, blame Ecuador for supposedly protecting him all this time when we told them that he would never be recognised as such, harbouring a known criminal, and then ultimately giving him up (*they* granted permission for the police to enter, which has only ever been the obstacle to the UK doing so!).

    The context is: Swedes wanted him. Swedes didn't get him because UK said No. Swedes asked properly. UK started the process. Which included an arrest (which means "to stop", and is used to give time to ascertain the situation and whether charges are warranted). That arrest resulted in Assange being bailed. He broke the bail. Fled the UK law enforcement system. Hid inside Ecuador's embassy in the UK for the better part of a decade, putting out press release, thumbing his nose at authority, costing the UK an *incredible* amount of money. UK then get permission to enter embassy to arrest him, do so. They also get an extradition request, they schedule him in front of a UK court to defend himself against that request. He'll probably even be eligible for legal aid if he wants it.

    At what point has the UK done more than the minimum required under their agreements with the EU/US? At what point have they had the (legal or illegal) capability to do much more to see him behind bars and refused to take those paths?

    The guys a prat. He's going to jail for skipping bail, simple as that. While there, he's going to have a lot of expensive lawyers argue on his behalf about whether any extradition request is valid or not. Then he'll be extradited.

    Good-fecking-riddance.

    All he, Snowden and Manning have done is demonstrated that poor whistleblowing will see you in jail, nobody cares about what they whistleblowed about, and that if you try to pretend you're above the law, you'll ruin your life and end up before it anyway. Oh, and that none of them should have ever trusted any of the others with their information, and certainly not Assange.

  15. Re: Real TV news isn't reporting it on Wikileaks Co-founder Julian Assange Arrested in London (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Front page of the BBC all day.

  16. Often in maths, a mere change of notation, analogous equation in another field, or just looking at things in a slightly different way will open up whole new areas of maths.

    Fermat's Last Theorem took forever to prove and the proof relies on translating the problem to a completely unrelated area of maths, solving it there, and then translating the results back.

    And if you do things like use polar coordinates, etc. some areas of maths burst open with good sense and nice equations.

    Something as simple as a notation change can work wonders. But this is just for convenience of amateurs who don't understand what a derivative actually is and does. It's like saying "Don't use the word multiplication for vectors, because it's not the same as for scalars". We know. Anyone handling it knows. Anyone dumb enough to confuse the notations is going to find out very quickly that nothing works. Sure, it might help if you've literally never done those kinds of equations before, but likely then you'll not be making any ground-breaking mathematical discoveries any time soon.

    Things don't tend to survive hundreds of years for no reason, especially when they are one pen-stroke away from being changed, and have themselves gone through several notational iterations in their time.

    I got through a degree in maths without thinking "Well, this notation is stupid", including three years of advanced calculus.

    If you don't understand the notation, that's the very least of your worries as regards actually doing any calculus.

  17. Deaf people can't drive?

    As far as I know, there is no hearing requirement to driving in any country that I know of. My driving licence specifically says that I can only drive with vision correction. There isn't an equivalent category for hearing at all.

    Believe me, I'm the first person to say don't use a phone in any context while driving, or even have things on your lap / dangling / in the line of your vision / etc. I get ribbed for it all the time, but I stand by such things religiously.

    But if you need audio to drive, you're a bad driver already.

  18. Really? on Why Airlines Make Flights Longer On Purpose (bbc.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Surely that's just good schedule management.

    "When we say we get there at 8, we struggle and usually only arrive at 8:30 on average. Therefore, it makes sense to tell people that we arrive at 8:30."

    I can't see anything wrong with that.

    Sure, maybe not "the fastest achievable time" but they don't claim that. Doing so would be stupid as it would open them up to all kinds of lawsuits.

    I don't care about the technicalities. I want to know what time the plane (and therefore I) will get there, so that I can arrange to be picked up.

    If one airlines says they can get me there for 8, and another for 9, and I need to be there for 8, guess what? I'll use that one in preference. Similarly, if I have to get there as soon as humanly possible, I'll use the airline that has the earliest arrival time, and others will have different times - whether that's because of the trip they take, the risks they avoid en-route, or their operational efficiency, it doesn't really matter does it?

    Of all the accusations you could level at airlines "they gave us a more realistic time because they noticed that they couldn't always hit their promised time before" is hardly a bad one.

  19. Re:They're not entirely wrong. on Netflix Axes Apple AirPlay Support (cnet.com) · · Score: 5, Informative

    Presumably it has much more to do with being able to Airplay a perfectly viable compressed bitstream to an uncontrolled device that could be recording it or doing anything else with it (whereas Apple tended to respect the DRM etc.).

    Airplay->MP4 anyone? I'm sure it's possible.

  20. Re:Can we stop with the bullshit? on Why Aren't People Abandoning Windows For Linux? (slashgear.com) · · Score: 2

    Whatever the reason, relying on "it is less targeted" as your security is absolutely insane.

