Many state universities not in tornado alley installed warning sirens after the VA Tech shooting. I absolutely think RF was the right way to do this, because it allows for a much more resilient system.

You can query the FCC ULS for a lot of these places and just look at the license that was issued around the time the system was installed to determine the frequency. The mode is almost always analog FM voice, and the activation codes are probably DTMF.

I think this is a case where the simplicity of the system and the need for it always to work trumps keeping the script kiddies out. If you are caught transmitting on a licensed band without a license, the civil fine just for that is $16K.

I think the real danger is an terrorist jamming the frequency during his attack.

No, it was a guess. I saw a press article photo of an Uber Ford Fusion in conjunction with this story. This source says it was indeed a Volvo:

https://jalopnik.com/lidar-mak...

The pedestrian didn't seem to notice the car. The car appears to be a Ford Fusion (probably hybrid). If it was in charge-sustaining mode, the car might have been very difficult to hear.

The pedestrian was wearing a yellow hat and pushing a pink bicycle. Her shirt was dark though. She was visible to the camera for only about .77 seconds prior to impact. A human being would take 0.5-2 seconds to react to the object in the road once it became visible. Depending on the human, the pedestrian might have been visible for a couple of seconds longer than we see her in the footage, but the safety driver appeared to be distracted.

The reaction time of the autonomous car should be milliseconds. Assuming that the dashed lane markers are fairly evenly spaced, the car doesn't appear to have decelerated at all from my perspective. According to the police, the car was traveling 38 MPH, or roughly 61 km/h. On dry pavement with decent tires, the stopping distance in meters without accounting for any reaction time should be about (s^2)/(250*.8) with s = speed in km/hr... so, about 18 meters, or to be generous, 60 feet.

See https://korkortonline.se/en/th... .

Judging from the aerial layer on Google maps, the distance between the beginning of a lane marker and the beginning of a subsequent lane marker is 30 feet or so. From this, I think the first time you see the victim in the video she's about 43 feet away (.77 seconds at 38 MPH).

Here's the thing though... the LIDAR should have seen this in time to at least swerve to avoid. The LIDAR should also have seen the victim before the victim was visible in the headlights. In my state, the driver has the responsibility to swerve to avoid even if there isn't enough time to stop. It's obvious that there was nobody in the left lane (even in the blind spot, which isn't blind with LIDAR).

This really seems like an example of where an autonomous car could have saved a life that would have been lost due to a human driver's natural limitations, but it failed to do so. The car should have been able to see hundreds of feet, and the car should have had practically zero reaction time. Just as you would be lenient in judging and older driver for longer reaction times, I think we should hold the autonomous car to a higher standard.

This thing was a test vehicle. The debug-level logging of the incident should be made public so that if there was a bug that killed this woman, the truth will be known.

If it kills something we eat, like a cow, I think a cookout would be good.

I don't think it's a bad thing that someone is talking about morals and video games.

It's apparently completely acceptable to a sizable chunk of society for kids to play video games where they kill people. What if someone made a video game that allowed you to simulate raping people? Imagine if you could buy an artificial vagina or human head that integrates with your gaming console so that you could rape it. Perhaps this will happen in a few years. This sort of thing is fundamentally bad.

Society is advancing in morals in some respects but declining in morals in others. For example, women have decided that it is time for men to rediscover respect for women - that can't be anything but good. I'm pretty sure Trump is not the right person to champion a moral issue. Whether allegations against him are true or false, he doesn't have any moral street cred with most of the country.

I think firearms will always be necessary and dangerous. If we don't cull the deer population, they will cull us on the roads. Some people legitimately need firearms for self-defense. Therefore, people should be allowed to have the freedom to possess firearms, and the second amendment is a good thing. The NRA, insomuch as it is an organization that teaches people how to use firearms safely and accurately, is a good thing. I challenge anyone who thinks otherwise to go see a Rifle Shooting merit badge class at a Boy Scout camp. Teaching these kids respect for firearms saves lives. Do people need magazines that allow them to shoot 15 rounds without reloading? Nope. Does any serious marksman use bump stocks? Nope. Bump stocks are an attempt to turn a rifle into a toy. To its credit, the NRA isn't defending bump stocks. I don't think semi-autos should be banned, but high capacity magazines turn these things into indiscriminate tools for butchering crowds of people. I hope we end up with a reasonable compromise that saves lives and allows sportsmen to continue to be sportsmen.

Windows Embedded 8.1 Handheld is also impacted. I know because I happen to work for a company with a deployment of over 1000 units. Unlike the consumer version, the end of mainstream support of these things is not until 7/2019. Examples include Panasonic FZ-E1 and Honeywell Dolphin CT-50.

To compromise something like, for example, account credentials, you still have to execute *code* on the computer that takes advantage of the vulnerabilities.

Many (most?) older "enterprise" non-phone devices (think WinCE, Windows Embedded Handheld 8, and yes, Android whatever version) are locked down to a single application anyway, with the users not allowed to install other applications (thus preventing the devices from running the malicious code).

Serious enterprises do MDM and lock down phones. Even without MDM, if you use something like Google for your IdP, you can disallow devices from accessing company accounts if they've been rooted or bootloader-unlocked from the Google Admin console.

I hate BYOD, by the way.

It's not fair to allow consumers to sue merchants for payment card data breaches who, due to market forces, are forced to accept payments via the deeply flawed, archaic payment card processing paradigm we have today. Merchants should never have to possess cardholder data, but in most cases, they are required to. Even merchants who use tokenization are required to pass cardholder data to a payment gateway to get back a token. P2PE is not an end-all solution, either. You can't hide from the future with math. The oligopoly that controls that payment card processing paradigm essentially doesn't have any incentive to make it more secure, so they won't.

I take that back. I had to pay $15 to the VE to cover the cost of the exam session... there doesn't seem to be a recurring cost. I've only been licensed for two weeks. KN4DVB. I will take general and extra next month.

It's something like $15 every 10 years, and the license is a barrier to entry that keeps the airwaves a little more civilized.

I would think you would have to consider how much money the grads of the more expensive programs contribute to the endowments, spend on football tickets, and pay in taxes later. I bet an engineer will pay a lot more back to the state in taxes than an art teacher.

Nah... it's not a semi tractor-trailer rig. The "semi" qualifier belongs to the "trailer" part. It's a tractor-semitrailer rig. The trailer is a "semitrailer" because it is only self-supported on the rear end ("semi" meaning "half"). The front end of the trailer is actually over the tractor (pivoting on the "fifth wheel", so to speak), so the trailer only partially trails the tractor (the part with the cab, engine, etc). If you get fancy, get it right.