Yet here is he, quite prepared to give into bullying terms when it suits him.
I'm sorry, but: what?
I think a group that is in a heavily-embargoed, poverty-ridden country has every right to be furious at their scraped-together funds being used for speaking engagements in the highly-privileged nation that is doing the embargoing.
The fact that RMS went and booked the other speaking engagements shows that he truly has no political sensitivities, and has been the wrong person to represent the FSF for quite some time.
If the plane has a bird strike and has to ditch in the Hudson, they don't want you to miss announcements because you're busy flinging Angry Birds. It's not about the electronics, it's about them having your attention during the two parts of flight where all the crashes happen.
As someone whose father was a pilot, that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard; if something happens that is important enough, trust me, you'll notice, big time. Foreign Object Damage, for example, if a blade lets loose from the jet engine, will sound like someone set off a bomb on the wing (don't worry, most jet engines these days are designed to contain several blades failing.) And trust me, your flight attendants will make it reaaaaaaally damn clear if they need you to do something, and you'll notice everyone around you, well, doing it.
They don't want your device interfering with instruments during takeoff and especially landing if ILS is in use (now high-accuracy GPS landing systems are becoming more prevalent), and the rule was the best solution they had to "do electronic devices interfere with plane instruments?" You can't test every device out there, even if you only had to test a dozen instruments, and there are thousands of different avionics packages in hundreds of different planes out there. So the easiest assumption is, when hundreds of lives are at stake: turn off the cell phones, keep the portable devices off, etc. Keep in mind that with GPS, the signal from the satellites is about fifty watts, making for incredibly low signal, so even modern gear could be affected what seems like very low leakage by your music player.
My father and I tried an experiment once - back in the late 90's, we fired up an ultraportable laptop with jeppesen data on it while we were on the ground. The damn thing was like an RF bomb. It caused noticeable interference with the radios, the VOR went a little wonky, and the stormscope interpreted some RF noise from the laptop as lightning strikes (noise on the stormscopes is actually fairly common, but the laptop had a clear effect.) Guess what? Being off-course (VOR) has fuel implications, traffic avoidance implications, etc. Yes, pilots are supposed to check and cross-reference stuff (in fact, much of the busy work a pilot or copilot did pre-GPS-everywhere...was checking one navigation system against another...ADF vs VOR vs GPS vs LORAN), but the rule in aviation is to minimize ANY problems, because they have a nasty habit of snowballing. Aviation disaster reports are full of "this little thing wasn't working, and so-and-so didn't repair ____ quite right, and..."
It's a weird sort of cap. Once you hit it, they throttle your connection to stupidly slow speeds.
Which is funny, since on my "4G" phone in Boston, most of the time I'm lucky to get 10-20KB/sec because all the backhauls are grossly underspec'd.
In Davis Square in Somerville, I'll get several megabits a second. In Roslindale (Boston)? I'm lucky to break 100kbit, yet my phone proudly displays a "4G" icon and full signal strength.
All that talk about not being evil is all fine and dandy. But how come Android does not have a decent off line map application?
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Android has several, including osmand.
As for your complaints about Google Maps not having an offline mode and whining about a cabal between Google and the carriers - on Android, it caches map data which is now vector-based, not prerendered tiles. They were waiting for device processors speeds and 3D abilities to become suitable. If you travel in the same area again, data from the cache is used. You can scroll around an area you intend to travel, too, to preload the data.
Newsflash: carriers, like power, gas, and water companies - are most interested in conservation, because it means more customers on the same infrastructure.
So? I don't know about you, but most founders of tech companies knew just enough to bang out enough to show someone to get funding, and then real professional programmers are hired.
I agree with the OP. The original article is whiny and amounts to "my NASCAR racer didn't work very well in the Maine Forest Rally." Among other things, I'm wondering why the hell he didn't just download a copy of Virtualbox and plop a Linux installation on it.
Years ago, a friend had a 5 minute long conversation about how cops were incredible assholes, speeding tickets were just revenue collection (which they are), etc.
Shortly after the conversation ended, he got pulled over for speeding, and the cop walked up, said hello, and asked him if he'd like to continue the conversation. He'd been chatting with the (bored) cop.
Every single year, OSX loses the Pwn2Own competition first. Windows and Linux always go down on the same day.
Perhaps because everyone wants the Mac and focuses the most intensely? Desirability in a hacking contest with local network access != real world security exposure.
In my decade+ IT career, I've never seen a Mac rooted or infected with a virus beyond a Office macro. Curious, no?
Also curious that I've seen Linux boxes routinely rooted (usually by IRC-bot-seeking scriptkiddies) and Window machines infected with spyware at an average of around 1 a week out of a population of about 75-100.
I was actually thinking it's a false dillema, starting with the premise that "national security is the highest priority." Sure as hell isn't for me. I just want a functioning public transit system, power, running water, and law and order in my community. Funny how our state got slammed with record levels of snow, and the National Guard couldn't help out...because they're deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Funny how funding for social spending has dried up and all the teenagers in my community are now running around shooting each other (and innocent bystanders) because they have no education, no job, no future.
The only people that seem concerned about national security are the people paid to do so or the people who otherwise benefit from such efforts and its rhetoric.
the exchange, once a monopoly, will deliver record speed and stable trading in order to fight back against the fast erosion of its dominant marketshare by specialist electronic rivals
The issue facing markets isn't that. It's algorithmic trading:
Too bad you can't really buy it, and it's insanely expensive, with per-port costs in the hundreds of dollars range. Lots of choices for adapters (which are also insanely expensive)....but I went looking for a 10GbE switch for our small-ish server room for some of our higher bandwidth systems that easily saturate gigabit ethernet...and came up very short in terms of selection. The vast majority of the market consists of switches with 1-2 10GbE uplink ports. That's slightly useful for some situations (for, say, a backup server with a lot of bandwidth, or linking to a main backbone), but not so useful if you want to link up a whole bunch of systems.
Here's a suggestion for anyone that's listening: Android tells you what access an application wants, and aside from minor problems like there being obscure reasons for why the program needs access to "make calls" (often this just means the program wants to be able to tell if you're *in* a phone call or not and behave appropriately), this is reasonably handy.
However, my main objection: you don't get to see this information in the marketplace, so you can't make a purchase decision based on it...and worse, you can't *control* what access a program gets. For example, a lot of programs request "coarse" location information, which is enough to tell where you are within a few blocks. I don't want my backgammon program to know my location, and I wish I had the ability to tell the Android OS "no, that's not OK".
It's an all-or-nothing approach that leaves me often feeling like my arm is twisted into accepting the app, often because there are no alternatives for the functionality I want...
Many cities use snow melters to deal with snow; that's basically the same thing.
I really wonder why environmentalists aren't up in arms about it; the snow melters can burn hundreds of gallons of fuel an hour, which is more fuel than it takes to a heat a house for a month.
Frankly, I've used the stock firmware on a number of Android devices (started with a G1, currently have an HTC Vision, T-Mobile's G2) and I wouldn't go back to the carrier-provided OS if you paid me
I've got a G2 as well. I don't suppose you realized that all the bugs I'm talking about apply to your device?
Or that the G2 has the most stock, unmolested Android installation of any phone/carrier save maybe the Nexus S?
It's been my universal experience that community hardware ROMs tend to suck, and worse, the community usually isn't honest and upfront about all the problems; it's only after you install, find a slew of problems, and start googling that you find all the email and forum threads with dozens of "me too"s and no response from developers.
I installed Cyanogen 6.1.1 on my Android phone, and it turns out there are a slew of issues that were reported in the 6.1 release candidates that "cyanogen" and his buddies just never could be pissed to fix before final release OR the.1.1 update that followed. It doesn't support hidden SSIDs, when the stock ROM does just fine. It also no longer supports sleeping with WiFi; if the phone goes into sleep mode, you have to cycle WiFi on and off again. Worse, wifi goes dead in a way that doesn't trigger the normal switchover to cellular data, which REALLY sucks if you're using something like Google Voice for texts and phone calls - you simply will not get the calls, missed call notification, or text messages. The sensitivity of the touch screen changed such that you now have to hold the phone to use the screen (ie, you can't tap something on the screen while it sits on your desk). All these issues have been reported in the forums and had bug reports filed, and they're sitting, untouched.
