First off, I'm not one of the complainers. I haven't built anything remotely as cool as this. The first airplane flew something like 300 feet. This proof of concept is impractical with current technology.
That being said, these are high school kids. High school kids who are interested in science and investigating technology in more ways than studying a book written by someone else who knows how many years ago and regugitating facts and plugging numbers into formulas to pass a written test. What this is more than anything, is an investment in the future. The future of these kids, of science itself, and potentially of finding an alternative to more harmful energy sources.
When you have a large forum of hardcore science buffs and geeks, it's easy to get mired in the merits of a particular solution to some problem, and of course discussing the pros and cons of such a solution is valuable to both interested third parties such as myself and to those working on it directly. But it's also easy for people to lose sight of other indirect benefits of such "impractical" endeavors like the ones I listed above.
I second your congratulations to the kids at this school who've been involved in the project, and to the staff/parents/others who were behind it in the first place, and to those who've fought to get something this cool for the kids to work on. That's awesome! Now if we could just get other schools to do things like this, I think solutions to a lot of other social problems might appear much much sooner.
This is Arizona, we tried that. It turned into a potentially $650 million dollar expense to the tax payers of this state. Fortunately our constitution allowed for changes in tax code at any point up to the end of the fiscal year, and this was scrapped before it spun wildly out of control. In the end, tons of greedy people got fucked out of $10-30,000 in tax credits for buying luxury sport utility vehicles that had been converted to alt-fuel for the purpose of getting the huge tax refund, and now we have a ton of alt-fuel enabled vehicles on the road who have never seen a drop of alt-fuel in them whatsoever.
Perhaps in more liberal/green-minded parts of the country like California this could work, but it sure as hell didn't here.
The car analogy is flawed. Your assumption is that microsoft knows exactly what the problem is at this time, when in fact they need to diagnose it and determine the proper fix.
In your car analogy, it would be more equivalent to say that the manufacturer knows that *A* screw will come loose after 10,000 miles, and can lead to the engine falling out. In such a case they would advise customers who own the car that it can happen, and they may be at risk if they continue to drive the car the way it is without modifying an engine mount that will keep the engine in place until they can determine WHICH screw is coming loose after 10,000 miles, at which point they would issue a recall and repair it.
Which is exactly what Microsoft will do when they know what is causing the problem and how to fix it without breaking something else. It is simply foolish to suggest that Microsoft are telling customers to fix the problem and that they will not release a patch for it. What Microsoft are doing is offering advice to customers to protect THEIR data and systems until Microsoft can solve the problem permanently, not telling them to fix it themselves.
I live in Phoenix and saw this on the news the other night. This is a gated-community in Scottsdale with a guard-shack which is manned 24/7. Apparently these people think that the gate on their community and the guard at the gate should mean that people who don't live there shouldn't be able to interact with their wireless signals as well.
Anyway what was reported on the news here was that some tech who was in the neighborhood to repair someone's computer had somehow stolen financial information from them. What wasn't clear was how this was known, my guess is some form of identity theft or credit card fraud. How they were able to pin this down to a technician who was in the neighborhood to repair someone's computer is beyond me, unless they actually caught the guy using the information or something.
What was interesting about the story was that everyone commenting or reporting seemed to have no clue that this could easily be done from OUTSIDE the neighborhood. It was astonishing that they were reporting it in a way which would lead people to believe someone would actually have to get past the guarded gate and into the neighborhood to get into someone's computer. I was dumbfounded.
May I offer a userful suggestion? Each time you refresh this page you get a different, randomly chosen list of files. Were this an actual warez site, it would have the same list more or less on a given day. My suggestion is to come up with a way of generating the randomness of the page using the current date and the ip address of the client requesting the page, such that refreshing the page with a given IP address will return largely the same list on a particular day. Otherwise their bots would have a fairly easy task (once they catch onto this idea) of determining that the list is bogus.
Section 1B would seem to me to cover what Verisign did a while back when they were redirected unregistered domain names, or am I mistaken? Any lawyer types care to comment?
iD has always done this with the windows version after several patches. They only have the copy protection in the codebase for the first several versions of the software. But I doubt they'll remove the serial number requirement.
I think Quake 3 lost the CD protection around version 3.12 or 3.17 or something like that. It was the same with Quake 2. CD protection always goes bye bye in the Windows version in a later patch.
