Maybe if American women weren't so obese and/or afflicted with princess mentalities, then American men wouldn't care much about having a sexbot. I'd bet good money almost all the demand for these things is coming from American men.
Just look at the statistics for how many Americans now are single (either separated/divorced or never married at all), it's going through the roof. There just aren't a whole lot of quality women out there any more. Part of this can probably also be blamed on our government and its policies which have created an obesity epidemic (which hits women harder than men, because women have more body fat naturally and lower metabolisms, so they have a harder time staying thin), and of course corporations which (because of profits and also government policies) create shit food that makes people fat. They don't have this kind of obesity problem in Europe.
You've got to be kidding. MS's mobile phone marketshare is crap because their phones are ugly and no one likes the crappy UI. They've been trying to push those phones in phone stores for years, and also at the Microsoft stores, but no one wants them.
I've got a pretty nice HP printer which has proven to be very reliable. It's a LaserJet 2300d. Of course, it's over 10 years old now.... I got it on Ebay for $100 years ago and the 3rd-party toner cartridges are pretty cheap.
I'm actually typing this on a brand-new HP ProBook laptop, but it's my employer's, not mine. This thing sucks ass; it has the absolutely worst keyboard layout I've ever used on a laptop. However, to be fair, it seems that most laptops have adopted these shitty flat keys and terrible layouts. But this one is supposed to be a business model, competing with the Thinkpads and Latitudes, but it's crap compared to those two. (Then again, I also have a new ultra-small Latitude for work, and that thing sucks too, with an awful keyboard. But my Dell Precision 6800 laptop (another work computer, yes I have 3) has a nice keyboard.)
Many in the GOP today are for drug legalization, and gay marriage (positions too far to the left for any DEMOCRAT to endorse in 1980).
This is total BS. Just look at who GOP voters are voting for: religious nuts who scream constantly about gay marriage, and who support people who refuse to obey the law in regards to it.
The GOP of George W Bush (from a family of modern Whigs who, like the Romney family worked very hard to prevent Reagan from getting elected) grew entitlements more than many Democrats have done (remember his prescription drug program?)
Yes, and who elected W? That's right, GOP voters.
So while you may have a point about the modern GOP resembling the Whigs a lot, it's not some kind of conspiracy, and it's not like GOP voters don't agree with them; the GOP voters elected these people willingly. There have been other candidates out there, but the GOP voters are mostly religious freaks who care more about gay marriage than almost anything else, and will elect anyone who panders to their fundie values.
The GOP of today is far less socially conservative, far less religious, far less defense-hawkish, and far less economically-conservative than it has ever been since its founding.
Total bullshit. Proof: the current GOP politicians and presidential candidates (Trump excluded, maybe; his followers don't seem to be too religious or care much about the gay marriage issue).
Face it, the party of Barry Goldwater is gone, and has been replaced by the party of Ted Cruz and his Dominionist dad Rafael. Goldwater himself worried about what would happen to his party if the religious nuts got in there.
On top of all that, look what happens when a kid does show an interest in STEM: he gets arrested and accused of terrorism! The other kids (who aren't Muslim) are going to see this and avoid playing with electronics too. It's no wonder there's no more EE jobs in this country; they've all gone to Asia.
Well this is what happens when we hire from the bottom of the barrel to teach our kids in public schools.
Even worse, this is in Texas, so the bottom of the barrel there is close to the bottom of the barrel of the entire US. (Only a few places like Mississippi are arguably worse, though these days I'm really starting to wonder if MS and AL have an unfairly-earned reputation compared to TX; I'm constantly hearing about shit like this in TX, but I really haven't heard about a lot of bad stuff in MS and AL in the last decade or two. Maybe MS and AL have improved a lot.)
Oh please. According to Wikipedia, they had them back in 1899 in NYC and Chicago. That isn't very long after motor vehicles became generally available to the public.
Sanders is too old? That's the best you can come up with?
He's not *that* old; McCain was as old. And Sanders seems to be in good health. I'm sure he can handle 4 years before he croaks. I'd rather take my chances with him rather than any of these other clowns (including corrupt Hillary).
The $10K window job costs that much because you need to pay these scammers lots of money in profit for going door-to-door and suckering people for something that'd cost a fraction as much from a normal window business or Home Depot.
You can also do the job yourself; it isn't that hard, and the windows themselves are actually pretty cheap.
But yeah, don't do an upgrade if it isn't going to pay for itself in a reasonable amount of time. And be suspicious of those claims about how much reduction in heating and cooling costs you'll realize; those claims are usually very inflated.
But if you're building a new house, or installing a new window anyway, you might as well get triple-pane windows.
Suppose you're driving on one of those roads, and find that an accident has blocked the road in front of you, leaving just enough room for you to stop.
Yep, this just happened to me last week on one of these roads. There was a *huge* accident with a bunch of emergency vehicles blocking the road. I had to slow down rather quickly.
