If you are concerned someone is going to "maliciously" divulge secret information to the public for no personal gain but the satisifcation of causing disruption? So what? I can live with that trade off. Its better than the treat whistlblowers as traitors we have now.
That would suggest that random government employees can exercise their personal moral judgment over what their country's allows to do. So, PRISM is illegal, disclosing it, assuming ti works like Snowden says it does, it's legitimate whistleblowing. However, tapping foreign leader's phones is completely legal and every country on Earth does it -- disclosing this serves no purpose, Snowden has disclosed it because he believes he's qualified to morally arbitrate which US programs should be secret and which shouldn't.
That's kinda the issue -- a crankish libertarian former Ars Technica poster/current Russian agent is effectively nominated himself as US national security declassifer in chief, regardless of what our elected representatives or anyone else who's legally been given that job has to say about it. It's illegal to spy on Americans but it's also illegal to leak stuff -- and leaking stuff that isn't illegal and doesn't really affect Americans serves no purpose but to hamstring US intelligence gathering and embarrass the US government. Which is why he works for Vladimir Putin now.
The business issues are complicated, I don't think it's a straightforward slam dunk.
Firstly, Fox would have to contend with the fact that Lucas would repudiate their cut, and they'd probably get zero marketing help from anybody -- all the original cast are presently on a contract with Disney for the next trilogy that probably precludes them even saying anything about a recut, let alone artistically endorsing it, which is what would be required. Studio never release a film twice, without having the director's stamp of approval on the re-release or certifying the the restoration process only adds new material and is as close to the director's intent as is possible. If no one is willing to vouch for the artistic legitimacy of the the theatrical cut, you're pretty much guaranteed to only have the die-hard fans as your audience.
The second issue is with the fans, as you say:
I didn't mention it but I was wondering how much new remastering work there would really have to be considering the special editions as you say, did a lot of it already.
Well, none of that work is part of the "theatrical" version either, how do we decide which work from the special editions qualifies as authentic to the theatrical version and which isn't? It's not so clear-cut -- I personally like a lot of the VFX changes in Empire, I think they're appropriate and they definitely support the story and are mostly unobtrusive, but all of them violate the theatrical version. The theatrical version, even in its pristine 1977-1980-1983 version had a LOT of bad VFX issues that the special edition cleaned up. Everybody hates the goofy Mos Eisley robots and Jabba's new palace, but the new shot of the Falcon blasting off? Or the fact that I can watch the asteroid belt chase without seeing any matte lines?
Settling these issues in a way that will mollify the fanboys gives studio executives nightmares -- I speak with some knowledge of this, and a lot of studio people see the "original version" crowd as a bunch of Comicon cranks who are pursuing an unrealistic platonic ideal version that probably never existed, and that any modification Fox might make may make the ornery tastemakers of the fan scene turn up their nose. The issue is a total minefield which it's just easier to avoid. A version can never be original "enough," and even the hint of inauthenticity will turn off the die-hards, which as I pointed out, are the only audience for this thing.
Studios always resolve this issue by calling their re-releases a "director's cut," but in this case they just can't do that.
Also a smaller nit: it's not clear that Fox has the right to recut the special edition or use any of the SE assets to create a different edit. Even if these elements exist, Fox almost certainly only has the right to distribute them under the condition they are not modified in any way. And they almost certainly don't have possession of the raw elements without new effects "overlaid".
1977 Lucas did, and wrote the script [imsdb.com] and made the film that way.
You can't go by the imsdb, it's just not authoritative. Notice that the script (such as it is) is portrayed as a "reading draft" and doesn't have scene numbers or any revision marks. Even if the script said it we have no idea what he actually shot that day, the editing is heroically saving his generally terrible setups throughout that sequence, and it's not clear what happens without the sound effects and the cutaways spelling it out.
Paramount did a great job, and continues to do a good job (COME ON DS9) with the Star Trek blu-rays.
