Aside from the obvious issue of the system giving false positives and causing an accident, Toyota could be putting themselves in a slippery slope when it comes to possible legal issues.
What they are technically doing is involving themselves in the "enforcement" of the drink-driving laws - surely meaning that one day when their system fails to prevent a heavily inebriated person from driving one of their vehicles and subsequently being involved in a collision, then thanks to our out-of-control blame culture they would be wide open to a barrage of litigation, regardless of where the true blame should be placed?
It's about a Chinese doctor who uses cadaveric cells (from aborted foetuses) to treat people - in the programme he is shunned by western doctors for not running the treatment regime as a proper medical trial, and thus not being able to prove his treatment is doing anything.
Well worth seeing, if you can get hold of a copy by some means!
Yes, I had thought about the fact I'm not actually making use of the power-saving technology of my CPU due to this problem! Luckily the PC is fairly quick so I don't get a DoS-style slowdown, just a noticeable and annoying one.
I had been looking at various extensions myself to block the loading of SWF files, thanks for that piece of info, sounds like adblock is ideal if it can provide me with a hotkey to turn it back on when I am e.g. viewing a flash animation or game. Flash advertisements on the other hand are just an abomonation that I wish had never graced our screens.
I have of course noticed that Firefox uses quite a lot of memory, but it is the CPU usage that is of a greater concern to me and actually causes me problems.
I have an Athlon 64 3000+ and a gig of RAM, and I regularly go to use an application that has a genuine need for a lot of CPU e.g. a game, to find it runs slowly and then upon investigation Firefox is found to be using 50% or more of my CPU!
I have investigated further and the problem seems to relate to tabs containing Flash, I have had to get into the habit of making sure I don't keep pages open that contain flash banner ads etc (which I already found to be an annoyance, and unfortunately are appearing on an ever-increasing number of sites). Has anybody else had a similar experience? Is it Flash using all the CPU, or an inefficient interfacing with Flash by Firefox? Having a few pages containing Flash open shows immeasurably small CPU usage, but add a few more and it skyrockets:(
I'm hearing from a lot of people that this service is going at a snail's pace, a friend is waiting for his data 25 hours after he requested it and the system told him it would be ready in 12.
Will this go down in history as the day Google got slashdotted?:P
Lesson 1. When criticizing spelling, perhaps one shuld [sic] ensure that one spells and types correctly so as to not inadvertantly become hypocritical.
It was actually Marathon->Snickers, and there was a slight difference in that case, in that Snickers was the US name for the product and they just brought it in line. As for all the others, totally pointless indeed!
I've seen that warehouse myself from the M25, and wondered... A quick google just revealed they make screen-printing ink - so when they say "more than ink", they just mean "ink":)
I just can't help but find it amusing how much time and money companies spend changing their names, to so often change the back again afterwards.
The new names are often awful, as well as the justification for changing them, like when the Post Office here in the UK announced they were to change their name to "Consignia" to enable them "to better serve the needs of customers". So many people went "WTF?" that they scrapped the plan, but not before they'd already wasted loads of money on it.
The BBC story is better than the one linked to from the article.
Definately some fine contenders for a Darwin award, depending on the outcome. Being a Firefighter I've seen people do some stupid things with Petrol, but even this one's new to me!
They could also add some form of security handshake to the client & the protocol to identify it as a valid apple client.
Ultimately, you could sniff the data as it is transferred to a genuine client - their options to totally close the hole are very limited. I expect there's some colourful language flying around the Apple boardroom right now:P
Indeed, I think this is one to watch with great amusement from the sidelines:)
What will be more interesting is HOW they fix it. If they are passing the files down "clean" at the moment and then the iTunes client applies DRM to the tracks...
Can you imagine the huge amount of processing that would be required to apply DRM server-side instead, which I should imagine is the only way to prevent the use of this method?
If his Microwave is leaking enough radiation to interfere with his neighbours' WAPs, his inoperable wireless network is by far the least of his worries!!!
Now we can move from the myth that free software is impervious to exploits, and into the reality that vulnerabilities are acknowleged and patched faster in most free software projects.
Free != Open-source. There are various arguments for and against closed-source and open-source development models, and I believe what you were intending to refer to was the (in my opinion quite valid) belief that an open-source approach is likely to produce higher quality code and faster bug patches.
It has precisely nothing to do with the price of the software.
And they've done the world of good in my opinion...
But then I don't posess the persecution complex and level of paranoia that many do, and thus I'm a firm believer that a person should only be worried about the Police knowing what they are doing if they intend to commit a crime. I also feel very strongly that people should be able to feel safe, to actually *be* safe, and to *not* be victims of crime - a basic but important human right in my opinion.
I have no "spying" worries with regards to the CCTV in my town, the cameras are localised to the town centre and are very obviously placed to monitor past trouble spots. If the government really wanted to spy on us, they could do so covertly and we would never know. They could be doing so already, so I wouldn't personally waste any time worrying about it, life's too short.
CCTV has done nothing but good in my town. Within a week of it going online a trainee camera operator was playing around with the pan and zoom capabilities and noticed a collection of weapons on the passenger seat of a parked car. Police waited for the owner to return, apprehended him, and later it divulged that he was on his way to attempt the murder of his ex-wife when he was arrested.
The cameras here have aided successful prosecution following crimes, helped to prevent imminent crimes, and deterred crimes, the overall result being a huge decline in the crime rate.
