AT&T keeps adding "insurance" charges to our bill without asking. They make up odd excuses to keep adding it back after removal, something like, "Oh, you said, 'Are you sure', I thought you said, "You insure us".

Reminds me of the browser Spam Bar prompts: "Are you sure you don't want to not add the Ask Tool Bar? _Yes _No"

Making huge discoveries about the universe without leaving mom's basement? Nerdgasm!

Here's a more technical discussion from NHTSA. At page 74-75, the data elements of the Basic Safety Message I and II are listed. The BSM Part I message doesn't contain the vehicle ID, but it does contain latitude and longitude. The BSM Part II message has the vehicle's VIN. So this is explicitly not anonymous.

Back in the 1980s, when Caltrans was working on something similar, they used a random ID which was generated each time the ignition was switched on. That's all that's needed for safety purposes. This system has a totally unnecessary tracking feature.

Most of this stuff only works if all vehicles are equipped. It also relies heavily on very accurate GPS positions. However, there's no new sensing - no vehicle radar or LIDAR. The head of Google's autonomous car program is on record as being against V2V systems, because they don't provide reliable data for automatic driving and have the wrong sensors.

If something is going to be required, it should be "smart cruise" anti-collision radar. That's already on many high-end cars and has a good track record. It's really good at eliminating rear-end collisions, and starts braking earlier in other situations such as a car coming out of a cross street. Mercedes did a study once that showed that about half of all collisions are eliminated if braking starts 500ms earlier.

V2V communications should be an extension of vehicle radar. It's possible to send data from one radar to another. Identify-Friend-Foe systems do that, as does TCAS for aircraft. The useful data would be something like "Vehicle N to vehicle M. I see you at range 120m, closing rate 5m/sec, bearing 110 relative. No collision predicted". A reply would be "Vehicle M to vehicle N. I see you at range 120m, closing rate 5m/sec, bearing 205 relative. No collision predicted". That sort of info doesn't involve tracking; it's just what's needed to know what the other cars are doing. It's also independent of GPS. Useful additional info would be "This vehicle is a bus/delivery truck, is stopped, and will probably be moving in 5 seconds.", telling you that the big vehicle ahead is about to move and you don't need to change lanes to go around it.

If you like the field of statistics it seems a better long-term bet than IT. The "laws" of math are not going to change in 40 years, where-as in IT the languages, GUI's, frameworks, and Paradigm Fad of the Day will change...several times. Plus it won't give you Carpel Tunnel (unless you can't trick a grunt into data entry). You are expected to know the domain (industry) such that outsourcing is not as likely either.

Software may pay more in the short term, but career-wise, stats seems more stable.

I do divide by 3, and my friends divide by 3.

I'm a TW customer, and I didn't notice the difference because TW always sucks (and so does their sole competition in the area. F oligopolies).

Some outsource STEM to Asia, others to heaven. Same diff: both have a funny accent and accept less pay.

Still using Imperial measurements?

Twelve is a more logical base than 10. It divides evenly by 2, 3 and 4. Base 10 only does 2 and 5. Mirroring fingers is so stone-age.

[they believe] that religion in school meant students were better behaved and more obedient, and society as a whole was just better off

Note there is no real evidence that the threat of a ghost-father BBQ-ing your ass for eternity if you are bad actually works as an incentive. Shorter-term feedback is usually much much more effective on humans (and all animals).

the problem with "Intelligent Design" is not that whether it's "true" or not, but rather that it's not science because it ignores the Scientific Method

I disagree. ID is a valid theory, in terms of a possible explanation. After all, Monsanto is doing ID (and some DD - Dumbass Design), so we know it can happen to some degree. Old-fashioned breeding is also ID.

But, the evidence for it is very week in the big-picture sense. We normally don't discuss very week theories in science class. I don't mind if a state textbook puts in a blurb about it, but the "Evidence" section would be blank.

An interesting side discussion for students is if complexity alone is evidence for ID. In other words, if a natural explanation is not currently known, is that strong evidence for a creator, or merely evidence of humanity's knowledge gaps?

Asking those kinds of questions is a great way to learn such that I am all for bringing up ID in a science class, if done well. I really hate to say it, but I agree with Bush in terms of bringing it up. (I have to shower after that admission.)

Nah. It just takes more crashes before the exploit achieves penetration.

(Address space randomization is a terrible idea. It's a desperation measure and an excuse for not fixing problems. In exchange for making penetration slightly harder, you give up repeatable crash bug behavior.)

Comcast: "The dunce-caps we are wearing are not really dunce-caps, but rather dandruff routing devices."

The Slashdot article doesn't tell me what MediaGoblin does, or what it's for. Nether does the MediaGoblin site. The documentation, in typical Gnu syle, starts out with "how to participate" and continues with installation instructions.

It's sort of like Wordpress, but with different features and support for streaming media. There's a list of sites that use it. Of the public sites listed, all but one are demos of MediaGoblin. The first site on the list that isn't a a demo and works is this set of baby pictures. There's one site that lets you upload stuff. It's a collection of uploaded pictures with no organization.

This seems to be a publishing system for people with nothing to say.

Back in the 1990s, Microsoft developed something similar. Their idea was to render frames in layers, with the more distant or less active layers rendered less often. if the viewpoint changed, the background layers were scrolled, rotated, or transformed to match, rather than being re-rendered immediately. It never caught on, because graphics hardware became fast enough to re-render everything on for each frame.

This new thing is similar. Mispredicted frames are viewpoint-warped as a temporary measure so the user sees something. The image is wrong, but close enough to look OK until a new rendered frame is sent. It looks OK for Doom, on which it was tested, because Doom is mostly about the shooter and the opponents moving; there's not much general activity in the background. GTA IV/V would probably look much worse than normal.

The whole concept represents a desperate attempt to make something "cloud-based" that shouldn't be.

It's "forked up", if that's what you mean.