On the other hand, the special director's edition of The Motion Picture is far superior to the theatrical cut, but the theatrical cut is the only one available on Blu ray.
There only needs to be one. It's just that no-one has yet made it fully in HD yet.
Nota bene:
The version of the film that you might have seen on television in the 1980s, or on VHS in the 80s or 90s, is not the theatrical edition either. Lucas made several subtle changes to the editing, color and particularly the sound mix of the trilogy throughout the 1980s. Every time the elements came out of the vault he redid something.
Frankly it's not clear if any of the 1977 theatrical source materials (the "intermediates" or the camera negatives) still exist. Lucas straight-up claims "the negatives were destroyed" in the process of creating the special edition, which is possible, but it would have been very careless and required him to go out of his way to destroy them. The "camera negatives" that most people refer to when they're talking about movie archival are the negative A/B rolls, which is the edited camera negative. It's almost impossible to re-edit a film from A/B rolls so it's never done, so either a film dupe is made of these, or the A/B rolls are transferred into some kind of HD digital workflow, which would certainly have been available around the time of the Special Edition.
Fox, being the distributor, would have certainly produced several intermediate, theatrical-grade elements -- you take the camera negatives and the printing company makes positive -> negative -> positive iterations as a part of integrating the sound track and blowing-up the final image to the theatrical aperture. The intermediate positive in that process, the "IP" or interpositive, will have all the original color correction ("color timing") and reframings Lucas did; contractually Lucasfilm had to hand over a "fine grain IP" to Fox, this is what used to appear in all the contracts, it's the key deliverable, it's what Fox made all the release prints out of. (Nowadays producers just deliver a DCP to their distributor.) So, it stands to reason Fox is in possession of an IP somewhere.
There's definitely an economic factor involved, they couldn't just transfer the IP, they'd probably have to do some restoration, and that's crazy expensive. Also there's no way they could release it with the 1977 Dolby Stereo mix, it would just sound too low-fi compared to people's expectations, they'd have to remix it into 5.1 or 7.1, and who knows if Fox would be able to obtain the rights to the source sound elements necessary to do this. I believe Lucasfilm retains physical possession of the sound elements for all the Star Wars films, but again as with the IP, Lucasfilm would have been required to deliver to Fox both a Dolby Stereo mix of the film, a stereo "M&E" or music and effects mix (for foreign countries to dub over with their native language), and stereo "stem" mixes, separate mixes of at least the dialogue, sound effects and music.
If they had just a film print of the theatrical, unfortunately this would probably not be economical to use. Even if the print itself was pristine and unscratched, there will be some color issues after all this time, and release prints have a relatively high contrast and this usually makes the transfers not good enough for sale. Also, again, the only audio on a release print will be the Dolby Stereo, and optical Dolby Stereo at that, which never transfers very well.
(I work in theatrical film post in Hollywood and have done some restoration work with films from the 1980s.)
Set your phone to automatically wipe if the wrong passcode is entered 10 times. (iPhones have this, I'm sure Android has a solution along these lines as well.)
The Sony "SVO-" line of VHS/SVHS VTRs were used throughout studio production in the 90s. At dear University we had SVO-5800s, and these could record and play back VHS and SVHS, they had a 9-Pin P2 remote control implementation for editing controllers and so they could be controlled from an MC. They also had a full time base corrector, VITC and LTC recorder, reader and decoder, and they could also be genlocked. They had I/Os on BNCs and XLRs.
At my public access station in the mid 90s we had Panasonic AG-7750s, which were similarly equipped, and could do insert/assemble edits out of the box. Fancier Panasonics had dynamic tracking and could shuttle/scan without rollbars.
If you have a better idea, feel free to go to Russia and try out your idea.
Basically his column is "I asked Putin this question because in the USA... (a few thousand words about how the USA spies on its citizens)."
It's not about Russia at all. And if Snowden were brave, he'd stand trial, instead of playing Putin's stool pigeon. Just think of it, Putin feeds and protects the most powerful voice for Internet freedom ever known, and can drop a dime on him at a moments notice.
