The problems with ethanol as a fuel are twofold, though neither problem is insurmountable.
First, ethanol will damage and eventually destroy engines that are not designed to burn it, full stop. It deteriorates rubbers and plastics, notably fuel lines, filters, pumps, etc. but also causes lubrication problems with piston rings, valves, and so forth. Most "late model" cars in the US (the cutoff point for "late model" is sort of nebulous at the moment) are designed to handle up to 15% ethanol content in their fuel. It is a safe bet to assume that any vehicle that does not explicitly state in the manual or marketing literature that it is compatible with higher ethanol concentrations (E85, etc.) is not, in fact, compatible. E85 capability is a huge marketing bullet point these days, and aside from a few very new model vehicles from Chevy and especially Ford, American engines will be damaged by high ethanol concentrations. Full stop. No argument allowed, nor required. Many engines can be converted to run somewhat satisfactorily on ethanol, but most of them do not have a factory conversion and must be converted using third party parts with the usual gamut of quality problems that this often entails. Many, many engines on the road cannot be converted to ethanol at all: Truck engines, high performance engines, bike engines, etc. Also, many older engines ("older" as in 15-20 years, still otherwise perfectly viable vehicles, not to mention all of those even older than that) cannot be converted at all.
On the topic of destroying engines, I can provide experience for a sector nobody's thought much about: Small engines. Lawn mowers, chain saws, weed trimmers, and everything else related. In the small engine shop run by my store, we have seen a marked increase in failures of nearly every fuel related part in the power equipment we service. Fuel lines rotting out within a year of purchase, seals going bad, rings seizing, pistons scoring, and filters clogging. I have personally pulled lawn mower fuel filters from units filled with E15 fuel just packed with fibrous gunk the likes of which I had never seen before the ethanol-laden fuel became popular in my area. I guarantee you that if any piece of gasoline powered equipment runs at all on high-ethanol fuel, it will not do so for long.
The second caveat is that ethanol has lousy energy density compared to gasoline. You get less heat and less energy out of ethanol per gallon than gasoline, and there's no way around it. Converted vehicles will get reduced mileage on ethanol as compared to gasoline. Ethanol-only vehicles will have to have larger tanks or just suffer with less range per tank than comparable gasoline vehicles. If ethanol prices closely follow gasoline prices, even in the short term, it will become a much more expensive proposition than most people anticipate. Likewise, our "barrels per day" number will not be directly transferable from gasoline to ethanol - A considerably larger amount of ethanol will have to be produced, pumped, shipped, and sold compared to gasoline today. This will incur additional cost and add additional complication.
In time, these problems will be solved. But it's going to cost a lot, and the one thing Americans have been known to get sore about in a hurry is some government type coming along and demanding that they get rid of their stuff/spend money/buy a new lawn mower/mothball their classic car because of the Ethanol Revolution. Under the theoretical argument that the whole country goes ethanol eventually, I predict a LOT of resistance to the idea, rallied under banners of "taking away our freedom," "admonishing tradition," "from my cold, dead fingers," and so forth. Some of which, admittedly, will be justified. (Though I'd doubt regular old gasoline will go away any time soon, or indeed at all until we run out of crude oil entirely. Motorheads are die-hard types, many of them are willing to spend lots of money, and someone will crop up to meet that demand. On it goes.)
Or buy a modchip. Backups can be burned any old time you like. CD-R's deteriorate faster than pressed CD's, but if you have your backup image on a more stable medium (or a regularly refreshed one) it only costs pennies to make a fresh, working disk.
The kicker is, I found out that the first disk in my collection to die this way was disk TWO of Final Fantasy 8. It would have made my life a lot easier if disk one failed first.
Note that this is important for those using burnable CD and DVD media for archival purposes. Typical burned CD-R disks, like the ones likely filled with millions of peoples' irreplaceable digital photos, routinely fail to last more than two years in storage. Many, many disks last longer but certainly enough fail in this time frame or before to make it a big issue. Data burned to CD-R and DVD-R (or whatever format of the week) should be read off and burned to new media regularly.
Or he may know like the rest of us preservationist nerds that even pressed optical disks are prone to having their data layers oxidize and become unreadable in 10-15 years. I already have old Playstation 1 games that are stored properly but are still flat out unreadable because the data layers have expired.
Due to the way the plastic layers are sandwiched together, DVD's are even more prone to this than CD's are. Unless you store your disks in a vacuum in the dark they're not an archival medium unless you're regularly copying the data to new disks or a different medium anyway... just as you'd have to do with hard drives.
I'll add that I would be more compelled by Internet ads if 99.99999% of them weren't worthless, annoying crap. It's the same problem I have with many television ads: Does anyone truly believe they will gain my business by attempting to insult my intelligence?