Another example: the WRT-610N. Supported by one of the alternative ROMs for access points. Trouble is: performance sucked compared to the stock drivers, it would hang about every 18-24 hours, and so on. Lots of impressive features, but utter Fail when it came to basic reliability.
The answer to this question is incredibly simple.
Backups. If you really don't trust your sysadmin, or simply want to audit them, there are lots of options, like having the backup software email backup reports to both the sysadmin and the executive director.
Store them off-site with your chairperson or executive director. Or hire a company like Iron Mountain, where everything is audited, access is controlled, and only certain people are allowed to request tapes outside of the normal rotations.
Safety "burst" discs are built into the regulator of the cylinders so that if over pressurization occurs they rupture. The results are frightening and embarrassing but its only air and not shrapnel since the cylinder remains intact.
Ask a dive instructor who is old enough, and they'll tell you about The Time I Saw a Burst Disc Retention Cage Shoot Through The Side Of Someone's Trunk And Through The Car Next To It.
Basically, the "cage" that "catches" the burst disc often is corroded or otherwise fails from the force of the burst disk hitting it with a couple hundred pounds of force. They break free and usually make it through at least two pieces of sheet metal before coming to a stop.
Also, burst disks are not 100% reliable, nor are the correct disks always installed. And yes, SCUBA tanks DO fail- usually when being filled, and they shatter. That's why scuba shops only re-fill tanks while they sit in containment vessels (the vessels also hold water, which helps with the heat from adiabatic compression.)
For those who are not into car repair et al, Audi used hydraulic pressure accumulators for power brake assist. It's a great system, particularly for turbocharged cars, which spend a considerable amount of time in normal driving with low or no manifold vacuum (which is created by the pistons trying to draw air past a restriction, aka, the throttle vane. That big round thing your brake master cylinder comes out of? That's the vacuum servo. It uses surface area to multiply force from the vacuum.) Citroen used the same idea to power the extensive hydraulics used in their famous suspension systems. Mercedes did as well for their cars which had hydraulic power windows (!!), door-closers, and suspensions. Nowadays, the idea of hydraulic assist has largely gone by the wayside, with auxiliary electric vacuum pumps used where necessary. It's a shame, because the hydraulic system had a HUGE amount of reserve; you could pump the pedal hard almost thirty times.
The reservoirs are lovingly nicknamed "the bomb" by enthusiasts and owners of mid-80s-to-early-90's Audis, strictly on appearance; they look sort of like a large-ish cartoon bomb. I have NEVER heard of one exploding or failing (in terms of the pressure vessel, say, by cracking) in any way, and they've been in use for almost thirty years.
The way they DO fail, very predictably, is via the internal bladder that separates the nitrogen charge from the hydraulic fluid. Eventually the bladder fails, or the nitrogen simply diffuses through the bladder. Also, hydraulic systems are pretty horribly unreliable; with age, everything rubber fails eventually. Citroen did a pretty good job of proving that too, but on Audis, pretty much all the hydraulic hoses eventually fail. The hazard, in this case, is that when this system fails, it'll dump gallons of very slippery hydraulic fluid all over the road. If you're lucky, it won't also spray it all over, say, your hot exhaust. Atomized oil is pretty damn flammable.
Another danger: with the Audi system, all you had to do was pump the brake pedal until it was hard, and the system was safe to work on. This system would involve higher pressures and larger quantities of fluid...and it would become a real danger for anyone working on the car to do so with the system charged, as fluid over a certain pressure will either break skin or worse. I imagine they'll develop an easy way to discharge it, but people are still idiots.
