cryptnoob

There was a TED lecture by a founder of Gap Minder that showed this data in exactly the same way a few years ago.

It really opened my eyes that the things I had been told all my life, and was still hearing from people who thought they were smart, were in fact, based on very dated information that was no longer true.

Once a fact is learned by the general masses, it's practically impossible to get them to unlearn that fact after it changes.

They should never have been allowed to sell an Android phone in the first place. They're probably trying to promote their cash cow, the iPhone by crippling Android in the court of public opinion.

Check out this Joel on Software post. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/10/08.html

Be sure to note the Server Fault link it links to as well http://serverfault.com/questions/72767/why-is-internet-acces...

I agree that fission is a powerful technology that environmentalist killed 30 years ago and now can't seem to admit they may have been wrong.

I think fission is another stepping stone that we can use in our climb up the energy ladder, but I would hate to see us stop there. It surprises me that lack of proponents that fusion has. I'd like to see a lot more resources thrown toward fusion research.

That's quite a threat. If you make me actually pay for what I consume in your store, I'll take my business elsewhere! You better watch it. I'm not kidding about this. You just lost a non-paying customer, you SOB!

Nitpick: Site needs to add style="outline-style:none;" to the flash players.

That was a fun watch! I've bookmarked content authority as well. Can you point us to a finished site, so we can see the end result of the process?

Indeed, you don't need to do it ever. I don't take CVV codes, nor does 37 Signals.

This is more believable to me, as the "set-point" for cruise control is not dependent upon throttle position, but instead, is remembered by the computer. There's nothing to check against to insure believability.

More suspect, in my opinion, is that in a cruise control, you have a feedback system, based on car speed. The car speed is almost certainly redundantly sensed, so that's no worries, but the feedback loop itself could potentially go oscillatory if there were other variables introduced that hadn't been designed for. Those variables could be pretty subtle. For example, maybe the gear motor that you use to mechanically control the engine gets sourced from another distributor, and they give you a better one, that has more torque. Perhaps that throws off the stability analysis that you had done. Tons of things could change somewhere between the 500K's car and 1M's car you produced, lots of different vendors and permutations could come into play that could throw off the stability of a cruise control, I would think.

EDIT: They're probably using feedback in the control motors as well (servos), so that's a non-realistic example, but it illustrates the problem.

You usually design so that a single point of failure can't hurt you. If one position sensor (they use pots, since they're practically indestructable and not vulnerable to ESD, power transients, etc) fails, you sense the problem with the other sensor. They're not "primary and backup", they're both equally important.

You postulate that both sensors short out at the exact same instant, since any other scenario would power down the vehicle. They did it within milliseconds of each other, and they did it at some intermediate, yet believable level. (They didn't "peg at maximum", as that would also alert the software there was a problem. Instead they pegged, identically, at some believable value.

I'll take the other side of that bet any day.

I've designed systems like this. You use redundant potentiometers to sense throttle position. If they don't match within 5%, you power down.

You also toggle bits in your code. One in the main loop, another in any interrupt service routine that you are dependent upon. These bits then go to a GPIO so that the GPIO toggles. If the ISR freezes or the main loop freezes, the GPIO quits toggling. You then have an hardware, RC-Diode type circuit, that stays high if it's input toggles, but goes low, if it's input goes low and stays low, or goes high and stays high. The output of this circuit drives a relay, so that if the CPU quits toggling the GPIO, the relay clicks off. The output of that relay is a dead-man's switch that powers down the vehicle. The end result is a hardware fail-safe if the CPU misbehaves. There are other tests to confirm that the relay isn't frozen, that the RC-Diode circuit isn't frozen, etc.

So, in theory, if a high-school sophomore designed the vehicle, you might have a problem. Otherwise, I think you don't give the engineers that design these systems enough credit.

Please forward your proof of this to Toyota and the congressional committee to which Toyota swore this was not the case.