Do you, as a human driver, then have any options other than preparing for impact? This situation looks to me like one where there is no satisfactory answer, and therefore not a reason to fault automatic driving.
Well, there's a few things you can do: if someone looks like they're going to run into you while you're waiting for the accident to clear, you can pull into the other lane, or maybe the ditch if that's a better risk than getting rear-ended. You can also (when no one's coming) try backing up, pulling into a driveway, turning around, and leaving (which is what I did; shortly after I did this a bunch more cars came speeding around the turns towards the accident).
Maybe it would stirr up a little competition and we could have better systems and interfaces (I have the Dodge uconnect 4.3, and boy is this interface fucked up and hard to use. 4 clicks on a touch screen to send heat to the feets instead of the face? Who tought of that????)
Why'd you buy it then? My new Mazda3 is loaded with tech features and an infotainment system, and it still has a fully separate HVAC system (albeit a dual-zone automatic one), so changing that setting is a simple dedicated button. Integrating HVAC with infotainment is just a cost-cutting move; if my Mazda, which is definitely not aimed at the luxury segment, can afford to have separate HVAC controls, any car can.
Modularity sounds nice, but no one wants their dashboard to look like a military aircraft cockpit with drab square and rectangular parts bolted in with visible fasteners. They tried modularity a while back with the "DIN" sized car stereos, and they got super-tiny stereos with teeny-tiny little buttons, because they stupidly based the standard on the previous sorta-standard, which was the crappy old dual-knob car radios of the 60s-70s. When you only have two knobs, one for volume and one to adjust the frequency on an analog scale, you don't need a lot of space, but then they were trying to stick CD players and lots of controls into that same tiny amount of space, and it was terrible. This is the problem with standards like that; you get stuck with some crappy standard because everyone else uses it you have no room to improve. That's why no one uses DIN any more; it sucked and they finally got tired of designing dashes around it and not being able to make them better.
What we really need is open source code for these systems; then enthusiasts or small companies will be able to make alternative or updated versions, much like DD-WRT and OpenWRT have done for WiFi routers. And if they also published some hardware specs, there's probably be a whole new industry of companies making both hardware and software upgrades for these cars. We already have this to an extent: my wife's mid-2000s Volvo for instance has a USB/MP3 add-on system available from a European company named GROM, but because the system's interface specs are secret, it's reverse-engineered and basically a hack (it tries to make MP3s look like CD tracks), and really doesn't work that well from what I've read.
Because a panel of people who know how to drive cars and who have basic knowledge about how cars work isn't going to help much with computer security. In fact, even a panel of computer security experts isn't going to help any: how are they going to evaluate the system, unless they can find a bunch of serious hackers (like the guys who hacked into the Jeep and drove it remotely)? Most of these systems are closed-source and proprietary, so you can't just poke around in there to see if it was written correctly or not. It's not like a car engine, where you can easily take it out, take it apart, and see how it was designed and put together. On top of all this, even if they did give out access to the source code to "computer security experts", that probably wouldn't help either, because these "experts" would probably be a bunch of morons who want to install McAfee or something, and would have no clue about how embedded systems should be architected for security and reliability. A bunch of avionics engineers would probably be a good start, but even here, security hasn't been much of a focus or a concern because they haven't had to worry about this stuff before, only making the software provably correct to avoid bugs causing any kind of problems in-flight. Seriously, the number of people on the entire planet who would be qualified to really evaluate this is very, very, very small.
The judge who invalidated the gag order, Victor Marrero, is the same judge that struck down a portion of the revised USA PATRIOT Act in 2007, forcing investigators to go through the courts to obtain approval before ordering ISPs to give up information on customers, instead of just sending them a National Security Letter.
Uh-oh, it's one of those activist judges again!! How dare a judge stand up for our rights!
Well planes are "elevated" and don't have any track at all, but we don't have any problem jumping in those on a routine basis. At least SkyTran tracks are only 20-30 feet or so above the ground, not 30,000, and it's not likely the track is going to fall down. At worse, if there's a problem, you'd have to sit there for a while until maintenance crews come get you; that's no worse than present-day trains (you're not normally allowed to just get out of an Amtrak if it stops on the tracks due to a maintenance problem).
Just need consumer reports to start ranking reviewed cars on their information security
How the hell is Consumer Reports going to rank cars based on this stuff? It's not like they have a panel of computer security experts on hand. Their reviews are based on feedback from their customers, which gives them reliability info. No one knows that a vehicle is insecure until suddenly some hacker figures out how to take it over remotely.
Entertainment system has a network connection with the life-safety network without a one-way transfer? D. And a connection to Bluetooth or the Internet? F.
You can't have a hands-free phone and dialing system built into the car without Bluetooth. People want these services, and they're useful services to have. If you want to drive around some 30-year-old piece of shit, go ahead, but modern car buyers (the people who actually buy new cars and keep these companies in business) aren't like you, they want these features.