Things that blink and wiggle around when I'm trying to read. Some goddamn dancing peacock built in flash with a feather for every state urging me to take out a mortgage. Flash ads that talk! Stuff that tries really hard to look like Windows error boxes! Shit that pops up as an overlay on top of the page I'm trying to read, and obfuscates the way to make it go away! Some goddamned double underlined thing that pops up a big gaudy box that's nearly impossible to close because I had the audacity to move my mouse over the wrong word in a pararaph! Some thing that stalls a page loading for a minute and a half because it's got a thirty megabyte FLV embedded in it!
It's not bad enough that nobody pushing banner ads seems to sell anything I want. Apparently every advertiser on the face of the planet has also taken it upon himself to personally irritate, insult, annoy, obstruct, or attempt to cajole me through threats and lies ("Your system is insecure, click here to install our tool!" "492 malware threats found!" "Hide your porn history from prying eyes!"). Modern banner ads are the new spam, and it's only fitting that they be universally blocked until advertisers can find a way to be more compelling and a lot less obstructive.
Other than the odd impulse purchase from J-List or ThinkGeek or something, who seriously buys anything they see in a banner ad? Almost nobody, that's who. Search engines are the backbone of everyone's browsing experience nowadays, so if you're selling something on the web and somebody wants to buy it they're assured to find you long before you find them via stupid banner ads. And, you know, potentially turn them to one of your competitors instead because you insist on making your ads fucking annoying.
I hate to break it to you, but this far everything everyone's ever penned on this particular subject because... are you following along with this at home? The technology doesn't exist yet. We don't know. It's an unknown, and anything could happen up to and including nothing at all.
All I'm doing is putting forth a possibility tainted by my own opinion. I'm straightforward enough to be honest about that. Why are you so hell bent on turning speculative opinion into some kind of bullshit personal affront?
While we're on that topic, though, let's look at the track record of our illustrious elected officials. It is already mandated that all cell phones sold in the US come with GPS chipsets capable of transmitting your phone's location. In most cases this can be disabled excepting 911 calls, but the technology is there. Your position can already be triangulated fairly accurately just via cell towers. This is a proven fact. Warrantless wiretapping and general spying on US citizens without cause by the Federal government is so well documented that there's already been massive outcry and a million and one headlines about it. This is a proven fact. OBD2 compliant automobiles sold in the USA are required by the DOT to have black boxes (for lack of a better term) that record vehicle speed, brake status, RPM's, and the other assortment of telemetry available in a modern engine for the sole purpose of the police using it against you in post-crash investigations. This is a proven fact. Traffic cameras are already in place in many locations throughout the country and are not only used to hand out speeding tickets as well as track individual vehicle movement when the police so desire, as has made headlines more than once. This is a proven fact.
None of the above is speculation. People who live off your tax dollars want to know where you are and what you're doing at all times, and the demonstration of this desire is made clear again and again and again. How many stories are posted to Slashdot to the effect of "company developing X technology to recognize faces/scan fingerprints/track crowd movements/snoop on cell or internet conversations?" Count them. How many of them go on to say they're doing it with government funding or for homeland security purposes, and all those other buzzwords? There's a reason Slashdot has a "Your Rights Online" section. There's a reason stories like these are of so much interest.
What is speculation is what will happen if a widespread vehicle based network of no concrete design or aim is put into service. My speculation is that bad things will happen if it is, especially given the track record of the US government both Federal and local in passing mandates involving automotive technology. If you don't agree with my speculation, that's fine. But if you want to blow it out of proportion and turn it into some kind of affront that's all you.
Not to rain on YOUR parade, but you should read and comprehend my entire post before trying to nitpick.
You can turn your cell phone off, you can leave it at home, or you can chose not to have one. Try doing that with a mesh networking "black box" that's buried somewhere within your car's computer system and the DOT has mandated is illegal to disable or remove (if the future-car-to-be even works without it). If this weird vision of the future comes to be you may just want to invest in a bicycle.
My point wasn't that Mesh Networks Are Bad, M'kay, but that building a huge one in a form that will specifically enable shady government types to meddle with it is a spectacularly bad idea.
I vote thanks but no thanks on this. Despite whatever wild-eyed claims about "openness" or "oneness" or whatever other hippie bullshit the brainchilds of this are spouting, there is absolutely NO information of any kind that is appropriate for my vehicle to be broadcasting. I'm sure the police and Federal government would absolutely LOVE to have a way to track the location of every vehicle in the country, not to mention who owns it and who they're talking to via their built in net cellphone at the time. Integrating this with the idea of a vehicle is a hilariously bad idea, because the instant it comes about there will be DOT, Federal, and State laws with a laundry list of mandates about how "open" this system will be allowed to be to be "roadworthy," and I guarantee you not a single one of these mandates will be in your best interest.
