Not with the protocol itself (because you couldn't trust it anyway), but you could implement crypto on top of the bus to avoid that problem. Everybody signs the messages and only accepts messages from approved sources who have signed their messages correctly.

You don't have to pre-place keys everywhere in the car. You just need all of the asymmetric key exchange to happen when you turn the key. If it takes 50 ms then so be it. Hopefully nobody gets in a high speed collision 45ms after starting their car. After that each component will have negotiated a symmetric key that they can use for the rest of the communication. You can decode a 256bit AES key in a couple of microseconds on even cheap microcontrollers these days.

I have to imagine that things have changed at least a little bit in 17 years.

I appreciate the theft deterrence aspect of this, but I wonder what it does to the third party parts market. For the key and immobilizer that's fine, but when every single part on the car needs a specific code that is baked into the ECU then repairs start to get tricky.

Ah, but there is also a privacy screen guard defeater!

Of course, it was also part of a sovereign country that they had treaty obligations to protect and the "referendum" took place after the territory was already completely occupied and under foreign control. And naturally, there was a big hurry to the whole process.

And then of course, it happened in a complete vacuum, totally separate from the continued occupation of and material support in other areas of Ukraine. No Russians there, where there IS actual shooting and resistance. Nope.

You forgot to put "referendum" in quotes.

Gays I agree - but women and religion? Where do Republicans differ from Democrats on women's rights? Where do Republicans and Democrats differ on freedom of religion?

Gay marriage... while I fully support it, it is hardly an issue critical to the nation's future. I certainly would not make it my litmus test when selecting a politician unless the two were otherwise very similar. Which, incidentally, happens to be the case most of the time.

While I agree that pharma holds a lot of sway with Republicans*, you are overlooking a huge reason for Medicare expansion: most of their supporters were (and still are) elderly. US politics is more about what "team" you are on then it is ideological in nature, and the Republicans were simply making a play that was popular with their fans.

* and Democrats, for that matter - witness the ACA

By that logic, the only moral problem with Iraq was that the opponent had the audacity to resist invasion. If they'd just surrendered, the US would have been in the right and could have gone further and annexed the territory.

- stares in disbelief at monitor -

Where in my comment do I mention either fascism or communism?

I'd argue that both the Democrat and Republican parties differ very little in actual practice - only the wedge issues show any real difference, and those are usually social issues with only a minor effect on the nation as a whole. For instance, I don't know how you can single out the Democrats as the socialist party when the Republican party is responsible for what at the time was the largest expansion of Medicare ever.

You only missed my sarcasm. :)

Company... as in limited liability corporation? As in, get their charter from the government?

And despite they being a figment of our collective imagination, companies are still deemed to have religious freedom and political speech freedom?

Yeah, that's exactly the same as the USSR, with central planning and state-owned and controlled industries.

I understand that some people on here probably weren't alive during the time of the Cold War, but at least peek at the USSR Wikipedia entry.

I'm with you. I just read the minutes of a meeting full of advertisers selling a dubious product.

I guess I deserve that. What I mean is that the national government will have to crack down on local government corruption if they want to keep the local governments in line. They probably will eventually do this, as it was done in the US. Unfortunately, there is no government level above that to rein in corruption at the national level. You can see this at work in the US.