I wonder if you guys have put any bandwidth preservation measures in place in case of a natural disaster than limits connectivity between the mesh and the outside. I'm thinking if a giant mutant beaver takes out a dam that fries nearby telcos, you don't want somebody on a Skype video chat using up the lone remaining Pringle can-to-mountain top link. But then, that's more of an issue for the Project Byzantium use cases than yours I guess.

PS -- please tell me you didn't create 68 slashdot accounts just to get that UID.

Since we're already talking about cars, I'll have to resort to a phone analogy.

The smartphone equivalent is that "all" this does is provide an API for smartphone apps to access GPS location, tilt sensor data, and battery SOC and drain rate. But really that's pretty huge in itself, it's enough to enable search based on location (be that Yelp, Opentable, or just Bing). It's enough to create crowd-sourced traffic maps, and it might even be enough to do Slashdot style moderation of nearby drivers.

But yeah I'd like the diagnostic info (much of which is going to be model-specific) and even more I'd like to write to the CAN bus to control non-critical stuff. And of course as an app writer I'll want to secretly upload your address book to my servers so I can sell it to information brokers and download targeted advertising. Oops did I say that out loud?

My first app would switch to recirculating air whenever I go near one of the local sewage treatment plants or enter a tunnel. (Or any rectangle I can define via a pair of GPS coordinates, and of course the smell map will be a downloadable crowd-sourced database.) Upon exiting the smelly zone the vent mode returns to whatever it was set to prior. Right now I have a subroutine running on base-brain to handle this task which works well for the frequently travelled areas. But if I forget when driving near that feed lot on I-5, I'm stuck with cow-shit air for *miles*.

So can openxc control things like the air vents? I'm thinking of the Prius which has a recirc button the steering wheel as well as the dash, so it's probably possible to plug into a bus somewhere.

For the record, anyone that pays $1100 for an HDMI cable should be mauled by angry weasels.

I'd say paying BestBuy $1100 for an HDMI cable *is* being mauled by weasels, so no problem there.

My faith is restored. I salute you.

Yes, the Firefox team is finally going to release ESR after all this time. It proves that Mitchell Baker can be very unforgiving if you forget the safe word.

[I came all this way looking for an ESR joke. C'mon people, throw me a bone here.]

But they have to make up for the cost of billing you for it somehow....

No, you've confused the instructions for first responders with the instructions for the dealerships doing post-crash repairs.
Per a post elsewhere:

The Volt service manual documents what should be done to inspect the high voltage systems following a collision in Volume 2, section 11, page 332. After a collision as severe as in the side-impact crash test, the battery pack should be removed from the vehicle.

Still it's a good thing NHTSA is looking into this (while not picking solely on GM). After the Toyota unintended acceleration issue the US auto safety regulators looked bad because they appeared to have not paid attention to the early warning signs, and that ended up being bad for the regulator, the regulatee, and the consumers. Even if this turns out to be a total non-problem, it will help debunk fear-mongering against EV technology. IMHO.

Because:
    1) you could choose a notary run by someone you trust
    2) you could UN-choose a notary if you stop trusting it
    3) you can delegate the above to your browser maker or a plugin maker you trust, and not worry about it, just like you already do with the CA system. But *they* can do #s 1 and 2.

With the CA system you don't have have that flexibility in any practical sense.

It doesn't cost $23M/year to attend college only because banks don't expect students to repay a $24M/yr loan. However you'll notice that med students pay a lot closer to $23M/year than history PhD students.

The vast majority of students aren't saying "gee, $20K/year is too much, but I'm all in at $19.5K". They are simply applying for loans at whatever the cost, and if they get them they're in. It's a different twist on the free market dynamic you're imagining. The price is tied to what is lendable, which is determined by the banks based on how much of a students future expected earnings they believe they can grab. Schools are happy to go along for that ride.

As an aside on the relationship of school price to the actual cost of education, schools will claim (and feel) the need to pay competitive salaries to high level administrators and profs in demand. This is partly how the max the bank will lend is ultimately laundered into the "cost of education".

It's still greed all the way down.

When large segments give up on college the prices will go down. They can only be as high as they are because people are willing to borrow (and others to lend) large amounts of money to pay for them.

This is the key misunderstanding here. It's not a "free market" question. It's ultimately a question of the same corruption that has infected other segments of our system. No matter how many students attend, all of them will have their future earnings taken. Tuitions will not drop in proportion to attendance, they will only rise or fall in proportion to the expected future earnings of their students.

Schools expect you will earn money, so they justify higher tuitions (which they then spend profligately on salaries and expansion projects while monetizing every aspect of the "academic" process). Banks expect you will earn money, so they lend in proportion. The banks and the schools have rigged the game.

What happens when there are two billion sites (like Moxie hoped) that all need to be queried once a day by every notary? Who pays those bandwidth bills?

In Convergence notaries do not poll those sites once a day or ever. Notaries only contact a server when there is a mismatch between what the client reports seeing and what's already in the notary's cache. That means the notary only contacts a site when the site has changed its cert.

Honestly I think you might have missed his point. A larger excerpt of the blog post:

Given that essentially the whole population of Chrome users would use the default notary settings, those notaries will get a large amount of traffic. Also, we have a very strong interest for the notaries to function, otherwise Chrome stops working. Combined, that means that Google would end up running the notaries.

There is some truth to that -- a performance concern leading to a privacy concern.

But given that the notaries are only queried for the very first contact to a secure site (browser uses its cache for future contacts), I wonder if he's overestimating the amount of traffic at the notaries and it's impact on the browser experience. Plus, as you pointed out, users can have their own notary lists like the anti-phishing ones, so if they don't want to trust Google they can pick non-Google servers.

Or Google could fund (perhaps in consortium) an external party to provide high-availability notaries that firewall Google from the privacy issues around notarizing Chrome users' https requests. Convergence can also use an intermediate proxy in order to hide the browser's IP address from the notaries it uses. So long as the default is to use a non-Google proxy to talk to Google's notaries, Google would be safe from privacy accusations on that front.

Average users could simply subscribe to a list of notaries like most users do with the filter lists for Adblock Plus or IE9's Tracking Protection lists. Someone trustworthy who cares maintains the "EasyTrust" list that most users will subscribe to, and the community of knowledgeable geeks keeps an eye on that and cries foul if it gets taken over by a Sith lord or something.

But hell, even if the default list is maintained by the browser vendor, it's still way better than and more agile in response to problems than what we have now.