I daily drive a Tesla and the touch screen computer is often glitchy thanks to Tesla's roll out updates and fix issues later attitude but I reboot it while driving (hands on steering wheel reboot command: hold down both scroll wheels for 10 seconds) if it's not running right and there is no need for the luddite fear. It's annoying to drive without the radio controls for 30 seconds but driving without the touch screen computer running doesn't "take the entire car down with it"

Tesla is even doing this to its cars while still in warranty. Mine was recently volt capped so it has reduced range and less horsepower, and they also slowed down charging about half as fast as it was new. If it was out of warranty and they told me about it, I might be more forgiving but this was done without my permission and if there is a hardware problem I paid for the warranty to fix it.

It's also used for WiFi, so it could be a galactic Access Point. Watch, it's just a misconfigured alien laptop rebroadcasting HPSETUP

I feel like using Google products is becoming a bad idea, simply because you can expect it to be retired as soon as it becomes useful when they decide to make an identical product under the banner of choice of the moment, or simply kill it with no replacement product at all. This used to be disappointing, but Google does this so often it doesn't affect me any very much more because I won't even try most of their recent offerings knowing they won't keep it around. According to this article, I started avoiding Google's new offerings late 2011 or earlier.

It's not my friends. It's the FBI, congress, etc. They keep making things up to push for backdoors and spy programs.

Agreed. Aging tech isn't the problem here, a complete inability to listen to or fund IT is the problem here. If they had a usable rolling backup system, it wouldn't matter how old everything is. If they had all brand new equipment and no functional load balancing system to compensate for outages that will always be a potential issue, they would still be offline for as long as it takes to fix everything. I have a hard time believing the words "off site redundancy" never came up in any IT budget meetings over the past half century, so their failures are 100% bad business decisions not IT issues. It would be no different if they had refused to budget for more fuel than exactly as much as predicted they would need. Tblaming the aircraft rather than the person that made the stupid decision to run out of fuel wouldn't make sense. It only works here because people don't understand IT, and the people that chose to allow outages like these aren't willing to admit it so they will repeat them again.

Apparently. I remember one of the Snowden leaks had an NSA quote along the lines of "Tor makes for a sad analyst" so it is an inconvenience to domestic spy programs.

They already know they're specifically targeted for this. They were among the first to report an NSA man-in-the-middle attack on a new laptop delivery as it was delivered to a three letter agency for several days before being sent to the Tor project coder who ordered it. They were going to look for how that machine was bugged, but I never saw a follow up on that story. Considering how the Guardian's office computers and laptops had specific chips on the motherboards destroyed in a police raid after that Snowden leak, it's probably in a mobo firmware somewhere rather than in the OS.

Is this encrypted? Because I have been repeatedly told encryption is for terrorists.

Challenge accepted! Seriously, if an AR receiver is acceptable (legally defined as "a gun") this is completely do-able. ARs are simple boxes with a few holes in the right place and another box threaded on top. It gets even simpler if single-shot is OK as then I don't need a buffer tower or magazine well, so it's literally a box with like 8 holes. I know I can do this in a dozen or so lines of OpenSCAD, and I think I can do it in Javascript/HTML/PHP

Having purchased government surplus vehicles at auction, this is something any potential bidders would be wise to take note of. It can take 6 months for the government to deliver, despite collecting money immediately.

Big clothing chain in Spain. It's clothes are mostly plain.

3D printing is additive manufacturing, sintered powder is 3D printing. "CNC" is typically seen as subtractive manufacturing, but 3D printers are still CNC machines.

I'm 100% on board with you - it was always about entertainment. Having fun, connecting with others similarly fun-oriented and motivated to seek it out. Showing off your creative side, being the weirdest version of yourself in public. I think his point was Burners used to be their own clean up crews. The attitude that someone else will do the cleanup is why there's a problem. The money does go there, but a lot of it lines pockets - the Man is profitable, and that's on purpose.

That's how these things happen. It's popular, there are more of us motivated weirdos making an effort to party in the desert than ever, and there's more groups than just us weirdos. We still stand out - probably even more than ever now that newcomers who just want to pay the fee and see the sites helped make the Man a well known event... but some people always want things to go back to the way they were, or a romanticized way they weren't but might have been in an ideal memory.

I compare the Man's changes to a backyard BBQ to point this out to people that don't like how it's changed. Invite your friends over, they'll all take care of their own mess. You can supply the drinks and food, they have a great time and everything is an easy cleanup at the end of the day. Next year, you have more people wanting to enjoy the BBQ. The neighbors house becomes part of the party, his friends come and they love it, despite not being anything like your friends, and everybody makes new friends. 5 years later, it's a block party people are making trips from nearby states to come see. It's huge. You can't afford to supply the beers and burgers any more. The garbage situation is beyond your ability to handle yourself, and too many people either don't clean up or can't find an empty can/bag if they want to try. You have to start charging and hiring crews to take care of this, or the city is going to shut you down.

That's the Man, how I see it anyway. Complain about the growth if you like, it changed and it can't go back to what it used to be. Embrace the newcomers, they're still awesome, they've always been different, and you don't have to dislike the differences if you don't want to.

My thoughts are similar: The OS is nice, it's as usable an OS as Microsoft has made. But there's a reason Microsoft made it propagate like a zombie outbreak. People don't want it. MS has to know there are serious issues with the direction decision makers are taking the company when one of their more tolerable new friendly operating system releases is given away for free and older versions of their product are still preferable. Trying to monetize your customers is not working, M$. Learn from that.