Maybe they're trying to eliminate terrified support calls "help help help some virus called DHCP is changing my dns servers just like the one I read about on the news help help help"
Allowing the infected computers to fail is probably best. They'll stop working, then get replaced or cleaned up. How is that bad?
Maybe the US govt doesn't want them to be cleaned up because the us govt is involved in them, somehow.
Note I'm not completely tinfoil hat here. I'm not suggesting that the govt wrote the virus or infected the computers. I'm merely suggesting this MIGHT be something like the syphilis experiments done on minorities decades ago... leave them infected, watch carefully, see what happens... Obviously a packet sniffer on the incoming DNS traffic tells you how many there are, you can generate all kinds of interesting graphs and studies and reports... You also have at least one pretty strong data point on security update habits, because they were not updated when infected. I would imagine some interesting data is being generated that would be eliminated if the "experiment" were terminated early.
Agreed, there's not much out there in Android-land as good as Skyrim or Civilization or the obscure hex-based military strategy games I like. However the PSVita games aren't that good and cost just as much.
So... Serious gaming time is at the PC with the fantastic monitor and video card and great games at a fair price, etc. Skyrim, and I'm almost embarrassed to admit it, the free star trek online.
Walking around goofing off gaming time is the phone. I like the "age of conquest" basically RISK series of games.
The psvita would be great for those in between times... you know, the times that don't exist. Why if I had a psvita the perfect time to use it would be... um...
Yes, you can get a $15 one-time discount on a single purchase from a highly questionable website in exchange for being registered to a pay service at the price of $16 / month. Sounds like you've found a real winner right there!
Caffeine pills. nodoz and friends. I used them to wean myself off caffeinated energy drinks without a headache. Its been awhile but I used a spreadsheet and I distinctly remember how much of a PITA it was to chop nodoz smaller than 1/4 size so I went for 1/2 pill intervals. I recall the process took a couple days.
Psychological addiction was unaffected of course. Sit at computer, sip energy drink, right?
What's to keep your average marker-sniffing high school student from cracking these open and going to town (and then to the hospital)?
A fatal dose would cost about "three hundred" or so dollars and ripping all the canisters apart would take hours, I suppose. And probably more mechanical skill that your average stimulant addict.
Probably a "easier" way to poison someone, since foul play is expected if they find your blood full of rat poison, but if there's so much caffeine in your blood that its crystallized (slight exaggeration) then they'll just shrug their shoulders and say "I saw this on Oprah; kids these days; too bad"
also bringing back the gamers lost to the likes of Android and IOS Devices
LOL. The good news is, you've got a joystick. The bad news is, the games cost $40 instead of 99 cents. Couldn't be more "sony" of a product, especially the non-usb usb cable. How sony of them.
Some nosql "db" support 256 bit keys and everyone knows filesystems can only support 8.3 filenames, so at 8 characters of 7 bit ascii thats only something like 56 bits. If only microsoft had a filesystem supporting longer filenames... maybe next decade.
(note I'm intentionally avoiding the idea of a 256 directory deep filesystem, each directory containing a subdirectory 0 or 1, because that is just... illness)
For the record, I have no fucking clue how to ride a horse or to even begin to deal with them. Have some relatives that do, but I suspect that people that can ride a horse is going to be a pretty small percentage.
My limited heresay knowledge of horse riding while mixing the metaphors a bit is its very much like "learning to be an airplane pilot" in that straight and level in good conditions in an area you already know without too many others around and no distractions is silly easy, but when times get tough you'll get kicked in the nads when you're least expecting it, and learning how to avoid that situation and/or how to survive that situation is where all the training time is spent.
Unlike cars where you throw people into them and the fatality rate is a bathtub curve, with airplanes and horses you toss people on and the fatality rate is some kind of weird long tail power distribution.
