At the risk of being modded down furiously, I would like to express my opinion on this:
1) Cartoons are seldom sexy
2) The Simpsons jumped the shark years ago. Since then it has been repeatedly jumping the shark, again and again, once every day at least in the vain hope that somebody notices that it has jumped the shark. So far very few people have.
3) Cross-promoting press release opportunities like this bore me to tears. I can understand Slashdot covering this, but I have seen this "news" in 'serious' newspapers. FFS.
That is all.
Every now and then a 'designer' unveils a jacket or whatever with some kind of technology built into it (for the past ten years at least), and says that its 'new' and 'amazing' or whatever, and that its going to change the world.
IT WON'T. People DON'T WANT that stuff built-in to their clothing. It's uneconomic to build that stuff in to clothing. Not only do you have to manufacture the device(s) in question; you have to build them in to garments of differing styles, colours, sizes etc etc, and that utterly destroys any economies of scale.
Anyway, what happens when you need to wash this jacket? What about if you want to use the tech on a warm day? What if you want to wear a different jacket that day?
I realize the crash-test setup and standards continually change, but is there any sort of archive of data tables, or graphs, or something of that sort, showing improvement over time? Like, can I see what the difference in forces on the driver or likelihood of serious injury would be for a 1985 Civic vs. a 2005 Civic going 40 mph into a barrier?
Top Gear tries to stay away from useful facts and info as much as possible.
And the idea of Top Gear having TWO cars that cost below $40,000 on the screen at the same is pretty far fetched.
Indeed, sir.
The last series (in the UK at least) I feel was better than last year's in that respect, I think the cheapest car they had on the show last year was a BMW M3, and that was as an example of an 'ordinary' car!
Fifth Gear, despite its problems, is carrying the baton for 'everyman' motoring.
/patiently wates for some idiot to ignore the fact that road deaths are consistently going down in absolute terms, and in per-vehicle-mile terms; and to claim that dangerous cars/roads are 'safer', that everyone overcompansates for advances in safety, and that cars should have a spike on the steering wheel.
I thought that crushed wasps and hornets, for example, give off a smell that causes their brothers (wait- actually sisters, right?) to go into attack mode.
- AJ
And all this time I kept a dead wasp on the gear lever surround in my car as a 'warning' to other wasps not to come in...
The problem here is capitalism doesn't care -- only protecting high value targets would be the sensible precaution, but why only do that when can make millions, even billions, for a few years until the resistance is developed?
And if the technology was only used to protect 'high value targets', you would probably use that fact as 'evidence' that "capitalism doesn't care".
Sell millions of units at $1 each and people scream "the corporations are trying to get rich by flooding the world with their crap!". Sell a few hundred for $100 each and they scream "they don't care about the poor, the greedy bastards!". Universal blame.
Of course, that disregards the fact that sprinkling Latin into English sentences, whether grammatically correct or not, makes you a tosser or a lawyer.
*Mails a check to pay his redundancy abuse fine
Strange, I always thought that "tossers" were harmless yet annoying folk. I would have thought that lawyers (often) deserve calling "wankers" at the least, or preferably "arseholes".
I thought the IPhone invented cellphones, batteries, touchscreens, mobile internet access, the internet, downloadable applications, radio communication at all,..... note: I intentionally capitalised the 'I' in 'IPhone', just to piss off the sort of people who would be pissed off by that.
moderated by some group of people that are not associated with either the defendant or his lawyers, and not associated with the district attorney & his council,
What, you mean like some kind of "jury"?
Do you intend that this "jury" write up a document, to be read by the jury? Maybe the original jury can than write a document to be read by yet another jury- infinite jury recursion!
It's not all that surprising. British companies used to be advised not to talk business on the plane to France, because the French intelligence agencies were placing bugs in the headrests and giving sensitive information to French companies.
And I'm quite sure that MI5 (or whoever) did/do spy on non-British companies to give British ones an advantage (or at least I hope so:P)
This is one of those examples of "war morality"; whereby "us doing X to them" is fine, but "them doing X to us" is completly unacceptable and a sign of cowardice and various other undesireable traits.
Now they know that we weigh them it wouldn't be that hard to cut the equivalent weight. There are plenty of internal struts that can be drilled, etc to make up for a lightweight hardware device.
If they wanted to be really clever, they could desolder selected chips and replace them with chips having 'additional functionality', so to speak.
Do you think it would go undetected for long if thousands of cellphones and laptops made in China, Korea or wherever had a hardware sneak-chip installed?
For the sake of argument, yes. It would be entirely feasible for EVERY unit of a certain (or any) product to have a 'sneak chip' installed, it could very easily be 'baked in' to the IC designs used.
I believe (meaning I don't have a link to evidence:( ) that an attack has been demonstrated using this exact method, whereby a certain bit pattern on a certain bus triggered malicious behaviour.
