There have been public demonstrations, some televised, of certain models of modern car that allow you to change things like timings and injection sequences, via OBD, over Blueooth, using default passcodes.

I'm sure they're all patched now. Of course. No more will that ever happen again.

There's also been demos of being able to DoS certain buses in the car remotely and wirelessly, preventing everything from in-car entertainment to immobilisers from working, etc. using similar techniques.

These things are all out there. Go look. And that's just OBD. God knows what happens when you start tying in Wifi into the car speakers, joining that to the satnav for Internet updates, joining those to the car etc.

You can see cars on the market today, not even particularly unusual or modern ones, that pull in OBD information into the electronic dashboard which also doubles as a music interface and a satnav and a fuel gauge and a Bluetooth phone interface and everything else. It's not at all hard to imagine that such things haven't covered every single possible hole where information from one can leak to another.

And anything OBD-writing is potentially dangerous. As in "blow up your engine" dangerous. Most older OBD systems are nothing more than read-only technical data. Newer ones do more to allow flashing, firmware updates, and even modification of settings that control emission levels (e.g. fuel injectors, exhaust re-introduction pumps, etc.). Add that together and you have one big mess waiting to happen.

There's a reason that you don't buy mod-chips for your engine nowadays that you can swap out to pass emissions test and then swap back to get the "sports performance" of your car. Because they don't need to swap the chips physically any more.

So what you're saying is that all ISPs have to support IPv6, they all have to do so in a standardised (or EVERY POSSIBLE) way, and there's no way to do anything until they get off their butt.

That's what 6-in-4, and the various tunnels were made for, because the ISP's aren't getting off their backside because if they support 6rd but your router was made before that and so doesn't support it, then as far as the users are concerned they don't support IPv6 at all.

But even there, that's FOUR WAYS to do the same thing. All involving third-parties.

What about what *I* would like to do to combat a third-party not supporting IPv6? What if my router didn't support ALL those protocols independently and completely? What if my ISP never adds IPv6, how do I get on the IPv6 network even with all the above?

When you have so many different and competing standards, some EXPRESSLY designed so that the ISP doesn't have to be IPv6-ready, and STILL there's so much choice that your router has to support them ALL in order to claim IPv6 in any significant way, then you're onto a loser.

I don't care about PnP. I care about it being able to be done. But I'm an IT guy. I don't need it to be PnP and I can sort that out for my users. But not without all the ISP's we use onboard, not without explicit support for all the protocols (What if my ISP changes from DHCPv6 to another method? Can they still claim IPv6 compatibility even if my hardware no longer works?), not without having to know how all the standards and protocols work, and not without having to do all the legwork.

With IPv4, you have basically two options - DHCP which is a way of automatically plugging in all the information you would require for the alternate, which is a list of static addresses of various services. With IPv6, there are six, seven, eight protocols that all need different levels of information and co-operation from your ISP, assign different kinds of IPv6 addresses to you, (6rd, or 6in4, or local IPv6, or global IPv6? Who knows?) all work differently, may or may out just route out via a 6in4 address to the wider Internet via any route they like, rather than being provided by your ISP directly, etc. etc. etc.

It's a damn mess. And I have a router that I bought specifically to do this, have enough knowledge to set any or all of them up, could easily sign up to even tunnel provider available, and you know what - I can't be bothered because of the hassle of all that junk.

My websites and external servers are all IPv6 and accept mail over it on a daily basis. I just set up a static, it routes, off we go. My hosting providers provide NONE of the above automatic configuration services. My ISP provides NONE of the above and won't get out static IPv6 ranges.

What you have is a complete deadlock and mess until someone picks a standard and sticks with it. Because if I were an ISP, I'd just say "Sod it, I'm not going to provide ALL those methods and then be accused of missing one out, so I may as well provide none and let the user worry about it". And that's exactly what ISP's are doing.

You know what my solution was? I set up an OpenVPN link to my external servers and just talk via IPv4 to it, sending pure IPv6 through the VPN for a globally-routable IPv6 address that I've reserved for that purpose. It was easier to set it up myself using YET ANOTHER way of doing it than faff with any of the services available, supported or not.

I went out the other day and bought a new router for home after my WRT54G that had been doing the job for years started to show its age.

I decided to buy a PROPER router, with multiple gigabit, multi-connection failover, IPv6, VLAN, VoIP, VPN, LDAP, QoS, wireless access point management, all the trimmings.