Where my roommate works, they had a server that hadn't needed a reboot for about a year and a half. At the time it was the company's only server, no backup servers, no redundancy because previous to this one they hadn't needed a server at all and it was still a reasonably small company.
They brought it down for a system update after which it wouldn't reboot. After restoring from nightly backup, they found that the pre-updated system wouldn't boot either. Nor the previous week's backups, nor any backups they had for the previous 6 months. Two days later they had rebuilt the entire system from scratch.
Had this system been rebooted monthly, they'd have discovered the problem at a time when they still had a backup that would actually boot. Rebooting a mission critical system periodically isn't really a bad idea, because you just never know the true state of your systems until you actually test them.
I hope your update goes more smoothly than my roommate's did.
At which point we apply the spammers' techniques to genome research!:D
Wouldn't that be ironic, that spam actually DID provide a cure for cancer or some other disease? And you wouldn't even have to read it or buy anything!
First, the ignition. In this car, the ignition is not a physical switch you can just twist to off. It is an electronic switch operated by a smart card. Starting the car is done with a push-button. Shutting it off is accomplished by shifting into park and removing the smart card.
Second, the brakes. Most power assisted brake systems use vacuum assist. This does not work at full throttle because the engine has no vacuum. You'll have power assist while the vacuum reservoir has vacuum, but that isn't nearly enough to bring any car to a stop from 120 MPH at full throttle. Secondly, there are the factors of brake fade, and fluid boiling when you're talking about speeds this high and factory equipped brake systems.
Third, the cruise control. I can't speak for all cruise control systems, but I've seen many systems where the cruise control system is linked to the throttle in such way that the gas pedal goes down when the cruise control applies throttle, however if you lift the gas pedal with your toe it has zero effect on the throttle position with the cruise control. The reason for this is that it would destroy the cruise control system if you were to lift the gas pedal while the cruise control was applying throttle.
Fourth, the previous reply addresses the shifting into neutral suggestion. I suspect many cars have such a feature.
Fifth, considering that he ended up some 100+ miles from his destination, I don't think he was just trying to get away with driving that fast. If he did want to drive his car that fast, it would be very easy to just drive to the autobahn and do so perfectly legally. Many europeans have such a luxury.;)
Not in these newer luxury cars. Even back in 1991 Infinity was making a car, their flagship Q45, where all the electronic systems were linked together. In modern cars they're tying more and more systems to one another. When you add anti-lock brakes it often makes sense to tie the ABS system to the engine management to cut fuel to the engine under anti-lock braking, and to the transmission to control engine engagement and shifting. When you add traction control it becomes necessary to tie the brake system to the engine management system and transmission system. When you add electronic parking brakes it becomes necessary to tie that braking system to the engine management and transmission system. When you want to make the car theft-resistant by incorporating a smart-card instead of a mechanical key/switch to the ignition, you lose the ability to control the steering lockout independently from the ignition. And when you tie that system to the transmission requiring the car to be in park before turning off, ostensibly to prevent a driver from inadvertently leaving the car in neutral and rolling away later, you lose the ability to turn the ignition off in the event of a failure such as this.
When the new model BMW 745i came out a year or two ago with the iDrive system running Windows embedded, they had several problems with the system (I don't recall what the problems were, but the iDrive controls basically everything in the vehicle).
You may think these systems are all unrelated and it would take multiple simultaneous falures of unrelated systems to cause a problem like this, but I think you may be making assumptions about those systems.
For example, shifting into neutral, even automatic transmissions have that option you say. Yes they do (in almost every car), but given that in modern cars that shifter is nothing more than an electronic switch, and the actual shifting is controlled by computer and electro-hydraulic actuators, the transmission may not actually shift into neutral (especially if the engine is operating and full-throttle).
Brakes stronger than the engine? Yes that's true...at standstill. When you're going 120 MPH the brakes are ANYTHING but powerful, and in most cars they will overheat and fade in fractions of a second. At 120+ MPH doing a panic stop in many large vehicles will cause the brake fluid to heat to its boiling point, leaving you with no hydraulic pressure whatsoever, ergo no brakes no matter how hard you step on the pedal. If you're not aware of this possibility, it may not occur to someone in a panic situation in traffic on the highway about to careen out of control or smash into the back of a truck to RELEASE the brakes and allow them to cool for a second so you can slow down some more.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying you may think the systems and factors involved here are much simpler than they may in fact be.
