... and best of all software updates in an age when most manufacturers can't keep the sat nav up to date.
Bingo. Toyota charges for for one (1) map update than the cost of two (2) brand new Garmin or Tom-Tom GPS units with included lifetime map updates. That has soured me on built-in car nav systems. Google Maps is better anyway, with its real-time routing around traffic jams. If I'm going somewhere likely to not have cell service, I can just download today's offline map.
I'm on a techie mailing list which includes someone who has a deeper knowledge of the EV1 issues than appears in a tendentious "documentary".
GM was betting on rapid improvement of batteries. By the time they'd have to replace the batteries in a couple of years, they'd have better/cheaper/more powerful batteries. By only leasing the EV1, not selling them, they guaranteed that the batteries would actually get replaced, and not have to rely on everyone paying attention to recall notices, because everyone does not.
The improvements, alas, didn't come in time.
There was a little issue with the batteries, especially as they aged, having a tendency to what he referred to euphemistically as "thermal excursions". Maybe not Samsung Note 7 level, but still, a hazard.
That meant legal liability, increasing as the batteries aged, and the risk of those "thermal excursions" rose. When California dropped the electric vehicle requirement, GM didn't need to take that risk any more.
Yeah, the fans of the EV1 (which were many, it was by most accounts a really nice car) didn't want to give them up, but "leased", not "owned". The legal liability issue was the killer. It could be shown that GM *knew* the batteries had potential issues as they aged, because they did. The owners of the cars could promise not to sue, they could sign a stack of liability releases and disclaimers and knowledge of the risks that weighed more than the cars, and it wouldn't have made the slightest difference in the legal liability to GM. Courts and juries have over and over and over again proved that no release of liability, no matter how strongly worded, or how much the person taking the risk wants it, has any force in the face of some poor pitiful victim of a tragic event wailing in court about the horrible, mean, nasty corporation who sold them the dangerous object, even though their signature is next to every paragraph spelling out each and every hazard, and saying that they swear on a stack of Bibles that they completely understand and accept the risk, and absolve the company of any liability.
I'm not anti electric car. I drive a Prius, and for my next car, I'm seriously considering a Tesla or Volt. But the EV1 issues was far from just the "Evil corporation destroys a non-polluting car because they make money polluting" crap from an exceptionally bad "Captain Planet" episode that's usually presented.
Hillary being the Democrat candidate was just party politics as usual. I think the hack was to get a completely non-viable candidate trumped (ha) up as the Republican candidate to pave the way for the coronation of Her Hillaryness. Note how NBC News sat on the "Grab the Cat" video all through the primaries, when it might have done some good, in order to ("Oh, *please* let it be Trump!") spring it as an October Surprise.
Also, note the utterly absurd way the "debates" were handled. The immoderators (deliberately?) steered the "debates" in such a way as to dumb them down into ridiculousness, which plays to Trump's strengths, such as they are.
I think the biggest factor in Trump's win is that the attitude of Hillary and most of the Democratic Party, which is basically "How dare those unwashed nobodies in flyover country fail to show proper gratitude that their betters are willing to take up the burden of running their lives for them?!?", doesn't really play well in those parts of the country they show such open and complete contempt for.
I usually check both Expeida type sites, and SouthWest... remembering that for just about any non-Southwest airline, I need to add $25 per checked bag each way to the price. Southwest is usually cheaper even before considering the checked baggage gouge from the other airlines.
Modified by I refuse to fly American Airlines at any price... though they're usually more expensive anyway. (Long story involving AA not getting me to even one connecting flight, either way, not able to find baggage containing my CPAP for three days; refusing to connect me to the baggage desk at the destination airport 60 miles from my parents' house, baggage only found when I managed to get ahold of someone at the *Delta* baggage desk, who walked over the AA baggage claim and pointed out my bags to the AA idiots.)
If Hollowood would get some... oh, I don't know... *NEW IDEAS*... yeah, silly thought there, what am I thinking?... maybe I'd be a bit more inclined to subject myself to their product?
Of the three movies they were touting in TFA, two were remakes.
There's very little of their output that I'd consent to waste what's left of my dwindling lifespan on if it were free.
("Hollowood" was a typo, but I decided to keep it. Pretty much says it all.)
Email is "From" the CEO, and says something like "Hey, Bob, this account somehow got missed, it's way overdue and the money has to go out TODAY! I'm in important meetings all day and am unable to talk on the phone, any questions, just reply to this email." Either the From address is to a look-alike domain, or sometimes just a gmail/hotmail/yahoo account, or something at one of the many world.com generic domains, or the From address is the real CEO's address and there's a Reply-To somewhere else.
