The nice thing about the plan is that, unlike active retransmitting satellites, there are no controls on it. A better design is the large mylar balloons also mentioned in TFA. What happened to those? I can think of many amateurs who would love to be able to bounce signals off of something like that for cheap, reliable international communications.
Think of the possibilities... Some have played with receiving TV signals from the other side of the planet via moon-bounce. A signal reflector so much closer would offer many more possibilities. It's an electromagnetic gateway to the other side of the planet. These days, it would probably get adapted to laser communications as well, while no current satellites have that option. Just as a test-bed for experiments like this which can't be performed economically any other way, it sounds like a great project to fund. Why haven't we even attempted any such thing, since active satellites became possible?
That would be great, but again that is the future. Solar will need to progress, and biofuels would need to NOT progress for solar to overtake them.
That's incredibly idiotic... You're proving you haven't the slightest conception of the subject you're acting like an expert on.
NOTHING happens in less than a decade. These solar plants are being built RIGHT NOW. Even if fusion was perfected TOMORROW, these solar plants would all still be built.
And I must also point out your claim of biofuel overtaking solar is similarly brain-damaged to an incredible degree. It's a bit like speculating about a snail overtaking a sports car. You clearly know absolutely nothing on the subject, and your obsession with biofuel is some kind of magical fantasy land you conjured up, and have no conception of the costs or limitations.
If hybrid pay back period were measured in less than 100,000+ miles or a dozen years
It is. You're just foolishly spouting more baseless nonsense.
I think that's more an effect of fossil fuels becoming so inexpensive again.
No, the EU dropped biodiesel flat because it was accelerating the deforestation of the rain forest for biofuel farmland.
And oil certainly isn't inexpensive. Natural gas has gotten cheaper, but nearly all biofuels were never intended as a replacement for that... always just oil.
I certainly don't see an explosion of solar any more than I see an explosion of biofuels.
Observational bias. The BLM had to put a moratorium on the horde of solar installation requests in California, because they couldn't handle the environmental reviews of all them quickly enough.
The projection is that renewables will make up at least 1/3rd of all electrical power generation in CA by 2020, and the majority of that will be from solar.
For cars, neither biofuels nor electricity make any economic sense right now
Plug-in hybrids seem to make profound economic sense right now. Further up the scale, the Chevy Volt is a practical option in the luxury category.
Most of the all-electric vehicles are more economical over their lifetime than conventional vehicles (which is the definition of making economic sense), if you can live within their limitations.
But as I said in the first place... The technology is just about there, and prices are falling quickly. We just need to wait a little bit longer. Just plot the line from the EV1 to the Leaf, and project the date that electric vehicles will be as cheap upfront as conventional cars. Biofuels, OTOH, won't ever have those kinds of economies of scale driving down prices.
Only when you're completely and totally disregarding the manifold losses incurred with your ridiculous biofuel scheme in the same breath. The only possible place biofuels ever made sense was in vehicles, since batteries were expensive, heavy and not sufficiently capable, but even there, it never really worked out because the inefficiency was so horrendous, and the costs were always higher, and more polluting.
Now that batteries are capable enough and starting to take over, biofuels have been nearly forgotten by everyone with two neurons to rub together, and for good reason.
Windows servers undoubtedly have the advantage of being able to turn up a service almost on accident, and have it minimally work. Actual administration and maintenance of them, though, is a Kafka-esque nightmare. I feel bad for Exhange admins. I've heard many horror stories of Windows support telling Admins there's no fix, no fallback, and they'll have to reinstall the entire server recreate datastores, and then they take a few months manually importing All user emails.
Linux/Unix servers take more knowledge and effort to get up and running in the first place, but then are much more stable and deterministic, handle higher load, need less babysitting, and are easier and more consistent to keep updated and make changes to, knowing you're never going to have unrelated services break, or mysterious slowdowns and service unavailability.
There's no doubt what comes out ahead in the end... Linux adminsa can mantain many times more servers than Windows admins. Consider that those Windows admins won't be free, and you'll be cash positive by hiring Linux admins in a very short time. I've worked for some of the most penny-pinching tight-wad companies around, and they emphasize Linux heavily (including on the desktops) paying their Linux admins more than even most management, and yet they heavily prefer Linuxx, and wouldn't dream ofusing Windows for anything important.
then you deal with enormous line losses on top of the 15-30% losses from pumping all of that water
Enormous line losses?!? Last I checked, grid losses average 7%. Your solar site and pumped-hydro site presumably aren't overloading their lines.
