skgoa

> everyone will be plugging their car in at home

I realize that a lot of people here are privileged enough to own a single family home, but the majority of humanity lives in apartments and parks on the street. Trickle-charging at home is not a universal solution. The only practical solution seems to be some form of rapid charging of the car's energy storage. Either by pumping huge amounts of amps into a huge battery pack, or adding some kind of chemical fuel that gets reacted in an internal combustion engine or a fuel cell.

There are a lot of products like this available and every corporation's offices I have been to have had one of them.

Tell that to the people who won't buy that car.

You are 99% correct. We use the english terms for this here in Germany, too. Everyone in the industry used to literally call this feature and others like it "pre-crash".

Yes, but people regularly get burns and light blunt trauma from airbags. The US versions of many cars even have slightly weaker airbags, because many people don't wear seatbelts and might be killed by a full-strength airbag.

When you drive a truly noisy car or motorcycle, you will remember to do it.

It really depends. The newer traffic control bridges we have on our highways take a picture from both the front and back.

I had a similar issue when my bank introduced a new banking app. The web login page has different requirements for the password than the app. I.e. on either I can set my password to something that the other will not accept.

There was someone who not too long ago fixed an SQL injecction to his front bumper and it managed to break the automated toll collection system.

One important fact here is that everything the pilots will need to reach quickly in an emergency still is a physical button. It's just the more "nice to have" things (e.g. programming the cost factor of the engines, putting the route into the autopilot) that are done through the screens. Though, even those inputs are largely done with a funky kind of mouse+keyboard. Actual touchscreens are largely relegated to tertiary functions like airport information displays.

As a visually unimpaired person, those touch buttons are just horrible. Especially so when it is a function that does not have an immediate effect. Just this morning I switched my monitor on, off and on again, simply because by the time it actually reacted, I had pressed the power button again already.

It shouldn't be, but for most people entering into it, becoming highly desirable on the job/employee market is the chief motivator. If a university doesn't cater to that demand, the students will go elsewhere.

So he wasn't that smart after all.

As an automotive security engineer, I have to interject. Miller and Valasek hacked into a car that was very far removed from what we consider modern automotive electronics. Any truly modern car will have decoupled networks with firewalls in-between. It will have intrusion detection systems, secure boot, signed code, encrypted memory, will communicate critical information via TLS etc.

The Jeep hack (as well as their Toyota and Ford hacks) was exptremely important, because it put public pressure on the less technologically capable OEMs to get with the times and implement a (somewhat) secure electronics architecture. As someone who shares the road with those shitty cars I'm thankful for that. But even at the time of the hack, there were many OEMs whose cars were not anywhere close to that vulnerable and the industry hasn't stood still since then.

And since you mention Tesla, I also have to point out that they are one of the worst at security. E.g. they have an RJ45 port behind the dash that you can just plug into. It used to be that this gave you complete access to everything, but people abused it. So Tesla made it a little bit harder, though not impossible, to get into their system. Tesla also has a lot of bugs in their smartphone integration that allow "fun" exploits like remote unlocking.

Yeah, this really isn't a good article.

The difference was almost entirely the size. The US used to have very few cruisers during the 70ies, but the Soviet Union had a lot of ships that were much smaller than US cruisers, yet designated as cruisers. So the US simply redesignated all large destroyers (i.e. the entire Ticonderoga class) as cruisers, arguing that the larger size enabled them to e taskforce flagships. But the difference in size between the Ticonderogas and the first Burke's (build 15 years after the Ticos IIRC) was only roughly 1000 tons and by now the 3rd generation of Burkes is as large as the Ticos were.

Firefox has performance and general software bloat issues on all plattforms. They sacrificed their original "tailor the browser exactly to your needs" approach on the altar of keeping up with Chrome on features.

It used to be that these categories had very different roles. Nowadays, NATO defines these categories based on size. Well, technically the water displaced by the hull. The main difference is in how many missiles a given category can carry and how much a ship of that size costs.

Battleships only exist as mothballed reserves. A battleship was one of the largest ships in the fleet with massive guns and super thick armor. It was meant to fight in the major fleet vs. fleet battles. The name stems form "line of battle ship", because these ships were typically arrayed in a line starting back in the late middle ages. When WW2 showed that airplanes and missiles had made big guns and armor redundant, battleships were relegated to being giant anti-air plattforms that escorted the aircraft carriers. No one built any new ones since then, though "missile battleships" were studied for a while.

A massive step down in size are cruisers, who used to be ships that operated independently form the fleet. There are very few of those around nowadays and they tend to be the core of a fleet instead of cruising alone. You will often see them armed with hundreds of anti-ship missiles nowadays.

