If you are still using a bank that provides only static username/password authentication, you and your bank are completely unconscious.
The minimal level of safety any bank should offer these days is seeded password, and even that is seriously weak in the long run. Demand 2FA authentication. Write letters, complain.
I'm afraid that Plato wouldn't agree with you. If a person doesn't know what freedom is, they are unable to long for it. One of Plato's initial points is that if a person would have his head restrained, unaware of being able to move his body and such, he would not realise that he is being limited.
Another way to look at it would be to have someone live in a completely closed cell, day in, day out, without having ever known anything else before. Let's not think about feces (or assume the prisoner would understand the concept of a toilet), and that food would be delivered through a specific system.
If the prisoner, in this scenario never knows anything else, he could not imagine anything else. If there is nothing to provide an input to your senses (and that includes imagination), there is nothing to imagine. It is fair to assume that the prisoner would simply accept his condition, loneliness and fate as there are no alternatives.
If, however, you put a man in a cage, after he has tasted freedom, knows that he too posesses the physical ability to run about as he sees his captors do, know he would be able to run free again if he were not restrained by the cage, then yes, he would want freedom as well, however this is not the same. Wanting freedom is not an innate state of mind, if anything is innate in a human, it's the ability to want what others have, and to have the arrogance to be treated as fairly at least as well as anyone else.
Now, you say something quite interesting (paraphrasing) "you own what nature has given you, ie your body and the products of the labour your body is able to accomplish". Again, I agree with this but only to a point. Physical ability isn't what defines what you can and can't do, in most cases -- the Egyptians, Mayas and whatnot have proven this time and time again. What limits any individual, initially, is the ability to see, imagine, and drive the things their mind can come up with. In order to believe you can make a boat, your mind needs the crutches, the framework to come up with such an idea. If you are entirely free of thought and movement, this is fine.
If, however, again going back to the idea of limitation, one has been punished everytime he was creative, or everytime he was acting impulsive, or taking initiative, you can be sure that after a pretty short amount of time you can entirely crush one's spirit and mind.
To anyone who wants to interject: I am using Plato's hypothetical idea that you would limit a prisoner in such a fashion from the very first moment his mind or body is conscious. The human mind is something extremely powerful, and just a glimpse is enough to spark a lifetime of longing and faith; the hypothesis is that the isolation is utterly complete. Even though I'm pretty sure there are enough sick freaks who could imagine ways to have a human baby grow to be an adult without ever watching anything but a wall, live in a completely isolated room, or get beaten everytime it shows any manifestation of self, please, don't try this at home.
I'm assuming you're french, and therefore used "objective" instead of lens. There are a lot of photogs that indeed will throw huge amounts of money at their hardware, but to be honest it's usually a useless investment.
Also, why you'd be talking about glass in a thread that is specifically aimed at sensors beats me. You don't need 700mm at f/1. Plus, any body that you use with some Canon L is necessarily going to be full-frame, meaning you don't need to be at ISO 50. With full-frame, you can without any problem go up to ISO 400 and not notice any noise -- especially with fast lenses.
To be honest, you sound more like the arrogant paps who don't understand a whole lot about photography than a decent photog. Maybe you too tape up your lens' controls, and just know that you need to be at x meters from your target to be in focus?
You say you want more portable glass. However, you're still asking for a 700mm lens. You do realise, that in order to have 700mm lens at f/1, you need an entrance pupil with 700/1 = 700mm worth of diameter? Yup, that's right, 70cm of diameter in order to achieve f/1. Not sure that's ever going to be portable, mate.
Didn't think anyone would call your bluff out here, eh?
Mod parent up. The exact same thing is noticeable in France.
I love cooking with wine in quite a few different dishes and styles. I always used the cheapo wines I could find, and in southern France (as in, 30 miles from the Spanish border), a cheap wine is something you get between 1 EUR per 750ml bottle and 3-4 EUR per 5 litre box.