And 15% loss for power storage is a great, minuscule loss.
I don't think this compares favorably with bio-fuel electrical generation costs
WTH are you talking about? Even after you count all the energy lost to fertilizing, planting, managing, and harvesting that land, then you suffer MASSIVE losses converting it into a biofuel, and then you've got huge energy costs to ship it, and finally you're presumably going to burn it in a power plant, which means you might get 55% conversion efficiency out of it. That's on top of the plants being an order of magnitude less efficient at converting solar power into energy in the first place.
There's no comparison, and I don't see how you can twist the logic around to even claim biofuel isn't vastly worse.
A ship crossing the ocean cannot rely on batteries.
They could, actually... Batteries and solar panels. Weight is a non-issue for large ships, and they have a lot of space available. They probably won't in the near future, but the technology is getting there in a big hurry.
Tractor trailers doing an overnight haul cannot rely on batteries.
No they can't, but long-distance transport is more efficient via freight trains, and they can be powered by overhead electric lines quite well. Short-haul trucks that are battery powered already exist. As do forklifts, and lots of other heavy machinery. And even if tractor trailers are the hold-out, converting everything else to solar/battery power will dramatically drop the price of fossil fuels.
And batteries are certainly not capable of storing enough energy to supply the electrical grid overnight when the sun isn't shining.
No, but you wouldn't use them for that. For grid-level purposes, you'd use pumped hydro storage. It's already installed in mind-boggling capacities. Besides, "overnight" in the US is off-peak time, where far less power capacity is needed. If we have enough solar installed to support daytime loads, we'd just basically shut off hydro during the day, and go full hydro at night (along with whatever wind capacity is available), and not sweat energy storage.
I had high hopes that fuel cells would become viable, not for cars, but for homes. If photovoltaic got good enough, and fuel cells got cheap, we wouldn't need the electric company.
Why do you want fuel cells, when batteries are more efficient at the purpose you described? For stationary use, the weight of cheap batteries shouldn't be an issue, and neither is the slow charging time with 24-hour cycle times.
Non-hydrogen fuel cells are interesting as a replacement for traditional conversion of fossil fuels to electricity, with better efficiency than Carnot. But natural gas / gasoline / etc. fuel cells haven't been forthcoming. Methanol fuel cells are becoming popular with forklifts, but ones that can directly use fossil fuels without conversion will offer a huge leap in efficiency, and significantly lower consumption of those fuels.
As for low-tech, while an IC engine may have dozens of moving parts they're generally easy to repair with hand tools; a fuel cell with its one part is essentially impossible to repair.
A fuel cell also practically never NEEDS to be repaired, because it isn't under the stresses of an ICE. You might as well complain that you can't repair your car battery...
For a solar panel to compete [...] you would need tremendously improved battery/capacitor technology. You would also need to replace the existing infrastructure for moving around liquid fuels.
Current batteries are more than good enough. A car full of Li-Ion batteries can get better range than a conventional ICE car, and charging is getting very fast now, so charging might be faster than your current stops to eat.
We have a replacement for the oil infrastructure, it's called the electrical grid, and it goes directly to almost everyone's homes, so we'll need far fewer electrical charging stations than we currently have of gas station, and they can just be electrical boxes in existing parking spaces at malls, airports, and other freeway-adjacent rest stops.
For instance, if you were a small organic farmer could you plant some of this stuff in the scrubby back 20 and then with a little bio-fuel setup in the barn make your own fuel?
That seems highly unlikely.
If this stuff (sugarcane) will grow, then some type of food crops will surely grow, too. You'll have a lot of money and effort invested in keeping it free of bugs, diseases and being overgrown by weeds.
Modern farmers generally irrigate their crops, and pumping all that water won't be cheap, and sugarcane is hardly drought-tolerant.
