Trivial to break. Thirty-four lines of Perl to do it right, though I'm sure somebody could write something much simpler using "map" that would also work with reasonable probability.
#!/usr/bin/perl
$/ = undef;
my $string = <STDIN>; my @parts = split(/(<script.*?>|<\/script>)/, $string);
DRM is an exercise in futility. Protecting streaming media is exactly as important as protecting radio broadcasts, i.e. not at all. Completely unimportant. It's a waste of time and money that could be better spent making higher quality programming. It does nothing to prevent people who are determined to capture the audio program, and no matter what they change in the DRM tech, it cannot prevent it).
Unfortunately, it does do lots of harm in other areas; it causes unavoidable compatibility problems, prevents average people from format-shifting to devices like iPods for listening at their convenience, prevents average people from time-shifting pseudo-broadcast content to a more convenient time, and in general, massively erodes at every aspect of legitimate fair use without actually providing any provable benefits in preventing "piracy".
IMHO, the Audio Home Recording Act should be expanded to cover digital broadcasts/streaming media in any sane universe. The term "piracy" should not even apply to non-purchased media that is freely provided for download or streaming, so long as that media is only copied for personal (defined as non-commercial) use. We need to nip this stupidity in the bud.
Isn't that approximately like hiring Satan to be your minister of peace and harmony? Like hiring Ronald Reagan to be your head of Alzheimer's research? Like hiring Hitler to be your minister of anti-Nazi policy?
Yikes! I mean I know you can be clueless about tech, but... jeez, Carly Fiorina? That goes way beyond clueless all the way to hopelessly inept. He might as well have George W. Bush set the policy. Heck, does he have a three-year-old grandson or granddaughter? Because even an average three-year-old would be a better choice. Heck, a monkey flinging excrement at a bunch of words taped to a wall would probably result in a better technology policy. Wait, what am I saying? A crack-addicted three-year-old monkey trained by George W. Bush would do a better job setting technology policy. There. That's more on the right order of absurdity.
Of course, tech people (for the most part) don't vote Republican, so I guess McCain feels he has nothing to gain from a good tech policy and everything to gain from a tech policy that favors the big business folks who do vote Republican, so I'm not at all surprised. Still, I had a great deal of respect for McCain before he started running. Since then, he has rapidly de-evolved from being someone who thinks for himself and stands up for some fairly sane set of values (albeit one with economic policies that I didn't generally agree with) into just another party politic tool. Obama is quickly descending in that direction, too. At this rate, by the time all is said and done, we'll have two more choices that nobody can tell apart except on issues that don't really matter except to a few people. At that point, no matter who wins, everyone loses....
If the people who would otherwise submit standards to ISO and follow standards set by ISO generally think they are irrelevant, they become de facto irrelevant. At least in this field, IMHO, they are remarkably close.
The damage to the standard has been done, but by outright rejecting the protests, ISO is also irreparably damaging its reputation. That damage could have been mitigated. Instead, they covered their ears and screamed "LA, LA, LA, LA, LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" like a petulant five-year-old child.
Today, they might as well have released a press release that said, "We are a standards body that represents the desires of the highest bidder. Screw you all." That's certainly the way the entire open source community is going to interpret this. The result can be nothing less than a large percentage of people who should care about ISO standards replying, "Screw you, too." No other outcome is possible at this point; they have effectively marginalized themselves in the eyes of the technical community---probably irrevocably so. In the eyes of the community, the ISO simply no longer matters, or more accurately, must be completely ignored for the good of standardization.
Or, in government terms, "One wrong turn deserves another."
Unfortunately, I'm on a block metering scheme through a mobile home park. The park does the metering and does bulk purchasing from PG&E, so I can't change my metering to anything other than usage-based metering, AFAIK. Thus, at least until I move, that part is academic for me.
Had lots of trouble with other American cars by other manufacturers too---to the point that I don't buy them anymore. The point was that most of the problems I've had with American cars stemmed from their seeming inability to build a modern engine due to the higher complexity.