When I moved to the UK, the cheapest I could find began at 6-7 GBP. In France, most people drink (or should I say, absorb) 3 EUR bottles. They'll go for a 12 EUR bottle when they're feeling fancy. You rarely see people going for the 30+ EUR bottles, unless it's a dining party and you have to bring a gift.
The first time I tasted a 100+ GBP was in London. And yeah, sure, it was nice to have a penguin decant it and use a spotless napkin to absorb the couple of drops that would otherwise have hit the tablecloth, but for all intents and purposes, the 12 EUR wine will do just fine.
That being said, I agree with grandparent though. Going for a 4 digit wine is a once in a lifetime experience that people who can afford it should definitely pay up for. Make sure to bring a wine-knowledgeable friend with you that night too, that way if it tastes like crap and you don't know if you ought to start shouting, your mate will make that decision for you.
The thing is that a decentralised system isn't a bad thing at all. PKI was designed, from the start, to be usable as a non-centralised system (non-pyramid). Realistically speaking, using the same example as the one you offered, where a doctor needs to validate medical records provided by the patient to be truthful, you only need to verify the other doctor's credentials and a signed file.
Now we get back to the old "How do I trust another doctor's certificates?", well, we use a centralised service. Each doctor needs to enroll (Google cache of the same document) to get his certificates, and they are delivered by a central authority, possibly governmental (or whatever authority governs doctors in your country). It's not a very hard thing to do, and can be implemented for roughly a couple million dollars -- the whole system.
How many doctors are there in the US? A laughable amount if you compare how many certificates are issued for the DoD. Heck, you could even implement it to be fully PIV-C compatible, and get cross-certification from the US government, and would allow doctors' credentials to be easily validated during a crisis.
Heck, nobody even needs to own the PKI solution in the US. The government can do it for you, if you are a valid organisation, an excellent project provides certificate management for you. Outside the US it gets a bit more difficult, as interoperability is not quite as great as in the US, however PIV is starting to have quite a lot of traction in Europe as well (I can't remember off the top of my head if it's PIV-I or PIV-C that is being implemented with the UK police forces).
A pretty good read (Google cache as it doesn't seem to be loading from here) about how data is provided on a PIV smartcard.
Somehow, I get the feeling that ET's first email will be something like:
Subject: 0rder Vicodin, Hydrocodone, Paracod, Codeine, Phentermin at Cheapest Price on net. 100% NoPrescription + FDA APPR0VED, FedEx shipping and FREE BONUS pills with every order!
You move from the false assumption that Iran's official and national chant is "Death to America". The truth is, they don't really care about you. They just want to live a peaceful and long life, as most human beings are trying to do.
Most Iranians, at this point, are conflicted by their government. They want freedom of speech and expression. They want to be able to discuss issues openly, without having to worry about disappearing one day.
Bottom line is, don't blame a whole country because a misinformed and misguided government is oppressive. Don't send your troups either, you'd be amazed at how powerful a people can be when provoked sufficiently, even if that means putting an end to their own government. The Iranian people are a good people, with honest beliefs, good schools and diverse, however oppressed political opinions.
I'm sure you'll notice that only the last point is a problem, all the rest are good things.
It can result in people losing their jobs, it can result in less content on any given site, and it definitely can affect the quality of content.
Well, guess fucking what Ken: Ads can also affect the quality of content. I don't have an issue with having a few ads here and there, and I'm happy to support the websites I enjoy, however having to allow me eyeballs to be raped by stroboscope-like flashes, flash-ohsoslowness, and general latency due to overloaded ad servers isn't making the content any better.
The day editors stop putting stupidly short articles on 9 pages just to get more clicks, which forces me to go to the print version (which most of the time doesn't bring any ad clicks to the website anyway, or less at least) rather than the full website edition, I will reconsider using adblockers. You're shooting yourselves in the foot more than any adblock-user.
And if the amount of people using adblockers is large enough for you guys to run an experiment, and make/. front page, I'm guessing the numbers isn't low enough for you to keep ignoring it. You pride yourselves in listening to the community, maybe they've already sent the first message, and this wasn't the response they expected.