And finally, farmers generally have to rent heavy equipment to harvest their crops, and now they'll need special mechanical harvesters they may not be able to find, or will be expensive to rent.
plants are still just inefficient solar panels whose only advantage is that their energy output is chemical, not electrical, thereby minimizing transmission and storage energy loss.
Batteries are rather efficient at storing electricity, as is pumped-hydro for grid-scale needs. Grid transmission losses are in the single-digit percentages, which is better than you'd ever hope to get from loading-up liquid fuel on a tanker trunk. And finally, electric motors are nearly 100% efficient at converting electricity into momentum, where internal combustion engines get a measly 30% if we're being kind. And as you said, you must also factor in the inefficiency of the plants consuming water, arable soil, and space, when PV or solar-thermal would be far more efficient.
Electric vehicles are a superior option in every way. The only thing holding them back at this point is the price of batteries, and we've seen that those really are dropping pretty fast.
About every other smartphone OS maker who has gone the "thou shalt build thy apps using HTML5, not native code" has been burned by bad performance, even when they launched with high-end phones.
FirefoxOS has no magic bullet. Their javascript performance will be just as poor. They seem to be developing this only because they have more money coming in than they know what to do with, and smartphones are a buzzword.../. had a good story on javascript performance, specifically on phones, a month ago:
I guess all this means that they are aiming Firefox OS at the low end of the market, where performance matters less than being able to afford a smartphone.
Except you can get no-contract Android phones even cheaper than this, which obviously support native apps, java/dalvik apps, and HTML5 apps, even run under Firefox.
You might have MEANT that, but you sure didn't say so. Neither did the GP.
Calling it open source when you meant GPL/free software, and also calling it "Android" when you apparently meant Linux specifically, only served to completely confuse any point you were trying to make.
QNX is a microkernel. What can the QNX microkernel do that the Linux kernel behind Android can't?
You said it yourself; QNX is a microkernel, while Linux is not. Go look up all the benefits of microkernels, and you'll have your answer.
A few quickies: The security can be absolutely impervious to attackers (see OpenVMS winning in every hackathon). The system can be mind-bogglingly stable, even if the drivers are crap and crash all the time (see OpenVMS at the top of every uptime chart). The system can run reliably, even with horribly faulty hardware... QNX was notable for running fine with just a few KBytes of reliable memory (perhaps ROM) while the rest of the RAM could be flaky as hell. QNX also has real-time features built-in that Linux can't touch, though more and more RTOS code keeps getting bolted-on to the Linux kernel.
Android is often open source so once they finished porting they would have to share what they wrote with Samsung.
"Open Source" doesn't force you to share anything. The BSDs, X, Apache, etc., are all "open source".
You may have meant Android is GPL'd / Copyleft / Free Software, but that's absolutely NOT true, as basically only the Linux kernel is GPL'd, while the rest of Android is under freer licenses. The preferred license is the Apache 2.0 license (similar to MIT/X).
You can only piggyback your calls from an open wifi connection or one you have a password/login to use.
Yes, but presumably you have a valid password for use on wifi at your home, and hopefully your work as well. That should cover the OVERWHELMING majority of calls and data usage you make/receive, and is the amount of coverage Republic asks you to have before signing up.
Your access to WiFi APs when out shopping or whatever is neither here nor there, as you've still got full cellular service for all those instances, and Republic believes your time on wifi at home/work makes up for the times that you aren't.
A much bigger issue is their horrible phone selection (I would have signed-up if they offered a decent, inexpensive Android slider like the Transform Ultra which was down to $80 a while back), and problems with WiFi to cellular hand-off dropping your calls.
They have a special feature that I think is quite interesting--probably all of the carriers should allow this--you can connect to a WiFi and use that to make or receive calls--this is a good idea for bad reception areas and basements.
Not only CAN you, they EXPECT you to do that, and will send you a nasty letter if you don't. T-Mobile has the same feature on most smartphones, but they won't kick you for not using it. And that method has some issues... Republic says your call won't get dropped when you walk out of range of WiFi (if a cellular signal is available), but customer reports say the opposite is true.
It really isn't dramatically cheaper than other pre-paid options. Ting would work out just about as cheap if you're a light user most of the time, BoostMobile drops your bill after several months down to $40/mo for unlimited everything, which is small enough of a price difference not to matter to me. But...
