At least Chamberlain isn't requiring you to watch a 60 second advert before you can operate their devices. Not yet anyway - but that would really bump up how much they could charge companies advertising in the app.

If you're going to commit a serious crime, be paranoid. Do your online research using DuckDuckGo accessed through a VPN that is outside the USA and keeps no records such as Mullvad. Also use a security oriented browser like Firefox. Maybe add Tor to all that also. Pretty easy really.

It's long been held that writing and saying are equivalent (except for some civil issues like libel and slander) and there's the problem. 14 searches for an address to which you have no connection (owner, renter, live there, your girlfriend lives there, etc.) is going to raise some some eyebrows if that address goes up in flames. It's going to grenerate some questions that you will need to answer if you don't want the police to draw a negative inference. Now, should police have access to your search history? They can use whatever you say to other people, and with a warrant they can access your mail or your email or your phone data or your bank or credit card accounts or vehicle data or CCTV or photo recognition data or travel history (plane, train, ANPR, cell tower data, etc.) so why would search history data be different?

Google is at liberty to sell your search history to anyone. In my mind that makes it semi-public data, and it's not obvious why your search history should be treated any differently from any other form of communication.

Work changes over time. Around 1810, the Ludittes destroyed the machines which replaced skilled workers. It did cause hardship but that was a short term problem because the machines needed people to construct them, operate them, repair them, and also created ancillary jobs because they produced textiles much faster. They also reduced the cost of textiles by a large amount. All in all, substantially greater productivity without creating long-term unemployment.

Jobs are always being replaced. My grandfather was a computer. No joke, that was his actual job title. He worked on large civil engineering projects such as bridges and other constructions where accurate calculations were vital. He told me that at least three people did each of thousands of calculations needed. If there were disagreements in the results the work product was turned over to senior computers to find the errors. Today the calculations are done in a tiny fraction of the time of doing them manually, and I don't see many out of work human computers.

In the 1870s, gas street lighting was being replaced by electric lighting. In some large cities in Britain a switch was located in each electric light pole so that the lamplighters kept their jobs turning the lights on and off. That didn't last more than a few years, the costs of centrally switching the lights were far too great.

I'm sure there are thousands of similar examples. Jobs change mostly to increase productivity. Long term, employment doesn't go down, people just learn new skills. Sometimes the new skills pay more, sometimes not. So long as capitalism reigns that's the way it's going to be. Maybe that needs changing, I don't know.

My neighbor's Tesla Y was rear ended at a traffic light. It didn't look like much damage in the pictures he showed me but the car was totaled. The insurance company's estimator told him that the whole rear end had to be replaced because it was cast in one piece.

Mullvad doesn't use passwords, just a randomized account number. If you tell your closest 1,000 friends your account number they have unfettered access to the service so long as you keep paying. So far, Mullvad doesn't seem to have any issues with this arrangement.

Mullvad accepts payment in some crypto currencies and even cash in various currencies. Of course, if (like me) you are only using the service to overcome geofencing you can also use more traditional payment methods such as a credit card or PayPal.

Incidentally, Mullvad's service is first rate. They are one of the few VPN companies that does WireGuard correctly, and I've had no complaints about the speed in the four years I've been a customer.

Trump said that global warming is a Chinese hoax. Since this data is coming out of China it's obviously a hoax as well. /s

If Nvidia is price gouging why are their gross profit margins about the same as other semiconductor companies?

As someone who started coding professionally in the '60s (when "computer science" wasn't a subject in any university - if you were interested in computers you were pointed to the Math department) I agree with your comments about confusion of boolean and arithmetic uses of "=".

But the biggest problem I've seen with neophyte coders using C (and other languages) is memory management. While malloc and free provide everything needed, it's really easy for less practiced coders to end up with a complete mess (think use after free, double free, memory leakage), particularly pernicious in multi-thread situations.

That's the problem I would like to see fixed. Zig does help significantly with Allocator but Rust is better - the multiple memory models will allow you to drive off a cliff or alternatively hit the the guard rails at compile time.

