IMHO an electric car that would be capable of a single-charge one-way trip from Silicon Valley to the Reno entertainment facilities and/or Tahoe ski resorts WOULD be a practical single vehicle,...
With another 15% range you'd also cover LA-Los Vegas, Detroit-Chicago, and a host of other common long-distance trips.
IMHO an electric car that would be capable of a single-charge one-way trip from Silicon Valley to the Reno entertainment facilities and/or Tahoe ski resorts WOULD be a practical single vehicle, at least for many Silicon Valley early-adopters who use those sites as their primary take-a-break vacation sites.
It would handle both commuting on pure electricity (with recharge either at home or at work) and the common weekender vacations (with an overnight charge at the destination). It would also go five hours in semi-mountainous terrain and more on flatter land, making even cross-country trips practical with some advance planning (i.e. make reservations for lunch and dinner at restaurants or "truck stops" with a recharge facility)
(See parent posting for more discussion. This post is partly because I forgot to change the Subject: on that one to make it stand out.)
Battery swap stations. Then this all becomes reasonable, and fill actually needs.
New battery technologies, light and robust enough for automotive use, allow recharge of about 80% of capacity in a matter of minutes (presuming you have a charger that powerful).
They're also extremely efficient. (They HAVE to be or the charging rate would melt them into slag.) So they make effective regenerative braking, with most of the energy stored in the battery, practical.
I don't know if the new Tesla plant will be making this. But I expect it will be deployed as an automotive supply within a couple years.
This, along with the logistical problems of "battery swap" solutions (especially in a many-player competitive market), will no doubt kill such schemes before they leave the drawing board.
The LAST thing I want to do with my precious vacation time is spend a bunch of it arranging to rent and drop off a vehicle, and much of the rest of it driving a strange vehicle with unfamiliar handling characteristics and unknown maintenance status - risking breakdowns in remote places during holidays, with the repair problems exacerbated by the need to coordinate with the rental company.
The problem is that it is not really 90% of vehicles that the electric car could replace but a single vehicle 90% of the time (which is still 90% of vehicles on the road at any one time). ~10% of the time we used our car for going on holiday or taking long road trips for other reasons. This, along with the incredibly high price, is what makes an electric car impractical for me.
Same here.
I have a vacation/retirement home about 250 miles from home (and over a low and a high mountain range - start about 10 feet above sea level, cross a pass about 8,500 feet (worst of three roughly equivalent routes), end at 5,000 feet. And the last 0.7 miles may be foot-deep mud part of the year. When an affordable electric vehicle comes along that can do this one-way (with a half-ton of cargo) then come to a full charge overnight, it would be an acceptable replacement for my current commuter vehicle - even though my commute is MUCH shorter than this trip.
But think of the cargo as four people and their luggage, and delete the foot of mud, and this is almost EXACTLY the cycle involved in a denizen of Silicon Valley making a weekend trip to Reno for entertainment or Tahoe for skiing. Make a "commute" car that can do this trip as well (or even with only two passengers and correspondingly less luggage) and a lot of Silicon Valley people could get by with ONE car. Short of that, it's a pure commute vehicle, so the worker needs two (or, like me, commutes in a gas hog).
Such a vehicle could also do cross-country trips by towing a dinky trailer with a small generator and fuel tank (temporarily converting it into a plug-in hybrid, without the weight penalty during the bulk of its use as a commuter vehicle). A cruising car, even at freeway speeds and with rotten aerodynamics, requires well under twenty horsepower, while the battery pack could handle the mountains (and recharge on the way back down). But hooking that up, though practical for two-week vacations, wouldn't cut it for weekend getaways.
(Especially those of us who are considering moving mission-critical systems from Linux to a BSD because, for instance, systemd makes security auditing massively more difficult and expensive for a small startup.)
We are nerds, and this matters to us.
So if you personally are not interested, please just shut up and move on to something that DOES interest you, rather than polluting OUR discussions with "I'm not interested in this!" whining.
But they use the hardware bug Rawhammer to flip bites without CoW being triggered.
ROWhammer - "hammering on" the adjacent rows of the memory in the chip - by reading them repeatedly - which causes charge leakage and occasional bit flips in the adjacent row.
Because the attacking process is only reading the beside-the-target rows, the OS doesn't think the memory is being changed and thus doesn't decombine the two processes' instance of the page.