I can tell you from personal experience that factory brakes on many cars (especially large cars like this) are woefully inadequate for the speeds they are capable of. What happens when your car starts taking off without you stepping on the gas and reaches 120 MPH and you try to panic-stop a large sedan with inadequate brakes is that you end up boiling the brake fluid under the extreme pressures and the extreme heat generated by the brakes at that speed.
I've had this happen to me driving a 1990 Ford Thunderbird SC at approximately 125 MPH and trying to slow down to 65 MPH for a corner that dropped into a valley. The brake fluid boiled at approximately 105 MPH and I had *NO* brakes as I was basically using vapor for hydraulic fluid. Thankfully I had the presence of mind to let off the brakes for a second to allow the rather effective cooling that ventilated disc brake rotors have at that speed, returning the brake fluid to its liquid state and then was able to downshift (manual transmission) and brake at a lesser rate and slow down enough to make the corner using both lanes (thankfully there was no traffic at the time) without plunging over the bank.
Lots of people who have experience in racing can attest to this phenomenon, although it's not very common in race cars anymore since the advent of DOT 5 silicone brake fluids. Needless to say, after this incident I flushed and replaced my brake fluid with racing brake fluid.
The vehicle in this article has an ELECTRONICALLY controlled "hand brake" (which contrary to popular belief is NOT designed as an emergency brake, it is a PARKING brake) which automatically engages when the ignition is turned off, which can only be switched off when the ELECTRONICALLY CONTROLLED transmission is in park. The ignition switch is controlled by a smart card which electronically operates the steering wheel lock and ignition rather than a physical switch you can twist and disable the ignition system and leave the steering unlocked. Cars like this are designed to be idiot-proof to make their owners feel safe.
I can't say with any authority, but I would not be surprised if, in addition to over-rev protection of the engine, that the transmission will NOT shift out of gear while the car is operating at wide-open throttle, as allowing this would likely cause fairly catastrophic transmission damage. Renault's own website highlights many of the features of this vehicle as making them "safer" in addition to increasing the expected lifespan of many of the powertrain components, going so far as to claim that these systems DOUBLE the expected lifespan of many wear-and-tear parts.
I think the only thing in this article that smells rotten is that auto manufacturers are becoming so concerned with being able to wave the "safest car in its class" flag that they're doing poor implementations of electronic "driver-aids." I'm sure they're probably wonderful and great in many circumstances, but the onus of potential software bugs or poor analysis of the situations encountered on public roadways and improper implementation leads to situations where the car takes control away from the driver *regardless* of what the driver knows about what's going on at the time.
Ultimately what it comes down to is that cars like this, with electronically controlled systems DIRECTLY responsible for the safety of the occupants (such as brakes and shifting into neutral and shutting down the engine) need an effective, immediate, simple MECHANICAL bypass.
This is exactly the reason one should *NEVER* base judgements of what someone stands for merely on the basis of what name or label is attached to them. Like so many people who claim they are Christians and are the most un-Christian people on the face of the earth.
Would someone who truly believes in the Bible honestly be able to stand up and say that a man or group of men in government have the right or ability to legislate away the freedom of conscience that their God saw fit to endow every man, woman and child with? Would they honestly be able to say that they know better than their God what's good for their fellow man? I guess that's something everyone must decide for themselves, but I for one would not be able to do that.
Going to church makes you a Christian about as much as me going to the auto repair shop makes me a mechanic. Saying you're a Christian makes you a Christian about as much as saying you're an astronaut makes you an astronaut. Being labelled left-wing means you stand for free speech, democracy, and respect for other people about as much as being labelled right-wing means you stand for free market, "freedom of religion," or pro-life.
Everyone is different. Labels and names only confuse the reality. Does it really matter if someone says they're a Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, left-wing or right-wing, Christian or atheist? Or are their actual actions, and the way they live their lives and conduct themselves what actually matters at the end of the day?
Bush is a perfect example of the problem with this. He has a very vocal group who support him blindly, the fundamentalists. But a large portion of the people whom I know who support him don't seem to pay attention to what he actually does or has done, they support him because he has the label of Republican, conservative, right-wing, Christian, President etc. Reality doesn't seem to enter into the equation for these people, so long as he has the requisite names attached to him.
And lest anyone complain that I'm a left-wing nut, Clinton had the same groups of people behind him. It doesn't matter your affiliation or political bent, this is a fact accross the board. Most people want things to be simple, they look at the label on someone and decide if it's a label they like or not. They could give a shit less who the person actually is or what they've actually done or said.
