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User: Locke2005

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  1. Re:Less service? on Why Car Salesmen Don't Want To Sell Electric Cars · · Score: 1

    All the Hondas I've owned just need oil, filter, tire, and wiper changes before 100k (unless someone hit it). At 100k, you need to put 3 or 4 thousand worth of maintenance into them, and after that they need a lot more.

  2. Re:Less service? on Why Car Salesmen Don't Want To Sell Electric Cars · · Score: 1

    Doesn't Tesla have an undercar robot that will do a battery swap in a few minutes now? Yeah, replacing the batteries in the trunk takes a while, and Honda won't even let me replace my own batteries in my hybrid, despite explaining to them that I have a degree in Electronics Engineering and experience as an electronics technician.

  3. Re:Less service? on Why Car Salesmen Don't Want To Sell Electric Cars · · Score: 1

    10k oil change interval is pretty standard on newer cars, and the usual usage estimate is 10k miles per year.

  4. Re:Less service? on Why Car Salesmen Don't Want To Sell Electric Cars · · Score: 1

    Have you tried not driving like an a-hole? Most cars come with brake pads that will last 100,000 miles under "normal" use.

  5. There is a valid reason for some of these on Companies Want To Insert Ads Into Unicode (thenextweb.com) · · Score: 1

    Dominoes now allows you to order pizza by texting them a pizza emoji; presumably other delivery services would like to get in on the action. (Sounds to me like this would require setting up a lot of information associated with your phone number ahead of time for it to work, and useless for any company that doesn't do delivery or internet orders)

  6. Re:Better Question on Why Car Salesmen Don't Want To Sell Electric Cars · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I find dealerships very annoying because they don't want to sell you the car you want, they want to sell you one of the cars they have on the lot that day! Apparently their goal with every customer is to have them buy something the same day, not come back later to pick up the actual vehicle they wanted. Why can't I order a vehicle with everything I want from the manufacturer, and go pick it up at the plant or port of entry myself, saving the $800 in "destination fees"?

  7. Less service? on Why Car Salesmen Don't Want To Sell Electric Cars · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure the average service cost is that much less when you factor in replacing a $4000 battery pack every 8 to 10 years. Also, there are high end SUVs that cost even more than the low-end Tesla Model X at $80,000.

  8. Flaw is obvious: the "lawsuits" are for distributing copyrighted material, not for downloading it. Bittorrent is designed so that all while you are downloading, you are also seeding those same files, but it is possible to prevent it from seeding, which I assume the RIAA/MPAA goons do.

  9. RIAA has discovered a viable business model! on Judge Wipes Out Safe Harbor Provision In DMCA, Makes Cox Accomplice of Piracy (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    1) Hire people to "pirate" content from themselves 2) Sue carriers for facilitating the "piracy" (they've got deep pockets!) 3) Profit!

  10. Re:In Soviet Russia, TV watches YOU! on What Is the Future of the Television? (ben-evans.com) · · Score: 1

    Because the slight incremental increase in ad revenue would more than make up for the expense of bandwidth to receive video from every single customer? Your nightmare scenario only works if network and processing bandwidth is free...

  11. Re:TV with API would be nice on What Is the Future of the Television? (ben-evans.com) · · Score: 1

    You can already get cell phone apps that control your smart TV via WiFi... if you're talking about opening up the APIs used to third-party developers, that might cause more problems than it solves. The IR interface appears to be fairly open now, anybody can make a universal remote and cellphone apps to do it are ubiquitous. We probably need to wait for the WiFi interface to stabilize more before they open it up.

  12. Re:TV's in state of flux on What Is the Future of the Television? (ben-evans.com) · · Score: 1

    4K was the point of diminishing returns, human perception isn't capable of distinguishing anything more than 4000 divisions across in their field of vision. Higher resolution than that is only useful if you're going to be blowing the image up or just looking at a small section of the image, which by definition is NOT the video-watching audience. Also, eventually people will realize that pushing 4 times as many bits down the pipe costs 4 times as much. Flat panels will transition from LED to OLED as the yields get better, currently a 65 inch OLED costs $5000, and larger ones go up to $20,000. Smart TVs already have WiFi and Ethernet support, and yes, even web browsers, as well as all the popular streaming services built in (although using a TV remote as a mouse really sucks). A few smart TVs even have voice command support, that that has sparked privacy concerns -- can you really trust your TV when it's listening to everything in your house 25/7? (Sounds like a Big Brother scenario to me). Yes, I'm still waiting for videoconferencing to be built-in to the TV, or at least support for a USB webcam. Not sure what the killer application for motion detectors is; even Kinect seems to be fading now, despite my initial reaction that they could build some great games around gesture recognition.

  13. Re:TV is not dead, but cable certainly is on What Is the Future of the Television? (ben-evans.com) · · Score: 1

    Agreed, time-shifting is essential. This notion that everybody watches a show at the exact same time is a curious anachronism... so why is it all the seats to the first showing of the next Star Wars movie have sold out over a month in advance? And yes, the cable companies need to clue into the fact that their $50/month cable service has no tangible advantage to a $10/month streaming service. I get internet-only from Comcast, so of course they called me early this morning to try to convince me to "upgrade" to more services as part of their current promotion... their business model is dead, and they're still flogging it.

