> I guess that isn't horrible only 50 places to pay it to.
Incorrect. Some states (NH) outlaw sales tax on most goods (there are some taxed items, such as prepared foods but that is a restaurant tax). Other states have hundreds of sales tax zones (Nevada for example). This creates huge interstate commerce barriers for the smaller players, which is why Amazon gave up the fight and is now lobbying for it. The end result is there is literally hundreds (if not thousands) of individual sales tax zones - and some are compounded because some zones allow for a local sales tax which is added on top of the total cost+state tax, further complicating the issue.
Amazon can easily handle this, as can Newegg (and I suspect B&H as well), but most smaller eCommerce sites cannot. It is a huge cost to develop the logic for or change ecommerce platforms, and is an administrative nightmare for the bookkeeper/accountant.
You mean intrastate commerce, that is, state governments are forbidden from creating barriers to interstate trade. That is the sole domain of the Federal government, and is the sole reason for the Commerce Clause. The Commerce Clause is being abused to justify laws such as the AFA and is almost never used for its intended purpose.
Taxing out-of-state purchases is completely unconstitutional and anyone who remits such "user fees" is an illiterate moron, or one who has never read The Constitution of The United States of America.
It's amazing what can be accomplished by not having an administrative-heavy government.
For example, some are outraged that we just gave NH officials free tolls on NH turnpikes. The thing is, we have to reimburse them for travel expenses (and they're mostly volunteer positions anyway, making NH less crooked than other New England states) which is administratively heavy, so it's cheaper to just give them a free pass on in-state turnpikes. It keeps the overall costs down, gives legislators a little perk in addition to their what, $200/yr salary (IIRC), and makes sense.
I moved here from Taxachusetts and am glad I did (I was constantly getting hit with bogus taxes and user fees in Taxachusetts. If Massachusetts could get away with taxing income tax and taxing sales tax, that is, adding a tax on top of a tax, they would). Now if only I worked in NH, I'd gain what amounts to a $12K to $15K / year raise because I would not have to pay state income tax. As it is now working in MA I am being taxed without representation.
> ou have to remember they made entire systems to defend against XB-70 Valkyrie [wikipedia.org]
They may claim to have. . . but were that the case they'd have succeeded in downing the SR-71 in the 29 years following the XB-70's cancellation. They never did succeed, and it was not for the lack of trying.
> True, but the website already exists. If it's a case of fixing defects rather than re-architecting from scratch, there's no reason why multiple teams can't work on different parts of the system. And multiple people within a team can't work on different defects.
You are assuming that there is a detailed (and accurate) functional spec, design spec, and that the code is organized and well-documented - and that it is architected in such a manner that throwing more engineers at it will actually fix the problem. More often than not, that is not the case.
And by now anyone who is tech-savvy has bought a GPS-equipped dashcam so they can prove rookies to be the lying sacks of shit they are in court when they misreport how fast you were driving.
Maybe people should go back to fumbling with atlases and hood-sized street maps while driving at 65mph, trying to find their current location rather than using google glass or a smartphone which keeps the map centered and provides large turn directions and also voice guidance. Yep, let's ban modern electronics and go back to nice, safe unfolded maps blocking the drivers' view. That was always the safest way to navigate.
For calibration; cars can come with different gear ratios and tire diameters, so rather than make multiple speedometers or have to change a speedometer gear or wheel speed sensor, the algorithm can be made selectable or modifiable so it can be changed over the OBD2/CAN bus.
They've never had me do anything like that - no stock OS reinstall, BIOS updates or anything else. But then I don't deal with their low-end crap. I currently have a Dell Precision M6400 laptop and my next laptop is going to be a Precision as well. I know I would probably get a better price from the actual manufacturer of a given model (be it Clevo or whomever) but the customer service from the manufacturers is nonexistent at best.
Xen is great and powerful, but after having worked more on RHEL 6 lately (which forced a move to KVM if I want to stick with the official repositories for updates - no Xen kernel from Redhat any more!) I've developed a new appreciation for Qemu+KVM. As a nice bonus when I run it on a workstation I do not have to resort to fugly hacks to use the NVIDIA drivers.
I am an American and I support Apple's moves on this. If America collected outrageous tax rates on Apple's revenue, our politicians would increase spending by 4-5x that amount. By supporting the "punish $people_who_work_for_a_living" mantra, we are enabling addicts (congress and the white house) to continue their habits (frivilous spending - if the portions of government we shut down are so nonessential, why the fuck did we spend money on them in the first place?).