Hmm. Could be, but all cars are kinda expensive. Two theoretical conversations:
"Hey World, Look at Me In My New Red Vette" "ha ha your dashboard rattles" "Fing car companies I hate them all... (rage)"
"Hey World, Look at Me I Drove to Work in My Commuter Car, oh and I noticed the dash rattles a little" "OK everyone golf clap for vlm, here's your participation trophy now get the F into the building and get to work"
Great. Now you have a number which is meaningless without the dealer's big book of trade secrets.
Even my cheapie code reader has a # to text converter in it so it directly reads out in English text "o2 sensor fail" or whatever on any GM model. And this was just a midrange scan tool, I'm sure the really fancy ones are even more detailed. If you have something really obscure you might have to google or borrow the chilton book from the public library. The internet's been around for a long time... use it.
Sometimes you get weird ones like "crankshaft position indicator fail" which is a bit tricky for a car with no crankshaft position indicator... that means it detected a misfire due to wet/damaged/old spark plug wires.
In a world where the DVD and BR encryption code can't be kept secret, ODB-II codes can't be kept secret either.
Once they started doing SUVs and minivans, which were nothing but re-badged Chevys, it was clear that they were merely a duplicate division so getting rid of them was easy.
The only "real saturns" were the S series made in spring hill. To the best of my knowledge everything else was somebody elses car, rebadged. They had several rebadged mid sized cars too, seems like they rotated thru them every two years or so toward the end. I donno about the minivan, to the best of my memory they tried rebadging everything but trucks and minivans, but in their death throes maybe they offered a minivan for a short period of time.
1) Led by the US = megacorps have purchased both political parties so its basically megacorp-net. Expect lots of censorship and control focused around maximizing profits.
2) Led by the UN = most of the UN members are crooks, dictators, religious extremists, military leaders who killed the civilian leaders to gain control, basically the scum of the non-business society so its basically dictator-net. Expect lots of censorship and control around killing all dissenters and forcing one lunatic religions beliefs upon people of other lunatic religious beliefs (or non-beliefs)
you can do it with robots, and so there's no way you'd be able to convince any funding bodies to fund a manned mission
Ask your friends in engineering, we'll find a way. Probably you're right, dozens (hundreds?) of little RC cars with C4 and geophones driving everywhere, but you're gonna need a RC car mechanic back at the garage to maintain the cars, replacing wheel bearings if nothing else, and may as well make that dude a geologist too...
But anything short of that can be managed and is managed every day. So why do you think the server would ever be unavailable?
Two way street. Your side is up, using lots of funds from your $10K invoices and cloud providers and disaster recovery sites and offsite tape backups. Thats nice.
THEIR side, however, is not up. The residential cablemodem of the work-at-home dude or the contractor. Their ultra cut rate DSL provider who only gives NAT addresses. Their traveling salesweasel using an insane hotel network that doesn't pass anything but plaintext port 80 "for your protection". Their salesweasel trying, for some unimaginable reason, to demo the latest commercial from inside an editor instead of using a saved.avi format output while trying to tether over his cellphone. They paid $10K to use it "legally" instead of getting the superior free version from pirate bay which would have worked perfectly in these situations.
None of the GM divisions have been tops for initial quality
With the exception of the now defunct Saturn. I'm convinced they gave Saturn the axe because it made all the other divisions look bad. Love my indestructible Saturn commuter car...
is the fact that most new cars are very difficult for the owner to repair themselves, given that many are highly integrated with computer systems. Shade-tree mechanics are going to disappear.
Tired meme. I've been hearing continuously and forcefully since I started helping my dad change the oil on his car... in the 80s... Let it die.
The funniest part is people going on and on about how expensive ODB-II scanner are... first of all yes in 1998 they were thousands of dollars, but I bought one half a decade or so ago, pretty full featured too, for something like 3 tanks of gas (and I drive a small car, for a SUV its probably more like one tank). Seriously, they cost less than an old fashioned PDA, figure less than a hundred bucks and you're good.
