"You're car shutting off going around a bend will cause loss of control."

No. It will cause loss of power. It does not stop brakes / steering from being operational. And if you're going fast enough to do the corner with all this tech, but not without, it's DRIVER ERROR.

"Sure, driving down a strait road, on a sunny day, with no one within a few car lengths and this wont be a problem."

Driving properly.

"Also, the air bags stop functioning; which is a problem when you loose most of your control from your vehicle."

"Your" control.

"Ever have an engine just turn off while driving? it's startling, so people hit the breaks used to ABS will lock them up and end up in a slide, with surprising difficult steering."

Yes. And I didn't. And I was a "new" driver at the time (but older than most beginners). The car shut off, I let it drift and steered gently. It had ABS. It had power-steering. I hadn't driven a car without them. I still didn't even veer out of lane except in a controlled maneouvure to pull to the side of the road. I've also had my brake pads fail jam a wheel (so like putting the brakes on, but lop-sided) while on a motorway.

But all that is besides the point. If you're a driver, and you panic, that's the worst thing you can do. And is also, again, driver error.

"Nope. It means no such thing. How about you drive 65 miles an hour around a curve in traffic and have someone else tuun off the ignition? whats that? you won't do it? clearly there is something wrong with your driving."

Not really. You still have full steering and your speed will decrease. You might lose power-steering but at those speed it has little effect - you are steering literally fractions of a degree around the steering arc.

And 65 mph around a curve in traffic? Maybe that's your problem? The only curve you'd do that on is a motorway curve. Which has lanes and distances set so that you never have to steer more than a fraction of a degree of the arc.

Again - like the "sledgehammer to the server" redundancy test, or the "let's restore from backup" data test. If you're NOT prepared to do them, it's because you KNOW you're not doing things correctly. But you wouldn't do them "just because" because it could, potentially, possibly, maybe, be slightly dangerous and you don't do things like that when you're driving.

Powersteering/ABS in the third para, obviously.

Yep.

Let's assume the engine stalled or had a random mechanical failure. Then the engine will cut out just the same, and take the same systems down.

Sure, your steering will get heavier once the ABS goes off but if that's a problem then you were driving RELYING on the ABS to ALWAYS work perfectly (which, in every scenario I can imagine, means you weren't driving safely).

The brakes? Still function the same as ever. And you have two of them. And loss of power is what supposedly caused the crash, so you could just coast to a halt.

The steering lock? Not an issue in this case (presumably the lock doesn't come on with the key still in the ignition, like ALL steering locks).

The loss of power? Then you were driving assuming that your car will always run at 100% efficiency and driving, by the word of UK law at least, dangerous. Loss of power should never cause a problem. Burst of power, YES. But not loss.

What else?

The article says "When the ignition failed, she lost control, skidded and was hit on the passenger side by another car."

So she actually lost control and skidded. How do you do that when the power to your car just went OFF? It means you were going too fast. Or relying on the ABS / traction control to save you. Or, just plain panicked and steered off the road.

Sorry, there's just too much unsaid here. Yeah, sure, there's a manufacturing defect. But saying it was the car's fault rather than (almost 100% of the time) the driver's is ludicrous. Fact is, either the car was roadworthy with a minor unknown fault, and the driver fucked up, or it wasn't roadworthy at all.

I should be able to reach over and switch your ignition off while you're driving. NOT take the key out, but switch it off. Sure, the car won't perform the same but that's what you have to deal with as the driver. If you're NOT confident on someone doing this AT ANY TIME you're ever driving the vehicle then, like the "sledgehammer to the critical server" or the "test restore from backup tape" test, it means you were doing something wrong in the way you were driving. And if you're not confident in that, maybe you should take a couple of courses or just go into a car park / other private land and try it out and see in a safe environment before you carry on driving to work.

"We've already ramped up emissions by millions upon millions of times, and it's literally causing DNA and brain injuries, preventing curing of cancer, causing species decline and extinction, and other problems. The Schumann resonance which the earth produces and all life is dependent on is literally being over powered by microwaves and other EMF causing all these different phenomena, including conditions like anxiety and schizophrenia."