I don't mind paying for content -- however I'm not going to have a monthly payment going for every news website that I visit. How about a conglomerate of websites, bundled with OpenID. I pay once, and that gives me ad-free access to all the websites in the bundle. The model could be based on pay-per-view (you have an amount of credit which gives you x number of page views) or full-on subscriptions (you get unlimited views to website x, y, z. Price is based on the number of websites you want).
Considering I'm logged in with OpenID, you guys even get the luxury to blast me with 100% accurately targeted ads on the websites I haven't paid for.
How about the content-creation industry starts using their fucking heads rather than always using the ban hammer as soon as they lose profit?
Anyone ever heard about a smartcard? Generate the key on the smartcard, it never has to be exported (unless you want key recovery and escrow, in which case you need the CA to generate the key).
Last time I heard, 144k cards (GnD makes 'em, amongst others [Gemalto]) could store 4 2048 keys (a Java card has applets, an applet is basically a container on the card, which will define what size keys can be used/generated. Consider 'em partitions, but more complicated), so my guess would be that you could store a 4096 key without any problem, though, I've never seen it in practice.
The Chip and PIN principle is a lot older in Europe than anywhere else in the world. Asia is far behind, however converting fast, and the US is down the drain. France has implemented a Chip'n'PIN system since the early 90s, and Belgium has been using its local equivalent (Bancontact) since the mid-90s. Because credit/debit cards are synonymous to Chip and PIN cards in Europe, EMV has become a synonym for a unified European payment system.
The US has massive plans to implement EMV. The main difference is that banks are quite opposed to it because the cost of overhauling their complete architecture for the sake of fraud is quite a difficult thing to sell -- we're not talking about a simple card update, every single Point of Sale will need a new terminal, every single individual will need his card replaced. How many credit cards are used in North America? 700 million if my memory serves me well, or more. At roughly $15 per card, when bought in high quantities, that's quite a lot of money. Each terminal costs roughly $150-$230, so that's not a small investment either.
Next to that, you need the network connectivity, and the servers to handle it. I remember discussing this with a colleague some time ago, and by eyeballing it quickly, we got a number of roughly $100 to $130 per customer. Obviously, the banks could always ask for more cash from the government to pay for it?
Not quite. Chip and PIN means that the cardholder has to physically interact and give his approval of the transaction.
You give your card to the cashier, or insert it directly in the terminal (if you're a bit slow the cashier will insert the card for you in the reader, right in front of your nose). The terminal presents the cardholder with the AMOUNT to be paid, and in the same step requests the cardholder PIN. By giving the PIN, which contractually is never to be shared with anyone and authorising the transaction the bank discharges its fraud responsibility to the cardholder.
The problem is that now, considering the bank still believes the PIN has been provided and thus it was the cardholder's decision to pay, they outrightly deny any refund when the cardholder claims fraud. The paper mentions that a number of frauds could already have been commited using the same pinciple or technique, and that a number of bank customers really should be entitled to a refund, considering that Chip & PIN isn't as secure as the banks claim it is.
The keys that are on the smartcard (there are a number of keys) remain on the card, and can't be extracted, whether you have the PIN or not (meaning even the cardholder can't extract the keys. If the keys, during generation, as marked as not exportable, even the bank can't extract them, even with the master key). In order to perform an operation, you query the card with a bunch of information, and usually the PIN (specific operations like getting the ATR don't require an open session though.). Considering they still need the keys on the card to sign the transaction the card still needs to be physically present (at least, even though I work in the field, is my understanding of the attack).
Oh, and yes: we're scrambling for answers at this point. Obviously we're downplaying the whole thing, but I'm pretty sure our sales guys are going to get a huge number of calls in the next few days.
You can't clone a chip's contents. The keys are generated on the card itself considering there is no need for escrow, so the keys never even leave the card.
