Oh, but buttons and knobs cost money to make, the touch screen is just a few bucks.

And touch screens are sexy. Touch screens sell cars. Knobs are sooooo 20th century. Your granddad's car had knobs.

When I was picking options for my last car I decided not to go with the in dash navigation system, simply because I knew I could install a bracket for my phone that did much more than the nav system. If the nav system was $300 more than the "premium" stereo (with line-in) I could have justified it, but it was a whopping $1800 more than the mid-range system, which I'm sure wasn't cheap (it was part of the package). For what basically is a small PC running VXWorks or some such real-time OS and a DVD drive.

Exactly! Just provide a display and hooks to the steering wheel controls (use something standard like Bluetooth HID profiles and HDMI). No need to come up with your own "solution" that will be obsolete in 3 years, or worse, lock me into a monthly fee.

The problem continues to be that car manufacturers want to control the whole "experience" no matter what, because they know that their products are remarkably similar to everyone else's products. The stereo/info-tainment system is about the only part of the car that isn't designed by DOT regulations, so that's where they differentiate themselves from other manufacturers.

Audi's stereos work with iOS only, depending on what system you pick.

Which is yet another reason I keep seperate work and home devices. If they aren’t going to keep up with security patches and the device is comprimized, it only affects “their” stuff, not mine.

You're sort of confusing leaks and ingress, but because they go hand in hand you get a pass. A leaking cable system usually doesn't cause problems for the cable system, except that a break in the shield will often cause an impedance mismatch, which will in-turn cause microreflections (standing waves) on the transmission line. I've driven out poorly maintained plants, where my leakage detector never stopped, but for the most part the plant still was able to deliver good bit error ratios and decent analog pictures.

I don't know what the cost of repair was, it wasn't up to our club to fix it. In fact, I'm not entirely sure it has been fixed yet, but if we don't get resolution we can contact the FCC. We all hope it doesn't come to that, and I'm sure the owner will cooperate with us since we rent space in the same building.

As Verizon (especially) lights up LTE they bring in trucks that look for problems in the 700MHz bands. They are taking a proactive approach to cleaning up the band before RFI causes problems. This makes sense since LTE uses QAM and high symbol rates to push data, meaning that the carrier to noise requirements are much higher than 3G. Most cable companies use the same frequency band, up to 750MHz. To make matters worse, cable systems use QAM carriers too, so the demodulators can get confused and pick up the wrong carrier.

Cable companies monitor their plant for signal egress from broken coax, cracked housings, poor craftsmanship, etc (leakage), but usually around 115MHz, in the aeronautical bands (since there's been cases of planes lining up on leaks instead of the glide path). Because some types of leaks are frequency dependent, a system that looks great in the aeronautical band might leak like a sieve at 700MHz. In fact a certain set top box happened to have vent slots that made a perfect antenna at 700MHz.

http://www.slideshare.net/Cisc...

Cheap switching power supplies can still put out a bunch of RFI. Cost of upgrading is non-trivial when talking about an entire office building. If the cell tower is on or next to the offending building it can be degraded by only one or two faulty units.

One of our club repeaters started getting a lot of QRM (interference) back in November. It is located on top of a ski mountain in a building that houses a small restaurant. It turned out when they opened the restaurant and turned on the florescent lights the QRM started. At the end of the day they shut off the lights and it stopped. It took the better part of a day for the guys to track down the source, thinking it had to be something like a wireless router or plasma TV. It's likely that it was just one bad ballast or transformer, but it was more than enough to make the repeater unusable.

Even more a reason for nuclear. 2 nuclear plants and some peaking plants could provide all the energy the state needs. 4 plants at opposite ends of the grid would provide near 100% redundancy.

It is still running, scheduled for shutdown 4th qtr 2014:

http://www.safecleanreliable.c...

Also, a correction: the 2GW of energy produced is heat from the reactor. Actual electricity produced is 650MW or so. Still 35% of the electrical production in the state, so nothing to sneeze at.

I wonder what will happen next year, after Vermont Yankee is shut down and the grid loses 2 GW of base load?

Also, anyone have any statistics on wind production over the same period?

The lackluster jobs reports have almost nothing to do with automation and worker replacement. Big companies don't hire in the mass needed to move the unemployment stats much more than a few tenths of percent. This is because they already have hired people. They've been hiring people for years as the grow. At some point you can decide to get a little more out of the people you hire by pushing them a bit, or maybe making their jobs a little more productive. But either way, the last thing a modern business wants to do is hire a bunch of people they'll have to layoff down the road.

Small business is where the growth in employment happens. Small business expansion is at an all-time low, and has been since the rise of stupid laws like Sarbanes/Oxley, that can devastate a small company while just adding to the accounting burden of big companies (who can absorb it or pass it along to their customers). Until the US becomes small-business friendly again, there's not going to be much job growth.

And what about all that automation? The whole point is that robots are getting cheap. That means it's going to be possible for small businesses and entrepreneurs are going to be able to buy them. What will they do with them? How about custom manufacturing everything? If you've ever remodeled a kitchen, you know that there's a lot of activity around building cabinets, designing the space, picking materials, etc. It's one of those things that produces a lot of activity and is expensive, but not so far out of reach that average people can't afford it. Now think about the automotive aftermarket, custom motorcycles, even additions to homes. All of these things are somewhat custom today. Imagine if those same ideas were applied to cell phones, where a designer could build a model of a phone just for you, have the circuit board made, 3Dprint the case in any color(s) you want, Assemble the phone in the back room and finally, gets you a detailed breakdown of the cost, which is surprisingly not much more than today's iPhone 5S.

Oh, and when you drop it, can easily fit a new glass cover on it because he knew you were going to do that.

And with cheap and smart automation (IE robots):

We'll have people who "paint" murals and frescos on the walls of your living room for the same price as a single color.
We'll have people who create furniture that no one else on Earth has ever made before, just for you.
We'll have automobiles with custom bodies, paint and mechanicals.
We'll have cell phones and tablets that fit our hands exactly and are completely unique to our needs and desires.
We'll have people who take up woodworking by designing 3D models of birdhouses and emailing the plans off to a factory, with the results delivered 24 hours later.