Secondly autozone will loan you one in exchange for a drivers license with the assumption that whatever you need to replace, you'll buy from them upon return, so if you can push-pull-drag the thing to the lot if it barely runs at all, or have one friend in the whole world who will give you a lift, its free.
Thirdly most failure modes don't require a scanner unless you're an idiot. Battery is dead, no lights no start no voltage, I'm not stupid enough to scan it, I put in a new battery. Same for coolant leaks, oil leaks, cracked hoses, suspension/tire/brake probs, blah blah blah. You do need a scanner for some more obscure emissions problems. If you are stupid and/or don't know how to google, sometimes the only way to test a sensor is a scanner.. a scanner is the Fastest way, thats how I figured out my 12 year old O2 sensor had gone out. If the rusty 5 year old muffler rattles when you floor it, only a idiot hooks up a scanner instead of replacing the rusted out muffler. Brakes make horrific scraping sound? I don't think a scanner helps you figure out the brake pads are toast (and after that scraping, the disks too)
Those stats could reflect people who purchased cars but just use them less; eg: more car owners are biking, walking and using public transportation in effect to rising gas prices.
The unemployment stats are irrelevant because they are fudged for political reasons. However no one has fudged the civilian job market participation stats (total number of people with wage income aka W-2 and contractor 1099 receivers), and several millions fewer people are employed now, therefore they don't drive to work.
I can verify that a couple times a week for 7 years I've been driving the exact same route home at rush hour and I've shaved about 15 minutes off my average commute. For years I used to rarely get home before 6pm, and now I rarely get home later than 5:45. Until I get downsized too, its all good for me because I don't see sitting in stop and go traffic as the peak of my hierarchy of needs like some idiots do (some morons see traffic jams as a kind of belonging and acceptance thing, where they're all in it together)
I really didn't care much about my commuter car, as long as it passes smog check and gets me to work cheaply in stop and go traffic, I just don't care. The plastic dash parts rattle together when its below 10 degrees (F) out. Also the clearcoat is failing on the non-functional spoiler after only 14 years of exposure. Somehow I got a bit of scotch tape on the instrument cluster and I can see everything OK it just looks a little dirty. Maybe I should, but I Just Don't Care.
The caddy and vette buyers believe they're getting the cream of the crop, so they scream in agony if there is a speck of dust in the car. Thats a different type of bias. I know for a fact that caddy and vette complaint rates are thru the roof. They are almost certainly "about as good" as my car, those brands just attract whiners, therefore you hear more whining.
I suspect you're seeing something of the sort in this story. If you corrected for the demographics of the buyers the difference would probably disappear.
The third reason why you see the "problem" is I'm sure mitsu spent more money on advertising than eagle, obviously advertising supported media is going to do their best to claim the mitsu is better. The car market is about as bad as the video game "magazine and website" market this way. The review score is a direct simple function of advertising budget, nothing more.
AP reports that global competition is squeezing lemons out of the market
Wrong. I can't remember the last time I saw a TV commercial pimping the reliability of a car. Then again I don't watch much TV. The cause is ever more stringent emissions testing.
Whats driving out bad cars is aside from purely cosmetic issues its almost impossible to have a mechanical problem yet pass the "smog check" tests and get/renew license plates. They've been getting dramatically more stringent where I live. They use to wave anything thru with a warm engine and no current codes regardless of test status. As long as it "runs", even just for 5 minutes, just clear the codes in the DMV parking lot if necessary and you used to be all good. Now, until the 05 model year you are only allowed 2 test fails and 05 and newer you are only allowed one test fail, in addition to the previous no failed codes. It takes "about a week" or "half a tank of gas" to pass the evap test so basically you need completely perfectly flawless operation for a week or so in order to pass.
I had some problems last time because my thermostat was failing so it was just a little too cold for the computer to be satisfied therefore it refused to run the catconv test and the egr test and I believe one other test, leading to a fail, although I had no codes. Would have passed in '10, failed in '11 due to bad test results.
