Oh shit, my avatar is in need of an AR15/M16/M4 or some other evil black rifle - I tried looking a while back and couldn't find one and just figured MS banned them to protect teh childrenz from images of firearms. Anyone know where I can get one before its too late?

Why do you want to encrypt the RFS? You shouldn't have any sensitive data there, and having to decrypt your binaries before they can be loaded into memory is a huge performance hit. Or am I not understanding what you're trying to do?

Yeah, like an ethanol addict that would die if they just up and quit cold turkey. Just giving oil is a nice thought and all, but its unfortunately not very realistic yet - we need that petroleum fueled economy to develop an energy replacement.

He's not operating on rumor, he's absolutely correct. This type of thing happens all the time - a drug is developed in the US and approval is easily achieved in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, etc, and then it takes several more years to gain FDA approval. Most Phase 2 trials are performed in these countries because its just so much easier to get approval and then test it on the thousands of patients required to make the FDA happy.

Before you go on about how noble the FDA is about saving lives, I suggest you work with them first. They are far more dedicated to maintaining their bureaucracy than actually saving lives. They require filling out paperwork on filling out paperwork. And its not like people are dropping like flies in other industrial nations that have more efficient approval processes.

Furthermore, if you want to blame high drug prices in the US on anything, this is the problem right here - the gross majority of employees in any big pharma company are responsible for some FDA requirement. On the upside, they do create a ton of jobs.

The problem is our current social security and medicare/medicaid system are systematically flawed. They are pyramid schemes that depend on an exponential population growth that hasn't been happening because people just aren't fucking like they used to. In other words, the rate of expenditure growth is out pacing the rate of revenue growth and no amount of spending cuts or tax increases are going to fix that.

Of course we also need to seriously overhaul our tax code to eliminate the volumes of handouts to special interests and cut the huge waste that is our foreign military occupations. In the end though, its the exponential SS and medicare/medicaid liabilities that will kill us.

You'd be correct, except you are totally missing the cost of regulatory compliance. Actually coming up with and manufacturing a compound to treat some ailment is cheap and easy. Proving to the FDA that it is safe for sale for some purpose is extremely costly. No one is going to pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to perform these trials if, once approved, anyone can go out and manufacture and sell the same drug for $2/bottle. How the hell are they ever going to cover the margins of millions of man hours invested in clinical trials competing against people whose only operating expense is a small factory in Mexico or China?

What people such as yourself don't understand is the primary business of pharma companies is regulatory compliance. The gross majority of people employed by these companies, and the gross majority of their expenses go to making the FDA happy. If you want cheap drugs and to eliminate the need for drug patents, you either need to eliminate the FDA (dumb) or place the burden of testing these drugs on the government and the tax payer (also dumb).

The system we have now may not be ideal, but it works pretty well. It's efficient and promotes innovation. Yeah, drugs are more expensive when they're first released, but the patents are short lived and cheap generics quickly make it to market. If anything, this should be an example of how the patent system should work - patents last only long enough for the inventor/investor to make an ROI before expiring and entering the public domain.

So we should all just walk then? That doesn't seem very conducive to our right to freely travel.

This logic doesn't fly (pardon the pun) with other rights; how is it at all acceptable that we should be expected to waive one set of rights to reasonably realize another?

Oh, and I take it you don't understand that rights don't come from the US Constitution - you are born with them and the US Constitution is designed to put limits on the government to prevent it from violating those rights. It is not an exclusive list of rights. At least, it wasn't supposed to be before we started pissing on it in the name of safety.

Exactly. We call them traffic circles and we've had tons of them in NJ for a very long time - way, way before 1990. Being able to navigate traffic circles in NJ is a trademark skill required for any resident and is often a problem for new comers. Many of the circles have been eliminated, or are in the process of being eliminated, simply because they don't scale well to the ever increasing traffic volume.

While I actually enjoy navigating circles, a well designed intersection with an adaptive traffic light system yields a much better result.

You are correct - seeding torrents is like a P2P pyramid scheme and the people on the bottom are left holding the bag.

The thing is, this situation is a rare occurrence for most users, and most will be able to seed greater than 1 most of the time. In my experience, the number of torrents you can comfortably seed greater than 1 dwarfs those that you can't. While I have found torrents on private trackers to be typically very well seeded, often to the point of saturation, I've never had a problem maintaining a positive ratio and I usually don't seed more than a day or two.