Pass.
If we're going to do the mesh network thing, I'd rather have it in a portable device like a phone or PDA that doesn't give the government a billion inroads to regulate, legislate, and subvert it, and one that I can chose not to buy, to turn off, or to leave at home.
Windows 7 isn't even out yet and already there's talk of the next product coming around the corner. I think this is part of the problem Microsoft is having with Vista: Nobody wants to invest in the considerable outlay in "upgrading" to the latest version of Windows when they already know their investment is going to be irrelevant in a year or two when something newer (read "better" in the eyes of Joe Sixpack) hits the shelves.
"I'll hold off," say millions of cash-strapped computer users.
Yes, but funky blue-spectrum LED lights will make your downtown area look like a cyberpunk novel cover, which is worth way more awesome points than 160 lumens per watt.
Plus, if existing phosphor-on-blue-die LED's are any indication these will also make fluorescent objects in your downtown area light up like christmas trees.
I'm going to argue this point. I was once told, point blank, by a captain of the New Castle police department that, quote "his job was not to protect me from criminals, his job was to arrest be for not toeing the line."
I'll agree that he's not a representative example. But you have to admit that the mentality is there.
Millions of lower class, minority, and various other put-upon people like those who already have records basically can't contact the police for help or protection from criminals who target them for fear that they themselves will be victimized by the police. Consider that the first thing that usually happens in my area when you call the police to report a theft is that they start sniffling around your affairs, running your license plates, and running your name against computers to see if they can "get you for something." I've been told repeatedly that the police can't and aren't interested in investigating the petty crimes I've been a victim of because either there's not enough time or manpower, they don't care, or it's not profitable for them (fines, tickets, and drug arrests). And I'm not making this up just to back my position.
Here's some other news: The presence of my local police department and its recent staffing increases, crackdowns, checkpoints, and threatening policing tactics hasn't done a damn thing to curtail crime or deter criminals. Crimes are up in my city, enough for the year's murder rate to keep making front page headlines.
Just out of curiosity, what mechanism does Linux use to do this? In Ubuntu both on my laptop and desktop it magically detects floppies when they're inserted seemingly without spinning the drive. My laptop uses an external USB drive, but my desktop has a bog standard internal drive circa 1992.
But on a different note, if you want Windows to autodetect floppies for you... Buy an LS-120 drive.
People need to wake up to the realities of this shit. Modern day police departments are filled with tyrannical people who enact tyrannical policy purely for the sake of their own egos. (Not all of them, but enough bad apples to ruin the bunch in a lot of cases.) The modern day police department is a THREAT to security and liberty in this country, not a protector of it, and in all honesty people need to start fighting back against it. Unfortunately, the police are also the ones with all the guns and tear gas and media connections who will label protestors, detractors, and other enemies of tyranny as "terrorists" or "criminals." And they have their egos in a bunch over their presumed notion that everything they do is "in the right," and anything anyone says or does against them is automatically "in the wrong," largely because we've let them think that way for entirely too long.
Only n00bs use credit based, per-month ripoff carriers.
Despite their exasperatingly mostly-local coverage I've been really happy with, of all outfits, MetroPCS. For less than half of the cost of most people's "real" voice-plus-data plans I have unlimited talk, unlimited text, and unlimited data to my phone or to a tethered laptop. I have no contract and can give them the finger and take my CDMA phone (which I *own* thank you very much) to any other CDMA ("3G") carrier I like: Sprint, AT&T, Cingular, &c.
"The California Air Resources Board says that the climate control systems of dark-colored cars need to work harder than their lighter siblings â" especially after sitting in the sun for a few hours."
Except in the wintertime, idiots.
This may be almost, nearly well and good for California (it's still a stupid fucking idea, but let's roll with it) but I am going to be supremely pissed if this legislation gets copycatted by all the states in the Northeast who always copycat CARB laws. You know, states where it's cold most of the year. My state is at the geometric opposite end of the country as California yet has similar "sniff test" laws, identical gas can laws (yes, I'm not allowed to use a normal fuel can because it might spill a drop or two of gasoline creating "VOC's" nevermind the fact that the gas that doesn't get spilled is going to be fucking burned in a lawnmower engine), identical you're-not-allowed-to-sell-this-engine laws...
This is idiocy. The impact of this type of scheme will be so small as to be immeasurable, I'm sure, but the effect it'll have on pissing off the citizenry will be massive.