Slashdot Mirror
Aside from the obvious issue of the system giving false positives and causing an accident, Toyota could be putting themselves in a slippery slope when it comes to possible legal issues. What they are technically doing is involving themselves in the "enforcement" of the drink-driving laws - surely meaning that one day when their system fails to prevent a heavily inebriated person from driving one of their vehicles and subsequently being involved in a collision, then thanks to our out-of-control blame culture they would be wide open to a barrage of litigation, regardless of where the true blame should be placed?
This type of treatment was the subject of a recent BBC Horizon programme:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon /doctor.shtml
It's about a Chinese doctor who uses cadaveric cells (from aborted foetuses) to treat people - in the programme he is shunned by western doctors for not running the treatment regime as a proper medical trial, and thus not being able to prove his treatment is doing anything.
Well worth seeing, if you can get hold of a copy by some means!
Brilliant... Once again that's a very useful piece of information, many thanks for that :)
Yes, I had thought about the fact I'm not actually making use of the power-saving technology of my CPU due to this problem! Luckily the PC is fairly quick so I don't get a DoS-style slowdown, just a noticeable and annoying one.
I had been looking at various extensions myself to block the loading of SWF files, thanks for that piece of info, sounds like adblock is ideal if it can provide me with a hotkey to turn it back on when I am e.g. viewing a flash animation or game. Flash advertisements on the other hand are just an abomonation that I wish had never graced our screens.
I have of course noticed that Firefox uses quite a lot of memory, but it is the CPU usage that is of a greater concern to me and actually causes me problems.
I have an Athlon 64 3000+ and a gig of RAM, and I regularly go to use an application that has a genuine need for a lot of CPU e.g. a game, to find it runs slowly and then upon investigation Firefox is found to be using 50% or more of my CPU!
I have investigated further and the problem seems to relate to tabs containing Flash, I have had to get into the habit of making sure I don't keep pages open that contain flash banner ads etc (which I already found to be an annoyance, and unfortunately are appearing on an ever-increasing number of sites). Has anybody else had a similar experience? Is it Flash using all the CPU, or an inefficient interfacing with Flash by Firefox? Having a few pages containing Flash open shows immeasurably small CPU usage, but add a few more and it skyrockets :(
I'm hearing from a lot of people that this service is going at a snail's pace, a friend is waiting for his data 25 hours after he requested it and the system told him it would be ready in 12.
Will this go down in history as the day Google got slashdotted? :P
What the guy should do is buy an e-mail system that can handle 1,000,000 users and not screw around trying to chewing gum his own solution.
He who never tries never learns anything either... and he who learns how to achieve something like this is subsequently worth a lot of money.
Lesson 1. When criticizing spelling, perhaps one shuld [sic] ensure that one spells and types correctly so as to not inadvertantly become hypocritical.
But I thought he was in Western Pakistan... or is that all part of the game?
It was actually Marathon->Snickers, and there was a slight difference in that case, in that Snickers was the US name for the product and they just brought it in line. As for all the others, totally pointless indeed!
I've seen that warehouse myself from the M25, and wondered... A quick google just revealed they make screen-printing ink - so when they say "more than ink", they just mean "ink" :)
I just can't help but find it amusing how much time and money companies spend changing their names, to so often change the back again afterwards.
The new names are often awful, as well as the justification for changing them, like when the Post Office here in the UK announced they were to change their name to "Consignia" to enable them "to better serve the needs of customers". So many people went "WTF?" that they scrapped the plan, but not before they'd already wasted loads of money on it.
The BBC story is better than the one linked to from the article.
Definately some fine contenders for a Darwin award, depending on the outcome. Being a Firefighter I've seen people do some stupid things with Petrol, but even this one's new to me!
They could also add some form of security handshake to the client & the protocol to identify it as a valid apple client.
Ultimately, you could sniff the data as it is transferred to a genuine client - their options to totally close the hole are very limited. I expect there's some colourful language flying around the Apple boardroom right now :P
Indeed, I think this is one to watch with great amusement from the sidelines :)
What will be more interesting is HOW they fix it. If they are passing the files down "clean" at the moment and then the iTunes client applies DRM to the tracks...
Can you imagine the huge amount of processing that would be required to apply DRM server-side instead, which I should imagine is the only way to prevent the use of this method?
If his Microwave is leaking enough radiation to interfere with his neighbours' WAPs, his inoperable wireless network is by far the least of his worries!!!
Now we can move from the myth that free software is impervious to exploits, and into the reality that vulnerabilities are acknowleged and patched faster in most free software projects.
Free != Open-source. There are various arguments for and against closed-source and open-source development models, and I believe what you were intending to refer to was the (in my opinion quite valid) belief that an open-source approach is likely to produce higher quality code and faster bug patches.
It has precisely nothing to do with the price of the software.
And they've done the world of good in my opinion...
But then I don't posess the persecution complex and level of paranoia that many do, and thus I'm a firm believer that a person should only be worried about the Police knowing what they are doing if they intend to commit a crime. I also feel very strongly that people should be able to feel safe, to actually *be* safe, and to *not* be victims of crime - a basic but important human right in my opinion.
I have no "spying" worries with regards to the CCTV in my town, the cameras are localised to the town centre and are very obviously placed to monitor past trouble spots. If the government really wanted to spy on us, they could do so covertly and we would never know. They could be doing so already, so I wouldn't personally waste any time worrying about it, life's too short.
CCTV has done nothing but good in my town. Within a week of it going online a trainee camera operator was playing around with the pan and zoom capabilities and noticed a collection of weapons on the passenger seat of a parked car. Police waited for the owner to return, apprehended him, and later it divulged that he was on his way to attempt the murder of his ex-wife when he was arrested.
The cameras here have aided successful prosecution following crimes, helped to prevent imminent crimes, and deterred crimes, the overall result being a huge decline in the crime rate.