Any competent Corporate IT already scrubs URL's from all email, it get's quarentined and a tech has to look at the email before the user can get it.

Comcast was doing that back in the early 2005's

Unless it's active low, then tie it to V+ rail.

Pull Write Enable line to ground and the best hackers in the world cant change anything on the chip.

Dont need to be. All they need to do is add a very small switch. you are updating the firmware? flip the physical switch.

Lessthan $0.10 in electronic parts to make something hackerproof.

I'd say they're #2 already... oh wait you meant second place. Never mind...

No argument from me. I make wiring harness that go into automobiles (among other things) for a living. The amount of useless customization and non-standard parts used would make your head explode. For example one of the parts we make uses a custom wire, had two custom connectors designed for it, and uses two different grommets because the engineers for cars in the same family couldn't be bothered to talk to each other to commonize a hole size. This means that the price is probably 50% higher than necessary and instead of having material lead times of a few days, we have to order materials 4 MONTHS in advance with minimums close to 50K units. I am an engineer but I'm astonished at how incompetent some engineers are at their jobs.

It's less that they don't want people upgrading them (though that is a part of it) but rather that they are trying desperately to find ways to differentiate their products from the other guys even when there is no point in doing so. There is a LOT of Not-Invented-Here going on. Heaven forbid that you find the same part on a GM and a Ford. Seriously, they get pissed if you even try to sell them the same product the other guy uses. It's ridiculous. I've literally seen a GM engineer start yelling because he found some part that was also used on a Chrysler vehicle.

The big thing will be getting recharge times down. That's going to take another 10-15 years minimum I think. (The superchargers are nice but not quite there yet) Until then long distances with EV will be via hybrids. I think it won't be long before we start seeing long distance haulers and trucks being hybrids. Lots of torque from the electric motors and it will help the automakers meet CAFE standards. Wouldn't be surprised to see some diesel electric hybrids at some point.

Cannot do that in an electric YET. Give it 5-10 years and it could happen. Heck the notion of an EV that can do 400 miles on a charge isn't in the realm of science fiction. The Tesla can do over 230 now and it isn't optimized for range. I don't have any trouble envisioning an EV with double that range.

So how do that equate to "pathetic"? I get that it might not be a good fit for you but that's just how it goes sometimes. Very tall and very short people unfortunately have necessarily limited options because accommodating them tends to ruin the ergonomics for "normal" sized people who constitute the majority of the buying public. I dated a girl once who was about 4'9" and she actually needed blocks on the pedals of her truck to drive it. I prayed the airbag never went off on her because she had to sit so close it would likely have killed her. Most really tall guys I know end up driving big SUVs of some description. Kind of sucks but that's the way it goes. I think you'll probably see somebody do some big trucks in pure EV and there already are hybrids out there.

You are correct but kind of missing the point. The Ford does outsell the Chevy (which is true) but the point you glossed by is that there is no objective reason for this to be the case based on the technical merits of the respective vehicles. In some years the Chevy is an objectively better vehicle and the prices are so similar as to be identical. So if people were buying entirely based on objective evidence you would expect the sales crown to pass to Chevy or even Ram from time to time. But this doesn't happen.

It's not actually clear that buyers in a GMC dealership would necessarily buy the Chevy over the Ford even though the GMC is completely identical to the Chevy in all meaningful respects. Hence they have to break them out even though you are quite correct that they are the same vehicle mechanically and could rightfully be viewed as one for sales.

Daimler did not sell Chrysler to Fiat. They bought Chrysler in 1998 for $38 billion. They sold Chrysler to Cerebus Capital Management in 2007. Fiat bought their interest in Chrysler in 2009 alongside the bankruptcy and they did not acquire a majority interest until fairly recently.

I can assure you that they've never managed to sell a GPS system "at 2000% markup" even though the price does seem outrageous. To understand why you have to understand product costing in the auto industry. The auto industry does not do huge volumes of consumer electronics like GPS systems. This means their unit prices are rather high. Furthermore each GPS system is to a non-trivial degree customized for the vehicle it is going into which makes the price quite a lot higher. This means that that $2000 GPS option actually probably costs a substantial percentage of that price because they don't sell enough of them to get the cost down lower.

My company makes parts that go into some of the custom wiring harnesses for things like this. Best case they are probably making about a 2-3X markup on the GPS option depending on the volume of the vehicle it goes on. Chances are good they are making less than that especially if it is standard equipment. Remember that even the most profitable auto manufacturer in the world (currently Porsche) has something like 10% net profit margins. So no they aren't making "2000% markup" on pretty much anything.

If you want to know what a part really costs to make, go to your automotive dealer and see what price they are selling it for as a service part. As a crude rule of thumb the markup from manufacturers cost is usually around 6-8X. So for example my company sells a wire harness to our OEM customer for about $2. If you could buy that harness from your GM dealer it would probably cost you about $35-55 retail. Basically the harness goes through somewhere between 2 and 5 suppliers and each one marks it up by around 10-30% along the way. Then when the dealer gets it they basically double whatever price they paid for it (sometimes more) which gets you to a roughly 6-8X the original cost to build.

TeleAtlas kicks Google's butt in maps.

And people were buying them because they were the best alternative available in most cases. Yes they were very often crap but there was no non-crap option available. Once there was and they started bleeding market share they eventually (albeit late) starting making better products. The reason for the recent bankruptcies was because their labor and benefits costs because uncompetitive in a competitive market. But the cars they make have continued to appeal and sell, even in the darkest days of bankruptcy. Sales has never truly been the big problem for the Big 3, even with reduced market share. People like their products even when they probably shouldn't if they were being objective about it.

It's only not proof if you think people are nothing more than gullible sheep with no concept of what interests them. Since that isn't actually true we have to consider that people buy what actually appeals to them and that sales figures are actually the best data available on what constitutes a compelling product.

Umm, completely different cars in completely different market segments. Not even remotely a meaningful comparison. One is a performance luxury car that sells for nearly six figures to wealthy tech nerds. The other is a compact runabout purchased almost entirely by the granola crowd for eco cred. Would be hard to be more different.

Perception matters. For example there is no technical reason the Ford F150 has been the best selling vehicle in the US for the last 32 years. In a given year the Chevy or Ram offerings are often objectively better for that model year. Yet Ford out sells them every single year. Why? Perception. Having a brand people like and are comfortable with matters a lot.

And as far as size goes, Telsa is a tiny auto maker. GM sells more vehicles in a month than Tesla has sold in their entire history. The big auto makers could introduce an all electric vehicle very quickly if they wanted to but mostly they are working on hybrids and watching the market. If Tesla can prove the market (good chance of that) then you'll see them jump in later on in a big way. But the longer they stay out of the market the better it will be for Tesla if they can do what they are working on. Tesla has a brand with very high appeal right now.

Maybe not, but there is a way to say it like an asshole which you just proved.