I have the following: $600,000 loft (and appropriate decor/rooftop pool) BMW 328i 84 IMDb credits, and my crew has won three Oscars 2 dogs 2 iPhones 1 Macbook Air 2 MacPros (I also have a MacBook running ubuntu)
I am uncertain of the future of tech without Apple products. I just don't 'get' the obnoxious contrarianism of Android products. Or their enormous screens, or their uniformly poor OS upgrade and hardware support, or Google's completely obscure roadmap for Android.
The thing Apple is selling you, beside the hardware, is the complete integrated product. They take your money, they give you something that works, that's their sole "monetization" strategy. Unlike everyone else in the business, trying to suck you into their various creepy ad/clickstream/search front-running scams.
I won't even go into the Google tracking everything you do to, you know, "help" you.
This isn't the 1990s, competitive Apple products are always competitively priced. It's the feature packages on Apple kit that people get upset about.
My point is that we cannot say something is (or has been) compromised unless we have concrete evidence of the compromise in hand. We can't just say, in the abstract, "everything's compromised" simply on the basis of the assumption that all software is fatally flawed.
See, you're the sucker reading those government propaganda numbers. Everybody knows that "real corrected shadowstats" inflation has been running 20% a year since 2008. STOP OBUMMER'S DEBASEMENT! rON pAUL 20FREVVER!!!!
That it reacts fast is good. That the bug could be audited in the source, in public, is good.
We should remember that FLOSS reacted very quickly to the "revelation," but the bug itself has been sitting there for years, which isn't really supposed to happen.
It's nice we know how long it's been there, and can have all kinds of philosophical discussions about why the OpenSSL folks decided to write their own malloc.
Also OpenSSL was effectively a monoculture and just about every SSL-encrypted internet communication over the last two years has been compromised. OpenSSL has no competition at its core competency, so the team really has no motivation to deliver an iteratively better product, apart from their need to scratch an itch. FLOSS software projects tend not to operate in a competitive environment, where multiple OSS products are useful for the same thing and vie for placement. This is probably bad.
his point was that people need to see what they're giving to the government
People "see" it already, on their paystubs and on their 1040s.
What he wants is for tax collection -- not taxes themselves, just the way they're collected -- to be intentionally disruptive, so that people will attempt to lower rates and revenues not because they are high, per se, but just because the way they're collected causes economic harm.
No, you'd just have a bunch of big banks getting into tax financing, offering modest loans at reasonable interest rates(see fine print) to help people who didn't save for their bill.
The withholding system works because it causes the least economic distortion -- the more a tax "hurts," the more adverse an effect it has on day-to-day economic decisions, the more it's liable to cause people to make bad economic decisions, like saving huge lump sums in the bank instead of investing or consumption. A tax "hurting" might be good politics (for some people), but if it causes people to have irregular cash flow or makes it significantly harder for them to make planning decisions it will hurt economic growth.
If you want to talk overall economic health, taxation does not really impact it since all those tax dollars just go strait back into the economy anyway.
Ehhhhhhhh.. it's not that simple. The government can allocate wealth well or badly, it can waste a significant amount of money by overpaying, by giving a supplier more than the least they would be willing to accept -- classic economic rent. Suppliers win premium prices through lobbying.
It cuts both easy though, lobbying can cause the government to waste money, or cause the government to force everyone else to waste money, just as Intuit has basically carved out an entire industry for itself as the IRS's middleman, while if the IRS were to simply pre-fill people's returns itself most people would save a little bundle every year on tax prep.
Ironically, NASA has almost certainly killed more people with the space shuttle than have died due to ignition switches.
I haven't the slightest idea why they're going to NASA of all places for an engineering audit, whenever there's a shuttle accident it's always transpired that NASA has intractable compliance and engineering culture problems, and lack the capacity to properly validate a tricycle for safety, let alone a mass-produced motor vehicle. Their incompetence has literally cost the US a manned spaceflight program.
