Precedent has shown that you are 100% correct, even when the alternative is not a bomb here, but a loss of lives in military conflict there.

However, given that Stuxnet and Flame both clearly were successfully deployed, infiltrated the relevant systems, and didn't cause a meltdown, is a pretty good indication that they weren't intended to cause a meltdown. Given the nature of what they're working with, I'd say it's likely (although not a guarantee) that they were coded in a way to not affect failsafe systems.

If you're planning on getting one, it's worth looking at your OS, too. If you use Vista or an earlier Windows OS, you're not going to have support to TRIM commands (without which future write operations can be slowed).

It's also worth looking at some settings. If you have concerns about the shelf life of your drive, you could be exacerbating that if your SSD is used for virtual memory, since there's a significant amount of reading/writing going on with the paging file.

From a purely anecdotal standpoint, I can say that the reliability is not an issue. I've had an OCZ 60GB SSD for my operating system and a couple of frequently used games, while using an HDD for the volume storage, and have been using it for almost two years without running into any issues from the drive. The performance impact is noticeable (as far as games go, load screens go by much more quickly, other than that, the big issue is that it will take your system a hell of a lot less time to boot up).

http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=03052007 There's a good story arc in the Achewood comic that covers a masterfully baited scam artist. Yes, it's fiction, but still a great read.

I'm going to daresay that the ones who only work a few hours a year are going to be the ones who are well above the median chance of 20% as far as getting caught goes. Doing it right takes a little preparation.

For current devices, USB/SATA really don't tend to be the biggest bottlenecks. It's nice that they're developing technology to improve this. But I have a feeling adoption of this is going to be slow going, since there's no immediate benefit and it increases the expense. I could see this quickly going the way of FireWire.

And only got the response: "That's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage."

...it's a scary thought to see how much could be done if they used this a pre-cog. Conceivably, if you searched for something on a 'banned list', they could report it to the police, track your location via your Android phone so that police can find you, or, maybe even have your car drive you to the nearest police station (with their fine self-driving vehicles). Or spot you via one of their Street View patrols, combined with facial recognition software. Never mind if you also emailed a friend about the potential crime from your Gmail account.

The "guns don't kill people" argument has been around for a long while. And while I'm going to go out and say that I support the right to bear arms, I think it's an absolutely fallacious argument.

While you can argue that guns don't kill all day, you have to keep in mind what they were designed to do. They were designed to kill. There is no other valid function for them. You can't use them to cut your steak up (like a knife). You can't use them to do anything but kill (unless of course you count target practice, which, ultimately, is practicing to kill).

So yes, it takes a person behind the gun to actually point it and pull the trigger to perpetrate a murder with a gun. And the ultimate issue at hand isn't gun ownership. But the cavalier attitude of "guns don't kill people" overlooks the entire reasons guns exist - to kill. Keeping in mind the gravity of that, and accepting the responsibility that comes with that, is something that every gun owner would do well to think about.

As bad as insurance rates are, in general, the insurance market doesn't "rake folks over the coals".

Insurance is a very unique business model in which the cost to 'make' the product isn't known at the time of sale. But there's a lot of information that can be used to determine what it's going to cost. And scientific information on rising sea levels is among that information.

Raking over the coals implies a certain gouging. What's going to happen is that insurance is going to be expensive, but it's because the insurance companies will be reasonably certain that it's going to cost a hell of a lot in future claims. And that's just good business.

If things go wrong with the connection, will they send Karl Hungus to fix it?

That's why they send him. He's an expert.

It sounds way too much like this guy is trying to make a living off of being Tom Smykowski from Office Space. Let everyone else do your job for you, and make money off of it. Quite a dream, eh?

At the end of the day, there's a hell of a lot more to being a legislator than taking the votes from the people and giving them to the senate. It's about taking complex problems, and coming up with complex solutions, combined with the sales component of convincing people that that's how they would have wanted it to be solved.

That post was Insightful, you insensitive clod.

I'm at one of those companies. In my 30s, I'm one of the younger folks. Older software companies are where you're apt to find a lot more stability and reasonable working hours, perhaps at the expense of a gaudy starting salary.

There are plenty of hard-working, non-droid, Americans who understand the binary language of moisture vaporators, you insensitive clod.

I'm hoping that it has redundancy involved - the same way there's a backup BIOS on some mobos so that you don't brick it if there's an error while flashing. Maybe the initial version of it permanently flashed on a ROM, that it will use if a later version is corrupted (which can be checked by CRC or something as such). Considering that this is a remote thing, you especially have to consider the possibility that the vehicle can go out of range to receive additional parts of the update, etc, so there's a lot of ways that this could go wrong if they haven't thought through the possibilities. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that they've considered that. The bigger concern I have is that they had better make sure that their software QC does not get lazy with this option available. A lot of times, that is the case - you figure if you mess up, you can always send a new patch with minimal error, but within a critical system such as a car, if you mess up badly enough and don't catch it before it ships, you can kill someone. Let's hope someone up top at corporate isn't thinking that this means they can reduce costs from a QC standpoint.