Kak, boet.

Google + NSA + autonomous cars: you will get fucked, certainly.

Mod parent up please. This is the play, not anything else.

Few outside the US have considered it a good country for a long, long time now. Fewer still outside the common definition of "the West" would consider the US anything other than a malignant bully enforcing its will on others through violence, whether that be political or physical. It is impossible to keep up the charade though, even to your own citizens. Finally, slowly, the scales will fall from your eyes.

I know many of you will say "so what, your country could do it if it could" and that the US was "obliged to act in its national interests". However, it should be plain to see that the necessary enforcement required to perform to that standard have long been surpassed, and today the interests of your corporations are served by your government, and the corporations in turn serve but a handful of masters. Ultimately we've got a situation where the interests of a mere handful of supremely wealth and untouchable individuals are more important than the rights and privacy of the millions who have toiled to enrich and empower them. Inevitably, the requirements to keep this status quo have been brought to bear on those responsible for allowing this state of affairs. Don't hang about, it's going to get worse. Having your privacy invaded is nothing; wait until drone strikes hit your neighbourhood. Wait until Guantanimo Bay is no longer merely for the brown or the Islamic. Wait until those urban armies dressed as cops bust more than drug dealers.

Just had to say: brilliant .sig. Thank you.

Well I run a site (see "homepage" link) that wasn't made for advertising, but it has allowed me, for a brief time at least, to devote my time to researching the information and purchasing materials for researching the information. Much of what you see on the site is online through my effort first. A whole lot is parsed by me from low-quality images that can't be searched, OCRd or otherwise rendered (see what I did there?) useful for people requiring answers. I tried to behave as respectfully towards my users as I could - no extraneous pages to click through, no annoying ads, and I made the decision to serve only text ads. I guess I'm SOL for now, but it would be nice not to be hated for just trying to make ends meet and doing what I love.

From my point of view, the advertisers are the problem for another reason - they have ridiculously high demands for honouring payments, like not only must a user click, they must complete so and so action or the click doesn't count (which leads to ever more prominent, gaudy ads to try and bait users to click), extremely low revenue if the metric is views rather than clicks, etc. There is also zero transparency from their side - a click is valid or not on their say-so alone.

Hopefully this will push ads towards a more peaceful and unobtrusive pay-to-display model - as per any other medium that has ads at all.

Rebooting after installing bug fixes. For the bug fixes.

Gnome 3 was a fuckup, but it started way back, when Havoc Pennington declared that too many options confused users. That was the start of the slippery slope that led us to this scenario. Taking away options completely instead of just offering basic & advanced configuration options was a fucking stupid idea. A desktop or any interface needs to get out of the way and make your day-to-day experience as painless as possible, but Gnome was hijacked by look-at-me designer types with nothing better to do than find ways of breaking shit that worked pretty fucking well. End result? A clusterfuck that nobody wants to use.

As I'm out of mod points, have a good, old-fashioned +1.

You do know that in just a couple of days there are over 30 dead already? Hardly peaceful. Certainly not democratic in any sense.

Yeah, the US traditionally champions democracy with the caveat that the people elected had better be who the US wants to see in power, or your democratic process will be summarily and violently overthrown. Egypt is just one more chapter in this book of aggression.

Fuck me. Truly a first world problem.

Actually, HDD or mobo.

If what you say is true, hello :), and I would suspect the hard drive almost certainly. It's 5 years old and is likely due to fail. Copying large blocks of data as you describe could well be the trigger to start hitting bad sectors and then boom!, dead drive. Without escalated privileges you could not possibly have done OS-level damage doing what you have described.

The current test cycle setup is rubbish, even with approximations made for load on the rolling road based on the coast-down phase of the test. Undue importance is put on CO2 emissions whilst disregarding the really nasty exhaust gases, but obviously that's because most EU countries base their tax solely on CO2 output now.

That said, the car makers are not doing themselves any favours by playing around the edges of the stated legislation, even if you bear in mind that pushing the rules to the limits is one of the basic principles of motor racing in any format, and would be the default mindset of those engineering the cars.

Constructing a truly even, fair and representative test will be terribly difficult, if not impossible. I wonder if any changes they make will be worth the effort at all.