Ugh. I was going to ignore it in the first post but now people are quoting and repeating it. What's *ridiculous* is that nobody can fscking spell ridiculous!!! I'm not exactly a grammar Nazi, but damn, come on! Doesn't that spell checker in your browser work!? Even if you don't know how to spell it, doesn't the big red underline on the word clue you in?

I'm going to go ahead and assume you're still using Lynx and have it configured for some ancient version of vi that didn't have any sort of spell checker built into it. That's the only way I'm going to be able to sleep tonight.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's exactly what he said. And I kinda doubt people will ever stop calling you retarded.

Presumably a good chunk goes into keeping the accommodations, uh, humble....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

It's funny how well an organization can get along working out of a simple little office building until they have money coming in and then they need a big, fancy headquarters.

Kind of a bummer, though, that the fun version had port-side injectors and a top-mount intercooler. How long to change plugs? Seriously?

We had a similar situation come up with one of our older products. People copied our initial hardware designs some 12 years ago, built (crappy) knock offs and sold them as their own along with copies of our chips to go along with it. The black market was clearly going to run us out of business and I despised the idea of having to basically compete with ourselves just to keep handing new features over to leeches. It was infuriating to the point that I had seriously considered just shutting the business down and moving on to other things.

Instead, we spent a LOT of time redesigning our stuff to prevent anyone from (reasonably) being able to do that again. We basically wasted an entire year just dealing with counterfeit issue rather than improving our core product.

Luckily it paid off and we were able to shut that whole black market segment down. But at one point we had to consider the same option FTDI did. We gave thought to effectively bricking devices that we were able to identify as counterfeit or, worse, someone would send us one of these counterfeit packages asking us for support or service on the item. We had to basically return to them a chip and adapter we knew, without a doubt, was a bogus copy of our stuff.

It was hard, but we knew full well we could not possibly damage or keep something they had purchased through what they considered legitimate channels. FTDI should have realized this as well. They royally screwed up on this one.

It's a little strange, though, because if you buy something somewhere and it ends up being a stolen item, you're obligated to give it back to the original owner. I mean the police trail leads to your doorstep, you're out the item you bought whether you knew it was stolen or not. I guess the same concept doesn't applied to IP somehow. I'm not even sure how it would. I guess IP isn't really "property" after all.

Just saying.

How long does it take to travel 80 miles if you're going 80 mph? Surely someone with your math and science creds can finally give a definitive answer.

So, basically, you and a crash victim's daughter describe the government's claims as fraudulent. Great. Oh and probably a number of plaintiff lawyers on the victim's side when the whole mess was retried too. But they're always claiming stuff is true right up until it's proven false in court and then they're "terribly disappointed" by the verdict.

Bottom line here is that the case was retried because a bunch of people were convinced the original claim was fraudulent and STILL some FIFTY years later, the courts found the claim to be valid. It was appealed and the District Court found they were valid too. Nobody had any dog in the fight any more at that point. So if the claims still seemed valid to those guys that specialize in such matters, I'm inclined to believe them. There was no fraudulent claim to privilege at the time and we need to stop yelling there was. Even if you disagree with the decision, you have to accept that there's enough gray area in this case to warranty a little restraint in the usage of it as an example everywhere.

No...not the cause, the report itself. They didn't want to release the report. It contained broader information that they didn't want other governments to know at the time. It had no specific secret equipment details, but it did have mission details that (when considered 50 years ago) were secret. Read the 2005 appeal section of that wiki pedia article you quoted. And keep in mind that the original plaintiffs in the case were offered unrestricted access to the remaining survivor and turned it down. They could have surely gotten the information they needed about the fire had they just called that survivor to the stand. But, no, they wanted the full report released and then everything got all hung up at that point.

That original claim to privilege was retested in the early 2000s once those "secret" documents had been declassified and *still* the court found that the government had *not* abused its state secrets privilege. It may be your opinion that the government tried to hide negligence, but that's not the accepted opinion and not the one reached by many trained scholars (judges, lawyers) actually practicing in the field on a daily basis. So perhaps you should remove the tin foil hat covering your eyes every once in a while and consider that there may be more to some things than you might first think.