The implication of this is that some mad bomber could make a real bomb and just put some damn fool marking on it, causing people to cheerfully ignore it because it doesn't look like something they saw on TV or in a cartoon. Leave out the blinky lights and stenciled "explosive" markings (not to mention pins and sparkly fuses) but instead put it in a box labeled "water pump equipment" or "1 doz. Acme paving stones." Hell, if you put the thing in a burlap sack with a dollar sign on it some moron would probably try to steal it and bring it home.
Anonymous speech should be specifically protected on the web, end of story. Full stop. No debate. Anyone in any position of power who thinks otherwise should be dragged out of office for positing such a stupid notion.
If someone wants to complain anonymously about someone else it should equally be that person's right (not to mention responsibility) to publicly refute any claims they disagree with. There's no sense in whining about a search engine coming up with "undesirable" things about you -- get off your lard butt and post some information that IS desirable about yourself, if it bothers you so damn much. Otherwise, realise that people other than you are going to take hateful anonymous comments on the Internet at exactly face value: Namely, zero. Or close to it.
Why not, since booting to Linux is (provided all the hardware support is happening) guaranteed to let you do whatever you want with your media, files, and software?
This seems like as good a jumping point as any. With any luck, enough people will realize this and make said jump and we'll all have Microsoft to thank for it.
Just think that for at least a decade now the main bullet point on the glossy full color box of the computer-as-toaster has been "create and share your own multimedia!" One by one users of Windows 7 will discover that they can't actually do this to their satisfaction anymore and abandon ship for Linux or, more likely, Mac.
Cable companies, you want to protect the bottom line?
Stop sending me six-page glossy advertisements first class mail every week. How much does that cost you in printing and postage? Quit begging me to upgrade to services I already have. Stop bombarding me with ads that insult my intelligence. Stop offering me "this price for six months!!!1!!" deals that will rip me off in half a year and hope in vain that I'm too stupid to notice. Stop cutting all of the channels I actually watch and moving them to premium packages. Quit reordering my channel numbers every two weeks. Stop lying about how many "HD" channels you have. Stop trying to screw me by playing billing games - my bank tells me when you cashed my check, so don't try to rip me off with fake late fees. Hire operators who are neither surly nor clueless...
Uh, I hate to break it to the detractors of the Android Market, but the Apple app store applies to only one phone as well. And while the iPhone IS the New Hotness status symbol and so forth, there are still a hundred and one Razr/Blackberry/HTC/Envy/Blackjack owners for a single iPhone owner. Despite its popularity, the iPhone is far from ubiquitous.
I like the idea of this. A solar powered phone would be great (provided solar charging isn't the ONLY) option when I'm on the road or on a camping trip, or burn up all by battery life playing Tetris on the bus. Flip it over, leave it next to a window, forget about.
What I'm not altogether keen on is the contrivance of bundling this with the "green" fad. I don't give two shits about how many trees the manufacturer hugged with designing the packaging, and I, for one, think that moulding phones out of recycled water bottles is more than a bit daft. Even if the phone doesn't wind up clear and crinkly, I don't think water bottle plastic of questionable origin and quality is a great idea for the casing of an expensive gizmo with a big fragile solar panel on the back.
I don't get why so many companies have so much trouble figuring out the PDA formula. It's appalling to think that with all the advances of wafer-thin phones, laptops with GeForces and a zillion processor cores, and suchlike that my five year old Dell X51V is STILL the best general purpose PDA you can buy.
This is not difficult. Here's what you do:
1. Make a general purpose PDA shaped computing device that's reasonably powerful, user programmable, and has software development tools that don't suck. Run Linux on it or whatever if you want to. 2. Make the phone component optional. Like, maybe, make the phone part a module or (gasp) sell it as a standalone PDA that you can plug a SIM card into IF YOU WANT TO, without having to tie it to a two year contract and some cell carrier. 3. ??? 4. Profit.
I encrypt everything I can as a matter of course, weather I "need" to or not. Largely because I can, but also because it's good policy in general to preemptively defeat stupid crap like this.
Kicking off the start to the more widespread use of encryption also has to begin someplace, so I figure I may as well encrypt everything I can. All current Bittorent clients support encryption, and in most (like uTorrent and Deluge) it's simply a matter of checking a single checkbox to make it happen.
Ain't nobody's business what comes and goes from my computer or yours, regardless of its legality.
So that's it? All that to-do about Vista and how it's the Next Big Thing and it's slated to be replaced by "Windows 7" inside of a year and some change from now? That'll mean that Windows Vista was in production longer than it will be in service.
Slashdot Mirror
The problems with ethanol as a fuel are twofold, though neither problem is insurmountable.
