Except that many parts of the grid heat up during peak hours, and the engineers who designed it did so with a dependency on low power consumption at night, which would allow them to cool down. If you have a bunch of cars in an area charging at night, there won't be enough time for the transformers (etc.) to cool off before companies open shop in the morning and start heating those components up even more. Then one day, BOOM!

It's not just peak performance of the grid that matters, it's the minimum, peak, mean, and average.

I worked with one of them for a little less than a year. I couldn't stand it. Within an 18 month period, a team of 8 lost 2 employees, hired another, lost 2 more, then lost the new hire, but had one of the first 2 that left decide to return because the job market was a mess. This was a team developing customizations to an enterprise application, and the turnover could be boiled down to 2 things. The first is the manager, who was an overbearing and micro-managed everything. The second was the brilliant jerk. He literally wrote books about the system we were developing our customizations for, but he was hyper-critical of everyone's work, and our manager had him do a peer review of everything our team produced. It was one of the most miserable years of my life.

Oh, I agree that realistic violence (as opposed to "fantasy violence" in superhero cartoons) should be gated as well, but that's a much tougher sell given the current state of society. Thankfully, there are ratings at the beginning of most (all?) television programs in the U.S., but unfortunately many parents use it as a babysitter, and don't pay any attention to such things. My solution is to simply not have a television at all. That takes the probability of seeing something I don't expressly want to see down to almost nil.

Now you're just spreading FUD. The FCC should be preventing this stuff from showing up where it isn't expected, but it's not trying to prevent porn from being on the internet, nor is it trying to prevent it from entering your home via your TV, as long as it's clearly gated. The FCC doesn't prevent your local cable company from providing you with porn. It prevents it from being broadcast openly to anyone with a TV, who can easily stumble upon it unwillingly. That's why a breast can't be displayed during the Super Bowl. It's the wrong place and the wrong time. Families will watch the Super Bowl, including kids, because it's considered to be "relatively" safe. Although, the FCC should be doing more about the commercials shown during the event.

If you want to view porn, that's up to you, and nobody should prevent you from doing so, as long as it's behind a door that says "here there be porn." That way, I and my wards won't stumble upon it without my expressed consent. To say that the FCC is trying to prevent it from being provided to you AT ALL is a gross overstatement, and just plain FUD.

At one company that I worked for, I was part of the pilot for their VM roll-out, and I was able to use multiple screens. We used a Citrix client. I had to position the Citrix client window so that it was rendered partially on each screen, then maximize it. That allowed me to use both screens (which had very different resolutions and even different aspect ratios, but worked flawlessly). If I positioned the Citrix client window only on one screen, and maximized it, it worked on only one screen. The key was to have it positioned so as to render portions of it on each screen before maximizing.

I worked at one of the big 3 TC hardware companies and we used TCs for everything. All the developers used them to connect to their own VMs, and that is where we did all our development. It worked very well. We even had TC notebooks, which I saw being used "in the wild" by a librarian at our county law library. Our CEO's theory was that if we were going to sell our product, we needed to use our product.

That being said, you're absolutely right that they are not aimed at developers. They're aimed at any company that wants a simple, secure, easy to manage, and secure (yes I wrote secure twice) device that doesn't need a lot of horsepower. For example, they perfectly fit the need of self-serve scanners at a grocery store. Hotel and car rental chains make excellent use of them as well for their front desks. These three examples don't make use of VMs, but they were our biggest customers.

The biggest problem with using TCs and VMs is the licensing costs. The hardware needs an OS, and often times that's an embedded Windows. It needs to be remotely manageable, and that's usually Altiris. Their are Debian-based OSs available, but it still takes time for developers to customize it, secure it, etc., and those costs are built into the device. Now let's say you want to use VMs. You need servers, OSs, the VM software itself, and support contracts. The last three require yearly fees. If you're using TCs and VMs, it's going to be expensive.

Security is the main selling point of these devices, but security is also one of the least appreciated selling points for computer hardware. Speed, features, and price are the main selling points for computer hardware, with price being the heaviest factor.

