Ok, automakers want to force me to obey their license terms? WHERE ARE THEY?

I've never had a dealer make me sign a EULA or license terms to use the car they just sold me... Go ahead guys, TRY IT!.

Once you do this, I'm going to review all the software I can find in my car and start looking for Open Source libraries in all that fancy user interface stuff you are providing now and make you comply to the license terms for it all. I have a feeling that we will find that you have some legal problems..

Next they are going to try this on hand tools....

We've reached the limits of the flash technology which drives both the SATA and PCIe versions of the storage device, at least in terms of how fast the data can be received from the media (the nand flash). This is not surprising. Flash is not all that fast and it quickly becomes the limiting factor on how fast you can read data out of it.

Just moving from SATA to PCIe wasn't going to change the underlying speed of the media. The slowest device in the chain is what rules the overall speed. We've just moved past where the drive interface is the limiting factor.

So the story here really is, that we have reached the limits on the Nand Flash, at least on read performance.

OpenWRT is pretty much brain dead simple with the default load if you have reasonable hardware and use LuCi. Usually the load of the firmware is exactly like what the factory firmware does. Yea, LuCi is a bit more compex than your average home router product, but it's still easy enough that I was able to figure it out with very little help. Armed with the FAQ and or WiKi it's really easy and takes you about 3 steps.. 1. set the root password, 2. configure your internet connection and 3. turn on the wireless connections. Everything else is optional for most.

One issue they could fix is the default configuration. Something a bit more functional out of the first flash might be nice... Just enough to get everything running out of the box, but the failsafe mode is only a few mouse clicks away from an internet connection.

Yes....

Reverse osmosis plants use pressure to remove the salt by forcing it though membranes. Pressure requires pumps, which require power... What I'm reading says 3KWH pre cubic meter of water...

Don't buy hardware unless you can load your own firmware on it. OpenWRT or DDWRT are both great options. Personally, I have two Netgear routers. One that runs OpenWRT that is my internet facing router and it is rock stable as long as my ISP doesn't do something stupid (like they did last week when they changed me from PPPoE to DHCP access w/o telling me in advance). The router my ISP provided would reset multiple times a day (got to love that actiontech junk) and the stock firmware on the Netgear would require a hard boot about once a week. However, OpenWRT has been rock stable for months.

The small business stuff isn't that bad actually, once you get past the infant mortality issues in the hardware.. I'd not recommend putting them into a large enterprise network, but for small businesses and home use they are fine. I have 4 of these switches which have been working fine for 10 years now and let me do basic Layer 2 switching, VLAN's and fully functional spanning tree for redundancy. It's a pain to keep the right version of IE laying around so you can manage them, but I just keep an old Windows XP virtual machine for that. Now if you are a large enterprise, don't even think about anything but the full up, enterprise level equipment.

I've actually had pretty good luck with the "small business" line born from the Linksys purchase by Cisco. I have 4 of these old Linksys smart switches in my home network and they've run fine for the last 10 years. The problem you will have is that they can only be configured using a version of IE that was last supported on Windows XP so I have to keep a old Virtual Machine with XP on it laying around so I can configure the switches...

I'm with you, but I generally use OpenWRT myself...

But you can automatically try to find known issues using common attack vectors and avoid shipping the known ones. You can also automatically try randomly generated kinds of potential exploits and see what happens to your software. It's called fuzz testing. And it can expose *possible* exploits, especially if you know something about how your software works. For instance, you can detect that some random packet got passed by the TCP stack and was sent to an application which did something unexpected like logging an exception. You can then take the discovered issue and investigate why the application does what it does and that there isn't an attack vector you can exploit (buffer overflow, SQL injection, or something else).

Not to mention... How do you know you fixed an unknown vulnerability? I'm waiting for an answer....

Well, only if you are not bypassing some OTHER water use that is more easily curbed. Why not start filling in all those private swimming pools in Southern Cali? Can you image how many billions of gallons go into evaporation alone for pools that might be used once a month?

What about watering lawns, leaking toilets, dripping faucets, leaking pipes and kids playing in the hydrants opened in the street? I'm sure ALL of these are orders of magnitude bigger issues than what is "wasted" by bottling it for drinking.

No, actually the earthquake wasn't the problem, the plant survived fairly well with an earthquake that was many orders of magnitude above the designed speciation's. If the emergency power hadn't failed (by being flooded in sea water), the plants wouldn't have been useable and we would have had some leakage of radioactive water but not the mess we have now. What failed was the electrical power at the plant because the giant wave that took out all the backup generators and there was no way to get portable generation on site fast enough to keep the plants from overheating.

Not to mention that these designs where incredibly OLD technology, having not advanced in nearly 20 years. Much safer designs exist, ones that don't have the problems with needing supplemental cooling pumps when there is an unplanned shutdown, where they fail to an inertly safe state in emergencies. They can be built to withstand just about any earthquake short of total local destruction, and even then fail into a inert state. (but an event like that would likely make the nuclear issue look tame anyway) And although you might have to wait a few thousand years before you can totally decommission the plant after something like that, you won't have the issues Japan saw.

Never let a good crisis go to political waste.. That's what I always say.... (sarcasm off)

That's what the co-located Nuke plant is for... OR if you don't like that, how about a Natural Gas one?

2 12 inch pipes? They might as well be pipe cleaners because you are not going to get enough water though them to make *any* kind of difference. I'll be that we loose more water in Torrance CA though dripping faucets than you could get though those pipes.

Have you seen what they have in New York City? You think 2 12 inch pipes will be of any use? NTMWD where I get my water in North Texas gets 10% of it's supply though ONE 96 inch pipeline from Lake Texoma and where they are not running the pumps flat out, I don't think they could do more than about 40% of our daily need though that with the pumps funning full blast. And that's just for a couple of counties north and east of Dallas.

No, you are going to need pipelines measured in tens of feet to be of much use...