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Comment Re:Use an existing standard please (Score 1) 358

Speaking of power, those wall outlets supplying mains voltage also require orienting them correctly, as do ethernet cords, even fibre optic cords are designed to require proper orientation (though that one has always struck me as odd) people seem to manage all of these in their daily lives without issues, yet as soon as you put it on a phone it confounds them.

Comment Re:I don't get it. (Score 3, Insightful) 342

Or you know, you could look at what Tesla actually does...

It's a combination of the fact that Teslas require only a minute fraction of the service of a normal internal combustion engine car, and that Tesla already provides better service than any dealership in existence. They have service centres all over the place (who cares if it's in the same place as the store if it's no further away) and you don't even have to go to the service centre because they will either send a mechanic to your doorstep, or pick up the car from your home or office for you (and replace it with a loaner if service will take longer than you can wait)

So why would I want to force their stores (best located in high foot traffic areas like malls) to be co-located with their service centres (best located in low rent areas like industrial parks) when it doesn't do anything to help me as a consumer? The only thing that it would do is either increase costs (paid in the end by the consumer) or decrease convenience (again at the expense of the consumer)

This law doesn't look at what the most advantageous model is for the consumer, it looks at what the existing business model is of the dealerships and forces everyone in to that mould effectively prohibiting any improvement to it.

Comment Re:Or, just maybe... (Score 1) 11

This is my thought too. I had the hood ornament torn off my car once, and the radio antenna another time. Do I think the idiots did it because they hated diesel cars for political reasons? No. I thought they were probably immature jerks who thought it was fun to destroy other people's property.

Comment Re:Let me get this straight (Score 1) 520

They should actually be grateful it all comes from one source, it's an incredible opportunity for them to buy local caching from netflix to save on bandwidth. if the same volume came from 1000 sources they'd actually have to upgrade their outgoing links which could prove to be much more expensive.

Or they could act like every other abusive monopoly and try to double dip and get paid twice for the same service... which of course is the option they chose...

Comment Re:Let me get this straight (Score 2) 520

I have no problem with my ISP "overselling" as long as it doesn't impact the end users. They know that if they have 10,000 customers with 100mbps connections, that doesn't mean they need to be able to provide 1tbps of bandwidth, but just because they used to be able to get away with only having a total of 1gbps and they now need 10gbps to handle the same load is just a cost of doing business. (numbers made up on the spot, and probably not accurate, but the principle still applies) They should be thankful that they don't actually need to provide the 1tbps that would actually be required if people were filling the pipes they sold them.

I would say the ISP has three choices.
1) Admit they can't provide the bandwidth they're selling, and stop selling that level of bandwidth.
2) Realize they can't provide the bandwidth they're selling, and upgrade the network until they can handle the average spikes in said load.
3) Beg netflix to give them a local cache to save them on having to do either 1 or 2
What they should not be doing is getting paid twice for the same bandwidth.

Comment Re:Long-term loss (Score 1) 520

Which is why you already pay more for a 100mbps connection than you do for a 10mbps connection than you do for a 1mbps connection. If all you do is read plaintext slashdot, you only need the 1mbps connection to do just fine, if you stream HD movies you'll need probably the 10mbps connection, if you want multiple 4KHD streams pay for the 100mbps connection.
Sure the ISPs pay their own upstream costs in terms of what bandwidth they need, but you pay them in a very similar way.

What SHOULD be happening is that the ISPs should be crawling to Netflix hat in hand begging for a local cache to save them on upstream bandwidth, not trying to extort extra money for something they've already been paid for!

Comment Re:turn off the car? (Score 1) 664

Interesting, my 1983 300sd had the throttle jam open on me once too, wasn't grease though, the pedal broke off the metal lever and jammed against it. It's a good thing I was able to think fast and turn off the ignition and stand on the brake because it chose to do this at a very inopportune moment entering a small and very crowded parking lot.
Of course that was back in the days when you had the option to shut off the ignition without using an unintuitive interface to ask permission from the same computer that may be misbehaving while you try to do so...
The brake pedal should include a physical disconnect for the throttle, not implemented in software.

Comment Re:Why do we still allow this sort of overeach? (Score 1) 511

By default android takes an all or nothing approach, it tells you what permissions the app wants, and you decide if you want to install it or not. There are however 3rd party solutions for rooted phones which allow you to deny specific permissions and these work well (for example I told my weather app that it didn't need permission to vibrate the phone, I'm capable of deciding when I want to look at the weather). The problem here is two fold though:
1) you can allow or deny, but you can't fake, which means if an app decides not to run without reading your contact list to show you the weather, you can't show it a blank contact list to trick it in to running, I think you should.
2) and this one is more important. Accessing arbitrary files all over the internal file system (such as what VAC is doing in this case) is not considered a permission, it's allowed by default, and is not one of the things you can block, or even see if the app needs.

This is ridiculous. I could deny every permission in android, and a program like VAC could still read my DNS cache. Now I could stop it from contacting the internet, but obviously that's something I want an online game to be able to do. So even the most "advanced" OSs we have today in this area, STILL don't stop apps from accessing random files that they have no business accessing. This is a major security concern.

Comment Re:Why do we still allow this sort of overeach? (Score 1) 511

Sure it does, it just doesn't do it using the browser. it checks what DNS lookups you've made, and assumes that it's the same thing (which it pretty much is for this purpose)
The problem is, it shouldn't have access to read that file. Only your DNS resolver should. Security on modern OSs is a big problem, the fact that none of them take it seriously, and all of them allow every piece of software to do whatever it likes on your computer is what needs to change.

Comment Re:Why do we still allow this sort of overeach? (Score 1) 511

I think you misunderstand me, I'm actually not complaining about what VAC does, I'm complaining about what our modern OSs allow EVERY app to do. Not using this app doesn't fix the underlying security concern that every app on my computer has the same access and can do whatever it wants with the information.
This is what we need to fix. Our computers need to stop blindly trusting every app.

Comment Re:Why do we still allow this sort of overeach? (Score 2) 511

Then I can give them permission to do so.
The OS should assume the worst from any application asking for access outside of itself, and let the user decide. I should be able to give it access, deny it access, or fake the results.

The problem here isn't what VAC is doing, the problem is that any app can do this without any oversight at all.

As a side note, anti-virus and anti-malware wouldn't be issues if we stopped this ridiculous idea that every app should have full and complete control of the user's system.

Comment Re: Why do we still allow this sort of overeach? (Score 1) 511

So your excuse is because this one application has a use you like, all OSs should allow ALL applications free reign.

This is a technical answer exploiting a security hole that shouldn't exist to try to prevent a social problem. If people stayed away from VAC in protest it wouldn't fix the underlying broken concept in every OS that says apps should have free reign over the system.

The problem here is not VAC, the problem is the OS allowing every single app unlimited access to the system, something we should not be allowing.

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