The Macbooks are (currently) made by Quanta. They're an ODM - original design manufacturer. That's like an OEM, except they also design the product. They're the ones who came up with such innovations like hogging a unibody laptop chassis out of a single solid piece of aluminum, not Apple. Slashdot had an article describing how they bought the CNC milling machinery, were playing around with hogging out aluminum billets, and pitched the idea to Apple. Quanta also makes laptops for pretty much every other laptop brand out there, so no, Apple doesn't have a monopoly on quality. I always tell buyers that about the only thing the brand name tells you is what sort of aftermarket support you'll get.
This is exactly why I tell people not to buy Apple. My work Dell has a melt down, they send me a replacement, I swap the disk and send back the dead one. A Mac has a meltdown and I have to go to an apple store and wait for them to deign to see me.
What Apple figured out is the Gucci effect. If you develop a strong brand name, people will pay extra to buy it regardless of features or quality.
Exactly, Apple is a brand. Nothing more, nothing less. If Apple's were priced the same as Dells, and Dell is not a cheap computer brand here in the UK, the Apple would be considered a vastly inferior product.
Now I do own an Asus as a personal laptop. Its got the same spec as the same year MBP except it only cost £750 instead of £:2,600. If anyone is looking for a personal laptop, I couldn't recommend Asus highly enough. My last Asus is still going, the only reason I replaced it was the fact it couldn't run modern games any more (and really, no brand can future proof when it comes to gaming). Maybe not as a work machine as they lack the conveniences of a Dell or Lenovo, like a docking port.
Borders are interesting, and not as fixed as people want to think.
The United States is a country, but each State is a State. for EU it isn't a country but a Union, which contains a bunch of countries which are most a single state.
The United Kingdom is a bunch of countries as well.
You had me up until here.
The EU is a proper union of disparate states that agree to co-operate under common rules for trade, human rights, et al. including a system of justice for cross border cases.
The UK is a singular political entity under a with a unified parliament. The individual countries in the UK are more akin to the individual states in the US. They have varying degrees of legislative power but rarely can overrule the parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Someone living in Scotland votes for both the Scottish parliament and the UK parliament. Only a few places like the Isle of Man are independent of the UK parliament.
The UK and EU are very different as governing bodies.
It is also pathetic that FPS no longer ship with map editors. Worse, DLCs only come with ~3 maps. Hell, even Age of Empires 2, a 19 year old game STILL has new maps being made. e.g. The "Nothing" theme is currently popular.
For a long time, 3D maps were insanely complex to produce, far beyond that of the average gamer. Also tools to make them were expensive and proprietary.
However with many games being open world build-em-ups a la Minecraft, the tools to make custom maps are now the game itself. The biggest problem is that engines are not quite up to snuff.
And then game devs wonder why no one plays their game after 5 years./sarcasm But ooh, shiny!
For game publishers, this is a feature, not a bug. They don't want you playing Call of Snorefare 432 which was released six months ago when they've reskinned it and released it as Call of Snorefare 433.
Its little wonder most of the games I play these days are Indie or small publishers. I used to love Battlefield (1942, 2) but after BF3 became a grind fest, I completely lost interest.
Honestly, I've never bought a newspaper in my adult life and I'm near to pushing 40... Almost all of the same content can be found online without the 24 hour time delay. The problem traditional print media has with this isn't losing out on the $1.50 they used to get but the huge advertising revenue from a near captive audience. Online advertising doesn't generate the same revenue.
Add to that the fact that most commercial papers are now just mouthpieces for their chosen political parties, its little wonder they've lost all trust amongst the general public and they are only kept alive by subscribers who are actively trying to avoid reading news that conflicts with their warped world view... Which is why papers like the Daily Mail are losing readership the slowest.
Escuse me but fuck you I just paid $25k in property taxes for a 3br, 2 bath house. The schools nearby are mediocre at best on a good day.
I have met my daughters teachers. Paying them even more than the 6 figures they make now.
Protip: when you lie on the internet, make your lies believable.
Teachers make nowhere near six figures (which is 100,000). I'll also call bollocks on the property taxes thing. I doubt you even earn $25K per year given how little clue you've got about what teachers earn.
This is a nine-passenger aircraft. No matter how cheap it is, it can't replace a common turboprop commuter aircraft like the Q400, which seats 80-90 people.
Correct. This is an alternative to aircraft like the Beechcraft Superking which is most notable as a commercial island hopper.
Point you are missing is that a CHEAP smaller plane may be economic with small passenger numbers.
Conventional planes need higher passenger numbers to break even and I know here (Oz) those rural destinations really hurt because of that.
Small capacity propeller driven aircraft are used a lot for short island hops, in places like Nauru and other pacific islands or the Channel islands here in the UK. I think the distances in Australia would severely limit a plane with a 650 mile range (1200 KM) however a short hop to Guernsey from Southampton would be ideal. However I'm sceptical about the numbers. They're probably fudging the $200 p/h operating costs by omitting costs that all aircraft have like insurance and some maintenance items.
Why doesn't the car turn off when the key is no longer "close" to it?
Safety.
