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Transportation

Government To Require Vehicle-to-vehicle Communication 390

An anonymous reader writes "For decades, the focus of auto safety has primarily been on surviving the traumatic impact of crashes through features like air bags and seat belts. But now the focus has shifted to avoiding crashes by developing technology to make future vehicles 'smart' enough to detect and respond to threats, such as an oncoming vehicle. The technology, known as 'vehicle-to-vehicle,' or "V2V," lets cars 'talk' to each other and exchange safety data, such as speed and position. If a nearby car abruptly changes lanes and moves into another car's blind spot, the car would be alerted. Federal transportation officials did not announce when the new regulations would go into effect but said they hope to propose the new V2V rules before President Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017." Combine this with remote kill-switches or pulse guns, Amber-alert scrolling signs, proliferating cameras, automatic plate recognition and unstoppable text messages from on high for some not-so-distant driving dystopia.

Comment Re:$700 million - and still insecure!!! (Score 4, Informative) 351

The commercial company that built this website was let go from their contract, and without that contract there will likely be firings.

But yes, feel free to tell us about all the firings from the major corporate breaches that happened in the last year. Because if you think this doesn't happen all the time, you're living in a fantasy world.

Comment Re:Go Team USA! (Score 2) 351

Congress is currently among the most incompetent and ineffective governining bodies on the planet. It's filled with people in safe seats (no particular effort required to win) and corporate shills who are open about it. The place needs a total purging, but that would require voters to do something other than vote for the same party every single time.

And if you expect anything out of voters these days, good luck with that.

Comment Re:Won't reverse course... (Score 3, Informative) 1009

Making their desktop/laptop users hate Metro is not advancing their phone/tablet cause. It's the opposite. Nobody who has a bad experience with Metro on their PC is going to go looking for it in another environment.

They needed to make using Metro painless on PC for that strategy to work, and they failed in spectacular fashion. It's time to give PC users what they want and make Metro a secondary thing in that environment, because it simply works badly on PC and forcing it hurts their other product lines.

Comment Re:Vista/7 (Score 4, Insightful) 1009

Its amazing how nobody at Microsoft seemed to realize that if they forced Metro on people and people didn't like it, that would harm their phone/tablet sales rather than help them.

If I hate it on my desktop PC (where it sucks), why would I want it on a tablet?

Comment Simply no need to buy as many anymore (Score 4, Insightful) 393

It used to be that a house with multiple PCs wasn't that uncommon. With phones & tablets there are now many households that can get by with zero PCs, and many more that can do everything they need with just one.

Real world user performance has stagnated, with hardware gains not translating into doing a given task faster anymore. A PC from three years ago isn't that much slower at what most users are doing than a brand new one, so there's no particular need to upgrade.

This is what a mature market looks like. The product is going to continue to sell for a long time, but it's not the hot item it used to be.

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