Republic is an interesting option mainly because, while being so cheap, they still ALLOW YOU TO ROAM ONTO VERIZON, potentially giving you much better coverage than all other Sprint MVNOs (if anyone knows of another one, I'd like to hear about it).
I was hoping to watch them in good quality, not some blurry non-accelerated shit like VP8.
The quality of VP8 is as good as H.264. It isn't hardware accelerated, no, but modern CPUs are plenty fast enough. Hardware decoding will come in time... H.264 didn't have widespread hardware support out of the gate in 2005, either.
cannot affort to even buy a house unless they find £300,000, and where both people generally have to work just to pay for it.
Housing prices have risen in large part because people are demanding LARGER and nicer houses (and yards) than their parents had, and also doing far less of the repairs and maintenance themselves. There are TONS of cheap houses out there, which you and many others will summarily dismiss because it doesn't look good enough, or isn't in the right area, to give you the sufficient bragging rights you want.
In short, your unhappiness and difficulties are largely your own doing because of your unrealistic expectations.
Cutting brake lines actually involves slicing them just deeply enough that they're intact until high speed hard braking ruptures it. This is easier to disguise as "maintenance" than any electronic method, and much more deadly than anything described here... Their disabling of the brakes only worked at low speed and makes a tell-tale god awful noise.
Engine braking is not an option on a large number of vehicles, particularly the Prius in the demonstration... That just leaves the parking brake you'll also need to disable (would be true with any electronic tricks as well).
Stop me if I'm going too fast... All you've got to promote this obscene amount of work is: well, maybe they won't notice the out of place cell phone under the seat, tethered to the car's computer. That's a long-shot. I'd go for brake lines...
Or you could do a MINISCULE FRACTION as much work, and just cut the brake lines. Or replace your theoretical $30 Android trojan device with a stick of TNT.
You're not helping your case by coming up with ridiculous, irrational, paranoid fantasies, and making IT security folks look like nutjobs.
Good. Talk about the remote vulnerabilities all you want. Get THOSE fixed. Those would be the problem. This article however, is worthless, baseless nonsense.
And no, I don't feel obliged to go back and check every dupe for the past 4 years to try and find a link to some less awful information.
How did Ford and Toyota react? They publicly dismissed the research and thus far haven't committed to fixing any of the weaknesses that Miller and Valasek found. Ford described the hacks as "highly aggressive direct physical manipulation of one vehicle... which would not be a risk to customers," while Toyota said in its statement that their work wasn't hacking. Miller, who is a security engineer at Twitter, says he isn't confident the car-makers will do anything about the flaws. Percoco says the car-hacking research was a good example of finding important security flaws in consumer products.
If that's "a good example" I'd hate to see all the other ones. Ford and Toyota representatives were the only rational and reasonable voices, and absolutely correct that the "hacking" in this case, involved SITTING IN THE BACK SEAT AND PLUGGING IN TO THE CAR. What do we say around here about having physical access to someone else's computer?
Some idiot reporters like the NYTimes article threw-in the word "remote" to describe the attacks, when it clearly didn't belong. Though to be fair, later mentioned that, "The researchers said they did not address the question of the defenses the cars might have against remote access."
So this being the only actual referenced example in TFA, is a lot of baseless BS fear-mongering, and we are left without any reason to believe a problem actually exists.
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The nice thing about the plan is that, unlike active retransmitting satellites, there are no controls on it. A better design is the large mylar balloons also mentioned in TFA. What happened to those? I can think of many amateurs who would love to be able to bounce signals off of something like that for cheap, reliable international communications.
Think of the possibilities... Some have played with receiving TV signals from the other side of the planet via moon-bounce. A signal reflector so much closer would offer many more possibilities. It's an electromagnetic gateway to the other side of the planet. These days, it would probably get adapted to laser communications as well, while no current satellites have that option. Just as a test-bed for experiments like this which can't be performed economically any other way, it sounds like a great project to fund. Why haven't we even attempted any such thing, since active satellites became possible?
That's incredibly idiotic... You're proving you haven't the slightest conception of the subject you're acting like an expert on.
NOTHING happens in less than a decade. These solar plants are being built RIGHT NOW. Even if fusion was perfected TOMORROW, these solar plants would all still be built.