Say your Key Fob breaks or stops responding on the motorway whilst you're doing 80. The last thing you want is for the car to decide to shut itself down whilst Andrew Audi is millimetres from your tailpipe at those speeds. When the car shuts down you lose power steering and braking.
The issue here is that many manufacturers are pushing button-less entry. This means that you don't need to press the unlock button to enter the car or disable it's immobiliser. You only need the transponder to be close to the car. The safety "feature" is that it only works over a few metres... Which as anyone who knows anything about information security will figure out in 10 seconds flat, is no security at all.
This is why I didn't opt for this option on my BMW.
You know, socialism and fascism are not actually mutually exclusive in practice.
And yet, so many socialist countries manage to own the means of production AND manage to pull the fascism hat out of their ass all at the same time. East Germany to Venezuela...some things never change.
The common trait you're looking for isn't fascism, it's authoritarianism.
Fascism is far right authoritarianism.
Communism is far left authoritarianism.
Fascism is a government based on ultra-nationalism, it simply needs authoritarianism to achieve this (read: to silence and suppress their opposition).
i have two Bialetti Moka pots, a French press and two stove top percolators, one percolator is over 50 years old its a Revereware with a copper bottom,
I love good coffee, however coffee shouldn't be bitter.
America does so many culinary items quite well, however coffee is one of the few failures because it's brewed to be extremely bitter. It completely ruins the flavour of the coffee.
Coffee in the UK or Australia is vastly more drinkable and flavoursome and rarely bitter.
I've got a Gaggia espresso maker and Aeropress for work. I use quality coffee, my favourite is imported from Antioquia, Colombia but at a pinch M&S beans will suffice. Its the quality of the beans that matters.
Not so different that it would legally allow police to sell that information collected. That would be a gross invasion of privacy by law pretty much police are only allowed to collect and present to the courts only, information collected during their duties, other than that, the law pretty much requires they SHUT THE FUCK UP. I really think some police forces need, like unruly guard dogs, taught their place. Honestly those who allowed should be prosecuted where possible and where not, most definitely fired for betrayal of the public trust.
Where I come from, police are put under extra scrutiny, far more so than the ordinary public because they are granted extra ordinary powers over the general public. Even covering up a few parking tickets has cost police commissioners their entire careers.
We have, in my country, a process called a "royal commission". It's got nothing to do with the Queen, but it is an ad-hoc and very high level public inquiry into serious matters. The most famous one would be the Royal Commission into New South Wales police service.
Corruption in law enforcement is something we take very seriously in Australia and the UK and I've always been a bit bemused as to why the US permits such corrupt forces to operate.
Just like taxes on Gasoline, Cigarettes, Alcohol and Gambling. This is just an other Sin tax
Petrol is a sin? When did this happen. I cant remember the part of the bible that said, "Thou shalt not engineer the combustion of internals".
The word you're looking for is "soft target". Gamers will not garner any sympathy from the majority, same as smokers, drinkers, gamblers and drivers. This makes it a soft target, not a sin.
Sin taxes refer explicitly to vices, drinking, smoking, gambling, pornography and the like.
The thing is, going after soft targets almost never gets as much cash as they hope for, in fact they rarely generate enough money to justify their existence like the "soft drink tax" here in the UK.
Sound like a smart and potentially effective programm to Kickstart local economy to me. If digital natives are what you're looking for this could work way better than throwing obscene amounts of tax cuts in Amazons direction.
Someone has been thinking outside of the box. That alone makes this program and it's proposal intriguing.
If I were an USian, I'd check this out.
Honestly sounds like the worst idea to try to kick start an industry. Bribe people to move there, when the bribes dry up, they'll move somewhere else.
Australia tried to prop up an unprofitable car industry this way. For decades and hundreds of billions of state funding were thrown at them without any regard. However as soon as the gravy taps were tightened even a little bit, Ford and GM Holden picked up sticks and left.
If Tulsa wants people to move there, provide the infrastructure. Better public services, decent education, things people want in a new home. Hell, just making sure there is affordable and fast internet will get interest from tech companies.
If this is mostly happening via the old magnetic strip than what does the chip even have to do with this story?
If you can intercept the conversation between the EMV chip and the terminal, you can skim enough information to produce a counterfeit mag stripe that will work. That's actually a long-standing vulnerability in the EMV system.
There was supposedly a fix which involved programming different ICCV codes on the chip and in the mag stripe, but that fix depends on the card provisioners to implement. This is typical of security debacles: a fundamental weakness in the system isn't really fixed by a band-aid that requires everyone to do the right thing.
Not sure why you're going on about card cloning... Hardly anyone clones cards any more as they're too easy to trace and there are far better uses for card details.
The article said "compromised", not "cloned" so likely the card numbers are being used to make online transactions as all you need for that are your card number, cardholder name and expiry date (CVV/CVC is optional, not using it just attracts higher merchant fees and it's like criminals care about that with someone else's money). Dumb criminals try ordering a new TV, smart, organised criminals do $5 transactions across tens of thousands of card numbers to a fraudulent merchant account, pocketing the $4.50 they get after fees. Low dollar transactions are less likely to be noticed by cardholders and more likely to be ignored by banks/credit processors.