First, ethanol will damage and eventually destroy engines that are not designed to burn it, full stop. It deteriorates rubbers and plastics, notably fuel lines, filters, pumps, etc. but also causes lubrication problems with piston rings, valves, and so forth. Most "late model" cars in the US (the cutoff point for "late model" is sort of nebulous at the moment) are designed to handle up to 15% ethanol content in their fuel. It is a safe bet to assume that any vehicle that does not explicitly state in the manual or marketing literature that it is compatible with higher ethanol concentrations (E85, etc.) is not, in fact, compatible. E85 capability is a huge marketing bullet point these days, and aside from a few very new model vehicles from Chevy and especially Ford, American engines will be damaged by high ethanol concentrations. Full stop. No argument allowed, nor required. Many engines can be converted to run somewhat satisfactorily on ethanol, but most of them do not have a factory conversion and must be converted using third party parts with the usual gamut of quality problems that this often entails. Many, many engines on the road cannot be converted to ethanol at all: Truck engines, high performance engines, bike engines, etc. Also, many older engines ("older" as in 15-20 years, still otherwise perfectly viable vehicles, not to mention all of those even older than that) cannot be converted at all.
On the topic of destroying engines, I can provide experience for a sector nobody's thought much about: Small engines. Lawn mowers, chain saws, weed trimmers, and everything else related. In the small engine shop run by my store, we have seen a marked increase in failures of nearly every fuel related part in the power equipment we service. Fuel lines rotting out within a year of purchase, seals going bad, rings seizing, pistons scoring, and filters clogging. I have personally pulled lawn mower fuel filters from units filled with E15 fuel just packed with fibrous gunk the likes of which I had never seen before the ethanol-laden fuel became popular in my area. I guarantee you that if any piece of gasoline powered equipment runs at all on high-ethanol fuel, it will not do so for long.
The second caveat is that ethanol has lousy energy density compared to gasoline. You get less heat and less energy out of ethanol per gallon than gasoline, and there's no way around it. Converted vehicles will get reduced mileage on ethanol as compared to gasoline. Ethanol-only vehicles will have to have larger tanks or just suffer with less range per tank than comparable gasoline vehicles. If ethanol prices closely follow gasoline prices, even in the short term, it will become a much more expensive proposition than most people anticipate. Likewise, our "barrels per day" number will not be directly transferable from gasoline to ethanol - A considerably larger amount of ethanol will have to be produced, pumped, shipped, and sold compared to gasoline today. This will incur additional cost and add additional complication.
In time, these problems will be solved. But it's going to cost a lot, and the one thing Americans have been known to get sore about in a hurry is some government type coming along and demanding that they get rid of their stuff/spend money/buy a new lawn mower/mothball their classic car because of the Ethanol Revolution. Under the theoretical argument that the whole country goes ethanol eventually, I predict a LOT of resistance to the idea, rallied under banners of "taking away our freedom," "admonishing tradition," "from my cold, dead fingers," and so forth. Some of which, admittedly, will be justified. (Though I'd doubt regular old gasoline will go away any time soon, or indeed at all until we run out of crude oil entirely. Motorheads are die-hard types, many of them are willing to spend lots of money, and someone will crop up to meet that demand. On it goes.)
Or buy a modchip. Backups can be burned any old time you like. CD-R's deteriorate faster than pressed CD's, but if you have your backup image on a more stable medium (or a regularly refreshed one) it only costs pennies to make a fresh, working disk.
The kicker is, I found out that the first disk in my collection to die this way was disk TWO of Final Fantasy 8. It would have made my life a lot easier if disk one failed first.
Note that this is important for those using burnable CD and DVD media for archival purposes. Typical burned CD-R disks, like the ones likely filled with millions of peoples' irreplaceable digital photos, routinely fail to last more than two years in storage. Many, many disks last longer but certainly enough fail in this time frame or before to make it a big issue. Data burned to CD-R and DVD-R (or whatever format of the week) should be read off and burned to new media regularly.
Or he may know like the rest of us preservationist nerds that even pressed optical disks are prone to having their data layers oxidize and become unreadable in 10-15 years. I already have old Playstation 1 games that are stored properly but are still flat out unreadable because the data layers have expired.
Due to the way the plastic layers are sandwiched together, DVD's are even more prone to this than CD's are. Unless you store your disks in a vacuum in the dark they're not an archival medium unless you're regularly copying the data to new disks or a different medium anyway... just as you'd have to do with hard drives.
I'm entirely with the OP on this.
I'll add that I would be more compelled by Internet ads if 99.99999% of them weren't worthless, annoying crap. It's the same problem I have with many television ads: Does anyone truly believe they will gain my business by attempting to insult my intelligence?
