drzaiusapelord

>$43,905

In IL we get the $7500 tax break and a $2500 break for state taxes. My real world price is closer to $33k. All EV makers are better on tax breaks to make their cars look affordable.

Also its odd for someone shopping for an SUV to settle for a pickup. They're an entirely different class of car that appeal to different market needs. I could never get away with a pickup. Its not an option.

I once got into a shouting match at the dealership over warranty engine issues for my Jeep. I've had similar experiences with Ford as well. So we have GM, Chrysler, and Ford all with horror stories. I'm sure buyers of foreign cars have the same stories to tell.

I recently test drove a Honda CRV and told the salesperson explicitly not to call me and that we're just test driving and comparing various models for a couple months. He not only sat us down with the 'hard sell' but literally called me every day for 2 months. Note his 'hard sell' was $300 off MSRP.

I feel the independent dealer system has largely failed us and they're all terrible and unfixable. If I end up buying a Tesla it will be less for the car and more for the lack of traditional dealer experiences. Or I end up buying a 3 year old car and enjoy the savings from massive depreciation.

The volt has 'unlimited' range. When the battery is exhausted, its ICE runs to power the electric engine. Volts get driven as hard as normal cars.

This is fairly predictable. With a hostile Trump administration towards Canada, we're losing influence with Canadians so they will continue to cozy up with Europe.

Not sure what Trump's endgame here is other than alienating once allies and economic partners. Trump went instantly to nuclear and Trudeau was forced to respond in kind. This is what happens when diplomacy is little more than namecalling and 'my way or the highway.' The USA isn't this unstoppable juggernaut everyone must bow down to and accept being bullied from. Europe, China, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Turkey, etc are all vying for influence and will take advantage of our every misstep. Europe certainly did today.

>and ran them into the ground.

They weren't doing too great at the time of purchase. I imagine this was another patent farm buyout and then sold, sans important patents, to someone else.

BD doesn't really have a product. There's nothing to sell. Even the military scoffs at these very noisy[1] and difficult to maintain robots, especially when they have a literal army of 18 year olds who don't mind carrying 40lbs packs into battle.

BD makes pretty demos and does good research but it can't be monetized, yet, if ever.

[1] https://qz.com/582991/the-us-marines-wont-be-using-googles-r...

Kyle Olson, a spokesperson for the Marines, told military.com on Dec. 22 that the noise the LS3’s gas-powered engine gave off was tactically rather unhelpful. “As Marines were using it, there was the challenge of seeing the potential possibility because of the limitations of the robot itself,” Olson said. “They took it as it was: a loud robot that’s going to give away their position.”

Well, that's the big issue isn't it? Pre-twitter, pre-out of control social media, etc a claim from a Jr level person like this would have been met with skepticism and gone through an academic filter that would has squashed it. Nowadays its all over the world before there's a sane response to it. Sadly, many who have memorized this little factoid will never see the rebuttal.

>It should go without saying that a single scholar’s un-peer-reviewed claim does not truth make.

What about a single scholar's un-peer reviewed rebuttal? One of the fun things of social media is that something like this goes viral and everyone says "see I knew it" and the skeptics get shot down for "you're not an academic" but then another academic is skeptical and then we're back to "see, see I knew it." I don't see a solution here buts an amusing pattern.

Not sure who the authority here is, if anyone. I imagine this is the kind of thing that will need to be debated and 'solved' at a later time, regardless if Prof Mulder's skepticism is correct. There could be more to this story that she doesn't know, for example, but I'm personally leaning towards her thesis, but I'm naturally skeptical so I'm fairly biased.

That's a good example. I guess there's other mitigation at work here. In my case if I'm in a public wifi area and connecting to my work PC then I'm using VPN to access smb. Smb just isn't open to the wifi attacker.

In a case that it is, its curious how you would inject data into a smb stream and not fail checksums from client-side chechking. Maybe its trivial to deal with this, not sure.

If the WPA2 protected wifi network is using AES, which is the most common in my experience, then they won't be able to inject any data. From the Krack website:

If the victim uses either the WPA-TKIP or GCMP encryption protocol, instead of AES-CCMP, the impact is especially catastrophic. Against these encryption protocols, nonce reuse enables an adversary to not only decrypt, but also to forge and inject packets.

Christ, what a mess of an accident. You'd think there would be a practical solution to this that didn't involve operators having to worry about each other behaving correctly. Like moving the airport or shipping lane somewhere else so they don't interfere. Or the tower handling this via automation like a laser bouncing across the waterline and triggering an alert if a boat is too close to the shore.

