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Transportation

Toyota Sudden Acceleration Is Driver Error 930

phantomfive writes "The NHTSA has investigated data recorders from Toyota cars whose owners claimed to have crashed due to an accelerator error. They found that the throttles were wide open and the brakes weren't being pressed. The investigation looked at a sample of the cars, selected by the NHTSA." Jamie found this article with a superior headline at Balloon Juice.

Comment The list is mostly irrelevant (Score 1) 284

The Joyo list is pretty irrelevant anyway, used maybe as a guide for high school textbooks and not much else. Most of the new characters they're adding are very common, and everyone knows them already. Actual literacy in Japanese requires more like 3,000-4,000 characters, which everyone just picks up through reading and daily life regardless of what the government's official list says.

And as you probably know, for those learning Japanese or Chinese as a second language, characters start getting a lot easier once you know a thousand of them or so.

Comment Re:MPEG_LA Isn't the devil (Score 1) 247

Patents weren't even strictly invented to prevent copycat manufacturers. They were invented to make manufacturers publish technical implementation specifications on inventions that were too difficult for a copycat to produce without specifications. The incentive to do so was a limited-time monopoly against copycats and disincentive for competitors to compete until the patents had expired.

So really, any invention that is obvious to re-implement without reading the patent specs should be non-patentable.

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