Re: OTA updates?
And instantly void your warranty. Not advisable. Best not to buy into such a hair-brained scheme in the first place.
26684 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
"In the real world most people make disappointing purchase decisions."
Absolutely. However, as the family geek/nerd and resident gear-head, I am usually consulted prior to large purchases of anything vaguely technical being made, including personal transportation. Most of my friends also bounce questions off me for this kind of thing. I'm sure many others among ElReg's commentardariat hold a similar position of trust among friends and family.
This is one of those things where we should be passing the word early and often.
Read the fine print before signing anything, people. The word "contract" has a meaning in Law whether you like it or not.
"But turn off any feature which my car has in the showroom when I *buy* it, and I'll see you in court."
Toyota has stated they are planning on doing just that. The most common two that I've heard bandied about are heated seats and remote start ... They plan on selling you the car with those options, and then after a couple years, they will turn them off unless you agree to pay a monthly "service fee". Apparently they are planning on doing this with cars already on the road.
"The more intricate in-car chippery gets"
The happier I am fixing my pre-1970 feet with a nail file, bailing wire, duct tape and chewing gum while my modern car driving friends often have to wait a couple-three weeks for the dealer to get parts in. These days, a month or more is becoming common.
"Unless, of course, you were talking about American cars with a fastback roof line"
Not exactly. By way of reference, here's a photo of the Beach Boy's "Little Deuce Coupe". The original fastback mustang was called just that ... the Fastback, while the hard-top with a trunk was and is called a coupe. Etc.
On the other hand, the most beautiful hard-top car in the world is indeed a fastback, and called a coupé, but it's not by any stretch of the imagination American. In fact, most of us Yanks pronounce its name incorrectly ...
Exactly. From what I've seen, the so-called "Russian hackers" are opportunistic skiddies who delight in graffiti and other defacement, along with ripping off the ignorant, using tools produced elsewhere.
There are probably several dozen people reading and commenting here on ElReg that are technically more competent than any so-called "hackers" that I've noticed coming out of Russia.
In our ever-so-politically-correct hell of a modern world the phrase "Crop Duster" is considered derogatory. Instead we are supposed to use the term "Aerial Applicator".
Note that most of the guys and gals I know who do it for a living say "Fuck that. We're crop dusters.", so I don't have a clue who is making this decision.
I had a friend, now sadly passed away, who was an architect. He drew houses for a living. Not just any houses, but houses that were a joy to live in. I realize this is peculiar, but he had an excuse.
You see, he grew up in an original Frank Lloyd Wright designed and built abomination. He wanted to make sure nobody else had to grow up in such a cold, uncomfortable, useless excuse for a shelter ever again. His words, not mine.
From personal experience, I'd say half are drunks, half are stoned, half are brainwashed, half are ignorant oiks and half voted for him "because Daddy always voted a straight Republican ticket".
Obviously, there is some overlap.
"What do you do when it's HR doing <illegal thing>?"
You get your ducks in a row, retain a lawyer, make sure your paper trail is clean, and then call them on it, starting with reporting to your direct Boss, and working your way up the management chain. When they fire you, place it in the hands of the landshark. They will probably offer to settle out of court, possibly in the high 6 figures or low 7 ... At that point it's a matter of asking yourself how much your ideals/scruples are worth.
Have fun! :-)
"I've rarely seen any justice, let alone biblical."
Same here. But I have seen it occasionally ... Extrapolating across the entirety of ElReg's commentardariat, the proverbial Thinking Man would have to conclude we haven't yet heard the bulk of the stories out there.
" It just doesn't seem plausible. "
About a billion years ago in Internet time, call it roughly 1985, my Boss and I were in my office talking to the company owner on the speaker phone. The guy in charge of Advanced Manufacturing slammed into the office, making all kinds of demands, threatening us with firing and worse of we didn't drop everything to do his bidding. Until the owner's voice came out of the telephone, saying three magic words: "Dave, you're fired." ,,, My Boss was given the newly vacated AdvMan seat the following morning, and I took over his position. The owner cautioned both of us separately "Play fair with everybody, I don't like assholes". Needless to say we took him at his word.
"DOS wouldn't format the system drive which it had booted from "
Depends on the version of DOS. In some early versions, simply entering the command FORMAT with no drive letter designated will allow you to format the current drive, regardless of whether your booted from it or not.
If Windows is running off the boot drive, the FORMAT command will not allow you to format that drive, because it is in use.
Best guesses are still just guesses. Let's not get all excited and think that this thing is re-creating a lost original. Just because there is a computer in the mix doesn't make it so. As they say, it's at best 72% accurate with known texts. Gawd/ess only knows how far off it is with the unknown ones.
Put another way, it is between a third and a quarter made-up bullshit. Ask any school teacher how accurate a child's overall paper will be if it's that full of error.
I suspect that most of the downvotes in this thread are from kids who were born too late for Usenet.
The downvotes for the OP are probably from people who recognize the post as yet another attempt at starting a simple flame war, which nearly always gets quite tedious.
I'll just leave this here.
Now where did I put that pages-long .sig ... Ah, well. Wrong font anyway.
The commentard known as Clausewitz 4.0 suggests: "The west is pushing Russia to become the true, undeniable safe heaven for hackers."
As a hacker, I feel perfectly safe here in the heaven called California. Somehow I rather think I wouldn't feel quite so safe in Russia.
If by "hackers" you actually mean "crooks", kindly say "crooks". Ta.
"Sigh, why this angry?"
Have you honestly never run across sabroni, Chris? It's always angry ... usually to the point of dropping all pretense of logic. Which is a shame, because in rare bouts of lucidity it is apparently a fairly knowledgeable coder, and technically more than competent.
"I don't suppose you bothered to read their article, did you?"
Of course I did. It's a subject I'm quite interested in.
"Not sure what papers from the 1960s you have in mind, but they do cite literature back to 1982."
Check out what Minsk's AI group at MIT and the fine folks at Stanford's SAIL were doing ... both contributed heavily to the subject, starting in the early 1960s. Their papers from the era are pretty much canon, even today.