There was also a real case in the UK whereby chip-and-pin credit card readers (used in retailer's POS setup) had a 'sneak chip' built in at the factory by unscrupulous agents. (I am aware that this both supports the 'it could happen' and the 'it would be detected quickly' arguments.)
Just to be clear, I'm not expressing any Anti or Pro Chinese sentiment here, but it seems somewhat ironic to be concerned about what "The Chinese" might do to compromise one's hardware, when that same hardware was designed and manufactured by "The Chinese" in the first place!
how much does data weigh? I'm sure the 1's are heavier than the 0's....
I'd have thought the 0's would be heavier, them being all fat-looking and the 1's all skinny..
Seriously though, I think that the 'weighing' scheme is intended to detect the addition of malicious hardware (however likely or not this may be).
Our friends in government are pushing this 'GPS-tracking-everywhere-to-apply-tax' idea in the UK as well, under the name of 'Road Pricing'. Here we already have very high petrol (gas, for you) taxes, equivalent to a rate of 300% (see breakdown here: http://blog.fridaynightsmoke.co.uk/2009/08/30/fuel-duty-rise-the-cost-of-motoring/ ).
Yes, they are proposing these charges IN ADDITION to fuel tax. Yes, the implementation of such a system would be so absurdly expensive that to 'raise' any money would require motorist's charges to be astronomical (they were talking about charges of up to £1.34/mile ($2.20/mile), ON TOP of fuel and other car running costs).
Also please remember the UK government's gung-ho attitude to mass surveillance.
When anybody proposes such a scheme, don't trust them as far as you could throw them.
So that means all of those stinky Europeans are doing it right? I just spent a month working in Brussels, and sometimes on the train or metro you'd get a whiff of somebody taking this news as a religious credo.
Occasional people with BO? On public transport, of all places?!?
THIS WOULD NEVER HAPPEN IN AMERICA!
Slashdot Mirror
At the risk of being modded down furiously, I would like to express my opinion on this:
1) Cartoons are seldom sexy
2) The Simpsons jumped the shark years ago. Since then it has been repeatedly jumping the shark, again and again, once every day at least in the vain hope that somebody notices that it has jumped the shark. So far very few people have.
3) Cross-promoting press release opportunities like this bore me to tears. I can understand Slashdot covering this, but I have seen this "news" in 'serious' newspapers. FFS.
That is all.
Every now and then a 'designer' unveils a jacket or whatever with some kind of technology built into it (for the past ten years at least), and says that its 'new' and 'amazing' or whatever, and that its going to change the world.
IT WON'T. People DON'T WANT that stuff built-in to their clothing. It's uneconomic to build that stuff in to clothing. Not only do you have to manufacture the device(s) in question; you have to build them in to garments of differing styles, colours, sizes etc etc, and that utterly destroys any economies of scale.
Anyway, what happens when you need to wash this jacket? What about if you want to use the tech on a warm day? What if you want to wear a different jacket that day?
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html
Sir;
reading that took up my entire afternoon. Thank you.
Is *anybody* here under the illusion that watching Top Gear will help them choose their next car? Sheesh.
Hey, I bought a Focus ST on Top Gear's (2005) recommendation.
It USED to be a 'useful' program, but has since became almost cartoonish.
I realize the crash-test setup and standards continually change, but is there any sort of archive of data tables, or graphs, or something of that sort, showing improvement over time? Like, can I see what the difference in forces on the driver or likelihood of serious injury would be for a 1985 Civic vs. a 2005 Civic going 40 mph into a barrier?
There are details of European crash tests at http://www.euroncap.com/
As al 'almost' example of what you are looking for, please compare the results for a Ford Escort (this model introduced 1990) http://www.euroncap.com/tests/ford_escort_1999/33.aspx vs a current model Ford Focus (introduced 2004) http://www.euroncap.com/tests/ford_focus_2004/204.aspx
Top Gear tries to stay away from useful facts and info as much as possible.
And the idea of Top Gear having TWO cars that cost below $40,000 on the screen at the same is pretty far fetched.
Indeed, sir.
The last series (in the UK at least) I feel was better than last year's in that respect, I think the cheapest car they had on the show last year was a BMW M3, and that was as an example of an 'ordinary' car!
Fifth Gear, despite its problems, is carrying the baton for 'everyman' motoring.
/patiently wates for some idiot to ignore the fact that road deaths are consistently going down in absolute terms, and in per-vehicle-mile terms; and to claim that dangerous cars/roads are 'safer', that everyone overcompansates for advances in safety, and that cars should have a spike on the steering wheel.
"I will crush you!" says man hiding behind anonymity on Internet. More news at 11.
On an interesting question, how many police officers play Grand Theft Auto?
Hey, they could always be playing the 'police missions'!
Seriously - what a muffin.... Wonder how his addiction will do, in jail...
You are sheriff John Bunnell and I claim my five pounds ;)
I thought that crushed wasps and hornets, for example, give off a smell that causes their brothers (wait- actually sisters, right?) to go into attack mode.