Sure there are consumer protection laws. No, they don't cover this sort of thing. A business can negotiate two different prices with two different customers for the same service. It's perfectly legal. However, the country was founded on principles of freedom, and free markets. Therefore, you find a lot of freedom for corporations to do whatever they want, because they bankroll the politicians, but very little freedom in practice for individuals. Sure, individuals can say whatever they want, but they can't do whatever they want. It's the ongoing pursuit of this mythical thing called "security" that prevents that.

When you're a government agency, or corporation. Remember, corporations control the (U.S.) government, and the government controls the money. Sure, any group can create its own form of currency, and some communities/municipalities have done just that. Just try to exchange that local currency for anything outside of town, however, and it all falls apart.

Didn't you know, you don't BUY a piece of hardware? You LICENSE it. That means you have the right to use it only how they say you can use it. That allows Microsoft to brick your XBox if you mod it, Sony to remove features (Other OS), Apple to dictate which networks you can use your iPhone on, etc., etc.

This is exceptionally insightful. It's the same sort of problem with putting "public records" online. That court document which has a person's SSN on it is a public record, but when you scan it into a database, and make it searchable online, that takes it to a whole new level, and becomes very dangerous. When I tell a new acquaintance my phone number in a public space, I expect that he will enter it into his cell phone, or write it down, and maybe a couple people will overhear it. I don't expect it to then be plastered on a billboard for all the city to see. Just because I told someone the information in a public space does NOT mean that it is meant for everyone to see. The internet a whole new kind of "public" in that it's FAR more accessible due to search engines, and the persistence of the information.

Sadly, most series don't have their entire storyline planned out from beginning to end. B5 truly is the magnum opus of space operas. I rewatched the entire series last year, and was amazed at how good the storyline was, even after I already knew it. Other than the change from Sinclair to Sheridan, and from Winters to Alexander, the entire storyline was 100% compelling and consistent from beginning to end. It was a Shakespearean epic in space.

I'd probably label it Hardware, but I think this Google fiber network has a backstory related to net neutrality. At about the time Google announced this program, they had just backed a push for net neutrality, which was defeated in some fashion, and the next day this program was announced. At least, that's how I remember it, but I'm probably completely wrong.

I'd pay extra for a decently fast broadband that didn't fold to whatever whims the goverment/MAFIAA have that day, and practiced true net neutrality. To my knowledge, I've never had any agencies/lawyers/etc care enough about my online activities to contact me or my ISP, nor has Comcast artificially slowed down my data. It's the principle that bothers me.

It's the principle that also keeps me from using any hermetically sealed Apple products (which is all of them). It's also the principle that keeps me from playing computers games that I really want, but are hampered by online activation requirements which strip away my rights as a buyer, and relegates me into the role of a 'licensee' (Civ5, Fallout NV, Assassin's Creed, Bioshock, etc.). Apple's hypercontrolling business model, or online game activation/control, may not affect me in any meaninful way, but it's the very principles that bother me.

If I even had another option for broadband that's faster than 1.5 Mbps other than Comcast, I'd sign up in an instant. Unfortunately, I don't even have an choice.

They probably put a hardcoded u/n & p/w into the system early in development to ensure that their login security system worked, then implemented configurable logins, forgetting to remove the hardcoded one.

When I code something that is meant to be configurable, I first hardcode some values to ensure that the code works, then I code a configurable text-file based system, like ini or properties files. Finally, I move on to implementing the desired configuration method, such as LDAP, SQL, or HTTP GET. Anything sensitive is encrypted, of course. I have always remembered to remove the hardcoded values, but I've seen colleagues forget to do the same.

To steal, one must take something from another's possession, and deprive them of its use. What he did was illegal, as the jury found. However, if all he did was copy the code, as opposed to destroying the originals and all versioned/archived/backed-up copies, then he didn't steal anything. The MAFIAA (Music and Film Industry Associations of America) would like you to think that what this man did was steal, because it's a short hop to apply the same logic from code to music and film. They'd be wrong.