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Comment Idiots ruin safety records (Score 1, Insightful) 443

I think the real message here is that Tesla's stellar safety record is due at least in part to its exclusivity and high price tag. The kind of people who can afford it are generally safer drivers. It's not a used Dodge Charger that some 16 year old asshole with a shiny new drivers license and Dad's credit card can buy off of the lot for a few thousand bucks.

Comment What about the ads (Score 5, Interesting) 147

As I understand it, if they get classified as a cable company Aero will be legally allowed to put their own ads into the stream, overwriting the ads the original broadcaster put in there or maybe removing them entirely if they still want to be an entirely subscription driven service. They could really seriously piss off some OTA broadcasters with this approach.

Comment Re:CFL's lasting almost 30 years (Score 1) 278

You could get a CFL in 1985? Back then "Compact" florescent seemed to be those fixture with the 12" diameter circular tube and a conventional ballast. They certainly did not fit in a traditional socket. I started seeing what we consider CFLs around 2000 or so, and the first versions were pretty bad. There was some seriously defective Chinese garbage all over the market during the first few years. Once I found a bulb I liked (Commercial Electric from Home Depot--they don't appear to exist anymore sadly), I bought a bunch and swapped out most of the bulbs in my house.

Comment Re:2-year CFLs (Score 1) 278

It's strange. Of the many CFLs I've installed, I've only had three failures. Two of which were early Walmart bulbs that were shit. The other was one of the bulbs I settled on for everything else, it got a smoky smell and discolored the plastic near one end of the tube: clearly some magic blue smoke escaped. Other than that, I've had 10 years of reliable service from a couple dozen bulbs. A few of the oldest ones (4 bulbs) have a "warm up" time where they are noticeably dim when you turn them on at first, but all of the other bulbs come on at or near their full brightness.

I do have underground power though, I wonder if comes out cleaner thanks to that?

Comment Re:Dimmable LEDs (Score 1) 278

I tried out a Cree flood in a light I have on a dimmer. The bulb mostly works, but it has somewhat odd behavior on low brightness levels where it will cut out after a few minutes. This only happens when the dimmer is near the bottom (but not totally off). Our workaround is to not use the lowest dimmer setting on that circuit, but it was unfortunate. I considered returning the bulb as defective, but that's effort and I only give a replacement bulb a 50/50 shot at fixing the problem.

Comment Re:So SSL is nothing more than an honor system? (Score 1) 107

x509 is as strong as the weakest signing authority, and there are many many signing authorities now.

It's a shame that browsers have such freakouts over self signed certs, because there is really little difference between them and officially signed certs. IMHO SSH did a better job of this by simply having you inspect the certs the first time you log on to a site and storing the result, only freaking out if the cert changes. It eliminates the complex chain of trust that in the end comes down to just trusting people you don't know anyway and hoping that none of the thousands of people involved are corruptible or incompetent.

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