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Comment Re:What companies still pay for periodicals? (Score 3, Insightful) 97

Why not? Mechanics are usually expected to bring their own tools.

That is true, and I owned thousands of dollars in tools. But those were primarily hand manual and power tools. Shops supply more permanent things like tire mounting and balancing machines, alignment machines, and air compressors.

News

VP.net Promises "Cryptographically Verifiable Privacy" (torrentfreak.com) 36

TorrentFreak spotlights VP.net, a brand-new service from Private Internet Access founder Andrew Lee (the guy who gifted Linux Journal to Slashdot) that eliminates the classic "just trust your VPN" problem by locking identity-mapping and traffic-handling inside Intel SGX enclaves. The company promises 'cryptographically verifiable privacy' by using special hardware 'safes' (Intel SGX), so even the provider can't track what its users are up to.

The design goal is that no one, not even the VPN company, can link "User X" to "Website Y."

Lee frames it as enabling agency over one's privacy:

"Our zero trust solution does not require you to trust us - and that's how it should be. Your privacy should be up to your choice - not up to some random VPN provider in some random foreign country."

The team behind VP.net includes CEO Matt Kim as well as arguably the first Bitcoin veterans Roger Ver and Mark Karpeles.

Ask Slashdot: Now that there's a VPN where you don't have to "just trust the provider" - arguably the first real zero-trust VPN - are trust based VPNs obsolete?

Comment Re:Do the Japanese need a lesson in biology? (Score 3, Informative) 85

If your name never changes then all of your achievements are indexed together. If your CV has to say, "I worked at XYZ between these dates, but under a different name" then that makes it a little bit harder to get a reference that's verifiably about you. You also potentially miss out on people seeing your CV on the pile and saying, "I worked with her before, she's worth calling in for interview". Little bits of friction can make a big difference.

Also, as an aside, talking about "modern audiences" reflects a cultural bias. There are cultures in which the wife always kept her surname. There's nothing inherently antiquated or modern in naming customs: it's "what I'm used to", "what my grandparents were used to", and "what that particular group of foreigners do".

Comment Re:Duh (Score 3, Informative) 181

Many professors didn't care for Einstein due to his inability to stay focused in school. He graduated in 1900 and spent the next several years working only part-time so that he could focus on writing his brilliant theories. Didn't even land a full-time job until 9 years after he graduated.

Sources? I can find unsourced claims that he was employed full-time at the patent office but finished his work in half the time and so was able to spend the other half doing physics. Certainly the "graduated" of your claim is his first degree; he submitted his doctoral thesis in 1905 and his habilitation in 1907. I see further unsourced claims that having obtained the habilitation he was only able to teach before 08:00 and after 18:00 because of his work at the patent office. 1909 seems to be not when he landed his first full-time job but when he landed his first academic job.

Comment Re:You know what... (Score 4, Interesting) 373

Companies currently pay for health insurance for their employees. If you tax employers then most people won't notice the change. That's effectively how it works in Europe: technically part of the social security payment may be paid by the employer and part by the employee, but it's deducted at source. Since the point of the single payer system is that a monopoly has a strong bargaining position, the expectation is that it would be cheaper than the current system.

Comment Re:cheap EVs (Score 1) 140

This may be of interest, so I'll share it...

https://core.verisk.com/Insigh...

This doesn't mean that EV fires aren't important, it's just that they seem to happen less often (per 100,000 cars) than ICE-powered vehicles. There are other citations, some newer, but I just grabbed the first one from Google.

EV fires still suck to get under control, especially for small volunteer fire departments without a lot of money to upgrade what they have. EV fires still release some pretty awful stuff - but so don't ICE-powered vehicles.

Every time someone posts this "fires per 100k cars" thing all the articles end up quoting https://www.autoinsuranceez.co... , and that report is really bad. They make reference to NTSB statistics on vehicle fires by vehicle type, which the NTSB does not track. They also report fires per 100k cars SOLD, not per 100k cars as you indicated. It's completely irrelevant as a statistic.

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