Plugging in a USB flash drive, backup drive, using a NAS, or using a Time Capsule works against disasters like HDD failure or accidental microwaving of a laptop... but all ransomware has to do is zero out the backup drive... or just punch random holes in stored files so they are worthless. A lot of newer machines don't have optical drives, much less decent backup software to get the user to back up to them.

This is something I've never understood. External hard drives should have a read-only toggle switch. It will help protect the drive against malware infections. And I know I'm not the only one who's made the bone-headed mistake of copying the corrupted file over the good backup, instead of the other way around.

I've always wondered why wifi networks only allow a single password. Why can't they allow multiple passwords? That way you can create a temporary one when a guest needs to access something on your LAN but you don't want to give them permanent access. Right now the only way to do that is an ethernet cable, or change your password to something else, give him access, then change it back when he leaves.

Multiple passwords would also give you the ability to revoke passwords you consider to be compromised, without affecting the ability of others with "good" passwords to continue connecting. I used to give my parents and my sister my wifi password so they could connect when visiting. Then I learned my dad had given the password to a friend who came to visit with him once. I had to change the password, which meant entering the new password on all my devices plus all my sister's devices.

You could even give different privileges based on password. Internet-only. Internet-only at reduced bandwidth. Internet + LAN. LAN-only. Only one other device on the LAN. etc. Kinda like the guest network thing showing up on newer routers, except a lot more flexible.

I hope I won't be disillusioned by someone who has done research into Woz, but what I have heard of Woz has pretty much been all good. Seemingly kind hearted, personal integrity, not all about the money.

If you've ever run your own company, you'll realize there's a special combination of goodness mixed with hard-assedness which is needed for success. Someone who's all kind-hearted can't bear to lay off people when the chips are down, and ends up sinking the entire company instead of casting off a few employees. You need to be a bit of a dick to make the tough calls, do the hard negotiations, and still be able to sleep at night. At the same time you have to respect and nurture your employees, get them to want to work for you.

If Woz hadn't paired up with Jobs (or someone like Jobs), he would've ended up as a reasonably successful nobody working an upscale programming/engineering job. Likewise of Jobs hadn't met Woz he likely would've ended up a car or vacuum cleaner salesman. The two of them together had that magic combination of technical skill, altruism, and willingness to go with the flow; mixed with selfish drive, ego, and ass-hattery which make a very successful company. The whole was greater than the sum of the parts.

Really. What sort of job do you have that didn't involve showing ID in order to submit the required federal tax forms as you were hired? What sort of paycheck are you getting that doesn't involve you using an ID in order to open a bank account or cash a check? Please be specific about the people who are working full time, so hard, that not once in their entire life can they be bothered to get a form of ID. And, out of curiosity, how on earth did they find time to go register to vote, or find time TO vote? You're saying that these are people who will have their routine trips to the polling place, year after year throughout their entire lives, thwarted because they couldn't take five minutes to stop once for a free ID?

So, you're asserting that there are no elections that turn on a matter of just a handful of votes? You're actually going to say that the many local and state elections (which do things like put congressional and senate representatives into power) don't sometimes get decided by only dozens of votes? And then you're going to assert that papers like the Washington Post, who have reported on elections as recently as 2012 where in just one local review there were instances of local voters fraudulently voting twice ... that, what, the Washington Post is lying? Is that because you think the WP is part of some vast, racists, right-wing conspiracy, and manufactured the records that were produced by the election officials, showing the felony-offense fraud?

Your anxious need to trot out the ad hominem shows how much you're aware that you're BS-ing, so I don't really need to go on. You know you're looking to defend fraudulent practices that primarily favor the one party whose activists have been caught red-handed generating tens of thousands of bogus voter registrations. And you're complaining about the person who suggests it's a good ID to make fraud harder to commit. Your opening comments about how difficult it is for full time workers to stop and get an ID that the already have to have was hilarious, though, so thanks for the entertainment.

Which part? The part where left-leaning activist groups generate enormous numbers of bogus voter registrations? Among others, ACORN did just that (getting busted doing it was why they re-organized and changed their name so nobody would keep bringing it up ... and you're probably hoping nobody will remember actual criminal prosecution for those actions). Or are you saying that the coordinated efforts to talk out-of-state college students into double-voting haven't, despite extensive reporting of exactly that, occurred?

Or you could look to no less a bastion of right-wing win nuttery than the Washington Post, which reported on a review showing thousands of people registered to vote in multiple states, and in one local review, caught over 150 people crossing state boundaries just in the DC area to vote more than once on the same day.

One of the county election supervisors who took time to review information in that instance found an example of where someone had been crossing state lines and voting more than once on the same day in local and national elections for over a decade. He said that in a dozen cases he'd reviewed, the purposefulness of the election fraud was plain, and the actions were class 6 felonies.

In cases where congressional seats or governorships can turn on a mere handful of votes, it's no "pile of bull" to point out that people are deliberately, systematically taking advantage of weak ID requirements and a weak registration system in order to fraudulently corrupt elections.