No.

It's not.

Please put your white-coat back on (in either sense - lunatic, or go and actually work in a science lab and prove it to yourself).

In a prolonged emergency, your phone is not the weakest link. Hell, once of those "emergency chargers" (a plug and a pack of AA batteries, basically) can be put next to your fusebox quite easily.

The problem is the cells. If your mobile phone is powered up by the local cell is flooded / offline / out of power then you're fucked.

I don't think landlines have much life left, to be honest. They are fast being replaced by wireless technology and are getting obsolete. And yes, while I have made phone calls on landlines in powercuts, the same can be said for mobile phones when the landline has also gone off.

The problem you're wishing to solve - long-term powerless - is much more of a problem all around and not one that either technology solves.

But then, generally, after a few days in anything catastrophic, calling from your house is likely to be not as important as you think. You either won't be there any more (and will be relocated somehow), or there'll be some other way of keeping in contact made available to you.

If you're that paranoid, keep a pair of cheap walkie-talkies charged. Worst that happens, you give one to a potential rescuer or use them to call in help yourself.

Sorry, but CSS isn't a copy protection technology of any kind. It's easily defeated within a matter of seconds on any modern PC. Legally, sure, but then if you're allowed to make an archive copy, that's your legal "right" and the industry would have to take you to court to decide which wins, and it will be expensive and (potentially) catastrophic for them to try it.

What pisses me off ten times more is the "unreadable sectors" copy protection. It means that I've never watched a DVD on my laptop as all the ones I've tried have that shit and even with properly licensed DVD playing software and a DVD compliant drive, I can't watch it.

So what do I do? I run it through one of the programs that just sucks the data off and ignore the errors, which leaves me with only "CSS" to defeat and half the time it's not worth the bother - leave it on, let the player worry about it and 99% of the time I only ever play from European region anyway so it doesn't hinder things to use something set in European region for CSS decryption.

To be honest the things that piss me off go in the order:

- Unreadable sectors
- Blocked UOPS
- Too much shit on the beginning of the movie (sometimes MINUTES before you can even get to the main menu).
- The law about making a backup of a product I have in my hands for my own, personal, reasonable usage (so I don't wear my discs out and have easy access to the content).
- CSS

Yeah, cos that never happens with petrol cars. Never at all. Not even once.

Sorry, I'm not a Tesla nut. I hate current generations of electric cars. We had milk-delivery "floats" since the 1960's in my country that used lead-acid batteries and were entirely electric, they were great for what they were. The top-end models are now viable all-electric cars. And cost ridiculous prices. And have some serious flaws (limited range, etc. that can't even come close to competing with my 15-year-old cheap second-hand petrol car).

But we haven't saved the planet. In fact, we've probably broke it a little more (lithium, power generation infrastructure, etc.).

So, no, I'm not a Tesla fan by any stretch of the imagination. The closest I get is that I once priced up an all-electric moped now that my job is ten minutes away rather than 2 hours. But even that was only because I already have a 32A charging socket on the outside of my house (for a kiln), could plug it into a 13A socket and - just in my lunch hour -charge it enough to get home. And I get free road tax. And no congestion charge. And cheaper insurance. And even then, I can't really justify the purchase price compared to an old clunker of a huge second hand petrol car that I can put a 12ft shed in (plus a complete replacement once a year or so).

But, actually, electric cars are just the same as petrol cars here. When you have something of that energy density contained in a metal box, that's tinkered with by random garages and amateur enthusiasts, that's parked up by the side of the road or driving over speed bumps at 50mph... eventually, statistically, enough of them will blow to provide a news story or two. And the automotive testing and recall process has been in place for decades now and you can be pretty sure that it's hard to get such products through the testing, especially with new technologies, if they are really that dangerous.

Fact is, you can cherry-pick any story you like and fudge the statistics as much as you want... an electric battery of just about any kind of this power is safer than the equivalent of sloshy, leaky, fumey explosive that your ordinary cars run off at the moment. In fact, it's one of the reasons that fuel cells just haven't taken off... as soon as you get back to putting sloshy leaky explosive stuff in a can, people go "No, thanks, I'll use a battery".