Okay, so I'm exaggerating a little bit.... That said, it depends on whether you have a van with rear air. Some systems may use freon for heat and air---not sure---but some of have a complete heater core back in the back. In a 15-passenger fan, that's about 25 feet of water hose each way by itself---about 20 feet for the length plus a little extra to reach the heater core, which I assume is in the ceiling. So in that case, you'd have on the order of fifty feet before you even count whatever length of hose is under the hood.:-)
Wow. Those are much better Wh/mile numbers than what I'd calculated based on dividing an EV's maximum range numbers by the charging figures a couple of years ago. I think my estimate was somewhere around 600 Wh/mile. If your numbers are right, that's good to know.:-) Oh, and they were also when gas was $3/gallon.... You know, a few months ago....
By 70,000 miles, my Ford Windstar had already had to have the intake torn down and cleaned due to a flawed valve cover design sucking oil through the EGR hose (emissions control crap) clogging the vacuum lines, causing the computer to adjust the fuel mixture incorrectly and show a Check Engine light. The overdrive off light started blinking periodically due to a solenoid problem in the automatic transmission. It also had a faulty switch on the air conditioner that caused the rear air to randomly turn on and off. Several replaced bulbs. Recall for something wrong with the fan controller for the rear heat or something, recall for overheating wiper motor, recall for two or three other things. Problem with the suspension system causes a rubber boot to rub against something under there and make noise. Oh, and then there was the fuel line that blew off the back of the fuel filter while I was driving down the road. I'm sure if I thought about it long enough, I could list plenty of other problems.
Okay, so maybe that qualifies it as not a "decently made car", but nearly 100% of the problems I've had with my vehicle stem from actual problems with the drive train, and the bulk of those stem from emissions control hardware.
Don't tell me these modern engines are a dream. They can be great, but so could engines 20 years ago. The difference is that now there are a lot more things that can go wrong because of all the complexity of the emissions control system, and that when things go wrong, they often go cataclysmically wrong.
Computers and sensors have actually simplified the engine control system considerably.
A modern car is more efficient and runs smoother. It is NOT simpler in its construction. A carburetor is pretty mind-bogglingly simple compared with computer-controlled fuel injection. It either works or it doesn't, and when it doesn't, you're not sitting there trying to figure out which damned vacuum line is clogged causing the engine to run lean. Likewise, manual transmissions are so much simpler than automatic transmissions that any suggestion to the contrary qualifies as delusional thinking. Ask anyone with a Ford Windstar what they think of transmission reliability. Ask anybody who has gone through three computers in their Chevy pickup what they think. There are simply way more things that can and do go wrong with a modern engine without abusing it.
In the old days, if something went wrong with an engine, it ran rough or misfired once in a while. If a mechanical distributor went bad, odds were you lost a cylinder once in a while. Nowadays, when the computer or the electronic distributor goes haywire, you don't get spark on any cylinder. Instead of a simple carburetor in which your foot controls the mix of air and fuel, you have this computer doing the controlling, and if one of those vacuum lines gets a bit clogged, You die every time you take the foot off the gas. And so on.
No, those sensors and fancy electronics do not make cars simpler. They make repair somewhat simpler so that people can diagnose many problems without actually having to learn anything about how the vehicles work. That's not the same thing as making the vehicle actually simpler. Further, making diagnosis easier actually means that when something goes wrong that the computer can't explain, you have people with no real car repair knowledge whatsoever standing around with dumb looks on their faces not being able to figure out how to find a low temperature leak in a metal water line just under part of the intake manifold shroud. Five days.
I doubt the motor controllers will last much longer than 10 years, on average. They all use large electrolytic capacitors, which don't last that long. In general, complex high-power electronics is not too reliable. If you do make that reliable, you still have the issue of batteries, which will certainly last less than 10 years in any EV. In all likelihood, an EV will be much more expensive to own than a gas-powered car.