McAfee makes the worst software on the planet. I'm not kidding or exaggerating: Mr. John McAfee, founder of the eponymous company, says so himself. If you can't believe him, then why would you believe someone else (including another company that's so stupid they continue to hang onto the name of the founder who now calls their products garbage)?
This ploy seems pretty lame to me really. Intel may be have been trying to push into the automotive market, but I doubt they've made much progress. The CPUs used in cars don't come from Intel, they come from other places; they're usually either some kind of ARM chip or maybe some kind of POWER chip from Freescale. Intel is a joke in the embedded market; they don't make any kind of microcontrollers at all. Wake me when they start making chips with 100-200 GPIOs, ADCs, etc.
And how McAfee shitware would have any relevance in automotive products, I have no idea. The security automotive systems need has to be designed in, as these are all small, low-power microcontroller-based systems, most of them running bare-metal; they don't need a stupid virus scanner.
This move of their seems like Microsoft suddenly trying to create some industry group (which is really just them and a couple of lackeys) and positioning themselves as "leaders" in the FOSS industry.
The best place to start in making cars more secure is to stop connecting them to the Internet or cellular networks. It makes them vulnerable to remote exploits and increases the cost of the car.
It also increases safety by allowing drivers to talk on the phone hands-free using a built-in Bluetooth system. On my car, I press a button on the steering wheel, speak "call John Smith", it finds someone with that name in my phone's contacts, and calls him, all without my hands leaving the wheel or my eyes leaving the road. People are going to talk on the phone in their cars whether you like it or not, so it might as well be made safe. (Plus, on a long, boring highway trip, why not?)
But now we have some jurisdictions (EU I think is one) mandating cellular connections in new cars so they can support "emergency features" (presumably stuff so when the car is involved in a serious crash, the car can notify emergency services automatically in case the occupants are pinned down or unconscious and cant make an emergency call themselves)
Again, what's the problem with that? Would you rather just sit there and die because you're unable to reach your phone and you're in the middle of nowhere? Honestly, this is probably a bigger issue here in the US where we have a lot more very rural and remote roads where there might not be any passersby for a while, or worse you go into a ravine or something and no one can see you.
Get rid of the cellular connections, get rid of all this "infotainment" crap (whoever thought "apps" in a car is a good idea is an idiot).
Anyone who thinks "infotainment" is all about apps is an idiot, and anyone who doesn't see the value of something like being able to play Pandora in their car is an idiot. More importantly, anyone who thinks AM/FM radio is at all listenable these days is a colossal moron; infotainment systems serve two important purposes: give us a nice stereo system so we can listen to the music we want (which these days means USB ports so you can plug in your music library with thousands of songs; you need a decent screen and UI to navigate that; also, things like Pandora are a good option too, if you want a more radio-like experience with stuff you haven't heard before, again, this requires a decent screen and UI to navigate, so you aren't fumbling with your phone plugged into an aux jack). Secondly, these systems give us navigation, which saves a lot of time and gas and improves safety a lot (since you aren't driving in circles looking for something that's not easily found on a map). Of course, you can add this stuff in with your phone and a mobile mount, but that's clumsy and not as well integrated.
The answer to all these from a security standpoint is simply having good security practices and a good architecture that makes it impossible to take control of a car remotely.
And spend some money on really strong encryption in things like the remote unlock keyfobs and engine immobilisers so hackers cant get in.
When was the last time you heard of this happening? All the latest exploits I've heard have been on American cars (namely Jeeps/Chryslers) over a cellular link. Obviously, poor security practices were used in architecting those systems.
Honestly, what I'd like to see for these infotainment systems are: 1) All code open-sourced, so security researchers can audit them, and so customers can modify and upgrade their systems if they choose. This is for the infotainment system itself (which these days usually runs on embedded Linux or similar anyway), not stuff like the engine controller or other critical systems. If they want to keep their ECU, ABS, EPS (power steering), etc. algorithms secret, I don't really care. Also, it's really more important that the base OS, bootloader, etc. be open-source; it doesn't matter that much if the music player application's source is available. 2) Specifications should be made public about how the electronic systems are architected
Auto manufacturers don't need to write secure code.
There's plenty of companies out there that specialize in writing mission-critical, secure code. Any company that writes avionics code would probably be a good choice. The automakers can outsource the software work to these companies, and concentrate on designing nice cars and operating assembly lines.
I'm not really clear that Skytran(tm) is the answer, but PRT clearly is.
