This is the same company that dedicated entire engineering teams to bypass emissions controls standards and putting TEN MILLION carcinogenic emission-spewing engines on global roads in blatant defiance of multiple countries' emission laws.

https://www.caranddriver.com/n...

They are only making this move after many countries have announced plans to ban combustion vehicles in less than a decade, and that many countries including the US are forcing VW as part of their $14B+ fine payment to invest in electric vehicles.

Anyone who buys a Volkswagen or Audi supports an inherently corrupt corporation that has done billions of dollars of damage to our environment.

Fuck Volkswagen.

We're already paying sales tax on these services, which in itself is sketchy at best. It's not able giving these guys a break, it's about keeping corrupt unaccountable local governments in check. These companies are already taxed at the federal level and all of their employees pay hefty income taxes as-is.

If they're not paying their fair share, raise the existing taxes and pipe more funding to municipalities through existing programs. Letting unaccountable local municipalities exercise legal taxing authority on internet businesses via a clearly obsolete legal framework is a compliance death blow to all small businesses that can't afford the compliance infrastructure. States leveraging sales taxes on small businesses is already a compliance crisis that will start to explode once they try to start auditing small businesses around the country.
 

Just goes to show how city governments will literally tax anything and everything to death. Revenues are in decline and they are reaching out and shaking down anything with a pulse.

If this somehow makes it to court, Netflix and everyone else would be wise to simply geo-block those cities from their services immediately, and let the resulting civil uprising take care of the rest.

I hope these idiots get curb-stomped in court.

This is clearly tax fraud, they just got caught. It should be prosecuted as such.

Ok, but why? Backing up individual PCs is a waste of time and resources in the high-speed network era.

Train your users that it's 2017, workstations are disposable and may disappear at any given moment. If their shit isn't saved on the network NAS or in $CloudDriveProvider, it doesn't exist. Restoring should be just re-imaging a computer and signing back into relevant accounts.

Windows has had seamless server file storage redirection for years, so you don't even really have to train them, just redirect My Documents and Desktop to the fileserver.

Ditch MS office already. It's 2017 and there is absolutely no excuse for these types of vulnerabilities anymore. It doesn't do anything useful that Google Docs does, unless you consider spreading malware useful.

The totals are not important, it's the trajectory. Streaming services are increasing in all metrics and have been for long enough now that it's a concrete trend. In some of those metrics, streaming is starting to pass cable. Cable is stagnant or decreasing on all metrics, and is only artificially supported by internet services.

That's the news here.

You can cherry-pick a metric and make cable tv look more profitable than streaming right now, but that doesn't change the fact that sometime in the near future, the majority of TV content will be consumed via streaming.

Broadcast/Cable TV is dead, and is just in a 10-20 year death throes period.

Common editors, don't turn this into buzzfeed...

You don't need a hacker to disable a Jeep's transmission, it does that on its own every few thousand miles.

Doesn't work with the current US tax structure - sales taxes are only collected on end-user purchases. Businesses do not pay sales taxes on business-to-business transactions in the US. It would create an accounting nightmare for most businesses.

The problem is that turn signals are a premium option on BMWs, it's not your average beemer driver's fault they can't afford them.

There are many standardization initiatives in progress. Adoption of standards in the embedded space takes years as code evolves MUCH more slowly than in the web world, and for good reason.

One of the major ones is AUTOSAR:
http://www.autosar.org/

Since embedded programming is open to liability, it already has coding standards that are orders of magnitude higher than any web developer would ever reach. So yes, this particular case there was a failure, but on the whole, you don't have lowest-bidder outsourced programmers doing your powertrain code development.

For most serious work, you'll need a proper keyboard. Once you add a keyboard, you might as well just grab an ultraportable laptop (e.g. MB Air or Thinkpad X-series).

Nearly all sodas contain caffeine. Caffeine, like most psychoactive drugs, has effects proportional to body weight.

A can of coke has about 40 mg of caffeine. For standard 180 lb adult, that gives you a nice little wake-me-up. But put that much drug in a 40lb kid, and you'll see the effects similar to a healthy adult slamming back 2 cans of Red Bull.

Couple that with the lack of self-control of kids, and it's no wonder they're bouncing off the walls.

Let a 40-lb kid have 4 cokes in a day? When's the last time you put back a 8-pack of Red Bull? Of course they're going to raise hell.

"Black box" is a misnomer. All of the powertrain and safety ECUs in the car (there's over a dozen in modern vehicles, not including the several dozen other miscellaneous ECUs) have had the functionality built into their software as part of OBD-II compliance since 96. Airbag ECU, Traction control, Anti-lock brakes, Transmission, Engine, power steering, etc. All of them record data upon a sensor fault (e.g. Impact in a collision).

Fun fact: nearly half of the software in some ECUs is dedicated to OBD-II compliance.

Congress has REQUIRED black boxes in every vehicle since 1996 with the introduction of OBD-II. In particular, the freeze frame functionality, which captures all the data leading up to an accident. Ugh.