On brand new cars, you are correct, the handbrake will prevent you to take off if you're an inexperienced manual driver. Most experienced drivers would feel it immediately and remove it quickly as it's a pretty common occurence.
The real problem I can see is that as soon as the cable streches a bit, or that the brakes actually are a bit used, you could probably drive off without too much hassle. Say after 5,000km? Anyway.
The real point I wanted to make, is that a lot of people on Slashdot are obviously from the US. Everyone seems to have grown up with an automatic in their hands, whereas in many other countries "the manual transmission driving education" is the only one that comes to mind.
What does this change? Well, quite easy. If my engine starts going mad, I just press the clutch pedal, and kinda physically disconnect the engine from the wheels. Once that's done, I can slowly pull the hand brake and bring the car to a stop (or at least slow it down safely, without locking up the rear brakes in one go). Be prepared to smell burning rubber though.
I don't mind the odd automatic, especially when I'm in a country where they drive on wrong side of the road (grew up in mainland Europe, now living in UK/Australia, the "wrong" side is a very objective thing that changes based on where I spend the last 2 weeks), because there's nothing worse than trying to open the door when really you want to switch gears, but on a day by day basis, I'd only consider it in very expensive cars (M5, Gallardo and Quatroporte).
Can anyone explain what the whole automatic madness is about in the States?
Slashdot Mirror
If you are still using a bank that provides only static username/password authentication, you and your bank are completely unconscious.
The minimal level of safety any bank should offer these days is seeded password, and even that is seriously weak in the long run. Demand 2FA authentication. Write letters, complain.
Randall Munroe should make a comic about Hollywood-inspired Slashdot comments.
I'm afraid that Plato wouldn't agree with you. If a person doesn't know what freedom is, they are unable to long for it. One of Plato's initial points is that if a person would have his head restrained, unaware of being able to move his body and such, he would not realise that he is being limited.
Another way to look at it would be to have someone live in a completely closed cell, day in, day out, without having ever known anything else before. Let's not think about feces (or assume the prisoner would understand the concept of a toilet), and that food would be delivered through a specific system.
If the prisoner, in this scenario never knows anything else, he could not imagine anything else. If there is nothing to provide an input to your senses (and that includes imagination), there is nothing to imagine. It is fair to assume that the prisoner would simply accept his condition, loneliness and fate as there are no alternatives.
If, however, you put a man in a cage, after he has tasted freedom, knows that he too posesses the physical ability to run about as he sees his captors do, know he would be able to run free again if he were not restrained by the cage, then yes, he would want freedom as well, however this is not the same. Wanting freedom is not an innate state of mind, if anything is innate in a human, it's the ability to want what others have, and to have the arrogance to be treated as fairly at least as well as anyone else.
Now, you say something quite interesting (paraphrasing) "you own what nature has given you, ie your body and the products of the labour your body is able to accomplish". Again, I agree with this but only to a point. Physical ability isn't what defines what you can and can't do, in most cases -- the Egyptians, Mayas and whatnot have proven this time and time again. What limits any individual, initially, is the ability to see, imagine, and drive the things their mind can come up with. In order to believe you can make a boat, your mind needs the crutches, the framework to come up with such an idea. If you are entirely free of thought and movement, this is fine.
If, however, again going back to the idea of limitation, one has been punished everytime he was creative, or everytime he was acting impulsive, or taking initiative, you can be sure that after a pretty short amount of time you can entirely crush one's spirit and mind.
To anyone who wants to interject: I am using Plato's hypothetical idea that you would limit a prisoner in such a fashion from the very first moment his mind or body is conscious. The human mind is something extremely powerful, and just a glimpse is enough to spark a lifetime of longing and faith; the hypothesis is that the isolation is utterly complete. Even though I'm pretty sure there are enough sick freaks who could imagine ways to have a human baby grow to be an adult without ever watching anything but a wall, live in a completely isolated room, or get beaten everytime it shows any manifestation of self, please, don't try this at home.