I'm surprised that the system is doing page recombine across multiple VMs. While it makes sense from a total resource standpoint (why should each VM have its own instance of a page of mostly-unchanging RAM?) it also makes performance vary more due to activity in other VMs - as well as opening the rowhammer vulnerability to cross-VM exploit.
I wouldn't worry too much about malicious apps, you obviously dont need to install any.... The built in software on my BlackBerry Classic does everything I need already: read docs, email, photos, etc.
ROFL!
We're talking about going off the grid - and out of the sight of state actor surveillance. That means aftermarket apps aren't (so much) the issue. Much of the concern is spyware built into the device and the network, along with network monitoring and intervention devices (such as stingray).
Blackberry has a track record of giving governments anything they ask for about their customers and their communications and data.
If we wanted to go cross-country without being tracked we'd have to shut 'em down. If we were serious about it we'd also use the old car that predates the serial-number-broadcasting, federally-mandated, tire pressure monitoring devices in the wheels, and avoid routes with licence-plate reading cameras.
Also: Put the automatic toll collection trasponder in a metal box and avoid toll roads, lanes, and bridges (which use database-connected licence-plate-readers as a backup for toll transponders that have failed.)
My wife and I have been using only 2G "feature phones" since we got cell service just before the turn of the millenium. (A cellphone is for use as a PHONE, darn it!.) And some "toy" bling from years ago that blinks a light when it hears them transmit. (Was interesting for looking at the schedule of their checkins with the cells, and confirming that they hadn't been activated as a room bug, which required much more air time.)
Still no guarantee. But there's less on them to be hacked, and you can always pull the battery if you don't want them to keep the net informed of your whereabouts or possibly act as a bug.
If we wanted to go cross-country without being tracked we'd have to shut 'em down. If we were serious about it we'd also use the old car that predates the serial-number-broadcasting, federally-mandated, tire pressure monitoring devices in the wheels, and avoid routes with licence-plate reading cameras.
We wouldn't do this lightly: The cellphones, in cooperation with the "Sync" entertainment center, also do the equivalent of OnStar, so we wouldn't have automatic 911 calls in a crash that rendered us unconscious. (But at least we can CHOSE to go somewhat dark - unlike those who have a real OnStar device, which has its own built in cellphone.)
But AT&T is shutting down their 2G service at the end of the year. So we'll have to buy and switch to something more recent (and no doubt more infiltrated by NSA.)
I'm considering going to an android phone running Replicant, to minimize (if not eliminate) the spyware opportunities. Not so much to keep NSA out. (I figure if they really want in they'll manage it, but they're reasonably good at not publishing what they find outside the spook community.) But more to impede other actors, such as identity thieves, industrial spies, private investigators,....
If you try to avoid being tracked, that makes them suspicious, and they'll track you even more.
Reminds me of the early days of networking and mailing lists.
My wife and I ran a mailing list on a controversial subject, from a server in our home. This was back when civilian encryption was very new and deployment uncommon. We made a point (and made it clear to our subscribers) that NO encryption was used. Reasoning was this:
- If the police decided to check the mailing list (or other communications with us) for something of interest, and it was unencrypted, they could get what they wanted with a passive tap. They'd prefer that, because if they DID find something to go after, they wouldn't tip off the target, while if they didn',t there'd be no sign they had even snooped.
- If the police decided to check and anything was encrypted, the easy way to get it would be to raid the place and seize everything that might be evidential: computers, printers, backup media, answering machine, printed paper - and smash up everything else while they were at it. They'd have found nothing - but caused lots of loss for us. And of course they'd have trashed our reputation - deliberately - both to get a warrant in the first place and to head off claims of police misconduct.
So we "ran bare", made the rule that nothing illegal, nor confessions of doing anything illegal, could be on the mailing list, and ENFORCED that rule: To the point of ejecting a number of people, and one actually shutting down the list for a week (when a participant made it clear he was about to violate the terms) and only bringing it back, reluctantly, under a new name and new terms after being petitioned by many more reasonable users.
(Eventually a law change made it, in our opinion, too much risk and work to continue, and we shut it down permanently, after advance warning and migrating our users to another list, started by some of our users more dedicated to the underlying subject. Then I was free to use an encrypted tunnel when a job, shortly after, required it.)
The keys are supposed to be on a locked down system and signing is supposed to happen in one controlled place.
