Frankly, I'd *like* a hackable car... something that I can tinker with and mod and adjust.

Can anyone tell based on the photos in the article what model it is? Looks like a Japanese sedan of some kind... not sure exactly what. Does anyone recognize the dashboard display?

Like most other alternative online payment methods (*cough* Paypal *cough*), this one is a terrible deal for consumers.

In the US, especially after the Credit CARD Act of 2009, you get a huge array of benefits for using a credit card:

• Strong, federally-mandated protection against fraud and bait-and-switch (in most cases, the card issuer and merchant duke it out over chargebacks, and the consumer owes nothing).
• Limits on interest rates and fees
• Most decent cards these days offer cash back/rewards... I get about 2% back overall via judicious mix of 3 cards.

Anyone with less-than-awful credit can get a credit card with no annual fee and pay it off monthly, thus incurring no interest or fees ever. Just use it as more convenient cash, rather than as credit. You have to get a credit check for Verizon cell phone contracts in the US too, so the bar for a credit card is not too different from that for Verizon's payment system.

With Verizon's payment system, you get none of these as far as I can tell. Credit cards have gotten too competitive, and thus unprofitable for issuers, and so they've invented newer and sketchier payment options designed to lure gullible and disadvantaged consumers. Shameful.

I see these "Free Public WiFi" ESSIDs all over the place in public areas, such as airports. They never work. They're usually ad-hoc networks.

I assumed for a while that they're symptoms/carriers of some kind of malware, but didn't really worry about it since I don't use Windows.

I just read this article which has a slightly crazy but just-maybe-plausible theory to explain them. They think that it's a weird, propagating out-of-control Windows XP feature, which makes every network to which an XP computer connects propagate its name as an ad-hoc network. And then when somebody else tries to connect because of the enticing name, they keep the ESSID alive for another minute since it's an ad-hoc network, and this continues ad infinitum. So the whole thing is nothing but a long-lasting "echo" of a forgotten network that keeps alive in heavily trafficked public areas. The whole idea seems nuts. Dumber than dumb. Dumber than Microsoft even.

But I haven't heard of any better explanation for the "Free Public Wifi" phenomenon. Anyone else???

The best phone cameras (iPhone, Droid) are pretty good, but not nearly as good as a good compact camera, and nowhere near a DSLR.

The best phone GPS's are very accurate, but have nowhere near the battery life, sensitivity, and ruggedness of a Garmin Legend unit designed for hiking.

The best phone keyboards are quite usable, but not as good as a tiny netbook, and nowhere near a larger netbook.

The best phone screens are large and clear, but not nearly as good as a portable DVD player, and nowhere near a notebook.

The best phone processors (ARM Cortex A8) are pretty darn close to a netbook, but nowhere near as powerful as a higher-end notebook or desktop.

The best phone media players (iPhone) are... okay, a decent phone actually is just as good, if not better than, a dedicated MP3 player in this case.

When you have a good signal, a 3G connection can give pretty high throughput, but not as good as midrange DSL or cable connection, and nowhere near as good as most universities' or corporate offices' bandwidth. ... And everyone seems to like it that way. The smartphone seems to have become the jack-of-all-trades device, highly integrated and packing tons of features. The best ones are good at lots of things, but they're not really "the best possible device" for any one task. Smartphones are good for talking and sending messages and browsing the web and figuring out where you are and taking photos and playing music, but there are dedicated devices that do any thing better. This probably explains why there's no phone that's just amazing for gaming. It would compromise all the other functions to a degree that would render it attractive only to a niche market.

Good to know! I don't see this anywhere in the FF 3.6 release notes.

I don't understand why it won't work with Firefox 3.5.7 though :-( I am running Ubuntu and have the free (if patent-infringing) x264 codec installed. I can play H.264 videos fine in Totem or Xine or VLC... why can't FF use this codec?

It is because of the classic dillema that keeps users on Craigslist (despite it being a steamping pile of crap), and keeps people on eBay (despite them charging a fortune). People searching need a critical mass of people selling, and people selling need a critical mass of people searching. It is a self-renforcing monopoloy that is a tough nut to crack.

Craigslist has always been unpopular in small markets, that is where Kijiji got its foothold.

This makes no sense at all. Why would Craigslist benefit from the network effect, but not Kijiji?

Example: We have a huge, active Craigslist in DC. By contrast, Kijiji has practically nothing. On the other hand, my hometown of Lansing, Michigan has a small and anemic Craigslist. Not many postings in the for sale section, for instance. The Kijiji site for Lansing is also very sparse.

