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Comment Re:Change is coming for car dealers (Score 1) 455

All they need to do is place a generator on a trailer and tow it with them.

If you don't mind spending thousands of dollars on a generator that can keep up with the car's power drain, and the snickers of everyone around you when you pull into a gas station with your $100K EV to fill up the tank. :-)

Comment Re:Bread, eggs, breaded eggs (Score 1) 186

A 39 inch 4kTV is the equivalent of 4 20 inch 1080p monitors together.

But useless for when you need to run the debugged program full-screen while watching what happens in a debugger, network sniffer, etc. at the same time. There really are times when you need multiple displays not just for the added screen area, but because each display is being used for something different.

Comment Re:I can't buy one (Score 1) 377

The i.MIEV is not a hybrid. It's electric. Which has its own sales problems because the powertrain is so simple and robust that it requires very little maintenance, so dealers HATE selling them (they don't make as much profit on new car sales since their margins always get squeezed and someone has to pay the interest on those 0% financing and stuff). Dealers love it when customers come back for service, because service is a high-margin item. High enough they toss in stuff like free oil changes and other cheap things to encourage returning. And do it every 3-6 months, at that.

I wish I could be surprised and not merely disappointed that a conspiracy theory comment got +5 on Slashdot.

That businesses are capable of projecting the long-term impacts of various options and then, based on that data, make decisions that are intended to increase their own revenues is not a "conspiracy theory". Now maybe the GP poster is correct and maybe he is misinformed -- that is to be settled by actually looking into the subject, not by hand-waving and insisting that no speculation you dislike could possibly be true. There is nothing he has said that violates the laws of physics or is inconsistent with the observed behavior of other businesses.

This kind of planning is mysterious and ominous only to people who never engage in any medium-to-long-term planning in their own lives. Considering the long-term repercussions of a sale is simply being smart. Dealers like to make money just like other businesses. They'd rather you come to them frequently for profitable service than infrequently or not at all. There's nothing absurd about that.

Comment Re:The eventual redefinition of "privacy" and the (Score 1) 89

The reality is closer to "any delivery man could one day decide to just steal your mail, and this is pretty likely to happen actually". But why don't they? In fact why doesn't anyone with some control over your life use that position to screw you over and take what they want? It's the question never pondered.

There's not much need to ponder the question, because it *does* happen. Not on a huge, sweeping scale (not including the NSA stuff, anyway), but it's enough to be concerned about.

Comment Re:Why do opera at all then? (Score 1) 121

Choreography is so dependent on timing anyhow that they'd rather have the singers step on their dicks than make the entire crew have to adjust to the mistake.

That's a whole different ball of wax. If the lead doing her pretty solo under a follow spot screws up and misses a verse, we can compensate and help her out. However, if we're doing something like "West Side Story" and someone gets lost in the midst of 30 other people doing their thing, that's their problem - we're not going to wreck dozens of people like that trying to save the soloist. :-)

Comment Re:Must have been an NSL (Score 1) 75

If you want to get around BitLocker, you don't bother exploiting BitLocker, you just install a kernel driver that filters ALL read/writes to volumes, this would be just as effective against TrueCrypt as it is against BitLocker.

On Windows you don't even need to do that. Detours gives you the ability to intercept any API call you'd like. Hook the appropriate file I/O calls, and you're done, no compromised drivers needed. Of course, there are ways to determine that the calls have been detoured, but there's practically no software in common use that does this.

Comment Re:Why do opera at all then? (Score 1) 121

The problem with using recordings is that the musicians normally synchronise themselves and follow cues from the stage.

This is the biggest issue for me. Most of my pit experience is from playing musicals, and while everything you said applies, there's another issue - when one of the performers has a brain fart and skips the first verse of a song, a real pit orchestra responds instantly and seamlessly because they're listening to what's going on independently of the conductor, and know the show. If an actor misses a cue, the orchestra vamps until he gets his act together, and can make it sound like nothing out of the ordinary happened. If for some reason the conductor gets out of sync with what's happening on stage, the orchestra knows to ignore him and to follow the stage when need be. All of those situations have happened to me personally, and I've yet to see an electronic performance that can deal with them effectively.

Having said that, I agree with some of the other posters that most of the sampled/recorded music in musical theater today is there because of money. It's not cheap to field even a small (5-7 members) pit orchestra for a show that does even only five performances per week. It's been years since I had the opportunity to play a show simply because all the theaters around where I live don't use live music anymore.

Comment Re:IPMI vulnz (Score 2) 62

But small companies with a few machines in a co-lo? This could get ugly.

It doesn't have to. Just set up a cheap hardware firewall and keep the IPMI ports on local addresses only accessible via VPN. If the firewall/router can handle the traffic, it's often a good idea to NAT the servers' public interfaces as well so that if you have to change your public IPs all you have to change is the firewall/router config without touching the servers themselves.

Comment Re:Fucking Bush! (Score 1) 272

we all wanted and needed hope and change. there's no way to know if he was geniune when he started out.

Yes, there is. Apply a simple test: is he being promoted by one of the two major parties? If yes, then he is not genuine.

There has been no meaningful exception since Kennedy. The way that ended simply proved what could happen if the candidate double-crosses the monied interests (the real power) that got him into office.

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