I see a bunch of insightful comments to the effect that "mitigating DoS is a good thing", etc., and decrying infosec folks because of crying wolf, not balancing security with other factors, not understanding engineering, etc. Your car likely has a network-accessible device on your CAN-BUS. Got bluetooth in your car stereo? Also got nav system or steering wheel controls for the stereo? Guess what?

If an attacker compromises a system on your car that is connected to your CAN-BUS, then they might be able to co-opt that system into doing nasty things on your CAN-BUS. Your entertainment system probably has the biggest wireless attack surface, but more and more frequently CAN-BUS is externally accessible, as through your side mirrors, likely the case if you have mirrors that tilt in reverse, etc.

And, these aren't even theoretical vulnerabilities; entertainment system remote exploit has already been demonstrated to disable brakes, etc.:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2F2015%2F07%2F...

Had to be said :-)

We might not have the electoral college by 2020:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

There's a current KickStarter project called LockedUSB which does something similar, but which also includes a power management chip in order to negotiate higher power charging levels that normally require data connectivity. LockedUSB doesn't appear as big or ugly as the one in TFA. (Full disclosure: I'm a backer)

I didn't know they had TV back in Timothy's time.

Uhhh, there's nothing free market or capitalism about USPS and unions of quasi-governmental workers. There's nothing free market about laws that prohibit companies from firing striking workers.

Government (and quasi-government, the USPS is effectively a government agency) employee unions have a unique position in that the "business" can't choose to go out of business and go elsewhere. So it's forced to capitulate to any demand, however unreasonable, that is not illegal and that the union is unwilling to budge on. Government employee unions are a bad idea for this reason.

There's another issue- moral hazard. When management of a private company make concessions during union bargaining, they are directly responsible (to their board and the marketplace) for paying the consequences of making those decisions. Politicians and government managers have much less accountability for making decisions that are not in the government's interest- managers are often shielded by law from retaliation (like firing for incompetence), and elections are often long away and often unions funnel more money to candidates who favor them in lawmaking and negotiations. So there's not much incentive to be adversarial in government employee union negotiations.

Exactly! I was about to post the same thing.

The initial investigation by the university was a whitewash, amounting to "they said they didn't do anything wrong". Look in my history for my comments on that. The NSF report (I just read the summary) seems pretty professional and thorough, but it "exonerates" Mann against a charge that no one seems to have made, i.e. that he falsified data. I have not read any such claim anywhwere credible (and in fact the NSF report explains at the beginning that their investigation was self-generated, not based on external complaints anyway, so I guess NSF just decided to look into it on their own).

Most of the NSF report basically sums up as "NSF didn't fund his research so our standards don't apply". The whole problem with Mann and with Hadley CRU is not that they falsified any data, but (1) that their methods were incredibly biased towards the outcome they wanted (support for AGW), and (2) that a small amount of research by a small number of individuals was used to try to change public policy, out of proportion with the weight of the evidence, coupled with the clear intent to suppress conflicting studies and voices.

I have no qualms with the NSF report. However it doesn't address my concerns with Mann or Hadley CRU.

Engineers do apprentice; it's a requirement of licensure. Usually licensure requires several of years of practice under a licensed engineer, in addition to degree requirements and testing.

See the article on Ars Technica

This is incorrect.

In the past we found undesirable behavior with private fire fighting organizations. This does NOT lead to the necessary conclusion that fire fighting MUST be a government provided service. It just means that we need mechanisms, legal or otherwise, to prevent bad behavior. There were also good aspects to private fire fighters.

For example, I personally like the idea of two fire fighting companies racing to my house as fast as they can, because only the first one on scene gets paid by the insurance company. This incentivizes timely response and placement of many fire stations in order to minimize distance.

In the Tennessee case, I think that the right thing to have done would have been to put out the fire and then send the guy a bill for the cost of putting the fire out. Not out of kindness, but just to avoid bad PR. In an area with high building density then there must be a fire response, and this model would work there as well. Already some cities charge you if you have a traffic accident and knock down a light pole, for instance.

I just don't think government is particularly good at anything, and I don't think that de jure monopolies result in the best outcomes.

Read the linked article. Saving gas is NOT the self-identified main reason that most people buy Prius. As I said, most people who buy Prius, by far the dominant hybrid, is because of, in their own words, "it makes a statement about me". This is smug; it's another way of saying "I'm better than you". Even your holier than thou "I use half the gas that you do" response is smug. You have no idea what kind of car I drive, or if I even drive at all, so your statement is unsupported by facts.