If you want to fix that, we need to start using 2FA for online transactions, but that'll never happen as banks will miss out on too many fees as people start to use other payment options.
Here's the thing -- by allowing the Russians to take over Eastern Europe in 1945, the US created that particular mess. The US should have stuck to their guns in 1945 and required truly free elections in all of the countries concerned. We had nuclear weapons. Stalin did not.
Actually, at the end of WWII... No-one had nuclear weapons.
The US used both of its finished bombs on Japan and weren't in a position to mass manufacture more, let alone deliver them to Moscow... And Stalin bloody well knew it thanks to spies at Los Alamos. Hell, if the US had half decent counter intelligence, the Soviet nuclear program would have been put back decades, if it even managed to produce a bomb at all.
However what Stalin did have was the largest army in the world and he did hold all of eastern Europe. Its not like the war weary allies could have challenged the Soviets and it would have harmed us to no end as we'd agreed on the split of Europe before the war even ended at the Yalta Conference. Going back on our word would have done more harm than all the Soviet tanks in existence.
The Allies really didn't need to do anything to counter the Soviets, whilst western Europe rebuilt, Stalin spent increasing amounts on military expenditure at the expense of civilian infrastructure. Whilst the western quality of life improved, the soviet quality of life diminished, the demise of the Soviet union was something that really happened between 1945 and 1960, it just took another 30 years for the dominoes to finish falling.
This being said, the stereotype of Eastern Europe being a mecca for fraud, corruption, and nothing else, is a bit of an outdated trope. Poland's economy is booming, though their politics are a bit shameful right now. Countries like Estonia have actually set themselves up as tech hubs right now, legit businesses and startups.
Much of Eastern Europe is still a shithole, Poland and a few others have done extremely well in pulling themselves out of it but Romaina, Bulgaria and Russia itself remain havens for organised criminals. I don't see Russia changing for a while, the criminals are effectively embedded in the government.
Poland has spent the last 30 years transitioning to a western country, their big problem right now is transitioning to a developed economy. They got big by being cheap, skilled labour. They cant continue to improve quality of life without changing that.
Yes we are all aware of VM's and use them whenever appropriate. The problem with VM's is that they don't have direct access to the underlying hardware which means that you can't use them for applications requiring low level access to the Network Card or the GPU.
Which makes a VM the perfect place for 95% of your applications.
Very few applications now will benefit from running directly on tin, and most are very specialised.
I don't even baulk at running SQL servers in VM's any more. Hypervisors losses are negligible and as long as you've got fast storage to host it on, you'll never see any issues.
If you do need to run your application on tin, you've got plenty of options besides a Mac. I bought an Asus in 2016 that had the same spec's as a Macbook Pro. The only differences were:
1. I could upgrade my own hardware (came with 8GB of RAM, I upped that to 12).
2. It cost £750 not £2,600.
I dual boot Windows and Linux, Linux Mint installed without an issue.
Checking signatures is worthless anyway, real peoples signatures never look exactly the same whereas a criminal can easily copy what he sees on the back of the card, or in the case of cloning the cards he can just sign the cloned card himself and thats what the merchant will compare against.
At least with a pin, the pin is either correct or not, and not displayed on the card itself.
Pin is safer, but it's all quite academic really. The majority of fraud uses neither the PIN or a signature. Card cloning has become very rare because it's difficult to do and if you've got the card number, expiry date and name... Utterly redundant.
The majority of card fraud is done via online purchases which only require the card number, cardholders name and expiry date (CVC/CVV verification is optional). The dumb criminals try buying big ticket items like TV's, the smart, organised ones simply make $5 purchases to front businesses they own. If you've got 10,000 card details, if only 3% work you've just netted $1,500 from a script that took a few minutes to run. Again, the organised criminals will randomise cards so you're not sending 10,000 transactions to the same bank. $5 is below the fraud detection level so if the cardholder doesn't notice, they can do it again in another month or two.
To combat this we're relying on banks blacklisting known bad merchants and detect new fraudulent merchants before they make too many transactions. It's not hard to set up a new merchant account, especially in a country where laws are "selectively enforced" (I.E. you can pay the copper to look the other way). As anyone who's managed an email server knows, blacklists suck.
The US opted for chip+signature, rather than chip+PIN like the rest of the world. Since no one ever checks signatures properly, stolen cards can easily be used for fraud in the US, without needing to shoulder surf for a PIN first.
This.
The huge advantage in EMV is that I can travel to most countries and my card simply works. Thailand, Japan, Germany, Colombia, South Africa, France, Turkey, Greece, Brazil... Pretty much everywhere except the United States where a lot of petrol stations refuse to accept foreign cards because they do not support EMV.
EMV isn't designed to protect against the kind of fraud that is commonplace now, that is the wholesale theft of card details, the number, expiry date and name printed on the front of every card because this is the information that is used in card fraud. This doesn't mean EMV is a failure, EMV is doing what it's meant to and means that anywhere I go, I can simply use my cards as if I were at home... except in the US.
Most card numbers are stolen online, either through infected PC's or by stealing them wholesale from merchant sites. First step in combating this is to make it illegal for merchants to store card data.