The thing is also going to be a total bitch in a fire; I'm sure they'll put a pressure relief on the nitrogen side, but even then, you've got 10-15 gallons of flammable oil to deal with.
I really don't see Chrysler having any incentive to make the thing more durable than Audi/VW/Citroen did. It'll be made so it lasts about 60-70K, and then you'll be looking at replacing a huge, high-pressure tank. Expect the hilarity 3-4 years from whenever they go on sale, probably sooner.
, I'd say they're probably more secular than the US in reality,
They have complete freedom of religion
Riiiight. Pay no attention to the fact that TWO THIRDS of ultra-orthodox men live on welfare and don't work (and amongst the women, 50% don't work, whereas 25% in general Israeli population don't.) If you elect to go into such studies, the government gives you automatic welfare AND excuses you from military service (where it is ordinarily compulsory) AND gives you a complete tax break.
Did I mention that these ultra-orthodox freeloaders are causing most of the upheaval and supporting hard-line policies? And multiplying like rabbits, marrying young and having huge families?
If that's "Secular", then I guess you'd be OK with the federal government giving welfare to people who decide to become ultra-right-wing Christians?
Android users: use KeepassDroid for storing your passwords in a keepass database, and then randomize your important accounts.
Now all you need to remember is one good password. When you tap on an entry after decryption, keepassdroid puts a notification item up, that when activated, pastes the password in your clipboard for pasting into nearly any app or web page. It does smart things like clear the clipboard after a delay, etc.
You can combine it with Dropbox for unified password management on all platforms; just use a 1.x database if you have a Mac, because KeepassX doesn't "do" v2.x databases, for some reason.
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Never mind the rampant illiteracy [...] Hell, one deaf school fired it's superintendent for not being deaf from birth.
Illiteracy such as not understanding the appropriate use of possessive and contractions?
Yet here is he, quite prepared to give into bullying terms when it suits him.
I'm sorry, but: what?
I think a group that is in a heavily-embargoed, poverty-ridden country has every right to be furious at their scraped-together funds being used for speaking engagements in the highly-privileged nation that is doing the embargoing.
The fact that RMS went and booked the other speaking engagements shows that he truly has no political sensitivities, and has been the wrong person to represent the FSF for quite some time.
If the plane has a bird strike and has to ditch in the Hudson, they don't want you to miss announcements because you're busy flinging Angry Birds. It's not about the electronics, it's about them having your attention during the two parts of flight where all the crashes happen.
As someone whose father was a pilot, that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard; if something happens that is important enough, trust me, you'll notice, big time. Foreign Object Damage, for example, if a blade lets loose from the jet engine, will sound like someone set off a bomb on the wing (don't worry, most jet engines these days are designed to contain several blades failing.) And trust me, your flight attendants will make it reaaaaaaally damn clear if they need you to do something, and you'll notice everyone around you, well, doing it.
They don't want your device interfering with instruments during takeoff and especially landing if ILS is in use (now high-accuracy GPS landing systems are becoming more prevalent), and the rule was the best solution they had to "do electronic devices interfere with plane instruments?" You can't test every device out there, even if you only had to test a dozen instruments, and there are thousands of different avionics packages in hundreds of different planes out there. So the easiest assumption is, when hundreds of lives are at stake: turn off the cell phones, keep the portable devices off, etc. Keep in mind that with GPS, the signal from the satellites is about fifty watts, making for incredibly low signal, so even modern gear could be affected what seems like very low leakage by your music player.
My father and I tried an experiment once - back in the late 90's, we fired up an ultraportable laptop with jeppesen data on it while we were on the ground. The damn thing was like an RF bomb. It caused noticeable interference with the radios, the VOR went a little wonky, and the stormscope interpreted some RF noise from the laptop as lightning strikes (noise on the stormscopes is actually fairly common, but the laptop had a clear effect.) Guess what? Being off-course (VOR) has fuel implications, traffic avoidance implications, etc. Yes, pilots are supposed to check and cross-reference stuff (in fact, much of the busy work a pilot or copilot did pre-GPS-everywhere...was checking one navigation system against another...ADF vs VOR vs GPS vs LORAN), but the rule in aviation is to minimize ANY problems, because they have a nasty habit of snowballing. Aviation disaster reports are full of "this little thing wasn't working, and so-and-so didn't repair ____ quite right, and..."