It's all meaningless anti-environmental political grandstanding BS because my 30 MPG car, even if horrifically detuned would still pollute less than half what a sloburban or a tiny manhood compensator pickup truck would at perfect tune. If they cared about the environment etc then my car would auto-pass without any testing... I could pour crankcase oil directly into the exhaust to make a smoke screen and still be cleaner than any diesel truck I've seen.
The point of this is you can't drive a car with license plates in my state unless its basically in perfect mechanical condition. Or if it isn't, you've got less than two years until your plates are (permanently?) pulled. Value engineering has finally figured out how to get 99.9% of cars to pass within the manufacturers guarantee period so the dealer doesn't go bankrupt on repairs, but they haven't figured out how to make them fall apart the very next year after the guarantee expires. Give them time, they'll figure it out eventually.
Maybe they figure with crude over $100/barrel, unemployment 25%, inflation 10%, collapse of the EU, etc, that no one will be flying, so they're planning to install prairie schooner scanners and horse wagon scanners.
So effectively, is this whole hullabaloo a "non issue" in the sense it's self-correcting anyway, as we run out of oil?
Yes, but from a political standpoint never let a good crisis go to waste. We have to find a way to get higher taxes and a smaller middle class and richer rich people and fewer civil rights outta this, somehow. The funny part is watching the little quislings supporting it thinking they're going to get a pat on the head and a nice doggie biscuit, instead of just getting screwed like everyone else.
Even a single link in support of the rant would have been nice.
I think he was intentionally making a point that The Heartland Institute is so over the top loony that reporting the truth makes the report look like a disregardable parody.
Look at HP and pretexting psuedo-scandal. Its all a big "eh" who cares, right up there with speeding on the highway or a journalist violating a NDA to leak a story. Journalistic ethics is an oxymoron so thats not even open to discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they're trying to eliminate terrified support calls "help help help some virus called DHCP is changing my dns servers just like the one I read about on the news help help help"
Allowing the infected computers to fail is probably best. They'll stop working, then get replaced or cleaned up. How is that bad?
Maybe the US govt doesn't want them to be cleaned up because the us govt is involved in them, somehow.
Note I'm not completely tinfoil hat here. I'm not suggesting that the govt wrote the virus or infected the computers. I'm merely suggesting this MIGHT be something like the syphilis experiments done on minorities decades ago... leave them infected, watch carefully, see what happens... Obviously a packet sniffer on the incoming DNS traffic tells you how many there are, you can generate all kinds of interesting graphs and studies and reports... You also have at least one pretty strong data point on security update habits, because they were not updated when infected. I would imagine some interesting data is being generated that would be eliminated if the "experiment" were terminated early.
Agreed, there's not much out there in Android-land as good as Skyrim or Civilization or the obscure hex-based military strategy games I like. However the PSVita games aren't that good and cost just as much.
So... Serious gaming time is at the PC with the fantastic monitor and video card and great games at a fair price, etc. Skyrim, and I'm almost embarrassed to admit it, the free star trek online.
Walking around goofing off gaming time is the phone. I like the "age of conquest" basically RISK series of games.
The psvita would be great for those in between times... you know, the times that don't exist. Why if I had a psvita the perfect time to use it would be ... um ...
Yes, you can get a $15 one-time discount on a single purchase from a highly questionable website in exchange for being registered to a pay service at the price of $16 / month. Sounds like you've found a real winner right there!
See? A sony product.
Caffeine pills. nodoz and friends. I used them to wean myself off caffeinated energy drinks without a headache. Its been awhile but I used a spreadsheet and I distinctly remember how much of a PITA it was to chop nodoz smaller than 1/4 size so I went for 1/2 pill intervals. I recall the process took a couple days.
Psychological addiction was unaffected of course. Sit at computer, sip energy drink, right?
Next thing you know, they'll be snorting coke!
