throwaway234

Every "free" service from Google has the end goal of serving you personalized ads. That's their business.

Honestly I think it still is to the majority of the public. Sure another engineer who is at all concerned with privacy knows about these devices, but I doubt a kid who is robbing a pap john's driver at gunpoint is aware.

He would spend so much time in the UIUC ACM office working on that thing. Pretty impressive for an undergrad ;)

Many uninformed people honestly do believe that, yes.

A ride on Virgin Galactic is $250,000 a ride to the ISS on a soyuz is $70,000,000.

That's why you build a Mars-dreaming company AND an electric vehicle company :)

I think he's talking about the Selective Service System aka the draft.

If you're male and haven't signed the document saying you will die for your country at the whim of a random number generator, you cannot apply for federal student loans.

Also In 40 states (+DC) it is a prerequisite for men to sign up for the draft before getting/renewing a driver's license (maybe any gov ID?). I suppose if that is combined with voter ID laws, yes there could be a subset of men in the US who match the clean description and are still unable to vote. That situation does not apply to women.

That's also assuming not registering for the draft (a max sentence of $250,000 / 5 years in prison) still can be called a 'clean record'. I think so.

From reading the front page and only blog post, I gathered it is paired with bluetooth to your phone, and you set a timeout before self-destruct.

So if you set an hour, if your card hasn't been paired with your phone in over an hour it can erase itself. The phone probably rewrites the data as soon as it identifies the card again and the pin is entered.

What tool do you use to change configurations?

I know my 2007 Lexus has those programmable options like beep durations and such, but I have only found two solutions - paying the dealership $60 to change them, or buying a $15 android app that changes them. I could do it myself, but the codes (Lexus Personalized Settings) are secret. Did you find a free alternative to modify your Prius settings?

As a millennial in SoCal, I think it's safe to say we need cars. But we don't buy new cars because they have iPhone docks, we buy used cars because we can afford them.

Not sure how this article could not mention student loans once. We are disenchanted by the idea of more monthly payments and debt. This issue seems much more economic than a blanket 'cars aren't cool anymore' attitude.

I can confirm it can be abused really easily. Back in middle school (2006? 2007 maybe?) me and my friends used a firefox macro addon and a free anonymous text website to send a few hundred vulgar texts to a girl that one of us had recently broken up with.

The next day at school one of us got called into the office. The girl's parents had hired a private investigator to find out who sent the texts. My friend denied everything and there was no real evidence so no one got caught (turns out these types of shenanigans are NOT okay, and illegal).

We had racked up her phone bill into over-usage rates and I'm not sure if the carrier dropped the charges we had produced or whether her parents had to pay. I can't imagine that night's incoming text cost being below $200.

But now I believe most teenage girls in the US have unlimited texting.