Things that blink and wiggle around when I'm trying to read. Some goddamn dancing peacock built in flash with a feather for every state urging me to take out a mortgage. Flash ads that talk! Stuff that tries really hard to look like Windows error boxes! Shit that pops up as an overlay on top of the page I'm trying to read, and obfuscates the way to make it go away! Some goddamned double underlined thing that pops up a big gaudy box that's nearly impossible to close because I had the audacity to move my mouse over the wrong word in a pararaph! Some thing that stalls a page loading for a minute and a half because it's got a thirty megabyte FLV embedded in it!
It's not bad enough that nobody pushing banner ads seems to sell anything I want. Apparently every advertiser on the face of the planet has also taken it upon himself to personally irritate, insult, annoy, obstruct, or attempt to cajole me through threats and lies ("Your system is insecure, click here to install our tool!" "492 malware threats found!" "Hide your porn history from prying eyes!"). Modern banner ads are the new spam, and it's only fitting that they be universally blocked until advertisers can find a way to be more compelling and a lot less obstructive.
Other than the odd impulse purchase from J-List or ThinkGeek or something, who seriously buys anything they see in a banner ad? Almost nobody, that's who. Search engines are the backbone of everyone's browsing experience nowadays, so if you're selling something on the web and somebody wants to buy it they're assured to find you long before you find them via stupid banner ads. And, you know, potentially turn them to one of your competitors instead because you insist on making your ads fucking annoying.
And then, as if to illustrate my point, this shows up on Slashdot's front page today:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/10/1549252&art_pos=8
Yeah. Paranoid. Right.
Yeah, I really need to find a new shtick, don't I?
This just in... No, wait.
I hate to break it to you, but this far everything everyone's ever penned on this particular subject because... are you following along with this at home? The technology doesn't exist yet. We don't know. It's an unknown, and anything could happen up to and including nothing at all.
All I'm doing is putting forth a possibility tainted by my own opinion. I'm straightforward enough to be honest about that. Why are you so hell bent on turning speculative opinion into some kind of bullshit personal affront?
While we're on that topic, though, let's look at the track record of our illustrious elected officials. It is already mandated that all cell phones sold in the US come with GPS chipsets capable of transmitting your phone's location. In most cases this can be disabled excepting 911 calls, but the technology is there. Your position can already be triangulated fairly accurately just via cell towers. This is a proven fact. Warrantless wiretapping and general spying on US citizens without cause by the Federal government is so well documented that there's already been massive outcry and a million and one headlines about it. This is a proven fact. OBD2 compliant automobiles sold in the USA are required by the DOT to have black boxes (for lack of a better term) that record vehicle speed, brake status, RPM's, and the other assortment of telemetry available in a modern engine for the sole purpose of the police using it against you in post-crash investigations. This is a proven fact. Traffic cameras are already in place in many locations throughout the country and are not only used to hand out speeding tickets as well as track individual vehicle movement when the police so desire, as has made headlines more than once. This is a proven fact.
None of the above is speculation. People who live off your tax dollars want to know where you are and what you're doing at all times, and the demonstration of this desire is made clear again and again and again. How many stories are posted to Slashdot to the effect of "company developing X technology to recognize faces/scan fingerprints/track crowd movements/snoop on cell or internet conversations?" Count them. How many of them go on to say they're doing it with government funding or for homeland security purposes, and all those other buzzwords? There's a reason Slashdot has a "Your Rights Online" section. There's a reason stories like these are of so much interest.
What is speculation is what will happen if a widespread vehicle based network of no concrete design or aim is put into service. My speculation is that bad things will happen if it is, especially given the track record of the US government both Federal and local in passing mandates involving automotive technology. If you don't agree with my speculation, that's fine. But if you want to blow it out of proportion and turn it into some kind of affront that's all you.
Not to rain on YOUR parade, but you should read and comprehend my entire post before trying to nitpick.
You can turn your cell phone off, you can leave it at home, or you can chose not to have one. Try doing that with a mesh networking "black box" that's buried somewhere within your car's computer system and the DOT has mandated is illegal to disable or remove (if the future-car-to-be even works without it). If this weird vision of the future comes to be you may just want to invest in a bicycle.
My point wasn't that Mesh Networks Are Bad, M'kay, but that building a huge one in a form that will specifically enable shady government types to meddle with it is a spectacularly bad idea.
I vote thanks but no thanks on this. Despite whatever wild-eyed claims about "openness" or "oneness" or whatever other hippie bullshit the brainchilds of this are spouting, there is absolutely NO information of any kind that is appropriate for my vehicle to be broadcasting. I'm sure the police and Federal government would absolutely LOVE to have a way to track the location of every vehicle in the country, not to mention who owns it and who they're talking to via their built in net cellphone at the time. Integrating this with the idea of a vehicle is a hilariously bad idea, because the instant it comes about there will be DOT, Federal, and State laws with a laundry list of mandates about how "open" this system will be allowed to be to be "roadworthy," and I guarantee you not a single one of these mandates will be in your best interest.