Have you developed a fear of flying over this? Curious about the long term aspects at play here. Who was found at fault here? I'm assuming the boat captain.

Ubiquity just released a patch for KRACK and soon others will I imagine. From a client perspective, same as always, wait for a patch from your OS vendor. edit: it seems this patch only handles modes where the AP is a client like a bridge or site-to-site. Its still a client-side fix and patching AP's used traditionally won't fix this.

In practice, everything of value should be going over TLS. If you're worried you should be using a VPN on untrusted networks. This attack, if I'm reading it right, doesn't do anything someone on your wlan or lan can't do right now via ARP poisoning and other attacks. So being on that work connection or restaurant wifi is almost the same risk level of this attack.

Someone made the argument that in the US our rails were built by men half killing themselves for low wages and with very few safety standards. That means a modern buildout is much more expensive than it was historically and the political will to build that budget is difficult or impossible.

Hyperloop is a run around that problem. Largely autonomous/low staffed boring that's non-union labor, non-public sector can make a lot of progress quickly. There's no public sector union demanding x amount of jobs, x amount of pensions, and other expensive regulations or union concessions. Musk's Boring Company thinks it can build tunnels for a fraction of the cost privately without much public sector regulatory weight and they might be right.

HSR is the saner idea, but without Congress funding it, its just not going to happen. Obama made a big push for it during the stimulus but more conservative states decided against accepting the money for both ideological and financial reasons. Once enough states say no, then the rail can't go very far, and the project eventually died:

First, Tea Party conservatives in Florida and wealthy liberal suburbanites in the Bay Area began questioning their states’ plans. Then, just as Joe Biden was calling for $53 billion in high-speed-rail spending over the next six years, a crop of freshly elected Republican governors turned down billions in federal money for lines in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida. Finally, Republicans in Congress zeroed out the federal high-speed rail budget last month.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technocracy/2011/12...

Musk has addressed this:

Similarly, the proposal briefly discusses thermal expansion: as the steel of the tubes heats in the hot California sun, the metal expands. That expansion needs somewhere to go. In high-speed railways, rails are allowed to overlap at the ends, but that’s not possible in the Hyperloop, and so Musk has a different solution:

“Specially designed slip joints at stations will be able to take any tube length variance due to thermal expansion,” he explained. “This is an ideal location for the thermal expansion joints as the speed is much lower nearby the stations. It thus allows the tube to be smooth and welded along the high speed gliding middle section.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/12/hyperloop...

I think the hand-wringing over expansion is a bit over the top right now. Seems like its a relatively solved problem and one the Hyperloop team is taking seriously. I imagine the cost of engineering and building giant slip joints is just part of the overall cost package and probably a non-trivial part. I find it hard to believe someone as relatively trustworthy and technical as Musk is selling this concept knowing full well its impossible.

Most likely, this is a solvable problem the same way many difficult problems were solved for cars, planes, and rails during their inception. I read an analysis somewhere that the Wright brothers solved 4 or 5 'hard' problems with their first plane. Their competitors at the time weren't able to solve even one. I'm not saying Hyperloop is guaranteed to work, but declaring it 100% impossible seems overly pessimistic.

My worry is a bit more prosaic, if we gain progressive leadership in congress, we may be looking at Euro-style high speed rail in many US regions, which would invalidate the hyperloop concept. This seems less likely, imo, but by far the saner move.

I just want to be able to right-click somewhere and have the system bring up a a simple FTPS or SFTP daemon and have it try UPnP to open a firewall/NAT transversal. This daemon would spin up just for the transfer then shut itself down once done.

Even if both parties are behind a firewall that won't respect UPnP, there's UDP hole punching which should usually work. Mozilla would just need to host a server to handle the port number handoffs.

I imagine this would handle 90% of the use cases. The rest would use traditional 3rd party hosting, IM transfers, email, etc.

Good point, but the 'net good' Jobs argument always feels a little hollow to me as he didn't live long enough to fight he later-life battles, namely destroying Android which he called a stolen work.

One of Cook's first significant acts was cutting back on the patent warfare between Apple and Google/Samsung. Jobs dying young saved us from this war, a war that would have damaged the smartphone and wearable market significantly.

