Actually, the box says "Your Apple iPad" inferring that Apple still own it and you're just using it.

Disingenuous bullshit. Ford don't own your car, yet it says 'Ford' right there on the front grille!

You're retrofitting the phrase to a possible meaning, when in fact there never was such a phrase, just a mishearing of a different one. And anyway its "for all intensive purposes". What does that even mean? It might mean something, but it sounds awkward and, due to its common misuse, makes the speaker sound ignorant. Anyone with a desire to not make themselves sound like a fool will give this one a very wide berth.

Intensive purposes makes no sense in the context this phrase is typically used in

Or indeed any.

It took me almost a week to be able to signal routinely without first turning the wipers on though.

That doesn't have anything to do with which side of the road you drive on, but rather which pattern the manufacturer happened to choose. I drive mostly on the left (UK and Australia), occasionally in Europe and USA, but in all cases the rental cars seem different regarding wipers/signals on left or right every time. I do wish they'd all standardise.

Lithium is an extremely abundant element. Being No 3. on the periodic table and all, means it's one synthesised very quickly after Helium. There's lots of it in rocks - hence the name.

I'm pretty sure if the demand is there, the mining of Lithium can be ramped up to cope, and techniques to extract it that might be too expensive for small scale will be cost-effective on a large scale.

I agree that better driver education would be a good thing. But it's not going to happen because it would make the cost of obtaining a license too high, blah blah - all sorts of political arguments that haven't got anything to do with prioritising safety.

I'm a PPL holder too, so I know what you're saying about pilot training, but that's a completely different thing for several reasons, not least of which is that the cost of obtaining a license is entirely irrelevant to the overall economy - if you can afford it, go for it. Also, the outcome of an accident tends to have greater consequences in the air, so overall the extra cost of safety is considered worth it and is written into the law. On the roads, for whatever reason, the extra cost of safety is deemed not worth it by most people, since a) they don't bother getting advanced driver training once they have their license, b) they drive badly most of the time, and c) politicians don't demand anything is done about it.

In other words, more driver training might lead to fewer accidents, but no-one is bothering with it, either voluntarily or mandating it by law. So, the fact remains, that for the typical driver, locking up on the brake pedal in panic will remain the norm, even though it's not a good thing to do. All that can be done is to design the cars themselves to be safer, using technology to make up for driver deficiency where it can. With increasing use of drive-by-wire systems, it's high time that car manufacturers were forced to follow coding and design standards, and have their designs independently audited and approved. That's going to improve safety far more cheaply than mandating more driver training.

To me it's unbelievable that such mandatory design approvals are not already the norm. I guess the pollies are well behind the state of the art as usual. Maybe the Toyota case will help shake them up. In any case it makes good business sense for manufacturers to at least go with the voluntary standards that exist, which Toyota did not do. Until they can show that they're compliant with the voluntary standards,the best way to fix this mess is not buy a Toyota. That's how free market correction is supposed to work, right?

Interestng. I wonder if it's different for the European market? I can't imagine a car sprung like that would do well in Europe - we like our cars to feel fairly firm.

Have you ever been in an impending accident situation? However it's caused, with only seconds to react it's extremely hard to think rationally about a series of steps needed to bring it to a harmless conclusion, EVEN WITH EXPERT TRAINING. For example, on a car without ABS, "cadence braking" is a technique that can stop you quicker in a skid, but actually doing that in a real slide (not just a training situation) is exceedingly hard. That's why ABS was invented - it practically performs rapid cadence braking for you automatically, so you're free to panic and lock up on the pedal.

The Toyota software flaw apparently indicates that the brake "failsafe" which closes the throttle when the brakes are applied only reacts to a new transition of the brake switch, not an existing braking condition, so you have to remove your foot and reapply the brake to activate the failsafe (assuming that part of the software is still actually running, which in the stack overflow case it probably wouldn't be). If the vacuum assist has also been depleted, or you're already in a skid, you're in big trouble; you'd have to fully comprehend the situation, and arrive at the conclusion that the only solution is to turn off the ignition (not a natural emergency procedure at any time) in the few seconds before you hit whatever it is you're careering towards. Could you do that? I seriously doubt it - even the best racing car drivers in the world still crash sometimes.

I know that; you know that; everyone on Slashdot presumably knows that. I didn't mean 'random' as in truly random, I meant that the spread of values produces by the hash must be effectively random. In the context of the article, you don't want anything like random, you want both deterministic and a function that maintains distance. A hash is completely wrong.

