Comment: Haven't cursed in over 10 years (Score 1) 286
Comment: Re:Typo (Score 1) 218
Comment: Re:Strain on the Grid (Score 5, Insightful) 603
Except that many parts of the grid heat up during peak hours, and the engineers who designed it did so with a dependency on low power consumption at night, which would allow them to cool down. If you have a bunch of cars in an area charging at night, there won't be enough time for the transformers (etc.) to cool off before companies open shop in the morning and start heating those components up even more. Then one day, BOOM!
It's not just peak performance of the grid that matters, it's the minimum, peak, mean, and average.
Comment: Re:Brilliant Jerks (Score 1) 491
Comment: Re:Coming to the US and EU soon (Score 1) 219
...but it's perfectly OK to have people getting shot and explosions and body parts flying around at any hour, right? Heaven forbid a little kid see a naked breast, but if he sees people getting shot in the head, that won't affect him at all.
Oh, I agree that realistic violence (as opposed to "fantasy violence" in superhero cartoons) should be gated as well, but that's a much tougher sell given the current state of society. Thankfully, there are ratings at the beginning of most (all?) television programs in the U.S., but unfortunately many parents use it as a babysitter, and don't pay any attention to such things. My solution is to simply not have a television at all. That takes the probability of seeing something I don't expressly want to see down to almost nil.
Comment: Re:Coming to the US and EU soon (Score 5, Insightful) 219
Now you're just spreading FUD. The FCC should be preventing this stuff from showing up where it isn't expected, but it's not trying to prevent porn from being on the internet, nor is it trying to prevent it from entering your home via your TV, as long as it's clearly gated. The FCC doesn't prevent your local cable company from providing you with porn. It prevents it from being broadcast openly to anyone with a TV, who can easily stumble upon it unwillingly. That's why a breast can't be displayed during the Super Bowl. It's the wrong place and the wrong time. Families will watch the Super Bowl, including kids, because it's considered to be "relatively" safe. Although, the FCC should be doing more about the commercials shown during the event.
If you want to view porn, that's up to you, and nobody should prevent you from doing so, as long as it's behind a door that says "here there be porn." That way, I and my wards won't stumble upon it without my expressed consent. To say that the FCC is trying to prevent it from being provided to you AT ALL is a gross overstatement, and just plain FUD.
Comment: Re:Developers (Score 1) 450
Comment: Re:Developers (Score 1) 450
I worked at one of the big 3 TC hardware companies and we used TCs for everything. All the developers used them to connect to their own VMs, and that is where we did all our development. It worked very well. We even had TC notebooks, which I saw being used "in the wild" by a librarian at our county law library. Our CEO's theory was that if we were going to sell our product, we needed to use our product.
That being said, you're absolutely right that they are not aimed at developers. They're aimed at any company that wants a simple, secure, easy to manage, and secure (yes I wrote secure twice) device that doesn't need a lot of horsepower. For example, they perfectly fit the need of self-serve scanners at a grocery store. Hotel and car rental chains make excellent use of them as well for their front desks. These three examples don't make use of VMs, but they were our biggest customers.
The biggest problem with using TCs and VMs is the licensing costs. The hardware needs an OS, and often times that's an embedded Windows. It needs to be remotely manageable, and that's usually Altiris. Their are Debian-based OSs available, but it still takes time for developers to customize it, secure it, etc., and those costs are built into the device. Now let's say you want to use VMs. You need servers, OSs, the VM software itself, and support contracts. The last three require yearly fees. If you're using TCs and VMs, it's going to be expensive.
Security is the main selling point of these devices, but security is also one of the least appreciated selling points for computer hardware. Speed, features, and price are the main selling points for computer hardware, with price being the heaviest factor.
Comment: Re:Doesn't the US have consumer-protection laws? (Score 1) 705
Sure there are consumer protection laws. No, they don't cover this sort of thing. A business can negotiate two different prices with two different customers for the same service. It's perfectly legal. However, the country was founded on principles of freedom, and free markets. Therefore, you find a lot of freedom for corporations to do whatever they want, because they bankroll the politicians, but very little freedom in practice for individuals. Sure, individuals can say whatever they want, but they can't do whatever they want. It's the ongoing pursuit of this mythical thing called "security" that prevents that.