Civilised society doesn't work like that.

If someone breaks a rule, and you punish them for it, you cannot them go off and break the same rule for them.

If someone steals something, it's not "justice" to steal something of theirs. That makes you just as bad as they are. And leads to "he did it to me first!" kind of baby-crap.

You show that you are an advanced, modern, civilised country by not breaking your own rules. Not carrying out "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" (where does that come from? Possibly the WORST example of literary fairness/justice there is. Mankind bad? I'll just drown the fucking lot of you in a flood....). And having nobody be above the law, not even courts, judges, or the leader of the country.

It doesn't mean you have to pussyfoot around. It doesn't mean you have to give prisoners playstations and compassionate leave and halve their sentences for good behaviour. It means you have to abide by the same rules that you are punishing others for breaking.

Also, if a populous gets a whiff of "one rule for me, another rule for them" being the actual greater truth of things (rather than an occasional spurious claim), then all the rules can soon become useless anyway and you descend into anarchy.

Unfortunately, this is lost on many "modern" countries.

Revenge is for five-year-olds who had their toy smashed. It invariably ends in tears and nobody having any toys.

Are you intending to write an antique DOS system in assembler that uses some really, really primitive version of FAT - by the looks of it? Then probably best not to look.

The other 99.99999% of the planet, however, might find it interesting.

Personally, I find anything still written in assembler to be totally worthless. If you wanted that, you could have run it through a disassembler at the time of it's release and it's not-much-more work to get to something just as readable.

Like the original Prince of Persia code dump - only useful for historical reference and to find out how data and data structures were processed in terms of file compatibility etc. (so, long-dead OS and filesystems are pretty worthless, especially when we know almost everything about them already).

And honestly, from a first glance, it's SUCH basic code that if you were to program any kind of DOS, and needed to be MS-compatible, the only obvious way to do so would be a basically word-for-word re-writing of what they have. There's almost zero room for "invention" or "interpretation" here, so it's mostly uncopyrightable except as a collection of code. Most functions are literally a handful of lines of assembler on well-known data structures that do one quite obvious thing and the necessary - and prescribed by the way the OS works - register / stack shuffling to make it happen.

If I were on the FreeDOS team, yeah, I wouldn't want to read it. But honestly, the chances are I wouldn't bother - I'd have a much nicer, more modern, easier-to-read, collaboratively-written project that does an awful lot more than these antique DOS's could ever do sitting right in front of me, already written. There's nothing "useful" here, but it buys MS some "open-source" lip-service.

I can't speak from experience but the things keeping me OFF 3D printers at the moment are:

- Too much faffing about to build the things (or too much cost to acquire them pre-built).
- Too much faffing about having to calibrate, adjust, tinker and play with them to get good results.
- Too fragile (i.e. you can't throw them about, take them to a friend's house).
- Too reliant on a small set of manufacturers (for the source materials, software, etc.)
- Still no established 3D printing "standard" in an OS. Sure, there are lots of "almost-standards" but I'd rather avoid another mess of things not being compatible - non-compatible printers just puts us back into the range of "I have to buy the same printer/manufacturer again because I don't want to change all my setup / software / source material" but in an era where it's too expensive to perform the current "Sod it, throw it away, buy the cheapest one again, suffer the time lost" scenario we have with 2D printers.
- 3D models are just that much harder to make and print reliably. The two examples of software you point out? Both licensed only for home use. Google Sketchup is the same. As soon as you say 3D, you have to pay for software (and driver integration, or learning-curve) so we've jumped back 20 years again). Then every home-built printer will have different tolerances and results.

3D printing needs to become a consumer-level tech. It's not. It's still up there with all the existing methods of plastics / wood / metal construction from a computer model. In the range of a trained person with expensive hardware in, say, a school for a specialised project. But not for the amateur home user unless they are prepared to spend as much time tinkering with the system as getting results out of it.