You don't want a hash function for this, where the hash is effectively random. You need a function that derives a unique value for each input, but retains the relative distance of the original value. i.e. two values that are very similar yield an index that is similarly close. That way the 'hash' can be used to determine how closely related two species are. Randomising in the way a true hash does is of no real value.

One problem caused by this fault is that if the throttle gets stuck in the open position (the exact amount is redacted from the public record, but it looks to be >30%), then the vacuum assist to the brakes is greatly reduced (after all, normally the throttle closes when you move your foot to the brake pedal, so you get full vacuum assist). The upshot is that the driver would need to apply far more pedal pressure than they're used to to get full braking - combined with the fact that the engine is pulling hard it will feel like the brakes have simultaneously failed. Turning off the ignition might help with the acceleration, but not with replenishing the vacuum assistance.

There is a lot more to this than simple driver error. Read the court testimony, it's a real eye-opener and in fact a really great read: http://www.safetyresearch.net/2013/11/07/toyota-unintended-acceleration-and-the-big-bowl-of-spaghetti-code/

Anyone who knows anything about coding, or just has an interest in this case can read a great summary here: http://www.safetyresearch.net/2013/11/07/toyota-unintended-acceleration-and-the-big-bowl-of-spaghetti-code/ which also has links to the testimony of the expert witnesses to the court.

The testimony makes fascinating reading, and is based on analysis of the actual source code in clean-room conditions. If after reading it you still think this isn't a software problem, maybe you need to turn in your geek badge right now.

They didn't speculate. They analysed the source code, which they had clean-room access to, as well as the actual compiler and test harness used by Toyota. Toyota testified that the stack utilisation was 41%, whereas the analysis showed that it was actually 97% *before* the recursion was taken into account. It looks pretty certain that stack overflow could occur. Following the stack are key system structures used to control the scheduling of threads on the CPU, and damage to these structures could cause one or more of the threads to never get any scheduled time. One of the threaded tasks not only controls the throttle, but also the failsafes in case of some scenarios,and also the code that writes fault codes to the battery-backed RAM. Basically, if that task dies, then the throttle is left uncontrolled, the failsafes don't kick in, and no fault codes are written so that the problem is revealed after the fact. It's a terrible design; a disaster waiting to happen.

Uses can protect themselves against this sort of thing by not buying a Toyota until they are compliant with the relevant standards. Only hurting them in the marketplace will get them to fix this problem.

The testimony from both expert witnesses Barr and Koopman are now a matter of the public record and actually make fascinating reading - they'll be especially interesting to computer guys because it goes into a lot of detail about the code design, though frequently translated for the benefit of the court into layman's language. It's going to go down in history I reckon as a classic case of how not to design a safety-critical system.

A great summary and links to the public court documents can be found here: http://www.safetyresearch.net/2013/11/07/toyota-unintended-acceleration-and-the-big-bowl-of-spaghetti-code/

Electric cars are not yet a mature product. Just as computers weren't back in the early 1980s, when they either cost a fortune and didn't do much, or cost less and did much less. Electric cars are at that stage now, but whereas some people will be content to sit back and wait for it to mature, then jump on the bandwagon, others will be in the right place at the right time with the money and the vision to be the one to take it from expensive luxury that doesn't do much (in this case, range) to a mature product. Someone has to do it. Tesla are doing it on their own, they almost failed before they got a big injection of cash from investors and the govt., but even better would be for a company like Apple to back them financially while giving them a free rein. If not Apple, then someone else - if GM or Ford had any sense they'd be doing it, but they don't have the vision or the money, and they're to entrenched in the old world.

to develop for Apple I would have to buy a Mac. Then I would have to pay what is it... $100/year the last I checked to get the development environment. (chump change I guess after buying a Mac) Then.. the only way the app could ever get on to more than a fraction of a percent of people's devices is to get it approved by the Apple store which everyone I have talked to claims is a real pain in the ass.

You're looking at it from the point of view of a dabbler; a hobbyist. If you're developing professionally the hardware and developer subscription cost is negligible compared to paying for the actual design, development and coding. Approval for the App Store is not difficult if you conform to the rules, which are there mostly to raise quality and security - as a professional developer you will want that.

The environment is more controlled (yes, that's a good thing), though screen sizes vary quite a bit too. Apple have layout technologies that help you with that and yes, they are somewhat like HTML in intention, where you specify constraints rather than pixel sizes.

But the biggest boon to professional developers is that the platform is really well-designed, has relatively few bugs and annoyances, is fairly secure, gives you an awful lot of good stuff for free, and supports a nice easy-to-use language as well. Obviously non of that matters to you because you're prejudiced - your first statement states that clearly. You're also not a professional developer, because your argument is irrelevant.