I figured. This is a common trap - to initially assume blame for your area of expertise. I find I do the same thing, but in reality, its almost never the electronics that fail - its usually the sensors, actuators, or wiring. This is especially true with automotive gear where the electronics combined with a CAN interconnect are damn near bullet proof, and are by far the highest grade kit the average consumer owns.

The accelerator position is measured by the throttle position sensor, which is just a potentiometer bolted to the side of the throttle body. This is usually measured directly by the ECU, and in no way involves the CAN bus or OBD (unless of course the signal goes outside of an acceptable range and an error is thrown). There are so many things that could go wrong - fouled TPS, damaged wiring/connector, fried ADC, etc - that would cause incorrect readings and not throw a trouble code. Of course, this would cause serious problems with the drivability of the car since acceleration enrichments would be wrong causing lurching and perhaps stalling on acceleration.

I think the important point to be made here is that our electronic gizmos can't measuring anything directly - they depend entirely on proxy measurements based on a set of assumptions. If any of those assumptions are violated, the measurement is no longer valid. I think the best example is GPS - it assumes a clear, direct line of sight to each satellite it uses. This assumption is violated in urban or mountainous areas where multipath reflections become a major concern, and location, velocity, heading, and acceleration are no longer valid.

Neither does the federal government. Roads are owned by state and local governments. The clean up is usually done by the local government. The insurance that I pay for pays for the expenses that result, and if I'm at fault, both my insurance company and myself are liable for damages.

Motor vehicle transportation, including licensing and registration, has always been a state issue - so why is it acceptable for a group of unelected federal bureaucrats to pass a decree that would greatly implicate the privacy for the majority of the population? Where do they derive their authority? Do you think something like this would actually go anywhere if they tried to enact it by legislation?

Furthermore, is there a real problem that this solves, or is it just a solution in search of a problem? Will this really provide that much more useful data that can't be determined through traditional means (aka measurements and physics)? I just see this being too susceptible to abuse - ie police scanning impounded cars as part of their 'inventory inspection' and writing additional summons for what they find.

I work in aviation and privacy is a big concern for some of our customers. Sometimes its for security concerns (the richer you are, the more people who want to make a mask with your face) and other times its for PR reasons (it doesn't look good when a company fires a few thousand employees in the name of cutting costs and then turns around and picks up a few new G550s - even though the new aircraft will save them money in the long run).

What these guys usually do is operate under a pseudonym. I don't know the full mechanics of it, but we regularly have customers with bogus names operating under bogus corporations. They get paint schemes totally devoid of any company logos or color schemes and doing a tail number search yields meaningless results. We know who they are, but on lookers, like in this case, will be totally in the dark.

Famous people usually don't care. While most celebrities can't even afford to look at a private jet, those that can often get their names painted all over the side of their aircraft as if saying 'look at the size of my penis!' The point being, if they want to be private, they can, but it seems these guys just don't care.

Now that isn't to say that they should have to go out of their way to maintain privacy. The FAA logs and keeps way too much information on these guys to the point it is downright scary. Of course, the relative safety of air travel has a lot to do with the strict controls of the FAA, but none the less, they need to be more concerned with privacy - if not for the sake of the VIPs, then for the safety of the couple dozen technicians and crew members maintaining and operating the aircraft.

Limited usually being 100,000+ times

I have prototype devices used for development that have had their EEPROMs erased and reprogrammed hundreds of times without any signs of a problem. A customer in the field would never come anywhere close to this.

In any case, this would be better served by flash memory than EEPROM.

I have to disagree with this. When you go on to actually use the math you've learned, not using a calculator is plain silly. There is no way I could have completed a few EE exams without my TI89 because of the large amount of complex (in both uses of the term) math required. I remember a number of my friends had trouble simply because they didn't know how to use their calculators and had to do their calcs by hand. I'm sorry, but when you have a test with a dozen problems, each requiring as much number crunching as an average calc exam, you need the calculator.

And now that I'm all grown up, I'm not going to model a filter by hand on a piece of graph paper. I'm going to use Matlab. If an engineer wanted to do math by hand today, they'd be seen as a dinosaur wasting time - not some mathematical genius.

If you really want to prepare people to use math in the real world, you need to include teaching them how to use today's tools. Teaching students how to do things by hand is great, but utterly useless by itself after they complete the final.