    The real reasons are:

    - People have Windows.
    - People know Windows.
    - Programs they buy/download work on Windows.
    - Programs they use in work also work on Windows.

    That's it.

    There's literally nothing stopping someone nowadays selling Windows apps that are literally just Linux VMs running inside a hypervisor that happens to be on Windows. True cross-platform capability.

    The reason I don't run Linux on my main machine? It already runs Windows, and I can put Linux in a VM. 50% of my servers in work are Windows, 50% are Linux. Because some things have to be Windows (e.g. Exchange), and some things can be Linux.

    But they all run on a Windows Hyper-V server (despite the underlying hardware supporting Red Hat) because people are familiar with Windows and I have to assume someone else will take my network over. Literally my entire working relationship with people in the same position as me has found one person who runs Linux as anything other than a toy to say they've done so - and most of them don't run it at all (except incidentally, e.g. Android phones, etc.).

    There are major in-roads (e.g. Chromebooks) but pretty much the underlying OS matters not one bit at all. As we go on, even the app layer doesn't matter as everything moves online.

    Fact is, at that point, people don't need to care what they are running. They could run them all, at the same time, on the same machine. Dual-booting was something we did before processors could support proper virtualisation. Nowadays even the cheapest laptop supports virtualisation extensions and could run on anything.

    Why doesn't it? Because people *literally don't care* about the OS they are using, could use, or what some application uses. They just want to click, install, work. Same way that I honestly couldn't give a shit whether my car engine was a classic piston or Wankel engine. I just want it to start, drive me somewhere, and get repaired by someone else.

    Anything else is literally trivia.

  21. It's not really a threat to privacy or security if you have an ounce of either, though, is it?

    You're encrypting your traffic, right?

    Then one of the primary facets of all modern encryption is that an adversary can read EVERY SINGLE PACKET you send and still be none the wiser as to what you were doing.

    If you're properly routing your traffic, encrypting your DNS, etc. etc. then it doesn't matter if Putin himself is delivering the packets.

    There may be net-neutrality issues, but there shouldn't be any security issues whatsoever. You should be able to publish your encrypted sessions on the ten o'clock news or in a newspaper... it literally makes no difference to whether or not your data was secure or not.

  22. Re:Sigh. on Cats Can Recognize Their Own Names, Study Suggests (gizmodo.com) · · Score: 2

    They respond to the name, because that name is used when feeding them. As per the article, it doesn't matter who says it, whether you feed them or not - they know what the sound for "Dinnertime" is, whoever says it. They are associating it with food.

    That they respond does not mean they think it means "Me, particularly" which a name does, but "Come Get It!". Now if one cat responded to their name to come get food but no other cat in the house cared, then you might have something testable. That's incredibly unlikely, however.

    Why would they only selectively respond to their name? Because they think it's a word that requires their attention? Or because they think it's a word related to an activity that they can tell isn't taking place, therefore they must have misheard/misunderstand/that word only works in certain places? The intonation is also entirely different, as you say, if you're saying "Come on, Tiddles, Dinner!" than "Did you want to come round for dinner tomorrow?". They don't understand the word, they know the sound that precedes dinner, which is however you - or someone else - normally calls them to eat.

    Cats are social animals, domestic cats are kitten-like in nature, they come in for pets with humans and each other in the same way. You're a big cat to them. Wild animals do the same, they just haven't accepted humans as they own kind because they didn't grow up with them. Put a lion cub in a human house, watch it acclimatise and "play" with humans like they were other lion cubs.

    Personally most cats don't like contact unless they've been handled from birth. They see humans as "something different but we'll accept you" rather than something they will happily snuggle against. Go approaching random cats that free-roam, were taken from shelters, were part-reared without human interaction or that live in a big enough space to not attach to a small subset of humans... they won't snuggle with you. Hell, even a domestic cat that's been abandoned or a kitten pushed out of the domestic litter will likely act wild rather than domesticated.

    One of the biggest problems with cats and people who love cats is that they assume all cats will snuggle, and many won't. I work in an environment with dozens of cats are quite accustomed to roaming the site. They are all house-trained, they are all "domesticated". But they see enough humans that they don't attach to any particular one at all, so getting them to snuggle is out of the question. You might be permitted a stroke or two if they like you and think you might have food and aren't a threat. Feed them and they'll follow you home. Just stroke them and swizzle their cheek and that's all you'll ever get.

    It's about the long-term effect of their interaction with humans, words and food. Same as your bear... you can't just lob a sausage at it and think it'll be your friend. It won't. But if you reared a bear-cub in a human house and said "Honey" every time you fed it, it would grow up to a) be accustomed to humans and bond with them, seeing them as "others of the same kind", b) respond to the word Honey, c) probably be way more placid than one battling the elements, predators and other bears.

