Ever since microchips were invented they've been worming their way into everything- toasters, washing machines, cookstoves, timepieces, agricultural machinery, factory machines, you name it, it's controlled by microchips. Cars and trucks have dozens of them controlling different subsystems. My old '95 diesel pickup is powered by a programmable engine that is used for all kinds of different jobs, such as ambulances, heavy hauling, and plain old pickup-trucking. These engines leave the factory programmed to specific performance standards. You can buy devices to re-program your engine on the fly, such as for maximum fuel economy or more power. Very handy when you're driving a  6500-pound behemoth with no load, or pulling a trailer full of big animals over mountain passes.

Something else that hasn't changed is vendor's annoying, no, make that pathological mania for secrecy. Another gadget you can get is one to read and decipher the trouble codes emitted by your vehicle's engine. There is just a tiny bit of built-in data storage in your vehicle, so if you don't capture the information quickly it's lost, which makes diagnosing a transient problem ever so much fun. Auto manufacturers hate these code-readers and try to keep their codes as Big Important Sekkrits. Which is another question I often ponder- when did manufacturers and retailers decide they had the right to control what we do with our own possessions? Fortunately, in the automotive world someone always blabs the Sekkrit Codes and posts them on the Internet.

I will now meander back to my main point, which is twofold: the struggles for freedom and common sense are inextricably linked and never-ending, and embedded Linux programming is where the action is.

"Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" is available free online, http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596002879/