Why do you think it takes balls to log in? Just be thankful that your safe and comfortable life means that you don't need anonymity. (I also don't need anonymity, but at least I have some understanding that other people are in different situations).

I'm also a cyclist, but I don't think engine noise is that critical. I get a lot of info about where a car is behind me from the noise that it makes, but the majority of that is the noise of tyres on the road. Engine noise is only useful in warning me when someone is aggressively accelerating (presumably to overtake).

Also, it's perfectly legal for deaf people to drive cars and ride bikes, so relying on sounds for safety doesn't work for everyone.

I don't mind occasional loose ends, but Prometheus was nothing but badly thought out loose ends that made no sense. It was a real shame as I love Ridley's other films and was really looking forward to Prometheus.

I really enjoyed it, but then I'm a big fan of PKD. What aspects of it don't you like or was it his general writing style rather than the content? (I didn't know it was planned as 2 novels - I wasn't aware that PKD actually planned his writing that much).

Nope, Alien makes a lot more sense than Prometheus no matter how you try to spin it. At least when they stick their face into an opening egg, they've still got their helmet on. The overall plot (evil company wants to smuggle an alien back to earth by flesh-wrapping it in a crew member) at least makes some kind of sense whereas Prometheus just doesn't (dying man decides to visit alien planet who had something to do with early humans so that they can keep him alive for some reason).

I don't even understand what the Engineer at the beginning was doing. His DNA somehow spawned humans except that we're clearly evolved from other life-forms on Earth, so maybe the Engineer spawned all life on Earth. Except, that would mean that he spawned all the dinosaurs and just got lucky that mammals ended up becoming the dominant life-form to eventually evolve into humans. How is that even supposed to work?

There's a difference between accelerating to a similar speed as the traffic you're joining and accelerating so that you wheel-spin past a single vehicle. It would take a bit of algorithm tuning to get it right, but I imagine that certain sections of road (especially junctions) require quick acceleration. There's also sections of road that you don't want to be accelerating ferociously e.g. before blind corners.

On average, drivers don't crash. Therefore the average speed must be reasonable for the road conditions, otherwise you'd get people having acrash on most journeys.

If you're going to be using "science", then a good first step would be investigating the correlation of accidents and speed. Speed by itself is not a reliable indicator of the recklessness of the driver.

I'd prefer more intelligent sensors/cameras that penalise aggressive acceleration (i.e. sudden rate of change of speed in close proximity of other road users) or can detect lack of awareness of the driver.

And also true (as far as we can tell).

As it's stateless UDP, there's not much of a connection to the proper server. All you need to do is send the appropriate source and destination ports and IP address and you're good. It would involve waiting for an outgoing request and then sending spoofed packets that look like they are a reply. The one with the right ports will be allowed through the firewall as it looks like a reply.

I'd always thought they were expensive, specialist devices, but it looks like you can get pci express cards for laptops quite cheaply. I'd imagine you'd want to position the aerial outside of a server room though.

Thanks for your translation, it's most helpful. I don't see why you need to seize control of a server to spoof a response as spoofing implies that you're faking the response so it looks like it's come from the respective server.

I believe this is made easier as NTPd sends from port 123 whereas openNTP uses a random port.

That's reassuring, but I wonder why Apple have rushed out this update. How many OSX users run a public NTP server?

Okay, not an open port, but if you request a time update wouldn't an attacker be able to respond with a spoofed malicious packet? By sending out a request, the (stateful) firewall will usually allow a response back. I'm not an expert, so I'd be interested to see if someone more knowledgeable could explain that in more detail.