The introduction of contractless payments is only accelerating the kind of fraud that is commonplace now as both Visa and Mastercard's implementation simply sends out your card number, name and expiry date in encryption so weak, it may as well be clear text to any device that asks for it. The device asking for it doesn't need to make a transaction immediately, it can simply store the information for later use. Even with a short range of less than 50 cm, imagine how many unique card numbers you'll get walking through a shopping centre or high street on a normal day. Not like anyone is going to pay any attention to some random guy with a handheld device, put a high-visibilty jacket on and you are pretty much invisible.
To stop the kind of fraud that is commonplace now we need to implement 2FA, any form of 2FA as long as we have a second factor of authentication. However this will never happen as it will discourage people from using their credit cards which means the banks will miss out on the percentage they're scraping off every transaction. Right now the cost of fraud pales in comparison to the risk of losing just a portion of that revenue stream. Also we'd need to change contactless to use a rolling code not based on your card number but this means the card has to be an active device which would discourage their use as many people won't be bothered to keep their credit card charged, so again, wont happen.
So combating card fraud is easy, however because there's more money being made by not doing these things than it currently costs to simply adsorb the cost of fraud, we'll continue to have to bear the cost and inconvenience of card fraud.
Motorbikes do that too, but motorbikes follow the road rules...
The article claims bikes were faster than motorbikes, and the lack of following rules is about the only differentiator in london - motorbikes are allowed in cycle/bus lanes, and motorbikes can generally accelerate much faster than a bike.
The article is basically an add for Deliveroo, so I'd call their data into question. It was probably in somewhere like London set during peak hour, which is something that is always going to favour anyone on two wheels who can go off-road.
Most smartphone apps like Strava lie about speed and times in order to keep people using the app. Cyclists want to think they're going faster than they really are, I once tried it when walking, it gave me incorrect measurements on both distance and speed compared to google maps (distance) and my phone's clock (which is updated over the internet). My actual walking speed was almost a full KPH under what Strava said I did.
I live outside of London. My average speed to work is 26.7 mph and the average cyclist can only go about 10 MPH I'm seriously doubting the article.
How is your Napoleon complex faring? Sounds like you skipped your meds today....
You can laugh now, but someday I will dance on your grave: short men live longer.... and you will pay more for your extra-long coffin. Enjoy the legroom.
The odd thing about Napoleon is that he wasn't that short. He was actually tall for the day at 5'7 which was actually slightly taller than most people at the time. The idea of Napoleon Bonaparte being diminutive came from British wartime propaganda where he was depicted as being short and monkey-like. Comparatively, Lord Horatio Nelson his British naval adversary was 5'4 but the Duke of Wellington, who commanded the British army during the Napoleonic wars towered over most people at 5'11.
So Napoleon wasn't short at all, he was in fact, slightly tall for a Frenchman.
Telstra has the same reputation as Comcast, Century Link, etc. IOW, they are a junk company. While Tesla has issues, they continually address them, and make things better. The Customer Service that we have had at Littleton (and denver's) service center has blown away what my wife got from Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Honda, and Toyota. The thought of cvustomer service becoming WORSE than these is bothersome.
As an Australian, I can say Telstra got better. The big problem where they really were as bad as Comcast, et al. was during the 2000's where they thought they could still operate as a monopoly (Telstra was the privatised remnant of the public Telecom Australia which was taken private in the 90's when the market was opened up to competition). This was when they were headed by then CEO Sol Trujillo who pretty much ran the company as his own private fiefdom.
After Trujillo was ousted, David Theody took the helm in 2009 and completely turned the company around getting rid of the idea that Telstra was still a monopoly and customers were still beholden to them. Telstra are still the most expensive telco, but their customer service far exceeds other large telcos (Optus and Vodafone) as does their coverage.
Reigns - what that German woman with the gold hat does.
Reins - things for steering a horse.
Rains - what it does in Manchester all the sodding time.
There are minerals smarter than some folk.
If you want to be a smart arse, at least be a correct one. "Reign" has an English definition.
Reign - hold royal office; rule as monarch.
Given how Musk controlled the company, that definition could easily fit.
Reign originated from the Latin, Regnum, hence a lot of western languages used similar words for king (rey/reina in Spanish, roi in French, rex in old French/English). Seriously, if you're going to be an arsehole... I mean English language pedant at least get it right.
Any lexical or grammatical mistakes in the above post, intentional or otherwise are entire designed to annoy grammar Nazi's.
Did you mean Telstra or Tesla? This could get really confusing.
Easy to tell the difference, one is a large company producing inferior products to people who refuse to shop anywhere else... Oh wait, I haven't thought this through (not true, Telstra has become a competitive and reliable service provider since Sol Trujillo was outsted, maybe Denholm can turn it around for Tesla)
Don't worry, with all the M&A going on in the US, soon we'll just have ONE media conglomerate, and it'll be $129/mo. + tax + fees for the privilege of accessing their stuff. Required Internet connection sold separately, additional data rates WILL apply, offer void in Your State.
For those of us not on FinanceDot... M&A means "Mergers and Acquisitions". Post was spot on though.
