The world is stuck in dongle hell. Every country is different. We haven't quite gotten to USB-C everything for DC power. There are a bunch of EV plug standards.

In the US, Tesla deployed NACS, and since it has like 60+% of the market share, it seems to have won.

I'm happy to have a smaller sized plug, one that supports both AC and DC Fast Charging, and that will over the next 3-5 years unify the EV charging network so we can ideally be rid of the adapters.

The first gas stations also were not standardized either. We will get to a standard soon.

"broken-ass shit." Have you seen the size of the CCS adapter??? It is stupid huge. The NACS can do both AC and DC fast charging without a huge connector. I can confirm that it has worked flawlessly for 4 years now, and I cannot say the same for many other charging networks. The plug really isn't that big a deal, I'm confused why you seem to be so angry about it.

I tend to keep my laptops for about 6 years, like the OP. But since I'm an Apple guy, the lack of upgradeability in Macbook Pros means I'm stuck with how it's made for the entire lifetime.

I usually bump the processor up and double the memory. My Early-2013 Macbook Pro Retina 15" has an Intel Core i7-4850HQ @ 2.30 GHz and 16GB of memory. Those were pretty decent specs for 6 years ago. I probably spent about $2500-2800. Over 6 years, that's $425-$470 per year. It still runs well, even when I don't close all of my Chrome tabs. I don't need a new one, but I'll probably get one in the next year or so.

I'm looking at the Macbook Pro 2019 16" ($2399) with the 2.4GHz 8-core 9th-gen i9 CPU ($300), 32GB RAM ($400) and 1TB SSD ($200) for a total of $3300 plus tax. Over 6 years it will cost me about $550 per year. If I use my Apple Card, I get 3% off ($100), or I could pay over 18 months with no interest (Apple Promo).

I wonder if I could buy it on Amazon with my Amazon Prime Chase card and get 5% off... :-)

Or sometimes B&H has good deals too.

In the end, I could spend $1500 on a laptop that would last me 3 years, another few hundred (thousand?) to upgrade it, but I'd have a PC (Windows or Linux) and, well, I'm kinda enjoying not being the administrator for a Linux Laptop, and there's not a good reason to move to Windows.

Apple Pay already abstracts the payment mechanism from the vendor, so your credit card number and personal info are not provided.

What would be needed is a location anonymization layer. Something where I could generate some one-time-use hash or identifier that I would provide to the vendor to put on the shipping label.

The vendor has the shipper pick up the package. The shipper is able to turn this one-time-use hash into a deliverable address. The software routes it to where it needs to go, providing as little information to the delivery person and anyone who sees the package.

The package arrives at the destination but without a name and address, just information that the shipper and receiver know.

Disposable Email and phone number if required.

It might cost you more to do it by hiding all your information, but there's a path to making it work.

Without the shipping obfuscation, a 3rd party could do freight forwarding.

Bwahahaha excellent and epic post!!!

"...you can definitely tell the difference between 92KHz and 192Khz, and even straight CD tracks they were encoded from."

Right, because ultrasonics distort more at 192kHz, thus degrading the quality of the audio reproduction as it reaches your ears.

If you remove the ultrasonics, then you likely cannot. And even if you can, I don't care, because I can't. Feel free to disagree with science to justify your hefty investment and your belief that your ears and equipment are somehow better, that's cool.

I recently read that someone moved their large operation from Cassandra to Hbase, a hadoop file system. http://hbase.apache.org/

HBase is the Hadoop database. Use it when you need random, realtime read/write access to your Big Data. This project's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware.

HBase is an open-source, distributed, versioned, column-oriented store modeled after Google' Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data by Chang et al. Just as Bigtable leverages the distributed data storage provided by the Google File System, HBase provides Bigtable-like capabilities on top of Hadoop. HBase includes:

Convenient base classes for backing Hadoop MapReduce jobs with HBase tables
Query predicate push down via server side scan and get filters
Optimizations for real time queries
A high performance Thrift gateway
A REST-ful Web service gateway that supports XML, Protobuf, and binary data encoding options
Cascading, hive, and pig source and sink modules
Extensible jruby-based (JIRB) shell
Support for exporting metrics via the Hadoop metrics subsystem to files or Ganglia; or via JMX
HBase 0.20 has greatly improved on its predecessors:
No HBase single point of failure
Rolling restart for configuration changes and minor upgrades
Random access performance on par with open source relational databases such as MySQL

+1 for sshguard. Compiled (not interpreted by perl, python or ruby), fast, stable, works great with any firewall -- pf, iptables, etc.

Agreed. 1Password, if you need Mac OSX only, is the bomb. It has a polished feel, handles generation of passwords for different sites with different size/character requirements with ease, lets you know how secure your existing and new passwords are, and allows you to sync between other OSX machines using Dropbox. For those with Windows boxes, there are other options. I can easily export my passwords from 1Password and import them using LastPass https://lastpass.com/ (Free), but that's only for my wife who uses my passwords occasionally, and it would suck for normal day to day use. So, if you have OS X only, 1Password is fantastic. If not, there are a few other options that are cross platform and will do the job. Writing them down seems like a bad idea.

Because both my wife and my father have purchased $599 Dells in the past, and after about 2-3 years they need to be replaced. With the Mac, sure you might overbuy hardware, but damn (my experience) it lasts and works great! I used to have to get a new computer every 2-3 years, and after switching to Macs, I haven't needed to because both the OS and Hardware continue to work well and now slow down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFClpADY7Tc

I thought it was stupid too, but most of credit card fraud these days is card-not-present, stolen from databases. I believe this is a cheap and easy way to thwart that. Because most people don't give up their credit card details to just anyone, having a card with this on it would still allow authentication while the merchant would have nothing to store, because they only have half the information. If they started storing successful auth keys (worthless to them, but valuable to hackers), maybe, but there's little benefit for a merchant to store the success auth strings, since they are no good after their use.

It's yet another level of security, one I would use and benefit from.

I'd much rather this than what I have now, which is no security.

Once you know how it works, it's easy to assign a numeric value for each LCD window. Conveniently there are 7 panes that make up an LCD, with each one either on or off. Huh, seems very similar to ASCII. You come up with a standard representing that (maybe there is one?), and now I can use ASCII to describe which of the lines are on or off. Using top-to-bottom, left-to-right the one in the video could be described as:

0110010 _ 0011000 0100010 _ 0011001 0010100

2_chr(24) "_â â

OK, so it's not perfect, but still, it would be easy to convert to an easily storable value. Once that is done, you can go further to decode the challenge with a script, and voila, you have all the stuff you need to use the card fraudulently. It would take a bit more work, but once you have it, you're toast.

Not only that, but it would be fairly easy to reverse engineer. Now it WOULD make it harder for people to steal the database and use the card, since that's not stored by any of the merchants who accept cards, so a DB dump from an ecommerce site would result in less fraud if this were widely implemented. Recurring transactions would be problematic though; how could I rebill a credit card each month for a dynamic number without the cardholder entering in the code? And who is generating the challenge? Me? The credit card purveyor? How? Are they sending me an image, or just numbers and I have to generate the image?

A unique idea, and it does solve the problem of stealing credit card databases. And it is cheap and easy to put on a card, it's the whole backend system that is the biggest challenge. Though if Payflow Pro (PayPal) and Authorize.net implemented it, it would probably do a lot of damage to the card fraud industry.