And I must also point out your claim of biofuel overtaking solar is similarly brain-damaged to an incredible degree. It's a bit like speculating about a snail overtaking a sports car. You clearly know absolutely nothing on the subject, and your obsession with biofuel is some kind of magical fantasy land you conjured up, and have no conception of the costs or limitations.
It is. You're just foolishly spouting more baseless nonsense.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2012/05/cheaper-hybrid-payback-time-goverment-website-/1
No, the EU dropped biodiesel flat because it was accelerating the deforestation of the rain forest for biofuel farmland.
And oil certainly isn't inexpensive. Natural gas has gotten cheaper, but nearly all biofuels were never intended as a replacement for that... always just oil.
Observational bias. The BLM had to put a moratorium on the horde of solar installation requests in California, because they couldn't handle the environmental reviews of all them quickly enough.
The projection is that renewables will make up at least 1/3rd of all electrical power generation in CA by 2020, and the majority of that will be from solar.
Plug-in hybrids seem to make profound economic sense right now. Further up the scale, the Chevy Volt is a practical option in the luxury category.
Most of the all-electric vehicles are more economical over their lifetime than conventional vehicles (which is the definition of making economic sense), if you can live within their limitations.
But as I said in the first place... The technology is just about there, and prices are falling quickly. We just need to wait a little bit longer. Just plot the line from the EV1 to the Leaf, and project the date that electric vehicles will be as cheap upfront as conventional cars. Biofuels, OTOH, won't ever have those kinds of economies of scale driving down prices.
Only when you're completely and totally disregarding the manifold losses incurred with your ridiculous biofuel scheme in the same breath. The only possible place biofuels ever made sense was in vehicles, since batteries were expensive, heavy and not sufficiently capable, but even there, it never really worked out because the inefficiency was so horrendous, and the costs were always higher, and more polluting.
Now that batteries are capable enough and starting to take over, biofuels have been nearly forgotten by everyone with two neurons to rub together, and for good reason.
Windows servers undoubtedly have the advantage of being able to turn up a service almost on accident, and have it minimally work. Actual administration and maintenance of them, though, is a Kafka-esque nightmare. I feel bad for Exhange admins. I've heard many horror stories of Windows support telling Admins there's no fix, no fallback, and they'll have to reinstall the entire server recreate datastores, and then they take a few months manually importing All user emails.
Linux/Unix servers take more knowledge and effort to get up and running in the first place, but then are much more stable and deterministic, handle higher load, need less babysitting, and are easier and more consistent to keep updated and make changes to, knowing you're never going to have unrelated services break, or mysterious slowdowns and service unavailability.
There's no doubt what comes out ahead in the end... Linux adminsa can mantain many times more servers than Windows admins. Consider that those Windows admins won't be free, and you'll be cash positive by hiring Linux admins in a very short time. I've worked for some of the most penny-pinching tight-wad companies around, and they emphasize Linux heavily (including on the desktops) paying their Linux admins more than even most management, and yet they heavily prefer Linuxx, and wouldn't dream ofusing Windows for anything important.
Enormous line losses?!? Last I checked, grid losses average 7%. Your solar site and pumped-hydro site presumably aren't overloading their lines.
And 15% loss for power storage is a great, minuscule loss.
WTH are you talking about? Even after you count all the energy lost to fertilizing, planting, managing, and harvesting that land, then you suffer MASSIVE losses converting it into a biofuel, and then you've got huge energy costs to ship it, and finally you're presumably going to burn it in a power plant, which means you might get 55% conversion efficiency out of it. That's on top of the plants being an order of magnitude less efficient at converting solar power into energy in the first place.
There's no comparison, and I don't see how you can twist the logic around to even claim biofuel isn't vastly worse.
They could, actually... Batteries and solar panels. Weight is a non-issue for large ships, and they have a lot of space available. They probably won't in the near future, but the technology is getting there in a big hurry.
No they can't, but long-distance transport is more efficient via freight trains, and they can be powered by overhead electric lines quite well. Short-haul trucks that are battery powered already exist. As do forklifts, and lots of other heavy machinery. And even if tractor trailers are the hold-out, converting everything else to solar/battery power will dramatically drop the price of fossil fuels.