They always had a 5GB Cap
It's a weird sort of cap. Once you hit it, they throttle your connection to stupidly slow speeds.
Which is funny, since on my "4G" phone in Boston, most of the time I'm lucky to get 10-20KB/sec because all the backhauls are grossly underspec'd.
In Davis Square in Somerville, I'll get several megabits a second. In Roslindale (Boston)? I'm lucky to break 100kbit, yet my phone proudly displays a "4G" icon and full signal strength.
I'm not surprised either. EA's Battlefield 2 featured soldiers who were very obviously Chinese and generic "arab".
Deploy Juniper products where you can. Commit confirmed alone will help keep you sane.
You mean the firewall vendor that can't even get passive FTP right?
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=juniper+FTP+ALG
The recorder has pingers in it, and even if they go dead, sidescan sonar makes it little more than a matter of time.
in order to promote exploration, commerce, science and United States preeminence in space
Translation: "to restart the space race, bring in jobs to my home state, and billions of dollars in spending to defense contractors."
All that talk about not being evil is all fine and dandy. But how come Android does not have a decent off line map application?
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Android has several, including osmand.
As for your complaints about Google Maps not having an offline mode and whining about a cabal between Google and the carriers - on Android, it caches map data which is now vector-based, not prerendered tiles. They were waiting for device processors speeds and 3D abilities to become suitable. If you travel in the same area again, data from the cache is used. You can scroll around an area you intend to travel, too, to preload the data.
Newsflash: carriers, like power, gas, and water companies - are most interested in conservation, because it means more customers on the same infrastructure.
Ted Dziuba is a co-founder of Milo.com
So? I don't know about you, but most founders of tech companies knew just enough to bang out enough to show someone to get funding, and then real professional programmers are hired.
I agree with the OP. The original article is whiny and amounts to "my NASCAR racer didn't work very well in the Maine Forest Rally." Among other things, I'm wondering why the hell he didn't just download a copy of Virtualbox and plop a Linux installation on it.
Years ago, a friend had a 5 minute long conversation about how cops were incredible assholes, speeding tickets were just revenue collection (which they are), etc. Shortly after the conversation ended, he got pulled over for speeding, and the cop walked up, said hello, and asked him if he'd like to continue the conversation. He'd been chatting with the (bored) cop.
Every single year, OSX loses the Pwn2Own competition first. Windows and Linux always go down on the same day.
Perhaps because everyone wants the Mac and focuses the most intensely? Desirability in a hacking contest with local network access != real world security exposure.
In my decade+ IT career, I've never seen a Mac rooted or infected with a virus beyond a Office macro. Curious, no?
Also curious that I've seen Linux boxes routinely rooted (usually by IRC-bot-seeking scriptkiddies) and Window machines infected with spyware at an average of around 1 a week out of a population of about 75-100.
I was actually thinking it's a false dillema, starting with the premise that "national security is the highest priority." Sure as hell isn't for me. I just want a functioning public transit system, power, running water, and law and order in my community. Funny how our state got slammed with record levels of snow, and the National Guard couldn't help out...because they're deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Funny how funding for social spending has dried up and all the teenagers in my community are now running around shooting each other (and innocent bystanders) because they have no education, no job, no future. The only people that seem concerned about national security are the people paid to do so or the people who otherwise benefit from such efforts and its rhetoric.
the exchange, once a monopoly, will deliver record speed and stable trading in order to fight back against the fast erosion of its dominant marketshare by specialist electronic rivals
The issue facing markets isn't that. It's algorithmic trading:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Algorithmic_trading#Issues_and_developments
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash
10GbE ethernet is really very nice.