They may be taking a page from Jack in the Box, when JITB hired NASA to completely overhaul their procedures after the salmonella deaths. Given NASA's record it's a miracle JITB burgers didn't all subsequently carry Ebola.
She was the provost of Stanford University, she's got a huge rolodex in government and SillyCon Valley. She's also obviously got a big background in IR and particularly working with Russia and Africa, which are both huge growth markets for Internet companies.
Her biggest crime was not asking all the right questions, and didn't have to swag necessary to challenge Cheney or Rumsfeld, not that she was particularly motivated. She's proven to be a pretty bad administrator and manager, but she's going on the Board, not into management.
7.1 million sign ups out of over 300 million people for a "mandatory" participation program is truly pathetic regardless whether it is above or below what was expected.
Are you sure that's the right comparison? There are over 300 million people in the US, but you only have to apply for "Obamacare" if you don't have employer-provided health care, you aren't covered by your parents, you aren't qualified to draw on Medicare or Medicaid, and your obligation is waived for religious or moral reasons. This remainder only comes out to about 20-30 million.
Bullshit. Tesla has stated that the computer that controls the 17" and panel LCDs are completely separated from the important stuff in the car.
Hrm. The Tesla touchscreen give your instrumentation and feedback on powerplant performance, and it allows you to control the headlamps, doors, regenerative braking and hydraulics. I'm not clear on what kind of "complete separation" were talking about. If an attacker got into the touchscreen they probably wouldn't be able to brick the whole car, but if you lost the touchscreen while moving on the road you could be in a lot of trouble.
Hate to tell you, but touch screens have been a staple for fighter jets for a few days now,
Hate to tell you, but fighter pilots are trained professionals who spend years learning how to use their equipment in an efficient way that doesn't interfere with their flying of the plane.
Also, the obvious complexity of flying a supersonic $10e9 machine designed to blow stuff up notwithstanding, the problem domain of flying a fighter jet does not involve such things as traffic and obstacles, which is why we've had automatic pilots 60 years ago, but we're only barely beginning to have auto-driving cars.
Slashdot Mirror
That would suggest that random government employees can exercise their personal moral judgment over what their country's allows to do. So, PRISM is illegal, disclosing it, assuming ti works like Snowden says it does, it's legitimate whistleblowing. However, tapping foreign leader's phones is completely legal and every country on Earth does it -- disclosing this serves no purpose, Snowden has disclosed it because he believes he's qualified to morally arbitrate which US programs should be secret and which shouldn't.
That's kinda the issue -- a crankish libertarian former Ars Technica poster/current Russian agent is effectively nominated himself as US national security declassifer in chief, regardless of what our elected representatives or anyone else who's legally been given that job has to say about it. It's illegal to spy on Americans but it's also illegal to leak stuff -- and leaking stuff that isn't illegal and doesn't really affect Americans serves no purpose but to hamstring US intelligence gathering and embarrass the US government. Which is why he works for Vladimir Putin now.
$2B dollars actually is pretty good for that kind of force projection, delivering a couple cruise missiles beyond air defense can decide a war.
$1.1 trillion for a fighter program that hasn't been delivered yet and actually might not ever is rather different. The B-2 has a big bottom-line number but the development and maintenance programs are really where we get taken to the cleaners. You should smell a rat the moment you see the word "affordable" in a military mission patch.
The business issues are complicated, I don't think it's a straightforward slam dunk.
Firstly, Fox would have to contend with the fact that Lucas would repudiate their cut, and they'd probably get zero marketing help from anybody -- all the original cast are presently on a contract with Disney for the next trilogy that probably precludes them even saying anything about a recut, let alone artistically endorsing it, which is what would be required. Studio never release a film twice, without having the director's stamp of approval on the re-release or certifying the the restoration process only adds new material and is as close to the director's intent as is possible. If no one is willing to vouch for the artistic legitimacy of the the theatrical cut, you're pretty much guaranteed to only have the die-hard fans as your audience.
