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Adam Savage Revises Claim of Lawyer-Bullying On RFID Show
Nick writes "A few weeks ago a video of a talk given by Adam Savage of the television show MythBusters spread across the internet (including a mention on Slashdot.) On the video, Savage stated that the show was unable to produce an episode about previously known RFID vulnerabilities due to a conference call to Texas Instruments that unexpectedly included several credit card companies' legal counsel. TI (via a spokesperson talking with cnet.com) stated that only one lawyer was on the call and that the majority of the people on the call were product managers from the Smart Card Alliance (SCA) invited by TI to speak. Then Savage (via a Discovery Communications statement) reaffirmed that he was not on the call himself and that the decision was not made by Discovery or their advertising sales department but rather MythBuster's production company, Beyond Productions."
Boot him where? Without Adam Savage "Mythbusters" loses quite a bit of its' luster. I would be willing to bet "Mythbusters" is one of Discovery Channel's more popular shows.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Dude, have you worked with the legal department for a fortune 500 company? Our company policy is that if something is to be recorded, it must be scripted and the script approved by the legal department first.
Think Deeply.
Its not the first time that Mythbuster's has had obviously politically motivated skews on their production and/or results.
Like the time they were testing all the various myths involved in beating alcohol tests (Breathalyzer, etc) and were very careful to word their statements to say that no one method managed to beat all the different tests, and never specifying which methods beat which tests. Or the time they tested the fuel efficiency of drafting behind a big rig truck and spent most of the episode hamming up the potential dangers of tailgating.
To be fair though, in those cases it was more about Safety (translate Liability) as they could heavily damage road safety and Law Enforcement's ability to police it. Its like how in most fiction Ive seen, they always misquote the proportions of charcoal, sulfur, and salt peter that go into gunpowder, so the young and/or stupid won't go out and blow off fingers.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
The decision was made by the Mythbuster staff in much the same way a man with a gun directed at him volunteers.
Anyone see "Wrong Trousers?" Gromit puts down the bat when feathers points the gun.
(Instant karma for using Wallace & Gromit!)
>Discovery didn't make the decision, they just presented the choice to the production company to either not produce the show, or take a long walk off a short pier.
Beyond Productions is an independent Australian company and sells sometimes different versions to the UK and other countries (which also don't have the 'don't try this at home' stuff and where you can say things like 'sperm' on TV), they could very well do it in this case as well.
Different network, same torrent.
You are delirious. Amex makes (that's income to shareholders) about $250 million dollars a *month*:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AXP
Mastercard makes about $30 million a month:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MA
The ownership of Discovery is sort of opaque:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Communications
But some numbers are available (this holding company does not represent 100% of the Discovery channel and related operations):
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=DISCA
(they lost money on about $700 million in revenues)
Beyond Productions is a little more open:
http://www.beyond.com.au/corporate/reports.html
http://www.beyond.com.au/pdf/bil2008_accounts.pdf
The made about $5 million (Australian dollars) last year.
The credit card companies are not going to enter into a protracted legal battle with significant PR consequences chasing after a few tens of millions of dollars.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Really? You've never seen a MasterCard with PayPass? My bank replaced my old debit card with one over two years ago.
Granted, the only place I've seen that accepted PayPass was at a Sheetz, and it didn't seem to work. But they're definitely out there.
They won't can Adam. Where would they find someone who's simultaneously so devious and so ignorant of scientific fact?
They tried to un-stupid the show a little when they brought in Grant, who actually seems to have passed a science class at some time in his past, but even he seems to have lost the ability to keep them from walking straight into unphysical presumptions.
All that production budget and they can't spend a few minutes a week phoning a real scientist to ask if their ideas to prove/disprove the myths aren't just more myths? They only seem to spend on "explosives experts", but that's their insurance company talking. I guess the insurance company cares if someone gets blown up, but not if someone gets stupider thinking it's being made smarter.
Still. The show is too much fun to stop watching.
That was the ep where they tested boxers Vs briefs if I remember right.
Actually it was cooler than that. They were testing a myth about a woman in the Civil War that supposedly got impregnated by a bullet that hit her and which had previously hit the family jewels of some poor bastard.
They actually set up this rig downrange with (you guessed it) ballistics gel. Halfway downrange they had a bag of "genetic material" (semen) in the line of fire. They had a marksman fire through the bag and into the ballistics gel. Then they tried to find "genetic material" with a microscope.
They busted the myth as I recall.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
For the record, I do work for a merchant service provider (aka - a credit card processor). In the many years I have been here, we have never offered a point-of-sale system that supports contactless payment (RFID), and I have never seen a credit card that had an RFID (other than in commercials).
My bank tried to get me to use one some time ago. They claimed it was "more secure" but they also tried to charge me an extra $50/year for the privilege of having it, and I couldn't see any change to the laws that made them responsible for money mysteriously disappearing from my account. As far as I was concerned, if they wanted to run a "more secure" system (without commenting about whether it was actually more secure), they shouldn't have been offering it to consumers as an optional extra.
I think you mean "made them less responsible." I thought consumers are protected from all charges beyond the first $50 in the case of fraud. (Scroll to bottom.)
So, $50/year is a total ripoff unless you get defrauded more than once a year. It's basically guaranteeing you lose that $50 bucks annually, even if you never experience any fraud. Nice.
Program Intellivision!
Only if you don't understand how the quota system works. Once you fill your quota, you can lease quota from less successful fishing boats. That's why they do the crab count. It's not a mad dash like it was in the first season but it's still a race. Once the quotas are leased to another vessel they're theirs to harvest, but it's not as cut and dried as you think. In fact I believe one of the vessels was doing so poorly this year they ended up leasing their quota out and cutting their season short this last season.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
You are incorrect, but probably not in the way you imagined: the passports do use RFID, but not to confer advantages to the owner. If that were the case, then they'd make it optional and charge extra for it! Instead, RFID in passports confers liabilities to the owner and advantages to the government: it allows the government to surreptitiously track the owner more easily.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Are you saying there were no bodies, or were you saying there were two?
Allyn E. Kilsheimer, CEO of KCE Structural Engineers (a company involved in providing emergency engineering and post-collapse assistance) said "I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts."
Of course, once you reach the level of batshitness you've achieved, you can simply ignore his testimony by saying "they got to him too!"
And I'm sure you simply don't accept the claim that the remains of 184 people were identified; surely "they" got to all 102 DNA analysts, sample processors, logistics staff, and administrative personnel at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory. It's a DOD facility, after all.
Are you saying there was no debris from the plane? That's simply incorrect; hell, you can even see photos of a bunch of it at this batshit conspiracy site. And photos of the plane debris inside the building (where, in answer to your question about the lawn, most of it ended up, in agreement with conservation of momentum) can be seen at this somewhat less batshit crazy site. And some more photos here. And more photos, with amazingly detailed analysis, here
But I'm sure "they" got to the owners of all of those sites.
757. If you can't get that much right after being corrected, I don't see any point in talking to you further.
Like most of the plane, the tail and wings got shredded, and ended up inside the building. As Mete Sozen, a structural engineer who studied the impact in computer simulation, put it, "At that speed, the plane itself is like a sausage skin. It doesn't have much strength and virtually crumbles on impact."
It's like shooting an aluminum foil origami crane out of an air cannon at high speed, through a stack of steel cheese graters, and then demanding "where's the crane's tail? There must be a trick!"
Into a building? One as hardened as the part of the Pentagon that was hit? Please, name me one similar crash.
Oh, and by the way, regarding your original question about simulating the piloting of the crash, see this:
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood