I work for a military contractor; I'm an Engineer. The kind of clearance one would require for that type of work is left to the imagination of the reader; it's reasonably high and took about a year to get.
I have never been fingerprinted...unless they did it when I was sleeping.
Just posting this has made me feel nothing but relief all day. Last night was the best sleep I can remember having. My massage therapist is going to wonder what happened.:D
I'm going to look for a counselor for myself to make sure before we get things started... er, stopped?
Reframing the problem has made the solution simple.
I've used Puppy, Ubuntu, and Mint recently, with a laundry list of other distros over the years.
Mint is your hands-down best out-of-the-box choice. The reason is simple -- it comes with a Flash player already installed. That means that facebook, youtube, twitter, and every other flavour-of-the-week website is going to just work as soon as installation is completed. If you're using other distros, you're going to have to enable the universal, guess about which open-source player and version will work, and cross your fingers. (Remember, if it fails ONCE, Linux is too complimicated.) It is based on Ubuntu, so you get a lot of support PLUS all the proprietary functionality that the average user will want.
Puppy is faster, and by a long shot. Even though it's not as polished, it is usable, so much so that my daughter can use it. (She is six.) I've got another copy running on my ancient P2 366 laptop, and it's actually usable.
Honestly Kozar, I'm not even sure if I still love her anymore. I feel like I'm always under attack for something. Last night she said that she didn't want to hang out with me and I said I'd clean. Once the cleaning was well underway, she was upset that she didn't get to spend any fun time with anyone all day. (This was after saying that she didn't want to do the couples councelling homework because she was in a bad mood and it would go badly for me.) I'm giving her a lot of slack because of her meds and some underlying medical issues, but I've just felt like she's taking all her stresses out on me. I don't feel much of anything for her -- love, hate, anger, compassion, or anything. I mean, I still care about her, but I don't think I'd be sad if she left.
You know what? I'm scared of the logistics and I don't know if I'm more afraid of the logistics or of losing her. I can't afford to buy another house or keep paying the mortgage if I'm not staying there. We've got two kids and I don't know how I'm supposed to give them a good example -- stick together or cut your losses when it seems hopeless? Maybe I'm more concerned with how the kids would react if we weren't together anymore.
It's been years since she's been interested in sex, and the dozen times a year for the last three years have been about the same as when I'm on my own. I haven't considered anything on the side, but she's convinced that I am having an affair. The morning after a family vacation, she said, "Are you stepping out on me?" "What? No, of course not." "Well, you would say that." I've lost a lot of weight, and she's basically the only one who hasn't noticed. (Hell, a strange girl at a bar grabbed my butt, which was the most touching I'd had in a long time.)
We're going to councelling, but it seems to be the two of them ganging up on me. I haven't been able to express my emotions for years -- biting my tongue instead of saying anything mean -- and they're both telling me that I'm disconnected from my emotions. I'm sad; she has depression. I had some heart palpitations; she had a year-long period. Whatever I bring up, it's always worse for her.
But then, her councellor (a different person than the couples therapist) told her that we were in a great relationship, about 8 months ago. Apparently that's all changed since then, and I've been a blank wall for the last ten plus years.
But then, she has supported me without hesitation through school, work... you know what, she didn't. She put up with it, but was always complaining that my marks weren't good enough or that I wasn't looking hard enough for work. The same with the weight loss (I weighed 250# when we met, and I'm 165# now). She hasn't been very happy about that either.
Although it sounds ridiculous to mention this online to a complete stranger, the two of us did meet online, long before it was trendy or even acceptable.
I know, tl;dr. That's why I didn't make this coherent. Where's that pesky copy editor that's been asking for freelance work?
As a Canadian and a somewhat hairy geek, I can attest the following:
1. No.
I've got an outgoing personality, and I'm in excellent physical shape (I was at the gym 1 hour and 26 minutes ago;) ). I'm employed (basically for my intellect alone) and I'm good with kids. Outside of work, I bike, SCUBA dive, and play a musical instrument.
One thing that you're going to be seriously lacking in knowledge is code management.
You've got to use something like CVS or Subversion to keep track of your code. (Both tools are free) If you aren't using a CMS, then you don't have code, you have a bunch of text files that happen to compile. You can check differences, make rollbacks, and use a lot of great tools to track what's been going on in your codebase. You can try something new and then either integrate it or dump it. I used TortoiseCVS as the front-end client for CVS for years. (When I moved into PLCs, I couldn't find a tool that would work, which was quite terrible.)
Nobody teaches you that, even if you go to school.
You'll also want to learn some scripting, like Tcl / Tk, so you can run automatic tests. Nothing shows your edge conditions like a mindless script.
Learn how to comment and be consistent in your code. Use good and obvious variable names with consistent syntax. If you want to use CamelCasing, that's fine. If you want to use ALL_CAPS_WITH_UNDERLINES, that's weird but okay. Here's the stumbling block: The code should obviously tell you WHAT it is doing. The comments should tell you why it's doing that. I wrote a Viterbi decoder that was about 30 lines of code. With the comments, it was closer to 130 because it was a weird and intricate system that required a lot of explaining. Trust me, when you go back in five years and wonder what in the hell you were thinking five years ago, those comments will save you a lot of grief. People who say they don't have to comment are either terrible programmers or terribly inexperienced, NO EXCEPTIONS.
If this was me, I'd do the same thing as Tenenbaum. Fuck it, you're already looking at bankruptcy, why not burn everything you have in the off chance that you take them with you?
"From Hell's heart I stab at thee / For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee."
You already own a house. It's not like paying someone $500 TOPS to run a fuckload of CAT5 wire is going to break your bank now.
Get someone who knows what they're doing. It's a bitch to try to crimp Ethernet without the right tools, and those will set you back a couple of hundred dollars (for the good ones). You'll also require a tester, probably some pull lube, a special drill bit, rods, etc. I'm an Electrical Engineer and I get someone in to run cables. While they're at it, run wire for speakers around your living room and anywhere else you may want later.
Plus, you can't use wireless for streaming HD video. You'll be able to put your media box next to the TV and throw 100MB/s at it from the grunty box down in the basement / server room.
You're right, I forgot how kindly a nation China is. They use slave labour to manufacture our crap (one of my former co-worker's parents were slaves in an iPod factory). They poison our kids with lead, melamine, and cadmium. It is a nation that we should cut off all trade ties with. Nothing good comes from China.
Google should have responded to their attacks with
Hey, my old TV is one of the Sony 32" WEGA models. I spent a looong time trying to find an HD model that didn't suck.
Take a look at Panasonic's plasma line. It's actually watchable. Of course, the signal providers compress it to the point where there's blur everywhere, but with a good feed it's a good TV.
Your eye responds to images logarithmically, so if you get a bright flash then a dead time, you still see that bright flash for a short period. (Not meaning burn-in.)
One of the techniques for overdriving an LED is to pulse it. A regular LED will die very quickly if you throw 300 mA through it, but if you drive it with a pulse train where the average doesn't exceed the max current for the device, it can sustain a brightness almost equal to the 300 mA level.
The problem with Linux is that it's inarticulate. Look at Ubuntu, which is arguably the easiest way to get someone to use Linux if they're from a Windows background.
It works great, it's faster, and most configurations work right out of the box. if you have one of the few configurations that have been checked by the developers. (If you've got an ATI card like I do, Fuck You.) If you've got an older machine without one of the specific wireless cards detailed in document XR-122-65_rev_a_kernel26.6.1, you can with ndiswrapper and wpasupplicant. Rolling back the kernel version will also improve compatibilty on older systems. All of thse commands can be found on forums online, so there's lots of support for......what the FUCK are you talking about, Beardo? My machine USED to work, and now it doesn't and that's because I listened to you.
Windows is dominant because they write and market to people who aren't technical users. Read that bolded sentence again. Apple is hauling up their maketshare for the same reason -- they are marketing to the vast majority of people that want a computer but didn't spend their childhood in the CS lab. My dad doesn't want to learn how to use a command line to set up the email. My wife, lead tech support for distance education for a College, didn't like Ubuntu because of the Flash problem.
NOBODY GIVES A FUCK ABOUT PROPRIETARY DRIVERS. IF THE SHIT DOESN'T WORK THEN IT IS A LINUX PROBLEM. (Yes, even if it isn't.)
Hell, MS still has their ridiculous search, when you could just drop to a shell and type "dir *foo*.ext/s | more" and be done in 10 seconds. But you see, if you weren't the kind of person who reads/., I just a) bored you and b) acted condescending and c) said something unintelligible.
Linux is a spectacular tool, but like calipers, $30 ESD wirecutters, or my $200 soldering station, just aren't the right tool for the majority of people out there. If the developers get their heads out of their asses and learn how to market the software AND give the public what it wants, then and only then will Linux get its fair share of the market.
First, take a deep breath. The most important rule is "Don't Panic".
Next, you download a Linux distro with a LiveCD. Ubuntu's a little bloaty, but it's got a lot of drivers right out of the box. If you've got internet access, you should be able to do that. If not, then you'll have to contact a friend with access or do it from the lab. Grab a beer while you wait -- it'll be a while.
Burn the liveCD and boot with that. You might have to edit your BIOS settings to boot from CD first. Choose the "try Ubuntu without making any changes to your computer" option. Once it boots up, you'll be able to access your hard drive, and most importantly, your dissertation. Print the fucking thing, email it to your gmail account, and while you're at it, email what you've got to your professor. Let him know that you're "having computer problems, so I'm sending what I could recover in the meantime." Remember that computers fail all the time so you have to keep copies of important papers on physically separate systems.
You're apparently a smart enough guy to get a PhD, so you should be able to figure out how to navigate Ubuntu. It's basically the same as Windown, but with the bar on the top instead of the bottom. My daughter's six and she can use Puppy Linux.
Actually, you could probably use Puppy. The whole OS is only 150MB, so it'll download in a much shorter time than Ubuntu. It's not quite as polished, but I've had good luck with it.
Think of a wife as an PCIx16 slot. You give it resources, it makes things look pretty, takes care of a lot of ridiculous details that you wouldn't otherwise care that much about, and occasionally overheats and gets bitchy about your configuration.
Some really high-end cards allow you to spawn whole new processes, and that's worth the price of the upgrade.
Okay, only a Professional Software Engineer can design webpages or write code. In BC, that's an actual discipline for Engineers. (I'm Electrical myself; one of my friends has her P.Eng in Software, and my alma mater was one of the first to offer it.)
See how that works?
The real problem is really your attitude, not the fact that "artsy-fartsies" are writing webpages in Dreamweaver. We can talk about the relative merits and security of Windows / OS ? / Lunix all day (which, really, is what/. is all about) but the problem has shifted. We still have some phishing attacks and the ever-present Trojan horse, but the game has shifted significantly here. Getting your PC hacked by viewing a framed image? That's not a 1995 trick anymore. That's showing a very high level of sophistication and talent.
This is a hip-hip-horrah moment, and you should have a chill down your spine.
No system is secure, unless it is powered off, with no OS, no power supply, and locked in a vault after being encased in concrete, and even that's no guarantee. Hell, even Kodak had problems with frames that were still in the motherfucking boxes at Wal-Mart. Big deal, you say, so what if some/b/tards put goatse on 10,000 frames? Do you think that's all that happened? We know that images can carry malicious code, and I guarantee that several of those benign-looking default Kodak logos were replaced by infected pictures that 0wz0r3d your box the moment you plugged in via USB or, apparently, looked at the pictures with your browser.
The malware writers are talented, dedicated, and tireless. All they have to find is one mistake anywhere and It Is Compromised. You have to make sure there are no holes. Surely you can see how you can't win that game.
Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson never wrote a single word in the Dune universe.
I've read all of them, just once, I've never dressed up as Paul, I don't know how to pronounce Bene Gesserit, and I still know more about Dune than they do.
In computing, a one-in-a-million chance happens every second. This is true with any embedded systems controlling your car.
This isn't limited to Toyota, mark my words. Mustangs have had the same problem for years, and they blamed that on floormats too. IIRC, the controllers are all outsourced to one company.
Motorola, which, thinking about it, has also fucked up the HDCP code on their cable boxes...
Kid on a bike? I'm 33 years old and I bike to work, you insensitive clod. You're right, though -- no amount of foam on the car is going to help. In the matchup between 2 tons of steel, in any form, vs. 165 pounds of skintanium, skintanium loses every time. I don't have any crumple zones.
Slashdot Mirror
My three-year-old was throwing pennies onto the table a few weeks ago. One of the coins landed and stayed on its edge.
I work for a military contractor; I'm an Engineer. The kind of clearance one would require for that type of work is left to the imagination of the reader; it's reasonably high and took about a year to get.
I have never been fingerprinted ...unless they did it when I was sleeping.
Just posting this has made me feel nothing but relief all day. Last night was the best sleep I can remember having. My massage therapist is going to wonder what happened. :D
I'm going to look for a counselor for myself to make sure before we get things started... er, stopped?
Reframing the problem has made the solution simple.
I've used Puppy, Ubuntu, and Mint recently, with a laundry list of other distros over the years.
Mint is your hands-down best out-of-the-box choice. The reason is simple -- it comes with a Flash player already installed. That means that facebook, youtube, twitter, and every other flavour-of-the-week website is going to just work as soon as installation is completed. If you're using other distros, you're going to have to enable the universal, guess about which open-source player and version will work, and cross your fingers. (Remember, if it fails ONCE, Linux is too complimicated.) It is based on Ubuntu, so you get a lot of support PLUS all the proprietary functionality that the average user will want.
Puppy is faster, and by a long shot. Even though it's not as polished, it is usable, so much so that my daughter can use it. (She is six.) I've got another copy running on my ancient P2 366 laptop, and it's actually usable.
Honestly Kozar, I'm not even sure if I still love her anymore. I feel like I'm always under attack for something. Last night she said that she didn't want to hang out with me and I said I'd clean. Once the cleaning was well underway, she was upset that she didn't get to spend any fun time with anyone all day. (This was after saying that she didn't want to do the couples councelling homework because she was in a bad mood and it would go badly for me.) I'm giving her a lot of slack because of her meds and some underlying medical issues, but I've just felt like she's taking all her stresses out on me. I don't feel much of anything for her -- love, hate, anger, compassion, or anything. I mean, I still care about her, but I don't think I'd be sad if she left.
You know what? I'm scared of the logistics and I don't know if I'm more afraid of the logistics or of losing her. I can't afford to buy another house or keep paying the mortgage if I'm not staying there. We've got two kids and I don't know how I'm supposed to give them a good example -- stick together or cut your losses when it seems hopeless? Maybe I'm more concerned with how the kids would react if we weren't together anymore.
It's been years since she's been interested in sex, and the dozen times a year for the last three years have been about the same as when I'm on my own. I haven't considered anything on the side, but she's convinced that I am having an affair. The morning after a family vacation, she said, "Are you stepping out on me?" "What? No, of course not." "Well, you would say that." I've lost a lot of weight, and she's basically the only one who hasn't noticed. (Hell, a strange girl at a bar grabbed my butt, which was the most touching I'd had in a long time.)
We're going to councelling, but it seems to be the two of them ganging up on me. I haven't been able to express my emotions for years -- biting my tongue instead of saying anything mean -- and they're both telling me that I'm disconnected from my emotions. I'm sad; she has depression. I had some heart palpitations; she had a year-long period. Whatever I bring up, it's always worse for her.
But then, her councellor (a different person than the couples therapist) told her that we were in a great relationship, about 8 months ago. Apparently that's all changed since then, and I've been a blank wall for the last ten plus years.
But then, she has supported me without hesitation through school, work... you know what, she didn't. She put up with it, but was always complaining that my marks weren't good enough or that I wasn't looking hard enough for work. The same with the weight loss (I weighed 250# when we met, and I'm 165# now). She hasn't been very happy about that either.
Although it sounds ridiculous to mention this online to a complete stranger, the two of us did meet online, long before it was trendy or even acceptable.
I know, tl;dr. That's why I didn't make this coherent. Where's that pesky copy editor that's been asking for freelance work?
How you doin'?
Obligatory XKCD reference...
As a Canadian and a somewhat hairy geek, I can attest the following:
1. No.
I've got an outgoing personality, and I'm in excellent physical shape (I was at the gym 1 hour and 26 minutes ago ;) ). I'm employed (basically for my intellect alone) and I'm good with kids. Outside of work, I bike, SCUBA dive, and play a musical instrument.
My wife has basically told me to never touch her.
The audio on my cable box drops out if I use HDMI. The cable company said that the workaround is to use component.
One thing that you're going to be seriously lacking in knowledge is code management.
You've got to use something like CVS or Subversion to keep track of your code. (Both tools are free) If you aren't using a CMS, then you don't have code, you have a bunch of text files that happen to compile. You can check differences, make rollbacks, and use a lot of great tools to track what's been going on in your codebase. You can try something new and then either integrate it or dump it. I used TortoiseCVS as the front-end client for CVS for years. (When I moved into PLCs, I couldn't find a tool that would work, which was quite terrible.)
Nobody teaches you that, even if you go to school.
You'll also want to learn some scripting, like Tcl / Tk, so you can run automatic tests. Nothing shows your edge conditions like a mindless script.
Learn how to comment and be consistent in your code. Use good and obvious variable names with consistent syntax. If you want to use CamelCasing, that's fine. If you want to use ALL_CAPS_WITH_UNDERLINES, that's weird but okay. Here's the stumbling block: The code should obviously tell you WHAT it is doing. The comments should tell you why it's doing that. I wrote a Viterbi decoder that was about 30 lines of code. With the comments, it was closer to 130 because it was a weird and intricate system that required a lot of explaining. Trust me, when you go back in five years and wonder what in the hell you were thinking five years ago, those comments will save you a lot of grief. People who say they don't have to comment are either terrible programmers or terribly inexperienced, NO EXCEPTIONS.
If this was me, I'd do the same thing as Tenenbaum. Fuck it, you're already looking at bankruptcy, why not burn everything you have in the off chance that you take them with you?
"From Hell's heart I stab at thee /
For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee."
*shakes tiny fist*
Yes, a pro install is the way to go.
You already own a house. It's not like paying someone $500 TOPS to run a fuckload of CAT5 wire is going to break your bank now.
Get someone who knows what they're doing. It's a bitch to try to crimp Ethernet without the right tools, and those will set you back a couple of hundred dollars (for the good ones). You'll also require a tester, probably some pull lube, a special drill bit, rods, etc. I'm an Electrical Engineer and I get someone in to run cables. While they're at it, run wire for speakers around your living room and anywhere else you may want later.
Plus, you can't use wireless for streaming HD video. You'll be able to put your media box next to the TV and throw 100MB/s at it from the grunty box down in the basement / server room.
You're right, I forgot how kindly a nation China is. They use slave labour to manufacture our crap (one of my former co-worker's parents were slaves in an iPod factory). They poison our kids with lead, melamine, and cadmium. It is a nation that we should cut off all trade ties with. Nothing good comes from China.
Google should have responded to their attacks with
"Did you mean "Tiananmen Square?"
for every answer and turned off SafeSearch.
Hey, my old TV is one of the Sony 32" WEGA models. I spent a looong time trying to find an HD model that didn't suck.
Take a look at Panasonic's plasma line. It's actually watchable. Of course, the signal providers compress it to the point where there's blur everywhere, but with a good feed it's a good TV.
I have a Plasma TV because the PQ on LCD, even the 240Hz LCD TVs, is fucking shitty.
Your eye responds to images logarithmically, so if you get a bright flash then a dead time, you still see that bright flash for a short period. (Not meaning burn-in.)
One of the techniques for overdriving an LED is to pulse it. A regular LED will die very quickly if you throw 300 mA through it, but if you drive it with a pulse train where the average doesn't exceed the max current for the device, it can sustain a brightness almost equal to the 300 mA level.
The problem with Linux is that it's inarticulate. Look at Ubuntu, which is arguably the easiest way to get someone to use Linux if they're from a Windows background.
It works great, it's faster, and most configurations work right out of the box. if you have one of the few configurations that have been checked by the developers. (If you've got an ATI card like I do, Fuck You.) If you've got an older machine without one of the specific wireless cards detailed in document XR-122-65_rev_a_kernel26.6.1, you can with ndiswrapper and wpasupplicant. Rolling back the kernel version will also improve compatibilty on older systems. All of thse commands can be found on forums online, so there's lots of support for... ...what the FUCK are you talking about, Beardo? My machine USED to work, and now it doesn't and that's because I listened to you.
Windows is dominant because they write and market to people who aren't technical users. Read that bolded sentence again. Apple is hauling up their maketshare for the same reason -- they are marketing to the vast majority of people that want a computer but didn't spend their childhood in the CS lab. My dad doesn't want to learn how to use a command line to set up the email. My wife, lead tech support for distance education for a College, didn't like Ubuntu because of the Flash problem.
NOBODY GIVES A FUCK ABOUT PROPRIETARY DRIVERS. IF THE SHIT DOESN'T WORK THEN IT IS A LINUX PROBLEM. (Yes, even if it isn't.)
Hell, MS still has their ridiculous search, when you could just drop to a shell and type "dir *foo*.ext /s | more" and be done in 10 seconds. But you see, if you weren't the kind of person who reads /., I just a) bored you and b) acted condescending and c) said something unintelligible.
Linux is a spectacular tool, but like calipers, $30 ESD wirecutters, or my $200 soldering station, just aren't the right tool for the majority of people out there. If the developers get their heads out of their asses and learn how to market the software AND give the public what it wants, then and only then will Linux get its fair share of the market.