Slashdot Mirror
The Macbooks are (currently) made by Quanta. They're an ODM - original design manufacturer. That's like an OEM, except they also design the product. They're the ones who came up with such innovations like hogging a unibody laptop chassis out of a single solid piece of aluminum, not Apple. Slashdot had an article describing how they bought the CNC milling machinery, were playing around with hogging out aluminum billets, and pitched the idea to Apple. Quanta also makes laptops for pretty much every other laptop brand out there, so no, Apple doesn't have a monopoly on quality.
I always tell buyers that about the only thing the brand name tells you is what sort of aftermarket support you'll get.
This is exactly why I tell people not to buy Apple. My work Dell has a melt down, they send me a replacement, I swap the disk and send back the dead one. A Mac has a meltdown and I have to go to an apple store and wait for them to deign to see me.
What Apple figured out is the Gucci effect. If you develop a strong brand name, people will pay extra to buy it regardless of features or quality.
Exactly, Apple is a brand. Nothing more, nothing less. If Apple's were priced the same as Dells, and Dell is not a cheap computer brand here in the UK, the Apple would be considered a vastly inferior product.
Now I do own an Asus as a personal laptop. Its got the same spec as the same year MBP except it only cost £750 instead of £:2,600. If anyone is looking for a personal laptop, I couldn't recommend Asus highly enough. My last Asus is still going, the only reason I replaced it was the fact it couldn't run modern games any more (and really, no brand can future proof when it comes to gaming). Maybe not as a work machine as they lack the conveniences of a Dell or Lenovo, like a docking port.
Borders are interesting, and not as fixed as people want to think.
The United States is a country, but each State is a State. for EU it isn't a country but a Union, which contains a bunch of countries which are most a single state.
The United Kingdom is a bunch of countries as well.
You had me up until here.
The EU is a proper union of disparate states that agree to co-operate under common rules for trade, human rights, et al. including a system of justice for cross border cases.
The UK is a singular political entity under a with a unified parliament. The individual countries in the UK are more akin to the individual states in the US. They have varying degrees of legislative power but rarely can overrule the parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Someone living in Scotland votes for both the Scottish parliament and the UK parliament. Only a few places like the Isle of Man are independent of the UK parliament.
The UK and EU are very different as governing bodies.
It is also pathetic that FPS no longer ship with map editors. Worse, DLCs only come with ~3 maps. Hell, even Age of Empires 2, a 19 year old game STILL has new maps being made. e.g. The "Nothing" theme is currently popular.
For a long time, 3D maps were insanely complex to produce, far beyond that of the average gamer. Also tools to make them were expensive and proprietary.
However with many games being open world build-em-ups a la Minecraft, the tools to make custom maps are now the game itself. The biggest problem is that engines are not quite up to snuff.
And then game devs wonder why no one plays their game after 5 years. /sarcasm But ooh, shiny!
For game publishers, this is a feature, not a bug. They don't want you playing Call of Snorefare 432 which was released six months ago when they've reskinned it and released it as Call of Snorefare 433.
Its little wonder most of the games I play these days are Indie or small publishers. I used to love Battlefield (1942, 2) but after BF3 became a grind fest, I completely lost interest.
Honestly, I've never bought a newspaper in my adult life and I'm near to pushing 40... Almost all of the same content can be found online without the 24 hour time delay. The problem traditional print media has with this isn't losing out on the $1.50 they used to get but the huge advertising revenue from a near captive audience. Online advertising doesn't generate the same revenue.
Add to that the fact that most commercial papers are now just mouthpieces for their chosen political parties, its little wonder they've lost all trust amongst the general public and they are only kept alive by subscribers who are actively trying to avoid reading news that conflicts with their warped world view... Which is why papers like the Daily Mail are losing readership the slowest.
Escuse me but fuck you I just paid $25k in property taxes for a 3br, 2 bath house. The schools nearby are mediocre at best on a good day.
I have met my daughters teachers. Paying them even more than the 6 figures they make now .
Protip: when you lie on the internet, make your lies believable.
Teachers make nowhere near six figures (which is 100,000). I'll also call bollocks on the property taxes thing. I doubt you even earn $25K per year given how little clue you've got about what teachers earn.
This is a nine-passenger aircraft. No matter how cheap it is, it can't replace a common turboprop commuter aircraft like the Q400, which seats 80-90 people.
Correct. This is an alternative to aircraft like the Beechcraft Superking which is most notable as a commercial island hopper.
Point you are missing is that a CHEAP smaller plane may be economic with small passenger numbers.
Conventional planes need higher passenger numbers to break even and I know here (Oz) those rural destinations really hurt because of that.
Small capacity propeller driven aircraft are used a lot for short island hops, in places like Nauru and other pacific islands or the Channel islands here in the UK. I think the distances in Australia would severely limit a plane with a 650 mile range (1200 KM) however a short hop to Guernsey from Southampton would be ideal. However I'm sceptical about the numbers. They're probably fudging the $200 p/h operating costs by omitting costs that all aircraft have like insurance and some maintenance items.
Why doesn't the car turn off when the key is no longer "close" to it?
Safety.
