Do these updates look like they'll solve Tesla's problems?

Since Tesla's biggest problems come from buggy whip... I mean, car dealership... protectionism, combined with a dislike bordering on zealotry from a media that still considers the Chevy L88 as the engine to beat for every compact sedan they review?

No. No, these updates will not solve Tesla's problems.

My very first program was 'hello world' in Basic on the High School computer lab's Apple ][ in 1981 (learned Fortran in that same course). I got a TI 99A for my birthday that year, and I wrote more noddy programs in Basic over the next few years, saving them meticulously on cassette tape.

I can't imagine using Basic for anything useful these days, but it was fun while it lasted.

If the people on /. don't see the worth of buying decent mobile apps - what's the point of them other than to advertise and hijack the masses?

I pretty much only use my tablet as a web browser (and in private browsing / incognito mode by default), and occasionally as a test bed for my own apps (nothing published, just for the hell of it). I can get to virtually any "productivity" tool I need via browser, and for the few things I can't, we have RDP. I can also get to more games than I can ever possibly get sick of via browser; and while they may or may not contain ads, it doesn't much matter - My usage pattern provides a practical privacy barrier in two senses; first, it limits the access of the sites I visit to access my personal information stored on the tablet; and second, it limits the amount of personal information actually stored on the tablet in the first place.

I can count the number of things actually "installed" on my tablet on one hand... A PDF viewer (and I won't count my plain-PDF library of a few hundred books as "apps"), a couple open-source games (for airplane mode), and an offline mapping/gps thingamabob that lets me follow my position on a "live" map even in airplane mode.

I'm not sure where your 98% statistic comes from

You'll notice my first sentence echos the GP's almost word for word. I'll readily admit that as hyperbole, but I didn't start it.

As for those old win98 and 2000 systems you mention - I have had the "pleasure" of helping people upgrade from them, years after they went EoL. One word: Ugly. These things pick up so much malware (not even counting the viruses you can't see, just the obvious shit that doesn't even try to hide) you may as well just publish your PII on the front page of the NYT.

Yes, you can take some steps to minimize the damage, and if you have a realistic upgrade path in the next month, I wouldn't completely panic about missing today's XP EoL deadline. If, however, you just plan to keep using it indefinitely until Microsoft gives in and decides to go back to the look and feel of Win95... What can I say but "Thanks for the contribution to my retirement fund" when you need someone like me to clean up your mess in a few years. :)

and yet his efforts will probably stop 99.9% of the crap that affects "modern" Windows versions with their clueless users.

99% of the crap that affects "modern" versions of windows makes use of bugs that date back to the days of XP and older. And as these long-standing bugs get discovered and patched, effectively the very act of MS releasing a patch will serve as an advertisement to the world of malware about the existence of a new XP exploit that will never get closed.

Continuing to use XP for any box either connected to the network or publicly-accessible (ie, kiosks) at this point amounts to begging the world to hack you - Nothing short of willful negligence.

Wouldn't you prefer that they create conditions where students learn a lot more? After all, failure isn't an objective.

If I believed in the trivially-false progressive delusion that no dumb kids exist? Sure. I would also prefer that the Rockefellers give everyone a gold-shitting unicorn when they turn 18.

In this world, however, a good three quarters of people shouldn't go to college. If we want to elevate the "trade" schools to have a "similar" status (with a wink and a nod), hey, great. But when we push everyone to go to college and then half the incoming freshmen need to take remedial math and English... Then no, failing half the freshmen out in their first semester would provide the greatest benefit to everyone. It would save those who don't belong there a ton of money; and when when you pack a real class with morons, they distract from the actual instruction time for people who do belong there.

TLDR: Yes, Virginia, there are stupid questions. And you waste the class time I paid for by asking an awfully lot of them.


/ Hint #1 that you don't belong in college: If you feel the need to waste class time arguing with the professor about how he grades (particularly about how much partial credit he gives wrong answers) - Just go home.

Distorted picture? Seriously? Republicans fought a major legislative war to ... literally .... take food out of the mouths of hungry children. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, feeding children in poverty through no fault of their own, Republicans wanted to slash it by $40 billion, and did slash it $9 billion. I could go on and on about the appalling impact of other Republican policies, but that right there, literally fighting to take food out of the mouths of hungry children, is so wildly egregious to establish the Republican model of compassion. Taking food out of the mouths of hungry children. Taking fucking food out of the mouths of hungry children. At that point, virtually the only way to "paint a distorted picture" would be drag in Nazis or something.

I've seen the figures, and they don't support your claim.

Republican tax deductible giving is indeed higher, but you and I both know that tax deductible doesn't equal charity. Charity is giving to benefit other people, feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless, treating the sick, donating to research to cure diseases for the benefit all mankind, and so on.

A group of people buying themselves a clubhouse is tax deductible if you call the building a "church", hiring people to run that clubhouse and preform services for themselves is tax deductible if you call those services "religious services". But you and I both know that any money that goes towards buildings or goods or services for oneself is not charity. If someone gives $300 to their church, and only 3% of the church budget goes to feeding the homeless, then that's really only $9 given to charity and (tax deductible but non-charitable) $291 dollars buying a building and services for oneself.

The money given to buy themselves a church and buy themselves religious services cuts into disposable income, it cuts into the money Republicans give to charity.