The problems with Jobs is that he fought for his customers, which was nice if you're a customer, but if you're not, you're now a victim of Jobs. Why should Android buyers be assaulted by him? What did they do wrong other than buy into a more open-ish ecosystem? The patent system and courts are wholly corrupt and/or incompetent, so its not like there's a moral avenue for jobs to attack Android. Just everyday business sociopathy.

Worse, a lot of Jobsian logic has been tossed out the window recently. The whole "the human thumb is so long so smartphones must be 3.5" maximum" and a variety of other cargo-cult wisdom. The iphone and mac lines of today most likely would not have been possible with Jobs at the helm. iOS is more Android-like than ever and recent decisions with MacOS seem un-Jobsian to me.

I think Jobs died at the perfect time. Enough to bring in the mobile revolution but not long enough to run it into the ground over a scorched earth war with competitors. That doesn't exactly make him a great example of sociopathy for 'good' as much as it makes him a good example of dying relatively young.

The above also ignores unexcusable sins like fighting "poaching" from his competitors with a gentlemen's deal (enforced by the threat of patent lawsuits - again) which only kept engineer salaries lower than they should be.

What happens when the top guy is on the spectrum and over-rides these decisions? Part of the problem isn't just being on the spectrum but having someone in a position of power on the spectrum. You can have the best men and women at Facebook, but if Zuck is personally greenlighting these moves then it does no good.

As someone who worked in an environment like this, its very frustrating to see good judgment tossed out the window because the boss's ego or social blindness overrides all.

Worse, executive culture in the US is elitist culture. After a while, when you push 7 figures for years, fly your own plane, spend weekends on the yacht, have four homes, etc you just simply fall out of the mainstream and one's judgment on what is appropriate PR simply is off-kilter. Its funny how well we understand this with, say, royalty of old, but somehow our capitalistic 'royalty' get a free pass. Its the same human brain at work here be it today or 18th century versailles. People who are elevated to a certain point will simply become out of touch. Adding being on the spectrum to this only makes it worse.

>zuck overrided.

I really do wonder if Zuck is a functional sociopath, and not in a 'jokey' way but in a clinical fashion. Many of his top level decisions seem to show a complete lack of empathy and his reputation like calling Facebook users "dumb fucks" for trusting him, really seem to fit the bill. Perhaps we can excuse a lot of this for his relatively young age he found success at, or even just write him off as on the spectrum and tone-deaf as opposed to sociopathic, but its something to consider and worry about considering his vast influence.

Sadly, in the world of US executives, a certain level of sociopathy seems to be the norm. Or at least, learned pseudo-sociopathy (The Gervais Principle) [2]. There's many critical writings about what under-regulated capitalism leads to[1] and the type of people who end up the most successful in such environments, but I'm not sure if HN is the place to have this conversation considering its ultimately a forum for entrepreneurs. But there are pressing questions and ones I imagine that will be more important as income inequality and automation begin to eat the world.

[1]

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/11/sociopa...

[2]

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

>he Austrian government claimed that a safe return would be impossible without a specially designed case to protect it from the vibrations caused by flight.

The damage argument seems pretty self-serving. Even if there was damage during the flight, how much would happen and how much couldn't be repaired? I suspect anything done on a flight could be restored just fine.

There's definitely a ship of theseus aspect with artifacts. I imagine most of things of this class have been worked over many times. Adding another layer of damage and restoration to bring it back to its rightful home seems like a reasonable price.

Linux ate proprietary Unix, not Windows. Windows "servers" domination as listed by garner and others were tiny office NT4 domains back then, not internet facing websites and such. The web never really got dominated by MS and Unix and Linux always strangled MS in the cradle. Even stats by netcraft are misleading. Sure you'll see a lot of small business IIS crap and Exchange OWA, but that's no the web in general. The web has always been dominated by linux/Unix.

Ignoring batch processing, they're also keeping this information in case of fraud issues, refunds, customer tracking for marketing purposes, etc. Even with PCI compliance you can store card information. You only can't store the CCV number. If your storing methods uses easy to circumvent encryption, then, ta-da, the hackers get all the credit cards.

So does using a chip reader. Assuming its up to current standards the card's information is cryptographically locked to Sonic's vendor ID and any stolen stored CC info could only be used at other Sonics.

Chip + Pin solves it even better by forcing the attacker to learn the pin for the card. We're not there yet in the US but once everyone has modern chip readers, adding pins will be trivial.

Also as a customer I'm not liable for these issues. The vendor is. With cryptocurrency, if there's a hack against me and my coins are gone, well, they're gone forever.