What? "have you tried turning it off and on again?" is a very real-world scenario. Have you not ever dealt with deployment/help desk grunts in an IT department?;)
Great, IF your motherboard, CPU, and graphics cards all meet the requiremets, AND you are running on Linux, AND running the commercial and closed release of Virtualbox (which, if he is running on Linux, why bother with VB for games? Just install them natively!)
Right now there are some large DNS amplification attacks going on. Set up a PC as a DMZ and run ethereal as others suggested, and see if it is excessive UDP traffic on port 53. If it is, it is probably botnets attempting to leverage a DNS server or forwarder on your network to flood their target. Of course, the botnets do not care whether or not you are actually running a public DNS; since it costs the operators nothing to fuck with your connection they are indiscriminate, and ISPs seem to not care about the issue.
The problem is while you can mitigate it somewhat by not serving up root DNS requests, DNS servers will still send a 16-byte NXDOMAIN response, not completely ignore the requests. To add to the problem you can't really block the requests (short of capturing the packets and reading them yourself) since the packets are spoofed; what appears to be the source is the client IP, which is actually their target. You can use either iptables or DNS rate limiting to limit the traffic you are sending out to their clients, but the incoming requests will still be coming in and there is no real way to stop that (they'll still be hitting either your router or DNS server). Here is a list of the iptables rules to drop the packets for these attacks:
The list is updated regularly but again the packets will keep hitting your IP; the best you can do is implement those rules to not compound the problem.
It depends - many scientists are fairly certain Neptune and Urectum (oh wait, it's still Uranus until 2620) have solid cores, so you can almost certainly land "on" those planets (ignoring pressure issues). Saturn and Jupiter are also thought to have rocky cores, or to have had them originally, but it is uncertain. It's entirely possible due to gravitational pressures and electrical current the cores are not really a solid nor a liquid but an ultra-dense plasma. The idea that the gas giants in our solar system possess (or possessed) solid cores is a fairly new theory based on data (gravitational, magnetic, and radar) gathered by various probes as well as mathematical predictions.
Correction: It's dumb to make a proprietary mobile data transceiver for a car. Witness an entire generation of ONSTAR-equipped vehicles from just a few years ago that are now completely nonfunctional now that the analog cell network is decommissioned.
My next car will have a mobile data connection - I want the live traffic updates integrated with GPS without having to jury-rig a cellphone on the dash or have it lying loose in the car. Instead, I'll use the iDrive joystick to operate the GPS. The one thing I wish the car will have that none of them do is a standard mobile radio similar to the mini-PCIe interface in laptops, where if the wireless data standard is phased out, I could just upgrade the radio.
Contrary to what some are implying, mobile and embedded data and processor technology are showing NO signs of stabilizing - quite the opposite in fact, they are rapidly accelerating so it would be a tremendous breakthrough if automakers would standardize at least some components and software APIs.
On the software side, SAAB under Spyker was reputedly making huge strides in this arena, where they were going to roll out Android-equipped infotainment systems in the 9-3 and 9-5, and it would have had tremendous potential. Imagine not only being able to install Torque and create custom gauge themes, but going a step further and run something similar to the T8Suite, enabling you to create custom tune profiles, and then select between customized economy and aggressive tune profiles on the fly. A nice high PSI, high fuel rate and advanced ignition to take advantage of a turbocharger upgrade, then a very low boost profile (similar to their old LPT models) with a lean-burn mixture and retarded timing and adaptive shift points (or a shift light for us manual drivers) to maximize fuel economy without having to give up on-demand performance. Some might view the CAN/OBD integration as a security hole, but it's like having physical access to a Linux box - once you have physical access to the car (OBD port or software or otherwise) it's game over as far as security goes, so I'd consider it a feature. As far as direct control over the fuel, ignition, active suspension, ABS, etc. I don't think we'll ever be away from the individual embedded systems running those, with their being fed only values from lookup tables from the BCM (and a tune aside from engine component changes and hard hacks to an ECM and sensors really only modifies those lookup tables anyhow and if there is a fault the modules revert to an open-loop "limp mode" with default lookup values)
Many automatics (and I am including DCTs in this category) are now fully computerized, so yes, they are shift by wire.
More and more cars are also throttle by wire as well. The gas/accelerator pedal is being relegated to a "more power request" than the throttle body butterfly valve control lever it used to be.
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> I guess that isn't horrible only 50 places to pay it to.
Incorrect. Some states (NH) outlaw sales tax on most goods (there are some taxed items, such as prepared foods but that is a restaurant tax). Other states have hundreds of sales tax zones (Nevada for example). This creates huge interstate commerce barriers for the smaller players, which is why Amazon gave up the fight and is now lobbying for it. The end result is there is literally hundreds (if not thousands) of individual sales tax zones - and some are compounded because some zones allow for a local sales tax which is added on top of the total cost+state tax, further complicating the issue.