To be honest, I will look at 3D printing seriously, even for personal hobbyist use, when someone like HP or Epson or a big name (hell, doesn't even need to be a printer manufacturer, Dyson, Samsung, whoever) produce a small black box. From that I put in up-to-but-no-more-than four materials / colours / dyes in a standardised package. I get a free bit of software with a few thousand models and - critically - import of any 3D model and/or conformity to a standardised 3D printing protocol so I can use other software. And it just works. Every time. I print, it comes out exactly as it is on the screen. WYSIWYG 3D printing. I don't even mind if it costs as much as a really decent 2D printer with more expensive consumables. But the hurdle to jump is the simplicity, repeatability, the hands-off method of printing, the automatic calibration and error detection (why can't we combine with something Kindle-like to detect when the print job is going wrong and have the printer slice off the last layer and start it again?), the single-black-box that is available complete, without assembly, from Amazon, tested and ready to go.

Until then, it's nothing better than a hobbyist electronics kit, or someone building a high-end overclocking rig, or one of those RPi racks... the domain of someone who has so much time on their hands that they don't actually need the printer in the first place.

The summary tries to make it sound like it's Github's - or even Amazon's - fault.

If you're stupid enough to store credentials that allow access to pay-for goods in your name, and to then blindly upload them to a public service, I have little sympathy.

No more than people who upload their SSH keys, or hard-code their credentials into their code in the first place, or those who put the contents of their passwd/shadow/htpasswd file into a public arena. All of which we've had articles about people doing - and others finding via Google or just a quick inspection of certain projects. I'm sure there was even one with a Steam API key of some kind once.

Sure, it's easy to do if you're not paying attention - especially if you blindly upload a ton of hidden files (Why? Quite what hidden files do you need to upload to a public third-party version-management service? Yes, I've svn'd or bzr'd my /etc/ in the past for basic rollback functionality, but when you press commit to a public service, are you not checking WHAT files are going up and/or excluding hidden files by default anyway?)

Sorry, but for such projects Amazon shouldn't warn them, they should just block those credentials. It's a quick, easy lesson in how to manage your access to a third-party resource, and the hassle of having to redo your account verification should be enough of a kick up the bum to get you to never do it again.

And those people who were billed? Sorry, it's like asking the credit card company to refund you after you post your credit card number in a forum - sure, they might do it, but they are not obligated to as you breached the contract by failing to ensure the security of those details in the first place (proving it was your fault can actually make the credit card company not liable for it, even with "credit card protection" in law - it's just that proving it is usually more hassle than just paying it). The resources were consumed, by someone with your valid credentials. Your problem.

Free isn't as important as "good enough". Just because something's free doesn't mean we all dive into it - it has to be *AT LEAST* good enough as well.

The problem MS has is that things like Google Apps for Education"good enough" for almost everyone's uses and - to schools - free. I've put entire schools onto it. Why not? Gigabytes of "always up" storage, accessible from web, PC, Android, etc. Gigabyte-sized inboxes with one of the best email services around (GMail). Integration into your AD if you desire but also manual / CSV user/group management. Enforced signatures on email, group permissioning, all kinds of integration and automation, and switching to them is just a matter of changing your MX record once on any domain you'd like them to handle (and you can always change it back).

Google Apps so that people can work from home on the same documents they created in school. No need to spend fortunes on Office licensing just so that that temporary, occasional member of staff can edit a document.

Google Calendar, which does 99% of whatever I've seen people actually use Exchange calendaring for, with unlimited calendars, no licence fees, no software installation, no onerous browser requirements, no need to expose your servers to the world.

I've seen schools do most of their timetabling through Google Calendar - it's free and good enough, such that they haven't bothered to look for alternatives because, well, why? They don't have any problems with what it does or does not do.

That's before you even get into Google Pages, all the other stuff they offer and their Android device management (which is great - set policies, install apps and remote wipe Android devices remotely for everything in your Google "domain").

