Agreed. I use LUKS, or a solid software layer, but it would be nice if the hardware layer worked, just as a way deter brute force attempts and cudgel whomever has the drive to erase it, ensuring the data is out of their hands.

One thing I found useful with external SSDs by Sandisk was the password protection, in addition to using BitLocker, FileVault, VeraCrypt, LUKS, etc. The password protection would stop some casual person who got possession of the drive, and likely they would just click "erase disk" after some random guesses at the passphrase, ensuring the data was gone with a new AES key. (I keep backups, so I rather have the data gone than in the wrong hands.)

Tuns out that the app that was used for that wasn't just obsoleted, but not even available for download. However, it did come on the drive, so I was able to remove that password protection.

I sort of wish they had something that not just was updated, but also worked under Linux. Having a layer of protection, even if it may not be solid encryption, but good enough to deny use of the drive unless it is formatted and all data rendered inaccessible, is good enough.

If they changed the law just a bit, it would be useful. All numbers must go through a hash mechanism, and if the number matches a hash, don't call it. This way, they can't just use the DNC list as a base of operations.

Bingo. I am lucky -- I have 240v, 50 amp ready to go when I go for a charger, and the charger can just be plugged in via a dryer outlet, or hard-wired in.

However, when I go around the area I live in, in a mile radius, there are two chargers at one business, and those are at most 120 volt, "overnight" chargers that only add a few miles per hour to the battery bank... and the cords are always gone (yummy copper for the meth-heads, I guess).

If you don't have your own charger, EV life sucks. You have to take time out to park somewhere to charge, pray that someone didn't vandalize the charger, and usually there is someone ahead of you who will be there at least 45 minutes... and good luck getting them to give a shit to move. Of course, sitting at a charger means the local crusties know they can stand at the power charger, and you can't move your vehicle until you get rid of them.

In Europe, different story. There are standard chargers everywhere, no need to have a special app, no need to doublecheck anything... just plug and go. However, in the US, the infrastructure isn't there, and with the way politics go, it is data centers flipping matrixes (or tensors), or Bitcoin miners that get the lion's share of the infrastructure buildout.

So, this leave PHEVs. BYD has a pickup truck called the Shark. Two wheels are powered by an electric motor, two by a gas engine. You can plug it in, use it as a gas vehicle... whatever you choose. Its range is just 100km for all electric... but add gas, that's 840km, which is pretty impressive. Plus, it is useful as a generator, where in this area, if you have a portable generator, it will go for a stroll, no matter how many chains you put on it, so having the vehicle handle that helps greatly.

Of course BYD is banned from selling in the US... but they are getting other carmakers to consider actual PHEV pickups. The RAMCharger got scrapped, but the REV should have similar functionality. The Ford Lightning also got scrapped, but supposedly is coming back with a gas range extender (which, ironically, Ford patented the toolbox for it about 5-6 years ago.)

With economic conditions, I think having PHEVs is the best compromise between being charging overnight, versus being able to do with no access to chargers, or a grid down event. Plus, something like a generator onboard can be a great help in a power outage, especially in areas where hurricanes hit.

Most Apple shareholders know that come WWDC and iPhone time, their shares will get a bump in price. If the iPhone not introduced, this may cause Apple's stock to take a huge hit, mainly because Samsung, Huawai, and others are still introducing phones, and Samsung's camera setup is almost an order of magnitude more megapixels than Apple's.

Apple may be forced to, just by precedent, introduce something even if it is just making an "S" version that has some basic improvements and little else. It won't be a hit, but it will at least meet what Wall Street expects from them.

It would be nice if Apple could just make an announcement that they are taking a year off from new models... just to refactor everything it does, from stem to stern, be it the hardware, OS, applications, UI/UX, cloud offerings, security... you name it. Things like adding an override code to activation locks that people can save and set aside to ensure they can use their devices after a restore, or upgrading Time Machine to a deduplicating backup system, even if it means writing a fancy wrapper around Restic.