Sure beats giving up on cc's entirely for cryptocurrency, which comes with its own headaches and problems, especially Bitcoin which as a network wouldnt be able to cover 1 hour of credit transactions in the states.

>The one place I want microsoft to succeed is smartphones.

Someone tell this guy about Win10 telemetry and store app tracking.

Its not like he had much choice. Adopting Apple, his historic competitor, would have been too much of an ego bruising for him. Linux is more neutral to MS anyway. MS never had a lock on the server market that linux is successful in. The home computer front has always been under attack by Apple with varying results. Especially today where owning an Apple computer isn't just for 'designers.' Pretty much every college student has one.

Outside of their business line, Lenovo completely phones it in. I never recommend Lenovo for consumers. Heck, even their think-series laptops and desktops often have critical bios and driver updates shortly after release that need to be installed or the machine will bluescreen, lock up, drop wifi, etc.

At work, I only buy Thinkpads and Think-series PCs after they've aged 6+ months. I can't imagine how people get by being early adopters. We early adopted a Carbon laptop once. Borderline unusable wifi and trackpad. It took 6-12 months for Lenovo to release the updates that fixed these issues, and even then the trackpad never felt right to me (misses taps, misses drags, fails to detect two fingers, etc.)

Agreed, I doubt OEM's are pissed. Now they have an excuse to upsell the customer. I imagine the decision to move on or stay with a socket or firmware lock is 50% technical and 50% commercial for Intel. They need to keep OEMs happy and sales flowing. They don't want to just sell CPUs and have end users pop-in new CPUs and lose the support and goodwill of OEMs with mb's and systems to sell.

From a marketing perspective this means a new model number, new ads, etc all designed to make last years system obsolete and to bug you into buying the latest and greatest.

I used Firefox Focus on my Pixel for a few weeks and was blown away by how fast it was. The mobile web went from borderline unusable to borderline pleasant with it, I imagine largely due to its tracking and limited ad blocking. Sadly, I migrated back to Chrome because anything that needs to work with Google login or opening an app simply doesn't work. This causes issues with a lot of things I use.

I feel like I'm being ActiveX'd into using Chrome now which is very non-Googly. Not sure how feasible it is to use a different mobile browser until Mozilla and Google work together to make sure they're all on the same API page on Android. Ironically enough, Windows is far more open and friendly to competing browsers than Android.

In the UK, yes. Holding encrypted data against the wishes of the government, that is to say you are unwilling to decrypt it for them, is a crime. I believe up to two years in prison.

I was active in the BBS scene during that time. What could be done over 1200-2400 baud was fairly impressive considering the technical limits. Especially when ANSI and RIP graphics became the norm. Later 4800 and 9600 modems became cheap. By the late 80s these were the norm.

Ordering systems would have been trivial to implement if the political and commercial will was there. Not too long after this you had Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL offering these kinds of services. I remember they let you order flowers, buy software, etc from their online systems.

The web and tcp/ip internet replacing it all didn't come until much, much later. From 1983-1995 online services were ruled by non-TCP/IP dial-up BBS services and proprietary services like Prodigy. Home internet didn't take off until 1995-1996 and even then it was fairly limited.

>Apple II or Comnmodore

On top of all the PC clones running DOS and Windows (Windows 1.0 was 1985), Amigas, Macs (as you mention), Timex/Sinclair, etc.

Macs were home computers, there were just less of them. Back in those days people paid large prices for home machines, so the pricetags might seem high today but the utility/novelty factors made up for it.

But home computer adoption was skyrocketing at the time. My argument here is that once people saw the utility of this then they'd buy modems, the same way they saw the utility of printing and bought printers for their computers.

At the time, a modem was the same price, if not cheaper, than a printer or a floppy disk drive. It wasn't exactly a luxury expense.

By the 80's, Service Merchandize had green screen "Silent Sam" terminals in all their stores you could walk up to, order what you wanted, pay right there, then walk to the back of the store and pick it up from a conveyer belt from the warehouse area, a bit like picking up your luggage.

Imagine if this kind of system went through a dial-up and the items were simply shipped to you. We would have had mass e-commerce in 1985. The French did actually have something like this via their minitel system, fwiw.

In the end, open-ish standards and SSL won the race, which is probably a good thing. I'd rather be stuck with a broken-ish web than locked into these various proprietary designs controlled by one corporation. Even if Sears/Prodigy would have delivered these services, they would have been crushed by the web.