Why not skip the decade-long cycle of getting out the word, and simply introduce mandatory attendance at elections?

Many other countries do it, and it makes for significantly fairer elections with fewer batshit insane^W^Wextremist candidates.

There are authorities that are relevant for automotive embedded software safety. Groups such as the UK's MIRA have a working group, MISRA (Motor Industry Software Reliability Association) which define a safe subset of C that is workable for embedded systems.

Specifically, undefined, unspecified and implementation-dependent behaviour of the C standard is identified, and the unsafe aspects are prohibited as part of the MISRA-C subset.

Alongside this, embedded system vendors in the automotive industry have serious validation requirements both from clients, and from internal compliance processes - the SEI's CMMI and ISO 26262 are a couple of standards that come to mind.

Keep in mind, this may be a little out of date - it's been a few years since I worked in automotive, but the people working in the industry do take it very, very seriously.

Simply buy the affected customers an XBox 360. Their online services are still working..

I think we can safely assume that Blackberry is about as secure as a wet paper bag in countries where the device has become "commercially successful" and the government is less than interested in maintaining privacy.

Mentioining "national security" at the end of the video is a clear sign that RIM has well and truly given in on their claims of absolute security for the sake of maintaining a moderately-successful business.

Never trust the security of communications where the keys are being handled by someone outside your organisation.

Why not just use Boot Camp and dual-boot Windows on the Macbook? A machine of that vintage should be able to run Windows 7 well, and it'll save a thousand or two.

I'd be fine with this, as long as the beancounters are forced to personally visit every single trucker in person, and attempt to extract their fees.

I'd imagine they'd soon have a 'close encounter of the truckstop kind'... perfect sort of punishment for this level of arrogance. Next they'll be demanding fees for listening to the radio while driving to work. The publishing industry will stop at nothing to fraudulently demand fees for others' works.

How is this relevant to 'news for nerds'? A startup with overenthusiastic PR says they're "aiming at mobile"... but no concrete plans or implementation?

Call me back when it's something worth giving a shit about.

The restriction on civilian GPS receivers is that the receiver should be able to show a position higher than 11mi, or a velocity greater than 515m/s, but not both simultaneously. A number of GPS manufacturers, however, have implemented this in a somewhat slack fashion and used || instead of &&.

Where's the blame targeted at Verizon? Last I checked, they were the ones pushing the profits-over-neutrality angle.

If you don't like their business practices, don't do business with them. Simple as that. Businesses think in terms of dollars; it's the only way to send a clear message.

The flaw that most articles on biometric identification, be they fingerprints, retinal scans or other, is that you only have a limited number of immutable keys to choose from. While it may not be an issue in a school setting, if anyone is able to reconstruct the fingerprint or retina picture from the stored data, or at least a fake fingerprint/picture that is functionally equivalent to the real one, it's game over. You only have two eyeballs, and ten fingerprints.

I'd rather a system that allows me to change the key once in a while.

In a few years time, it may even be voted Psi-Scan of the Year, best budget model, 3 years running!

I'd strongly suggest that you do at least a basic level of looking into theory while you're creating "practical circuits" - it's quite helpful when you're debugging to know at least roughly what's meant to happen.

One source I can recommend is the MIT Open Courseware resources - the 6.002 course on Circuits and Electronics is a good place to start; I'm an embedded software engineer who's started to push into the hardware side of things, and that set of lectures helped me turn my vague understanding of electronics (being able to read a circuit and understand what's going on) into something practical (being able to design a circuit).