Everything depends on where you are. There are places, even in the U.S., where incident rates are a couple times over the national average.

As long as it's driveable, it should keep on driving - precisely the opposite of what most people would do. So yeah, I'd go with autonomous any day in such a situation - I can duck and cover and don't have to pay attention to the road.

I hate these people, just so you know.

Has your laptop been tested to work under water? I mean, shit, I like to sit and read in the bathtub, it'd be nice if I could, well, rest it on my lap, with the bottom half submerged you know. If I'm not coming across clear: the goal of a test program isn't to send people to the moon on a first launch.

Now you're anthropomorphizing and it sounds really silly.

So, you're making shit up. At least we know who you're paid by.

No. But before they even think of selling such a product, they must have a plan for customer disclosure and field updates in place, as otherwise offering such product becomes a big liability once the first vulnerability disclosure gets into the open. Here at least they were informed about it in advance, someone else could have simply leaked the disclosure anonymously.

The company in question have set themselves up for failure, and I'm not very sympathetic to their plight. If you distribute shit with firmware in it, you have two options:

1. Don't worry about upgrades, but apply a software development process that would be applicable to a "launch and forget" space mission. Thus you invest up front into ensuring that the damn thing will perform to specifications before you launch it. It's expensive, but you can truly deploy the product and at least have a lot of tangible evidence that you applied state-of-the-art engineering to ensuring that the customers should be secure. You did your due diligence.

2. Use a loose development process, and ensure that there is a (perhaps tiered) system of customer notification, field upgrades, and service contracts.

This is a no brainer really, if you've got half a brain, that is.

Who said anything about replacing them? The company needs to have a program, together with their distributors/sales network, of updating the firmware on such devices. If they don't, they've already lost, and their customers are crazy for buying such devices.

So, they are going through scientology playbook, then? /shakes head

Interestingly enough, XP still "lives" and receives updates, since the embedded versions are in full support. There's one registry entry you need to add to get any XP to become "supported" as far as updates are concerned...

Dude/dudette, you're doing it wrong. Seriously. And not "holding it wrong" wrong, but just fundamentally wrong. I have never had a Win 7 activation issue, and I don't even try particularly hard.

Can confirm. Used Ventura Publisher a lot back in the day. IIRC, it took a day to pre-render a full set of outline fonts, and you had to have an empty hard drive for it... It worked great, though! I also vividly remember running Ami Pro with its bundled Windows 2, and then Win 2 Corel on Win 3.0 :)

I don't even know what kind of activations those would be. XP can be preactivated by installing proper keys that match the OEM BIOS, no need for any special disks. Windows 7 can use either that or the loader. So for XP and 7, you don't need to activate anything. For Windows 8, IIRC there's no way to do an illegal activation on unmodified software anyway, and with the key in the BIOS, you don't need to do anything special and the proper key is there already - so the activations are legit. Someone must have been really incompetent, I think...

So, that was merely an acknowledgment that Hawaii was taken over. I don't think that anyone tries to deny that, right? What happened, though, is that they now have a representative democracy instead of a monarchy that was, by all accounts, headed nowhere.

Sure. It's can still be bullshit, though, and it is in this case. I see some parallels between this and the Kurdish cries for their own country. If either got what they wished for, they'd be royally screwed.

Calling a move from a monarchy to democracy underhanded? Uhm, oookay, if you say so.

That is really a deal breaker :( Good to know.

I think that it'd be doable in the visible spectrum, except that each pixel at the camera would need to be an optical-to-RF heterodyne. You could distribute the phase reference through an optical fiber link.