Might be more necessary than you would think with the change from a solid rear axle to a IRS. IRS is well known for being much hoppier and letting the wheels launch into the wheel well during burnouts and hard launches.

Not digging this device, and especially not the Arduino fans trying to pimp an even more expensive variation. I'm all for kit electronics, but e-mail / smartphone notifications are the way to go for computer notifications remotely. And the comms down argument against fails if you setup some form of heartbeat system. As for the Arduino is the bestest crowd... ummm, your community is already well aware of how to wire in notification LEDs to the kit.

Sorry, you're wrong from a vehicle control and engineering standpoint. Stability control is any system that increases the control and behavior of the vehicle. ABS systems specifically increase control of the braking AND every traction / stability control system uses the ABS subsystem specifically to monitor and control wheel speed, in addition to other sensors and controls. Even in the ignorant way you tie EFI into stability control, you are wrong for trying to be obtuse and correct; throttle, fuel, and timing are all used by stability control systems to meter power output.

Many cars made as far back as the last 10 years don't even have a conventional dedicated ABS system in the manner you are implying. The pumps, solenoids, and wheel sensors are similar to older designs, but the control logic is entirely built in the stability / traction control logic and the original ABS algorithms are just minor functions. The fact that there are per wheel solenoids to pulse the brakes pretty well describe a traction control / stability control role rather than just ABS.

I have noticed similar trends of brand / model specifics for a wide array of jobs in both the white collar and skilled blue collar trades. The reason seems to be not just to get people who are instantly productive, but also for liability, both managerial and liability. Think about it, what better coverage is there when things go tits up than to able to say you hired someone who claimed to be an expert in their field. Traditional engineering has been rife with such micro-scoped hiring for years to the point that you have experts in minutia like air conditioning condenser side pipe layout who jump from job to job fleshing out architectural designs.

IT is vaguely moving many jobs to having less to do with skill sets and more to being a purpose specific drone.

Bonus with facial recognition, they also have clues as to your mood, disposition, and intentions.

Several people are trying to make this completely false point in the bullshitty post Snowden mass media... It requires an incredible amount of ignorance to believe. Facial recognition is plenty fast to track you throughout public transit with trivial difficulty. Cards can be swapped and purchased anonymously. Why would any nefarious government agency wishing to track citizens leave it up to chance like that?

A few really simple reasons the government would be in favor of Bitcoin:
1) Gain control early.
2) Every transaction leaves a trace. The idea that Bitcoin is anonymous is a bit of bullshit. Yes, right now the exchanges keep one hand from knowing the other. This is easily changed.
3) In aggregate, it's impossible to trace for a non-government entity. This means slush fund spending woohoo time.
4) Politicians have figured out that the extreme anti-social end of the internet from which Bitcoin has gained its popularity are a bunch of socially inept jack offs. They know these people have poor impulse control and too much intellect, but are easily swayed by marginal amounts of lip service.

You two below understand that there are pocket readers that can pull your CC mag stripes through your pants. Not sure what kind of electrical engineer you are, I am a physicist with a good amount of EE, both academically and vocationally, and listening for the RF from an inductive reader is really easy. Most physical readers are lightly shielded and that is usually enough to stop reads at a distance (i.e. more than 1 ft). How exactly is this card concurrently holding 8 cards... oh that's right, it dynamically writes the stripe each time you go to use it. This means a very clear RF signal as it writes the stripe with an inductor array. A simple tuned antenna for the speed that the bits are written at and some simple gear will grab the bits right out of the air as the write occurs.

There is one way to prevent easy reading, that is to write multiple bits concurrently and at randomized positions in the stripe. Somehow, I think the odds that they did this pretty low. If by chance they claim they write the whole stripe at one time, there will still at some stage be a serialized signal or some other method to serialize the RF spatially. Might need two antennas at most.

Seriously, someone could prove the vulnerability in about 5 minutes with an oscilloscope just to show the RF leakage. It has to leak RF because the stripe is exposed.

Solar energy generation is quickly becoming another route for the rich and bourgeois classes to extend their distance from the poor and lower ranks of middle class.

The solution is WAY simpler than Arizona is making it. Report the energy generation, both that bought by the utility and that which the customer generated and used themselves as income to the IRS. This upside is this taxes larger residences / installations, thus making it a progressive tax.

Skimming will be easy. Listen for the RF or similar EMF when the card remags the stripe. I pointed this out about the Geode back when that was the hot POS (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1404403369/geode-from-icache). Hell, you should be able to do it from dozens of feet away, no more need to get close to someone's wallet.

Hey, can I be a famous hack (the older academic definition) like Ang Cui if I can demonstrate a simple means to listen from 10-20 feet away to the amplifier circuits on iPhones / iPads / Droids when reading from a Square or PayPal scanner... keep in mind the audio circuits in a phone are not made to be shielded the way an ATM card reader or similar is.

No, but small auto shops are consolidating. The internet, especially YouTube, has opened the door to amateur auto mechanics who wouldn't have learned otherwise. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the privately owned shops have become so inconsistent from shop to shop in honesty and competence that most people feel (are) safer taking it to the dealership. Again, communication enabled by the internet has increased the awareness of consumers that frequently the work the shop did was bs or overpriced.

Well, now you've let the cat out of the bag about how they were going to handle power uptime.

Works in the microwave band eh? Can I get one of these in the K/Ka band for my automobile?

Or Facebook knew they would decline the first offer out of hand, and is just baiting would-be competitors to blow giant piles of money on a boondoggle. Zuckerburg strikes me as that kind of brilliant and calculating. Even if they had taken the $3B offer, Facebook could easily have made the acquisition terms so onerous as to make it stillborn.

Also the body of traffic laws isn't about what you can prove your ability to do by experiment. It is largely about finding a middle ground for the average driver to be comfortable while dealing with occasional cock ups. I'm sure you text fine going in a straight line in moderate traffic. You would more than likely not notice the retard blowing through a red light coming from the perpendicular at an intersection.