The thing that puts SkyTran above all the others (not that there's many...) IMO is that it uses suspended rails, rather than being ground-based. Anything ground-based would be a PITA to deploy, because it's going to interfere with everything else on the ground, especially existing roads. Look what a mess it is to install light rail: roads shut down, businesses put out of business (this is what happened in Phoenix/Tempe when they installed a light rail), etc. And then you still have the problem of it being slow because it has to stop for intersections, pedestrians, etc. SkyTran avoids all that by going over everything, and by putting different-direction rails at different levels, you don't even have intersections. It's simple and beautiful. The main problem is cost (the rails are maglev), but supposedly it's much cheaper than regular roads, which I can believe: regular roads cost a fortune because they're built on-site, whereas SkyTran rails are built in a factory. Stuff is always far cheaper when it's manufactured at high volume in a factory and doesn't need to be customized. The only possible problems I see with it are placing the utility poles (since that can obviously interfere with stuff on the ground, but nothing like another track), and interference with stuff above the ground such as big trees. Oh yeah, the biggest problem I see: the whole chicken-and-egg problem, getting the whole thing off the ground and getting factories built and cities buying into it. But they're supposedly building a small section in Tel Aviv so I guess we'll see how that goes.
Honestly, it seems like I never hear anything bad about Finland.... The only thing that seems to suck about it is that it's located next door to Russia.
All in all, still hugely childish to think we are the only sentient life in the galaxy, when life can exist it does. When sentience can dominate due to adaptability to high environmental variance, it will (think cyclic ice ages and fire and the fur of less adaptable species).
Maybe, maybe not. The conditions needed to form life (as we know it) aren't that common, they require a planet within the "habitable zone" of its star. We're only now figuring out that there's a LOT of planets out there, but almost all the ones we can see are definitely not like ours: smallish, rocky (not gaseous), not too hot or cold. We're just now starting to see ones closer to ours, but again, not usually within the habitable zone. And even if we do start seeing a bunch like ours, how many will have had the necessary chemical ingredients, and how many of those will actually evolve life, and how many of those will evolve intelligent life? And on how many of those will the life create technology like ours, and on how many of those will they advance enough to seek out life on other planets before destroying themselves with nuclear weapons? So you can see, the Drake Equation (plus my additions for technology and peacefulness) are working against you. On the other hand, there's a billion stars in the Milky Way. However, you just said "the only sentient life in the galaxy"; there's a LOT of galaxies out there, billions at least, each with millions to billions of stars. Of course, if there's some fairly-advanced civilization out there (maybe like us in a couple hundred years, building nice rotating space stations and moon bases and such) in another galaxy, the time needed to travel here from there would be absolutely astronomical, unless these aliens have figured out some kind of super-FTL drive. Even at lightspeed it'd take a ridiculous amount of time. I know it's silly and there's nothing in our understanding of physics that allows it, but I sure hope someone figures out a way of traveling between stars at speeds orders of magnitude faster than lightspeed (perhaps through artificial wormholes?), because that's what you need to actually race around the galaxy like they do in Star Trek.
So what happens when a socially developed species, starts to encounter far more socially advanced species.
I'd say that depends on exactly what kind of contact the more-advanced species initiates, and what kind of relationship it creates with the less-advanced species. If they just pop in to visit and say hi but otherwise have a hands-off approach, that would definitely create huge changes in our society, but I don't see how that would make us feel "trapped and under observation in an anthropological park", unless we get all paranoid that they're plotting something sinister. (But if they have the technology to easily visit us and say hi, they also have the tech to easily wipe us out if they want, so if they don't, then they obviously don't want to.) I guess the other thing that could happen is it'd be like Star Trek: Enterprise where we get pissed off that the aliens aren't giving us the secrets to their advanced technology, and are making us bumble around at Warp 1.6, taking years to complete trading missions, while they zoom around at Warp 5-6. But that seems a bit silly since if they never bothered to initiate contact, we wouldn't know about their technology anyway.
No, not monorail. Monorails suck because they're too expensive per-mile and they have the same problem trains and light rail have: they only go along a single, long route (not in a grid), and stop at every stop, so they take forever. PRT avoids all these problems, and gets you to your destination in a fraction of the time of driving (let alone trains/buses), going straight from your embarking point to your destination with no stops for other riders or for intersections.
Why it isn't blindingly obvious to everyone that this is the system we need to start building out as an alternative to taxis and buses and lightrail, I really don't know, and my only guess is that people are simply too stupid to understand how something can work and be of benefit until someone else has already built the thing and demonstrated it. It's just like smartphones; everyone thought they were silly and unnecessary until Apple made one that was easy to use (unlike the WindowsCE crap that came before), and then stuck it in their mall stores so everyone could walk up and try it out. Then suddenly everyone wanted one. Or personal computers at home; everyone thought they were useless, just for nerds, not necessary, until they built the internet, then their tech-savvy friends got them and got internet access, and suddenly it was a gold rush.
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I'll bet she's an American woman too.
Maybe if American women weren't so obese and/or afflicted with princess mentalities, then American men wouldn't care much about having a sexbot. I'd bet good money almost all the demand for these things is coming from American men.
