The Mythbusters shouldn't be embarrassed, their hacks are just what they need for both a practical, quick-and-dirty approach to a car that won't ever be driven again, and the hack-n-whack approach is good for their ratings.

The people behind this new implementation should be embarrassed.

Yes, it's kind of neat to implement remote control with consumer grade stuff, cheaply.

We're lampooning it, in part, because it's so Mythbusters to control the car with belts and pulleys and by pushing the pedals when many modern cars could be electronically told to do that.

They should be. Their hack-implementations pushed the pedals and turned the steering with pulleys and belts.

In a modern car with electronic stability control, antilock brakes, and drive-by-wire throttle cable it's silly to make something that pushes the pedals. It's even sillier to have a pulley and a belt turn the steering wheel when many new cars have park-assist, where the steering can be controlled by the vehicle.

With many modern cars such a system could be implemented without making it obvious to anyone that it's there. No extra components or modifications within the passenger compartment. And that is the point, automakers are continuing to build systems to alpha-test the systems that would need to be present in a car capable of driving itself. It's not much of a stretch to take one of these modern cars with all of these self-control features and to add the sensors needed to allow it to drive itself. We may even see grey-market retrofit kits fifteen years from now, if original-equipment self-driving cars hit the market in the next decade.

> It's not good enough that they track you at every site that uses Analytics,
> every site that uses AdWords, every site you go to from their search engine,
> every site you visit with their Toolbar in play. (I'm forgetting a hundred other ways they suck your data.)

Factoring in a few of the other ways you didn't list, like sites with YouTube videos, we can guess Google is aware of about 85% of consumer web traffic. Using their DNS would tell them the only the hostname of the other 15%, and only once per TTL. So call that 7% from using Google's DNS.

Using anyone else's DNS gives that other company 100% of your lookups rather than the 0% they had before. 100% is a lot more than 7% or 15%, so you're giving up a lot more privacy by using any DNS other than Google.

In other words, Google already knows which sites you're visiting - you got to those sites by searching Google. Why would you also give that information to some other company?

That was my thought process after I found that Chrome is so good for web development. I'm using Chrome, so Google has a profile of my web surfing. There is no reason to let another company have the same information, so I'm better off using Google services all around. (Besides the fact that Google provides good services, which get better as they are integrated.)

Interix once claimed that they hoped to build a certified Unix. It doesn't appear that they ever did so:

http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/catalog.htm

I don't see Interix listed as certified Unix 93, certified Unix base, certified Unix 98, or certified Unix 03. I do see OSX listed.

Agreed. It's a WORKSTATION. It doesn't need to be a tiny little 11 pound can. A few weeks ago a drive was going out in my old Mac Pro. I slid out the drive carriage and slid in a spare sata drive I had laying around on a shelf.

Reading what I wrote, I realize I have too damn many computers. At home, I have an Android phone, tablet, and TV box. Linux / Windows laptop, Linux desktop, MacBook Pro, Linux home server, and for some volunteer work I do a Linux PBX. That's 8 computers at home.

    At my 8-5 job, I have the Mac Pro and for my side job I have a rack full of servers.

Perhaps you've confused the Mac Pro workstation with a portable iOS device competing with Android. I'm one of those "Google fan boys" I guess, since I have three Android devices. I also have a Mac Pro and a MacBook Pro. All are excellent for their intended purpose.

I strongly prefer my $99 Android Nextbook over my iPad. So yes, Apple's iOS devices do indeed suck - their usefulness per dollar is really bad. The Mac Pro isn't an iPad, though, it's a workstation that runs certified Unix.

Well no, not unless the "cloud" storage provider allows you to restore deleted files, or old versions of files. Dropbox does, for example.

If the bank still has network access to the ATM, then the bank could configure the machine to have no access until such access is authorized, remotely, for a given time window, with an expiring password that the service technician could even write on the top of their workorder form, as once it's entered, it's gone. That would prohibit illicit crews from gaining access without having someone inside the company assisting.

Alternately, require the sensors indicating that the machine has been properly opened into service configuration before releasing control. Since such a configuration would probably give the in-person attacker direct access to the money stored in the machine, there would be little reason to continue with an electronic attack, as opposed to drilling through or breaking through a panel now to get at a port, which doesn't expose the money.

To add to your argument, I expect that Good Morning America and other national-level programs could afford to pay the live professional stenographer.

How about understanding the guy with the stutter? The guy that doesn't move his jaw so his consonants are almost imperceptible? The Scot? The Cajun? The Bostonian? The Puerto Rican? The Jamacian?

You just eliminated the upper middle class from making any stock investments.

Either you have no idea how tax brackets work, or else you didn't read my post thoroughly.

I set the scenario for new tax brackets, and my example of a 90% bracket starts a $5,000,001 in income and above. That doesn't mean that all if your income is taxed at 90%, it means that all income above $5,000,000 is taxed at 90%.

If $5,000,000 is your idea of upper-middle class, then I really don't know what to say. I tend to transition out of upper-middle class into wealthy somewhere in the annual income of $200,000 to $500,000 per household range, depending on the cost of living in one's area.

The difference is, the difficulty level to cross that river is small. The difficulty in building a permanent method by which to cross that river is small, but a little harder. The difficulty in crossing that sea is even harder. The difficulty in crossing that ocean is even harder still, and the first sailors didn't truly know what they'd have to face when they got there, but at least they could breathe the water and could attempt to fish for food from the sea.

Someone wishing to go to Mars cannot rely on nontechnological means of sustaining life. There is no air to breathe, no food to scavenge or forage for, and no water to drink. Breathable air has to be made from ingredients on the ground. Water has to be processed from ice or made from components of the Martian atmosphere. Food has to be grown in soil that might not even be able to sustain crops.

This isn't Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. As good as those books are, they're not science, they're not even really hard science fiction. They're the stories of characters, fictional creations that receive fictional macguffins to help with their fictional plot advances. I really enjoyed those books, but I do not in any way consider anything after the first couple of chapters to be worth thinking about in a real Mars mission. The ability to deploy, in advance, small, launchable factories designed to create breathable air and drinkable water are one thing, the ability to collect all of that infrastructure into one place and to keep it functioning is an entirely different story, and remember, in the books, the project had the support of both the American and the Russian governments. Not simply a couple of guys. Can't hold a bake-sale to buy a bomber.

Do you remember The Simpsons episode, "Marge vs. the Monorail," where they had a song-and-dance routine about monorails and the town bought one, and it didn't work? Well, that single episode of popular television has set back monorails to this day, even though when they've been installed (Disney parks the sizes of small cities, Seattle, Las Vegas, as examples) they've been incredibly well received and have been very cost effective to operate. This program, should it get into the popular culture before it fails, will do the exact same thing to space exploration.

I'm pretty sure they use Henny Penny fryersm

http://www.hennypenny.com/products/frying/pressure-fryers/

The problem with open deep frying is that as the moisture within the meat boils, it bursts out as little steam explosions popping through the coating. Sealing the deep fryer to create pressure keeps the moisture inside. Because the steam doesn't escape in a pressure fryer, the hot steam goes into the meat, cooking the center more quickly.