    Cats are the same. They are wild animals that quickly revert to wild behaviour in the absence of human interaction. If reared as a baby-human, in effect, they become playful and stay kitten-like with humans (miaows are an entirely kitten behaviour in the wild, domestic cats are the only ones to retain them, because.... they are treated by humans as a request for food much like kittens miaow to request food).

    They have learned to associate sounds but they don't understand deep concepts about those words (e.g. the concept of a name that is addressed only to them, rather than the word that gets used when they get fed). They are acclimated to human presence but without a deep bond from early age (pretty much never seeing anything but other bonded domestic cats and humans) they don't really offer the behaviours you described t

  23. Re:Sigh. on Cats Can Recognize Their Own Names, Study Suggests (gizmodo.com) · · Score: 1

    "X and Y are distinct" and "X has an interpretation that food is imminent" are two entirely separate conclusions.

  24. Sigh. on Cats Can Recognize Their Own Names, Study Suggests (gizmodo.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not necessarily.

    They are recognising a sound that normally precedes things of interest to them... usually food.

    For all we know, they think "Tiddles" means "I'm opening up a tin of meat for you". It only has to correlate enough for them to think it's worth getting their attention diverted to see if there's food, not every time.

    Now, I did teach my cats words. They understand what those words mean and how they differ. They don't always know their own name, for example, and will ignore you calling them upstairs by it (food isn't served upstairs, so why would I wake up and run all the way up there?.

    I teach my cats the word "down"... which discourages them off furniture, shelves, stairs, places they shouldn't be. They tend to get that.

    They don't need an explicit word for food, they tend to go by the sound of the food bag/tin being opened, but using their name does reinforce that. When you want them to approach, you can try the name but what piques their interest is chirpy sounds or holding out your fingers... both food-related enticements. They won't approach if they know you haven't got food, unless they want a stroke but that's usually a side-effect of wanting to sit on you or be fed.

    Some of them learned that me patting my lap means they are welcome to jump up but they struggle even with that.

    Let's stop anthropomorphising them... they are little wild animals that have been given a privileged environment that they will defend if necessary, accept our presence in because we are much larger and more dangerous than them, have become accustomed to us generally being amenable to them being present, sometimes scent-mark us (especially to remember who fed them, usually), act like kittens in such an environment, and respond almost entirely only to food-based enticements.

    That's not a bad thing. It's called a pet.

    Though it is said that the greatest, most natural, and most clear signal of any species in terms of offering of peace is to give food. That's why you shouldn't refuse offers of dinner in foreign countries. Giving somebody food is the biggest signal you can offer in terms of acceptance, non-threatening, friendliness, sharing of vital resources, etc.

  25. "A separate section of the report showed how the researchersâ"exploiting a now-patched root-privileged access vulnerability in Autopilot ECU (or APE)â"were able to use a game pad to remotely control a car. That vulnerability was fixed in Tesla's 2018.24 firmware release."

    Fact:

    By hacking the web browser in your car, a random third-party can cause your car to steer in any direction the attacker likes using a toy joystick.

    No matter WHAT the theoretical example, that shouldn't even be possible.

    This is not about kids playing Roadrunner... this is about, say, someone wanting to assassinate a Tesla driver and doing so by making them browse a web page on their Tesla (which I'm sure could be as easy as "access our webpage to find the satnav postcode", and then more sophiscated attacks on the browser).

    You browse the wrong website. Then months later, for a laugh, the person in control of the *direction your car travels at 70mph* steers you off the road and kills you.

    What should raise alarm bells is that the two systems - however disparately coded - are WIRED TOGETHER. Sure, this headline from the same article is researchers feeding crafted data, but it's a proof of concept. The underlying security layer violation is the real issue.

    This is *exactly* what people have been designing against for decades, by making it literally impossible. Tesla just threw that all away and tried to pretend they're still secure.

    As an aside, my Ford Sync messed up the other day while I was driving. Turned out I had filesystem corruption on the microSD that it reads MP3s off. The whole entertainment system went funny, rebooted, froze, jammed, etc. constantly until I diagnosed and resolved the issue. However, all driving functions were 100% unaffected. The only things that were affeceted were music, satnav and aircon (which did shutdown, crash and go do-lally too).

    Now these guys have just proven that the steering, the guidance, the cameras, etc. are accessible on the same security level as the web browser in the car. In any similar example (which in my case was as simple as a dodgy SD card) with a Tesla... that could easily kill you.

    In a maliciously-targeted attack, it could also do so without almost no trace whatsoever.

    These guys didn't go bridging the CANBus to the web browser, they didn't go soldering on new connectors, they used what was there and exploited a vulnerability in the web browser to steer the damn car without any driver interaction.

    If that doesn't say "deathtrap" to you, I don't think you understand the situation and have been believing too much Musk-preaching and headlines.