Too bad you can't really buy it, and it's insanely expensive, with per-port costs in the hundreds of dollars range. Lots of choices for adapters (which are also insanely expensive)....but I went looking for a 10GbE switch for our small-ish server room for some of our higher bandwidth systems that easily saturate gigabit ethernet...and came up very short in terms of selection. The vast majority of the market consists of switches with 1-2 10GbE uplink ports. That's slightly useful for some situations (for, say, a backup server with a lot of bandwidth, or linking to a main backbone), but not so useful if you want to link up a whole bunch of systems.
However, my main objection: you don't get to see this information in the marketplace, so you can't make a purchase decision based on it...and worse, you can't *control* what access a program gets. For example, a lot of programs request "coarse" location information, which is enough to tell where you are within a few blocks. I don't want my backgammon program to know my location, and I wish I had the ability to tell the Android OS "no, that's not OK".
It's an all-or-nothing approach that leaves me often feeling like my arm is twisted into accepting the app, often because there are no alternatives for the functionality I want...
Many cities use snow melters to deal with snow; that's basically the same thing. I really wonder why environmentalists aren't up in arms about it; the snow melters can burn hundreds of gallons of fuel an hour, which is more fuel than it takes to a heat a house for a month.
Frankly, I've used the stock firmware on a number of Android devices (started with a G1, currently have an HTC Vision, T-Mobile's G2) and I wouldn't go back to the carrier-provided OS if you paid me
I've got a G2 as well. I don't suppose you realized that all the bugs I'm talking about apply to your device?
Or that the G2 has the most stock, unmolested Android installation of any phone/carrier save maybe the Nexus S?
It's been my universal experience that community hardware ROMs tend to suck, and worse, the community usually isn't honest and upfront about all the problems; it's only after you install, find a slew of problems, and start googling that you find all the email and forum threads with dozens of "me too"s and no response from developers. I installed Cyanogen 6.1.1 on my Android phone, and it turns out there are a slew of issues that were reported in the 6.1 release candidates that "cyanogen" and his buddies just never could be pissed to fix before final release OR the .1.1 update that followed. It doesn't support hidden SSIDs, when the stock ROM does just fine. It also no longer supports sleeping with WiFi; if the phone goes into sleep mode, you have to cycle WiFi on and off again. Worse, wifi goes dead in a way that doesn't trigger the normal switchover to cellular data, which REALLY sucks if you're using something like Google Voice for texts and phone calls - you simply will not get the calls, missed call notification, or text messages. The sensitivity of the touch screen changed such that you now have to hold the phone to use the screen (ie, you can't tap something on the screen while it sits on your desk). All these issues have been reported in the forums and had bug reports filed, and they're sitting, untouched.
Another example: the WRT-610N. Supported by one of the alternative ROMs for access points. Trouble is: performance sucked compared to the stock drivers, it would hang about every 18-24 hours, and so on. Lots of impressive features, but utter Fail when it came to basic reliability.
The answer to this question is incredibly simple. Backups. If you really don't trust your sysadmin, or simply want to audit them, there are lots of options, like having the backup software email backup reports to both the sysadmin and the executive director. Store them off-site with your chairperson or executive director. Or hire a company like Iron Mountain, where everything is audited, access is controlled, and only certain people are allowed to request tapes outside of the normal rotations.
Also: http://www.deir.qld.gov.au/workplace/publications/alerts/alloy_cylinders/index.htm And if you walk into any dive store, you'll find the filling station includes a large tub. That tub is reinforced and designed to take some of the force of a tank exploding.
Safety "burst" discs are built into the regulator of the cylinders so that if over pressurization occurs they rupture. The results are frightening and embarrassing but its only air and not shrapnel since the cylinder remains intact.
Ask a dive instructor who is old enough, and they'll tell you about The Time I Saw a Burst Disc Retention Cage Shoot Through The Side Of Someone's Trunk And Through The Car Next To It.
Basically, the "cage" that "catches" the burst disc often is corroded or otherwise fails from the force of the burst disk hitting it with a couple hundred pounds of force. They break free and usually make it through at least two pieces of sheet metal before coming to a stop.
