You did notice and remember the Zune a few years back?

Just noticed the Peugeot 3008 diesel-electric hybrid is still not available for consumers.

So hobbyists worldwide still have their sporting chance to beat a multi-billion dollar international automaker consortium to be the first to successfully build a modern diesel-electric engine.

Invariably, during the course of this thread, someone will notice that Toyota/Lexus already have several of gasoline-electric hybrids, including a hybrid SUV (Lexus RX-400h). They will then ruminate how big or small (depending on viewpoint) the savings of this hybrid SUV are, compared to vanilla SUVs, with the occasional poster chiming in to tell the world that none of these hybrids have any kind of towing capacity, claiming it is the only reason people are buying an SUV in the first place.

Later, another poster will point out the newly-launched diesel-electric hybrids from Peugeot, which are mass-produced, rather cheap and available right now at every Peugeot car dealer in Europe, rightfully disputing the commercial viability of designing a diesel-electric hybrid drivetrain from the ground up and advocate either using the Peugeot itself or at transplant its engine. Other posters will then either bash 'murricans for not having developed diesel-electric first or bashing Europeans, especially the Cheese Eating French from not exporting most of their French cars to the States, which will quickly descent into an all-out flamewar between patriots claiming no French car lasts more than 50.000 miles, patriots claiming to never ever accepting any foreign, especially not a French car and Leftists that cite dozens of instances where American-made cars are either shoddy as well or not American-made in the first place. At this point, someone will then present Japanese cars to be of superior reliability, where the discussion will yet again split, with half joining the discussion for/against the Lexus RX-400h and the other side touting anecdotal evidence where American cars stood unscratched from minor accidents where Japanese cars were utterly destroyed from.

I, for one, would support the proposal of cars with micro-turbines and giant capacitors, if only for the sound they'll make.

Email, facebook, banking and personal calling can be done on a private smartphone.

Reasonably good smartphones are 100 bucks now plus a few bucks for data. Most people already have a regular cellphone, so the upgrade is not that expensive.

If your employer has a work phone for you, you will carry two phones with you while you're on the clock. Big deal.

The 100 bucks are not worth painting yourself a troublemaker. Sidestep the issue, save yourself from headaches and enjoy having a smartphone. You should get your own and never look back.

How do you make sure it is inspected only for suspicious traffic? Leave alone the Facebook passwords and filter only packets with the Evil bit set?

Then block the traffic or leave it alone.

Someone who opens mail envelopes at work that were marked "private" will get fired or even imprisoned. SSL traffic is also marked "private". Why should that be different?

No one can complain if Youtube or Facebook are blocked at the workplace. People get paid to be there for a different reason than reading their wall posts. If it is allowed to browse privately at work, don't ever touch the data stream. If it is forbidden, then just block the traffic. There is no middle ground here.

The proxy admin can read, include or exclude anything from the HTTPS traffic without anyone knowing.

Bank accounts, mail accounts, Facebook accounts, health care information. From all employees and all CEOs.

This situation cannot ever be acceptable for anyone, that's why no one should do such things from computers they don't control.

Close but no cigar.

Even things as simple as Facebook or email passwords can do much more personal harm than access to someone's bank account. Some bank accounts do not have enough money in it to be worthwhile, it is hard to do any transactions that cannot be traced by law enforcement anyway and simply knowing the balance isn't worth too much. But people could give each other Hell if they know email and Facebook passwords.

No one should access any personal information from work nor any other device they do not own or control. Keyloggers, traffic snoopers, remote control must be assumed to always be present in a corporate environment.

Great idea!

Everyone must be able to access health care information from work and that connection must be absolutely bulletproof.

Most other HTTPS needs can be declared to belong into your personal time or done via mobile phone, be it banking, social networks or email. But the health care provider that was officially sanctioned by HR and The Powers That Be can't under any circumstances.

If IT can and does snoop into some HTTPS connections, they could snoop into HR and health care connections. No amount of auditing should save them.

But I think it gets even simpler than that. Telling or asking for passwords to social networks is a federal crime now. Unless IT can plausibly demonstrate that do not save any passwords they may obtain in the stream. Which they can't, since they always bite more than they can swallow. They either snoop and save all data at least temporarily or they don't and everyone's happy anyway, as they could as well turn off the transparent filter.

Depending on local laws, this can be varied. The goal should still be to produce a do-or-don't scenario, where doing is highly illegal and the only way out is not doing anything at all, which is what employees want.

barrel, gallons, $/gallon, MWh, kWh, kcal/tbsp, kcal/gal, kWh/gal, bushel, pounds, L g/c^3, g/mL, lbs/gal,
bushels/gallon, kcal, kcal/gal, kcal/bushel

You guys need to lay off those medieval units and stop wasting 60% of your clock cycles on UNIT CONVERSION.

And electricity, and light, and probably the company employee clock also.

All which most employees more than make up for by working from home after work, working on weekends without bothering to ask for money or having a meeting with some coworkers off the clock, on the parking lot after leaving or in a bar later.

One (1) bad business decision of any employee costs more than that.

Remember Stuxnet.

Covert assasination anyone?

Implant a well-disguised piece of trojan code inside an ECU of opportunity.

Have it triggered at a specific speed, at local nighttime. Disable brakes, lights, airbags and stomp on the accelerator. If any crash is detected, quickly recover the firmware to an original, untampered backup that was stored away somewhere beforehand.

Crash investigators will find nothing but "reckless speeding" to be the cause.

Call it whatever you like. Statements like "People from country X are all stupid" or "people of ancestry Y are all criminals" are usually called "racist", except if it is Muslim, then it is "islamophobic", Jewish, then it's "antisemitic", but in essence, it's pretty much the same thing.

I'm not an American, not even from the same continent, but the sheer amount of racism within your post is disgusting.

If you're unsure if that post really is racist, try re-reading it, silently replacing "Americans" with any minority of your choice.

Poverty almost certainly IS due to lack of food or resources in the world.

Poverty may be reduced if some "optimal" resource allocation model would be obtained, with "optimal" allocation meaning totally different things for different people and even the same people during the course of their lifetimes.

In any case, the absolute number of mouths to feed, bodies to clothe, rest and shelter puts absolute requirements on finite physical resources. So no mode of allocation is possible to give every human on this planet more than 20 grams of gold. Even if these requirements may not be cleanly extrapolated from current resource use per capita by a Club of Rome and probably also aren't fix over time, they are certainly larger than zero. Even with perfect recycling and optimum use, there is a maximum of people to serve from any given amount of any resource. While it is tolerable to not have golden necklaces for everyone, there are other resources that cannot be left out so easily.

Unless poverty is defined only as "relative" poverty, i.e. "not poorer than 40% of the average", resources and mouths depend on each other, but not for infinity.