The second issue is with the fans, as you say:
Well, none of that work is part of the "theatrical" version either, how do we decide which work from the special editions qualifies as authentic to the theatrical version and which isn't? It's not so clear-cut -- I personally like a lot of the VFX changes in Empire, I think they're appropriate and they definitely support the story and are mostly unobtrusive, but all of them violate the theatrical version. The theatrical version, even in its pristine 1977-1980-1983 version had a LOT of bad VFX issues that the special edition cleaned up. Everybody hates the goofy Mos Eisley robots and Jabba's new palace, but the new shot of the Falcon blasting off? Or the fact that I can watch the asteroid belt chase without seeing any matte lines?
Settling these issues in a way that will mollify the fanboys gives studio executives nightmares -- I speak with some knowledge of this, and a lot of studio people see the "original version" crowd as a bunch of Comicon cranks who are pursuing an unrealistic platonic ideal version that probably never existed, and that any modification Fox might make may make the ornery tastemakers of the fan scene turn up their nose. The issue is a total minefield which it's just easier to avoid. A version can never be original "enough," and even the hint of inauthenticity will turn off the die-hards, which as I pointed out, are the only audience for this thing.
Studios always resolve this issue by calling their re-releases a "director's cut," but in this case they just can't do that.
Also a smaller nit: it's not clear that Fox has the right to recut the special edition or use any of the SE assets to create a different edit. Even if these elements exist, Fox almost certainly only has the right to distribute them under the condition they are not modified in any way. And they almost certainly don't have possession of the raw elements without new effects "overlaid".
You can't go by the imsdb, it's just not authoritative. Notice that the script (such as it is) is portrayed as a "reading draft" and doesn't have scene numbers or any revision marks. Even if the script said it we have no idea what he actually shot that day, the editing is heroically saving his generally terrible setups throughout that sequence, and it's not clear what happens without the sound effects and the cutaways spelling it out.
Paramount did a great job, and continues to do a good job (COME ON DS9) with the Star Trek blu-rays.
On the other hand, the special director's edition of The Motion Picture is far superior to the theatrical cut, but the theatrical cut is the only one available on Blu ray.
Nota bene:
The version of the film that you might have seen on television in the 1980s, or on VHS in the 80s or 90s, is not the theatrical edition either. Lucas made several subtle changes to the editing, color and particularly the sound mix of the trilogy throughout the 1980s. Every time the elements came out of the vault he redid something.
Frankly it's not clear if any of the 1977 theatrical source materials (the "intermediates" or the camera negatives) still exist. Lucas straight-up claims "the negatives were destroyed" in the process of creating the special edition, which is possible, but it would have been very careless and required him to go out of his way to destroy them. The "camera negatives" that most people refer to when they're talking about movie archival are the negative A/B rolls, which is the edited camera negative. It's almost impossible to re-edit a film from A/B rolls so it's never done, so either a film dupe is made of these, or the A/B rolls are transferred into some kind of HD digital workflow, which would certainly have been available around the time of the Special Edition.
Fox, being the distributor, would have certainly produced several intermediate, theatrical-grade elements -- you take the camera negatives and the printing company makes positive -> negative -> positive iterations as a part of integrating the sound track and blowing-up the final image to the theatrical aperture. The intermediate positive in that process, the "IP" or interpositive, will have all the original color correction ("color timing") and reframings Lucas did; contractually Lucasfilm had to hand over a "fine grain IP" to Fox, this is what used to appear in all the contracts, it's the key deliverable, it's what Fox made all the release prints out of. (Nowadays producers just deliver a DCP to their distributor.) So, it stands to reason Fox is in possession of an IP somewhere.