And if you do it that way you have created a single point of failure for the company - or at least all its deployed products. Kill that system, they're hosed. Ditto if (when) it dies.
So either they don't do it this "recommended" way or there is some kind of backup - which then also isn't this "recommended" way and becomes a potential security leak.
Libertarianism isn't anarchy, but they have this delusion that if there were no government, everybody would just get along and be happy and nobody would ever form a powerful gang and begin stealing from others... warlords don't exist to them... and they have no idea how dictatorships come about.
You REALLY are unaware of Libertarian ideas if you believe that.
Libertarians are under the delusion that an armed population, with a substantial fraction of them willing to shoot a bully or (in the case of a gang attack) take as many as possible down before one of them gets them, tends to make bullies and gangsters back down, or at least go find somebody who isn't alert enough to get his gun out in time.
Funny thing is, criminological research seems to agree with them - in spades.
You can stop a sword with a bigger sword (wielded by a sufficiently skilled swordsman), a club with a bigger club ditto, or a group of thugs with a bigger group of thugs. But (as McClary said): "You can't stop a bullet with a bigger bullet." That's why they called a gun "the great equalizer". And it's why governments working on becoming tyrannies are always trying to disarm their citizens.
Libertarians would like to reduce government. But they'd prefer to do so by legal means if possible. Getting from what we have now to minarchy OR anarchy would be easier if the US government were peacefully reduced to what its Constitution claims it should be.
The claim being addressed was that "a single supertanker pumps more air pollution into the atmosphere in a single day than all the cars in the world". That statement is quantifiably false.
The "air pollution" under discussion was CO, NOx, and HC. The evidence presented as falsifying it was gross C.
The original claim MAY be false. But the counterclaim does not address it.
If you have evidence that "all the cars in the world" don't produce more CO, NOx, and HC than one supertanker, please present it. Or ask the original claimant for his evidence that they don't. But don't declare victory in an argument on the basis of evidence that does not address the argument you claim is refuted by it.
The cheating VW Diesels do very well... with respect to carbon footprint as they get really good fuel mileage.
In fact, for a given fuel, fuel mileage IS a direct measure of carbon emission. Essentially all the carbon from the fuel ends up in the exhaust gasses. So the better the mileage, the less the carbon emission.
[Vehicle] emissions account for less than 1% of all air pollution sources.
Not true. Passenger cars and light trucks account for about 10% of the global carbon footprint.
Apples and oranges.
The emissions under consideration in automotive emission testing and regulation are CO, NOx, and unburned hydrocarbons ("HC"), not gross carbon output.
The full-blown factory/type-certification testing can MEASURE gross carbon output as a side effect, and uses carbon balance to measure mileage for the mandated sticker labelling. But gross carbon emission has nothing to do with the discussion of the amount of regulated "pollutants" that may be emitted from automotive engine control programs that cheat on the certification testing.
And before someone says "eventually you won't have any choice" - Of course we will. We might pay a bit a bit extra for the "marine" or "remote cabin" version,...
In some parts of California you no longer have a choice to not have a computer in your water heater, and will have to put in a computerized one when your current one fails. (Probably within a decade if you don't replace the sacrificial anode(s) every six years or less.)
- You can only put in an extremely energy-efficient model.
- These models achieve energy efficiency by using a spark, rather than a pilot light, igniter, and by closing an exhaust vent valve to block convection when the burner is off. They also have sensors to prevent ignition in the presence of flammable fumes (so you don't blow up your garage if you have gasoline fumes or a gas leak).
- Controlling and interlocking these features is complex enough, and automation chips are cheap enough, that it's cheaper to use a computer than special-purpose logic. So ALL the available ultra-efficiency models have computers.
- (Fortunately, as of this spring, the radio network interface on the brand I wanted (Rheem) was still an extra-cost optional board, rather than being built into the system-on-a-chip.)
Actually on my furnace you cannot connect a conventional thermostat. The thermostat talks to the furnace over RS-485 with a proprietary protocol. Now lucky for me it's not a 'smart' internet connected device. But depending on the installation the option of putting in a dumb thermostat may not exist.
I ran into something like that when I had to replace a water heater - in Silicon Valley.
In some areas of California, environmental regulations require you to install an extremely energy-efficient water heater. Part of the way this efficiency is obtained, with gas water heaters, is by not using a pilot light, which burns substantial gas all the time. (The pilot-light in my Nevada place's water heater puts out enough heat that, even with the heater set to "vacation" in the dead of winter, the tank's water is only about 10 degrees F below the normal setpoint when I arrive after weeks away.)
