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Comment Re:Buying cars based on fuel price... ugh (Score 1) 622

The other fact is that pure gas cars are getting really good milage.
My Chevy Cruze is averaging over 33 mpg for me.

LOL. My 2002 Prius got 45 mpg (not to mention much, much lower emissions).

33 mpg is in the same class as "can't be bothered". If you want to crow, you need to get more than 50 mpg, son.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Chronicle: Off to the bookstore for a book! 2

I love books. Well, i love reading them. There are people who do love books, such as an erstwhile coworker that told me she cried when they were lost or damaged, or something like that. She convincingly conveyed to me that she was emotionally attached to her books. She also no longer works here.

Comment Sad no one mentioned the French TGV (Score 2) 189

- Has been operating on conventional rail (cost $ vs. $$$ for maglev) since 1981.
- Is holding the world record of 574,8 km/h on conventioanl rail since 2007.
- Is linking all major cities in France and some abroad (Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, UK).
- Has commercial speeds of 280km/h for the oldest ones, to 320km/h for the current generation.
- Costs a fraction of the price of the maglev.

But, YMMV. And by all means go Japan !

Comment Re:"Surge Pricing" (Score 1) 96

Sometimes it's needed to help prevent a service being overwhelmed: our phone calls used to cost 4x more 9am to 1pm than 6pm to 8am because our phone service (government run) had limited available bandwidth. Now that is no longer an issue (largely c/o fibre optics) there is no pricing surcharge for the daytime peak.

In fact on a wholesale level from BT there still are three different time bands for pricing (daytime, off-peak, weekend) and different charges based on whether the call just goes through the local exchange, one regional ('single-tandem') exchange, or two ('double-tandem', which in turn is broken down into short, medium and long distances). Retail phone companies tend to lump them all together into a single rate, though - either an unlimited use bundle, or a simple flat-rate per minute.

For that matter, many of the better ISPs still have some time-based variation in charging: my previous one only charged for usage during the working day, my current one has three tariffs, one of which is much much cheaper outside working hours. (The worse ISPs tend to offer "unlimited" service, and accept that their network is congested and slow at busy times.)

Comment Re:Why it is hard to recruit... (Score 1) 67

They don't need script kiddies, they need social engineers. Question number one in the job interview should be "Is your native language Russian, Chinese, Farsi, Korean or Arabic?"

No, that's the beauty of global outsourcing: all they need's a Hindu accent. "Hello, I am being Sanj - I mean, Bob, from IT. I am needing you to be visiting TeamViewer to be fixing the Windows errors on your terrorist cell's PC..."

More seriously, I thought the offensive hacking was more an NSA/CIA operation: Army cybersecurity would be all about keeping the Windows systems patched and stopping generals replying to hot students who want naked sexy time over Skype in exchange for their passwords. (OK, it turned out that one should have been a CIA job too lately...) There's only a passing reference in TFA to the US having offensive capabilities, everything else is about securing DoD and contractor networks from attack, as I'd expect.

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