What ever happened to a person's constitutionally protected right not to incriminate themselves? I'm pretty sure such a law would be blatantly unconstitutional.
That's true for swing states, but if you don't happen to live in one of those, you may as well vote for the person you think will be the best candidate regardless of party affiliation. Otherwise the two parties get the message from the voting public that the two parties are all they really want and have no incentive to adapt to reality.
Yes, those people would probably rather have "Freedom" there....but I'm not sure that could really apply to Windows, do you think?
Oh well, those same Americans are perfectly happy with a government that just tells them they have freedom, rather than actually having it... so maybe that would be poetic in some sense.
By that same logic, doesn't a Windows users "Start" the shutdown procedure?
And if you don't want to go to the "Start" button in Windows to shut it down, you could always hit ctrl-alt-del and click shutdown. Or press the power button if you have power management enabled in the bios. I don't really see a fundamental difference between the two, it's just semantics really.
When I first started using Linux, one of the things that baffled me for hours until I could ask someone who knew Linux was how the heck do you rename a file?? I searched and searched for anything resembling a rename command and found nothing. It never occurred to me that you might use the move command to rename a file by essentially just "moving" the file to a new filename. That's at least as illogical (to me and every newbie I've ever known) as clicking Start to Shutdown for someone who isn't familiar with the idiosyncracies of a particular operating system.
And that's why viruses now just carry those (apparently) physically less harmful payloads of proxies and spam relays instead of just wiping out your hard drive and/or corrupting all your financial data or deleting your pr0n like they did long ago. Sucks doesn't it?
Of course the question of legitimacy comes up when you look at the business practices of the.com bubble era. If you look at many of those business practices, could you *honestly* say those were legit jobs?
It's too bad people need to work so badly that they can't look more closely at a company's business practices in determining whether or not they should be working for said company. *cough* SCO *cough* Enron *cough* <Investment Opportunity Du Jour> *cough*
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First off, I'm not one of the complainers. I haven't built anything remotely as cool as this. The first airplane flew something like 300 feet. This proof of concept is impractical with current technology.
That being said, these are high school kids. High school kids who are interested in science and investigating technology in more ways than studying a book written by someone else who knows how many years ago and regugitating facts and plugging numbers into formulas to pass a written test. What this is more than anything, is an investment in the future. The future of these kids, of science itself, and potentially of finding an alternative to more harmful energy sources.
When you have a large forum of hardcore science buffs and geeks, it's easy to get mired in the merits of a particular solution to some problem, and of course discussing the pros and cons of such a solution is valuable to both interested third parties such as myself and to those working on it directly. But it's also easy for people to lose sight of other indirect benefits of such "impractical" endeavors like the ones I listed above.
I second your congratulations to the kids at this school who've been involved in the project, and to the staff/parents/others who were behind it in the first place, and to those who've fought to get something this cool for the kids to work on. That's awesome! Now if we could just get other schools to do things like this, I think solutions to a lot of other social problems might appear much much sooner.
This is Arizona, we tried that. It turned into a potentially $650 million dollar expense to the tax payers of this state. Fortunately our constitution allowed for changes in tax code at any point up to the end of the fiscal year, and this was scrapped before it spun wildly out of control. In the end, tons of greedy people got fucked out of $10-30,000 in tax credits for buying luxury sport utility vehicles that had been converted to alt-fuel for the purpose of getting the huge tax refund, and now we have a ton of alt-fuel enabled vehicles on the road who have never seen a drop of alt-fuel in them whatsoever.
Perhaps in more liberal/green-minded parts of the country like California this could work, but it sure as hell didn't here.
The car analogy is flawed. Your assumption is that microsoft knows exactly what the problem is at this time, when in fact they need to diagnose it and determine the proper fix.
In your car analogy, it would be more equivalent to say that the manufacturer knows that *A* screw will come loose after 10,000 miles, and can lead to the engine falling out. In such a case they would advise customers who own the car that it can happen, and they may be at risk if they continue to drive the car the way it is without modifying an engine mount that will keep the engine in place until they can determine WHICH screw is coming loose after 10,000 miles, at which point they would issue a recall and repair it.
