Over his life, Jobs has had a greater impact. But at the time Apple was formed, Wozniak singlehandedly designed and engineered a machine that was simply peerless. The Apple ][ made every other system on the market look like a toy for years while costing less to build. Jobs' contribution at the beginning was modest in comparison. (BTW Woz was never much of a programmer, just a killer electrical engineer.)
I hope that the NSA revelations will be the biggest spur ever for use of effective crypto. It's the only effective response we have. The Administration and the Congress aren't going to restore privacy. We don't have a national anti-totalitarian party in the USA. Just the two pro-totalitarian parties.
the reason your house is insecure is because we can't protect it with math
Exactly! If physical security were like crypto, we could all afford to have the security of a head of state. People who want high security rely on effective specific countermeasures, not just law enforcement generally. Law enforcement helps your security but it is not the whole answer.
Strong crypto is an amazing thing, allowing anyone to achieve privacy that cannot be broken by eavesdropping. That is true today the same as it was before the latest NSA news broke. With such a tool available, it is crazy not to use it. The cost and difficulty are small and the protection is robust against any eavesdropper, not just the US gov't.
Autocar.uk is an enthusiast news and review site. They are careful about their reviews and it means a lot that Sutcliffe is so excited after driving the Model S. He was a professional racer. Autocar have tremendous integrity and independence unlike many US car mags which ritually praise US models for no reason other than their origin.
But Autocar also do comparisons that don't really mean much, like a track race between an SUV and a trackday special. The rolling start race with the Aston isn't meant to signify anything other than the real world result of the huge torque in an all electric. When the Model S ships in the UK their review will be a must read. This is just a little fun.
I think Musk is in need of some good advice on PR strategy. He started public battles with Top Gear and the NY Times over inaccuracies. I think it's more than likely he was right in both cases--those are not the homes of highly objective and sophisticated auto journalism. Top Gear is just entertainment, and the NY Times doesn't bother including the weight of a car in a review, which says something about their thoroughness. Autocar.uk in contrast is extremely respected and diligent.
But engaging the press in a press release war creates the wrong image for the company. Who will hear about it? Viewers of Top Gear and the NY Times. And they won't be likely to guess their beloved news source is in the wrong. You can't win that kind of fight and he should have known better than to try. I can't believe it has been good for Tesla on balance.
Top Gear is the Daily Show of automobile journalism. Although it's entertainment, a surprising number of its viewers would cite it as their primary source of auto news.
Just as with the Daily Show audience, the Top Gear audience isn't thinking very critically about every subject presented. With that kind of audience, it's all about appearances. Merely having heard that there has been a kerfuffle over their prior coverage of Tesla is sufficient for viewers to think, "well, perhaps what I saw about Tesla on Top Gear wasn't quite accurate." In other words, since loud and silly is all that this audience can perceive, I think Musk did the right thing.
I was skeptical of Musk's reaction to the Times, but in net, I think Tesla came out of that looking seriously intolerant of journalistic hijinks. And many people respect that.
I've actually thought the same thing regarding Top Gear for quite a while, and said as much in another offshoot of this thread (prior to reading this).
I was also on the side of it being a slight misstep for Tesla to make as much of an issue of the NYT and Top Gear problems, but in hindsight I think it's paid off for them. There's been so much good press now that people thinking back on the events may have a different opinion than when they first heard about it, and Tesla was less well known.
I love Top Gear. I love it for being loud and silly.
But, whether you and I see it as entertainment is somewhat moot when, like the Daily Show, much of its audience actually gleans the totality of their auto news intake from this entertainment show. Because, frankly, many are not interested in watching the serious news shows, automotive or otherwise.
The better solution would (IMO) to have been to out-Top-Gear Top-Gear in some fashion, and use that exposure to also cover your point of contention.
I think a suitable segment to parody would be the (rocket assisted) Mini Cooper Ski-Jump[1] from the Top Gear Winter Olympics Special[2].
For the low low price of a single Model S, a Merlin engine, and some quality time bodging one onto the other[3], he'd have a guaranteed viral hit in which to make his appeal to the public, as well as, almost certainly, the credibility of producing either a much better jump, or a much larger fireball.
As the saying (sorta) goes: "Never get into a rocket fight with a rocket scientist who owns his own rocket making company."
[3] plus somewhere with a ski-jump they don't really like that much, and whose authorities don't have a problem with a mostly-horizontal rocket flight-plan, which might be tricky.
they won't be likely to guess their beloved news source is in the wrong
It doesn't really matter if their beloved news source is right or wrong, it still paints Tesla as litigious. The only time such suits over reviews expressly supported by the manufacturer go over well is when the reviewer committed gross fabrications or other inaccuracies.
The omissions in their suit speak quite loudly to me. For example, I just went back and rewatched the Top Gear review. They mention the engine overheated in one Tesla, and in the other the brakes failed while it was charging. I notice Tesla only made a big deal about the race track range estimate, which if I recall they didn't even claim was wrong- just misleading. That leaves an especially bad taste in my mouth- it's almost like Tesla is trying to discredit the apparently real failures by nitpicking unrelated minor details.
It all looks even more shady when you consider how few of these sorts of scuffles come up with Top Gear & other car companies.
Let me correct myself. I came across Jim Grey's 1999 paper "Rules of Thumb in Data Engineering" where he states that this heuristic is from Gene Amdahl in about 1965: a balanced system has one bit of I/O per second for each instruction per second and one byte of memory for each instruction per second. So, 8 MIPS per MBpsIO, and one MB/MIPS.
I also converted. Plus, much better for me than the amazon ecosystem, there is calibre with all its automatic creation of news source documents and format conversions that usually just work. I wish they would just make the actual readers more bulletproof since I seem to break one on an annual basis but at today's cost I'll deal with it.
