...for cooperating with the Machiavellian pro-war, pro-surveillance, pro-torture old boy's club in the federal bureaucracy.

There should not be a *signal* to do it. Backdoors are too easy, which will also make them easier to abuse. The bar should be high.

There are already microwave transmitters that can fry a car's control system at range (such as the one promoted by SAVELEC). This should be the preferred method. The police should be *so sure* that the driver is a criminal that they're willing to stake a lawsuit on physically destroying a car's control system. That should be the bar.

Let's stop giving the police ways to cut red tape and instead occasionally make the police do it the hard way. Then there's less capacity for easy abuse.

Guess you've never heard of J. Edgar Hoover, then.

It wouldn't satisfy Putin. He took South Ossetia from Georgia and is likely still engineering a wider pro-Russia coup in Georgia. He engineered this situation in the Crimean Peninsula, and he's probably engineering other such incidents in other former soviet republics.

At no point is surveillance involuntary on the parts of our clients, or their clients. Also, our main clients are not insurance companies, and this is generally true of most of the telematics industry. And with the exception of insurance on utility vehicles, there are still ethical, legal, and practical limits to deploying for all the clients of a whole insurance company.

This LoJack thing is advertisement. Relax.

"You can cry into your Cheerios"
"so don't get upset"
"Man up and get going."
"stop crying about competition"

Sorry kiddo, I remain unprovoked. But I do want to point out a few misconceptions you seem to be operating under.

First of all, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that I am concerned about our competition. No, by pointing out that we have competitors, I'm saying that there were many such businesses before (and besides) LoJack. LoJack's technology and business model is nothing new, which begs the question of why LoJack (and only LoJack) is suddenly being mentioned. In any other world it would be called spam.

Second, you are peddling the same old tired fallacy about capitalism, that optimal competition yields optimal results. In other words, "better product beats worse product, so make a better product and you'll beat them!". That's horseshit, and you know it. Such systems don't work because competitors can't agree to follow the rules of the framework in which they operate. Perfect example: a company manages to get free advertising on a very popular tech website that ostensibly has certain guidelines against advertising in posts.

Third, we're well within our rights to complain about advertising in Slashdot submissions. We're following the guidelines, and others aren't.

And...ah yes. The "life isn't fair" excuse. The excuse that the intellectually lazy (or personally invested, as case may be) use to rationalize the nonsensical aspects of modern society. Have fun when someone bends or breaks rules/guidelines to get an advantage on you, and don't come here to complain about it.

I co-founded a company that does this, and we have a number of competitors in the same space. Tons of people and companies do this.

Do we get free Slashdot advertising too? No? Stop posting this shit and start posting news.

By that definition, all behavioral disorders are selection biases.

There are a set of concrete neurological and genetic characteristics that constitute psychopathy.

We've reached a sort of socioeconomic metastability wherein large corporations receive little penalty owing to the difficulty required to sue/prosecute them. Too big to fail, but also too big to require obedience to any form of morality.

Terahertz circuitry exists, it's just stupidly expensive to produce and cool, and plus performance isn't just about clock speed. Pipelining and memory access speed play into it a great deal.

This is a good point...the legal protections on American companies are in fact *stronger* than they would be for foreign companies.

Linus Torvalds was born in 1969. The Linux Kernel project began in 1991. He was not 15.

I'm not typically prone to suggesting conspiracies, but we've already seen cartel-like behavior from establishment car manufacturers and dealers as they lobby states to ban direct-from-manufacturer car sales. Considering the bizarre timeline (3 in a couple months, all of a sudden?), the tolerances and safety features surrounding the batteries, and the publicity that all of the victims milked with copious amounts of photos and interviews, could this be an illicit attempt to get Tesla banned?

I actually didn't see any romantic overtones with Petra that didn't occur in the book. Rather it's that Orson Scott Card is very bad at portraying platonic love in a way that doesn't look creepy in our society. It's similar to how Frodo and Sam would look completely homosexual if that relationship was put directly into the movie without any sort of translation.

Petra was meant to be Valentine away from Valentine, a mother or sister figure, I think. That's how it came across in the books and that's how it came across (but a bit too directly, as I said) in the movie. Just my opinion.

You are confusing private contracts with government charters- the two don't necessarily relate. A private entity can give your data to whoever they want so long as you agree to it by accepting the ToS (provided they include the permission in the fine print). It's not wiretapping. You're giving the private entity free reign, and the private entity is giving the government free reign. Yes, it's legal. Yes, it's constitutional (according to current judicial precedent). The Constitution does not ban your ISP from tattling on you to the government as long as you agree to allow them by accepting their ToS. The Constitution only pertains to scenarios where the government wants to search someone or their possessions directly. If you give your possessions over to someone, and you sign a contract with them saying they can give it to the government, then it's not illegal for the government to take it.

I'm obviously not defending this, but this is just the current legal reality. Current common law precedent and overly-permissive DoJ civil law interpretation have conspired to allow this sort of loophole.