Posts by haggy

FYI: Get ready for face scans on leaving the US because 1.2% of visitors overstayed their visas

Re: What if you have allergies?

Correct, you can't leave -- unless you are willing to go to the other line where a person looks at your passport and speaks to you to confirm that you are the person associated with the passport. That's as opposed to what just about every country but the US does when you leave on an international flight, not to a country within a specific group such as another EU country. Namely, make 100% of people go to the "other" line where things are done manually, unless the country has an automated system which many do.

This may be news to Americans, but to anybody else, how many countries have you been to (not counting trips within the EU where you aren't leaving the EU) where you didn't have to go through customs or immigration before a flight out of the country. Chances are excellent that the US is the only country you could name where your passport is checked by the government on the way in, but not on the way out. Everywhere else, the passport gets stamped, and likely scanned, on exit.

If this becomes standard practice in the US, it will merely mean that the US will finally be doing what the rest of the world has been doing all along by having people pass through and show a passport to an actual government agent. So why is there so much shock? Even in developing nations such as Vietnam, they have the technology such that a border agent can scan a passport when you leave the country, as opposed to merely stamping your passport. But they always had the capability of writing down the information if a person was found to have overstayed a visa. The US is simply planning to be less intrusive, leaving out the questioning part, and capturing data only to compare it to data that they already have. It would be absolutely useless to scan your face if they didn't have information from your passport on the way in.

Neil Young slams Google, after you log in to read his rant with Google or Facebook

Nothing on the site requires the use of Facebook or Google, nor is anybody required to use them to log in. Telling people that he's not responsible for information that they give to Google is warning people, not promoting Google. It's doing the opposite of what you are saying.

Even if people do use Google, that doesn't mean he has to agree with their policies on music. I don't agree with George Washington on slavery, but that doesn't mean that I'm against democracy because of it. Stop conflating issues.

Tesla 'API crashes' after update, angry rich bods complain

Re: Both cars?

He had problems with neither of his cars. The problem was between his phone and Tesla's network, and didn't affect the cars themselves at all. This had nothing to do with rolling out software to any car, or even rolling out a new app.

Re: So one needs an app to use the car?

No, you don't need an app to use the car. Without the app, you have to live with the dreaded inconvenience of having to do things such as telling your navigator where you want to go instead of it getting the information from the calendar on your phone, and you have to carry your fob with you to get into the car. If you can't live with that, you probably can't live with any car.

First of all this has nothing to do with any updates to the car. The cars are working fine and this doesn't affect the car's software at all. That would have been clear to anybody with a tech background who would know that the concept of an API being down made no sense, but for the rest of you, NOTHING HAPPENED TO THE CAR OR ITS SOFTWARE.

There was a network issue for the phone app, leaving owners in the unfortunate position of being like 100% (in rounded terms) of other car owners who have to make due without an app to talk to their cars. The issue has been fixed. It didn't keep anybody from using the cars. It didn't affect the car itself at all. It affected the ability to get information about the car from Tesla's servers, but anybody could have used the car as one normally would have. There might have been a tiny portion of the population that couldn't enable keyless driving when they forgot their fob or left it home, in which case they were almost as inconvenienced as any other car owner who left a fob home -- except they could still call Tesla toll free and have Tesla let them in. The car was communicating with Tesla just fine. It was people's phones not talking to Tesla's servers that was the issue.

People may have tried to reboot their cars to get around the problem, but it didn't work because there was no problem with the car's software in the first place. One of the biggest advantages of owning a Tesla is that if there ever is a problem with the software, it can be fixed easily and automatically over the air.