Just look at the statistics for how many Americans now are single (either separated/divorced or never married at all), it's going through the roof. There just aren't a whole lot of quality women out there any more. Part of this can probably also be blamed on our government and its policies which have created an obesity epidemic (which hits women harder than men, because women have more body fat naturally and lower metabolisms, so they have a harder time staying thin), and of course corporations which (because of profits and also government policies) create shit food that makes people fat. They don't have this kind of obesity problem in Europe.
An AC already answered your question just above.
Definitely not; the liberals are staunchly against the death penalty.
You've got to be kidding. MS's mobile phone marketshare is crap because their phones are ugly and no one likes the crappy UI. They've been trying to push those phones in phone stores for years, and also at the Microsoft stores, but no one wants them.
I've got a pretty nice HP printer which has proven to be very reliable. It's a LaserJet 2300d. Of course, it's over 10 years old now.... I got it on Ebay for $100 years ago and the 3rd-party toner cartridges are pretty cheap.
I'm actually typing this on a brand-new HP ProBook laptop, but it's my employer's, not mine. This thing sucks ass; it has the absolutely worst keyboard layout I've ever used on a laptop. However, to be fair, it seems that most laptops have adopted these shitty flat keys and terrible layouts. But this one is supposed to be a business model, competing with the Thinkpads and Latitudes, but it's crap compared to those two. (Then again, I also have a new ultra-small Latitude for work, and that thing sucks too, with an awful keyboard. But my Dell Precision 6800 laptop (another work computer, yes I have 3) has a nice keyboard.)
Many in the GOP today are for drug legalization, and gay marriage (positions too far to the left for any DEMOCRAT to endorse in 1980).
This is total BS. Just look at who GOP voters are voting for: religious nuts who scream constantly about gay marriage, and who support people who refuse to obey the law in regards to it.
The GOP of George W Bush (from a family of modern Whigs who, like the Romney family worked very hard to prevent Reagan from getting elected) grew entitlements more than many Democrats have done (remember his prescription drug program?)
Yes, and who elected W? That's right, GOP voters.
So while you may have a point about the modern GOP resembling the Whigs a lot, it's not some kind of conspiracy, and it's not like GOP voters don't agree with them; the GOP voters elected these people willingly. There have been other candidates out there, but the GOP voters are mostly religious freaks who care more about gay marriage than almost anything else, and will elect anyone who panders to their fundie values.
The GOP of today is far less socially conservative, far less religious, far less defense-hawkish, and far less economically-conservative than it has ever been since its founding.
Total bullshit. Proof: the current GOP politicians and presidential candidates (Trump excluded, maybe; his followers don't seem to be too religious or care much about the gay marriage issue).
Face it, the party of Barry Goldwater is gone, and has been replaced by the party of Ted Cruz and his Dominionist dad Rafael. Goldwater himself worried about what would happen to his party if the religious nuts got in there.
On top of all that, look what happens when a kid does show an interest in STEM: he gets arrested and accused of terrorism! The other kids (who aren't Muslim) are going to see this and avoid playing with electronics too. It's no wonder there's no more EE jobs in this country; they've all gone to Asia.
Well this is what happens when we hire from the bottom of the barrel to teach our kids in public schools.
Even worse, this is in Texas, so the bottom of the barrel there is close to the bottom of the barrel of the entire US. (Only a few places like Mississippi are arguably worse, though these days I'm really starting to wonder if MS and AL have an unfairly-earned reputation compared to TX; I'm constantly hearing about shit like this in TX, but I really haven't heard about a lot of bad stuff in MS and AL in the last decade or two. Maybe MS and AL have improved a lot.)
Oh please. According to Wikipedia, they had them back in 1899 in NYC and Chicago. That isn't very long after motor vehicles became generally available to the public.
Sanders is too old? That's the best you can come up with?
He's not *that* old; McCain was as old. And Sanders seems to be in good health. I'm sure he can handle 4 years before he croaks. I'd rather take my chances with him rather than any of these other clowns (including corrupt Hillary).
The $10K window job costs that much because you need to pay these scammers lots of money in profit for going door-to-door and suckering people for something that'd cost a fraction as much from a normal window business or Home Depot.
You can also do the job yourself; it isn't that hard, and the windows themselves are actually pretty cheap.
But yeah, don't do an upgrade if it isn't going to pay for itself in a reasonable amount of time. And be suspicious of those claims about how much reduction in heating and cooling costs you'll realize; those claims are usually very inflated.
But if you're building a new house, or installing a new window anyway, you might as well get triple-pane windows.
Suppose you're driving on one of those roads, and find that an accident has blocked the road in front of you, leaving just enough room for you to stop.
Yep, this just happened to me last week on one of these roads. There was a *huge* accident with a bunch of emergency vehicles blocking the road. I had to slow down rather quickly.