Which is exactly what Microsoft will do when they know what is causing the problem and how to fix it without breaking something else. It is simply foolish to suggest that Microsoft are telling customers to fix the problem and that they will not release a patch for it. What Microsoft are doing is offering advice to customers to protect THEIR data and systems until Microsoft can solve the problem permanently, not telling them to fix it themselves.
I live in Phoenix and saw this on the news the other night. This is a gated-community in Scottsdale with a guard-shack which is manned 24/7. Apparently these people think that the gate on their community and the guard at the gate should mean that people who don't live there shouldn't be able to interact with their wireless signals as well.
Anyway what was reported on the news here was that some tech who was in the neighborhood to repair someone's computer had somehow stolen financial information from them. What wasn't clear was how this was known, my guess is some form of identity theft or credit card fraud. How they were able to pin this down to a technician who was in the neighborhood to repair someone's computer is beyond me, unless they actually caught the guy using the information or something.
What was interesting about the story was that everyone commenting or reporting seemed to have no clue that this could easily be done from OUTSIDE the neighborhood. It was astonishing that they were reporting it in a way which would lead people to believe someone would actually have to get past the guarded gate and into the neighborhood to get into someone's computer. I was dumbfounded.
May I offer a userful suggestion? Each time you refresh this page you get a different, randomly chosen list of files. Were this an actual warez site, it would have the same list more or less on a given day. My suggestion is to come up with a way of generating the randomness of the page using the current date and the ip address of the client requesting the page, such that refreshing the page with a given IP address will return largely the same list on a particular day. Otherwise their bots would have a fairly easy task (once they catch onto this idea) of determining that the list is bogus.
I searched the online help for gmail and I found no documentation of this feature. Where did you find out about it?
And thanks!
If that were true then Sun wouldn't be able to patent a software licensing method.
Section 1B would seem to me to cover what Verisign did a while back when they were redirected unregistered domain names, or am I mistaken? Any lawyer types care to comment?
iD has always done this with the windows version after several patches. They only have the copy protection in the codebase for the first several versions of the software. But I doubt they'll remove the serial number requirement.
I think Quake 3 lost the CD protection around version 3.12 or 3.17 or something like that. It was the same with Quake 2. CD protection always goes bye bye in the Windows version in a later patch.
Where my roommate works, they had a server that hadn't needed a reboot for about a year and a half. At the time it was the company's only server, no backup servers, no redundancy because previous to this one they hadn't needed a server at all and it was still a reasonably small company.
They brought it down for a system update after which it wouldn't reboot. After restoring from nightly backup, they found that the pre-updated system wouldn't boot either. Nor the previous week's backups, nor any backups they had for the previous 6 months. Two days later they had rebuilt the entire system from scratch.
Had this system been rebooted monthly, they'd have discovered the problem at a time when they still had a backup that would actually boot. Rebooting a mission critical system periodically isn't really a bad idea, because you just never know the true state of your systems until you actually test them.
I hope your update goes more smoothly than my roommate's did.
At which point we apply the spammers' techniques to genome research! :D
Wouldn't that be ironic, that spam actually DID provide a cure for cancer or some other disease? And you wouldn't even have to read it or buy anything!
These are good points except for the following:
;)
First, the ignition. In this car, the ignition is not a physical switch you can just twist to off. It is an electronic switch operated by a smart card. Starting the car is done with a push-button. Shutting it off is accomplished by shifting into park and removing the smart card.
Second, the brakes. Most power assisted brake systems use vacuum assist. This does not work at full throttle because the engine has no vacuum. You'll have power assist while the vacuum reservoir has vacuum, but that isn't nearly enough to bring any car to a stop from 120 MPH at full throttle. Secondly, there are the factors of brake fade, and fluid boiling when you're talking about speeds this high and factory equipped brake systems.
Third, the cruise control. I can't speak for all cruise control systems, but I've seen many systems where the cruise control system is linked to the throttle in such way that the gas pedal goes down when the cruise control applies throttle, however if you lift the gas pedal with your toe it has zero effect on the throttle position with the cruise control. The reason for this is that it would destroy the cruise control system if you were to lift the gas pedal while the cruise control was applying throttle.
Fourth, the previous reply addresses the shifting into neutral suggestion. I suspect many cars have such a feature.
Fifth, considering that he ended up some 100+ miles from his destination, I don't think he was just trying to get away with driving that fast. If he did want to drive his car that fast, it would be very easy to just drive to the autobahn and do so perfectly legally. Many europeans have such a luxury.
Ironically, the parking brake on this car is not manually controlled.
