Back when the term hackers started to be misused by the press,
as in scary teenage vandals breaking into computers,
my usual comment was that teenage computer hackers were really
no different from the teenage car hackers of our parents' generations.
They did a lot of tinkering with machinery and hanging out with friends,
some of them mostly obsessed about making their cars look really cool,
some of them were trying to make Grandma's old junker into basic
transportation,
and some of them were drag-racing across your lawn with no mufflers.
It was an obsession that was more introverted and individual than sports,
some kids later turned it from a hobby into a paying job,
and while it was a bit less intellectual than computing,
it was also more real, and unlike computing, it was also a tool for
getting girls...
At 08:27 PM 02/19/2003 -0500, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
Hackers don't work on their own brakes for a reason: evolution.
Nah - hackers don't work on brakes because they're _avoiding_ evolution :-)
If I were planning to contribute directly to the future's gene pool,
I've got better criteria to do natural selection on than
skill at mechanical repair, and there are much more efficient ways to
transmit those skills than killing off people who don't have them.
It's also evolution of cars and financial states.
Back when cars had actual user-serviceable parts, I'd work on carburetors
and distributors and spark plugs and pollution-control widgets,
but except for my first auto mechanics class, I didn't mess with brakes -
if I mess up an engine, my car might not go anywhere, but that's
usually fail-safe, while making mistakes on brakes is fail-dangerous.
(Also, my next car had disk brakes, and I only knew how to do drum brakes.)
I changed a couple of sets of valve cover gaskets myself,
but when I was in grad school and the car I had then needed it,
the local garage would do the job for $15, which was worth paying for,
in part because there was a lot more pollution control equipment than
on the earlier car, and a lot more hoses and vacuum lines to move around
to get to the engine which would all need reconnecting later.
After several years of newer cars with electronic ignitions,
I acquired my first van, which was old enough to have a distributor,
but it was a Chevy so you adjusted it with dwell stuff instead of
feeler gauges, which was too much bother. And these days you're supposed
to recycle your oil instead of using it to patch the cracks in driveways,
so that's another job to pay somebody else to do.
My Cruiser was recalled last year - the main thing they had to do
was upgrade the firmware, so now it accelerates a bit better...