Do you, as a human driver, then have any options other than preparing for impact? This situation looks to me like one where there is no satisfactory answer, and therefore not a reason to fault automatic driving.
Well, there's a few things you can do: if someone looks like they're going to run into you while you're waiting for the accident to clear, you can pull into the other lane, or maybe the ditch if that's a better risk than getting rear-ended. You can also (when no one's coming) try backing up, pulling into a driveway, turning around, and leaving (which is what I did; shortly after I did this a bunch more cars came speeding around the turns towards the accident).
Maybe it would stirr up a little competition and we could have better systems and interfaces (I have the Dodge uconnect 4.3, and boy is this interface fucked up and hard to use. 4 clicks on a touch screen to send heat to the feets instead of the face? Who tought of that????)
Why'd you buy it then? My new Mazda3 is loaded with tech features and an infotainment system, and it still has a fully separate HVAC system (albeit a dual-zone automatic one), so changing that setting is a simple dedicated button. Integrating HVAC with infotainment is just a cost-cutting move; if my Mazda, which is definitely not aimed at the luxury segment, can afford to have separate HVAC controls, any car can.
Modularity sounds nice, but no one wants their dashboard to look like a military aircraft cockpit with drab square and rectangular parts bolted in with visible fasteners. They tried modularity a while back with the "DIN" sized car stereos, and they got super-tiny stereos with teeny-tiny little buttons, because they stupidly based the standard on the previous sorta-standard, which was the crappy old dual-knob car radios of the 60s-70s. When you only have two knobs, one for volume and one to adjust the frequency on an analog scale, you don't need a lot of space, but then they were trying to stick CD players and lots of controls into that same tiny amount of space, and it was terrible. This is the problem with standards like that; you get stuck with some crappy standard because everyone else uses it you have no room to improve. That's why no one uses DIN any more; it sucked and they finally got tired of designing dashes around it and not being able to make them better.
What we really need is open source code for these systems; then enthusiasts or small companies will be able to make alternative or updated versions, much like DD-WRT and OpenWRT have done for WiFi routers. And if they also published some hardware specs, there's probably be a whole new industry of companies making both hardware and software upgrades for these cars. We already have this to an extent: my wife's mid-2000s Volvo for instance has a USB/MP3 add-on system available from a European company named GROM, but because the system's interface specs are secret, it's reverse-engineered and basically a hack (it tries to make MP3s look like CD tracks), and really doesn't work that well from what I've read.
Because a panel of people who know how to drive cars and who have basic knowledge about how cars work isn't going to help much with computer security. In fact, even a panel of computer security experts isn't going to help any: how are they going to evaluate the system, unless they can find a bunch of serious hackers (like the guys who hacked into the Jeep and drove it remotely)? Most of these systems are closed-source and proprietary, so you can't just poke around in there to see if it was written correctly or not. It's not like a car engine, where you can easily take it out, take it apart, and see how it was designed and put together. On top of all this, even if they did give out access to the source code to "computer security experts", that probably wouldn't help either, because these "experts" would probably be a bunch of morons who want to install McAfee or something, and would have no clue about how embedded systems should be architected for security and reliability. A bunch of avionics engineers would probably be a good start, but even here, security hasn't been much of a focus or a concern because they haven't had to worry about this stuff before, only making the software provably correct to avoid bugs causing any kind of problems in-flight. Seriously, the number of people on the entire planet who would be qualified to really evaluate this is very, very, very small.
Do you have a cellphone? If so, you're being tracked. What does it matter if the car makes use of that data connection?
You want to live free, go find some land in rural Alaska, buy a doomsday survival kit, and shack up there.
The judge who invalidated the gag order, Victor Marrero, is the same judge that struck down a portion of the revised USA PATRIOT Act in 2007, forcing investigators to go through the courts to obtain approval before ordering ISPs to give up information on customers, instead of just sending them a National Security Letter.
Uh-oh, it's one of those activist judges again!! How dare a judge stand up for our rights!
Well planes are "elevated" and don't have any track at all, but we don't have any problem jumping in those on a routine basis. At least SkyTran tracks are only 20-30 feet or so above the ground, not 30,000, and it's not likely the track is going to fall down. At worse, if there's a problem, you'd have to sit there for a while until maintenance crews come get you; that's no worse than present-day trains (you're not normally allowed to just get out of an Amtrak if it stops on the tracks due to a maintenance problem).
Just need consumer reports to start ranking reviewed cars on their information security
How the hell is Consumer Reports going to rank cars based on this stuff? It's not like they have a panel of computer security experts on hand. Their reviews are based on feedback from their customers, which gives them reliability info. No one knows that a vehicle is insecure until suddenly some hacker figures out how to take it over remotely.
Entertainment system has a network connection with the life-safety network without a one-way transfer? D. And a connection to Bluetooth or the Internet? F.
