While they may not have a steel plate, they never place the fuel tank that low. In the vast majority of cars the tank is surrounded in steel and in a position where a collision with a road hazard will not touch it.

To expand on my original point with your thought: Lithium polymer battery use in surface R/C vehicles is already in the second generation. They had distinctly more fires when everyone first started using them because the only ones available were soft-case aircraft batteries. The sanctioning body quickly codified a hard case rule and now even casual bashers use hard-case batteries. This doesn't negate any of my observations, though. I'm not knocking the Model S (I'd love to have one), but the battery position is clearly primarily for performance and not safety.

If you work for J Random Megacorp with iron-clad IT policies, why are you using GIMP for image manipulation? It doesn't sound like this would be to the exclusion of other methods.

There's a club for people like you.

Mind you, sometimes they really are out to get you.

Just ask anyone that races R/C. You must treat them with respect, charge them carefully, and never puncture them. Once you break any of these rules, they catch on fire. In spite of this, you only rarely see a lithium battery fire in R/C racing because most racers know how to maintain them properly and when to dispose of them (properly).

Then again, Tesla, in their drive for performance, built these cars with their batteries mere inches from the surface of the road. No gasoline car has their tank that low and even R/C cars have them higher in the chassis and more protected from the surface.

Actually, my comment was 95% joke. Their fuel that is "nitrogen enriched" does not contain additional volatile molecules. It's actually a marketing scheme for their detergent blend. Even though I'm sure it's similar to other detergents, the marketing also turns me off because NO2 is also a harmful pollutant (I suspect you were thinking of N2O when you typed that).

Which is the very reason I question the marketing effort behind "nitrogen-enriched" fuel. I don't want the most common diatomic molecule in the atmosphere displacing good, energy-rich, hydrocarbon chains in the fuel I'm buying. It's like selling me gasoline with some percentage of ethanol blended in for the same price as gasoline or charging me more for pure ethanol (I will, however, make exceptions for pure ethanol made from a single grain type containing adulterants from being rested for an extended period in a barrel), that is, dishonesty in labeling.

This is exactly what I'm saying: You move as if moving your body. The same signals that would go to your limbs through your nervous system could simply be intercepted and interpreted by a computer.

Our bodies are not terribly different from a basic electronic circuit, wiring in a car, a bus in a computer, or even a network, aside from the mechanism of signalling (which is not actually that different). I wouldn't be surprised if nanotechnology reached a level where this would be possible within the next century.

For better immersion, we'd be better off if we could somehow intercept nerve signals to the body. Thinking "move forward" isn't the same as "getting up, balancing, and walking", which could theoretically be done completely virtually if we could intercept signals from the brain to the body.

If we did that, we could also feed the body movement commands separate from the brain. Imagine playing a video game for a couple hours while our body rides an exercise bicycle through computer control (at varying intensities based on lactic acid feedback). You could play a video game or work in a virtual environment while your body is essentially at the gym.

"Assault rifles" are, by definition, automatic at some level (fire more than one shot with a single trigger pull). It's improbable that this person had any type of automatic weapon or assault rifle. Semi-auto isn't unreasonable to expect, in which case it was probably simply a "rifle", which might not sound as menacing, but that's exactly what it was. This doesn't make it less deadly. In fact, curiously, automatic weapons in the hands of untrained people tend to be less effective because the shooters waste more ammunition and can't control them as well. Semi-automatic weapons are much easier to get accurate hits with, while burst-fire weapons are far easier to kill with (especially with small-caliber ammunition, like modern assault rifles used by American forces).

To describe the weapon as an "assault rifle" is absolutely incorrect usage and pure sensationalism.

There's a difference between them being generated and sent in an email (which is not exceptionally dangerous because it should be temporal (that is, you force a change when they log in and only allow it to be used within a brief window of time) and sending you an email with a stored password on request. Don't mistake the two. Again, the implication that they're storing your password with no more than a basic reversible cipher is very troubling.

I prefer vi(m), but drop to nano when a machine doesn't have it (which is rare, but common enough to be annoying).

Of course, if I have root and I'm working on more than a few small edits, you'd better believe there'll be vim on there before I log out.

Nothing annoys me more than plain text passwords in emails. Double bonus points if it's a password for something sensitive like my financial information (ex: 401(k), which are among the worst offenders in the bad security department...it's not like they have the largest sum of money in my name, after all).

The other disconcerting thing (probably the most frightening) is that they sent you your password in plain text. This means that your password is, at most, protected with a reversible cipher and is likely stored with no protection at all. That means if someone broke in (which doesn't even mean a threat from outside is necessary, and there are probably tens, if not hundreds, of people with accounts and/or passwords to get to the database) they could get your password and potentially every one you ever used. Then the real social engineering begins, when they call your bank with all your legitimate information and every likely password for your account in hand... Scary.