I'm sure they'll be banned for that reason. Cops/security guard/schoolteachers can't tell at a glance what has been reloaded into the canisters.
What's to keep your average marker-sniffing high school student from cracking these open and going to town (and then to the hospital)?
A fatal dose would cost about "three hundred" or so dollars and ripping all the canisters apart would take hours, I suppose. And probably more mechanical skill that your average stimulant addict.
Probably a "easier" way to poison someone, since foul play is expected if they find your blood full of rat poison, but if there's so much caffeine in your blood that its crystallized (slight exaggeration) then they'll just shrug their shoulders and say "I saw this on Oprah; kids these days; too bad"
also bringing back the gamers lost to the likes of Android and IOS Devices
LOL. The good news is, you've got a joystick. The bad news is, the games cost $40 instead of 99 cents. Couldn't be more "sony" of a product, especially the non-usb usb cable. How sony of them.
Some nosql "db" support 256 bit keys and everyone knows filesystems can only support 8.3 filenames, so at 8 characters of 7 bit ascii thats only something like 56 bits. If only microsoft had a filesystem supporting longer filenames... maybe next decade.
(note I'm intentionally avoiding the idea of a 256 directory deep filesystem, each directory containing a subdirectory 0 or 1, because that is just ... illness)
For the record, I have no fucking clue how to ride a horse or to even begin to deal with them. Have some relatives that do, but I suspect that people that can ride a horse is going to be a pretty small percentage.
My limited heresay knowledge of horse riding while mixing the metaphors a bit is its very much like "learning to be an airplane pilot" in that straight and level in good conditions in an area you already know without too many others around and no distractions is silly easy, but when times get tough you'll get kicked in the nads when you're least expecting it, and learning how to avoid that situation and/or how to survive that situation is where all the training time is spent.
Unlike cars where you throw people into them and the fatality rate is a bathtub curve, with airplanes and horses you toss people on and the fatality rate is some kind of weird long tail power distribution.
Hmm. Could be, but all cars are kinda expensive. Two theoretical conversations:
"Hey World, Look at Me In My New Red Vette" "ha ha your dashboard rattles" "Fing car companies I hate them all ... (rage)"
"Hey World, Look at Me I Drove to Work in My Commuter Car, oh and I noticed the dash rattles a little" "OK everyone golf clap for vlm, here's your participation trophy now get the F into the building and get to work"
Great. Now you have a number which is meaningless without the dealer's big book of trade secrets.
Even my cheapie code reader has a # to text converter in it so it directly reads out in English text "o2 sensor fail" or whatever on any GM model. And this was just a midrange scan tool, I'm sure the really fancy ones are even more detailed. If you have something really obscure you might have to google or borrow the chilton book from the public library. The internet's been around for a long time... use it.
Sometimes you get weird ones like "crankshaft position indicator fail" which is a bit tricky for a car with no crankshaft position indicator... that means it detected a misfire due to wet/damaged/old spark plug wires.
In a world where the DVD and BR encryption code can't be kept secret, ODB-II codes can't be kept secret either.
Once they started doing SUVs and minivans, which were nothing but re-badged Chevys, it was clear that they were merely a duplicate division so getting rid of them was easy.
The only "real saturns" were the S series made in spring hill. To the best of my knowledge everything else was somebody elses car, rebadged. They had several rebadged mid sized cars too, seems like they rotated thru them every two years or so toward the end. I donno about the minivan, to the best of my memory they tried rebadging everything but trucks and minivans, but in their death throes maybe they offered a minivan for a short period of time.
Two bad choices:
1) Led by the US = megacorps have purchased both political parties so its basically megacorp-net. Expect lots of censorship and control focused around maximizing profits.
