We driving off the fiscal cliff and now Obama’s primary concern is the details of the crash. CNS: “Bypassing Congress, the Obama administration has issued a proposed administrative rule, which if adopted, would mandate the installation of “black boxes” in all automobiles and light trucks beginning in 2014. … The proposed standard would require automakers to install event data recorders (EDRs) – so-called “black box devices” — to collect specific safety related data in all light passenger vehicles beginning Sept. 1, 2014.”
The tracking ability of these vehicles has been available for a long time, most people are not aware. Obama is not a leader of the people, why does this surprise anyone? My interest is in the technological aspects.
Think of these devices as those used in planes. Flight records must reveal all aspects prior to an incident involving a crash, there must be ample memory to track back from that point. Voice recorders for the pilot also must reveal aspects prior to the problem but not the entire flight. Due to limited memory, space is reused to always provide an approved number of minutes. Similar to inventory, it’s last in first out.
Older technology was limited in memory such that recycling was incessant. The problem being that eventually storage cells got tired and failed. It’s similar to what happened to those old cassettes and VCR tapes. There are simply a limited number of times on which these can be recorded.
Today’s technology is running away from the hard drive for increased efficiency and fattening the RAM. Coming out of the caveman Unix/Dos days, who could have dreamed of today’s RAM in our HD. Those were point to point processing days. In 2008 MAC was talking 16TB of RAM. Today 16GB is common and 1TB is available, compare prices!
The problem in the vehicles was limitation of storage. What happens in 2014 if big government eliminates that? In addition, not only is there no need to pull the flash drive, who has the control to pull it’s information? What about remote OS and software upgrades? Imagine what else this door opens.
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Related:
CNS: Obama Bypasses Congress to Mandate Black Boxes for All Cars — Beginning in ’14
ZDNET: The 16 TB RAM PC: when?
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December 17th, 2012 → 2:03 PM
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