It doesn't work often, but it apparently works often enough.
One thing LastPass will do for you that the copy/paste solutions won't is that LastPass will not autofill your wellsfargo.com credentials into a login page at wallsfergo.com. (Substitute less obvious domain-squatting combination.) For the even slightly security-aware, the "no domains match" is a speedbump between you and total pwnage.
If the universe is a simulation, there perhaps could be some way of hacking the code from the inside, like the exploits that affect things outside of a virtual machine.
Of course, once you do that, the folks running the simulation say "Oh, crap, not again!", fix the bug that allowed the exploit, and re-start the simulation from the last checkpoint, and we'll never know.
From the article, musing about how an alien visitor might classify them...
"Which of these would they consider a “planet” — or whatever the alien term for “planet” might be?"
Maybe a more useful classification would be to classify them by the characteristics of the body itself, irrespective of its orbit. Their word that we'd likely translate as "planet" might only apply to Venus, Earth, Mars, and Titan. (Rocky bodies with significant atmosphere.)
Being of an age where I got to experience some of these things as a kid, personally...
Mumps hurts. A lot. That's just the neck glands thing, and I only had it on one side. The testicular infection sounds truly horrifying, even without the sterility side effect.
Chicken pox was really annoying, and it means I'm at risk for shingles, because the virus doesn't go away. Ever.
Measles, I either didn't have it, or had a very mild case. My sister had it, and she was pretty sick.
Rubella, I don't recall it being particularly itchy, and I felt fine. My recollection is that it's a fairly mild disease in children. However, if a pregnant woman gets it, it often results in horrific birth defects.
I got the MMR vaccine when it became available, because it wasn't clear I'd actually had measles, and only had the mumps on one side.
There was a 2 and 3? Non sense. Why not sequels of Starship Troopers while you are at it!
If ever there was a movie needing re-imaging... Starship Troopers. I take that back, moving closer to the book (power suits) is not quite re-imagining is it?
There actually is a new Starship Troopers movie in the works, apparently. The makers are saying they're ignoring Ve'ereHeavin's abhomination, and going back to the book. http://www.hollywoodreporter.c...
I recall in a reading textbook some 55 years or so ago, a plot point in a story was some kids singing a song about someone whose idea of lighting was kerosene lanterns or candles, who checked into a boarding house, got ready for bed, "... and then he blew out the gas."
Oh poor Mr. Jones, oh poor Mr. Jones
We'll never see him more,
Until we meet again some day
On that far-away beautiful shore
Point being, any environment you're not familiar with can have unfamiliar hazards, that the people living in that environment know well to avoid.
And a "Nyah nyah nyah yo momma" response is so very very convincing. Not. As someone else pointed out, the "exorbitant rate you can whittle down if you're a megacorp with a whole building full of tax attorneys, but if you're a small to medium-large business, you're stuck with the whole bill" system is the big problem.
Someone a while back objected to the "spending money like a drunken sailor" thing, saying "When I was a drunken sailor, when I ran out of money, I stopped spending!
Alas, for a long time we've been stuck between the "Spend money like a drunken sailor" party and the "Spend money like a cocaine-crazed blonde billionaire heiress on Rodeo Drive with Daddy's American Express Centurion Card" party. I want the "Spend money like an ethnically insensitive stereotype of a Scotsman" party, but there doesn't seem to be one.
I've been using LastPass for years. I tried pwsafe (nice, but at the time, didn't support Mac well) and KeePass (which I didn't like for reasons that I don't quite recall now; ended up moving back to pwsafe) before I switched to LastPass.
The deciding factors were (1) LastPass Premium works on Android. (And, now, you don't need Premium; the free version also works on Android.) (2) Syncs password changes across all devices, and (3) Professional Paranoid Steve Gibson gave it his seal of approval.
Some of the others also have a way to sync across all devices now, but I haven't come across any compelling reason to switch. Though LetMeIn may be working on that one.
Not 100% of what goes on the dark web is criminal.
Take tor as an example:
Yes, some of them use.onion tor web services for the purpose of hiding ethically-dubious criminal activities.
(silk road used to be an example back then).
BUT, some use them for very practical reason like evading censorship (though it is *still* considered illegal in some specific jurisdiction, globally it's not and it's hardly unethical).
