The way I figure it, VW did their longevity and warranty cost calculations, set the horsepower and price, and then someone came back from R&D to say "We've got a couple extra settings you can tweak! You get extra horsepower and it's only a little more expensive in warranty costs!"

So they sell it as an add-on. Sure, the change is only software, but it's not too much different than they were already doing with things like APR tunes. Get your stage 2 kit installed by an independent or DIY? No warranty. Have the dealer do it? Full warranty, minus the performance parts themselves. Some dealers, if you bought the kit from them, would even self-warranty the bits excluded.

Granted, the whole "Sell the car and it goes away" thing is naff and needs to be changed, but.

She was, as head of the Reagan EPA, the reason we have Chevron deference in the first place.

Long story short? Polluters didn't like some environmental regulations, so they asked Anne Gorsuch's EPA to change them. Bing, bang, boom! The regulations now said what the polluters wanted them to.

This isn't new, or even weird.

Almost thirty years ago I worked for a leasing company. We leased computers and equipment, not buildings, but the two things went hand in hand. Our customers would say they had a new office going in, we'd line them up for all the gear they needed.

And guess what? We'd have the vendors in there months before the place was even complete so they could install the phone system, or pre-stage cubicles, or get the switches installed.

Part of the reason things have been crap lately is that the studios have been running smaller and smaller writer's rooms. Why hire eight writers when you can hire four, work the hell out of them, and then lay them off before production so they can't do any rewrites?

They're pushing quantity over quality.

Re-rejected it, really.

The 'latest offer' was the previous offer along with a threat.

And who also sold Gizmodo to Univision when they went bankrupt due to Bollea v. Gawker.

They're now owned by some vulture equity firm.

Wang is still in business?

What are they making now, monitor arms and PC mounting cradles? Keyboards with useless keys?

> the interplanetary equivalent of sending coals to Newcastle

Famously, one man did this, Timothy Dexter. He was the world's worst businessman, but luck was with him every time.

Buy a buttload of worthless currency issued by a country destined to lose a war to the British? He was the one laughing when the British lost and the newly formed US government paid out. Ship bed-warmers to the West Indies? Well, turns out they make great ladles for molasses manufacture.

Same with the woolen mittens he sent there; His ship got there at the same time traders were leaving for what's now Siberia.

On to the coal. Someone suggested, as a joke or as an insult, that Dexter could make money shipping coal to Newcastle.

So he did.

His ship hit the harbor at Newcastle the same week the coal-miners went on strike and he was the only game in town.

This has the odd side effect of Chrysler now being in the business of selling Chevrolets.

You're wrong here. Testing has shown that people who don't understand what the technology does can abuse it to prove any failure rate and reason that they want. For example, give it a database of criminal mugshots, set the match criterion very loose, and then be aghast that comparing images of a legislative body results in a large number of hits. Or start with a database of ethnically homogeneous images, set the match criteria tight, and then be aghast that comparing a set of images of different ethnicity doesn't result in any matches.

If you're not going to speak English, and don't understand what you are saying in whatever language you are speaking, please refrain from suggesting technical ideas.

No, they actually aren't, unless you have something doing DNS via HTTPS, and then you've got HTTPS encrypting it all already. 'DNS' is not "the web". "The internet" and "the web" are not synonyms.

Don't be so ignorant.

That's what HTTPS already does.

This is about DNS, not "web traffic".

There is never a never. Vendor lock-in means it is very expensive to change, not that it is impossible. If you buy a Motorola radio system, for example, you are locked in to Motorola -- until you spend the money to replace it.

If you put all your data into the AWS bucket, you are locked into AWS -- until you spend the money to get it all back out of AWS.

I was asked to investigate the costs of moving our data into AWS. The storage was really cheap. The open-ended costs were accessing the data outside of AWS, and that killed the project.

It's actually stupider than that. The alleged positive version was "greg says his car is blue." Note that this changes the verb (said/says) from past tense to future (currently says and continues to say), AND the car from "was blue" to "is blue".