Sure, there are power-users somewhere that have problems with it - I am a school network manager and I certainly had other things that I used and just used, say, IMAP or iCal formats to put the data into the things I wanted it in, but hell - for 99.9% of my users it was more than good enough and, because we were a school, free. I've even seen a much larger school use it just to clear some space on their servers so they don't have to upgrade RAID. Give everyone 5Gb of Drive storage and suddenly all that junk they "must have" on their accounts isn't as important any more.

And, if you ask, they will guarantee that your data stays under EU control - and they have a standard EULA that states just that or schools in the EU wouldn't be able to touch them.

Free is one thing, but Google Apps etc. is good enough that I've actually paid for it (more storage etc.) in the past and would pay again for it in the future. But there are numerous places I've worked where "free" and "more than good enough" are the terms that won the decision. Even in places with annually recurring MS licenses under educational licensing deals anyway.

Although I agree, the critical question really becomes: Did we get value for that corn over that timescale, enough to justify changing over to it.

Did the cost of not having to use pesticide X scale in comparison to the cost of finding new pesticide Y within 15 years (which, let's face it, is largely a random number determined by genetic mutation chance) and deploying it?

How much do farmers have invested in this? How much profit/loss would they have made just using the old pesticide or even suffering losses instead of having to buy this engineered corn?

The numbers have to pan out. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, I'm not a farmer so I have no idea. But if you want to "bet the farm" (quite literally) across the nation on the fact that you can out-engineer bugs constantly for at least the next generation or so (who can make their own decisions), while paying for for-profit engineered corn, that's not a decision to take on the basis of "it sounds good".

And you also have to think about the bigger picture - in the future do we want to be potentially spending more than healthcare costs on just how to get rid of bugs that we've dealt with for thousands of years? Redirecting all that effort to developing new corn and studying new bugs in order to do what maybe washing the corn or introducing a natural predator could do (which is not impactless in itself!)?

And do we want to guarantee that we'll ALWAYS out-strip nature? In this case, 15 years for something resistant occurred. But what's to say that in that time, next time around, we don't get 10 mutations of bugs that we can't stop for another 10 years each? Or that we don't get a mutation of bug that takes out ALL the crops for one year in a month (even if we then develop a pesticide the next week?)

When you're gambling with the food supply of a nation, it's not as simple as just letting private companies develop these things and leaving them to it. Monsanto pretty much have single-handedly proven that and take a significant chunk of money from everyone who grows crops - by patenting a gene that makes some crops immune to their own weedkiller - and even from people who didn't even know they were using Monsanto crops or never intended to (to the point where you get patent lawsuits against farmers for buying seeds from other farmers, or even because some seed blew into their land).

The question to ask is really about the longer-term costs, if ALL we get is 15 years of risky "safety". And even things like - is it sensible to replace crops, nationwide, with new varieties, entirely, over the course of 15 years just to avoid a particular pest?

Nor would health & safety, auditing, repair shops, replacement parts, the guy who checks the pitot tube on aircraft is clean, etc. nor countless thousands of other industries. The fact that the industry exists shows you that a) we cannot secure things perfectly but b) we try hard to do so.

Fact is, you cannot make a secure product, no matter how cocky you are. So you need experts to secure things, whether or not they are forced to do so on sub-standard operating systems, hardware or applications.

Personally, I think we've come on leaps and bounds in terms of OS security in the time I've been around, but it's application security that's the problem - and the biggest problem comes from OS's not being "allowed" to lock down applications to their bare minimum necessary resources in the first place.

And now we have a new threat - hardware security where our own machines are being used against us.

It's like saying that if everyone put rubbish in a bin, we wouldn't need street cleaners. Almost true, not quite, but almost. But it's honestly, never, ever, ever going to happen until we are literally redefining "rubbish", "bin" and "cleaner" (i.e. automated robots running around doing it for us).

And real life, as shown here, is much more affected by stupid people, making stupid decisions and even enacting stupid laws. In a perfect world we wouldn't have any of those either. But still we have lawyers.

They probably saw the Wii U and realised the most expensive mistake on it.

Can't say it'll affect my opinion of their product one way or another.