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Comment Re:MenuChoice and HAM (1992) (Score 2) 270

The other absolutely amazing thing they introduced in Windows 95 was the shortcut.

By forcing people to use them, you allowed any combination of multiple links to the same file in any location on your system. It made it so much easier for people to accept a concept like the Start Menu, while the actual programs were stored elsewhere.

It also had the upside of not making it easy to delete or lose files when clicking on or dragging items in the GUI.

Comment Isn't HoloLens way more useful for this? (Score 1) 45

Glass, it seems to me, is inherently far more limited than actual VR systems like the HoloLens. With the HoloLens you could choose where to put the small square of information you can see, plus of course there are all of the options of overlaying more info on top of physical objects you can computationally recognize...

I guess one big draw would be battery life, Glass you would think would be a lot better in that regard than the HoloLens.

Comment When the Man In the Middle is You (Score 2) 54

Crazy that the phone is not just some kind of passthrough ,but instead somewhere in he binary contains enough rights to do anything it likes with your car... the device must be just convincing the app that OnStar said it was OK to use it's unlimited powers to unlock the car and start the engine or whatever.

On the other hand, perhaps that ALSO means the attack cannot work with any arbitrary car, but only with an instance of an app you have already paired to your car so it was given the right credentials? If so it's a much less serious attack than it would seem at first.

The real issue would be, if a rooted Android or iPhone device could have the car-specific credentials scraped, to use at a later time with thier own OnStar app.

Comment I know about me (Score 1) 904

but I need to stretch my legs and rest a bit after driving 180ish miles. so stopping every 3 hours is still roughly in line with typical driving practices

I enjoy the five minute stop to get gas every 300 miles or so in my own car on road trips. I do NOT enjoy a 30 minute stop every 200 miles... That's called a "breakdown".

That's the kind of thing that turns a 10 hour one-day drive into a 17 hour mandatory two-day trip.

It's not like that is so uncommon either, lots of families I know only really stop for lunch, otherwise they are driving very long distances per day with short refueling stops.

Something else no-one seems to consider is the vastly larger number of "refueling" stations required if most cars are electric, each car has to stop for 10x longer, at shorter intervals...

Comment Re:Streetlights useful to remark road in bad weath (Score 1) 307

Some would argue that if you can't see the road, you shouldn't be driving.

You shouldn't start driving.

But you should keep driving if it means the difference between arriving at shelter for the night or risking sleeping in a car in a blizzard with extremely low temperatures, with the constant worry another car might hit yours.

Comment Re:Editors : WTF (Score 0) 307

Technically it's giving smaller amounts of something, not taking anything away. Nonetheless marginally it makes perfect sense to talk about "doling out cuts". It means starting with a total net cut and dividing the marginal impact among several parties.

Yes, it will raise a few eyebrows among editorial prigs, but it's perfectly clear what "doling out cuts" means.

Comment Re:Batteries in Cold Weather? (Score 1) 904

If you add up all the auxiliary stuff you need to power with electricity and round up generously, it's maybe 2000 watts load. The very best commercially available technology of today can run that load for 45 hours. So the impact of the auxiliary system load is marginal. That means it's only a concern if you're contemplating using close to the maximum range of your car. If you're traveling 15 miles each way in an 84 mile range Leaf, or 80 miles each way in a 250 mile range Tesla S, you don't really need to worry about running the heater and lights, even counting diminished battery capacity.

The average American spends 25 minutes each way commuting; even in NYC the average figure is 34.6. Even double or tripling that commute time due to bad weather and halfing the range due to cold, that's still easy for the Tesla. It's a bit of challenge for the Leaf with its 24 kwh battery and 84 mile range.

If the typical electric cars of ten years from now perform close to the high end of today, then the vast majority of people won't have to worry about cold weather's effect on range. But a sizable minority of Americans are what the US Census characterizes as "extreme commuters": people whose commute takes more than 90 minutes or fifty miles each way. Even at the low end of that spectrum cold weather range won't be an issue, but if you commute from Fargo to Bismarck ND every day it's safe to say you aren't going to be going electric any time soon.

Comment Victory for "Soft" Socialism (Score 1) 904

Subsidizing the cost of nascent "green" technology is needed to prod the industry to produce and learn how to make a better green mouse-trap through experience and R&D.

It's paying off now as electric cars are getting competitive. Gasoline engines have been the dominant car technology for a century, and thus have had a lot of R&D behind them. Thanks to subsidies to induce sales and R&D, electric cars have evolved to be competitive with gasoline.

Private companies rarely look more than 5 to 10 years ahead. It's why they have to be prodded via subsidies, etc. Finance theory on ROI teaches one to generally focus on the short-term. Whether this is entirely rational or not makes an interesting debate, but it's the ruling view of the current business world.

By the way, I consider "soft" socialism to be incentive-based. "Hard" socialism would be outright banning products. I'm generally against outright banning for products, such as incandescent bulbs and sugar-loaded Big Gulps. Tax them heavily as a disincentive, but don't ban them.

Comment Re:And the NSA? (Score 1) 223

Actually, they probably included a few big wrenches to assemble some of the rack systems, so they probably have the tools to break even 1024 bit encryption.

When you say "1024-bit encryption" you're talking about RSA, which is a completely different problem. 1024-bit RSA are too small to be used today and should be replaced.

2048-bit RSA keys, however, are roughly equivalent in security against brute force to a 112-bit symmetric key, and will be secure against anyone for quite some time. 3072-bit RSA keys are equivalent to a 128-bit symmetric key. Excascale, even yottascale, computers won't touch them.

But everyone really should be moving away from RSA anyway. ECC is better in virtually every respect. To get 128-bit security (meaning equivalency to 128-bit symmetric key), you only need a 256-bit EC key.

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