Wait a few years, your voice will change once you turn 14.
I'm assuming you're french, and therefore used "objective" instead of lens. There are a lot of photogs that indeed will throw huge amounts of money at their hardware, but to be honest it's usually a useless investment.
Also, why you'd be talking about glass in a thread that is specifically aimed at sensors beats me. You don't need 700mm at f/1. Plus, any body that you use with some Canon L is necessarily going to be full-frame, meaning you don't need to be at ISO 50. With full-frame, you can without any problem go up to ISO 400 and not notice any noise -- especially with fast lenses.
To be honest, you sound more like the arrogant paps who don't understand a whole lot about photography than a decent photog. Maybe you too tape up your lens' controls, and just know that you need to be at x meters from your target to be in focus?
You say you want more portable glass. However, you're still asking for a 700mm lens. You do realise, that in order to have 700mm lens at f/1, you need an entrance pupil with 700/1 = 700mm worth of diameter? Yup, that's right, 70cm of diameter in order to achieve f/1. Not sure that's ever going to be portable, mate.
Didn't think anyone would call your bluff out here, eh?
Mod parent up. The exact same thing is noticeable in France.
I love cooking with wine in quite a few different dishes and styles. I always used the cheapo wines I could find, and in southern France (as in, 30 miles from the Spanish border), a cheap wine is something you get between 1 EUR per 750ml bottle and 3-4 EUR per 5 litre box.
When I moved to the UK, the cheapest I could find began at 6-7 GBP. In France, most people drink (or should I say, absorb) 3 EUR bottles. They'll go for a 12 EUR bottle when they're feeling fancy. You rarely see people going for the 30+ EUR bottles, unless it's a dining party and you have to bring a gift.
The first time I tasted a 100+ GBP was in London. And yeah, sure, it was nice to have a penguin decant it and use a spotless napkin to absorb the couple of drops that would otherwise have hit the tablecloth, but for all intents and purposes, the 12 EUR wine will do just fine.
That being said, I agree with grandparent though. Going for a 4 digit wine is a once in a lifetime experience that people who can afford it should definitely pay up for. Make sure to bring a wine-knowledgeable friend with you that night too, that way if it tastes like crap and you don't know if you ought to start shouting, your mate will make that decision for you.
Hey sg,
The thing is that a decentralised system isn't a bad thing at all. PKI was designed, from the start, to be usable as a non-centralised system (non-pyramid). Realistically speaking, using the same example as the one you offered, where a doctor needs to validate medical records provided by the patient to be truthful, you only need to verify the other doctor's credentials and a signed file.
Now we get back to the old "How do I trust another doctor's certificates?", well, we use a centralised service. Each doctor needs to enroll (Google cache of the same document) to get his certificates, and they are delivered by a central authority, possibly governmental (or whatever authority governs doctors in your country). It's not a very hard thing to do, and can be implemented for roughly a couple million dollars -- the whole system.
How many doctors are there in the US? A laughable amount if you compare how many certificates are issued for the DoD. Heck, you could even implement it to be fully PIV-C compatible, and get cross-certification from the US government, and would allow doctors' credentials to be easily validated during a crisis.
Heck, nobody even needs to own the PKI solution in the US. The government can do it for you, if you are a valid organisation, an excellent project provides certificate management for you. Outside the US it gets a bit more difficult, as interoperability is not quite as great as in the US, however PIV is starting to have quite a lot of traction in Europe as well (I can't remember off the top of my head if it's PIV-I or PIV-C that is being implemented with the UK police forces). A pretty good read (Google cache as it doesn't seem to be loading from here) about how data is provided on a PIV smartcard.
That being said, maybe the health care professionals ought to have raised their voice at the same time the engineers and scientists did (Google cache)?
Somehow, I get the feeling that ET's first email will be something like:
Subject: 0rder Vicodin, Hydrocodone, Paracod, Codeine, Phentermin at Cheapest Price on net. 100% NoPrescription + FDA APPR0VED, FedEx shipping and FREE BONUS pills with every order!