It's tempting to blame drive by wire, since electronics is black magic to most people. Keep in mind that most passenger jets in the sky are fly by wire, these days.

For you to point blank claim this to be true, when it's been flatly denied several times, seems a bit over the top, don't you think?

When I sneak my own soda pop into the movie theater, I have violated their rules. I am running the risk of being kicked out of the theater with no refund and probably be very embarrassed in the process. I am not, however, breaking any laws.

What these people did seems analogous. I don't understand how the FBI is involved.

"The Database" if such a thing existed, should have a field for "probable state". This field could be filled in by the police detective in charge of the case.

Most "kidnappings" are just parents stealing their kid from the parent that got custody. While a formal accusation of that parent, sans evidence, is and should be, illegal, if the mom says, "I think my ex is working on a fishing boat in Alaska", putting AK in the probable field is a good bet.

Services like this could then geo-ip serve content based on state abducted, and state probable.

I know I'm probably being too conservative from my years doing embedded and assembly programming, but I disagree with this.

As you know, there is a cost to adding functions. They are not free from a code performance standpoint. Are they so close to being free that you don't need to worry? That depends on the processor and the application. I still do embedded and assembly programming, so I can't afford to drop this habit, because there, it does matter. So for web apps, I continue to use them liberally, but definitely not "at the drop of a hat".

I've lately found myself doing more of this, rather than switch statements or if/else. It works when you find yourself in a function that does only that thing, but often, you're in much more complex function, and you're not ready to return a value. Should you split this code into it's own function, allowing this type of structure, or use the switch, or if/else? I don't add functions for reasons as weak as this, so in those cases, I still have to use 'else'.

Yes Buzz Killington, you're right. Silly of him to make such an obvious error, wasn't it. So silly, it makes me smile to think of his ignorance.

I passed the EIT exam, worked under professional engineers for four years, and obtained letters of recommendation from them, all so that I had the right to sit for the professional engineering exam. I then took that exam and passed it. I pay $200 per year to maintain my registered professional engineer status in my state. All this gives me the right to stamp legal documents as an engineer ... and be held legally accountable for designs that cause injury to others, either physical or financial. I wear a stainless steel ring on the little finger of my right hand that was given to me to remind me as I sign off on designs, that the safety of others is in my hands.

I am allowed to put on my business card, my website, and my consulting advertisements that I am an engineer. Theoretically, you are not, if you haven't done these things, and a case could be made that you should not be able to, just like you don't get to call yourself a doctor or a lawyer.

The term engineer has undergone serious deflation over the years, which is a shame. I don't see this trend suddenly reversing, so I don't lose sleep over it, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't feel a little regretful over it's demise.

I am writing code to use authorize.net's CIM.

Here's the problem.

I don't like taking more information than is needed from people. I don't intend to take CVN numbers, and I don't intend to take Street addresses. You don't need them. All you need is a zip code for verification. I know people that run telephone chat lines. They only take zip codes, because people are typing everything into their telephones. No letters allowed.

Also, you'll note that 37 signals only takes a zip code. No CVN, no street address.

So, I log into my Authorize.net account, go to the virtual terminal, enter a transaction with only zip code verification. It works. No problem.

I go to their CIM panel, try to enter the same information. They tell me I need street address. Authorize.net tech support is extremely unhelpful, telling me to talk to Visa, ignoring that they allowed the exact same transaction through another area of their site.

So, I'm paying $25 a month for CIM, for the privelege of being forced to make my users life unnecessarily complicated. I have a problem with that.

If I can safely store those numbers without CIM, I intend to do so.

I need the CC numbers to do monthly billing.

That's actually a direction I was thinking about myself. Make myself a restful decryption webservice, Communicating by backchannel private ip to the webserver. When I need a number for monthly billing, submit it to the web service.

I also had the idea of some dummy security trigger database entries, so if somebody actually camps out on my server, using my own webservice to decrypt the database, eventually they hit one of my trigger entries, and my webserver reboots and my cell phone starts ringing.