So I don't get it... I can't actually find a specific small-town environment in which Kijiji actually has an advantage. Can anyone suggest a specific one? I also don't know of any marketing or technical reason why Kijiji would have gotten a foothold where Craigslist hasn't...

If the child porn smuggler is smart and careful, 20 PS3's won't be anywhere near enough to break strong, modern, encryption.

If he's dumb, there will be an easier way to decrypt the suspect data. Maybe the perp left the encryption key in plaintext somewhere, or used an obvious passphrase, or a weak or buggy encryption software.

There's no happy medium. What can you break with 20 PS3's? Maybe 56-bit DES?

While the key of DES is easy to brute-force today, and 80-bit keys are becoming questionable, 128-bit keys of high-quality algorithms are thought to be unbreakable via conventional (non-quantum) computers for the foreseeable future. There's a reason that the NSA is the second-largest electric utility user in Maryland...

Personally, every time someone emails me a link to tinyurl, or bit.ly, or tr.im... I murder a kitten. And I don't read the email.

Well, I didn't mean this as flamebait OR insightful... just funny.

I guess looking for humor on Slashdot is like looking for life on Mars ;-)

WTF!?

If I were going on a trip to Mars, the last thing I'd take along would be some techno-listening Eurotrash with unreasonable demands for prompt health care and a propensity for labor unrest. Hell, with their thin figures and tight jeans, some Eurotrashtronaut might get sucked out of the spacecraft through some any ol' tiny tear in the outer wall.

Don't they need any good old corn-fed Midwestern American boys on this mission? Sign me up.

Hey!!! In my country, documents are 210 × 297 mm, you insensitive clod.

(Okay, so I'm actually an American too. Fine :-P.)

This test isn't a complete experimental fiasco (like some of the Microsoft-sponsored listening tests that deem WMA to sound as good at 64k as MP3 at 128k).

But there are a couple of significant flaws with it, that make the results pretty useless:

• They used the AB method, rather than the superior ABX method. In the AB method, a participant hears the two versions of the song, without knowing which is which, and then much choose whether one is better, or whether they are equal. In the ABX method, the participant hears two distinct versions, then a third which is identical to ONE OF the first two. They are asked to figure out which of the first two samples is the same as the third. If they perform no better than chance at this task, it's a good indication that the null hypothesis may be correct. Which is very important, since modern audio codecs have gotten so good that their quality is often indistinguishable in practice. It's disingenuous to argue about slight degrees of preference without an attempt to determine their statistical significance.
• We don't know exactly which codecs were used!!! There are many implementations of AAC+ encoders, which may differ markedly in quality (though in 2006, a credible ABX test found that none was preferred over another to a statistically significant to a 95% confidence interval). Likewise, there are multiple implementations of Ogg Vorbis encoders. The aoTuV patches, in particular, are widely considered to considerably improve sound quality.

If you want to know about some methodologically-better comparisons of audio codec quality, please see the Codec listening test page at Wikipedia. Full disclosure: I wrote most of this article, and have attempted to compile the results of all the carefully-conducted independent tests that I could find.

Finally, none of this is to say that we should all demand 160kbps streaming audio if 48kbps can be made to sound just as good. It's just that this study doesn't establish that, not by a long shot. The headline is also wrong in claiming that 1/3 of the participants couldn't distinguish 48k from 160k audio: in fact, they preferred the 48k audio. And preferring one format is very different from claiming that it is of a high-fidelity: for example, audio with a compressed dynamic range is by definition degraded, and yet it persists in commercial rock recordings because uniformly loud music grabs listeners' attention more easily.

Won't affect the "debate"...

Creationists/IDers always acknowledge the efficacy of artificial selection, or breeding. They usually claim that artificial selection can add "information" to a genotype because it's the product of a conscious design effort directed by an intelligent being, namely a human breeder. Whereas they deny natural macroevolution, claiming that mutation can only destroy information, and never create it, sometimes with pseudo-scientific arguments about entropy and thermodynamics.

Of course, creationists never understand or accept mainstream scientific theories about what constitutes information.

Well, the weird thing is that most of the info on superconductors.org is actually pretty good... Eck's History of Superconductors page is actually pretty good, and he even acknowledges the 138 K ambient-pressure cuprate semiconductor as the current high-Tc record. :-)

Does he say anything about the facilities he has to do this materials synthesis and measurements???

So it's sort of a combinatorial approach, wherein he synthesizes a range of related crystals, and then measures them all at once and tries to discern the individual properties?

Hmmm... my understanding is that long-range ordering contributes significantly to many kinds of high-Tc superconductivity, and superconducting-like properties on may not scale up.