Say your Key Fob breaks or stops responding on the motorway whilst you're doing 80. The last thing you want is for the car to decide to shut itself down whilst Andrew Audi is millimetres from your tailpipe at those speeds. When the car shuts down you lose power steering and braking.
The issue here is that many manufacturers are pushing button-less entry. This means that you don't need to press the unlock button to enter the car or disable it's immobiliser. You only need the transponder to be close to the car. The safety "feature" is that it only works over a few metres... Which as anyone who knows anything about information security will figure out in 10 seconds flat, is no security at all.
This is why I didn't opt for this option on my BMW.
You know, socialism and fascism are not actually mutually exclusive in practice.
And yet, so many socialist countries manage to own the means of production AND manage to pull the fascism hat out of their ass all at the same time. East Germany to Venezuela...some things never change.
The common trait you're looking for isn't fascism, it's authoritarianism.
Fascism is far right authoritarianism.
Communism is far left authoritarianism.
Fascism is a government based on ultra-nationalism, it simply needs authoritarianism to achieve this (read: to silence and suppress their opposition).
i have two Bialetti Moka pots, a French press and two stove top percolators, one percolator is over 50 years old its a Revereware with a copper bottom,
I love good coffee, however coffee shouldn't be bitter.
America does so many culinary items quite well, however coffee is one of the few failures because it's brewed to be extremely bitter. It completely ruins the flavour of the coffee.
Coffee in the UK or Australia is vastly more drinkable and flavoursome and rarely bitter.
I've got a Gaggia espresso maker and Aeropress for work. I use quality coffee, my favourite is imported from Antioquia, Colombia but at a pinch M&S beans will suffice. Its the quality of the beans that matters.
Not so different that it would legally allow police to sell that information collected. That would be a gross invasion of privacy by law pretty much police are only allowed to collect and present to the courts only, information collected during their duties, other than that, the law pretty much requires they SHUT THE FUCK UP. I really think some police forces need, like unruly guard dogs, taught their place. Honestly those who allowed should be prosecuted where possible and where not, most definitely fired for betrayal of the public trust.
Where I come from, police are put under extra scrutiny, far more so than the ordinary public because they are granted extra ordinary powers over the general public. Even covering up a few parking tickets has cost police commissioners their entire careers.
We have, in my country, a process called a "royal commission". It's got nothing to do with the Queen, but it is an ad-hoc and very high level public inquiry into serious matters. The most famous one would be the Royal Commission into New South Wales police service.
Corruption in law enforcement is something we take very seriously in Australia and the UK and I've always been a bit bemused as to why the US permits such corrupt forces to operate.
Is microsoft a bacteria or a virus? /s
Parasite.
Just like taxes on Gasoline, Cigarettes, Alcohol and Gambling. This is just an other Sin tax
Petrol is a sin? When did this happen. I cant remember the part of the bible that said, "Thou shalt not engineer the combustion of internals".
The word you're looking for is "soft target". Gamers will not garner any sympathy from the majority, same as smokers, drinkers, gamblers and drivers. This makes it a soft target, not a sin.
Sin taxes refer explicitly to vices, drinking, smoking, gambling, pornography and the like.
The thing is, going after soft targets almost never gets as much cash as they hope for, in fact they rarely generate enough money to justify their existence like the "soft drink tax" here in the UK.
Sound like a smart and potentially effective programm to Kickstart local economy to me. If digital natives are what you're looking for this could work way better than throwing obscene amounts of tax cuts in Amazons direction.
Someone has been thinking outside of the box. That alone makes this program and it's proposal intriguing.
If I were an USian, I'd check this out.
Honestly sounds like the worst idea to try to kick start an industry. Bribe people to move there, when the bribes dry up, they'll move somewhere else.
Australia tried to prop up an unprofitable car industry this way. For decades and hundreds of billions of state funding were thrown at them without any regard. However as soon as the gravy taps were tightened even a little bit, Ford and GM Holden picked up sticks and left.
If Tulsa wants people to move there, provide the infrastructure. Better public services, decent education, things people want in a new home. Hell, just making sure there is affordable and fast internet will get interest from tech companies.
If this is mostly happening via the old magnetic strip than what does the chip even have to do with this story?
If you can intercept the conversation between the EMV chip and the terminal, you can skim enough information to produce a counterfeit mag stripe that will work. That's actually a long-standing vulnerability in the EMV system.
There was supposedly a fix which involved programming different ICCV codes on the chip and in the mag stripe, but that fix depends on the card provisioners to implement. This is typical of security debacles: a fundamental weakness in the system isn't really fixed by a band-aid that requires everyone to do the right thing.
Not sure why you're going on about card cloning... Hardly anyone clones cards any more as they're too easy to trace and there are far better uses for card details.
The article said "compromised", not "cloned" so likely the card numbers are being used to make online transactions as all you need for that are your card number, cardholder name and expiry date (CVV/CVC is optional, not using it just attracts higher merchant fees and it's like criminals care about that with someone else's money). Dumb criminals try ordering a new TV, smart, organised criminals do $5 transactions across tens of thousands of card numbers to a fraudulent merchant account, pocketing the $4.50 they get after fees. Low dollar transactions are less likely to be noticed by cardholders and more likely to be ignored by banks/credit processors.
