Do these people really think they're hiding Directive 4 from us?

We are only a year out from the murder of a health-insurance executive, so the police are more on edge than usual.

Then we need to threaten such things much more often, so that the cops will eventually get used to it, and relax. ;-)

Debian never tried to kill me through my computer. I'd appreciate it if my car manufacturer made their car as safe as my computer.

Fuck it, I just want a Debian car. Then I won't need to extract bloody vengeance from beyond the grave, as my zombie revenant tracks down the CEO of Subaru, and the rotting flesh of my hands tightens around his throat as payment for the time a popup distracted me.

Considering that for the one-time investment of $150 and a half hour of your time you could not have to do that any more? Hell yes, you're crazy.

Some people are busting out "definitions" of "End to End Encryption" but people were already using that as in informal descriptive term long before your formalized technical jargon was made up. Nobody should be surprised if there are mismatches. Have faith in our faithlessness.

I personally view the term as an attempt to call semi-bullshit on SMTP and IMAP over SSL/TLS. In the "old" (though not very old) days, if you sent a plaintext email (no PGP!), some people would say "oh, it's encrypted anyway, because the connection is encrypted between your workstation and the SMTP server, the connection from there to some SMTP relay is encrypted, the connection from there to the final SMTP server is encrypted, and the recipient's connection to the IMAP server is encrypted."

To which plenty of people, like me, complained "But it's still plaintext at every stop where it's stored along the way! You should use PGP, because then, regardless of the connection security, or lack of security on all the connections, it is encrypted end to end. Never trust the network, baby!"

Keep in mind that even when I say that, this is without any regard for key security! When I say E2E encrypted, it is implied that the key exchange may have been done poorly/incorrectly, mainly because few people really get to be sure they're not being MitMed when they use PGP. You can exchange keys correctly, but it's enough of a PITA that, in the wild, you rarely get to. You usually just look up their key on some keyserver and hope for the best. Ahem. And I say "usually" as if even that happens often. [eyeroll]

Indeed, every time I hear about some new secure messaging app/protocol, the first thing I wonder is "how do they do key exchange?" and I'm generally mistrusting of it, by default. And sometimes, I'm unpleasantly unsurprised, err I mean, cynically confirmed.

But anyway, if my E2E definition matches yours, great! And if it doesn't, well, that's ok and it's why we descend into the dorky details, so that we can be sure we're both talking about the same thing.

Samsung is collection of several companies and if you've ever spent any time working with them you quickly realize that they all prioritize other Samsung companies below other customers. I don't know whether it's because of anti-trust concerns, or market strategy, or just rivalry, but I've never seen any Samsung company that operated any differently. I worked quite a bit with Samsung Mobile and S.LSI, who are even quite interdependent (though S.LSI depends more on Samsung Mobile than the reverse), and they constantly ignored and even dissed one another.

There's no way your driver's ed class failed to mention that traffic is required to stop for school buses with their red lights flashing, and I think it's unlikely that your written test failed to include a question about school zone and school bus rules. Mine (Utah) certainly did.

In rural areas, like where I live, there aren't any marked crossings, and there really isn't any reasonable place to put them. If you mark a crossing it would only ever be used by the one or two houses near it, and only by school children, because there's really no need for anyone to walk across the street otherwise. The school buses stop directly in front of each child's house. There aren't any locations where a bus could pick up multiple children without making them have to walk an unreasonable distance, so each kid's house is a stop.

Also, the speed limit on my road is 45 mph, and cars routinely drive 55 mph... so having the "huge yellow beast" with flashing red lights and a flipped-out, flashing red stop sign is definitely necessary.

They also get in the way of building homes.

For a while (no idea about current situation) but where I used to live in the UK you could not build a property because the Environment Agency had enacted new rules which capped water run off into watercourses, and no council anywhere in the UK had manageable plans to actually meet it with new developments, so nothing got built.

The rules were well intentioned, but came down like a hammer and stopped everything.

Yep. CAFE-style regulation is the wrong way to attempt to reduce carbon emissions. The right way is to impose a carbon tax, then let consumers vote with their wallets and engineers work to make the right tradeoffs to meet customer demand. My guess is that consumers would choose to buy the more fuel-efficient vehicles and engineers might make the same tradeoffs... but now it would be clear that those tradeoffs are worthwhile.

Gas is pretty much exactly at its long-term, inflation-adjusted average price, and right where it was in the 1950s. Since then, it was a little higher in the 70s, a little lower in the 90s, a little higher in the early 2000s, but we're now back at the long-term normal price.

See https://afdc.energy.gov/data/1...

Whether the normal price of gas is "cheap" or "expensive" depends on your income and lifestyle, I'd think.

... except instead of shoes becoming the only profitable product to manufacture, it's chatbots. Nobody knows why, but when it's all over, the only survivors will be those who evolved into computer-illiterate deaf-mutes.

This is an appropriate place for tariffs. Not ridiculous, exclusionary tariffs like we have, but tariffs carefully calibrated to offset the subsidies as precisely as possible, putting BYD's cars on a level playing field against US EVs. I have great faith in free market capitalism and dislike anything that distorts the market, but sometimes you need to use regulation to correct for external market distortions.

Agreed; but it is possible to make a Metro-sized car that is safe by modern standards and still gets 40+mpg. The Smart ForTwo and the Scion IQ are two examples.

Yes, but only because most Americans are unwilling to drive a Metro-sized car anymore. They've been conditioned to think small/lightweight cars are unsafe or unmanly or etc.

The invisible hand of the free market solves a lot of things, but it's never quite figured out how to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Everybody wants to live on a livable planet, but nobody wants to pay for the technology required to keep that way.