Slashdot Mirror
Smartphones: Life's Remote Control
An anonymous reader writes "This year's Consumer Electronics Show has shown off more interconnected devices than I would know what to do with. Not only are existing devices I use getting modern, Internet-connected interfaces (cars, ovens, and security systems, for example), but companies are now putting out addons for smartphones that replace existing ones (blood pressure and glucose monitors, for instance. An article at the NY Times points out that the smartphone is quickly becoming life's remote control — a portal through with you'll soon be able to control far more of your electric devices than you might expect (or care to). 'For several years, technology companies have promised the dream of the connected home, the connected body and the connected car. Those connections have proved illusory. But in the last year app-powered accessories have provided the mechanism to actually make the connections. That is partly because smartphones have become the device people never put down. But it is also because wireless sensors have become smaller, cheaper and ubiquitous.'"
So MP3.com was driven into bankruptcy, and the "buy a CD, get an MP3" concept fell by the wayside.
He is best known for co-authoring the widely-used RSS 1.0 specification when he was 14, and as one of the early co-owners of Reddit.
After news broke on Thursday that a new Java 0-day vulnerability had been discovered, and was already being included in multiple popular exploit kits, two new important tidbits have come in on Friday.
Meanwhile, writes reader Beeftopia, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is getting in on the action, and "has warned users to disable or uninstall Java software on their computers, amid continuing fears and an escalation in warnings from security experts that hundreds of millions of business and consumer users are vulnerable to a serious flaw."
Hopper debuted at number five in the list of Top500 supercomputers, and can crunch numbers at the petaflop level.
But there is a market for Lamborghinis, and there is a market for computer cases that cost as much as a complete low-end computer.
Also this one:
When Android was first introduced, it got much of its buzz in the open source community, and despite it being a mobile juggernaut backed by huge companies, it remains an open source project that anyone can submit code to.
You could argue this is a series of three except that every single comma in that sentence is unnecessary
Just out of curiosity, if someone posted information here that facilitated an assassination or was a formula for how to kill lots of people quickly, would slashdot merely mod it to -1 and hope no one works that little slidey-bobber up top?
I was checking to see if a comment i was about to make was redundant, and slid the comment content filter control over to -1 to make sure no one had already written what I was about to post, and noticed that some tinfoilhat-wearer had posted a nonsensical, rambling rant about Obama. It was modded to -1, naturally.
My question however, is this: is there no provision for simply deleting such posts, rather than simply modding them to -1? Or perhaps removing them from slashdot and forwarding them along with the IP address, etc. of the poster to the FBI? I understand that some might object to such a practice as censorship, but I'm not talking about an opinion I disagree with, or a wildly unpopular or offensive one, I'm talking about some wacko who posts in a thread about Smartphones becoming the Remote Controls of Life, a long and rambling message about Obama and torture that doesn't have anything to do with the thread.
It's not even like it's conversational drift, where someone mentions that Obama has (or had) a Blackberry, and then someone else says "You know, Hitler had a Blackberry..." as a joke, then someone else ran with it...
No, this is just out of the blue... kinda like this:
Poster 1: Wow, I have noticed that about smartphoens! I can remote control call my friends! Or I dial a number, and say, "hey, I want a pizza," and BAM, 35 minutes later, PIZZA arrives at my door! It's effin magic!
Poster 2: I wish I could control my neighbor's dog with my smartphone, but it just says, "Error: device not hound!"
Poster 3: Yeah, I sawy that they have an app now that lets you unlock your car with the phone. That means if I lose my phone, I could lose my car too. Would particularly suck if my phone was stuck IN MY CAR!
Poster 4: Obama is a torturer torture torture NAZI obama torture...
etc.
It's weird, and the person who posted that (look at the -1 posts, and you'll see it...) is probably a deranged psychopath, whom the FBI should contact immediately if not sooner. Just sayin'.