- AJ
And all this time I kept a dead wasp on the gear lever surround in my car as a 'warning' to other wasps not to come in...
The problem here is capitalism doesn't care -- only protecting high value targets would be the sensible precaution, but why only do that when can make millions, even billions, for a few years until the resistance is developed?
And if the technology was only used to protect 'high value targets', you would probably use that fact as 'evidence' that "capitalism doesn't care".
Sell millions of units at $1 each and people scream "the corporations are trying to get rich by flooding the world with their crap!". Sell a few hundred for $100 each and they scream "they don't care about the poor, the greedy bastards!". Universal blame.
Of course, that disregards the fact that sprinkling Latin into English sentences, whether grammatically correct or not, makes you a tosser or a lawyer.
*Mails a check to pay his redundancy abuse fine
Strange, I always thought that "tossers" were harmless yet annoying folk. I would have thought that lawyers (often) deserve calling "wankers" at the least, or preferably "arseholes".
No, I didn't.
I meant "radio communication at all" as in "the very concept of using radio waves to communicate".
I thought the IPhone invented cellphones, batteries, touchscreens, mobile internet access, the internet, downloadable applications, radio communication at all, .....
note: I intentionally capitalised the 'I' in 'IPhone', just to piss off the sort of people who would be pissed off by that.
moderated by some group of people that are not associated with either the defendant or his lawyers, and not associated with the district attorney & his council,
What, you mean like some kind of "jury"?
Do you intend that this "jury" write up a document, to be read by the jury? Maybe the original jury can than write a document to be read by yet another jury- infinite jury recursion!
saying "now she sees plenty of the police- IN JAIL!"
Or just add the additional features at the factory and skip the desoldering altogether.
Indeed, sir.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1370863&cid=29440227
It's not all that surprising. British companies used to be advised not to talk business on the plane to France, because the French intelligence agencies were placing bugs in the headrests and giving sensitive information to French companies.
And I'm quite sure that MI5 (or whoever) did/do spy on non-British companies to give British ones an advantage (or at least I hope so :P)
This is one of those examples of "war morality"; whereby "us doing X to them" is fine, but "them doing X to us" is completly unacceptable and a sign of cowardice and various other undesireable traits.
Now they know that we weigh them it wouldn't be that hard to cut the equivalent weight. There are plenty of internal struts that can be drilled, etc to make up for a lightweight hardware device.
If they wanted to be really clever, they could desolder selected chips and replace them with chips having 'additional functionality', so to speak.
Do you think it would go undetected for long if thousands of cellphones and laptops made in China, Korea or wherever had a hardware sneak-chip installed?
For the sake of argument, yes. It would be entirely feasible for EVERY unit of a certain (or any) product to have a 'sneak chip' installed, it could very easily be 'baked in' to the IC designs used. :( ) that an attack has been demonstrated using this exact method, whereby a certain bit pattern on a certain bus triggered malicious behaviour.
I believe (meaning I don't have a link to evidence
There was also a real case in the UK whereby chip-and-pin credit card readers (used in retailer's POS setup) had a 'sneak chip' built in at the factory by unscrupulous agents. (I am aware that this both supports the 'it could happen' and the 'it would be detected quickly' arguments.)
Just to be clear, I'm not expressing any Anti or Pro Chinese sentiment here, but it seems somewhat ironic to be concerned about what "The Chinese" might do to compromise one's hardware, when that same hardware was designed and manufactured by "The Chinese" in the first place!
how much does data weigh? I'm sure the 1's are heavier than the 0's....
I'd have thought the 0's would be heavier, them being all fat-looking and the 1's all skinny..
Seriously though, I think that the 'weighing' scheme is intended to detect the addition of malicious hardware (however likely or not this may be).
I'm sure glad that the laptops and cellphones in question weren't MADE in China in the first place...
Oh, wait..
Our friends in government are pushing this 'GPS-tracking-everywhere-to-apply-tax' idea in the UK as well, under the name of 'Road Pricing'. Here we already have very high petrol (gas, for you) taxes, equivalent to a rate of 300% (see breakdown here: http://blog.fridaynightsmoke.co.uk/2009/08/30/fuel-duty-rise-the-cost-of-motoring/ ).
Yes, they are proposing these charges IN ADDITION to fuel tax. Yes, the implementation of such a system would be so absurdly expensive that to 'raise' any money would require motorist's charges to be astronomical (they were talking about charges of up to £1.34/mile ($2.20/mile), ON TOP of fuel and other car running costs).
Also please remember the UK government's gung-ho attitude to mass surveillance.
When anybody proposes such a scheme, don't trust them as far as you could throw them.
So that means all of those stinky Europeans are doing it right? I just spent a month working in Brussels, and sometimes on the train or metro you'd get a whiff of somebody taking this news as a religious credo.
Occasional people with BO? On public transport, of all places?!?
THIS WOULD NEVER HAPPEN IN AMERICA!