Feeling a bit precious about our fairy tale beliefs are we?

If you can't handle a bit of piss taking it doesn't say a lot about the strength of your beliefs now does it? You might want to pull that bible/koran/torah our of your arse and get a sense of humour.

It may well be one solid piece of carbon fibre with a 2 cm thick windscreen and a front struct that can take 30 tons of force , but it wouldn't make any difference if it was made out of reinforced unobtanium - if he looses it and has a rollover at 1000mph he's dead. Even if the structure survives - which I doubt - the G forces will probably kill him anyway.

They'll have no problem getting to 1000mph in that case! Wonder if Spinal Tap will do the after record party music?

"not suggesting anyone takes away your C, though I do have to wonder why you're too much of a pussy to write your drivers in assembler."

Oddly enough I'm quite familiar with x86 assembler and some stuff still needs to be written in it that even C can't manage. But your assertion that suddenly because a new language has some safety features de jour that prevent the programmer shooting himself in the foot its going to lead to better software is utter cock. If that were the case the best software in the world would be written in Visual Basic.

"These are simply not possible in the new language. And thus software quality will be improved."

What type of software? Good luck writing device drivers in Swift. Yes I know its a niche area, but you know, it is kind of an important one.

If the new languages that came along brought something new to the table then no one would complain, but often its just the same old cola with a bit of extra sugar. Wooah , garbage collection! genetic types! no pointers! Yeah, I'm really going to spend months getting up to speed just for that. Not.

"In a recent test, a man weighing almost 100 kg (220 lbs) "

They've got a way to go before it can support your average fat american then. But then I suppose if you need to get one of those land whales up the side of a building you'd use a crane anyway.

"If they're going faster, they're doing you a favour, if not, tough titties, act like a mature, responsible adult."

Oh I do - I just pass tossers like you on the inside. Usually resulting in THEM suddenly flashing their lights at someone having the temerity to not treat them like police. Fuck them and fuck you. I'll drive at the speed *I* want, NOT the speed YOU think is appropriate. If I decide to driver over the speed limit its got nothing to do with you and you have no business trying to prevent it.

"That's not true. It varies from vehicle to vehicle and between driving profiles, but it's usually 50-75% of the resistance at highway speed coming from aero drag - not 95%."

It very much depends on the speed of the vehicle and its coefficient of drag. Air resistance increases by velocity squared whereas rolling resistance is pretty much constant regardless of speed.

"Try an experiment: go the speed limit in the center lane of the highway and see how many furious drivers pound their horns and flash their headlights"

Yeah , I wonder why that could be. Perhaps because some arrogant ass is blocking the lane when he's supposed to move over if the nearside lane is clear. If you want to play traffic cop go sign up and do the 2 years training, otherwise get out the fecking way.

Given 95% of resistance at motorway speeds is air resistance, not rolling resistance I'm not entirely sure how having a massive fan to create the lift and another to propel the car is going to improve fuel efficiency given how inefficient propellers are to start with.

"Also, to your second point, in order to be exempt from CALEA, we are legally obliged make a reasonable effort to ensure the people we provide network service to are indentifiable associates of our organization"

Are you *seriously* suggesting using an easily spoofed MAC address is one way to do that?

Christ, I hope I never have to use a network you're administering! Its probably been hacked to death already.

Why perl? Its just a bash script. This the important bit (from memory as I don't have it here):

ifconfig wlan0 hw ether xx:yy... etc
ifconfig wlan0 up
wicd-client&

"but that doesn't change the fact that randomizing the mac address on connect would break things like DHCP reservations or MAC based white lists."

Yeah, but thats not really an issue when using public wifi networks is it which is essentially what this is aimed at.

"Using a random one when _connecting_ to a network could lead to problems..."

Never caused me any problems. I have a script that randomizes the wlan0 MAC address on my netbook for when I'm staying in hotels. Stops them tracking me between different locations.

It actually randomised the MAC address. Its been a long time since MACs were burnt into ROM and couldn't be changed. On Linux you can do it using ifconfig or one ioctl() in C.