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Comment Re:Well past its Best Before date (Score 1) 662

Like just about everybody, my picks for a new co-host include Sabine Schmitz

Her English is very good, but not good enough.

But they have to look very carefully at the show and decide if its worth continuing first. I'm not convinced it is.

You cannot sub out the cast and have the show work. So they shouldn't, but not because it's not worth it, but because they can't do it.

Comment Re:Boorish (Score 1) 662

Oh please, American cars technologically are no different than any other cars these days.

On average, that's false.

The main problem with American cars these days is styling.

No, the main problem with American cars these days is build quality, just like always. UAW simply doesn't do as good a job as the non-union workers at the Japanese plants. Whether that's because higher per-hour labor costs make it impossible to pay them enough to torque fasteners correctly, which is a thing they seem to have trouble with, or just because they're shiftless layabouts without work ethic, the truth is that American cars tend to be assembled like shit.

If I want a car assembled correctly, I buy one which was put together in Germany or Japan, or second choice, by a Japanese company operating its own plant in the USA.

Only the top-end American cars are built from the same basic design strategies as euro cars... well, maybe and the Fiesta and Focus.

Comment Re:what will be more interesting (Score 1) 662

Realistically though, How could the BBC have resolved this any other way?

The way most stars are handled when they act out, you put them into counseling, make them make a public apology, that sort of thing. And that's why the BBC is stupid for being all PC over things Clarkson has said in the past. They gave him final warnings over things which didn't deserve any warning, now this happened and they had no choice but to go straight to firing him.

Comment Re:what will be more interesting (Score 1) 662

Is your entertainment more important than someone being assaulted?

You mean battered. Just threatening someone is assault.

I think a lot of people would benefit from a pop in the nose. And I say that as someone who was bullied in school. Namely, some of those bullies could have used a good socking-up, for some perspective.

We don't know what was said. It's easy to say that violence is never an acceptable answer to something that someone says... But if that's true, then it's equally never acceptable to say something hurtful to someone, because words can hurt more and longer than fists depending on how they are applied.

I'll worry about Clarkson being violent when I find out what was said, and not until.

Comment Re:The BBC doesn't have much latitude here. (Score 1) 662

I think he probably took for granted the freedom the BBC actually gave him to speak his mind (about cars). It may turn out that the PC brigade were much more understanding than the world of advertising driven commercial TV.

I think that a corporate master will let Clarkson speak his mind, because that's a big part of the appeal. Without that, he's not the same guy.

Comment Re:Not concerned (Score 1) 177

The "trucking industry" is unlikely to be an agent of change. They are entrenched incumbents who will fight, lobby, and bribe to stop automation.

Again, why would they do that? The only members of the "trucking industry" who stand to lose if trucks go automated are truckers themselves, but they can't possibly out-lobby trucking companies.

Progress is more likely to be driven by customers such as WalMart, or entirely new transport companies.

No. Wal-Mart will just contract with whoever can moves the trucks most cheaply. But they're not going to do the leg-work themselves. They'll just contract whoever has the self-driving trucks, after they do the lobbying.

Wal-Mart doesn't give a shit how cheap trucking is, only that they get it at the lowest possible cost, because they don't care what their prices are, only that they are lower than the competition.

Comment Re:too bad.... but... (Score 1) 662

The refrigerator thing would definitely deserve being yelled at, don't you think? Employees have been fired for lesser offences.

It still wouldn't justify a 20 minute screaming tantrum that disrupted the entire hotel.

You're assuming that there were not earlier events which led to this event, and also that the producer didn't say anything to exacerbate the situation.

Look, violence is not a wonderful answer to something other than violence or impending violence, but the anti-Clarkson force seems to believe that he just got the wind up his arse and started throwing fists. But since none of us were party to the conversation, and none of us know what was said, none of us knows how unreasonable violence was as a response.

As someone who was bullied in almost every possible way in school, including a whole lot of verbal abuse, I know that verbal abuse can be as painful as the physical kind. In fact, studies have shown that emotional abuse actually causes physical pain responses in the nervous system. That's right, words literally hurt. If the BBC were as progressive as they'll have you believe, they'd fire people for saying mean things to other people. And then it might well have been the producer who was out of a job, before he even got a chance to eat a fist.

Comment Re:Not really needed (Score 1) 40

If his garbage causes you take take a different flow of execution, however, that provides him a way to reach bugs in the little-used parts of your code.

The different flow of execution triggered by an overflow trap should almost always be a simple call to "abort()". At this point, your program has already failed and should be stopped.

I disagree with your premise. Garbage input values should be checked and rejected in software before the overflow ever occurs. The hardware overflow check should be a last resort to enforce this at every instruction step, and in the worst case it converts privilege exploits into less serious DOS attacks.

Allowing "garbage output" as you propose just creates more opportunities for attacks when that output gets consumed somewhere.

Comment Re:BBC not to blame here, Clarkson is (Score 1) 662

Fact is BBC are getting dragged over the coals for letting all kinds of behavior from past stars go unchecked in order to keep the money flowing, including pedophiles.

So they cracked down on a shot to the jaw as a response to being soft on pedophilia?

Even if that is not true what is not in dispute is that he physically assaulted another person and some lines cannot be crossed no matter who you are or what you bring in.

Nobody really believes that "no excuse for violence" canard, do they? The world certainly isn't run that way.

Comment Re:Boorish (Score 1) 662

Well, to be objective here (though you might disagree) ... every time I get an American car as a rental I'm forced to conclude the people who design American cars are idiots.

It's not just you. Watch any car review show, there are many to choose from and you can watch pretty much all of them on Youtube. The presenters will always talk about how much better the fit and finish are in the kraut cans, and will always talk about how they are a much "nicer place to be" than their American rivals.

People don't understand how to watch reviews. Reviewers who aren't nice don't get to do reviews, so you have to mentally turn down the nice on every statement. If they say that something is quality, then it could be a lot better. If they say it's better than the competition, then you know it's that.

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