2) Led by the UN = most of the UN members are crooks, dictators, religious extremists, military leaders who killed the civilian leaders to gain control, basically the scum of the non-business society so its basically dictator-net. Expect lots of censorship and control around killing all dissenters and forcing one lunatic religions beliefs upon people of other lunatic religious beliefs (or non-beliefs)
you can do it with robots, and so there's no way you'd be able to convince any funding bodies to fund a manned mission
Ask your friends in engineering, we'll find a way. Probably you're right, dozens (hundreds?) of little RC cars with C4 and geophones driving everywhere, but you're gonna need a RC car mechanic back at the garage to maintain the cars, replacing wheel bearings if nothing else, and may as well make that dude a geologist too...
But anything short of that can be managed and is managed every day. So why do you think the server would ever be unavailable?
Two way street. Your side is up, using lots of funds from your $10K invoices and cloud providers and disaster recovery sites and offsite tape backups. Thats nice.
THEIR side, however, is not up. The residential cablemodem of the work-at-home dude or the contractor. Their ultra cut rate DSL provider who only gives NAT addresses. Their traveling salesweasel using an insane hotel network that doesn't pass anything but plaintext port 80 "for your protection". Their salesweasel trying, for some unimaginable reason, to demo the latest commercial from inside an editor instead of using a saved .avi format output while trying to tether over his cellphone. They paid $10K to use it "legally" instead of getting the superior free version from pirate bay which would have worked perfectly in these situations.
None of the GM divisions have been tops for initial quality
With the exception of the now defunct Saturn. I'm convinced they gave Saturn the axe because it made all the other divisions look bad. Love my indestructible Saturn commuter car...
is the fact that most new cars are very difficult for the owner to repair themselves, given that many are highly integrated with computer systems. Shade-tree mechanics are going to disappear.
Tired meme. I've been hearing continuously and forcefully since I started helping my dad change the oil on his car... in the 80s... Let it die.
The funniest part is people going on and on about how expensive ODB-II scanner are... first of all yes in 1998 they were thousands of dollars, but I bought one half a decade or so ago, pretty full featured too, for something like 3 tanks of gas (and I drive a small car, for a SUV its probably more like one tank). Seriously, they cost less than an old fashioned PDA, figure less than a hundred bucks and you're good.
Secondly autozone will loan you one in exchange for a drivers license with the assumption that whatever you need to replace, you'll buy from them upon return, so if you can push-pull-drag the thing to the lot if it barely runs at all, or have one friend in the whole world who will give you a lift, its free.
Thirdly most failure modes don't require a scanner unless you're an idiot. Battery is dead, no lights no start no voltage, I'm not stupid enough to scan it, I put in a new battery. Same for coolant leaks, oil leaks, cracked hoses, suspension/tire/brake probs, blah blah blah. You do need a scanner for some more obscure emissions problems. If you are stupid and/or don't know how to google, sometimes the only way to test a sensor is a scanner.. a scanner is the Fastest way, thats how I figured out my 12 year old O2 sensor had gone out. If the rusty 5 year old muffler rattles when you floor it, only a idiot hooks up a scanner instead of replacing the rusted out muffler. Brakes make horrific scraping sound? I don't think a scanner helps you figure out the brake pads are toast (and after that scraping, the disks too)
Those stats could reflect people who purchased cars but just use them less; eg: more car owners are biking, walking and using public transportation in effect to rising gas prices.
The unemployment stats are irrelevant because they are fudged for political reasons. However no one has fudged the civilian job market participation stats (total number of people with wage income aka W-2 and contractor 1099 receivers), and several millions fewer people are employed now, therefore they don't drive to work.
I can verify that a couple times a week for 7 years I've been driving the exact same route home at rush hour and I've shaved about 15 minutes off my average commute. For years I used to rarely get home before 6pm, and now I rarely get home later than 5:45. Until I get downsized too, its all good for me because I don't see sitting in stop and go traffic as the peak of my hierarchy of needs like some idiots do (some morons see traffic jams as a kind of belonging and acceptance thing, where they're all in it together)
Aside from bias there's also expectations.