The IPv6 config has a myriad of options. I got bored looking into all of them. 6rd, 6in4, DHCPv6, TSPC, AICCU, RADVD, god knows what.

Fact was, I got bored of trying to figure out which/how to use. Some required sign-ups and were basically IPv6 VPN's with all kinds of monitoring and restrictions, most needed ISP support to provide details, IP ranges, or some catch-all IP, and none were offering anything different to my eyes. In the end, it was all moot - my ISP offered no support for IPv6 at all (probably because of several competing and basically identical-to-the-end-user standards), and the other stuff requires me to sign up with a third party that will then take all my IP traffic and subject it to god-knows-what-jurisdiction.

The problem with IPv6 is not that it doesn't work. It's that it's not plug-and-play for whatever setup you have (transit over IPv4 or IPv6 native, for example).

If I get bored working out what to choose, I'm sure everyone else will not bother to support them until we choose just one either.

Have you been to university? There were entire lectures that I would pay to sit through again. You can't magic up that lightbulb moment just by searching Google for a keyword. You're paying world experts for their time.

Maybe universities are different now but it wasn't that long ago that I was there. You can't self-educate to that level without 8 hours a day of hard work and experts on hand. And that's just a degree. Masters, PhD and beyond are a world apart again.

I can't even get close to understanding my girlfriend's after she's been through years of postdoc published papers. Just Googling something and thinking you then understand everything about it is not an education.

That's not the problem.

Leap seconds are inserted by pretending that there's a 61st second in a minute. Everything not designed to handle that will fall flat on its face.

It's not a question of not knowing what time it is, it's a question of whether your software was built with certain (I would say not unreasonable at first glance) assumptions, or whether it follows the actual specification of the functions it uses and the data structures it handles.

58, 59, 60, 0, 1 tends to blow a lot of stuff up that was never built to handle such instances.

"I should be able to have a howitzer or a bazooka if I want one"

And I should be able to not have such things next door to me.

I'll continue to happily live at least one continent away from this kind of attitude, thanks.

I don't even think that it's that difficult.

Some old games just worked better because of their simplicity. Syndicate you could pick up in ten minutes, including completing a couple of missions, riding in vehicles, etc. despite it being almost an entirely new mechanic.

Syndicate Wars, I got bored to trying to get the camera where I needed it to go. The new Syndicate is a heap of junk.

But I would gladly pay for an extension, expansion, a slight enhancement of Syndicate designed for casual play.

Again, just because something is 3D and fancy graphics does not make it better. The games that used to be top-end games are now perfect casual games. I could happily play a game of Masters of Orion on the bus. But the mechanics of the original make it clunky. And modern remakes make it complicated, 3D, fancy and difficult to dip into and out of.

This is why the indie game sector exploded - games you can "just play". This is why I can remember fondly and still play ancient games like JetPac (a version coming to XBox One if the E3 thing is to be believed as part of a retro compilation title), Syndicate, Master of Orion, Theme Hospital, Rollercoaster Tycoon, etc.

People just think "2D = crap and old" when actually the 2D games are quicker and easier to play. That means they won't be AAA titles, but you could make a lot of money selling them as casuals. Angry Birds basically is this same phenomena. Farmville was this too. People realising that they'd rather play a fun 2D game than some fancy complicated modern title.

Nostalgia tells me which games I will choose to play from a limited set. But when it comes to it, ZX Spectrum games from 30 years ago are just as fun to play - and would be even more so with some tweaking to bring the control systems etc. up to date - as modern casuals. And some of the tactical/strategy games from those eras are still the best ones made.

Nostalgia makes me remember the things I used to have. But my brain is still pleading for something modern that is close to how well those games used to play, or could play with modern interfaces. That's not nostalgia.

Google Telephone Preference Service.

Top hit: UK.

And, actually, I'm just returning the favour. Every website I read, including Slashdot, no matter the scope of its international audience just assumes that I'm American and understand what the hell it's talking about.

There is no correct answer. What you are doing is not just "undefined" but impossible.

Even an infinite number of zeroes can't multiply out to be anything but zero.

So if you can get the answers "zero", "one", and "infinity" - all within the space of a few seconds - for the same question, there is no "correct" answer.

It's like asking what the square root of -1 is. There is no answer that's a valid number in any of the sets of real or integer numbers.

Division is only defined for non-zero denominators. It's as simple as that. Because there is no possible answer for a zero denominator.