Instead, they have a furnace-style spark igniter - and a computerized thermostat to control it.
One downside is that, in a power failure, the tank won't heat. (After a couple showers I need to start the emergency genny and make sure the water heater is on the backed-up circuit.)
But another downside is that the heater is able to hook up to your home network via WiFi - for convenient monitoring and remote control.
(Fortunately, as of this spring, the WiFi hookup is an add-on board, which I presume contains the radio. So I just didn't buy the board. But with radio-capable systems-on-a-chip becoming so cheap, due to the IoT, I expect that the next models will have the radio built-in and always-on. That will let the bad guys track whether, and when, the building is occupied by looking at the water heating load, or just screw around with the settings.)
Cash is seized all the time and never sold at auction.
Bitcoin is not money. Bitcoin is a commodity.
It happens that it is intended to act as much like a commodity based currency as possible under the current laws and the available technology. But that doesn't make it money, under either the general laws about money or the specific laws about how to dispose of a seized non-money asset.
As you said these are convenience things, and short of someone looking to specificly target that home these bluetooth locks probably shouldn't be on the front-door in the first place. They should be on the carport door, where you want a quick entry/exit, and still have the garage door as a second barrier.
Crooks LOVE unlocked garages or other crummy garage security. It gives them plenty of time unobserved to deal with the garage/house door.
Open the door and get in (either the car is unlocked, or they break in triggering the alarm). Plug the laptop into the OBD port. Command the alarm to turn off (if it was triggered).
Can you get to the onboard bus by popping off a mirror and plugging into its remote-tilt wiring?
How about cracking in via bugs in the radio stack for the tire pressure sensors?
Squad cars should have a way to enable a "Follow Me" feature so that an Auto-Drive car can be escorted to the correct location (and the needed persons could be at the CURB).
How about this for an upgrade:
When a user of autodrive asks it to "take me to an emergency room" the system does this:
- Locates the nearest accessible emergency room.
- Starts going there.
- Starts flashing the lights in an appropriate pattern.
- Phones ahead to tell the emergency room personnel and/or 911 dispatch that it is coming and give them arrival time and route info.
- Establishes a handsfree voice link to the E-room people (perhpas via 911 dispatch if appropriate for the particular location) to aid in medical treatment preparation.
- The medical and/or 911 dispatch personnel, or the car (again as appropriate) notify the police.
- The police can provide an escort and the car allows them to take over management of the routing or if they are equipped for it. Going into "follow me" mode on a particular squad car can be one of the police-selected options.
He should have pulled onto the side of the road with his hazards on and waited for paramedics. He risked dying at the wheel with no help available for what would have been very manageable emergencies for first responders.
Don't expect someone with a life-threatening medical emergency in progress to think clearly.
They're a real company, with real patents, and sued someone in their industry who is infringing. Why is that a troll? How is that not just proper use of the patent system?
One of the signs of impending death of a tech company is a spate of patent suits. This happens after they are no longer competitive and are trying to milk every source of revenue possible, in order to keep from going under. Out come all the patents - including the "obvious" ones - which they'd never bothered to attempt to enforce before (and thus never had them knocked down). Suits are filed against any company doing anything in the related field, even if it's not really covered by one of their patents, and it's up to those they sue to do the research to show the suit is bogus.
A stage before that is when management sacrifices the company's future to its current bottom line, by cutting R&D expenses - and thus ending inventions and development of new products. This is typically done in order to line their own pockets by making the stock price jump and their options worth a bundle. Then they cash out and the house of cards collapses on their successors' watch. If their successors can't turn it around you get the scenario above.
Before that they were competitive because they were still, or had recently, built new stuff that was ahead of the competition. This is where patent suits are appropriate - to keep people from just cloning their work without incurring the expense. But it's also where they're rare, because the company does better (or just did better) by running ahead of the pack, rather than by spending effort tripping the competitors.
The Gigafactory is an aassembly plant, Musk will keep buying the cells from Panasonic
...which will be produced - wait for it! - inside the Gigafactory. [wikipedia.org]:-p
Part of the reason for locating in Nevada was the availability of lithium ore.