Pass.
If we're going to do the mesh network thing, I'd rather have it in a portable device like a phone or PDA that doesn't give the government a billion inroads to regulate, legislate, and subvert it, and one that I can chose not to buy, to turn off, or to leave at home.
Windows 7 isn't even out yet and already there's talk of the next product coming around the corner. I think this is part of the problem Microsoft is having with Vista: Nobody wants to invest in the considerable outlay in "upgrading" to the latest version of Windows when they already know their investment is going to be irrelevant in a year or two when something newer (read "better" in the eyes of Joe Sixpack) hits the shelves.
"I'll hold off," say millions of cash-strapped computer users.
And thus, the cycle repeats.
Yes, but funky blue-spectrum LED lights will make your downtown area look like a cyberpunk novel cover, which is worth way more awesome points than 160 lumens per watt.
Plus, if existing phosphor-on-blue-die LED's are any indication these will also make fluorescent objects in your downtown area light up like christmas trees.
I'm going to argue this point. I was once told, point blank, by a captain of the New Castle police department that, quote "his job was not to protect me from criminals, his job was to arrest be for not toeing the line."
I'll agree that he's not a representative example. But you have to admit that the mentality is there.
Millions of lower class, minority, and various other put-upon people like those who already have records basically can't contact the police for help or protection from criminals who target them for fear that they themselves will be victimized by the police. Consider that the first thing that usually happens in my area when you call the police to report a theft is that they start sniffling around your affairs, running your license plates, and running your name against computers to see if they can "get you for something." I've been told repeatedly that the police can't and aren't interested in investigating the petty crimes I've been a victim of because either there's not enough time or manpower, they don't care, or it's not profitable for them (fines, tickets, and drug arrests). And I'm not making this up just to back my position.
Here's some other news: The presence of my local police department and its recent staffing increases, crackdowns, checkpoints, and threatening policing tactics hasn't done a damn thing to curtail crime or deter criminals. Crimes are up in my city, enough for the year's murder rate to keep making front page headlines.
Just out of curiosity, what mechanism does Linux use to do this? In Ubuntu both on my laptop and desktop it magically detects floppies when they're inserted seemingly without spinning the drive. My laptop uses an external USB drive, but my desktop has a bog standard internal drive circa 1992.
But on a different note, if you want Windows to autodetect floppies for you... Buy an LS-120 drive.
People need to wake up to the realities of this shit. Modern day police departments are filled with tyrannical people who enact tyrannical policy purely for the sake of their own egos. (Not all of them, but enough bad apples to ruin the bunch in a lot of cases.) The modern day police department is a THREAT to security and liberty in this country, not a protector of it, and in all honesty people need to start fighting back against it. Unfortunately, the police are also the ones with all the guns and tear gas and media connections who will label protestors, detractors, and other enemies of tyranny as "terrorists" or "criminals." And they have their egos in a bunch over their presumed notion that everything they do is "in the right," and anything anyone says or does against them is automatically "in the wrong," largely because we've let them think that way for entirely too long.
Only n00bs use credit based, per-month ripoff carriers.
Despite their exasperatingly mostly-local coverage I've been really happy with, of all outfits, MetroPCS. For less than half of the cost of most people's "real" voice-plus-data plans I have unlimited talk, unlimited text, and unlimited data to my phone or to a tethered laptop. I have no contract and can give them the finger and take my CDMA phone (which I *own* thank you very much) to any other CDMA ("3G") carrier I like: Sprint, AT&T, Cingular, &c.
"The California Air Resources Board says that the climate control systems of dark-colored cars need to work harder than their lighter siblings â" especially after sitting in the sun for a few hours."
Except in the wintertime, idiots.
This may be almost, nearly well and good for California (it's still a stupid fucking idea, but let's roll with it) but I am going to be supremely pissed if this legislation gets copycatted by all the states in the Northeast who always copycat CARB laws. You know, states where it's cold most of the year. My state is at the geometric opposite end of the country as California yet has similar "sniff test" laws, identical gas can laws (yes, I'm not allowed to use a normal fuel can because it might spill a drop or two of gasoline creating "VOC's" nevermind the fact that the gas that doesn't get spilled is going to be fucking burned in a lawnmower engine), identical you're-not-allowed-to-sell-this-engine laws...
This is idiocy. The impact of this type of scheme will be so small as to be immeasurable, I'm sure, but the effect it'll have on pissing off the citizenry will be massive.