If you want to fix that, we need to start using 2FA for online transactions, but that'll never happen as banks will miss out on too many fees as people start to use other payment options.
Here's the thing -- by allowing the Russians to take over Eastern Europe in 1945, the US created that particular mess. The US should have stuck to their guns in 1945 and required truly free elections in all of the countries concerned. We had nuclear weapons. Stalin did not.
Actually, at the end of WWII... No-one had nuclear weapons. The US used both of its finished bombs on Japan and weren't in a position to mass manufacture more, let alone deliver them to Moscow... And Stalin bloody well knew it thanks to spies at Los Alamos. Hell, if the US had half decent counter intelligence, the Soviet nuclear program would have been put back decades, if it even managed to produce a bomb at all.
However what Stalin did have was the largest army in the world and he did hold all of eastern Europe. Its not like the war weary allies could have challenged the Soviets and it would have harmed us to no end as we'd agreed on the split of Europe before the war even ended at the Yalta Conference. Going back on our word would have done more harm than all the Soviet tanks in existence.
The Allies really didn't need to do anything to counter the Soviets, whilst western Europe rebuilt, Stalin spent increasing amounts on military expenditure at the expense of civilian infrastructure. Whilst the western quality of life improved, the soviet quality of life diminished, the demise of the Soviet union was something that really happened between 1945 and 1960, it just took another 30 years for the dominoes to finish falling.
This being said, the stereotype of Eastern Europe being a mecca for fraud, corruption, and nothing else, is a bit of an outdated trope. Poland's economy is booming, though their politics are a bit shameful right now. Countries like Estonia have actually set themselves up as tech hubs right now, legit businesses and startups.
Much of Eastern Europe is still a shithole, Poland and a few others have done extremely well in pulling themselves out of it but Romaina, Bulgaria and Russia itself remain havens for organised criminals. I don't see Russia changing for a while, the criminals are effectively embedded in the government. Poland has spent the last 30 years transitioning to a western country, their big problem right now is transitioning to a developed economy. They got big by being cheap, skilled labour. They cant continue to improve quality of life without changing that.
Yes we are all aware of VM's and use them whenever appropriate. The problem with VM's is that they don't have direct access to the underlying hardware which means that you can't use them for applications requiring low level access to the Network Card or the GPU.
Which makes a VM the perfect place for 95% of your applications.
Very few applications now will benefit from running directly on tin, and most are very specialised.
I don't even baulk at running SQL servers in VM's any more. Hypervisors losses are negligible and as long as you've got fast storage to host it on, you'll never see any issues.
If you do need to run your application on tin, you've got plenty of options besides a Mac. I bought an Asus in 2016 that had the same spec's as a Macbook Pro. The only differences were:
1. I could upgrade my own hardware (came with 8GB of RAM, I upped that to 12).
2. It cost £750 not £2,600.
I dual boot Windows and Linux, Linux Mint installed without an issue.
Checking signatures is worthless anyway, real peoples signatures never look exactly the same whereas a criminal can easily copy what he sees on the back of the card, or in the case of cloning the cards he can just sign the cloned card himself and thats what the merchant will compare against.
At least with a pin, the pin is either correct or not, and not displayed on the card itself.
Pin is safer, but it's all quite academic really. The majority of fraud uses neither the PIN or a signature. Card cloning has become very rare because it's difficult to do and if you've got the card number, expiry date and name... Utterly redundant.
The majority of card fraud is done via online purchases which only require the card number, cardholders name and expiry date (CVC/CVV verification is optional). The dumb criminals try buying big ticket items like TV's, the smart, organised ones simply make $5 purchases to front businesses they own. If you've got 10,000 card details, if only 3% work you've just netted $1,500 from a script that took a few minutes to run. Again, the organised criminals will randomise cards so you're not sending 10,000 transactions to the same bank. $5 is below the fraud detection level so if the cardholder doesn't notice, they can do it again in another month or two.
To combat this we're relying on banks blacklisting known bad merchants and detect new fraudulent merchants before they make too many transactions. It's not hard to set up a new merchant account, especially in a country where laws are "selectively enforced" (I.E. you can pay the copper to look the other way). As anyone who's managed an email server knows, blacklists suck.
The US opted for chip+signature, rather than chip+PIN like the rest of the world. Since no one ever checks signatures properly, stolen cards can easily be used for fraud in the US, without needing to shoulder surf for a PIN first.
This.
The huge advantage in EMV is that I can travel to most countries and my card simply works. Thailand, Japan, Germany, Colombia, South Africa, France, Turkey, Greece, Brazil... Pretty much everywhere except the United States where a lot of petrol stations refuse to accept foreign cards because they do not support EMV.
EMV isn't designed to protect against the kind of fraud that is commonplace now, that is the wholesale theft of card details, the number, expiry date and name printed on the front of every card because this is the information that is used in card fraud. This doesn't mean EMV is a failure, EMV is doing what it's meant to and means that anywhere I go, I can simply use my cards as if I were at home... except in the US.