You can't have a hands-free phone and dialing system built into the car without Bluetooth. People want these services, and they're useful services to have. If you want to drive around some 30-year-old piece of shit, go ahead, but modern car buyers (the people who actually buy new cars and keep these companies in business) aren't like you, they want these features.
McAfee makes the worst software on the planet. I'm not kidding or exaggerating: Mr. John McAfee, founder of the eponymous company, says so himself. If you can't believe him, then why would you believe someone else (including another company that's so stupid they continue to hang onto the name of the founder who now calls their products garbage)?
This ploy seems pretty lame to me really. Intel may be have been trying to push into the automotive market, but I doubt they've made much progress. The CPUs used in cars don't come from Intel, they come from other places; they're usually either some kind of ARM chip or maybe some kind of POWER chip from Freescale. Intel is a joke in the embedded market; they don't make any kind of microcontrollers at all. Wake me when they start making chips with 100-200 GPIOs, ADCs, etc.
And how McAfee shitware would have any relevance in automotive products, I have no idea. The security automotive systems need has to be designed in, as these are all small, low-power microcontroller-based systems, most of them running bare-metal; they don't need a stupid virus scanner.
This move of their seems like Microsoft suddenly trying to create some industry group (which is really just them and a couple of lackeys) and positioning themselves as "leaders" in the FOSS industry.
You sound like a luddite.
The best place to start in making cars more secure is to stop connecting them to the Internet or cellular networks. It makes them vulnerable to remote exploits and increases the cost of the car.
It also increases safety by allowing drivers to talk on the phone hands-free using a built-in Bluetooth system. On my car, I press a button on the steering wheel, speak "call John Smith", it finds someone with that name in my phone's contacts, and calls him, all without my hands leaving the wheel or my eyes leaving the road. People are going to talk on the phone in their cars whether you like it or not, so it might as well be made safe. (Plus, on a long, boring highway trip, why not?)
But now we have some jurisdictions (EU I think is one) mandating cellular connections in new cars so they can support "emergency features" (presumably stuff so when the car is involved in a serious crash, the car can notify emergency services automatically in case the occupants are pinned down or unconscious and cant make an emergency call themselves)
Again, what's the problem with that? Would you rather just sit there and die because you're unable to reach your phone and you're in the middle of nowhere? Honestly, this is probably a bigger issue here in the US where we have a lot more very rural and remote roads where there might not be any passersby for a while, or worse you go into a ravine or something and no one can see you.
Get rid of the cellular connections, get rid of all this "infotainment" crap (whoever thought "apps" in a car is a good idea is an idiot).
Anyone who thinks "infotainment" is all about apps is an idiot, and anyone who doesn't see the value of something like being able to play Pandora in their car is an idiot. More importantly, anyone who thinks AM/FM radio is at all listenable these days is a colossal moron; infotainment systems serve two important purposes: give us a nice stereo system so we can listen to the music we want (which these days means USB ports so you can plug in your music library with thousands of songs; you need a decent screen and UI to navigate that; also, things like Pandora are a good option too, if you want a more radio-like experience with stuff you haven't heard before, again, this requires a decent screen and UI to navigate, so you aren't fumbling with your phone plugged into an aux jack). Secondly, these systems give us navigation, which saves a lot of time and gas and improves safety a lot (since you aren't driving in circles looking for something that's not easily found on a map). Of course, you can add this stuff in with your phone and a mobile mount, but that's clumsy and not as well integrated.
The answer to all these from a security standpoint is simply having good security practices and a good architecture that makes it impossible to take control of a car remotely.
And spend some money on really strong encryption in things like the remote unlock keyfobs and engine immobilisers so hackers cant get in.
When was the last time you heard of this happening? All the latest exploits I've heard have been on American cars (namely Jeeps/Chryslers) over a cellular link. Obviously, poor security practices were used in architecting those systems.
Honestly, what I'd like to see for these infotainment systems are:
1) All code open-sourced, so security researchers can audit them, and so customers can modify and upgrade their systems if they choose. This is for the infotainment system itself (which these days usually runs on embedded Linux or similar anyway), not stuff like the engine controller or other critical systems. If they want to keep their ECU, ABS, EPS (power steering), etc. algorithms secret, I don't really care. Also, it's really more important that the base OS, bootloader, etc. be open-source; it doesn't matter that much if the music player application's source is available.
2) Specifications should be made public about how the electronic systems are architected
Auto manufacturers don't need to write secure code.
There's plenty of companies out there that specialize in writing mission-critical, secure code. Any company that writes avionics code would probably be a good choice. The automakers can outsource the software work to these companies, and concentrate on designing nice cars and operating assembly lines.
I'm not really clear that Skytran(tm) is the answer, but PRT clearly is.