A motor controller does not necessarily need any electrolytic capacitors. There are designs for PWM-based controllers that do not use any capacitors. Here's one.
I never said anything about batteries. Supercapcitors are clearly the best choice for energy storage. They don't suffer from the failure rate of batteries, charge much faster, and are quickly approaching the same capacity.
Actually, I did the math, and at the $0.33 I would be paying for each additional kWh from PG&E, my numbers showed that an electric car would cost more by a factor of 2. A lot of it depends on where you are and whether you are able to get time-of-day metering and/or add solar panels. If you can't do either of those things and if you use air conditioning in your home, the math isn't always in your favor going with an EV here in CA.
Fast-charging battery tech is certainly a possibility, but the faster the charging, the shorter the life of the battery tends to be. By contrast, supercapacitors can also charge up in seconds but have no such limitations about lifespan. And unlike those batteries you're talking about, they can scale up to vehicle sizes today. For all practical purposes, charge speed with supercaps is more likely to be limited by the amount of power the grid can provide.:-)
Either way, though, the argument about recharge times made sense ten years ago when lead-acid batteries were the norm, but doesn't make sense in light of modern technological advances.
That's not what you will see in a car, though. If you have to break up a chemical bond, you're losing a huge chunk of the energy you will produce from the Hydrogen, and depending on the process used, it could actually be net energy negative.... All of the car prototypes I've heard of are using high pressure hydrogen with the exception of cars that are using gasoline reformers (and thus store the hydrogen in the form of gasoline).
Hydrogen electrolysis of water will almost certainly always be less energy efficient than using capacitors for storage. The only reason anybody cares about Hydrogen is that you can get a little bit better energy density right now, but supercapacitors are quickly catching up. Hydrogen is not the answer. It is the question. "No" is the answer. The primary goal of Hydrogen-based power is to keep people dependent on filling stations, not fixing our energy problems or saving consumers money.
Apart from people taking long trips, it offers no advantages over a pure electric system and lots of significant disadvantages, both in terms of producing emissions (H2O is a greenhouse gas, sorry to say) and in terms of inefficiency. Add to that the extra risk of driving around on top of what amounts to a giant bomb (gaseous hydrogen + spark = barbecued passengers), and it just screams "completely wrong answer". Oh, and it is much more complex. The car companies love this idea because that hydrogen power plant is one more part that will wear out, leak, or otherwise require maintenance ($$$) and is likely to cost almost as much as a new car does when it comes time to get it replaced. More money in their pockets, less money in the pockets of consumers.
Electric cars are a huge win there, too. The complex emissions control nightmare that U.S. law requires makes the drive train incredibly failure-prone. Automatic transmissions make them doubly so. Add in the complexity of computer-controlled everything and you have a device that is orders of magnitude more complex than cars were fifty years ago. And people wonder why cars seem to break down more often. It is like using a shiny new computer with monitor and printer where a printer-calculator would do the job. The simpler the device, the less failure-prone it will be.
With electric cars, you have basically four parts: a battery, a bunch of heavy gauge wires, a charge controller, and an electric motor. All of those are generally simple devices except the charge controller. Okay, so there are a few other things like an electrically-powered pump for your power steering and a modified A/C system, but in terms of the drive train itself, you get rid of a lot of crap. You get rid of the internal combustion engine, the computer that controls it, the transmission, potentially the radiator and hundreds of feet of water hoses (that leak), the oil pan (that leaks), the oil hoses (that leak), the fuel pump, most of the vacuum system, the catalytic converter, and the entire exhaust system, all of which are fairly frequent points of failure. Add to that dozens of sensors that no longer apply, including emissions compliance sensors (O2 sensors, catalytic converter temperature sensors, NOx sensors, etc.), axle speed sensors (largely used to verify the transmission is working correctly), vacuum line pressure sensors, etc.
