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Comment Re:You're dying off (Score 1) 287

Nope, I'm a very careful driver with no at-fault accidents in something upwards of a half million miles behind the wheel. (I have been rear ended while stopped.) Try again.

I have a lot of things I care about, but the car isn't one of them. I would prefer to take some sort of transit and not have to bother driving but that's not how the infrastructure around here works. Self driving cars are the next best thing, can't come soon enough. This is what a lot of older people have trouble understanding--the younger generations have more options and don't need to care about a car. For an older generation that literally built their homes around their cars that's hard to comprehend. When transportation choices were limited, the car promised freedom. Now the car represents a lot of work, and not having to deal with it seems a lot more freeing.

I've seen the people that are really passionate about their cars. They tend to be really unsafe drivers because they can't wait to hit that oversize gas pedal. They seem to be focused on the car and on themselves and not on the people around them. I actually start to wonder if spending hours alone in a box turns people into psychopaths.

Comment Re:You're dying off (Score 0) 287

Hey, if you like to define yourself by your car, that's cool. For myself, the car is a box that goes from place to place. I spend my money on things that actually make me happy, not the box that I use to get there. If I don't buy a new car every 3 years, that's a good quarter million dollars over twenty years that I can spend on housing, travel, cultural events, hobbies, whatever. But if you think it's better to have a nice box, it's your money. The car companies certainly spend a lot of money trying to convince people that the box really is the most important thing in life.

Comment Re:Missing the point (Score 1) 287

The point of a cheap used car is to provide transportation. The point of an expensive new car is to make the driver look like someone who can afford an expensive new car. The point is that being expensive is going to end up being less important to shoppers than playing nicely with their phone (even though there are a lot of older folks who have trouble imagining a world where you can't judge someone by the car they drive).

Comment Re:Good. +1 for Google. (Score 1) 176

Who decides who "example.com" is? A collection of CAs or the person who gets the money for adding the NS entry for example.com? You may have existential angst over this, but at a practical level the registrar is going to be intimately involved in deciding who owns your domain and will have a de facto ability to spoof that, cut you off, or do other bad things. The question is whether they can do any of this stealthily. One nice thing about DANE is that you can actually monitor the records which are being provided to ensure that people are getting the correct records (doing this right would mean either having a number of test locations or hiring a third-party provider that does this as a service). This is in contrast to the CA model, in which you don't know that someone is presenting a bogus cert unless you're google and you get to instrument everybody's browser.

As for the price, you misunderstand. Paying more certainly doesn't guarantee quality, but not paying certainly guarantees that a provider won't implement expensive controls. If you need a highly secure domain in the DNSSEC scheme, then you want a registrar that will implement things like out of band verification of changes, multi-party controls on their end to prevent unauthorized changes, routine auditing, etc. That will cost more than getting a domain from a registrar that doesn't provide those services. You're probably going to be using a registrar that has a low enough volume that they can actually inspect changes to a degree impossible if you support automated bulk registrations (so the costs are spread over fewer customers).The neat thing is, you get to decide what you need--there's no good reason why my vanity domain needs the same level of security as microsoft.com. If you're on the really high end, I'd expect that you'd actually third-party audit the registrar to make sure that they're doing the things they say they are. (That also won't be free.) But at least there would be economic incentives to do all of these things, unlike the current regime where there's no effective difference between a $100k verisign EV cert and a free startssl cert.

Comment Re:Good. +1 for Google. (Score 1) 176

>>registrars between you and the root can spoof you.
Not good.

Why is that not good? If your registrar is malicious, they can get a certificate issued for you anyway. The really nice thing about the "you have to trust your registrar" model is that you can actually vote with your wallet. Don't care about security? Get a cheap registrar. Want really good security? Pay extra for a registrar that has stronger guarantees. Even better: if a registrar screws up, its customers can leave. (Unlike the CA model, where if the CA screws up, they're too big to fail.) The techincal aspects are almost secondary to the benefits of providing economic incentives for the security-critical actors to do the right things.

Comment Re: Dupe (Score 1) 840

It's already been beaten to death up-thread. The benefits are things like more efficient space utilization and improved aerodynamics. The cost is that something that doesn't happen very often is less convenient. For the majority of car owners who were never going to change their bulbs anyway, there is basically no cost at all. I think that most "reasonable people" have no idea what is required to change their bulb, as galling as it may be for you. Calling it a safety concern is just about as hyperbolic as it gets. Seriously, how often do you blow a bulb? While driving? In a snow storm? If this is your number one issue, go ahead and get yourself a fifty year old chevy. It'll be a death trap in that snowstorm in a lot of ways, but it'll be really easy to change the headlight. (Not actually true: it required a screwdriver, and the screw was likely corroded and a PITA to remove in the dark on the side of a road. Even 50 years ago most people didn't really care about this issue.)

Comment Re: Dupe (Score 1) 840

But your point is basically "it shouldn't because I say so", which isn't really compelling. Who cares if it's many hours of driving? Most of the time if I lose a headlight I'm only really sure that it's out when I get to the garage and confirm that there's only one bright spot on the wall; there is sufficient redundancy in the system that driving on a single light is a non-event. In a case where it's really, really, dark and you really can't see well enough on one bulb, the odds are that the bright is still working fine. The odds that the second light will immediately go and that you'll be driving with no regular light is significantly less than the odds that the janky bulb stuff in the glove compartment or rattling in the trunk will have failed due to rough handling. This is simply a non-issue for any reasonable person, even if it really pisses you off.

Comment Re: Dupe (Score 1) 840

I used to replace in pairs, don't anymore. (The bare halogens are best just left alone. On my current car, the left bulb lasted 6 years longer than the right.)

The one in the trunk is likely to fail from rattling around in the trunk.

And regardless of whether I had a spare bulb, I'd never stop on the side of the road to change it, I'd just drive on the remaining light until a more convenient time.

Comment Re:Note to capitalists: business model (Score 1) 840

Hmm. Seems to me it's also good for the following points of view:

1) Miniaturization
2) Reduced cost and/or power consumption via increased integration
3) Improved ergonomics (case design not dictated by repair requirements)
4) Aerodynamics
5) Durability (repairability generally requires additional access points, fasteners, etc., which are themselves points of failure)

Or maybe there are no rational reasons to design things in way that's hard to repair, and it's all just a big conspiracy.

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