The sad thing is that there's an easy way to save weight on wiring. It's called moving to a higher voltage. Audi is already unafraid to make your battery expensive. A simple regulator provides 12V power to systems that require it, and moving literally all of the lighting to LED solves the lamp availability problem and is long overdue in any case, on any vehicle where it is not present.

Another way would be to distribute networked controllers more throughout the car. This just doesn't have to be expensive any more. It does complicate repairs, but Audi is unafraid to complicate repairs, as well.

Wait, what?

Sorry, but you have your head on the clouds. This is not how reality works. And no, I do no need to hire you. I can improve things myself, with the added difference that I know what is possible in practice and what is not.

Microsoft converted a long time ago. Unfortunately, they suffered a methane meltdown sometime around 2012 that contaminated their production floor.

I'm rather surprised you didn't catch a whiff of this while running Windows 8...

But we're talking about this in the context of Heartbleed, where pre-patch mitigation involved disabling critical services... A patch is what was needed here, and nothing else would suit.

I have found a shitpot of broken COPPER wires on my 1997 A8, in places like the wiring leading to the left side knock sensor which doesn't even flex much since it's attached to the fuel rail. I guarantee you that it will go badly.

The most wear sensitive part of a laser printer is the copy drum. If I recall correctly the old LaserJets had the drum integrated with the toner cartidge, so you replace to most quickly wearing part of the printer four or five thousand pages. It's no wonder they lasted so long. The mechanical parts that move the paper through the printer are pretty robust, so I wouldn't be surprised if the printers go until the capacitors in the electronics dry up, or the internal power connectors go bad.

That would be interesting, if it were true. Here's what TFA says:

"Del." I assume is short for "delegate". According to their website, the American Tradition Institute's tag line is "Free Market Environmentalism through *Litigation*" I assuming this means they aren't pals with Greenpeace, or even The Sierra Club, any more than the National Socialists in Germany were pals with the socialist Republicans in 1930s Spain.

Depends on what you consider "hiding the research". A fishing expedition through a scientist's personal correspondence is an invitation to judge his work on *political* grounds.

In science your personal beliefs, relationships, and biography are irrelevant. There are evangelical Christian climate scientists who believe climate won't change because that would contradict God's will as expressed in the Bible. These scientists may be regarded as religious crackpots by their peers, but that hasn't prevented them from publishing in the same peer-reviewed journals as everyone else. Since their papers invariably are climate-change skeptic, clearly they are publishing work which supports their religious beliefs. But their motivations don't matter. What matters is in their scientific publications.

In 1988, Gary Hart's presidential bid and political career were ruined when he was photographed cavorting on a yacht named "Monkey Business" with a woman that wasn't his wife. Now I didn't care how many bimbos he was boinking, but a lot of people *did*, which made it a political issue (albeit a stupid one in my opinion). Do we really want to use the coercive power of the state to dig through the private lives of controversial scientists?

It's a pretense that that would serve any scientific purpose. Maybe Mann is intent on overthrowing capitalism and creating a socialist utopia. That would be relevant if he were running for dogcatcher, but it's irrelevant to what's in his scientific papers. Scientists publish papers all the time with ulterior motives, not the least of which is that they're being paid to do research that makes corporate sponsors happy. As long as what's in the paper passes muster, it's still science.

It is not about not having disasters. It is about having them with acceptable low probability and acceptable amortized cost. The nuclear industry has failed spectacularly at that.

The stance "nothing bad must ever happen" is only advocated by people that failed "risk management 101", i.e. people that are really clueless.

Sorry, in many large organizations, the sysadmins are not allowed (or able) to change firewall configurations either. And sign-offs, even in emergencies like these, may take a few days.

What about acting? Or fiction? These are artificial experiences that evoke real emotional responses. Once the right buttons in your brain are pushed, most of your brain can't tell the difference between what is real and what is synthetic.

Granted, authenticity in human interactions is important, but it's overrated. Fake engagement often is a perfectly acceptable substitute. Situations where people put considerable effort into *seeming* pleasant usually *are* more pleasant than they would be if everyone felt free to paste their indifference to you right on their faces.

So this is a very interesting technology. What's disturbing about it isn't that people might be fooled into thinking the user is truly interested; it's that the user himself no longer puts any effort into creating that illusion. What if that effort is in itself something important? What if fake engagement is often the prelude to real engagement? Maybe you have to start with polite interest and work your way up to the real thing; I suspect the dumber parts of your brain can't tell the difference. If that's true, taking the user's brain out of the interaction means that interaction will automatically be trapped on a superficial level. This already happens in bureaucratic situations where employees are reduce to rules-following automatons. Take the brain out of the equation and indifference follows.

I suspect that the researchers are well aware of these issues; I believe that I discern a certain deadpan, ironic puckishness on their part. People who truly view engagement with other people as an unwelcome burden don't work on technologies that mediate between people.

In many large organizations, you have segregation of duties. This boils down to the sysadmins not being allowed to patch and recompile code. They are allowed to install a vendor patch though. And yes, segregation of duties is a good idea.

Indeed. There is however a certain type of wannabe "hacker" that needs to turn things into power-plays. These will disclose immediately and inflate their ego that way, no matter what damage this does.