  14. Re:"I like to watch." on What Is the Future of the Television? (ben-evans.com) · · Score: 1

    /. people: they leave the tv on because it drowns out the sound of their mom yelling at them from upstairs!

  15. I know where I'd like to see it headed: standards on What Is the Future of the Television? (ben-evans.com) · · Score: 2

    How did they manage to develop a 4K television standard that still kept the old 50Hz/60Hz dichotomy? Could we please just pick one universal framerate? Tying the screen refresh rate to the power line frequency is sort of silly at this point, isn't it? (Yes, I'm also upset the "4K television" and "4K movie" are two completely different resolutions)

  16. Re:One more layoff required... on Microsoft Blames Layoffs For Drop In Female Employees (cio.com) · · Score: 2

    Quotas may be justified as a court-ordered remedial measure to address an identified pattern of discrimination, meaning they should be limited in time. So there are limited valid applications for quotas, although in general I agree with your assertion that quotas are bullshit -- any company not hiring the best people for the position is hurting themselves, discrimination is a self-punishing transgression.

  17. Re:Equality of opportunity matters on Microsoft Blames Layoffs For Drop In Female Employees (cio.com) · · Score: 1

    Where is the diversity agent advocating against Asians in California college admissions? Where is the diversity argument arguing that I should be able to date my fair share of supermodels? Yes, I find the entire concept of a "protected class" galling, ideally everybody should be treated the same -- as human beings. The "glass ceilings" still exist because promotion is based on experience, and women have not been in managerial positions as long as men have, so on average most women have less experience. Those that have been working for the company forever do get promoted, e.g. Ursula M. Burns serves as Chairwoman and CEO of Xerox. The disproportionate number of women that got laid off was because they were newer hires, no conspiracy there.

  18. Re: Female employees are for cows. on Microsoft Blames Layoffs For Drop In Female Employees (cio.com) · · Score: 1

    It's not a "blow up sheep", it's a "Love Ewe", thank you very much! https://muttonbone.com/ [muttonbone.com]

  19. Re:Good on Microsoft Blames Layoffs For Drop In Female Employees (cio.com) · · Score: 1

    It's not a "blow up sheep", it's a "Love Ewe", thank you very much! https://muttonbone.com/

  20. Obvious solution: on Microsoft Blames Layoffs For Drop In Female Employees (cio.com) · · Score: 1

    Hire people to make sammitches for all the other employees. That should drive the female employee rate way up!

  21. Re: Live by the sword, die by the sword. on One Family Suffering Through Years-Long Trolling Campaign (dailydot.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No, don't get into an online pissing contest with anyone, because THERE ARE NO WINNERS!

  22. "Cynical", or just good business? on No Such Thing As 'Unlimited' Data (wired.com) · · Score: 1

    The "unlimited" word was flung around to increase customer count which increases the market cap of the company, No, they never had any intention of maintaining unlimited data. Was the lifetime guarantee of "unlimited" that some companies offered deliberately misleading? Probably, but they can cover themselves by just multiplying the price by 1000 and maintaining "We never said it would always be unlimited at the starting price!" And... that's pretty much what they are doing now, isn't it? This is analogous to the business plan of every dot com company: Offer products and services for free (or even at a loss, i.e. jet.com) to begin with, then "monetize" or sell later when the customer count is up to an impressive number. Of course, with a dot com, you could always inflate your customers numbers by creating ghost free accounts (who believes Facebook and others aren't doing exactly that?)

  23. Not just google on The 'Trick' To Algorithmic Coding Interview Questions (dice.com) · · Score: 4, Informative

    Amazon also uses coding tests like this, generally based on binary trees. Like an idiot, I didn't google "Amazon code tests" ahead of time and pre-solve all of the possible code tests, because I was given one and sucked at it, only to later find it was one of the listed ones. So, note to the wise: google the code tests for the company you're applying for and pre-do the possible solutions. I'd also note that these take a lot longer to solve than the company implies it should take, especially if you want to set up tests to prove your answer is correct.

  24. Re: Painting yourself into a corner on Comcast Expanding Data Cap Locations, Training Reps To Avoid Subject (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    After the Loma Prieta earthquake, you couldn't make a cell phone call in San Francisco, period. Why? Everybody in the country called the area, tying up all the trunk lines so that it took more than a minute to get a dial tone. And... the cell companies timed out trying to make a call after not getting a dial tone for one minute, meaning you had to redial and go back to the end of the queue. Presumably they have changed the dial tone timeout policy since then, but yes, almost every communications network suffers from non-graceful deterioration of service at 100% utilization. Even TCP/IP stops working when the buffering delay for retransmission exceeds the maximum configured round trip time.

  25. Re:Continuing behavior trend on Comcast Expanding Data Cap Locations, Training Reps To Avoid Subject (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    A few things they don't tell you about satellite internet: 1) It is blocked by rain or snow. 2) It has a ridiculously low data cap, meaning if you watch a movie over the net, you are throttled back to dial-up modem speeds for the rest of the month. 3) Transmission to a satellite requires extremely precise alignment. You really think that dish bolted to your roof is never going to move?

    I think your best available alternative is to continue using Comcast, and just ask them very nicely if they would please use lube in the future...