The result is that electric cars are much less likely to fail mechanically. Much less. In fact, one could reasonably argue that the reason auto manufacturers are dragging their heels is that, ignoring people who upgrade for appearance reasons or because their old car is too small to meet their needs, people are likely to replace their vehicles much less frequently than they do now. If the average person drives a car for 300,000 miles before they sell it and require no maintenance in the process, a $30,000 car costs only $0.10 per mile average, not counting energy costs. And that's a conservative estimate of EV longevity once we solve the problem of short battery lifespan. There's every possibility you'll have a rust hole where your feet should go before the electric motor or wiring gives out....:-)
So give them your keys. All 10,000,000 of them. Nowhere in the law does it say you have to help them figure out what key was used. It says you must either make the data available in an unencrypted fashion or provide the keys. It is still permissible to provide so many keys that (random luck notwithstanding) it will statistically take longer than your lifetime for them to pick the one that actually decodes the data in question.
I refer to this as the IBM defense; I heard an anecdote once that IBM, during discovery in a lawsuit against Amdahl (I may have the players wrong, though, so don't quote me on that), was ordered to turn over complete documentation of some part of their system, so they took their documentation, loaded it into an IBM mainframe, generated a core dump, and printed the contents (presumably in hex or binary form) on fanfold paper. The story goes that they then brought in about thirty of those boxes in response to the judicial order, and noted that there was an entire warehouse full of them if the opposing counsel would like to read the rest.
Unless the drive manufacturers are doing something way, way outside the spec, S.M.A.R.T. monitoring does not record any such access pattern statistics. It merely records a total read count for the entire device, total error counts for the entire device, etc.
At best, you could obtain the block remapping information and prove that any block that was remapped must have been written to at least once over the lifetime of the device. You could not prove that the remapping was not done during the factory burn-in period, though, AFAIK, nor could you show that the block was in active use.
Now if they stick a packet sniffer on your ATA bus, maybe you could get access pattern data. Then again, if they can do that, they can also likely recover the key, put a password sniffer on your keyboard, etc.
First, those federally mandated tire pressure systems can be disabled by the user. They are mandatory for the auto manufacturer to install, not for the customer to use. AFAIK, there's no law that prevents a customer from yanking them, putting in standard valve stems, and ignoring the warning on your dashboard.
Second, there is no requirement that these systems use transmitters installed on the tire. There are newer designs of indirect pressure monitoring that do not require these transmitters. While these cost more in the short term, they are much less subject to damage during tire replacement, and thus are likely to catch on even without the paranoia factor.
Third, your vehicle gives off so many detectable signals from the ignition system that if somebody really wanted to set up thousands of antennas all around the area and write some DSP software, odds are they could track you even without explicit transmitters....:-)
Just to recast your comment with a slightly different spin, religions were created by man based on an imperfect understanding of the divine. Religion doesn't have a problem with science inherently. Religions institutions have a problem with science.
More to the point, religion and science are both based on imperfect understandings of the universe and grow and evolve as new truths are revealed. Religion just tends to have a harder time being convinced.:-)
All the religions focus on banning behaviors that were perceived to be harmful to their regional society at the time. The differences are largely because they were started in different places and times.
Several religions consider pork unclean. The religions sprang up in the Middle East where water was scarce. Pigs use lots of water. Therefore, pork ranked right up there with gluttony in the absence of a modern world market. There were also health issues, IIRC.
Even banning homosexual behavior could possibly be explained away as a desire to preserve evolutionary diversity. If having a percentage of people who are homosexual in the gene pool confers some evolutionary advantage, and if saying "Sex with your own gender is wrong because it can't create children" made it more likely that those traits were preserved in future generations, it's possible that the seemingly arbitrary rule in question prevented the trait from dying out by attrition. That certainly doesn't make it right in a modern world where artificial insemination can produce the same effect, of course.
The point is that you shouldn't assume that those seemingly arbitrary rules you talk about really were arbitrary. It is equally possible that they served a necessary purpose at the time which simply no longer makes sense in a modern world.