No, but you wouldn't use them for that. For grid-level purposes, you'd use pumped hydro storage. It's already installed in mind-boggling capacities. Besides, "overnight" in the US is off-peak time, where far less power capacity is needed. If we have enough solar installed to support daytime loads, we'd just basically shut off hydro during the day, and go full hydro at night (along with whatever wind capacity is available), and not sweat energy storage.
Why do you want fuel cells, when batteries are more efficient at the purpose you described? For stationary use, the weight of cheap batteries shouldn't be an issue, and neither is the slow charging time with 24-hour cycle times.
Non-hydrogen fuel cells are interesting as a replacement for traditional conversion of fossil fuels to electricity, with better efficiency than Carnot. But natural gas / gasoline / etc. fuel cells haven't been forthcoming. Methanol fuel cells are becoming popular with forklifts, but ones that can directly use fossil fuels without conversion will offer a huge leap in efficiency, and significantly lower consumption of those fuels.
A fuel cell also practically never NEEDS to be repaired, because it isn't under the stresses of an ICE. You might as well complain that you can't repair your car battery...
Current batteries are more than good enough. A car full of Li-Ion batteries can get better range than a conventional ICE car, and charging is getting very fast now, so charging might be faster than your current stops to eat.
We have a replacement for the oil infrastructure, it's called the electrical grid, and it goes directly to almost everyone's homes, so we'll need far fewer electrical charging stations than we currently have of gas station, and they can just be electrical boxes in existing parking spaces at malls, airports, and other freeway-adjacent rest stops.
That seems highly unlikely.
If this stuff (sugarcane) will grow, then some type of food crops will surely grow, too. You'll have a lot of money and effort invested in keeping it free of bugs, diseases and being overgrown by weeds.
Modern farmers generally irrigate their crops, and pumping all that water won't be cheap, and sugarcane is hardly drought-tolerant.
And finally, farmers generally have to rent heavy equipment to harvest their crops, and now they'll need special mechanical harvesters they may not be able to find, or will be expensive to rent.
Batteries are rather efficient at storing electricity, as is pumped-hydro for grid-scale needs. Grid transmission losses are in the single-digit percentages, which is better than you'd ever hope to get from loading-up liquid fuel on a tanker trunk. And finally, electric motors are nearly 100% efficient at converting electricity into momentum, where internal combustion engines get a measly 30% if we're being kind. And as you said, you must also factor in the inefficiency of the plants consuming water, arable soil, and space, when PV or solar-thermal would be far more efficient.
Electric vehicles are a superior option in every way. The only thing holding them back at this point is the price of batteries, and we've seen that those really are dropping pretty fast.
FirefoxOS has no magic bullet. Their javascript performance will be just as poor. They seem to be developing this only because they have more money coming in than they know what to do with, and smartphones are a buzzword... /. had a good story on javascript performance, specifically on phones, a month ago:
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/13/07/14/2348226/an-interesting-look-at-the-performance-of-javascript-on-mobile-devices
Except you can get no-contract Android phones even cheaper than this, which obviously support native apps, java/dalvik apps, and HTML5 apps, even run under Firefox.
You might have MEANT that, but you sure didn't say so. Neither did the GP.
Calling it open source when you meant GPL/free software, and also calling it "Android" when you apparently meant Linux specifically, only served to completely confuse any point you were trying to make.
You said it yourself; QNX is a microkernel, while Linux is not. Go look up all the benefits of microkernels, and you'll have your answer.
A few quickies: The security can be absolutely impervious to attackers (see OpenVMS winning in every hackathon). The system can be mind-bogglingly stable, even if the drivers are crap and crash all the time (see OpenVMS at the top of every uptime chart). The system can run reliably, even with horribly faulty hardware... QNX was notable for running fine with just a few KBytes of reliable memory (perhaps ROM) while the rest of the RAM could be flaky as hell. QNX also has real-time features built-in that Linux can't touch, though more and more RTOS code keeps getting bolted-on to the Linux kernel.
"Open Source" doesn't force you to share anything. The BSDs, X, Apache, etc., are all "open source".