Amazon can easily handle this, as can Newegg (and I suspect B&H as well), but most smaller eCommerce sites cannot. It is a huge cost to develop the logic for or change ecommerce platforms, and is an administrative nightmare for the bookkeeper/accountant.
> interstate commerce
You mean intrastate commerce, that is, state governments are forbidden from creating barriers to interstate trade. That is the sole domain of the Federal government, and is the sole reason for the Commerce Clause. The Commerce Clause is being abused to justify laws such as the AFA and is almost never used for its intended purpose.
Taxing out-of-state purchases is completely unconstitutional and anyone who remits such "user fees" is an illiterate moron, or one who has never read The Constitution of The United States of America.
It's amazing what can be accomplished by not having an administrative-heavy government.
For example, some are outraged that we just gave NH officials free tolls on NH turnpikes. The thing is, we have to reimburse them for travel expenses (and they're mostly volunteer positions anyway, making NH less crooked than other New England states) which is administratively heavy, so it's cheaper to just give them a free pass on in-state turnpikes. It keeps the overall costs down, gives legislators a little perk in addition to their what, $200/yr salary (IIRC), and makes sense.
I moved here from Taxachusetts and am glad I did (I was constantly getting hit with bogus taxes and user fees in Taxachusetts. If Massachusetts could get away with taxing income tax and taxing sales tax, that is, adding a tax on top of a tax, they would). Now if only I worked in NH, I'd gain what amounts to a $12K to $15K / year raise because I would not have to pay state income tax. As it is now working in MA I am being taxed without representation.
> ou have to remember they made entire systems to defend against XB-70 Valkyrie [wikipedia.org]
They may claim to have. . . but were that the case they'd have succeeded in downing the SR-71 in the 29 years following the XB-70's cancellation. They never did succeed, and it was not for the lack of trying.
No, highway speed limits, at least federal interstates, have speed limits for the purpose of generating revenue.
> True, but the website already exists. If it's a case of fixing defects rather than re-architecting from scratch, there's no reason why multiple teams can't work on different parts of the system. And multiple people within a team can't work on different defects.
You are assuming that there is a detailed (and accurate) functional spec, design spec, and that the code is organized and well-documented - and that it is architected in such a manner that throwing more engineers at it will actually fix the problem. More often than not, that is not the case.
> Glass obstruction of view thing
Are they also ticketing those who wear sunglasses, since they "obstruct the view" by design?
And by now anyone who is tech-savvy has bought a GPS-equipped dashcam so they can prove rookies to be the lying sacks of shit they are in court when they misreport how fast you were driving.
Maybe people should go back to fumbling with atlases and hood-sized street maps while driving at 65mph, trying to find their current location rather than using google glass or a smartphone which keeps the map centered and provides large turn directions and also voice guidance. Yep, let's ban modern electronics and go back to nice, safe unfolded maps blocking the drivers' view. That was always the safest way to navigate.
I hope they're pulling over everyone driving an infotainment-equipped car. According to the letter of the law, those vehicles are illegal there.
Why make the speedo adjustable?
For calibration; cars can come with different gear ratios and tire diameters, so rather than make multiple speedometers or have to change a speedometer gear or wheel speed sensor, the algorithm can be made selectable or modifiable so it can be changed over the OBD2/CAN bus.
I'm surprised our politicians don't want to land on Uranus. They've been fucking every other anus for years.
They've never had me do anything like that - no stock OS reinstall, BIOS updates or anything else. But then I don't deal with their low-end crap. I currently have a Dell Precision M6400 laptop and my next laptop is going to be a Precision as well. I know I would probably get a better price from the actual manufacturer of a given model (be it Clevo or whomever) but the customer service from the manufacturers is nonexistent at best.
Xen is great and powerful, but after having worked more on RHEL 6 lately (which forced a move to KVM if I want to stick with the official repositories for updates - no Xen kernel from Redhat any more!) I've developed a new appreciation for Qemu+KVM. As a nice bonus when I run it on a workstation I do not have to resort to fugly hacks to use the NVIDIA drivers.
I am an American and I support Apple's moves on this. If America collected outrageous tax rates on Apple's revenue, our politicians would increase spending by 4-5x that amount. By supporting the "punish $people_who_work_for_a_living" mantra, we are enabling addicts (congress and the white house) to continue their habits (frivilous spending - if the portions of government we shut down are so nonessential, why the fuck did we spend money on them in the first place?).