I wonder what the solution is for SF. I don't think gondolas would work, similar to what was in Rio for the 2016 Olympics, but they are often considered an option in Austin (which does have the land, but as mentioned, the most ruthless people ran off with the money, so nice things can't be had, and it is a matter of won't than can't.). Maybe work on a subway system? There is the idea of small EVs like Smart cars which could be used as taxis... but where they go for parking and charging is a thing. Maybe the city should create a parking garage just for taxi EVs to reside for charging and standby, so they compete less with street parking?

The interesting thing is that many of the people that I have seen wind up being the most "American" (as in a model citizen, in a good way, not "'murican' in the obnoxious sense), are from India, China, and Japan.

I'm sure it sucks having to deal with a different culture that is often xenophobic, especially rural areas. They have my respect for that.

What would this gain, I'm curious. If the CPU isn't on standby, why have the OS go into a special mode which will introduce new bugs and security threat vectors.

Worst case, why not just have a "run level" that freezes and saves state of things, stops all apps, and effectively drops the machine into single user mode with some program watching ports and other input, to reverse things? However, this duplicates standby and suspend functionality, so why bother?

It would be nice if data would be deleted before it left the LPR, if it was considered irrelevent, or perhaps a series of encryption keys used so one body which requires judges to "turn their keys" to allow access be used, while LPR output fitting another criteria of vehicles which are not permitted on the road would be allowed to be accessed with just the LEOs' keys. In any case, all data is tagged with an expiration date, where if there isn't an explicit legal hold, it gets flushed, on an encryption key level, so even if the data is backed up, it is useless.

Done right, LPR and privacy can be on the same side. However seems people prefer large, easily hacked databases over common sense data reduction and compartmentalization.

Agreed, completely different layers of scaling, but the cloud installation that is sitting in a shipping container at the town square may be able to do that.

Even the disk storage is completely different, but for these relatively small tasks, OpenShift may be good enough, or even static virtualization.

The key is getting this stuff decentralized.

Do we need OpenStack? That is a heck of a lot of overhead. It might be that we may be better with a system better able to handle "pet" VMs like Proxmox or something that manages VMs on top of KVM.

I have worked on a number of OpenStack implementations. Too many man-hours to get it to work, and they get chucked for OpenShift, or even VMWare. If one needs Kubernetes, there are also solutions like Rancher as well.

One would be surprised. Canada has a number of regions and AZs. One bonus with Canada is how relatively easy it is to cool data centers.

Maybe this is something organizations can step in with, perhaps city/state/local governments. All buy a data center in a shipping container... and even though it doesn't sound like much, it could have a bunch of Proxmox (or maybe OpenShift) racks, backend storage via Ceph or another solid protocol, a 100-250 gigE storage/backup/network fabric, and for backups, something like MinIO. Done right, all it takes is a bunch of Supermicros, perhaps with basic configurations for each role, so maintenance is not difficult. Want cards that can do matrix multiplication with carry? Easy peesy... have a rack for those. Then, maybe have an aisle or two for tape drives, one set of tape drives that are for local storage, one set of silos aimed so someone can just walk in, throw the tapes in a box, hand them to the Iron Maiden guy, and that takes care of offsite backups.

Moving cloud computing to being decentralized would be a boon. Not just more places for redundancy, but it would provide extra income. Just to be able to toss a chunk of data over in Kankakee's data center while in Texas ensures geographic resilience from all but global disasters.

I'd say MS Word 3.0 on a Mac SE/30 was pretty good. Just basic responsiveness to keystrokes. It also fit on an 800k floppy with room to spare. The ironic thing is that there have not been many features added to Word since the 3.0/4.0 days that we use all the time.

Maybe that's a good thing. Everyone regrets when their quiet cool thing gets discovered by the mainstream and destroyed. Let people actively seek Linux, just so that the software companies with big legal budgets won't lobby Congress to demand hardware DRM, AI bloat, ad insertion stacks, and other crap.