So the upshot is to secure GPS communications to prevent spoofing using countermeasures as discussed here.

You are asking for permission to improve your life. Just do it. Everyone is replaceable. Leave good documentation for stuff that is hard to figure out. If you have been a good employee then you would have done that as a matter of course anyway. Give them sufficient notice and help them as much as possible during your transition out period.

Another major bank that shall remain nameless had a four-day outage in recent years. It was due to internal problems (messed up backups, bad SQL causing corrupted database, etc.). So it can happen although 6 days is really stretching it. I have also worked for a bank and seen systems hard down for close to a day (forcing me to fly across the country) due to a hardware failure that begat a human failure that begat a second hardware failure that begat a second human failure (lost backup media). So shit can happen even without hackers.

I started work on what I called ACCP (Advanced Car-to-Car Protocol) in 2004. From the overview:

ACCP is a protocol for communication between two moving vehicles, to assist in making the driving task more efficient, and to make driver intentions explicitly known to those around them. The capabilities of this system advance upon the limited “communications” available today (turn signals and brake lights). Computers within each participating vehicle can talk wirelessly to vehicles near (adjacent) to them.

My intent was for things like signaling "I am looking for an address and don't see it" while driving slowly, and co-operatively determining target speed to aid in passing situations on single lane roads. I was wondering how long it would be before someone started doing something like this (although Michigan is more skewed to safety).

Over the last few years I've second-guessed myself on exactly how much of this I would really want to see. The opportunities for abuse are many and getting the implementation right would be difficult.

I am early 50s, coding for almost 40 years. Still employed but worried about the next job (taking a pay cut and/or competing against clueless but cheap weenies). The fact you went into PM tells me you went to the dark side. I don't generally see people come back from that. At least stay abreast of trends and development environments that have traction. Perhaps start focusing on Android. I feel safer having coding skills than management skills. In a downturn you need to retain the "doers" not the PMs. All our PMs were let go in the last round of layoffs. All us 40+ year old coders are still working. My friend retired from his programming job last year at the age of 79. Still had calls asking him to do some contract work.

There already is a National Pinball Museum in DC, recently opened.

One day I smelled something burning and scrambled frantically, as I thought I had an electrical fire starting within the walls of my house. Turns out it was my wife's make up mirror sitting innocently on the edge of the bathtub. The sun hit the mirror just right and beamed a focused light onto a plastic container. The lid of the container was half-melted and smoking badly.

I hadn't thought of that angle. Maybe also the cage surrounding the plants results in an increased ambient temperature affecting the growth. Wind currents changed. So there's three variables to control and check: metallic substances, temperature, and airflow (with airborne entities).

Agreed, users would screw up the knob - that's why I said the knob maybe should be hidden. It's there only for "backwards compatibility". Going forward with new products and the new standard, we lose the knob, lower costs and all are happy. For machines running less than the set voltage an internal voltage regulator can adapt, since the voltage should be close. Best to use the standard voltage however and not transfer any extra electricity into heat.

One knob to set the voltage, probably between 15V and 20V. Maybe we hide the knob so it doesn't get adjusted accidentally. n amps of current max. 2.5mm or bigger jack size. There, specs all done. Build 100M of them and cut me my cheque.

They were able to crack a 1024-bit key in 104 hours using 80 slave workers. They also say the cracking app should scale linearly with the number of workers. So 800 slaves would mean on the order of 10 hours. That is pretty scary. Newer commercial apps should be using at least 2048-bit keys. I am not sure how that affects the results.