You may have meant Android is GPL'd / Copyleft / Free Software, but that's absolutely NOT true, as basically only the Linux kernel is GPL'd, while the rest of Android is under freer licenses. The preferred license is the Apache 2.0 license (similar to MIT/X).
Yes, but presumably you have a valid password for use on wifi at your home, and hopefully your work as well. That should cover the OVERWHELMING majority of calls and data usage you make/receive, and is the amount of coverage Republic asks you to have before signing up.
Your access to WiFi APs when out shopping or whatever is neither here nor there, as you've still got full cellular service for all those instances, and Republic believes your time on wifi at home/work makes up for the times that you aren't.
A much bigger issue is their horrible phone selection (I would have signed-up if they offered a decent, inexpensive Android slider like the Transform Ultra which was down to $80 a while back), and problems with WiFi to cellular hand-off dropping your calls.
Not only CAN you, they EXPECT you to do that, and will send you a nasty letter if you don't. T-Mobile has the same feature on most smartphones, but they won't kick you for not using it. And that method has some issues... Republic says your call won't get dropped when you walk out of range of WiFi (if a cellular signal is available), but customer reports say the opposite is true.
It really isn't dramatically cheaper than other pre-paid options. Ting would work out just about as cheap if you're a light user most of the time, BoostMobile drops your bill after several months down to $40/mo for unlimited everything, which is small enough of a price difference not to matter to me. But...
Republic is an interesting option mainly because, while being so cheap, they still ALLOW YOU TO ROAM ONTO VERIZON, potentially giving you much better coverage than all other Sprint MVNOs (if anyone knows of another one, I'd like to hear about it).
But T-Mobile also has an (individual-only) $30/mo (5GB/100min) plan, which is obviously cheaper than your family plan.
And even if T-Mobile really was an exception, being the SMALLEST of the four major cell carriers, it really wouldn't negate the claim.
The quality of VP8 is as good as H.264. It isn't hardware accelerated, no, but modern CPUs are plenty fast enough. Hardware decoding will come in time... H.264 didn't have widespread hardware support out of the gate in 2005, either.
Housing prices have risen in large part because people are demanding LARGER and nicer houses (and yards) than their parents had, and also doing far less of the repairs and maintenance themselves. There are TONS of cheap houses out there, which you and many others will summarily dismiss because it doesn't look good enough, or isn't in the right area, to give you the sufficient bragging rights you want.
In short, your unhappiness and difficulties are largely your own doing because of your unrealistic expectations.
Cutting brake lines actually involves slicing them just deeply enough that they're intact until high speed hard braking ruptures it. This is easier to disguise as "maintenance" than any electronic method, and much more deadly than anything described here... Their disabling of the brakes only worked at low speed and makes a tell-tale god awful noise.
Engine braking is not an option on a large number of vehicles, particularly the Prius in the demonstration... That just leaves the parking brake you'll also need to disable (would be true with any electronic tricks as well).
Stop me if I'm going too fast... All you've got to promote this obscene amount of work is: well, maybe they won't notice the out of place cell phone under the seat, tethered to the car's computer. That's a long-shot. I'd go for brake lines...
Or you could do a MINISCULE FRACTION as much work, and just cut the brake lines. Or replace your theoretical $30 Android trojan device with a stick of TNT.
You're not helping your case by coming up with ridiculous, irrational, paranoid fantasies, and making IT security folks look like nutjobs.
Good. Talk about the remote vulnerabilities all you want. Get THOSE fixed. Those would be the problem. This article however, is worthless, baseless nonsense.
And no, I don't feel obliged to go back and check every dupe for the past 4 years to try and find a link to some less awful information.
If that's "a good example" I'd hate to see all the other ones. Ford and Toyota representatives were the only rational and reasonable voices, and absolutely correct that the "hacking" in this case, involved SITTING IN THE BACK SEAT AND PLUGGING IN TO THE CAR. What do we say around here about having physical access to someone else's computer?
Some idiot reporters like the NYTimes article threw-in the word "remote" to describe the attacks, when it clearly didn't belong. Though to be fair, later mentioned that, "The researchers said they did not address the question of the defenses the cars might have against remote access."
So this being the only actual referenced example in TFA, is a lot of baseless BS fear-mongering, and we are left without any reason to believe a problem actually exists.