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."

Comments

Re:so

[Ogive17]

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.

legal counsel = cancer - they show up everywhere

[olddotter]

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.

Its not the first time...

[Quantus347]

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.

Re:so

[Mike Buddha]

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.

Re:batshit my butt

[Mr. Slippery]

why there was NO remainder of anything a passenger plane crash leaves in a crash site, and there were NO bodies, passenger belongings, pieces of bodies, ANYTHING but fairly intact TWO bodies in the scene.

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.

tell me where the hell did the 767's huge tail has vanished.

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!"

please, spare the bullshit. as if the world has never seen a passenger liner crash.

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:

Brian also consulted with a pair of commercial airline pilots who decided to try this kind of approach in a flight training simulator. Although the pilots were not sure the simulator models such scenarios with complete accuracy, they reported no significant difficulties in flying a 757 within an altitude of tens of feet at speeds between 350 and 550 mph (565 to 885 km/h) across smooth terrain. The only issue they encountered was constant warnings from the simulator about flying too fast and too low. These warnings were expected since the manufacturer does not recommend and FAA regulations prohibit flying a commercial aircraft the way Flight 77 was flown. These restrictions do not mean it is impossible for a plane to fly at those conditions but that it is extremely hazardous to do so, and safety was obviously not a concern to the terroris