Or, my main use for it: investigating sketchy links in spam. There's a fraction of these malware-serving web pages that specifically check for IP addresses belonging to companies and organizations that fight this stuff. I've found that if I curl the page normally, I get something entirely innocuous, but if I curl it through tor... there's the malware.
Alas, most of them are now blocking tor exit nodes...
Seriously. I think if they assign negative truth value to anything appearing in a story on a web page which has an ad for "male enhancement products" that features someone holding a geoduck clam in a disturbingly suggestive manner... that would improve the accuracy by an order of magnitude.
I really don't want news on Facebook. Any. At all. "This... is wrong tool. Never use this." I get my news elsewhere, generally starting with news.google.com. (Yeah... When I wrote "What I want is actual news, devoid of any sport crap, "celebrity" gossip, and shrieking partisan political screeds right left and/or center", I meant what I want from a news source, not what I want from news on Facebook, which is "none".)
I really wish Facebook would tailor what it shows me to match my preferences.
What I want is actual news, devoid of any sport crap, "celebrity" gossip, and shrieking partisan political screeds right left and/or center.
I block every sports story of any kind, every "celebrity" gossip story of any kind, and any and all postings of any kind that even mention Trump.
My Facebook feed is still flooded with all this crap. Where's this "tailoring your feed to match your preferences" thing hiding? I see no sign of it whatsoever.
Well, the MSDS for "Sea sand, washed" is pretty scary, too. Prussian Blue is amazingly non-toxic for something with "cyanide" in the name, and is used as a chelating agent to treat heavy metal poisoning.
You can still run code in documents. It is one of the major vectors for the spread of Locky.
Granted, Microsoft sets macros disabled by default, but all that's necessary is for the document with the Locky downloader to display "Secure Document: You must click "enable content" in order to view it." Two problems: One, Microsoft's "Click this to let any random malefactor ream you with malicious macros" button is given so innocuous a name as "enable content", and two, way, way too many people fall for it. (See how often the Locky folks succeed at this tactic.)
Slashdot Mirror
... and best of all software updates in an age when most manufacturers can't keep the sat nav up to date.
Bingo. Toyota charges for for one (1) map update than the cost of two (2) brand new Garmin or Tom-Tom GPS units with included lifetime map updates. That has soured me on built-in car nav systems. Google Maps is better anyway, with its real-time routing around traffic jams. If I'm going somewhere likely to not have cell service, I can just download today's offline map.
I'm on a techie mailing list which includes someone who has a deeper knowledge of the EV1 issues than appears in a tendentious "documentary".
GM was betting on rapid improvement of batteries. By the time they'd have to replace the batteries in a couple of years, they'd have better/cheaper/more powerful batteries. By only leasing the EV1, not selling them, they guaranteed that the batteries would actually get replaced, and not have to rely on everyone paying attention to recall notices, because everyone does not.
The improvements, alas, didn't come in time.
There was a little issue with the batteries, especially as they aged, having a tendency to what he referred to euphemistically as "thermal excursions". Maybe not Samsung Note 7 level, but still, a hazard.
That meant legal liability, increasing as the batteries aged, and the risk of those "thermal excursions" rose. When California dropped the electric vehicle requirement, GM didn't need to take that risk any more.
Yeah, the fans of the EV1 (which were many, it was by most accounts a really nice car) didn't want to give them up, but "leased", not "owned". The legal liability issue was the killer. It could be shown that GM *knew* the batteries had potential issues as they aged, because they did. The owners of the cars could promise not to sue, they could sign a stack of liability releases and disclaimers and knowledge of the risks that weighed more than the cars, and it wouldn't have made the slightest difference in the legal liability to GM. Courts and juries have over and over and over again proved that no release of liability, no matter how strongly worded, or how much the person taking the risk wants it, has any force in the face of some poor pitiful victim of a tragic event wailing in court about the horrible, mean, nasty corporation who sold them the dangerous object, even though their signature is next to every paragraph spelling out each and every hazard, and saying that they swear on a stack of Bibles that they completely understand and accept the risk, and absolve the company of any liability.
I'm not anti electric car. I drive a Prius, and for my next car, I'm seriously considering a Tesla or Volt. But the EV1 issues was far from just the "Evil corporation destroys a non-polluting car because they make money polluting" crap from an exceptionally bad "Captain Planet" episode that's usually presented.