Just a thought (and admittedly a somewhat bizarre one).
Slashdot Mirror
Trivial to break. Thirty-four lines of Perl to do it right, though I'm sure somebody could write something much simpler using "map" that would also work with reasonable probability.
Unfortunately, Slashdot thinks this contains too many "junk" characters, so I have to split it into two parts.
Heh. Exactly.
DRM is an exercise in futility. Protecting streaming media is exactly as important as protecting radio broadcasts, i.e. not at all. Completely unimportant. It's a waste of time and money that could be better spent making higher quality programming. It does nothing to prevent people who are determined to capture the audio program, and no matter what they change in the DRM tech, it cannot prevent it).
Unfortunately, it does do lots of harm in other areas; it causes unavoidable compatibility problems, prevents average people from format-shifting to devices like iPods for listening at their convenience, prevents average people from time-shifting pseudo-broadcast content to a more convenient time, and in general, massively erodes at every aspect of legitimate fair use without actually providing any provable benefits in preventing "piracy".
IMHO, the Audio Home Recording Act should be expanded to cover digital broadcasts/streaming media in any sane universe. The term "piracy" should not even apply to non-purchased media that is freely provided for download or streaming, so long as that media is only copied for personal (defined as non-commercial) use. We need to nip this stupidity in the bud.
Isn't that approximately like hiring Satan to be your minister of peace and harmony? Like hiring Ronald Reagan to be your head of Alzheimer's research? Like hiring Hitler to be your minister of anti-Nazi policy?
Yikes! I mean I know you can be clueless about tech, but... jeez, Carly Fiorina? That goes way beyond clueless all the way to hopelessly inept. He might as well have George W. Bush set the policy. Heck, does he have a three-year-old grandson or granddaughter? Because even an average three-year-old would be a better choice. Heck, a monkey flinging excrement at a bunch of words taped to a wall would probably result in a better technology policy. Wait, what am I saying? A crack-addicted three-year-old monkey trained by George W. Bush would do a better job setting technology policy. There. That's more on the right order of absurdity.
Of course, tech people (for the most part) don't vote Republican, so I guess McCain feels he has nothing to gain from a good tech policy and everything to gain from a tech policy that favors the big business folks who do vote Republican, so I'm not at all surprised. Still, I had a great deal of respect for McCain before he started running. Since then, he has rapidly de-evolved from being someone who thinks for himself and stands up for some fairly sane set of values (albeit one with economic policies that I didn't generally agree with) into just another party politic tool. Obama is quickly descending in that direction, too. At this rate, by the time all is said and done, we'll have two more choices that nobody can tell apart except on issues that don't really matter except to a few people. At that point, no matter who wins, everyone loses....
If the people who would otherwise submit standards to ISO and follow standards set by ISO generally think they are irrelevant, they become de facto irrelevant. At least in this field, IMHO, they are remarkably close.
The damage to the standard has been done, but by outright rejecting the protests, ISO is also irreparably damaging its reputation. That damage could have been mitigated. Instead, they covered their ears and screamed "LA, LA, LA, LA, LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" like a petulant five-year-old child.
Today, they might as well have released a press release that said, "We are a standards body that represents the desires of the highest bidder. Screw you all." That's certainly the way the entire open source community is going to interpret this. The result can be nothing less than a large percentage of people who should care about ISO standards replying, "Screw you, too." No other outcome is possible at this point; they have effectively marginalized themselves in the eyes of the technical community---probably irrevocably so. In the eyes of the community, the ISO simply no longer matters, or more accurately, must be completely ignored for the good of standardization.
Or, in government terms, "One wrong turn deserves another."
To stick with your theme: Income Siphoning Organization.
Unfortunately, I'm on a block metering scheme through a mobile home park. The park does the metering and does bulk purchasing from PG&E, so I can't change my metering to anything other than usage-based metering, AFAIK. Thus, at least until I move, that part is academic for me.
