That was an important design consideration with the Honeywell Round. The outer plastic ring was originally available in many colors, back when Making Everything Match was considered very important in home decorating. It's still available ($26.98 at Home Depot for the heat-only model), only in beige. But you can remove the plastic ring and paint it to match the wall if you like.

Honeywell has a touch-screen, WiFi, Android/IOS enabled thermostat which also measures humidity and can decide when to run in fan-only mode and save energy. True to their color history, Honeywell lets you change the touch-screen's background color to match your decor.

The Nest isn't a bad product, but it is overhyped for what it does.

The "old fashioned thermostat" shown is the famous Honeywell Round, usually credited to Henry Dreyfuss. It's one of the iconic objects of 20th century industrial design. The Nest thermostat copies that design. That's it's big selling point. There are other thermostats with Internet connections.

All it does is turn the HVAC on and off. It's not for use with systems where outside air intake is controllable with a damper or fan. It doesn't control fans separately from heating and cooling. It doesn't sense CO2 and humidity, and increase the air change rate when more people are present. (That last feature is a huge win for classrooms, conference rooms, and hotel function rooms.) Newer commercial building systems do all that. The Nest could have brought that technology to the home. But it didn't. It mostly just looks cool, and performs like other semi-intelligent thermostats.

People are going to buy computers to do stuff. Email, facebook, ms word, that is what the average users says they do on the computer. One big problem with netbooks was that people assumed that could MS Word, and when they found out they couldn't they returned the computer. This is a solution where OEMs can expose people to other OS while still allowing MS Office to run. Maybe some people realize that they don't need MS Office. Maybe they don't want to pay a monthly fee for Office and realize that Google Docs or OpenOffice is sitting right there fore free. Maybe the next computer they buy doesn't have MS WIndows.

This is scary enough that MS, allegedly, has in the past prevented OEM from installing two OS. The last thing MS wants a computer user to know is there is another OS. Look at the misinformation on the Mac, how expensive it is, when my last Macbook Air was $1000. Yes, more expensive that they mythicla $300 MS laptop that runs everything, but about what a good laptop costs. We can argue price, but MS is scared of users knowing there is choice.

We also see this in past EULA in which certain versions of MS Windows could not be the guest OS. This is likely the future of the PC. A reasonably functional and free client OS on top of which a virtualized guest OS can be run. This is basically what MS is doing now with the instant upgrade. Start with a functionality locked out, and buy a full OS after the fact. Like the Mainframe manufacturers used to do. You have all the hardware, but have to pay extra to use it.

And once you've got your 10,000 monthly candidates, then what?

Then you have to use some kind of systematic process (whether automated, manual or some mixture) to narrow that list down to the 50 terrorists (less the ones that slipped through the first filter). Thus, you're back to the original problem.

Thank you for that idea. I think I'm going to try it.

Early cars did have all sorts of control schemes. Some had steering tillers instead of wheels. There were throttle levers on the steering column on many vehicles. A Model T Ford has three pedals, two of which control the transmission. By the 1940s, things had settled down into something close to the current arrangement, but automatic transmission quadrants were not standardized until Congress stepped in. (GM had P-N-D-S-L-R, Ford and Chrysler had P-R-N-D-S-L). Standardization occured long after any relevant patents would have run out.

Note that you haven't actually changed the problem at all, just added humans to the system that needs to be better than 99.99998% accurate.

Though you have accurately identified one of the major reasons why the human part of the human/machine system will never achieve that level of discrimination: ass-covering.

In fairness, inside the USA is fair hunting areas for foreign intelligence agencies.

That fact highlights another issue, though, which is that even if all countries protect their own citizens from snooping by their own agencies (most don't, actually), this is easy for allied powers to work around through sharing agreements. "I'll spy on your people and you spy on mine, then we'll swap". We need to institute some protection against that as well.

None.

Do you have any? Note that I mean evidence, not supposition, not tenuous conclusions drawn from potential coincidences.

Cite?

I'm not disputing your point, but AFAICT while this is theoretically an issue, I haven't seen any evidence that it's actually being done.

I don't... So I make a point of ignoring it when it happens and hope that when I do whatever it is that is annoying others will be just as understanding.

That works for my neighbor's lawn mower too. But neither case is any way relevant to internet trolls - which are much more like having heavy metal bands practicing 24/7 in every garage for three blocks around. So, get back to me when you have a reasonable argument and lose the tinfoil.

I'm sure it's not risky at all from an engineering perspective. Metal is predictable, and if you can predict it you can design to maximize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses for the intended application. And if it's just not possible to make it work, the math will tell you so.

What's risky is the marketing side of it, because people are much harder to predict. If people like it, this may be a huge leg up on the competition for Ford, putting them in the driver's seat for several years while Chevy and GM play catch up, particularly if they can then lobby successfully for turning the regulatory screws on the competition. It could leave the competition having to artificially limit their sales. If people don't like it, Ford could be in a world of hurt for a few years.

Either that or OEMs like Apple don't pay retail prices for parts.

I think the aluminum is just the cheap way to increase the fuel economuy. The basic problem with a truck is the aerodynamics and the engine. The aerodynamics are always going to suck, and there is little that can be done about that. The engine, OTOH, can be adjusted.

Right now most trucks are powered assuming that they are going to be carrying a significant load, and that consumers are going to be expect a good performance with that load. The result of this, and the reason many like trucks, is that when they are not loaded they are overpowered and therefore can achieve a great speed. That many people buy trucks for speed and not load is indicated by the number of automatics that are sold.

This need not be the case. We had an old Toyota pickup and it was a four cylinder 100 horse power r siries engine. When loaded it was slow, but like most people I did not drive it loaded all the time. But it was a working truck. We had a big chevy truck as well for work around the farm. Fords engines are not inefficient, at around 50 horsepower per cylinder. The point is that most people are driving around in a six cylinder truck wasting gas when what they need is 4 cylinder. It can be significant. In they city my six cylinder car get 16 MPG while my 4 cylinder car, just a fast, gets over 20.

You know, all this is true. Men in my extended community were some of the first of die of AIDS as I was entering my free sexual period. Yet I had no cell phone, would go off on my bike, be gone all day, and was unsupervised after school. Maybe it was luck. Maybe I wasn't dumb. Maybe I was because I was poor, as it was the mostly the richer kids I knew who did recreational drugs and still got through school. We had drug houses across from where I went to school, where drugs were plentiful and cheap, but it was clear that that was not the path to success. I am not a person who thinks the war on drugs is anything but a waste of money, but I also never saw them as a way to a better life. For kids I think we should focus on the mostly likely path to a caring and successful life, they will figure out the fun detours on their own.

As far as 'meagan law' danger, it is safer now than when I growing up. When I was a kid, at least 28 teenage boys were raped, tortured, and murdered over a three year period. When parents reported them missing, the police just assumed they ran away. The murders would have continued and probably never be solved if not one of the co-conspirators shooting the ringleader and then confessing. Not even then the police did not want to deal with it. In a few cities we still have a high rate of abduction and murders of children. Not the police force is more professional and will tend to take these cases seriously. If I had been born a few years earlier, I might have been one of the dead.