Clearly, this is the signature of an FTL drive spinning up. Pity the folks using it died out 5.4999 billion years ago.

A state spying on it's own citizens... shameful. I'd be outraged, unless of course they said it was part of the war on terror, or whatever China's current favorite boogeyman is.

What do we know about the security of systems such as onStar?

But will a wearing a dongle help?

I got my hands on a few issues of the local police magazine and this was very clear. So long as someone ended up in jail they were happy. Even in the cases where the person was later exonerated using incontrovertible evidence (DNA match to another well known criminal) the rag would still defend the work and blame "pro-crime" lawyers for the reversal.

However, internal combustion engined vehicles require fossil fuel to run

Internal combustion engines can run quite well on hydrogen, ethanol, methane, and any number of other non-fossil sourced flammable gases.

In addition, plug-in hybrid vehicles offer a possible path for oil demand to drop drastically, without requiring any more improvements to battery technology. The vast majority of trips can be powered by electricity, while only longer trips need consume any oil. They need only drop in price.

Terrible. It insulted my intelligence at every opportunity. To pick just three:

1. A hard drive that's been at Ground Zero of a Chernobyl-level event, exposed to hundreds of sieverts of ionizing radiation, extraordinary extremes of temperature, a hydrogen-oxygen explosion with such tremendous overpressure that it blew the containment dome, and seawater pumped through the building as a last-ditch effort at cooling the core, is still somehow so readable that it just requires a classified forensics program to recover it fully.
2. The main bad guy's ultimate plan involves speculating on the future of a commodity that isn't exactly rare.
3. Targeting nuclear reactors in the U.S. and China as a practice run for the real attack is pretty stupid, as the practice run is so devastating that it guarantees an immediate and vigorous reaction from two world-power countries known to have active cyberwarfare programs, thereby announcing your presence to exactly the people you want to keep completely in the dark

This movie insulted my intelligence at every turn. I have a long (and spoilerific) list of all the what-the no-they-didn't good-Christ moments I saw in the movie; if there's interest I'll post them here.

There is an unspoken assumption by "sensitive" people that they deserve your time, or that their ideas need to be heard irrespective of merit.

Disagreeing with them, correcting them, or challenging them is _offensive_ to them.

Your first response doesn't convey the additional problem the way the 2nd one does

What additional problem?

"Hi, I am the busiest man in the free software world, and you just consumed my valuable time with amateur level mistakes. We have a FAQ about this, which you either didn't read or didn't understand, and as a result, my productivity has suffered. Please re-read the contribution FAQ. If you are still confused, send a message to LKML, not to me"

"I've cc'd this response to LMKL so that others don't repeat your mistakes, and so that everyone else is expecting your follow up questions and amended patch"

It's not "abusive" to point out that when people don't do their due diligence, everyone else suffers. Set an expectation of excellence, and expect people to follow it.

Results first. Feelings later.

Do you have any evidence of this? At all?

Because here's what I see:

Linux has remade the software world in its own image. I'd hardly call that "failing". Real actual super computer companies (e.g. Silicon Graphics) stopped developing their own OS and started shipping Linux.

Microsoft, the arch nemesis of Linux and Open Source, is shipping kernel patches and releasing code under open source licenses.

What does "success" look like to you?

And lest you say "that's just a singular case", we can look at Theo and OpenBSD. OpenBSD has been wildly successful, both as a BSD fork, but also in its broader mission to cultivate a software culture of excellence and correctness, with results that speak for themselves.

Linux and OpenBSD are two of the oldest open source projects around, with two pretty intense personalities at the helm.

I see no evidence to support your claim whatsoever.

There's this idea in the US that you are never allowed to hurt anyone's feelings.

The problem with that is that people are irrational, oversensitive, and cannot control themselves. Interacting with such fragile daisies is like tiptoeing through a minefield.

It is not, to me, a foregone conclusion that assertive people should tolerate having to deal with sensitive people. That is the prevailing dogma in US business, but it's not clear why that should be the case.

The meta response to this entire conversation space should be "stop bothering me with your bullshit and submit some fucking code"

If you can think of as many distinct sexual activities as there are symbols in your wrinting system, make a table and encode your secret messages as porn movies. (Spies will probably watch them, but probably also forget that they're supposed to be looking for messages.)

"...serious newspapers and comedy TV shows..."

Based on my experience in Kerbal, they're 95% of where they need to be. They've done the really hard stuff (controlled burns to bring the craft down at the right spot, slowing the descent at the right time without running out of fuel, etc) successfully. Properly orienting the rocket should be relatively easy assuming that the systems responsible for that haven't run out of fuel. The fact that the engine was able to get it that close without the fins working speaks volumes for how well the thing is operating.

Even if something else goes wrong the next time or two, they'll have a successful landing shortly. The simple fact that it hit the platform ought to be enough to let them start trying on land after another one or two similar attempts. As failures go, this was extremely successful.

Arrogant and self-obsessed. When you're around a little longer, you'll come to realize that you don't actually know everything. Or perhaps you won't as some never achieve significant emotional maturation.

First to create a workable, marketable, functional-in-the-real-world electric cars and created the first new successful car company in the US in decades to design, build, and sell them. Designed and built reusable rockets that run good reliably to the ISS for a fraction of the cost of any other solution ever devised by man. Also working towards sending people to Mars, which even world governments haven't even seriously considered. And on the Solar City side, they're making solar power so affordable to people that they've become the number 1 installer for residences in the US and the number 2 installer overall in less than 10 years of existence. 4.3 gigawatts of power produced by their installations as of 2013. They're doing all this while bumping up US manufacturing to compete directly with the Chinese. Who else is doing that successfully?

And again, I ask, what have YOU done lately besides read Wikipedia and spout off about things you don't understand? Because Musk, the guy you're criticizing, seems to be busy getting shit done.