Had lots of trouble with other American cars by other manufacturers too---to the point that I don't buy them anymore. The point was that most of the problems I've had with American cars stemmed from their seeming inability to build a modern engine due to the higher complexity.
Okay, so I'm exaggerating a little bit.... That said, it depends on whether you have a van with rear air. Some systems may use freon for heat and air---not sure---but some of have a complete heater core back in the back. In a 15-passenger fan, that's about 25 feet of water hose each way by itself---about 20 feet for the length plus a little extra to reach the heater core, which I assume is in the ceiling. So in that case, you'd have on the order of fifty feet before you even count whatever length of hose is under the hood. :-)
Wow. Those are much better Wh/mile numbers than what I'd calculated based on dividing an EV's maximum range numbers by the charging figures a couple of years ago. I think my estimate was somewhere around 600 Wh/mile. If your numbers are right, that's good to know. :-) Oh, and they were also when gas was $3/gallon.... You know, a few months ago....
By 70,000 miles, my Ford Windstar had already had to have the intake torn down and cleaned due to a flawed valve cover design sucking oil through the EGR hose (emissions control crap) clogging the vacuum lines, causing the computer to adjust the fuel mixture incorrectly and show a Check Engine light. The overdrive off light started blinking periodically due to a solenoid problem in the automatic transmission. It also had a faulty switch on the air conditioner that caused the rear air to randomly turn on and off. Several replaced bulbs. Recall for something wrong with the fan controller for the rear heat or something, recall for overheating wiper motor, recall for two or three other things. Problem with the suspension system causes a rubber boot to rub against something under there and make noise. Oh, and then there was the fuel line that blew off the back of the fuel filter while I was driving down the road. I'm sure if I thought about it long enough, I could list plenty of other problems.
Okay, so maybe that qualifies it as not a "decently made car", but nearly 100% of the problems I've had with my vehicle stem from actual problems with the drive train, and the bulk of those stem from emissions control hardware.
Don't tell me these modern engines are a dream. They can be great, but so could engines 20 years ago. The difference is that now there are a lot more things that can go wrong because of all the complexity of the emissions control system, and that when things go wrong, they often go cataclysmically wrong.
A modern car is more efficient and runs smoother. It is NOT simpler in its construction. A carburetor is pretty mind-bogglingly simple compared with computer-controlled fuel injection. It either works or it doesn't, and when it doesn't, you're not sitting there trying to figure out which damned vacuum line is clogged causing the engine to run lean. Likewise, manual transmissions are so much simpler than automatic transmissions that any suggestion to the contrary qualifies as delusional thinking. Ask anyone with a Ford Windstar what they think of transmission reliability. Ask anybody who has gone through three computers in their Chevy pickup what they think. There are simply way more things that can and do go wrong with a modern engine without abusing it.
In the old days, if something went wrong with an engine, it ran rough or misfired once in a while. If a mechanical distributor went bad, odds were you lost a cylinder once in a while. Nowadays, when the computer or the electronic distributor goes haywire, you don't get spark on any cylinder. Instead of a simple carburetor in which your foot controls the mix of air and fuel, you have this computer doing the controlling, and if one of those vacuum lines gets a bit clogged, You die every time you take the foot off the gas. And so on.
No, those sensors and fancy electronics do not make cars simpler. They make repair somewhat simpler so that people can diagnose many problems without actually having to learn anything about how the vehicles work. That's not the same thing as making the vehicle actually simpler. Further, making diagnosis easier actually means that when something goes wrong that the computer can't explain, you have people with no real car repair knowledge whatsoever standing around with dumb looks on their faces not being able to figure out how to find a low temperature leak in a metal water line just under part of the intake manifold shroud. Five days.
A motor controller does not necessarily need any electrolytic capacitors. There are designs for PWM-based controllers that do not use any capacitors. Here's one.
I never said anything about batteries. Supercapcitors are clearly the best choice for energy storage. They don't suffer from the failure rate of batteries, charge much faster, and are quickly approaching the same capacity.