Republicans have higher tax-deductible giving, but lower charitable giving.

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How perceptive of you, picking up on the subtle persecution.
Yep, because 6 and a half days a week the Slashdot community is wall-to-wall Odin worshipers.

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Yes, it is. What you meant to say was, "I find it unlikely that anyone would offer me what I consider my home and experiences to be worth."

Fair enough, but it amounts to the same thing under the present discussion. Of course someone could conceivably offer me enough money that I would gladly take it and buy my own private Caribbean island. I won't hold my breath on RDS offering me $100M for my 3Br cape in the middle of nowhere, however.


Please be more clear with your wording in the future. Blatant trolling like the above does no-one any good.

My wording perfectly communicated my intent, although I will admit to a bit (and just a bit, not anything over the top) of hyperbole - Though make no mistake, people do exist who wouldn't voluntarily sell at any price. I certainly wouldn't go so far as to call my comment "trolling", though - I meant every word of what I said. People bought out under eminent domain seizures - Or in this case, under "oops we turned your block into a hazardous waste dump, collect your $300k checks on the way out of town" conditions don't get compensated for their emotional investment in their property. Simple as that.

You want "fair" compensation, or the closest thing we can get to it? Every time we hear about one of these minor disasters, the CEO's family homestead gets bulldozed and turned into high-end luxury housing for everyone displaced. CEO doesn't have enough land? Work through the entire board until everyone has a new place to live. Of course, that would often fail because the soulless CEO finds it more convenient to live in a series of condos scattered across the world, but we can at least try to demonstrate to these scum why I wouldn't sell my home for twice its appraised value.

There's a video of someone asking astronomy graduates from an Ivy League university what causes the phases of the moon and the seasons, and most cannot answer.

And I graduated from a state school known for its quality engineering programs with a degree in CS, and half my graduating class could barely write HTML, much less actually code.

Unfortunately, the reality of a modern college education has become more a matter of opportunity than actual rigor. I would love to see colleges failing out half their freshman classes - except, that ignores the reality of the modern college as a business rather than an institution of higher learning. Bad for business, having a reputation for "firing" the majority of your clients.

Make no mistake, you can still get a lot out of a college education - I like to believe I took full advantage of my time there. But you can also get by with an insultingly high GPA (we can't just "pass" them, every precious little snowflake deserves A's, dontchaknow) just by showing up.

That said... I have trouble believing that astronomy graduates can't visualize how the steadily changing angle from which we view a 50% illuminated sphere gives rise to the appearance of "phases"... The light half of it shadows the dark half, and we see part of both from a sideways perspective.

I answered your actual question. Now, you' seem to be mocking it, based on how my answer does not apply to a question you did not ask

Fair enough. I should not have mocked your answer, and I apologize for doing so.

I thought it clear, though (from my subject, if nothing else), that I asked my original question rhetorically. I simply don't find that even remotely an acceptable answer.

Anyone exposed to the oil, or with property damage, will be compensated.

"Home" does not count as fungible.

The value to me of the place I've chosen to settle down far exceeds its market value. Yeah, great, they destroyed some houses and will pay for them plus a few grand extra as a "nuisance" fee; except they didn't destroy "some houses", they destroyed a neighborhood.

You can't just pay me off for my sunny spot on the back deck where the light hits just so, filtered between my favorite trees. You can't just pay me off for the trails I've made in the woods behind my house, or all the time I've spent learning those woods and enjoying them. You can't just pay me off for the squirrels I've trained to take peanuts right from my hand while sitting in that aforementioned favorite sunny spot. You can't just pay me off for needing to move away from my neighbor who I consider a close friend, or pay off his kids who love coming over to play with the cat.

Now... I would agree with you completely if the issue at hand involved individual property owners voluntarily selling a right of way across their yard to random oil companies, knowing that an accident could eventually occur. Except it doesn't work like that, and that explains why we hold these parasites to a higher standard of safety. They apply to the government for permission to steal that right of way for a pittance under eminent domain, they dot all their "i"s and cross all their "t"s to have the right people look the other way... And then they expect us to just live in the shadow of their stellar record of safety and caring about the environment?

FUCK THAT. They can damned well pay to put in pressure shutoffs every hundred feet.

For the same reason we don't put firewalls after 100 feet of network cabling. It's expensive and likely to _create_ more failures than it prevents.

Great analogy, because just like water or crude, bits on the wire leak out when a failure occurs and make a mess of everything around them. Man, I'll never forget the sticky mess I found myself in when a backhoe came through the top wall of the server room and took out a densely packed cabling tray. Bits up to my waist within minutes, just awful. ;)

Ironically, though, your answer does more to promote the idea than discredit it - Because, we do put routers between network segments and firewalls at each end-point, and no more fine-grained points of (virtual) compromise really exist.

Backhoes notwithstanding.

Why don't pipelines like that have passive shutoff valves every hundred feet or so, such that if the pipeline suddenly looses pressure, the valve closes and no more oil can escape than already made it into that section?

We've had those for water pipes in our homes for decades to keep the house from flooding in case of a burst. And filling your basement with water does a hell of a lot less damage than filling your basement with crude.

Of course, we all already know the answer to that. The same answer GM didn't give congress last week; the same answer we always have when talking about health and safety tradeoffs: Money.