EWNiedermeyer - Slashdot User

Submission + - NHTSA On Unintended Acceleration In Toyotas (thetruthaboutcars.com)

Submitted by EWNiedermeyer on Friday July 16, 2010 @09:23PM

EWNiedermeyer writes: Why do Toyotas suddenly accelerate out of control? According to data from NHTSA's complaint database, they might not actually. While NASA studies Toyota's throttle electronics for signs of a ghost in the machine, the National Research Council and NHTSA have found that unintended acceleration in Toyotas is a recent, media-fueled phenomenon. It happens predominantly to old and inexperienced drivers. Prior to Toyota's floormat recall, it happened to as many Volvos (per thousand sold) as it did Toyotas. Most UA events take place in parking lots. See all this and more brought to life in the full presentation made by various government officials (available for download in PDF format, incisive commentary at no extra charge) at The Truth About Cars.

Submission + - Earth's upper atmosphere collapses. None know why (csmonitor.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 16, 2010 @07:23PM

An anonymous reader writes: An upper layer of Earth's atmosphere recently collapsed in an unexpectedly large contraction, the sheer size of which has scientists scratching their heads, NASA announced Thursday.
The layer of gas – called the thermosphere – is now rebounding again. This type of collapse is not rare, but its magnitude shocked scientists.

"This is the biggest contraction of the thermosphere in at least 43 years," said John Emmert of the Naval Research Lab, lead author of a paper announcing the finding in the June 19 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters. "It's a Space Age record."

The collapse occurred during a period of relative solar inactivity – called a solar minimum from 2008 to 2009. These minimums are known to cool and contract the thermosphere, however, the recent collapse was two to three times greater than low solar activity could explain.

NHTSA Complaint Database Oozes Personal Data 62

Posted by timothy on Friday June 04, 2010 @10:55PM from the now-that-sounds-jes-disgustin' dept.

EWNiedermeyer writes "Are your name, address, date of birth, driver's license number and Social Security number publicly available online? If you've been involved in an accident, they might be and you would never know. The Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration solicits defect complaints from the public, which are hosted on NHTSA's public database. There are about 792,000 of these complaints currently online, and as the video at the link proves, many of them are improperly redacted. As a result, the most personal information imaginable is available to anyone who takes the time to troll the database. This is a clear violation of the Privacy Act of 1974, and NHTSA needs to shut down the database until it can control the personal data stored there."

Submission + - NHTSA Complaint Database Oozes Personal Data (thetruthaboutcars.com)

Submitted by EWNiedermeyer on Friday June 04, 2010 @03:10PM

EWNiedermeyer writes: Are your name, address, date of birth, driver's license number and social security number publicly available online? If you've been involved in an accident, they might be and you would never know. The Department of Transportation's National Highway Safety Administration solicits defect complaints from the public, which are hosted on NHTSA's public database. There are currently about 792,000 of these complaints currently online, and as the video at the link proves, many of them are improperly redacted. As a result, the most personal information imaginable is available to anyone who takes the time to troll the database. This is a clear violation of the Privacy Act of 1974, and NHTSA needs to shut down the database until it can control the personal data stored there. See the video for more...

Submission + - Yahoo & AP: Incompetent Or Malicious With Comm

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 04, 2010 @01:40PM

An anonymous reader writes: Someone noticed that certain Associated Press stories on Yahoo seem to be appending old comments to new stories in a way that was highly misleading (suggesting new stories had a lot more interest than they really did). The initial theory was that this was some sort of nefarious scam, potentially by Yahoo and the AP. However, Mike Masnick at Techdirt dug into the details and found evidence that it's more about incompetence in the way Yahoo built its comment system, combined with the way that the AP pushes and rotates its articles to partner sites. So, which is it? Is Yahoo incompetent or malicious?

Submission + - Fix For Sticky Toyota Pedals Temporary At Best (thetruthaboutcars.com)

Submitted by EWNiedermeyer on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @07:45PM

EWNiedermeyer writes: Toyota's fix for its sticky pedal problem has arrived at dealers, and it looks to be temporary at best. According to official Toyota recall instructions, the fix amounts to placing one of seven different shims on a tension arm that Toyota claims was causing the pedal assembly to stick (non-recalled, Denso-supplied units are designed without tension arms). The Truth About Cars performed the fix on a recalled gas pedal assembly per official Toyota recall instructions [available in PDF format at the TTAC link], and concludes:

"The only way we interpret the necessity of measuring the friction arm gap and choosing an appropriately sized shim is that the older units with more wear will have a smaller gap than the new(er) ones. The shim will compensate for that wear, but in a static, not dynamic way. As soon as the continued wear on the friction arm changes its size or other friction characteristics, the pedal is potentially back to the same sticky situation as before."

Not good.

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