First, take a deep breath. The most important rule is "Don't Panic".
Next, you download a Linux distro with a LiveCD. Ubuntu's a little bloaty, but it's got a lot of drivers right out of the box. If you've got internet access, you should be able to do that. If not, then you'll have to contact a friend with access or do it from the lab. Grab a beer while you wait -- it'll be a while.
Burn the liveCD and boot with that. You might have to edit your BIOS settings to boot from CD first. Choose the "try Ubuntu without making any changes to your computer" option. Once it boots up, you'll be able to access your hard drive, and most importantly, your dissertation. Print the fucking thing, email it to your gmail account, and while you're at it, email what you've got to your professor. Let him know that you're "having computer problems, so I'm sending what I could recover in the meantime." Remember that computers fail all the time so you have to keep copies of important papers on physically separate systems.
You're apparently a smart enough guy to get a PhD, so you should be able to figure out how to navigate Ubuntu. It's basically the same as Windown, but with the bar on the top instead of the bottom. My daughter's six and she can use Puppy Linux.
Actually, you could probably use Puppy. The whole OS is only 150MB, so it'll download in a much shorter time than Ubuntu. It's not quite as polished, but I've had good luck with it.
That's what I thought.
Now, I'm Canadian, so I'm not entirely versed in US Law (having learned most of it from Law and Order) but my understanding was:
The US Constitution is a list of things the Government is allowed to do. If it's not on the list, it's not okay.
Think of a wife as an PCIx16 slot. You give it resources, it makes things look pretty, takes care of a lot of ridiculous details that you wouldn't otherwise care that much about, and occasionally overheats and gets bitchy about your configuration.
Some really high-end cards allow you to spawn whole new processes, and that's worth the price of the upgrade.
Okay, only a Professional Software Engineer can design webpages or write code. In BC, that's an actual discipline for Engineers. (I'm Electrical myself; one of my friends has her P.Eng in Software, and my alma mater was one of the first to offer it.)
See how that works?
The real problem is really your attitude, not the fact that "artsy-fartsies" are writing webpages in Dreamweaver. We can talk about the relative merits and security of Windows / OS ? / Lunix all day (which, really, is what /. is all about) but the problem has shifted. We still have some phishing attacks and the ever-present Trojan horse, but the game has shifted significantly here. Getting your PC hacked by viewing a framed image? That's not a 1995 trick anymore. That's showing a very high level of sophistication and talent.
This is a hip-hip-horrah moment, and you should have a chill down your spine.
No system is secure, unless it is powered off, with no OS, no power supply, and locked in a vault after being encased in concrete, and even that's no guarantee. Hell, even Kodak had problems with frames that were still in the motherfucking boxes at Wal-Mart. Big deal, you say, so what if some /b/tards put goatse on 10,000 frames? Do you think that's all that happened? We know that images can carry malicious code, and I guarantee that several of those benign-looking default Kodak logos were replaced by infected pictures that 0wz0r3d your box the moment you plugged in via USB or, apparently, looked at the pictures with your browser.
The malware writers are talented, dedicated, and tireless. All they have to find is one mistake anywhere and It Is Compromised. You have to make sure there are no holes. Surely you can see how you can't win that game.
It's not B.A.s. We're outgunned and outnumbered.
Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson never wrote a single word in the Dune universe.
I've read all of them, just once, I've never dressed up as Paul, I don't know how to pronounce Bene Gesserit, and I still know more about Dune than they do.
I like that story.
In computing, a one-in-a-million chance happens every second. This is true with any embedded systems controlling your car.
This isn't limited to Toyota, mark my words. Mustangs have had the same problem for years, and they blamed that on floormats too. IIRC, the controllers are all outsourced to one company.
Motorola, which, thinking about it, has also fucked up the HDCP code on their cable boxes...
if such audio problems were endemic to that DVR, there'd be thousands of folks complaining over a broad area...but I don't see 'em.
Except there are:
"shaw audio problems" on Google garners 5.1M hits; other iterations of "shaw audio..." gets about another million.
Kid on a bike? I'm 33 years old and I bike to work, you insensitive clod. You're right, though -- no amount of foam on the car is going to help. In the matchup between 2 tons of steel, in any form, vs. 165 pounds of skintanium, skintanium loses every time. I don't have any crumple zones.