IMHO it was also because, with the plant in Nevada, the metals can be mined and processed into finished batteries entirely in a state with legal structures built around its history of mining - in primarily desert areas - as its cash-cow.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO an electric car that would be capable of a single-charge one-way trip from Silicon Valley to the Reno entertainment facilities and/or Tahoe ski resorts WOULD be a practical single vehicle, ...
With another 15% range you'd also cover LA-Los Vegas, Detroit-Chicago, and a host of other common long-distance trips.
IMHO an electric car that would be capable of a single-charge one-way trip from Silicon Valley to the Reno entertainment facilities and/or Tahoe ski resorts WOULD be a practical single vehicle, at least for many Silicon Valley early-adopters who use those sites as their primary take-a-break vacation sites.
It would handle both commuting on pure electricity (with recharge either at home or at work) and the common weekender vacations (with an overnight charge at the destination). It would also go five hours in semi-mountainous terrain and more on flatter land, making even cross-country trips practical with some advance planning (i.e. make reservations for lunch and dinner at restaurants or "truck stops" with a recharge facility)
(See parent posting for more discussion. This post is partly because I forgot to change the Subject: on that one to make it stand out.)
Battery swap stations. Then this all becomes reasonable, and fill actually needs.
New battery technologies, light and robust enough for automotive use, allow recharge of about 80% of capacity in a matter of minutes (presuming you have a charger that powerful).
They're also extremely efficient. (They HAVE to be or the charging rate would melt them into slag.) So they make effective regenerative braking, with most of the energy stored in the battery, practical.
I don't know if the new Tesla plant will be making this. But I expect it will be deployed as an automotive supply within a couple years.
This, along with the logistical problems of "battery swap" solutions (especially in a many-player competitive market), will no doubt kill such schemes before they leave the drawing board.
So rent one when you go on vacation. Duh!
The LAST thing I want to do with my precious vacation time is spend a bunch of it arranging to rent and drop off a vehicle, and much of the rest of it driving a strange vehicle with unfamiliar handling characteristics and unknown maintenance status - risking breakdowns in remote places during holidays, with the repair problems exacerbated by the need to coordinate with the rental company.
The problem is that it is not really 90% of vehicles that the electric car could replace but a single vehicle 90% of the time (which is still 90% of vehicles on the road at any one time). ~10% of the time we used our car for going on holiday or taking long road trips for other reasons. This, along with the incredibly high price, is what makes an electric car impractical for me.
Same here.
I have a vacation/retirement home about 250 miles from home (and over a low and a high mountain range - start about 10 feet above sea level, cross a pass about 8,500 feet (worst of three roughly equivalent routes), end at 5,000 feet. And the last 0.7 miles may be foot-deep mud part of the year. When an affordable electric vehicle comes along that can do this one-way (with a half-ton of cargo) then come to a full charge overnight, it would be an acceptable replacement for my current commuter vehicle - even though my commute is MUCH shorter than this trip.
But think of the cargo as four people and their luggage, and delete the foot of mud, and this is almost EXACTLY the cycle involved in a denizen of Silicon Valley making a weekend trip to Reno for entertainment or Tahoe for skiing. Make a "commute" car that can do this trip as well (or even with only two passengers and correspondingly less luggage) and a lot of Silicon Valley people could get by with ONE car. Short of that, it's a pure commute vehicle, so the worker needs two (or, like me, commutes in a gas hog).
Such a vehicle could also do cross-country trips by towing a dinky trailer with a small generator and fuel tank (temporarily converting it into a plug-in hybrid, without the weight penalty during the bulk of its use as a commuter vehicle). A cruising car, even at freeway speeds and with rotten aerodynamics, requires well under twenty horsepower, while the battery pack could handle the mountains (and recharge on the way back down). But hooking that up, though practical for two-week vacations, wouldn't cut it for weekend getaways.
I don't give a f*** about FreeBSD.
Some of us do give an f*** about the BSDs.
(Especially those of us who are considering moving mission-critical systems from Linux to a BSD because, for instance, systemd makes security auditing massively more difficult and expensive for a small startup.)
We are nerds, and this matters to us.
So if you personally are not interested, please just shut up and move on to something that DOES interest you, rather than polluting OUR discussions with "I'm not interested in this!" whining.
Thank you.
But they use the hardware bug Rawhammer to flip bites without CoW being triggered.
ROWhammer - "hammering on" the adjacent rows of the memory in the chip - by reading them repeatedly - which causes charge leakage and occasional bit flips in the adjacent row.
