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Comment Re:Crash safety testing not applicable. (Score 1) 128

From their site, they intend to make all the essential parts for crash safety out of printed plastic.

Everything on the car that could be integrated into a single material piece has been printed. This includes the chassis/frame, exterior body, and some interior features. The mechanical components of the vehicle, like battery, motors, wiring, and suspension, are sourced from Renaultâ(TM)s Twizy, an electric powered city car.

Also on their site has the specs.

Motor - 5 bhp or 17 bhp, 42 lb-ft torque*

Top Speed - approx. 50mph*

The "*" indicating there should be a footnote explaining it, is missing.

Actually, their donor car (Renault Twizy) isn't even classified as a car. It's a quadcycle, and is not currently legal for road operation in the United States. From what I found elsewhere, Renault isn't even planning to make it available in the US, since it doesn't meet the road requirements here.

Comment Re:Insurance (Score 4, Informative) 216

That falls into statistically normal usage. Being a commercial driver absolutely does not. Statistically, a commercial driver drives way more than a noncommercial driver, and they're much more likely to be sued, and for more money. It's absurd to argue that they should be able to drive on insurance rates calculated for statistical norms of noncommercial drivers. If you allow that sort of ignoring of statistics then you might as well get rid of all statistical tables period and charge every last person the same rate for all types of insurance.

Comment Insurance (Score 4, Insightful) 216

Why, exactly, should Uber drivers get to drive passengers using regular non-commercial drivers' insurance? Commercial insurance costs more because people who drive people around for a living are much more likely to cost the insurance companies more money. If you're letting them drive on non-commercial licenses than that means that regular drivers are subsidizing Uber-drivers.

Comment Re:Defective by design. (Score 1) 222

They're well defined now. AFAIK, they were nonstandard when initially proposed. Every time someone wants to deviate from accepted standards, there should be a darn good reason why, and I'm just not seeing any reasonable justification for creating a whole separate transport-layer protocol for something that basically behaves like a normal, connected stream.

And it isn't just explicit blocking that's a problem. Firewalls and NAT often make life miserable for users even when those firewalls aren't trying to block the VPNs. That's why as far as I'm concerned, if you're passing traffic, you should use TCP if you need the data to be robust and reliable, UDP if delayed delivery would make the data worthless, and ICMP for the usual network management purposes. IMO, everything else is anathema. :-)

Comment Re:Defective by design. (Score 1) 222

My point was that there was no valid reason for each of these VPNs to each use its own transport-layer protocol. A normal, connected TCP socket would have done the job just as easily. Every time someone strays from the expectation that all packets are either TCP, UDP, or ICMP, it means every hardware-based firewall maker (and every software-based firewall IT person) has to do extra work to deal with it, and hardware that worked before suddenly doesn't work or (if you're lucky) requires firmware updates. The fact that using a different protocol makes it easier to block is just another in a long list of reasons why the proliferation of transport-layer protocols is a bad idea.

Comment Re:Defective by design. (Score 1) 222

Okay, fair enough. I usually lump firewalls and routers in the same bucket, because outside of backbone hardware, most routers also act as firewalls. The point is that a lot of (badly designed) consumer routers (firewalls) do stupid things like routing only TCP and UDP, or treating those other protocols as "special" under the assumption that VPNs will always be used from the inside out, never from the outside in, resulting in all sorts of fun.

Comment Re:What's this? (Score 1) 8

Amazon was an experiment. I read the library's copy of Andy Wier's The Martian, really liked it, and googled to see if he had any more titles. Wikipedia said that he couldn't get a publisher so he introduced it as an Amazon ebook, it went to their best seller list, and a publisher bought the hardcover rights for a six figure sum.

So I thought, what the hell, why not give it a try? I thought it might give me extra exposure, but I was wrong.

Comment Defective by design. (Score 4, Informative) 222

It doesn't help that most VPNs are so easy to detect and block at the IP header level. PPTP depends on the GRE IP protocol (47), and L2TP is usually tunneled over IPSec, which depends on the ESP IP protocol (50). By using different protocol numbers in the IP headers, the designers of these protocols made it mindlessly easy to block them, and made them harder to support, because routers have to explicitly know how to handle those nonstandard protocol numbers.

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