Not in these newer luxury cars. Even back in 1991 Infinity was making a car, their flagship Q45, where all the electronic systems were linked together. In modern cars they're tying more and more systems to one another. When you add anti-lock brakes it often makes sense to tie the ABS system to the engine management to cut fuel to the engine under anti-lock braking, and to the transmission to control engine engagement and shifting. When you add traction control it becomes necessary to tie the brake system to the engine management system and transmission system. When you add electronic parking brakes it becomes necessary to tie that braking system to the engine management and transmission system. When you want to make the car theft-resistant by incorporating a smart-card instead of a mechanical key/switch to the ignition, you lose the ability to control the steering lockout independently from the ignition. And when you tie that system to the transmission requiring the car to be in park before turning off, ostensibly to prevent a driver from inadvertently leaving the car in neutral and rolling away later, you lose the ability to turn the ignition off in the event of a failure such as this.
When the new model BMW 745i came out a year or two ago with the iDrive system running Windows embedded, they had several problems with the system (I don't recall what the problems were, but the iDrive controls basically everything in the vehicle).
You may think these systems are all unrelated and it would take multiple simultaneous falures of unrelated systems to cause a problem like this, but I think you may be making assumptions about those systems.
For example, shifting into neutral, even automatic transmissions have that option you say. Yes they do (in almost every car), but given that in modern cars that shifter is nothing more than an electronic switch, and the actual shifting is controlled by computer and electro-hydraulic actuators, the transmission may not actually shift into neutral (especially if the engine is operating and full-throttle).
Brakes stronger than the engine? Yes that's true...at standstill. When you're going 120 MPH the brakes are ANYTHING but powerful, and in most cars they will overheat and fade in fractions of a second. At 120+ MPH doing a panic stop in many large vehicles will cause the brake fluid to heat to its boiling point, leaving you with no hydraulic pressure whatsoever, ergo no brakes no matter how hard you step on the pedal. If you're not aware of this possibility, it may not occur to someone in a panic situation in traffic on the highway about to careen out of control or smash into the back of a truck to RELEASE the brakes and allow them to cool for a second so you can slow down some more.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying you may think the systems and factors involved here are much simpler than they may in fact be.
I can tell you from personal experience that factory brakes on many cars (especially large cars like this) are woefully inadequate for the speeds they are capable of. What happens when your car starts taking off without you stepping on the gas and reaches 120 MPH and you try to panic-stop a large sedan with inadequate brakes is that you end up boiling the brake fluid under the extreme pressures and the extreme heat generated by the brakes at that speed.
I've had this happen to me driving a 1990 Ford Thunderbird SC at approximately 125 MPH and trying to slow down to 65 MPH for a corner that dropped into a valley. The brake fluid boiled at approximately 105 MPH and I had *NO* brakes as I was basically using vapor for hydraulic fluid. Thankfully I had the presence of mind to let off the brakes for a second to allow the rather effective cooling that ventilated disc brake rotors have at that speed, returning the brake fluid to its liquid state and then was able to downshift (manual transmission) and brake at a lesser rate and slow down enough to make the corner using both lanes (thankfully there was no traffic at the time) without plunging over the bank.
Lots of people who have experience in racing can attest to this phenomenon, although it's not very common in race cars anymore since the advent of DOT 5 silicone brake fluids. Needless to say, after this incident I flushed and replaced my brake fluid with racing brake fluid.
The vehicle in this article has an ELECTRONICALLY controlled "hand brake" (which contrary to popular belief is NOT designed as an emergency brake, it is a PARKING brake) which automatically engages when the ignition is turned off, which can only be switched off when the ELECTRONICALLY CONTROLLED transmission is in park. The ignition switch is controlled by a smart card which electronically operates the steering wheel lock and ignition rather than a physical switch you can twist and disable the ignition system and leave the steering unlocked. Cars like this are designed to be idiot-proof to make their owners feel safe.
I can't say with any authority, but I would not be surprised if, in addition to over-rev protection of the engine, that the transmission will NOT shift out of gear while the car is operating at wide-open throttle, as allowing this would likely cause fairly catastrophic transmission damage. Renault's own website highlights many of the features of this vehicle as making them "safer" in addition to increasing the expected lifespan of many of the powertrain components, going so far as to claim that these systems DOUBLE the expected lifespan of many wear-and-tear parts.