Because the attacking process is only reading the beside-the-target rows, the OS doesn't think the memory is being changed and thus doesn't decombine the two processes' instance of the page.
I'm surprised that the system is doing page recombine across multiple VMs. While it makes sense from a total resource standpoint (why should each VM have its own instance of a page of mostly-unchanging RAM?) it also makes performance vary more due to activity in other VMs - as well as opening the rowhammer vulnerability to cross-VM exploit.
I wouldn't worry too much about malicious apps, you obviously dont need to install any. ... The built in software on my BlackBerry Classic does everything I need already: read docs, email, photos, etc.
ROFL!
We're talking about going off the grid - and out of the sight of state actor surveillance. That means aftermarket apps aren't (so much) the issue. Much of the concern is spyware built into the device and the network, along with network monitoring and intervention devices (such as stingray).
Blackberry has a track record of giving governments anything they ask for about their customers and their communications and data.
If we wanted to go cross-country without being tracked we'd have to shut 'em down. If we were serious about it we'd also use the old car that predates the serial-number-broadcasting, federally-mandated, tire pressure monitoring devices in the wheels, and avoid routes with licence-plate reading cameras.
Also: Put the automatic toll collection trasponder in a metal box and avoid toll roads, lanes, and bridges (which use database-connected licence-plate-readers as a backup for toll transponders that have failed.)
My wife and I have been using only 2G "feature phones" since we got cell service just before the turn of the millenium. (A cellphone is for use as a PHONE, darn it!.) And some "toy" bling from years ago that blinks a light when it hears them transmit. (Was interesting for looking at the schedule of their checkins with the cells, and confirming that they hadn't been activated as a room bug, which required much more air time.)
Still no guarantee. But there's less on them to be hacked, and you can always pull the battery if you don't want them to keep the net informed of your whereabouts or possibly act as a bug.
If we wanted to go cross-country without being tracked we'd have to shut 'em down. If we were serious about it we'd also use the old car that predates the serial-number-broadcasting, federally-mandated, tire pressure monitoring devices in the wheels, and avoid routes with licence-plate reading cameras.
We wouldn't do this lightly: The cellphones, in cooperation with the "Sync" entertainment center, also do the equivalent of OnStar, so we wouldn't have automatic 911 calls in a crash that rendered us unconscious. (But at least we can CHOSE to go somewhat dark - unlike those who have a real OnStar device, which has its own built in cellphone.)
But AT&T is shutting down their 2G service at the end of the year. So we'll have to buy and switch to something more recent (and no doubt more infiltrated by NSA.)
I'm considering going to an android phone running Replicant, to minimize (if not eliminate) the spyware opportunities. Not so much to keep NSA out. (I figure if they really want in they'll manage it, but they're reasonably good at not publishing what they find outside the spook community.) But more to impede other actors, such as identity thieves, industrial spies, private investigators, ....
If you try to avoid being tracked, that makes them suspicious, and they'll track you even more.
Reminds me of the early days of networking and mailing lists.
My wife and I ran a mailing list on a controversial subject, from a server in our home. This was back when civilian encryption was very new and deployment uncommon. We made a point (and made it clear to our subscribers) that NO encryption was used. Reasoning was this:
- If the police decided to check the mailing list (or other communications with us) for something of interest, and it was unencrypted, they could get what they wanted with a passive tap. They'd prefer that, because if they DID find something to go after, they wouldn't tip off the target, while if they didn',t there'd be no sign they had even snooped.
- If the police decided to check and anything was encrypted, the easy way to get it would be to raid the place and seize everything that might be evidential: computers, printers, backup media, answering machine, printed paper - and smash up everything else while they were at it. They'd have found nothing - but caused lots of loss for us. And of course they'd have trashed our reputation - deliberately - both to get a warrant in the first place and to head off claims of police misconduct.
So we "ran bare", made the rule that nothing illegal, nor confessions of doing anything illegal, could be on the mailing list, and ENFORCED that rule: To the point of ejecting a number of people, and one actually shutting down the list for a week (when a participant made it clear he was about to violate the terms) and only bringing it back, reluctantly, under a new name and new terms after being petitioned by many more reasonable users.
(Eventually a law change made it, in our opinion, too much risk and work to continue, and we shut it down permanently, after advance warning and migrating our users to another list, started by some of our users more dedicated to the underlying subject. Then I was free to use an encrypted tunnel when a job, shortly after, required it.)
