I don't have the idea that this phone is so small that there is no space left to add a micro USB as well, if they so insist on adding their own connector (for which there may be valid reasons, of course).
Well if you throw that baby hard enough you may very well injure someone (other than the baby) or, thrown hard enough, actually kill them. But then you have to throw really hard as babies tend to be a bit rubber-like. Not exactly hard or so. Or of course you could hold the baby at its feet and swing it around like a club, definitely hurts when you hit someone with it like that.
So, yeah, sure, babies are potentially dangerous weapons, and should be forbidden from boarding a plane.
Darn, I was with you all the way until we got to your last assumption:
Someone somewhere must have gotten some intel about this vector.
Intel? At the TSA? Not going to happen (aka "Beam me up Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here").
This "someone somewhere" is not necessarily within the TSA. Correct me if I'm wrong but my impression is that the TSA is the agency that's basically doing the security guard work, not an agency that's doing actual intelligence gathering related to potential threats.
Just wondering. Not that I can vote in your country or so, but I hear a lot about it in the news and so about your upcoming presidential elections. This Mitt Romney, hasn't he promised to create something like 12 million jobs or so? I don't recall the exact number but it was pretty much the same as the number of registered unemployed in the US. Quite impressive a promise. I always wondered how he's going to create those jobs. Just nicely asking companies to hire more people usually doesn't work very well.
Now what is his stand on the TSA? Being a republican candidate I'd guess he's all for expanding the TSA in his to-be-smaller government. Could be a way to fulfil that promise.
If you are going to check something at a checkpoint then it makes sense to stochastically sample with secondary checks to test your error rate.
This may be true in general, but not for this situation. Checking your error rate with such random checks works only if the number of items making it through is big enough. If nothing comes through, or what makes it through is only a very small percentage of the total, you have a big chance to miss that one offending item when you do your random checking.
Here we're talking about chances literally in the order of one in a billion, if not one in ten billion. The chance that someone brings a bottle of explosive liquids to an airport checkpoint is simply that small - actually afaik no-one ever really tried to bring explosive liquids through an airport checkpoint.
So the chance that someone will bring such an item to your airport is extremely small. So basically on normal days, as in well any day actually, there is nothing to detect. Your "non-toxic test liquid" may as well be plain water as the test is going to be negative anyway. It's total and utter nonsense. Testing liquids people have bought in the restricted area, and that they are drinking at the same time, makes even less sense. It's hard to imagine that an explosive liquid would make for a good drink.
Make this "black box" record the events but destroy the data after say 15-60 minutes unless an accident occurred (accident detection isn't that hard: hard breaking, impact, strange manoeuvring, etc), or unless the car comes to a stop. So the part of the ride before the accident is there. Such a simple measure would solve both the insurance ("what happened here?") and the privacy issues.
I agree with the use of having a log of what happened just before an accident, but there is no need to keep all the data of all your trips at all times just because an accident might happen. And most people luckily can drive for many years without being involved in an accident.
A six-year-old usually can not yet read and write. Or at least not at a high level.
My son, now six, is starting to learn reading/writing seriously now after learning the letters and some simple words over the past year (in kindergarten). Most countries start teaching reading/writing at 6 yo, some even later.
Now he can operate a computer in so far that if we present him with a folder with video files he looks at the icon and selects which one he wants to watch using the mouse. Opening the correct folder he can not do: he can't read the names of the folders.
That's also the reason he can not use a web browser: he can't read.
And he can't do programming: he can't write either.
To start teaching maths, you first have to teach the numbers, and how to write them. To teach almost anything else you first need to teach them reading and writing. That'd also definitely be a prerequisite for programming.
You may not read license plates, but you are identifying and remembering cars near you all the time.
... and you're forgetting them as soon as they are out of the "danger zone". You don't keep track of cars you encountered (unless it's something very special maybe).
The rule of thumb: if it can be done, it will be done. No matter whether it's illegal or not.
This collected data may leak in so many ways, ranging from malicious computer break-ins to corrupt employees selling it out to the company itself selling it out. The only way to truly prevent data being leaked, is to not have this data at all.