Backwards. The Republicans know that the biggest source of bogus voter registrations, and the areas with the largest number of actively dead registered voters and turnout at polling places where the number of votes exceeds the eligible population, are in places where Democrat activists work the hardest to hold on to power. It's not that knowing people who vote are voting legally and only once isn't going to benefit Democrats, it's that such a process is counter to what liberal activist groups work so hard to put in place. Like huge efforts to get college students to register to vote where they go to school, but to also vote absentee in their home state. Stuff like that. When they pour so much work into it that it starts to show (like the thousands of bogus registrations routinely created by the former ACORN), you know they won't like having that work undone by basic truth-telling at the polling place.

If you're worried about people not knowing there's an election coming up, and not bothering to get an ID (really? you can't go to the doctor, fill a prescription, collect a welfare check, or much of ANYTHING else with already having an ID), then why not encourage the Democrats to apply the same level of effort they put into the shady practices described above, and focus it instead on getting that rare person who never sees a doctor, never gets a prescription, collects no government benefits of any kind, doesn't work (but whom you seem to suggest none the less are a large voting block) and, with YEARS to work with between elections ... just getting them an ID?

Sure they are. Because the only people who could possibly take actual offense at this would be those who, having it explained to them, still can't understand it. Those who are insisting that black people be offended by this are insisting that black people can't handle the simple information that would remove any perception of malice from the narrative.

When the apology is a completely over-wrought bit of silly nonsense rendered in response to gleeful press releases from the Big SJW industry (who desperately NEED there to be events like this, whipped hugely out of proportion, in order to have things to get sound angry about), then it's not an apology. It's a forced sacrifice on the alter of Political Correctness gone (ever more) insane. There's nothing to apologize for here, because nobody at Google sat down to create a racist process or racist results. People who can't mentally untangle the difference between intent and coincidence should just shut up ... except, they're all media darlings now, because it's fashionable to be completely irrational on that front, now.

If Google tagged me as "albino ape" or "yeti" or "Stay-Pufft Marshmallow Man" I'd think it was hilarious. Those manufacturing faux offense at this bit of completely benign nonsense are the real racists. They are the ones who are saying that black people aren't smart enough to understand the situation. As usual, the racist SJW condescension is the most actually offensive thing in the room.

You're not paying attention. These days, outcomes that have nothing to do with intention, purpose, or simple transparent standards, but which happen to lean statistically towards results not in perfect balance with skin color as a function of population (though, only in one direction) ... the process must be considered racist. The whole "disparate impact" line of thinking is based on this. If you apply a standard (say, physical strength or attention to detail or quick problem solving, whatever) to people applying to work as, say, firefighters ... if (REGARDLESS of the mix of people who apply) you get more white people getting the jobs, then the standards must surely be racist, even if nobody can point to a single feature of those standards that can be identified as such. Outcomes now retro-actively re-invent the character of whoever sets a standard, and finds them to be a racist. Never mind that holding some particular group, based on their skin color, to some LOWER standard is actually racist, and incredibly condescending. But too bad: outcomes dictate racist-ness now, not policies, actions, purpose, motivation, or objective standards.

So, yeah. The algorithm, without having a single "racist" feature to it, can still be considered racist. Because that pleases the Big SJW industry.

It's the same thinking that says black people aren't smart enough to get a free photo ID from their state, and so laws requiring people to prove who they are when they're casting votes for the people who will govern all of us are, of course, labeled as racist by SJW's sitting in their Outrage Seminar meetings. It's hard to believe things have come that far, but they have.

So, they DO care? How much less could they care?

In the early stages when there's uncertainty about what the best solution is, you want competition. People weren't sure whether AC or DC was the best way to transmit electricity over long distances. So Edison and Westinghouse were both allowed to build their power grids and let economic reality decide which was the more effective solution. Same with the cable companies - what's the best way to wire up, subdivide, and subnet a bunch of residential customers? Nobody really knew, so you want lots of different companies trying lots of different solutions. The ones with bad solutions slowly go insolvent and get bought out by those with good solutions. The government should only provide access to easements so the process doesn't get bogged down negotiating access rights with every customer.

All that changes once you're certain you've arrived at an optimal solution. Westinghouse's AC power transmission lines turned out to be best. And now electrical distribution is operated as a public utility Arguably, cable Internet has reached the same stage. Pretty much all the cable companies have standardized on the same tech (DOCSIS modems), indicating it's an optimal or near-optimal solution. And the apparent end-game is fiber to the home. So it probably is time to start treating cable/fiber Internet as a public utility. Give one company a contract to lay down and maintain the lines, but prohibit it from providing service over those lines. Any company is allowed to offer service over those lines, and the maintenance company has to offer all of them access at the same price per GB/mo of bandwidth.