Actually, I did the math, and at the $0.33 I would be paying for each additional kWh from PG&E, my numbers showed that an electric car would cost more by a factor of 2. A lot of it depends on where you are and whether you are able to get time-of-day metering and/or add solar panels. If you can't do either of those things and if you use air conditioning in your home, the math isn't always in your favor going with an EV here in CA.
Fast-charging battery tech is certainly a possibility, but the faster the charging, the shorter the life of the battery tends to be. By contrast, supercapacitors can also charge up in seconds but have no such limitations about lifespan. And unlike those batteries you're talking about, they can scale up to vehicle sizes today. For all practical purposes, charge speed with supercaps is more likely to be limited by the amount of power the grid can provide. :-)
Either way, though, the argument about recharge times made sense ten years ago when lead-acid batteries were the norm, but doesn't make sense in light of modern technological advances.
That's not what you will see in a car, though. If you have to break up a chemical bond, you're losing a huge chunk of the energy you will produce from the Hydrogen, and depending on the process used, it could actually be net energy negative.... All of the car prototypes I've heard of are using high pressure hydrogen with the exception of cars that are using gasoline reformers (and thus store the hydrogen in the form of gasoline).
Hydrogen electrolysis of water will almost certainly always be less energy efficient than using capacitors for storage. The only reason anybody cares about Hydrogen is that you can get a little bit better energy density right now, but supercapacitors are quickly catching up. Hydrogen is not the answer. It is the question. "No" is the answer. The primary goal of Hydrogen-based power is to keep people dependent on filling stations, not fixing our energy problems or saving consumers money.
Apart from people taking long trips, it offers no advantages over a pure electric system and lots of significant disadvantages, both in terms of producing emissions (H2O is a greenhouse gas, sorry to say) and in terms of inefficiency. Add to that the extra risk of driving around on top of what amounts to a giant bomb (gaseous hydrogen + spark = barbecued passengers), and it just screams "completely wrong answer". Oh, and it is much more complex. The car companies love this idea because that hydrogen power plant is one more part that will wear out, leak, or otherwise require maintenance ($$$) and is likely to cost almost as much as a new car does when it comes time to get it replaced. More money in their pockets, less money in the pockets of consumers.
Crap. Grammar error. If the average person drives a car for 300,000 miles before he/she sells it and it requires no maintenance in the process....
*sigh* Sorry. My bad.
Electric cars are a huge win there, too. The complex emissions control nightmare that U.S. law requires makes the drive train incredibly failure-prone. Automatic transmissions make them doubly so. Add in the complexity of computer-controlled everything and you have a device that is orders of magnitude more complex than cars were fifty years ago. And people wonder why cars seem to break down more often. It is like using a shiny new computer with monitor and printer where a printer-calculator would do the job. The simpler the device, the less failure-prone it will be.
With electric cars, you have basically four parts: a battery, a bunch of heavy gauge wires, a charge controller, and an electric motor. All of those are generally simple devices except the charge controller. Okay, so there are a few other things like an electrically-powered pump for your power steering and a modified A/C system, but in terms of the drive train itself, you get rid of a lot of crap. You get rid of the internal combustion engine, the computer that controls it, the transmission, potentially the radiator and hundreds of feet of water hoses (that leak), the oil pan (that leaks), the oil hoses (that leak), the fuel pump, most of the vacuum system, the catalytic converter, and the entire exhaust system, all of which are fairly frequent points of failure. Add to that dozens of sensors that no longer apply, including emissions compliance sensors (O2 sensors, catalytic converter temperature sensors, NOx sensors, etc.), axle speed sensors (largely used to verify the transmission is working correctly), vacuum line pressure sensors, etc.