Carpet- and Thigh-burn often go supersonic as well.
You move from the false assumption that Iran's official and national chant is "Death to America". The truth is, they don't really care about you. They just want to live a peaceful and long life, as most human beings are trying to do.
Most Iranians, at this point, are conflicted by their government. They want freedom of speech and expression. They want to be able to discuss issues openly, without having to worry about disappearing one day.
Bottom line is, don't blame a whole country because a misinformed and misguided government is oppressive. Don't send your troups either, you'd be amazed at how powerful a people can be when provoked sufficiently, even if that means putting an end to their own government. The Iranian people are a good people, with honest beliefs, good schools and diverse, however oppressed political opinions.
I'm sure you'll notice that only the last point is a problem, all the rest are good things.
It can result in people losing their jobs, it can result in less content on any given site, and it definitely can affect the quality of content.
Well, guess fucking what Ken: Ads can also affect the quality of content. I don't have an issue with having a few ads here and there, and I'm happy to support the websites I enjoy, however having to allow me eyeballs to be raped by stroboscope-like flashes, flash-ohsoslowness, and general latency due to overloaded ad servers isn't making the content any better.
/. front page, I'm guessing the numbers isn't low enough for you to keep ignoring it. You pride yourselves in listening to the community, maybe they've already sent the first message, and this wasn't the response they expected.
The day editors stop putting stupidly short articles on 9 pages just to get more clicks, which forces me to go to the print version (which most of the time doesn't bring any ad clicks to the website anyway, or less at least) rather than the full website edition, I will reconsider using adblockers. You're shooting yourselves in the foot more than any adblock-user.
And if the amount of people using adblockers is large enough for you guys to run an experiment, and make
I don't mind paying for content -- however I'm not going to have a monthly payment going for every news website that I visit. How about a conglomerate of websites, bundled with OpenID. I pay once, and that gives me ad-free access to all the websites in the bundle. The model could be based on pay-per-view (you have an amount of credit which gives you x number of page views) or full-on subscriptions (you get unlimited views to website x, y, z. Price is based on the number of websites you want).
Considering I'm logged in with OpenID, you guys even get the luxury to blast me with 100% accurately targeted ads on the websites I haven't paid for.
How about the content-creation industry starts using their fucking heads rather than always using the ban hammer as soon as they lose profit?
Try this: I don't use PayPal, and won't use a service that relies on it exclusively.
Five negations in 2 sentences, bit on the negative side, are we?
Anyone ever heard about a smartcard? Generate the key on the smartcard, it never has to be exported (unless you want key recovery and escrow, in which case you need the CA to generate the key).
Last time I heard, 144k cards (GnD makes 'em, amongst others [Gemalto]) could store 4 2048 keys (a Java card has applets, an applet is basically a container on the card, which will define what size keys can be used/generated. Consider 'em partitions, but more complicated), so my guess would be that you could store a 4096 key without any problem, though, I've never seen it in practice.
I've been a Unix sysadmin all my life.
And looking at how many times you've used "I", it shows.
This would probably be good for taking a one quick beer at lunch or so, but hangover isn't an issue then.
I take it you never had lunch in a proper Glaswegian pub.
TFA says that the government could petition the U.S. Supreme Court for review, so I take it that matters aren't yet...
[sunglasses]
set in stone.
YEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHH
There, fixed that for you.
It's P2P right? The downloaders are distributors.
Oh brother, you haven't seen my uTorrent ratio, have you? It actually says -Infinity.
The Chip and PIN principle is a lot older in Europe than anywhere else in the world. Asia is far behind, however converting fast, and the US is down the drain. France has implemented a Chip'n'PIN system since the early 90s, and Belgium has been using its local equivalent (Bancontact) since the mid-90s. Because credit/debit cards are synonymous to Chip and PIN cards in Europe, EMV has become a synonym for a unified European payment system.