The implication of this is that some mad bomber could make a real bomb and just put some damn fool marking on it, causing people to cheerfully ignore it because it doesn't look like something they saw on TV or in a cartoon. Leave out the blinky lights and stenciled "explosive" markings (not to mention pins and sparkly fuses) but instead put it in a box labeled "water pump equipment" or "1 doz. Acme paving stones." Hell, if you put the thing in a burlap sack with a dollar sign on it some moron would probably try to steal it and bring it home.
Anonymous speech should be specifically protected on the web, end of story. Full stop. No debate. Anyone in any position of power who thinks otherwise should be dragged out of office for positing such a stupid notion.
If someone wants to complain anonymously about someone else it should equally be that person's right (not to mention responsibility) to publicly refute any claims they disagree with. There's no sense in whining about a search engine coming up with "undesirable" things about you -- get off your lard butt and post some information that IS desirable about yourself, if it bothers you so damn much. Otherwise, realise that people other than you are going to take hateful anonymous comments on the Internet at exactly face value: Namely, zero. Or close to it.
Why not, since booting to Linux is (provided all the hardware support is happening) guaranteed to let you do whatever you want with your media, files, and software?
This seems like as good a jumping point as any. With any luck, enough people will realize this and make said jump and we'll all have Microsoft to thank for it.
Just think that for at least a decade now the main bullet point on the glossy full color box of the computer-as-toaster has been "create and share your own multimedia!" One by one users of Windows 7 will discover that they can't actually do this to their satisfaction anymore and abandon ship for Linux or, more likely, Mac.
Sounds like a winner to me.
Cable companies, you want to protect the bottom line?
Stop sending me six-page glossy advertisements first class mail every week. How much does that cost you in printing and postage? Quit begging me to upgrade to services I already have. Stop bombarding me with ads that insult my intelligence. Stop offering me "this price for six months!!!1!!" deals that will rip me off in half a year and hope in vain that I'm too stupid to notice. Stop cutting all of the channels I actually watch and moving them to premium packages. Quit reordering my channel numbers every two weeks. Stop lying about how many "HD" channels you have. Stop trying to screw me by playing billing games - my bank tells me when you cashed my check, so don't try to rip me off with fake late fees. Hire operators who are neither surly nor clueless...
Is this so difficult?
Uh, I hate to break it to the detractors of the Android Market, but the Apple app store applies to only one phone as well. And while the iPhone IS the New Hotness status symbol and so forth, there are still a hundred and one Razr/Blackberry/HTC/Envy/Blackjack owners for a single iPhone owner. Despite its popularity, the iPhone is far from ubiquitous.
I like the idea of this. A solar powered phone would be great (provided solar charging isn't the ONLY) option when I'm on the road or on a camping trip, or burn up all by battery life playing Tetris on the bus. Flip it over, leave it next to a window, forget about.
What I'm not altogether keen on is the contrivance of bundling this with the "green" fad. I don't give two shits about how many trees the manufacturer hugged with designing the packaging, and I, for one, think that moulding phones out of recycled water bottles is more than a bit daft. Even if the phone doesn't wind up clear and crinkly, I don't think water bottle plastic of questionable origin and quality is a great idea for the casing of an expensive gizmo with a big fragile solar panel on the back.
I don't get why so many companies have so much trouble figuring out the PDA formula. It's appalling to think that with all the advances of wafer-thin phones, laptops with GeForces and a zillion processor cores, and suchlike that my five year old Dell X51V is STILL the best general purpose PDA you can buy.
This is not difficult. Here's what you do:
1. Make a general purpose PDA shaped computing device that's reasonably powerful, user programmable, and has software development tools that don't suck. Run Linux on it or whatever if you want to.
2. Make the phone component optional. Like, maybe, make the phone part a module or (gasp) sell it as a standalone PDA that you can plug a SIM card into IF YOU WANT TO, without having to tie it to a two year contract and some cell carrier.
3. ???
4. Profit.
I encrypt everything I can as a matter of course, weather I "need" to or not. Largely because I can, but also because it's good policy in general to preemptively defeat stupid crap like this.
Kicking off the start to the more widespread use of encryption also has to begin someplace, so I figure I may as well encrypt everything I can. All current Bittorent clients support encryption, and in most (like uTorrent and Deluge) it's simply a matter of checking a single checkbox to make it happen.
Ain't nobody's business what comes and goes from my computer or yours, regardless of its legality.
So that's it? All that to-do about Vista and how it's the Next Big Thing and it's slated to be replaced by "Windows 7" inside of a year and some change from now? That'll mean that Windows Vista was in production longer than it will be in service.