My experience is that people who show up for a product or service (or pizza, whatever), get what they ordered and are content ... do NOT generally stop what they're doing to run off and tell the world, "My $10 pizza was satisfactory." Anybody who has ever worked retail (and paid attention) can tell you that a hundred happy customers will simply return for more business when they want, but not take time out to communicate to the business or to anyone else that they're happy customers. Life's too short, they just carry on. People who are truly dismayed about their experience, however, will take to every communication method they can dream up to make sure the world knows of their displeasure. And some of the people who do that are just plain nuts, or have very poor judgement, or are either hobby-level or professional trolls. That's who we all hear from, well out of proportion to the real-world experiences of most people. And the internet echo-chamber tends to greatly amplify that effect.

It was a poorly designed test with respect to driving. From TFA:

To ascertain the effects of extraneous information in a driverâ(TM)s line of sight, professor Spence and his team of students created two tests to measure the outcome. The first involved volunteers completing a number of computer-based tests in which they were required to say how many of a number of randomly organized spots were shown on a screen as quickly and accurately as they could.

Added to this, in some tests a black-outlined square arbitrarily appeared and the subjects were told to report whenever they saw this too. This secondary stimulus was shown at the same time as the spots, but did not appear in all of the trials.

Basically, if you apply this to driving, you're comparing driving by constantly watching the road and never glancing at your instruments and mirrors, to having information displayed on a HUD. Well duh you're going to be more attentive to things that happen on the road if you never take your eyes off the road. But you're going to be a massive danger to everyone else because you'll be going the wrong speed, and you'll be making lane changes oblivious to anyone else who might be in the way.

If they wanted to test the efficacy of a HUD, they should've run a third test case where participants were given the same task, but also required to monitor information being displayed below the computer screen showing the spots. (At a minimum. Information also probably should be displayed on either side as well to simulate monitoring your mirrors.) The question isn't is a HUD distracting from a single task. It's is a HUD less distracting than having to glance away from the road to see your instruments and mirrors.

After having driven a car with blind spot detection (a car in your blind spot causes an orange light on that side's mirror to light up), I'd say the simplified notification is much easier to perceive and comprehend. Before, I had to take my eyes off the road to glance at the mirror frequently, figure out exactly what it was I saw, put it together with what I saw before, and cogitate that the car that was there before is not there anymore, and therefore it is now probably in my blind spot. Now I can actually pay more attention to what's going on in the road ahead of me, and little lights in my peripheral vision automatically tell me when there's a car beside me that I can't see in my mirrors. I still check by turning my head before lane changes, but it's reduced the workload of driving enough that I feel my driving has improved.

Eh. Don't oversell the old gold standard. For starters, a gold standard was typically a steady and persistent malaise of deflation, as economic output increased more steadily than the money supply.

Yeah, anyone advocating returning to the gold standard needs to read some economic history to really see what things were like when we were on the gold standard. 1800-1933 saw 33 recessions/depressions - every 4 years on average - with declines in business activity or GDP of 10%, 20%, and even 30% common.

Since going off the gold standard, we've had 13 recessions in 82 years, or every 6.3 years on average. And aside from the recessions following the Great Depression and WWII, none of them has seen GDP shrink by more than 5%.

Zero inflation/deflation in a currency happens when the amount of currency floating around exactly matches economic productivity. With a fiat currency, a legit government tries its best to expand the money supply to maintain that balance. With a gold standard, whether you get inflation or deflation depends entirely on the ratio of economic productivity to how much new gold is mined. And don't even get me started on how disastrous it is to set a finite limit on the amount of currency you can mine, like Bitcoin does.

Being on the gold standard doesn't mean you have solid monetary policy based on a physical good. It means your "policy" is effectively determined by how much gold people are finding and mining at any given time - its based on luck and good/bad fortune. Yes it prevents abuse by the government printing too much currency. But it avoids that potential abuse by completely removing the economy's rudder, leaving you adrift and completely at the mercy of how lucky gold miners are that year.

The true fundamental currency is productivity. Whether you use dollars, euros, gold, or bitcoin, avoiding inflation/deflation means increasing the supply of physical/virtual currency to exactly match increases in productivity.

And believe me, on a long trip that difference is critical. He's done several trips (and I've been on one with him) where a 200 mile range just wouldn't have cut it.

I've been saying for years now that unless there's an order of magnitude breakthrough in battery charging technology, using an electric car on a long trip is going to remain stupid. It's telling that the solution closest to working thus far (that doesn't involve stopping for 30+ minutes every 2.5 hours) is swapping the battery pack (all 1200 pounds of it on the Tesla S).

That's a large part of the reason I don't think electric cars will catch on. Not that they couldn't. They could catch on right now if we can break free of environmentalists' pipe dream of all cars being electric. If you can convince people to use an electric car for their daily driving, and rent a gas/diesel car for their few times a year long trips, then EVs become completely viable today. Those long trips probably only represent about 10% of your annual drives, so we could potentially reduce our gasoline consumption by 90% right now.

But environmentalists' penchant for insisting that anything short of a 100% green solution is unacceptable is going to be their undoing. Just like with hybrids when they were first introduced - environmentalists initially hated hybrids because they generate all their energy from burning gasoline. They tried to block approval for hybrids as a way to meet California's LEV and ZEV standards, in hopes of forcing automakers to develop EVs.