You keep on harping on about the SCRIPTING IN ADVANCE part of filming a TV show, as if this is in any way not normal... I happen to have worked in the film industry. It's *completely* normal to have a script of what you're doing and when, as well as a rough outline of what you expect to happen. The producers wouldn't be doing their job if they *didn't* have such a script.

With that in mind, here's the show's producers comments on the scripting thing:

a) The truth is, Top Gear had already driven the car prior to filming, to enable us to form a view on it in advance

b) Our primary reasoning behind the verdict had nothing to do with how the Tesla performed; our conclusion was based mainly on the fact that it costs three times more than the petrol sports car upon which it’s based. It takes a long time to recharge, so you can’t use it as easily for the carefree motoring journeys that are a prerequisite of sports car driving. You can actually reach that conclusion without driving the car. As it happens, when it did come to the subjective area of how the car drove on the track, we were full of praise for its performance and handling.

c) Just so you understand there’s nothing devious going on, you need to know how this filming business works. When you film a car review, the reviewer is only the tip of the iceberg. Behind the lens is a film crew, and only a day’s worth of light to shoot the eight minute film. This means we have to prepare in advance a treatment – a rough draft of a script so that the director and film crew can get to work right away, knowing what shots they will need to capture. It will contain the facts about a car, and what we think of its looks and so on, but how well the car actually drives is added on the day. If we’ve driven it ahead of filming, as we do with most cars, we will also have an idea how it feels to drive. But, and this is crucial, as we uncover fresh information about a car whilst filming it, it is entirely normal for the treatment to be modified as the day unfolds. Jeremy is always tweaking the scripts to reflect what his driving experience has actually been on the day.

In terms of the what Clarkson actually said during the driving, he loved the car. It's the fundamental design faults that caused problems, and the fact that Tesla were marketing it as 'The Supercar. Redefined' led to TG testing it as a supercar (you know, on a racetrack). If you've seen any of their other supercar reviews, they're equally scathing about those cars deficiencies.

Tesla didn't get any worse or better treatment than any other manufacturer. They just went in there expecting to get a fawning love-fest type of review, perhaps they'd never actually watched the show...

Anyway, I'm out. I don't really care enough about this to argue it to completion.

So it was broken, then. Right. Gotcha.

If you're driving a car and it has power-assisted breaking you are naturally expecting the car to behave in a given way. If you get into a situation where the brakes do not react as strongly as you expect, that is potentially lethal - not just to you but to the poor pedestrian you didn't see.

No excuses. No "semantics" here. It was broken. End of.

What I'm reading from your post is that Top Gear identified a crucial weakness in the Tesla braking system, and Tesla has since fixed it. Good for Tesla, but to claim the original fault was specious is plain wrong.

- Here is a bottle of ethanol and here is an ethanol burner.
  - Burn 1/50th of the contents of the bottle and notice that it takes 4 hours to burn through.
  - Now you have two choices:
        1) Burn the rest of the ethanol and sit there avidly timing it to see how long it takes
        2) Multiply 50 x 4 => 200 in your head, taking less than a second, and go watch the game.

Top Gear chose option (2). You would appear to have chosen option (1). Personally I'm with TG on this one, I have better things to do with my time.

That's not too far off the mark, though, is it ?

Actually the last TGUK show I saw that had US cars in it gave them pretty good reviews. Standard TG procedure, they each chose a muscle-car and drove it across the country a bit. A few gimmicks along the way (police trap in the middle of nowhere, etc.) but IIRC they gave all the cars the thumbs-up at the end of the program.

No, he's right.

A "general purpose" tool is something that can be used for multiple purposes. There's no implication that the user has to be able to program it, let alone that the user should be able to program the machine using the machine itself. A single-purpose computer is something like the Bombe or the enigma machine. There are also analogue computers dedicated to specific tasks - it's the ability to *be* generally programmed that makes something general purpose, not the ability for the end-user to be able to program it; the distinction is small but significant.

My parents use a PC (it's a Mac, but hey) and all they ever use it for is email and the web. They could easily do that on a tablet as well. I'd humbly suggest there's a lot more people like my parents using "PC's" than there are people coding their own stuff on the very machine they bought. By sheer weight of numbers, the argument is carried in favour of the iPad (and other tablets) being PC's.

Apple's position is somewhere between a rock and a hard place on this one. As stated by Tim Cook, their goal has become to produce a seismic shift in the way things work - since Apple is the poster-child for child-labour in Chinese sweatshops, they've decided to turn this around into an advantage (for the workers) rather than just let it be a whipping post for Apple when lazy editors need to fill some column inches.

They're making *all* the reports available, even when it reflects badly on Apple. Then they fix the bad bits. Lather, rinse, repeat. Their goal is to try and drag the industry kicking and screaming along with them; to have the questions become "why do *you* not provide this level of transparency?" to the Dells, the Samsungs, the (insert any techie brand you care to mention here)... In the short term, sure, there'll be families worse off because they need the kids income. In the medium-to-long term, by making this an open, public conversation, other suppliers will start to have to do these audits, and the working environment within China will benefit as a result.

No matter whereabouts on Apple's 'ooh shiny (smirk)' -> 'gotta have this' scale you happen to be, I think you have to support that as a laudable goal. I also think it has a good chance (possibly one of the very few) of working and thereby reducing the painful period when a country starts to apply minimum wages and look after its citizens better. I think that's a good thing too.

Simon

You are conflating ignorance of the law with ignorance of the facts (and you appear to have copious amounts of both).

A pre-existing patent is not law, it is fact. IBM advises its employees to remain ignorant of other patents while working on products because if those products are later found infringing then their liability is reduced.

I was a Master Inventor at IBM before I quit in 2010 and we absolutely did check for pre-existing patents before filing anything new. Occasionally this would lead to wasted effort within IBM because a proposal would get further through the process than it would if the inventors had looked for relevant patents before starting work.

Doubtful.

If you can stream one rendered image every 16ms you can display 60fps. If you send OpenGL commands you will be better-off on a lot of frames but it will stutter every time you need to send a texture larger than a rendered frame (and most textures are larger than a rendered frame).

The game is to make the peak frame latency 16ms (or whatever your target is), not to reduce the average.

Actually the old-skool unit of mass is the slug, not the gram.

What I find odd is this: "stifle" is a relatively obscure word to use and yet they can't spell "dissent".

No you shouldn't. You should expect 0.5 collisions after hashing N/2 items. Trivially you are guaranteed at least M collisions when hashing N+M items.

I don't actually know off the top of my head how many collisions you should expect if you hashed N items.

As opposed to the entire populace of the USA which want to be gate-raped by the TSA, want to be locked up indefinitely without trial in Gitmo, and consider it the lesser evil that innocent children should die rather than american men with small penises give up their gun-toys.

Or perhaps there's a *populace* that is outraged by all these things, but a *government* that implements them. On both sides of the pond.

Simon.