You want to find out how many Euros in those Zimbabwean dollars you're keeping track of. The exchange rate fluctuates. The web-API you're using goes offline and returns zero, so you divide by zero. Whoops. How do you tell the difference between worthless numbers and just worthless currency?

You want to draw an interlaced gif of some sort, so you do every nth line, then every n-1th line, as you get the interlaced lines and work down towards a full image with every row drawn. And then you cock up at the end, accidentally hit zero and you overwrite the first line thousands of times with garbage rather than spot the mistake.

Zero is so completely the wrong answer, you don't even understand why. The actual real answer shouldn't even be the largest integer you can hold. And if it is, it could also be the smallest (i.e. largest negative). But actually it's none of them.

Division by zero is NOT something that produces a number. It cannot happen. It cannot return zero (which is incredibly wrong), nor can it return any single other consistent constant. It should actually just error, which is why it does. It should produce something that's not a number (NaN). And it does exactly that.

Divide by zero is like a null pointer. On the face of it is appears singularly useless. Why on earth would you want a pointer that you can't dereference? But it's there as an indicator. You cocked up. Majorly. If your maths is at all important at that point (a cell in a spreadsheet), then you're potentially losing billions of digits of accuracy.

You can continue on blindly with your cockup quite easily. Any idiot can overload the divide operator to return zero when the denominator is zero. And you won't get any of those nasty errors. Errors which are indicative of an earlier error that you're just ignoring.

There's a reason that, even back in the days of BASIC and very limited ROM space, you programmed in divide by zero as an error rather than just returning zero and documenting it. It's the same reason that you don't just "ignore" NULL pointer dereferences by saying "Oh, well, we won't call that function and just carry on from where we were then". Any idiot could make some kind of overload to allow that as well if they really wanted.

The fact is that if you're dividing by zero you're doing something that's mathematically impossible. There is no amount of zeroes you can multiply to get anything other than zero. Not even if you multiply infinities of zeroes do you get anything other than zero. Hence division by zero of any non-zero integer is IMPOSSIBLE. It doesn't have an answer.

And, like the square root of -1, if you just ignore it and pretend it exists you will run into all kinds of trouble. If you want to do something with it, in the same way that we use "i" to represent the square root of -1 to get lots of magical maths that actually works, use a language that recognises NaN and test against it.

But I'll tell you now that it's quicker and easier to test if you're dividing by zero BEFORE you do the divide.

I find it quite sad that for a developed country you think that going this far our of your way, and then only getting 1-2 robocalls a month is anywhere near acceptable.

I have a landline. I have not had a phone call to it in 5 years, except for family and friends. We have an answering machine which records the fact someone called, so I know that we haven't (and not just they didn't leave a message).

We just don't get this crap. If we did, I'd complain like fuck because I've asked for my number not to be public - to the point that I would demand a change of number from my provider.

But, in fact, all I did was register with my country's "Telephone Preference Service" - which is free - and that's that. The two mobiles in the house are also registered. Apart from very, very rare (i.e. once a year or less) texts from random spammers, which I then report, we don't get that crap on those either. Generally, they have CLI information, and those phones have a call-blocker feature by default, so they're easily dealt with too.

Even in work, I have several direct lines and the switchboard. What makes it through the switchboard is actually worse than anything that comes direct because - well, they just don't have the number to dial me direct and I would complain if they did.

The switchboard girls, though, aren't as good as distinguishing "Hi, I'm a random joe just after some information, I'd like to speak to... you know... what's his name... the guy in charge of IT... John! That's it, John!" "Hi John, Susan in the office just put me through to you because...."

(P.S. Want to get me to blacklist your company and report your phone number? Do this to me. I've strung one company along for over a year and made them waste inordinate amounts of time setting up appointments, etc. only for me to "have to cancel" at the last moment. And then when they twig and ask why, I tell them it's because of their dirty sales tactics. If they can lie to try to get through to me, I can lie to string them along.)

When it come to scammers, spam, just random harassing phonecalls, unwanted sales pitches from companies you've never heard of, etc. why should it be any different?

I'd just unplug my phone forever if that's really the scale of unwanted calls you get. Or I would make you go through a compulsory automated switchboard - nothing rings in my house until you've passed a phone CAPTCHA, said who you are, why you are calling, and rung from a number that I can block.

1) Cigarettes - I completely agree with. Ban it or don't. Taxing something to oblivion to compensate for the harm being done by it is pure money-making on people's deaths.