What? "have you tried turning it off and on again?" is a very real-world scenario. Have you not ever dealt with deployment/help desk grunts in an IT department? ;)
Great, IF your motherboard, CPU, and graphics cards all meet the requiremets, AND you are running on Linux, AND running the commercial and closed release of Virtualbox (which, if he is running on Linux, why bother with VB for games? Just install them natively!)
Good luck getting 3D acceleration. :-(
Right now there are some large DNS amplification attacks going on. Set up a PC as a DMZ and run ethereal as others suggested, and see if it is excessive UDP traffic on port 53. If it is, it is probably botnets attempting to leverage a DNS server or forwarder on your network to flood their target. Of course, the botnets do not care whether or not you are actually running a public DNS; since it costs the operators nothing to fuck with your connection they are indiscriminate, and ISPs seem to not care about the issue.
DNS amplification: https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA13-088A
The problem is while you can mitigate it somewhat by not serving up root DNS requests, DNS servers will still send a 16-byte NXDOMAIN response, not completely ignore the requests. To add to the problem you can't really block the requests (short of capturing the packets and reading them yourself) since the packets are spoofed; what appears to be the source is the client IP, which is actually their target. You can use either iptables or DNS rate limiting to limit the traffic you are sending out to their clients, but the incoming requests will still be coming in and there is no real way to stop that (they'll still be hitting either your router or DNS server). Here is a list of the iptables rules to drop the packets for these attacks:
https://github.com/smurfmonitor/dns-iptables-rules/blob/master/domain-blacklist.txt
The list is updated regularly but again the packets will keep hitting your IP; the best you can do is implement those rules to not compound the problem.
PDF editors, including Acrobat, are extremely limited in their editing ability.
It depends - many scientists are fairly certain Neptune and Urectum (oh wait, it's still Uranus until 2620) have solid cores, so you can almost certainly land "on" those planets (ignoring pressure issues). Saturn and Jupiter are also thought to have rocky cores, or to have had them originally, but it is uncertain. It's entirely possible due to gravitational pressures and electrical current the cores are not really a solid nor a liquid but an ultra-dense plasma. The idea that the gas giants in our solar system possess (or possessed) solid cores is a fairly new theory based on data (gravitational, magnetic, and radar) gathered by various probes as well as mathematical predictions.
Wikipedia begs to differ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_crystal
The same site has instructions for making tinfoil hats to block "them" from controlling your mind with their mind-control satellites. ;)
Correction: It's dumb to make a proprietary mobile data transceiver for a car. Witness an entire generation of ONSTAR-equipped vehicles from just a few years ago that are now completely nonfunctional now that the analog cell network is decommissioned.
My next car will have a mobile data connection - I want the live traffic updates integrated with GPS without having to jury-rig a cellphone on the dash or have it lying loose in the car. Instead, I'll use the iDrive joystick to operate the GPS. The one thing I wish the car will have that none of them do is a standard mobile radio similar to the mini-PCIe interface in laptops, where if the wireless data standard is phased out, I could just upgrade the radio.
Contrary to what some are implying, mobile and embedded data and processor technology are showing NO signs of stabilizing - quite the opposite in fact, they are rapidly accelerating so it would be a tremendous breakthrough if automakers would standardize at least some components and software APIs.
On the software side, SAAB under Spyker was reputedly making huge strides in this arena, where they were going to roll out Android-equipped infotainment systems in the 9-3 and 9-5, and it would have had tremendous potential. Imagine not only being able to install Torque and create custom gauge themes, but going a step further and run something similar to the T8Suite, enabling you to create custom tune profiles, and then select between customized economy and aggressive tune profiles on the fly. A nice high PSI, high fuel rate and advanced ignition to take advantage of a turbocharger upgrade, then a very low boost profile (similar to their old LPT models) with a lean-burn mixture and retarded timing and adaptive shift points (or a shift light for us manual drivers) to maximize fuel economy without having to give up on-demand performance. Some might view the CAN/OBD integration as a security hole, but it's like having physical access to a Linux box - once you have physical access to the car (OBD port or software or otherwise) it's game over as far as security goes, so I'd consider it a feature. As far as direct control over the fuel, ignition, active suspension, ABS, etc. I don't think we'll ever be away from the individual embedded systems running those, with their being fed only values from lookup tables from the BCM (and a tune aside from engine component changes and hard hacks to an ECM and sensors really only modifies those lookup tables anyhow and if there is a fault the modules revert to an open-loop "limp mode" with default lookup values)
Besides, it's no less secure than electronic keys, which have been compromised on at least some makes.
Many automatics (and I am including DCTs in this category) are now fully computerized, so yes, they are shift by wire.
More and more cars are also throttle by wire as well. The gas/accelerator pedal is being relegated to a "more power request" than the throttle body butterfly valve control lever it used to be.