The result is that electric cars are much less likely to fail mechanically. Much less. In fact, one could reasonably argue that the reason auto manufacturers are dragging their heels is that, ignoring people who upgrade for appearance reasons or because their old car is too small to meet their needs, people are likely to replace their vehicles much less frequently than they do now. If the average person drives a car for 300,000 miles before they sell it and require no maintenance in the process, a $30,000 car costs only $0.10 per mile average, not counting energy costs. And that's a conservative estimate of EV longevity once we solve the problem of short battery lifespan. There's every possibility you'll have a rust hole where your feet should go before the electric motor or wiring gives out.... :-)
So give them your keys. All 10,000,000 of them. Nowhere in the law does it say you have to help them figure out what key was used. It says you must either make the data available in an unencrypted fashion or provide the keys. It is still permissible to provide so many keys that (random luck notwithstanding) it will statistically take longer than your lifetime for them to pick the one that actually decodes the data in question.
I refer to this as the IBM defense; I heard an anecdote once that IBM, during discovery in a lawsuit against Amdahl (I may have the players wrong, though, so don't quote me on that), was ordered to turn over complete documentation of some part of their system, so they took their documentation, loaded it into an IBM mainframe, generated a core dump, and printed the contents (presumably in hex or binary form) on fanfold paper. The story goes that they then brought in about thirty of those boxes in response to the judicial order, and noted that there was an entire warehouse full of them if the opposing counsel would like to read the rest.
You get the picture.
Unless the drive manufacturers are doing something way, way outside the spec, S.M.A.R.T. monitoring does not record any such access pattern statistics. It merely records a total read count for the entire device, total error counts for the entire device, etc.
At best, you could obtain the block remapping information and prove that any block that was remapped must have been written to at least once over the lifetime of the device. You could not prove that the remapping was not done during the factory burn-in period, though, AFAIK, nor could you show that the block was in active use.
Now if they stick a packet sniffer on your ATA bus, maybe you could get access pattern data. Then again, if they can do that, they can also likely recover the key, put a password sniffer on your keyboard, etc.
First, those federally mandated tire pressure systems can be disabled by the user. They are mandatory for the auto manufacturer to install, not for the customer to use. AFAIK, there's no law that prevents a customer from yanking them, putting in standard valve stems, and ignoring the warning on your dashboard.
Second, there is no requirement that these systems use transmitters installed on the tire. There are newer designs of indirect pressure monitoring that do not require these transmitters. While these cost more in the short term, they are much less subject to damage during tire replacement, and thus are likely to catch on even without the paranoia factor.
Third, your vehicle gives off so many detectable signals from the ignition system that if somebody really wanted to set up thousands of antennas all around the area and write some DSP software, odds are they could track you even without explicit transmitters.... :-)
Just to recast your comment with a slightly different spin, religions were created by man based on an imperfect understanding of the divine. Religion doesn't have a problem with science inherently. Religions institutions have a problem with science.
More to the point, religion and science are both based on imperfect understandings of the universe and grow and evolve as new truths are revealed. Religion just tends to have a harder time being convinced. :-)
All the religions focus on banning behaviors that were perceived to be harmful to their regional society at the time. The differences are largely because they were started in different places and times.
Several religions consider pork unclean. The religions sprang up in the Middle East where water was scarce. Pigs use lots of water. Therefore, pork ranked right up there with gluttony in the absence of a modern world market. There were also health issues, IIRC.
Even banning homosexual behavior could possibly be explained away as a desire to preserve evolutionary diversity. If having a percentage of people who are homosexual in the gene pool confers some evolutionary advantage, and if saying "Sex with your own gender is wrong because it can't create children" made it more likely that those traits were preserved in future generations, it's possible that the seemingly arbitrary rule in question prevented the trait from dying out by attrition. That certainly doesn't make it right in a modern world where artificial insemination can produce the same effect, of course.
The point is that you shouldn't assume that those seemingly arbitrary rules you talk about really were arbitrary. It is equally possible that they served a necessary purpose at the time which simply no longer makes sense in a modern world.
Just a thought (and admittedly a somewhat bizarre one).
And God created man in His image. And man created consumer products in his image.
:-)