I was given a Mac Pro 2010 by a friend who switched to the 2013 Mac Pro. It was my first Mac and I did upgrade it to 32 GB of RAM. It's built like a tank - huge power supply, a Xeon processor and ECC RAM as standard. I upgraded the system to Linux in 2017, added an SSD on a PCIe card and installed 4x10 TB drives - it's been running 24/7 as my NAS since then. I should replace the drives based on their age and sometime in the next year I'll probably switch to a home-built box with larger drives running ZFS.

When I was a teen (before the internet) I hunted in every local bookstore (and the library) for anything remotely akin to porn and rarely found any. Now it seems it's in every library, so much so that they all must be closed.

While evaluating the Medicare choices for a relative two years ago I looked at Medicare Advantage plans. In my relative's area in Northern California, standard Medicare lists around 2,800 doctors in a 25 mile radius while not stating their specialities..

Most advantage plans offered less than 200 hundred local doctors, while not stating their speciality either. Looking at the physicians most of them appeared to be young (read inexperienced) and I didn't come across any who were board certified in family medicine. My relative's current primary care doctor - who is board certified - was not on any of the numerous plans that I checked.

Needless to say, I recommended staying far away from Advantage plans. There are many TV adverts for these plans around December (usually around two minutes long and in the middle of the day) and a huge number of mail offers, so they must be very profitable for the health insurance industry. That, by itself, is a bit worrying as they are less expensive and generally offer additional services (such as dental, routine vision care and free transportation to doctor visits.)

My relative chose standard Medicare and has been happy with the care she has received. She hasn't had to change any of her doctors (family medicine, rheumatologist, neurologist, podiatrist and probably others I'm unaware of.)

First of all, EFI (now UEFI) was invented by Intel in 1999, not Microsoft. In fact, the first manufacturer to use it was Apple when they switched from PowerPC to Intel. The bug is in Microsoft's boot code, it's not an issue with UEFI. Based on the article, the exploit can be removed by simply wiping the ESP. It's not in SPI memory or anything like that.

Of course if the code that installed the exploit is executed again (with admin privs) you have the same problem - but that's the same as many other exploits. If the article describes the full picture, it should be possible to write an automated malware removal procedure to get rid of the problem.

While not excusing layoffs-by-email in any way, I think I have an understanding why it's done. Having had to lay off people years ago before I retired,I found it very painful on both sides of the table. Obviously painful for most employees, but painful for the manager also because of the effect you are having on the lives of the people being laid off.

I had people, both male and female, crying, not too unexpected because the layoffs were completely unexpected. I was only told about them and who was leaving the day before. What was worse, it wasn't anything they had done wrong; it was because the projects they were working on were cancelled. It was the worst day during my employment. I understand that mine was short term pain compared to the long term pain the layoffs were causing to most, but it was still painful and took some days to get over.

Even worse, a female manager I knew had to lay off two thirds of her staff, and was laid off herself the next day. That was just cruel.

I recently drove my Tesla on a 600 mile (each way) trip. I used the car because I didn't like the idea of traveling in a metal tube for a couple of hours with a bunch of strangers. Actually I didn't do most of the driving - I would guess I drove about 10% of the time and autopilot drove the rest. The autopilot is great - most of the time. However it often can't handle some routine situations, such as construction zones. Situations involving hand signs from construction workers or emergency personnel are beyond its capability, and it has no clue about changing lanes to allow an emergency vehicle (or merely a faster car) to pass. Sometimes the autopilot has selected an inappropriate (read slower moving) lane, it needs help sometimes.

I would never consider using autopilot when not on a freeway - too many things can happen on surface streets, particularly when pedestrians can't hear the car. Also, the autopilot can't handle very sharp turns because its single radar sensor is fixed in a forward direction. I think Tesla was wrong not to use Lidar - if Apple can afford to put Lidar in a phone, Tesla can afford to put it in a car.

Overall, if you monitor the car and use autopilot sensibly, it's very useful. On a long drive you will arrive feeling fresher and less stressed. But trust it? Not a chance.

No, of course, they didn't steal it. I told them I would be ordering another car and asked them to credit me. Then they told me that my $100 deposit could not be credited as it was non-refundable - despite the fact that they messed up somewhere. It's a small amount but it was annoying.