The keys are supposed to be on a locked down system and signing is supposed to happen in one controlled place.
And if you do it that way you have created a single point of failure for the company - or at least all its deployed products. Kill that system, they're hosed. Ditto if (when) it dies.
So either they don't do it this "recommended" way or there is some kind of backup - which then also isn't this "recommended" way and becomes a potential security leak.
Dammed if you do, damned if you don't.
Libertarianism isn't anarchy, but they have this delusion that if there were no government, everybody would just get along and be happy and nobody would ever form a powerful gang and begin stealing from others... warlords don't exist to them... and they have no idea how dictatorships come about.
You REALLY are unaware of Libertarian ideas if you believe that.
Libertarians are under the delusion that an armed population, with a substantial fraction of them willing to shoot a bully or (in the case of a gang attack) take as many as possible down before one of them gets them, tends to make bullies and gangsters back down, or at least go find somebody who isn't alert enough to get his gun out in time.
Funny thing is, criminological research seems to agree with them - in spades.
You can stop a sword with a bigger sword (wielded by a sufficiently skilled swordsman), a club with a bigger club ditto, or a group of thugs with a bigger group of thugs. But (as McClary said): "You can't stop a bullet with a bigger bullet." That's why they called a gun "the great equalizer". And it's why governments working on becoming tyrannies are always trying to disarm their citizens.
Libertarians would like to reduce government. But they'd prefer to do so by legal means if possible. Getting from what we have now to minarchy OR anarchy would be easier if the US government were peacefully reduced to what its Constitution claims it should be.
The claim being addressed was that "a single supertanker pumps more air pollution into the atmosphere in a single day than all the cars in the world". That statement is quantifiably false.
The "air pollution" under discussion was CO, NOx, and HC. The evidence presented as falsifying it was gross C.
The original claim MAY be false. But the counterclaim does not address it.
If you have evidence that "all the cars in the world" don't produce more CO, NOx, and HC than one supertanker, please present it. Or ask the original claimant for his evidence that they don't. But don't declare victory in an argument on the basis of evidence that does not address the argument you claim is refuted by it.
The cheating VW Diesels do very well ... with respect to carbon footprint as they get really good fuel mileage.
In fact, for a given fuel, fuel mileage IS a direct measure of carbon emission. Essentially all the carbon from the fuel ends up in the exhaust gasses. So the better the mileage, the less the carbon emission.
Apples and oranges.
The emissions under consideration in automotive emission testing and regulation are CO, NOx, and unburned hydrocarbons ("HC"), not gross carbon output.
The full-blown factory/type-certification testing can MEASURE gross carbon output as a side effect, and uses carbon balance to measure mileage for the mandated sticker labelling. But gross carbon emission has nothing to do with the discussion of the amount of regulated "pollutants" that may be emitted from automotive engine control programs that cheat on the certification testing.
And before someone says "eventually you won't have any choice" - Of course we will. We might pay a bit a bit extra for the "marine" or "remote cabin" version, ...
In some parts of California you no longer have a choice to not have a computer in your water heater, and will have to put in a computerized one when your current one fails. (Probably within a decade if you don't replace the sacrificial anode(s) every six years or less.)
- You can only put in an extremely energy-efficient model.
- These models achieve energy efficiency by using a spark, rather than a pilot light, igniter, and by closing an exhaust vent valve to block convection when the burner is off. They also have sensors to prevent ignition in the presence of flammable fumes (so you don't blow up your garage if you have gasoline fumes or a gas leak).
- Controlling and interlocking these features is complex enough, and automation chips are cheap enough, that it's cheaper to use a computer than special-purpose logic. So ALL the available ultra-efficiency models have computers.
- (Fortunately, as of this spring, the radio network interface on the brand I wanted (Rheem) was still an extra-cost optional board, rather than being built into the system-on-a-chip.)
Actually on my furnace you cannot connect a conventional thermostat. The thermostat talks to the furnace over RS-485 with a proprietary protocol. Now lucky for me it's not a 'smart' internet connected device. But depending on the installation the option of putting in a dumb thermostat may not exist.
I ran into something like that when I had to replace a water heater - in Silicon Valley.