Hillary being the Democrat candidate was just party politics as usual. I think the hack was to get a completely non-viable candidate trumped (ha) up as the Republican candidate to pave the way for the coronation of Her Hillaryness. Note how NBC News sat on the "Grab the Cat" video all through the primaries, when it might have done some good, in order to ("Oh, *please* let it be Trump!") spring it as an October Surprise.
Also, note the utterly absurd way the "debates" were handled. The immoderators (deliberately?) steered the "debates" in such a way as to dumb them down into ridiculousness, which plays to Trump's strengths, such as they are.
I think the biggest factor in Trump's win is that the attitude of Hillary and most of the Democratic Party, which is basically "How dare those unwashed nobodies in flyover country fail to show proper gratitude that their betters are willing to take up the burden of running their lives for them?!?", doesn't really play well in those parts of the country they show such open and complete contempt for.
I usually check both Expeida type sites, and SouthWest... remembering that for just about any non-Southwest airline, I need to add $25 per checked bag each way to the price. Southwest is usually cheaper even before considering the checked baggage gouge from the other airlines.
Modified by I refuse to fly American Airlines at any price... though they're usually more expensive anyway. (Long story involving AA not getting me to even one connecting flight, either way, not able to find baggage containing my CPAP for three days; refusing to connect me to the baggage desk at the destination airport 60 miles from my parents' house, baggage only found when I managed to get ahold of someone at the *Delta* baggage desk, who walked over the AA baggage claim and pointed out my bags to the AA idiots.)
(Yeah... I always carry on my CPAP since.)
If Hollowood would get some ... oh, I don't know... *NEW IDEAS*... yeah, silly thought there, what am I thinking? ... maybe I'd be a bit more inclined to subject myself to their product?
Of the three movies they were touting in TFA, two were remakes.
There's very little of their output that I'd consent to waste what's left of my dwindling lifespan on if it were free.
("Hollowood" was a typo, but I decided to keep it. Pretty much says it all.)
Email is "From" the CEO, and says something like "Hey, Bob, this account somehow got missed, it's way overdue and the money has to go out TODAY! I'm in important meetings all day and am unable to talk on the phone, any questions, just reply to this email." Either the From address is to a look-alike domain, or sometimes just a gmail/hotmail/yahoo account, or something at one of the many world.com generic domains, or the From address is the real CEO's address and there's a Reply-To somewhere else.
It doesn't work often, but it apparently works often enough.
One thing LastPass will do for you that the copy/paste solutions won't is that LastPass will not autofill your wellsfargo.com credentials into a login page at wallsfergo.com. (Substitute less obvious domain-squatting combination.) For the even slightly security-aware, the "no domains match" is a speedbump between you and total pwnage.
If the universe is a simulation, there perhaps could be some way of hacking the code from the inside, like the exploits that affect things outside of a virtual machine.
Of course, once you do that, the folks running the simulation say "Oh, crap, not again!", fix the bug that allowed the exploit, and re-start the simulation from the last checkpoint, and we'll never know.
From the article, musing about how an alien visitor might classify them...
"Which of these would they consider a “planet” — or whatever the alien term for “planet” might be?"
Maybe a more useful classification would be to classify them by the characteristics of the body itself, irrespective of its orbit. Their word that we'd likely translate as "planet" might only apply to Venus, Earth, Mars, and Titan. (Rocky bodies with significant atmosphere.)
Being of an age where I got to experience some of these things as a kid, personally...
Mumps hurts. A lot. That's just the neck glands thing, and I only had it on one side. The testicular infection sounds truly horrifying, even without the sterility side effect.
Chicken pox was really annoying, and it means I'm at risk for shingles, because the virus doesn't go away. Ever.
Measles, I either didn't have it, or had a very mild case. My sister had it, and she was pretty sick.
Rubella, I don't recall it being particularly itchy, and I felt fine. My recollection is that it's a fairly mild disease in children. However, if a pregnant woman gets it, it often results in horrific birth defects. I got the MMR vaccine when it became available, because it wasn't clear I'd actually had measles, and only had the mumps on one side.
There was a 2 and 3? Non sense. Why not sequels of Starship Troopers while you are at it!
If ever there was a movie needing re-imaging ... Starship Troopers. I take that back, moving closer to the book (power suits) is not quite re-imagining is it?
There actually is a new Starship Troopers movie in the works, apparently. The makers are saying they're ignoring Ve'ereHeavin's abhomination, and going back to the book.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.c...
I recall in a reading textbook some 55 years or so ago, a plot point in a story was some kids singing a song about someone whose idea of lighting was kerosene lanterns or candles, who checked into a boarding house, got ready for bed, "... and then he blew out the gas."