Most card numbers are stolen online, either through infected PC's or by stealing them wholesale from merchant sites. First step in combating this is to make it illegal for merchants to store card data. The introduction of contractless payments is only accelerating the kind of fraud that is commonplace now as both Visa and Mastercard's implementation simply sends out your card number, name and expiry date in encryption so weak, it may as well be clear text to any device that asks for it. The device asking for it doesn't need to make a transaction immediately, it can simply store the information for later use. Even with a short range of less than 50 cm, imagine how many unique card numbers you'll get walking through a shopping centre or high street on a normal day. Not like anyone is going to pay any attention to some random guy with a handheld device, put a high-visibilty jacket on and you are pretty much invisible.
To stop the kind of fraud that is commonplace now we need to implement 2FA, any form of 2FA as long as we have a second factor of authentication. However this will never happen as it will discourage people from using their credit cards which means the banks will miss out on the percentage they're scraping off every transaction. Right now the cost of fraud pales in comparison to the risk of losing just a portion of that revenue stream. Also we'd need to change contactless to use a rolling code not based on your card number but this means the card has to be an active device which would discourage their use as many people won't be bothered to keep their credit card charged, so again, wont happen.
So combating card fraud is easy, however because there's more money being made by not doing these things than it currently costs to simply adsorb the cost of fraud, we'll continue to have to bear the cost and inconvenience of card fraud.
Motorbikes do that too, but motorbikes follow the road rules...
The article claims bikes were faster than motorbikes, and the lack of following rules is about the only differentiator in london - motorbikes are allowed in cycle/bus lanes, and motorbikes can generally accelerate much faster than a bike.
The article is basically an add for Deliveroo, so I'd call their data into question. It was probably in somewhere like London set during peak hour, which is something that is always going to favour anyone on two wheels who can go off-road.
Most smartphone apps like Strava lie about speed and times in order to keep people using the app. Cyclists want to think they're going faster than they really are, I once tried it when walking, it gave me incorrect measurements on both distance and speed compared to google maps (distance) and my phone's clock (which is updated over the internet). My actual walking speed was almost a full KPH under what Strava said I did.
I live outside of London. My average speed to work is 26.7 mph and the average cyclist can only go about 10 MPH I'm seriously doubting the article.
How is your Napoleon complex faring? Sounds like you skipped your meds today....
You can laugh now, but someday I will dance on your grave: short men live longer. ... and you will pay more for your extra-long coffin. Enjoy the legroom.
The odd thing about Napoleon is that he wasn't that short. He was actually tall for the day at 5'7 which was actually slightly taller than most people at the time. The idea of Napoleon Bonaparte being diminutive came from British wartime propaganda where he was depicted as being short and monkey-like. Comparatively, Lord Horatio Nelson his British naval adversary was 5'4 but the Duke of Wellington, who commanded the British army during the Napoleonic wars towered over most people at 5'11.
So Napoleon wasn't short at all, he was in fact, slightly tall for a Frenchman.
Telstra has the same reputation as Comcast, Century Link, etc. IOW, they are a junk company. While Tesla has issues, they continually address them, and make things better. The Customer Service that we have had at Littleton (and denver's) service center has blown away what my wife got from Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Honda, and Toyota. The thought of cvustomer service becoming WORSE than these is bothersome.
As an Australian, I can say Telstra got better. The big problem where they really were as bad as Comcast, et al. was during the 2000's where they thought they could still operate as a monopoly (Telstra was the privatised remnant of the public Telecom Australia which was taken private in the 90's when the market was opened up to competition). This was when they were headed by then CEO Sol Trujillo who pretty much ran the company as his own private fiefdom.
After Trujillo was ousted, David Theody took the helm in 2009 and completely turned the company around getting rid of the idea that Telstra was still a monopoly and customers were still beholden to them. Telstra are still the most expensive telco, but their customer service far exceeds other large telcos (Optus and Vodafone) as does their coverage.
Reigns - what that German woman with the gold hat does.
Reins - things for steering a horse.
Rains - what it does in Manchester all the sodding time.
There are minerals smarter than some folk.
If you want to be a smart arse, at least be a correct one. "Reign" has an English definition.
Reign - hold royal office; rule as monarch.
Given how Musk controlled the company, that definition could easily fit.
Reign originated from the Latin, Regnum, hence a lot of western languages used similar words for king (rey/reina in Spanish, roi in French, rex in old French/English). Seriously, if you're going to be an arsehole... I mean English language pedant at least get it right.
Any lexical or grammatical mistakes in the above post, intentional or otherwise are entire designed to annoy grammar Nazi's.
Telsa
Did you mean Telstra or Tesla? This could get really confusing.
Easy to tell the difference, one is a large company producing inferior products to people who refuse to shop anywhere else... Oh wait, I haven't thought this through (not true, Telstra has become a competitive and reliable service provider since Sol Trujillo was outsted, maybe Denholm can turn it around for Tesla)
Don't worry, with all the M&A going on in the US, soon we'll just have ONE media conglomerate, and it'll be $129/mo. + tax + fees for the privilege of accessing their stuff. Required Internet connection sold separately, additional data rates WILL apply, offer void in Your State.
For those of us not on FinanceDot... M&A means "Mergers and Acquisitions". Post was spot on though.