There's definitely an economic factor involved, they couldn't just transfer the IP, they'd probably have to do some restoration, and that's crazy expensive. Also there's no way they could release it with the 1977 Dolby Stereo mix, it would just sound too low-fi compared to people's expectations, they'd have to remix it into 5.1 or 7.1, and who knows if Fox would be able to obtain the rights to the source sound elements necessary to do this. I believe Lucasfilm retains physical possession of the sound elements for all the Star Wars films, but again as with the IP, Lucasfilm would have been required to deliver to Fox both a Dolby Stereo mix of the film, a stereo "M&E" or music and effects mix (for foreign countries to dub over with their native language), and stereo "stem" mixes, separate mixes of at least the dialogue, sound effects and music.
If they had just a film print of the theatrical, unfortunately this would probably not be economical to use. Even if the print itself was pristine and unscratched, there will be some color issues after all this time, and release prints have a relatively high contrast and this usually makes the transfers not good enough for sale. Also, again, the only audio on a release print will be the Dolby Stereo, and optical Dolby Stereo at that, which never transfers very well.
(I work in theatrical film post in Hollywood and have done some restoration work with films from the 1980s.)
Set your phone to automatically wipe if the wrong passcode is entered 10 times. (iPhones have this, I'm sure Android has a solution along these lines as well.)
The Sony "SVO-" line of VHS/SVHS VTRs were used throughout studio production in the 90s. At dear University we had SVO-5800s, and these could record and play back VHS and SVHS, they had a 9-Pin P2 remote control implementation for editing controllers and so they could be controlled from an MC. They also had a full time base corrector, VITC and LTC recorder, reader and decoder, and they could also be genlocked. They had I/Os on BNCs and XLRs.
At my public access station in the mid 90s we had Panasonic AG-7750s, which were similarly equipped, and could do insert/assemble edits out of the box. Fancier Panasonics had dynamic tracking and could shuttle/scan without rollbars.
No car with rear wheel fairings is a looker.
Basically his column is "I asked Putin this question because in the USA... (a few thousand words about how the USA spies on its citizens)."
It's not about Russia at all. And if Snowden were brave, he'd stand trial, instead of playing Putin's stool pigeon. Just think of it, Putin feeds and protects the most powerful voice for Internet freedom ever known, and can drop a dime on him at a moments notice.
Just throwing out this contrary case:
How well do the maps work when you don't have cell coverage in most cars? Just fine.
How well do the maps work when you don't have cell coverage with Apple? Not really at all.
Okay here we go
I have the following:
$600,000 loft (and appropriate decor/rooftop pool)
BMW 328i
84 IMDb credits, and my crew has won three Oscars
2 dogs
2 iPhones
1 Macbook Air
2 MacPros
(I also have a MacBook running ubuntu)
I am uncertain of the future of tech without Apple products.
I just don't 'get' the obnoxious contrarianism of Android products. Or their enormous screens, or their uniformly poor OS upgrade and hardware support, or Google's completely obscure roadmap for Android.
The thing Apple is selling you, beside the hardware, is the complete integrated product. They take your money, they give you something that works, that's their sole "monetization" strategy. Unlike everyone else in the business, trying to suck you into their various creepy ad/clickstream/search front-running scams.
I won't even go into the Google tracking everything you do to, you know, "help" you.
This isn't the 1990s, competitive Apple products are always competitively priced. It's the feature packages on Apple kit that people get upset about.
My point is that we cannot say something is (or has been) compromised unless we have concrete evidence of the compromise in hand. We can't just say, in the abstract, "everything's compromised" simply on the basis of the assumption that all software is fatally flawed.
See, you're the sucker reading those government propaganda numbers. Everybody knows that "real corrected shadowstats" inflation has been running 20% a year since 2008. STOP OBUMMER'S DEBASEMENT! rON pAUL 20FREVVER!!!!
Yeah that's the distinction. The point is that we noticed, and this *single* security hole has an enormous reach.
That it reacts fast is good. That the bug could be audited in the source, in public, is good.
We should remember that FLOSS reacted very quickly to the "revelation," but the bug itself has been sitting there for years, which isn't really supposed to happen.
It's nice we know how long it's been there, and can have all kinds of philosophical discussions about why the OpenSSL folks decided to write their own malloc.