Oh poor Mr. Jones, oh poor Mr. Jones
We'll never see him more,
Until we meet again some day
On that far-away beautiful shore
Point being, any environment you're not familiar with can have unfamiliar hazards, that the people living in that environment know well to avoid.
And a "Nyah nyah nyah yo momma" response is so very very convincing. Not. As someone else pointed out, the "exorbitant rate you can whittle down if you're a megacorp with a whole building full of tax attorneys, but if you're a small to medium-large business, you're stuck with the whole bill" system is the big problem.
Someone a while back objected to the "spending money like a drunken sailor" thing, saying "When I was a drunken sailor, when I ran out of money, I stopped spending!
Alas, for a long time we've been stuck between the "Spend money like a drunken sailor" party and the "Spend money like a cocaine-crazed blonde billionaire heiress on Rodeo Drive with Daddy's American Express Centurion Card" party. I want the "Spend money like an ethnically insensitive stereotype of a Scotsman" party, but there doesn't seem to be one.
A higher corporate tax rate than Cuba, for Pete's sake. And the usual suspects continue to wail that it isn't nearly high enough.
I've been using LastPass for years. I tried pwsafe (nice, but at the time, didn't support Mac well) and KeePass (which I didn't like for reasons that I don't quite recall now; ended up moving back to pwsafe) before I switched to LastPass.
The deciding factors were (1) LastPass Premium works on Android. (And, now, you don't need Premium; the free version also works on Android.) (2) Syncs password changes across all devices, and (3) Professional Paranoid Steve Gibson gave it his seal of approval.
Some of the others also have a way to sync across all devices now, but I haven't come across any compelling reason to switch. Though LetMeIn may be working on that one.
Not 100% of what goes on the dark web is criminal.
Take tor as an example:
Yes, some of them use .onion tor web services for the purpose of hiding ethically-dubious criminal activities.
(silk road used to be an example back then).
BUT, some use them for very practical reason like evading censorship (though it is *still* considered illegal in some specific jurisdiction, globally it's not and it's hardly unethical).
Or, my main use for it: investigating sketchy links in spam. There's a fraction of these malware-serving web pages that specifically check for IP addresses belonging to companies and organizations that fight this stuff. I've found that if I curl the page normally, I get something entirely innocuous, but if I curl it through tor ... there's the malware.
Alas, most of them are now blocking tor exit nodes...
Warning: Don't think about this in the context of "enhancement products." What Has Been Seen Can Not Be Unseen.
Seriously. I think if they assign negative truth value to anything appearing in a story on a web page which has an ad for "male enhancement products" that features someone holding a geoduck clam in a disturbingly suggestive manner... that would improve the accuracy by an order of magnitude.
No, no no! You've got the homeopathic "theory" exactly reversed. Hitting Earth with homeopathic asteroids would make it immune from real asteroids.
I'm seeing a lot of W2 spearphishing.
Note the return domain CORNPANY.com not COMPANY.com.
I really don't want news on Facebook. Any. At all. "This ... is wrong tool. Never use this." I get my news elsewhere, generally starting with news.google.com. (Yeah... When I wrote "What I want is actual news, devoid of any sport crap, "celebrity" gossip, and shrieking partisan political screeds right left and/or center", I meant what I want from a news source, not what I want from news on Facebook, which is "none".)
I really wish Facebook would tailor what it shows me to match my preferences.
What I want is actual news, devoid of any sport crap, "celebrity" gossip, and shrieking partisan political screeds right left and/or center.
I block every sports story of any kind, every "celebrity" gossip story of any kind, and any and all postings of any kind that even mention Trump.
My Facebook feed is still flooded with all this crap. Where's this "tailoring your feed to match your preferences" thing hiding? I see no sign of it whatsoever.
Well, the MSDS for "Sea sand, washed" is pretty scary, too. Prussian Blue is amazingly non-toxic for something with "cyanide" in the name, and is used as a chelating agent to treat heavy metal poisoning.
You can still run code in documents. It is one of the major vectors for the spread of Locky.
Granted, Microsoft sets macros disabled by default, but all that's necessary is for the document with the Locky downloader to display "Secure Document: You must click "enable content" in order to view it." Two problems: One, Microsoft's "Click this to let any random malefactor ream you with malicious macros" button is given so innocuous a name as "enable content", and two, way, way too many people fall for it. (See how often the Locky folks succeed at this tactic.)