Which tells me that something is wrong with the warning systems if Pilots are ignoring them. Pilots aren't idiots, but a warning system that's too sensitive is useless. If the check-engine light on your car comes on all the time because your gas cap isn't tight enough, do you start ignoring it? Then when it comes on for a legitimate reason, you're probbably going to still ignore it.

I don't know what's going on here, but the fact that two different pilots ignored warning systems in the same plane that led to disasters tells me the problem might not be with the pilots, but with the warning systems. Why are the pilots ignoring them? Hubris is one answer, but a warning system that trains you to ignore it is another.

Finally an excuse to re-make the terrible movie Maximum Overdrive. If you're one of the 99% of the population that's never heard of it, it's a movie where the trucks go crazy, drive themselves, and try to kill all of humanity. An interesting concept, but horribly executed. Based on a book by Stephen King, some nut let him direct it.

Umm.. you do realize that if the Google technology is all that great, then the experienced cabbies can just get one of the traffic broadcast tools.

Which is better, experienced London cabbie+technology, or some random guy+technology?

The london cabbie is also regulated on price. Ueber has "surge" pricing, so you can suddenly be gouged by Ueber when they detect a period when they can get away with charging more.

So.. Microsoft let governments of the world look at the source code at your special center, and then double-dog-swears that there's nothing fishy going on between then, and compiling the source code, like say a patch applied somewhere in the build process? Riiiight.

If you WERE to put a backdoor in, that's probably how it'd be done. Would you really want a backdoor explicitly in the code for a developer to find? Of course not, you'd put in something only a few people know about. The secret to secret keeping is limiting the amount of people who know.

The other way to hide the backdoor is to make it a hard to find bug. Plausible deniability is quite high.

I have to believe this is good news though. It means a lot of foreign governments are suspicious of closed source software, to the point where Microsoft has had to announce a plan to make their code however less closed source.

Anyone cosidering PHP should read this the now infamouns "PHP is a fractal of bad design".

http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/...

?

If you claimed to have a religious belief that you shouldn't pay for certain types of healthcare, you would be by definition, not an atheist.

As far as your odd plan to create a religion based on this belief... well go right ahead, but be prepared to act like a religion. Courts aren't stupid, and they aren't going to let you make up your sham religion for the sole purpose of evading the law. It's an old con, and the court system is wise to it.

That's simply not the same thing. The private limo industry is NOT a taxi service. Limo services aren't point to point, they're hiring a private car for the day or night. They're also FAR more expensive, and rely on reputation of the limo company.

Taxi services are normally dispatch services, with the drivers operating independently. It's VERY different from a limo service in about every way.

Taxi services are now suffering because of a combination of historic greed and anti-competitive actions. By that, I mean the sale of medallions, which brought in revenue to cities (greed) and made it difficult or impossible for people to start a taxi business (anti-competitive).

If cities want to eliminate the medallion program, stop the sale of them, etc, that's totally fine with me. But creating an unregulated industry to compete with a regulated one is simply unfair, and frankly possibly even unconstitutional. You can't make the laws apply to one set of people and not another. Uber is clearly a taxi dispatch service. Why should the law not apply to them, but apply to everyone else?

You've missed the point. The system can't survive with a regulated and unregulated market. The regulated market will have higher costs, and have to charge higher fees. So the regulated market will become smaller and smaller, and likely more expensive. Do you really want the choice where the safe, knowledgeable driver is extremely expensive, and your only alternative is some guy in his shitmobile who barely knows the city?

only ones bitching are those who run taxis who now get slightly less profit.

I don't run a taxi service. I don't know anyone who runs a taxi service. I rarely take taxis. I'm bitching.

This isn't replacing the taxi industry with a technology, it's pitting a highly regulated industry (taxi cabs) with an unregulated variant. Taxicabs pay huge amounts of money to run a taxicab. If you want to loosen regulations on taxis, fine. But Ueber is an attempt to create an unlicensed, unregulated market where a licensed regulated one exists. It has about zero to do with technology.

Exposing your skin (arms and face are sufficient) to sunlight is supposed to reset your body's clock when you travel.

The major thing that regulates the sleep/wake cycle is recently discovered 3rd light receptor in your eye. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... Sunlight will produce Vitamin D, but I know of no research that says exposing skin to sunlight will do anything for your circadian rythms. (Of course if you expose your sun, you'll also expose your eyes unless you shield them for some odd reason).

Yes, (though it's not exactly an empty drive). It's called deniable encryption, and is intened to stand up to "rubber hose cryptanalyis". (Or court orders as the case may be).

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

After the keypair expires

Computers have clocks in them that can be reset to any value you desire. How do you propose to cirvumvent that? If your proposal is "NTP", then I'd say that NTP can be very, very easily faked.

Also, even if you COULD somehow prevent falsification of the date, you just need to hack the software that checks the date. How do you propose to make THAT unhackable?

I'd agree with you, except for two things.

1. The court agreed to hear the case. They don't agree to hear cases where the law is clear.
2. 3 justices dissented from the majority opinion. So they must have believed the spirit of the law rather than loopholes and literal interpretations gave some leeway to Aero. I didn't see any links to minority opinions, but reporting on Surpreme Court decisions is normally absolutely terrible. Hell, they didn't even report who dissented, which tells you a lot about the politics involved.

No, that's not a tweak to an algorithm, it's a random input to an algorithm. The algorithm is the same, the input is different.

Taking MD5, it's published, and tweaking a few points (though who ever did this needs to be very competent) would have been sufficient.

No, that would have been stupid. It's unlikely someone would have reverse engineered your hacked md5 algorithm, but it's also possible you could screw it up.

The solution is VERY simple. Generate a random 256 bit string. Hash random-string+data, and use the output as the identifier. Throw away the random 256 bit string.

Some manager probably said any work for addition security wasn't worth the cost. Ooops!

No, some developer didn't know what the hell they were doing. You'd be surprised (but shouldn't be) how little most developers know about security, especially encryption.