The thing that puts SkyTran above all the others (not that there's many...) IMO is that it uses suspended rails, rather than being ground-based. Anything ground-based would be a PITA to deploy, because it's going to interfere with everything else on the ground, especially existing roads. Look what a mess it is to install light rail: roads shut down, businesses put out of business (this is what happened in Phoenix/Tempe when they installed a light rail), etc. And then you still have the problem of it being slow because it has to stop for intersections, pedestrians, etc. SkyTran avoids all that by going over everything, and by putting different-direction rails at different levels, you don't even have intersections. It's simple and beautiful. The main problem is cost (the rails are maglev), but supposedly it's much cheaper than regular roads, which I can believe: regular roads cost a fortune because they're built on-site, whereas SkyTran rails are built in a factory. Stuff is always far cheaper when it's manufactured at high volume in a factory and doesn't need to be customized. The only possible problems I see with it are placing the utility poles (since that can obviously interfere with stuff on the ground, but nothing like another track), and interference with stuff above the ground such as big trees. Oh yeah, the biggest problem I see: the whole chicken-and-egg problem, getting the whole thing off the ground and getting factories built and cities buying into it. But they're supposedly building a small section in Tel Aviv so I guess we'll see how that goes.
Where does the money go?
Honestly, it seems like I never hear anything bad about Finland.... The only thing that seems to suck about it is that it's located next door to Russia.
All in all, still hugely childish to think we are the only sentient life in the galaxy, when life can exist it does. When sentience can dominate due to adaptability to high environmental variance, it will (think cyclic ice ages and fire and the fur of less adaptable species).
Maybe, maybe not. The conditions needed to form life (as we know it) aren't that common, they require a planet within the "habitable zone" of its star. We're only now figuring out that there's a LOT of planets out there, but almost all the ones we can see are definitely not like ours: smallish, rocky (not gaseous), not too hot or cold. We're just now starting to see ones closer to ours, but again, not usually within the habitable zone. And even if we do start seeing a bunch like ours, how many will have had the necessary chemical ingredients, and how many of those will actually evolve life, and how many of those will evolve intelligent life? And on how many of those will the life create technology like ours, and on how many of those will they advance enough to seek out life on other planets before destroying themselves with nuclear weapons? So you can see, the Drake Equation (plus my additions for technology and peacefulness) are working against you. On the other hand, there's a billion stars in the Milky Way. However, you just said "the only sentient life in the galaxy"; there's a LOT of galaxies out there, billions at least, each with millions to billions of stars. Of course, if there's some fairly-advanced civilization out there (maybe like us in a couple hundred years, building nice rotating space stations and moon bases and such) in another galaxy, the time needed to travel here from there would be absolutely astronomical, unless these aliens have figured out some kind of super-FTL drive. Even at lightspeed it'd take a ridiculous amount of time. I know it's silly and there's nothing in our understanding of physics that allows it, but I sure hope someone figures out a way of traveling between stars at speeds orders of magnitude faster than lightspeed (perhaps through artificial wormholes?), because that's what you need to actually race around the galaxy like they do in Star Trek.
So what happens when a socially developed species, starts to encounter far more socially advanced species.
I'd say that depends on exactly what kind of contact the more-advanced species initiates, and what kind of relationship it creates with the less-advanced species. If they just pop in to visit and say hi but otherwise have a hands-off approach, that would definitely create huge changes in our society, but I don't see how that would make us feel "trapped and under observation in an anthropological park", unless we get all paranoid that they're plotting something sinister. (But if they have the technology to easily visit us and say hi, they also have the tech to easily wipe us out if they want, so if they don't, then they obviously don't want to.) I guess the other thing that could happen is it'd be like Star Trek: Enterprise where we get pissed off that the aliens aren't giving us the secrets to their advanced technology, and are making us bumble around at Warp 1.6, taking years to complete trading missions, while they zoom around at Warp 5-6. But that seems a bit silly since if they never bothered to initiate contact, we wouldn't know about their technology anyway.
No, not monorail. Monorails suck because they're too expensive per-mile and they have the same problem trains and light rail have: they only go along a single, long route (not in a grid), and stop at every stop, so they take forever. PRT avoids all these problems, and gets you to your destination in a fraction of the time of driving (let alone trains/buses), going straight from your embarking point to your destination with no stops for other riders or for intersections.
Why it isn't blindingly obvious to everyone that this is the system we need to start building out as an alternative to taxis and buses and lightrail, I really don't know, and my only guess is that people are simply too stupid to understand how something can work and be of benefit until someone else has already built the thing and demonstrated it. It's just like smartphones; everyone thought they were silly and unnecessary until Apple made one that was easy to use (unlike the WindowsCE crap that came before), and then stuck it in their mall stores so everyone could walk up and try it out. Then suddenly everyone wanted one. Or personal computers at home; everyone thought they were useless, just for nerds, not necessary, until they built the internet, then their tech-savvy friends got them and got internet access, and suddenly it was a gold rush.