2) Aside from the above (because it directly hurts others than the smoker themselves), what you stick in your gob-hole is up to you. Nothing speaks louder than paying a competitor because they have something not offered by others. But people don't. People are choosing to eat this stuff. And despite obesity epidemics, we simultaneously have anorexia epidemics and though - on average - we are getting bigger, that's mostly due to IGNORANCE or APATHY, not whatever is in the food. Anyone who cared would eat other things. Few people do.

4) Margarine's been around for over 150 years. The same 150 years where we've all lived longer than ever before. Note that this is, in general, true of almost all the things that health nuts abhor - salt was a major part of diets going back pre-Roman era. I'm not saying we shouldn't improve (we can't do everything the Romans did because it was "good enough for them"), but it's not the killer you make out unless you seriously abuse it. Or, again, are ignorant or apathetic of it.

3) Celebrity chefs are among the worst: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... In preference to all that "artificial" stuff, they suggest you make meals just as bad, if not worse, than the processed foods you abhor.

Kids should learn to cook because kids should learn to cook. Cooking shouldn't consist of sticking a bag in a microwave. However, if you were to suggest that kids learn to cook by using their smartphone to follow a recipe, there's uproar because it's not how you learned to do it.

Newsflash: People no longer eat up a table, in general. People no longer use napkins on their laps, in general. People no longer sit down for several courses, in general. People no longer eat three square meals a day, in general. Because ALL of those thing are bollocks and unnecessary and the legacy of previous generations that invented them.

However, even back in the 60's / 70's you didn't have the sheer range and volume of food available to you. The cuisines and variety of foodstuffs are unbelievable nowadays. The Mediterranean diet is over in the US, the sushi bar is in London, etc.

But the one factor that's the same in all the above - people. People don't care what they eat. So you can either nanny perfectly competent, intelligent, grown adults (your suggestion), or you can let them kill themselves slowly - when they're going to live far longer than you will anyway.

You, and places like the FDA, etc. are on a loser. The second you ban one thing, the manufacturer's will whack up prices until they find another cheap thing they can get away with. And it'll take decades to ban again. And in the meantime, all you've done is made food more expensive.

There has to be controls, of course, but banning something like salt, sugar or fat is really such a dumb-arse suggestion. Put labels on it. Warn about it. Spread bad press about it. Let economic nature take it's course - when I was a kid, there was no Diet Coke, there was no gluten-free food, there was no "low-fat" yoghurt, there was no allergens clearly marked in bold, there was no nutritional information - those all came about through one manufacturer having to compete for a slightly-more-educated customer base than the others. The fact that 90% of that is absolute bollocks and has actually FUELLED thing like nut allergies is neither here nor there.

Tip: Do not base any security or malware decision on what keywords are contained on a site / URL, what signatures exist (or don't) in a file or anything along similar lines.

It pissed me off when people say "You can tell if you have virus X because it create file Y or registry entry Z". Yes, and it takes a microsecond to produce an identical virus that DOESN'T.

Don't base your decision to visit a website on the keywords or URL. Base it on knowing that your browser will not ever execute any code from there without asking first, will not give out your personal information, and won't let you go to a previously unvisited site without warning you massively about entering your passwords etc. And certainly won't "just go" there by you viewing an email with that URL on it somewhere.

Security by "good boy / naughty boy" lists is not security.

national-lottery.co.uk

(No, seriously... try the alternatives without the hyphen and it redirects to the hyphened domain).

I have a Bluetooth mouse. It loses connection and isn't brilliant but you could use it for casual word-processing or similar use.

I have a Bluetooth keyboard. It works okay.

I work in a school. Put ten of them in a room and it all falls apart. If they aren't directly interfering the hassle of getting one and only one to join on to one and only one computer is a pain in the butt. Windows isn't particularly great at this, even on 8.

But at home I have four wireless XBox 360 controllers on a cheap dongle thing I bought from Amazon. Works perfectly, don't need to set anything up, recognised by all games, if one goes to sleep, you press a button and carry on.

Bluetooth isn't perfect and probably not good for this kind of thing. Wireless is even worse as you then have a controller-over-IP situation. There is no real alternative.

Also, go buy a bluetooth PC keyboard/mouse compared to the cheapest of "other wireless" sets. You'll pay more. I can only presume that this is patent or similar licensing. There are also a lot fewer models of such things because the cheap wireless stuff just works. You don't need to know the ins-and-outs of a protocol like the XBox controllers. You can pick up cheap dongles and controllers that are compatible for next to nothing, so it's not hard to work out and not "secret".