I never stopped listening to the radio (primarily while driving, because it's free and convenient and I can get a wide variety of content) just like I never stopped buying printed paper books, which by the way are better for you if you read in bed at night than if you're using an e-book reader with a backlight, which by the way can be dropped and break, or that you can forget to recharge, or that some author or publisher can (by mistake or by design) decide to yank back content you paid for, or decide to 'edit' (read as: censor) your content, and there is little to nothing you can do about it. Radio still has it's place in the world and it would be a sad thing indeed if broadcast radio went the way of the dinosaurs. You don't need to pay for a data plan or broadband internet access to listen to it, you don't need to be in range of a wifi hotspot or need a wireless signal, you don't need to create a playlist or be limited to whatever you loaded onto your PMP, and unless you're living in a small market, you have multiple stations you can switch to at the push of a button. Yes, there are commercials, but if they bother you that much that's a great use for the station presets on your car stereo, you can surf stations until you find something else to listen to.

I would think it just as likely that this sort of activity is being committed by 'useful idiots' as it would be from actual IS forces or their actual affiliates.

Best of luck to Anonymous in this.. but frankly I think they're probably better suited to 'declare war' on the guys who did the Sony break-in than they are against a militant terrorist organization like I.S., who has (apparently, and at least for the moment) deep pockets to obtain whatever it is they need to track down Anonymous members and cut their heads off.

As a sidebar to this discussion: What the actual fuck do you do about 'organizations' like the Zeta drug cartel that are, for all intents and purposes, the de-facto power in Mexico? Or have I given them more credit than they deserve, here?, because from what you read and hear in the news, it's like they're the de-facto power in Mexico, and even the combined forces of the Mexican military and their police force couldn't manage to wipe them out before they were wiped out.

It has to start with discontinuing dumping shit into the atmosphere that's screwing everything up, and we can't get everyone to do it. Then it comes out that a large pecentage of the problem is jet airliners and cattle of all things. No, we're not anywhere close to being able to 'engineer' this, we can't even stop fouling our own nest.

Yes, it is. If you aren't, then you're not paying attention.

Great. I suppose this will also be part of the 'internet of things', too? Goodie, not the government will be able to 'calm down' the populace with the push of a button. Handy for quelling inconvenient things like public political protests, freedom of speech, etc. Politicians will LOVE it.

It's simple: You hack the OnStar crap right out of the car. At the very least, you locate the antenna it's using for it's (presumably cellular network) wireless connection, and you cut or otherwise disconnect the cable, preferably grounding it as well, effectively disabling the entire system. If possible, the OnStar hardware itself will be a separate module; then even easier, you just disconnect the entire module. In fact if it were I, and I was spending that much money on a new car, I'd insist as part of the agreement to purchase the vehicle, that the dealer disconnect it, and prove to me that it's been done, or I don't buy the car. I'll bet you money that they'd do it with little or no argument, because they're more interested in making a sale. Just spent a few minutes with Google and apparently there are model-specific instructions for disabling/removing OnStar. Also, there's this: Don't buy a car if it has OnStar in the first place. Enough people do that, they'll stop offering it. Make it clear you're not buying a particular model because it's got OnStar installed by default.

Actually familiar with the movie. Julie Christie getting railed by the hexagonal metal penis of the ultimate f**king machine, Proteus. So she can gestate a fleshy shell for himself to escape destruction into. Classic. Bizzarre, but classic.

You're preaching to the choir here; I am agreeing with you.

Friend, there is nothing wrong with being a little paranoid, it's a survival trait.

I am heartened to see I'm not the only one who sees the massive problems technology like this can cause. We do not need every damn thing in our homes connected to the Internet.

Get murdered in your own house by -- you guessed it! -- the house itself!

..or, at the very least: Your house becomes one big surveillance platform to watch your every move. "Don't be evil", indeed!

If energy can neither be created or destroyed, only change forms, then what happens to the photons emitted by starts when those photons reach the edge of the Universe? I'm just looking for theories, here.

Want to know what's going on here? I'll tell you: Regardless of who did what, we (the U.S.) are using this as an excuse to slap sanctions on North Korea. Why am I not getting upset over this? Because Kim Jong Un and the entire North Korean government are a bunch of fucking assholes, and anything that can be done to make life more difficult for them is fine by me. Anybody really want to stick up for North Korea? Go ahead and try, I don't think you've got a leg to stand on.

Maybe not, but if this is true then shoudn't we be focusing our efforts towards a replacement for jet engines that burn fossil fuel?

I'm not really saying 'don't do this, it'll cost you your life and your immortal soul!' or anything as silly as that. If there's no chance that you're going to pay someone to repair it, and you feel capable, then sure go right ahead, but don't hold your breath waiting for a miracle to happen, either. As previously stated I think that the reason this works at all, is because BGA packaged devices (microprocessor, graphics processor, SoC, PCH, what have you), when run through reflow, had one or more solder balls that didn't make contact with the solder paste on the PCB beneath them during the IR reflow process, but that when it the whole assembly cooled, made physical contact enough to pass QC testing of the finished board, and probably helped by the fact that a heatsink assembly was pressing down on it. Over successive heating/cooling cycles of using the device, the PCB warps, pulling those balls away from the pads on the PCB, causing the unit to fail. Now, what heating it in an oven for a while would do, due to the fact that the PCB and the BGA component(s) in question expand and contract to different degrees, is re-warp the PCB back in the other direction, causing electrical contact to occur again -- temporarily. At a company I used to work at, we actually had a small-scale hot-air rework station we could use for BGA package devices, and I'd used it, with a lot of liquid solder flux, to 'float' a BGA package on it's own molten solder, then 'nudge' it ever so slightly, to cause the intermittently contacting solder balls to make full contact with the now-molten solder, 'fixing' the PCB permanently. However this device used temperature-controlled hot air both from the bottom and the top of the PCB at much higher temperatures than any oven in your kitchen is capable of. So, at best, the 'fix' described in TFA would be temporary at best, as demonstrated by the fact that it had to be done again later.

Now, if there was 100% inspection of all BGA devices on a PCB being mass-produced, then such 'defective' PCBs would never be assembled into finished products in the first place, and they'd more or less last forever. However QC inspection on that level would probably mean the finished consumer product would double or triple in price, and there'd be fewer of them leaving the factory slower, because it takes time to inspect them with the Xray machine needed to do that. Also it's not even 100% guaranteed to catch all defects of this type. So only a small percentage of a production run of PCBs asembled are inspected like this.