I really didn't care much about my commuter car, as long as it passes smog check and gets me to work cheaply in stop and go traffic, I just don't care. The plastic dash parts rattle together when its below 10 degrees (F) out. Also the clearcoat is failing on the non-functional spoiler after only 14 years of exposure. Somehow I got a bit of scotch tape on the instrument cluster and I can see everything OK it just looks a little dirty. Maybe I should, but I Just Don't Care.
The caddy and vette buyers believe they're getting the cream of the crop, so they scream in agony if there is a speck of dust in the car. Thats a different type of bias. I know for a fact that caddy and vette complaint rates are thru the roof. They are almost certainly "about as good" as my car, those brands just attract whiners, therefore you hear more whining.
I suspect you're seeing something of the sort in this story. If you corrected for the demographics of the buyers the difference would probably disappear.
The third reason why you see the "problem" is I'm sure mitsu spent more money on advertising than eagle, obviously advertising supported media is going to do their best to claim the mitsu is better. The car market is about as bad as the video game "magazine and website" market this way. The review score is a direct simple function of advertising budget, nothing more.
AP reports that global competition is squeezing lemons out of the market
Wrong. I can't remember the last time I saw a TV commercial pimping the reliability of a car. Then again I don't watch much TV. The cause is ever more stringent emissions testing.
Whats driving out bad cars is aside from purely cosmetic issues its almost impossible to have a mechanical problem yet pass the "smog check" tests and get/renew license plates. They've been getting dramatically more stringent where I live. They use to wave anything thru with a warm engine and no current codes regardless of test status. As long as it "runs", even just for 5 minutes, just clear the codes in the DMV parking lot if necessary and you used to be all good. Now, until the 05 model year you are only allowed 2 test fails and 05 and newer you are only allowed one test fail, in addition to the previous no failed codes. It takes "about a week" or "half a tank of gas" to pass the evap test so basically you need completely perfectly flawless operation for a week or so in order to pass.
I had some problems last time because my thermostat was failing so it was just a little too cold for the computer to be satisfied therefore it refused to run the catconv test and the egr test and I believe one other test, leading to a fail, although I had no codes. Would have passed in '10, failed in '11 due to bad test results.
It's all meaningless anti-environmental political grandstanding BS because my 30 MPG car, even if horrifically detuned would still pollute less than half what a sloburban or a tiny manhood compensator pickup truck would at perfect tune. If they cared about the environment etc then my car would auto-pass without any testing ... I could pour crankcase oil directly into the exhaust to make a smoke screen and still be cleaner than any diesel truck I've seen.
The point of this is you can't drive a car with license plates in my state unless its basically in perfect mechanical condition. Or if it isn't, you've got less than two years until your plates are (permanently?) pulled. Value engineering has finally figured out how to get 99.9% of cars to pass within the manufacturers guarantee period so the dealer doesn't go bankrupt on repairs, but they haven't figured out how to make them fall apart the very next year after the guarantee expires. Give them time, they'll figure it out eventually.
Maybe they figure with crude over $100/barrel, unemployment 25%, inflation 10%, collapse of the EU, etc, that no one will be flying, so they're planning to install prairie schooner scanners and horse wagon scanners.
So effectively, is this whole hullabaloo a "non issue" in the sense it's self-correcting anyway, as we run out of oil?
Yes, but from a political standpoint never let a good crisis go to waste. We have to find a way to get higher taxes and a smaller middle class and richer rich people and fewer civil rights outta this, somehow. The funny part is watching the little quislings supporting it thinking they're going to get a pat on the head and a nice doggie biscuit, instead of just getting screwed like everyone else.
Even a single link in support of the rant would have been nice.
I think he was intentionally making a point that The Heartland Institute is so over the top loony that reporting the truth makes the report look like a disregardable parody.
Look at HP and pretexting psuedo-scandal. Its all a big "eh" who cares, right up there with speeding on the highway or a journalist violating a NDA to leak a story. Journalistic ethics is an oxymoron so thats not even open to discussion.