The US has massive plans to implement EMV. The main difference is that banks are quite opposed to it because the cost of overhauling their complete architecture for the sake of fraud is quite a difficult thing to sell -- we're not talking about a simple card update, every single Point of Sale will need a new terminal, every single individual will need his card replaced. How many credit cards are used in North America? 700 million if my memory serves me well, or more. At roughly $15 per card, when bought in high quantities, that's quite a lot of money. Each terminal costs roughly $150-$230, so that's not a small investment either.
Next to that, you need the network connectivity, and the servers to handle it. I remember discussing this with a colleague some time ago, and by eyeballing it quickly, we got a number of roughly $100 to $130 per customer. Obviously, the banks could always ask for more cash from the government to pay for it?
Source: I work in the industry.
Not quite. Chip and PIN means that the cardholder has to physically interact and give his approval of the transaction.
You give your card to the cashier, or insert it directly in the terminal (if you're a bit slow the cashier will insert the card for you in the reader, right in front of your nose). The terminal presents the cardholder with the AMOUNT to be paid, and in the same step requests the cardholder PIN. By giving the PIN, which contractually is never to be shared with anyone and authorising the transaction the bank discharges its fraud responsibility to the cardholder.
The problem is that now, considering the bank still believes the PIN has been provided and thus it was the cardholder's decision to pay, they outrightly deny any refund when the cardholder claims fraud. The paper mentions that a number of frauds could already have been commited using the same pinciple or technique, and that a number of bank customers really should be entitled to a refund, considering that Chip & PIN isn't as secure as the banks claim it is.
Yes, they still need the card.
The keys that are on the smartcard (there are a number of keys) remain on the card, and can't be extracted, whether you have the PIN or not (meaning even the cardholder can't extract the keys. If the keys, during generation, as marked as not exportable, even the bank can't extract them, even with the master key). In order to perform an operation, you query the card with a bunch of information, and usually the PIN (specific operations like getting the ATR don't require an open session though.). Considering they still need the keys on the card to sign the transaction the card still needs to be physically present (at least, even though I work in the field, is my understanding of the attack).
Oh, and yes: we're scrambling for answers at this point. Obviously we're downplaying the whole thing, but I'm pretty sure our sales guys are going to get a huge number of calls in the next few days.
You can't clone a chip's contents. The keys are generated on the card itself considering there is no need for escrow, so the keys never even leave the card.
Married men understand the principal better.
Indeed, that's why I've stopped asking my wife to come to parent-teacher conferences.
you die if your body temperature deviates a few degrees from 98.6F
Holy crap! I'm at 37!!!!
On brand new cars, you are correct, the handbrake will prevent you to take off if you're an inexperienced manual driver. Most experienced drivers would feel it immediately and remove it quickly as it's a pretty common occurence.
The real problem I can see is that as soon as the cable streches a bit, or that the brakes actually are a bit used, you could probably drive off without too much hassle. Say after 5,000km? Anyway.
The real point I wanted to make, is that a lot of people on Slashdot are obviously from the US. Everyone seems to have grown up with an automatic in their hands, whereas in many other countries "the manual transmission driving education" is the only one that comes to mind.
What does this change? Well, quite easy. If my engine starts going mad, I just press the clutch pedal, and kinda physically disconnect the engine from the wheels. Once that's done, I can slowly pull the hand brake and bring the car to a stop (or at least slow it down safely, without locking up the rear brakes in one go). Be prepared to smell burning rubber though.
I don't mind the odd automatic, especially when I'm in a country where they drive on wrong side of the road (grew up in mainland Europe, now living in UK/Australia, the "wrong" side is a very objective thing that changes based on where I spend the last 2 weeks), because there's nothing worse than trying to open the door when really you want to switch gears, but on a day by day basis, I'd only consider it in very expensive cars (M5, Gallardo and Quatroporte).
Can anyone explain what the whole automatic madness is about in the States?
Seeing the issues with HAM, I'm guessing SPAM is moot over there...