I think the only thing in this article that smells rotten is that auto manufacturers are becoming so concerned with being able to wave the "safest car in its class" flag that they're doing poor implementations of electronic "driver-aids." I'm sure they're probably wonderful and great in many circumstances, but the onus of potential software bugs or poor analysis of the situations encountered on public roadways and improper implementation leads to situations where the car takes control away from the driver *regardless* of what the driver knows about what's going on at the time.
Ultimately what it comes down to is that cars like this, with electronically controlled systems DIRECTLY responsible for the safety of the occupants (such as brakes and shifting into neutral and shutting down the engine) need an effective, immediate, simple MECHANICAL bypass.
404 Not Found o_O
This is exactly the reason one should *NEVER* base judgements of what someone stands for merely on the basis of what name or label is attached to them. Like so many people who claim they are Christians and are the most un-Christian people on the face of the earth.
Would someone who truly believes in the Bible honestly be able to stand up and say that a man or group of men in government have the right or ability to legislate away the freedom of conscience that their God saw fit to endow every man, woman and child with? Would they honestly be able to say that they know better than their God what's good for their fellow man? I guess that's something everyone must decide for themselves, but I for one would not be able to do that.
Going to church makes you a Christian about as much as me going to the auto repair shop makes me a mechanic. Saying you're a Christian makes you a Christian about as much as saying you're an astronaut makes you an astronaut. Being labelled left-wing means you stand for free speech, democracy, and respect for other people about as much as being labelled right-wing means you stand for free market, "freedom of religion," or pro-life.
Everyone is different. Labels and names only confuse the reality. Does it really matter if someone says they're a Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, left-wing or right-wing, Christian or atheist? Or are their actual actions, and the way they live their lives and conduct themselves what actually matters at the end of the day?
Bush is a perfect example of the problem with this. He has a very vocal group who support him blindly, the fundamentalists. But a large portion of the people whom I know who support him don't seem to pay attention to what he actually does or has done, they support him because he has the label of Republican, conservative, right-wing, Christian, President etc. Reality doesn't seem to enter into the equation for these people, so long as he has the requisite names attached to him.
And lest anyone complain that I'm a left-wing nut, Clinton had the same groups of people behind him. It doesn't matter your affiliation or political bent, this is a fact accross the board. Most people want things to be simple, they look at the label on someone and decide if it's a label they like or not. They could give a shit less who the person actually is or what they've actually done or said.
What ever happened to a person's constitutionally protected right not to incriminate themselves? I'm pretty sure such a law would be blatantly unconstitutional.
Yeah, like his name is really "Smith." ;)
That's true for swing states, but if you don't happen to live in one of those, you may as well vote for the person you think will be the best candidate regardless of party affiliation. Otherwise the two parties get the message from the voting public that the two parties are all they really want and have no incentive to adapt to reality.
My God, I didn't realize his problem is just that he hasn't been rebooted in over 49 days!
Yes, those people would probably rather have "Freedom" there....but I'm not sure that could really apply to Windows, do you think?
Oh well, those same Americans are perfectly happy with a government that just tells them they have freedom, rather than actually having it... so maybe that would be poetic in some sense.
By that same logic, doesn't a Windows users "Start" the shutdown procedure?
And if you don't want to go to the "Start" button in Windows to shut it down, you could always hit ctrl-alt-del and click shutdown. Or press the power button if you have power management enabled in the bios. I don't really see a fundamental difference between the two, it's just semantics really.
When I first started using Linux, one of the things that baffled me for hours until I could ask someone who knew Linux was how the heck do you rename a file?? I searched and searched for anything resembling a rename command and found nothing. It never occurred to me that you might use the move command to rename a file by essentially just "moving" the file to a new filename. That's at least as illogical (to me and every newbie I've ever known) as clicking Start to Shutdown for someone who isn't familiar with the idiosyncracies of a particular operating system.
And that's why viruses now just carry those (apparently) physically less harmful payloads of proxies and spam relays instead of just wiping out your hard drive and/or corrupting all your financial data or deleting your pr0n like they did long ago. Sucks doesn't it?
Of course the question of legitimacy comes up when you look at the business practices of the .com bubble era. If you look at many of those business practices, could you *honestly* say those were legit jobs?
It's too bad people need to work so badly that they can't look more closely at a company's business practices in determining whether or not they should be working for said company. *cough* SCO *cough* Enron *cough* <Investment Opportunity Du Jour> *cough*