Now, that said, I'm no big government promoter. Far from it. You can read some of my prior comments for examples. What I don't want are for people to discredit the entire concept of major government reform by making such broad statements without addressing the (potentially legitimate) counter arguments. Taken in context, those original claims to state secret privileges seem relevant to me in this particular case.

I wish I had learned to balance real life with coding life sooner. I used to do the same zillion hour marathons everyone else did at one point or another in their coding careers. I loved the challenge and being the one producing the results. But then, eventually, I realized there's really a LOT more out there than that tiny little challenge/reward cycle. Biking, hiking, sports with friends, whatever. You can easily burn through 10-15 years of your YOUNG life living the code only to realize later when you're not so young any more that there were TONS of things you would have enjoyed doing more. You can make up some of that, but not nearly all.

Truer words have never been spoken. People are stupid and you can't fix stupid. You'd think they'd weed themselves out eventually, but as it turns out, we're all people. And we're all stupid. We're just stupid at different times.

I've nearly run into the back of someone at a stop light when they started rolling forward and then suddenly slammed on the brakes because they didn't see a car coming into the intersection. I was glancing around checking for traffic I might have been concerned with and nearly ran into the back of him because I just assumed he was going to continue rolling forward like the hundreds of others before him I had been behind at other intersections.

A single moment of inattention and a single false assumption nearly caused a wreck. I was stupid. We're all stupid. We all need some engineered help against stupid from time to time. A sensor that detects an impending crash with something right in front of me would have helped. Lots of cars have these things now. That's an engineered solution to a moment of stupidity.

Not everything can be fixed with engineered solutions, but we can't assume modifying behavior is a fix-all either. In fact, I would give behavior modification a far less chance of success given how random and clueless we meatbags are.

So I vote for more engineered solutions, not less. But the solutions need to involved some human behavioral analysis as well. I mean who in their right minds couldn't have predicted that passing motorists would see these count down times and use them to speed through intersections? And who wouldn't have predicted that this would leave to an increase in accidents on average? Duh. That should have been taken into account and a different solution should have been investigated.

All that said, I also feel like we need to define some acceptable limits here. I mean we can't go making every single intersection 100% secure. If some accidents are happening at an intersection, let's talk about the *rate* and decide if that's just an acceptable rate or not. The fact that there are accidents or that accidents are happening a little more often now than they were before is a little meaningless without numbers to compare to. I find that we have FAR, FAR too many laws and regulations trying to bring fatalities and liabilities and accidents to near zero already.

The beatings will continue until the smileys stop. If you're so happy, get back to work.

OMFG...why do people have to reply like that? "It's more like", "Not only that, but", "It's worse than that because". Ugh. The one-up-manship drives me nuts.

How is "individuals achieve better performance when they are happy" any better than "people who are happy do better at things"? Seriously? How is one "more like" the article than the other when the whole purpose was to provide a sarcastic summary of a long-winded project to show some obvious results?

And the little smiley at the end does NOT make it all OK. It's not smart. It's not humorous. It's nothing but a bunch of drivel so you could hear your keyboard clack away.

And while you're at it, get off my damn lawn!

First, that 13 year old girl was bullied on My Space, not Facebook. Prosecutors tried to go after her, but ultimately she was acquitted of the main felony charge anyway. So maybe nobody is going after the "bullies" in this case because they know better. If they can't even get a 3-year sentence to stick on an "uneducated, immature soccer mom", what chance do they have against high ranking officials that will be even harder to pin down anyway? Seems like a good call to me.

I can't tell if you're joking or not.

The computer can adjust for the change in stoichiometric ratio (mixture), obviously. And to some extent I'm sure they have fiddled with the ignition timing and maybe the open loop mixture tables as well. But you're stuck with whatever compromise in compression ratio they decided on when they designed the hard parts. And who knows if valve timing might be better tweaked as well. Cars that don't have adjustable valve timing will have a compromise there too.

I'm fairly certain the OP's point is valid that somewhere in the system some number of compromises are made to allow for the multi-purpose operation.