Also OpenSSL was effectively a monoculture and just about every SSL-encrypted internet communication over the last two years has been compromised. OpenSSL has no competition at its core competency, so the team really has no motivation to deliver an iteratively better product, apart from their need to scratch an itch. FLOSS software projects tend not to operate in a competitive environment, where multiple OSS products are useful for the same thing and vie for placement. This is probably bad.
People "see" it already, on their paystubs and on their 1040s.
What he wants is for tax collection -- not taxes themselves, just the way they're collected -- to be intentionally disruptive, so that people will attempt to lower rates and revenues not because they are high, per se, but just because the way they're collected causes economic harm.
No, you'd just have a bunch of big banks getting into tax financing, offering modest loans at reasonable interest rates(see fine print) to help people who didn't save for their bill.
The withholding system works because it causes the least economic distortion -- the more a tax "hurts," the more adverse an effect it has on day-to-day economic decisions, the more it's liable to cause people to make bad economic decisions, like saving huge lump sums in the bank instead of investing or consumption. A tax "hurting" might be good politics (for some people), but if it causes people to have irregular cash flow or makes it significantly harder for them to make planning decisions it will hurt economic growth.
Ehhhhhhhh.. it's not that simple. The government can allocate wealth well or badly, it can waste a significant amount of money by overpaying, by giving a supplier more than the least they would be willing to accept -- classic economic rent. Suppliers win premium prices through lobbying.
It cuts both easy though, lobbying can cause the government to waste money, or cause the government to force everyone else to waste money, just as Intuit has basically carved out an entire industry for itself as the IRS's middleman, while if the IRS were to simply pre-fill people's returns itself most people would save a little bundle every year on tax prep.
Why don't you save it for your boss, smartass. Elon Musk is making you guys look like morons.
Ironically, NASA has almost certainly killed more people with the space shuttle than have died due to ignition switches.
I haven't the slightest idea why they're going to NASA of all places for an engineering audit, whenever there's a shuttle accident it's always transpired that NASA has intractable compliance and engineering culture problems, and lack the capacity to properly validate a tricycle for safety, let alone a mass-produced motor vehicle. Their incompetence has literally cost the US a manned spaceflight program.
They may be taking a page from Jack in the Box, when JITB hired NASA to completely overhaul their procedures after the salmonella deaths. Given NASA's record it's a miracle JITB burgers didn't all subsequently carry Ebola.
She was the provost of Stanford University, she's got a huge rolodex in government and SillyCon Valley. She's also obviously got a big background in IR and particularly working with Russia and Africa, which are both huge growth markets for Internet companies.
Her biggest crime was not asking all the right questions, and didn't have to swag necessary to challenge Cheney or Rumsfeld, not that she was particularly motivated. She's proven to be a pretty bad administrator and manager, but she's going on the Board, not into management.
Are you sure that's the right comparison? There are over 300 million people in the US, but you only have to apply for "Obamacare" if you don't have employer-provided health care, you aren't covered by your parents, you aren't qualified to draw on Medicare or Medicaid, and your obligation is waived for religious or moral reasons. This remainder only comes out to about 20-30 million.
Hrm. The Tesla touchscreen give your instrumentation and feedback on powerplant performance, and it allows you to control the headlamps, doors, regenerative braking and hydraulics. I'm not clear on what kind of "complete separation" were talking about. If an attacker got into the touchscreen they probably wouldn't be able to brick the whole car, but if you lost the touchscreen while moving on the road you could be in a lot of trouble.
Hate to tell you, but fighter pilots are trained professionals who spend years learning how to use their equipment in an efficient way that doesn't interfere with their flying of the plane.
Also, the obvious complexity of flying a supersonic $10e9 machine designed to blow stuff up notwithstanding, the problem domain of flying a fighter jet does not involve such things as traffic and obstacles, which is why we've had automatic pilots 60 years ago, but we're only barely beginning to have auto-driving cars.