The next step down are destroyers, which are still fleet escorts (mostly against aircraft, hence Air Warfare Destroyer) in the major navies and have also taken up the role of going on independent operations. This is because smaller navies tend to not have any destroyers or bigger ships, so sending one destroyer armed with say 64 missiles can be sufficient. A destroyer used to be a relatively small ship that had the job of defending the fleet against other small ships like torpedoboats or submarines. The name stems from "torpedoboat destroyer".

The next smaller categories is frigates. These are the most numerous and are the workhorses of modern navies. They do convoy escort, but also defend bigger fleets from submarines. Many navies also send them on independent missions. They will tend to have 16 or 32 missiles, but won't typically have the big anti air radar a destroyer would. "Frigate" was the name used for sailing ships that couldn't stand in the line of battle. I.e. in say 1750 there would be only two categories: line'o'battleships and frigates.

Those categories are the major ocean-going combat ships. There are lots of smaller ships below that and a lot of support ships, too.

Sorry, but you are completely incorrect in this matter. White collar crime is prosecuted fiercly in Germany, especially when it's a case that got public attention. However it takes far longer than it would in the US, because prosecutors are extremely thorough to guarantee a conviction.

We have far less of an acceptance of plea bargains. Pre-trial deals are almost unheard of, because the defendent can "come clean" at any time of the trial and the timing must not enter the judgement to their detriment. OTOH a defendent also has nothing to gain from co-operating early beyond whatever he/she is absolutely required by law to do. This means that the prosecussion will almost always have to do the entire work of proving beyond any reasonable doubt that the accused is guilty. Which they have to do on paper long before the first hearing is held.

Hence, cases brought to trial in Germany are generally water-tight. Stadler is almost definitely going to prison. The only question is for how long and who else he implicates.

Audi is not trying to get out of anything. They are saying that they will not throw an ex employee under the bus in the media before he/she is convicted of the crime. Audi do assist the prossecution and will probably push for a repayment of bonuses via their own lawsuit, though.

Eh, you are equating slow growth with "running out of steam". Even if they don't grow from here on out, they will stay one of the world's most profitable companies for decades. Apple is turning into a stable, mature company. This is a completely normal and expected stage in the business lifecycle.

I agree on Apple having been more or less stagnant for a while now. It's no surprise when you look at their products IMO. They seem to mainly be consolidating the market share that they have. As a consumer, you get immense advantages from staying inside their ecosystem, but there seem few people left who aren't yet in their ecosystem and are open to getting into it at the same time.

But calling this a "disaster" is a bit much. The "iPhone gravy train" is still going very strong, albeit a tiny bit slower. They have lots of other products that sell very well. They make a huge amount of practically free cash from their plattforms. If their services and content creation efforts are even semi-successful, they will continue to diversify away from being just a consumer electronics company.

In my experience "the old waterfall companies" are the ones where the engineers are trusted with a task and left to do their thing. In such an environment, managers are only there to assist the engineers. I.e. escalate issues, provide ressources etc. and most importantly: fight for their team/department in meetings. We go to our team lead only when it is necessary and he only asks for updates when he needs to report our status to a superior.

What I have witnessed in those hip, agile young companies is that you have to report exactly what yyou have done, what you are plannign to do etc. constantly. At least once a day, plus whatever other weekly meetings you are in. Sometimes your entire day is filled with meetings and you are supposed to fit your actual work somewhere in the breaks. And if you can't finish a task in a day, you trigger extra attention from managers and suddenly you find yourself sitting at your desk with another engineer and a manager looking over your shoulder, wasting hours of expensive time instead of letting you work.

Those are the two extremes I have encountered and they are only annecdotes. But they do serve to show that the development process chosen for a project is not tell you anything about the management style.

And if you don't use the tools the way they are meant to, you are just wasting massive amounts of time.

It seems to be a matter of propper balance. You can elevate patterns, idioms etc. to language features and you can add entirely new features that enable entirely new solutions. Java and Python are doing this sensibly. But burying devs in an avalanche of new language features that change the way you are supposed to do fundamental things is going to make it much harder to keep up. Especially when this happens every 3 years.

And this is why most companies doing anything having to do with media will not ever even read/watch works that were sent to them unsolicited. There are so many ideas being in different states of development at any given time that there is a failry high risk of inadvertenly opening yourself up to being accused of plagiarism.

Some people even seem to see their 2 weeks vacation abroad as their annual excuse to act out power fantasies.

But this stems from lots of people having bad experiences with obnoxious people who will not stop before the police is called.

> Musk says it's still on the table as a backup plan "pending NASA approval".

read: NASA says it's not happening.

Just because it was said on TV doesn't make it true. I don't mean to sound condescending, but if you are interested in this topic you will find a wealth of information in actual history books.

> and successfully concealed the existence of the network from the Germans (using the carrot propaganda and other means).

This is not true. The RADAR stations were well-known to the Germans, who bombed them from the very start of the BoB and devised many tricks to counter them.