Also, burst disks are not 100% reliable, nor are the correct disks always installed. And yes, SCUBA tanks DO fail- usually when being filled, and they shatter. That's why scuba shops only re-fill tanks while they sit in containment vessels (the vessels also hold water, which helps with the heat from adiabatic compression.)
For those who are not into car repair et al, Audi used hydraulic pressure accumulators for power brake assist. It's a great system, particularly for turbocharged cars, which spend a considerable amount of time in normal driving with low or no manifold vacuum (which is created by the pistons trying to draw air past a restriction, aka, the throttle vane. That big round thing your brake master cylinder comes out of? That's the vacuum servo. It uses surface area to multiply force from the vacuum.) Citroen used the same idea to power the extensive hydraulics used in their famous suspension systems. Mercedes did as well for their cars which had hydraulic power windows (!!), door-closers, and suspensions. Nowadays, the idea of hydraulic assist has largely gone by the wayside, with auxiliary electric vacuum pumps used where necessary. It's a shame, because the hydraulic system had a HUGE amount of reserve; you could pump the pedal hard almost thirty times.
The reservoirs are lovingly nicknamed "the bomb" by enthusiasts and owners of mid-80s-to-early-90's Audis, strictly on appearance; they look sort of like a large-ish cartoon bomb. I have NEVER heard of one exploding or failing (in terms of the pressure vessel, say, by cracking) in any way, and they've been in use for almost thirty years.
The way they DO fail, very predictably, is via the internal bladder that separates the nitrogen charge from the hydraulic fluid. Eventually the bladder fails, or the nitrogen simply diffuses through the bladder. Also, hydraulic systems are pretty horribly unreliable; with age, everything rubber fails eventually. Citroen did a pretty good job of proving that too, but on Audis, pretty much all the hydraulic hoses eventually fail. The hazard, in this case, is that when this system fails, it'll dump gallons of very slippery hydraulic fluid all over the road. If you're lucky, it won't also spray it all over, say, your hot exhaust. Atomized oil is pretty damn flammable.
Another danger: with the Audi system, all you had to do was pump the brake pedal until it was hard, and the system was safe to work on. This system would involve higher pressures and larger quantities of fluid...and it would become a real danger for anyone working on the car to do so with the system charged, as fluid over a certain pressure will either break skin or worse. I imagine they'll develop an easy way to discharge it, but people are still idiots.
The thing is also going to be a total bitch in a fire; I'm sure they'll put a pressure relief on the nitrogen side, but even then, you've got 10-15 gallons of flammable oil to deal with.
I really don't see Chrysler having any incentive to make the thing more durable than Audi/VW/Citroen did. It'll be made so it lasts about 60-70K, and then you'll be looking at replacing a huge, high-pressure tank. Expect the hilarity 3-4 years from whenever they go on sale, probably sooner.
, I'd say they're probably more secular than the US in reality,
They have complete freedom of religion
Riiiight. Pay no attention to the fact that TWO THIRDS of ultra-orthodox men live on welfare and don't work (and amongst the women, 50% don't work, whereas 25% in general Israeli population don't.) If you elect to go into such studies, the government gives you automatic welfare AND excuses you from military service (where it is ordinarily compulsory) AND gives you a complete tax break.
Did I mention that these ultra-orthodox freeloaders are causing most of the upheaval and supporting hard-line policies? And multiplying like rabbits, marrying young and having huge families?
If that's "Secular", then I guess you'd be OK with the federal government giving welfare to people who decide to become ultra-right-wing Christians?
Android users: use KeepassDroid for storing your passwords in a keepass database, and then randomize your important accounts.
Now all you need to remember is one good password. When you tap on an entry after decryption, keepassdroid puts a notification item up, that when activated, pastes the password in your clipboard for pasting into nearly any app or web page. It does smart things like clear the clipboard after a delay, etc.
You can combine it with Dropbox for unified password management on all platforms; just use a 1.x database if you have a Mac, because KeepassX doesn't "do" v2.x databases, for some reason.