In some areas of California, environmental regulations require you to install an extremely energy-efficient water heater. Part of the way this efficiency is obtained, with gas water heaters, is by not using a pilot light, which burns substantial gas all the time. (The pilot-light in my Nevada place's water heater puts out enough heat that, even with the heater set to "vacation" in the dead of winter, the tank's water is only about 10 degrees F below the normal setpoint when I arrive after weeks away.)
Instead, they have a furnace-style spark igniter - and a computerized thermostat to control it.
One downside is that, in a power failure, the tank won't heat. (After a couple showers I need to start the emergency genny and make sure the water heater is on the backed-up circuit.)
But another downside is that the heater is able to hook up to your home network via WiFi - for convenient monitoring and remote control.
(Fortunately, as of this spring, the WiFi hookup is an add-on board, which I presume contains the radio. So I just didn't buy the board. But with radio-capable systems-on-a-chip becoming so cheap, due to the IoT, I expect that the next models will have the radio built-in and always-on. That will let the bad guys track whether, and when, the building is occupied by looking at the water heating load, or just screw around with the settings.)
Cash is seized all the time and never sold at auction.
Bitcoin is not money. Bitcoin is a commodity.
It happens that it is intended to act as much like a commodity based currency as possible under the current laws and the available technology. But that doesn't make it money, under either the general laws about money or the specific laws about how to dispose of a seized non-money asset.
As you said these are convenience things, and short of someone looking to specificly target that home these bluetooth locks probably shouldn't be on the front-door in the first place. They should be on the carport door, where you want a quick entry/exit, and still have the garage door as a second barrier.
Crooks LOVE unlocked garages or other crummy garage security. It gives them plenty of time unobserved to deal with the garage/house door.
Open the door and get in (either the car is unlocked, or they break in triggering the alarm).
Plug the laptop into the OBD port. Command the alarm to turn off (if it was triggered).
Can you get to the onboard bus by popping off a mirror and plugging into its remote-tilt wiring?
How about cracking in via bugs in the radio stack for the tire pressure sensors?
Squad cars should have a way to enable a "Follow Me" feature so that an Auto-Drive car can be escorted to the correct location (and the needed persons could be at the CURB).
How about this for an upgrade:
When a user of autodrive asks it to "take me to an emergency room" the system does this:
- Locates the nearest accessible emergency room.
- Starts going there.
- Starts flashing the lights in an appropriate pattern.
- Phones ahead to tell the emergency room personnel and/or 911 dispatch that it is coming and give them arrival time and route info.
- Establishes a handsfree voice link to the E-room people (perhpas via 911 dispatch if appropriate for the particular location) to aid in medical treatment preparation.
- The medical and/or 911 dispatch personnel, or the car (again as appropriate) notify the police.
- The police can provide an escort and the car allows them to take over management of the routing or if they are equipped for it. Going into "follow me" mode on a particular squad car can be one of the police-selected options.
He should have pulled onto the side of the road with his hazards on and waited for paramedics. He risked dying at the wheel with no help available for what would have been very manageable emergencies for first responders.
Don't expect someone with a life-threatening medical emergency in progress to think clearly.
They're a real company, with real patents, and sued someone in their industry who is infringing. Why is that a troll? How is that not just proper use of the patent system?
One of the signs of impending death of a tech company is a spate of patent suits. This happens after they are no longer competitive and are trying to milk every source of revenue possible, in order to keep from going under. Out come all the patents - including the "obvious" ones - which they'd never bothered to attempt to enforce before (and thus never had them knocked down). Suits are filed against any company doing anything in the related field, even if it's not really covered by one of their patents, and it's up to those they sue to do the research to show the suit is bogus.
A stage before that is when management sacrifices the company's future to its current bottom line, by cutting R&D expenses - and thus ending inventions and development of new products. This is typically done in order to line their own pockets by making the stock price jump and their options worth a bundle. Then they cash out and the house of cards collapses on their successors' watch. If their successors can't turn it around you get the scenario above.
Before that they were competitive because they were still, or had recently, built new stuff that was ahead of the competition. This is where patent suits are appropriate - to keep people from just cloning their work without incurring the expense. But it's also where they're rare, because the company does better (or just did better) by running ahead of the pack, rather than by spending effort tripping the competitors.
Part of the reason for locating in Nevada was the availability of lithium ore.
IMHO it was also because, with the plant in Nevada, the metals can be mined and processed into finished batteries entirely in a state with legal structures built around its history of mining - in primarily desert areas - as its cash-cow.