And that means collecting only the data you really need, storing it only for as long as you really need it to be stored, after which it is to be destroyed.
Think about it, would have it been better if gay activists in 60-s used privacy protection to shield their private lives instead of openly admitting their sexual orientation and fighting for their rights?
To this day I think most gays will hide their orientation to a certain extent. It's not common to see men walk hand in hand on the streets (for women it's far more common to hold hands - female friends often do so, no sexual/physical attraction needed).
And regarding activists, they can also use privacy protection to protect themselves while being activist for whatever cause. Speaking about being gay, promoting gay rights, joining gay-pride parades, etc. doesn't mean you have to give everyone your personal details such as telephone number and home address. There are activists that do their work largely anonymously, staunchly protecting their privacy for security reasons.
Driving with the flow of traffic is one thing, speeding is another. Just because someone else is speeding doesn't make it OK for you to speed as well. A cop may pull over just the first one, or a random in-between one, a speed camera will take photos of everyone and fines will be mailed to everyone.
And on the "too slow" driving: the only roads that I know with minimum speeds are motorways. Cyclists are not allowed there of course, nor are vehicles like mopeds, farm vehicles, and other motor vehicles that can't make the minimum speed. On any other road you're allowed to drive as slow as you want, even if it's as slow as a pedestrian. Common courtesy dictates you'd regularly pull over to let other traffic pass, but I have never heard of it being an offence.
Driving with the flow of traffic is also a courtesy rule: if you can, you should try to keep up with the rest of traffic. It can never justify speeding though.
For networking cars and collission avoidance, you don't need to know which individual car is where. Just like when you're driving now, you see "oh, there's a car", not "oh, there's car nr KW1234". Which car there is, doesn't matter. Just that there is a car.
Network communication can for sure also be set up in that manner. Using a random ID for each connection (of course you need something to identify a connection) should be good enough. No need to log which cars you encountered, it's not even needed to log that you encountered a car.
Ask a human driver about their trip, how many cars they enountered, and they don't know. No-one remembers, as it's totally unimportant. You often don't remember which traffic light was red, and which was green. Unless something out of the ordinary happens most people don't have any memory of a routine trip, other than that they did it.
When a person breathes out a gramme of CO2, they lost a gramme of body weight. It's nminerals.ot magically created; it has to be replenished. To increase overall biomass, you must have a source of CO2, water, and other elements (effectively the complete range of the periodic system, as almost every single element is used in your body and is needed for survival).
Eventuall there'd be enough N, P, K and micronutrients that recycling would be enough.
Only if 1) you have no waste at all, and 2) the amount of plant material taken out is less than what's going in.
Everything, including CO2 and water must be provided to the plants. That has to come from somewhere. On Mars there should be enough CO2 and maybe water, the moon is a much harder problem there.
And these micronutrients also have to come from somewhere. They don't magically appear. If you start growing a human population, you may start to recycle dead bodies for their nutrition, but more humans mean more nutrients taken out of your already tiny ecosystem. You will have to find some kind of a local source for those additional nutrients - probably minerals, which are usually not easy to digest by animals, let alone plants.
And then there is the issue of fertilisation that many plants need to grow fruits (or at least to grow seeds for a next generation). We normally will use insects for that. It can be done by hand, but it's not exactly efficient.
I know about hydroponic farming, and that's likely the way any extraterrestrial farming would go.
But the ones we have now are still in our ecosystem, not in an absolutely sterile environment like on the Moon. That may prove a key difference. These baths or glass fibre mats or whatever they use the roots are hanging in will contain lots of bacteria they picked up from the environment, totally naturally. What these bacteria do I don't know but good chance they do influence growth.
This urban legend well pre-dates the Internet (as in: the commonly available Internet for the masses, not the network as such). I know it since at least the early 90s. Possibly longer.
The moon and Mars have gravity - albeit less than Earth. No idea whether that's enough.
OTOH I wonder how well those plants do in absence of a complete ecosystem. Thinking of our own bodies, we have more foreign microbe cells in our gut than we have cells of our own. Without those bacteria we can't survive, we need them to digest our food. Healthy soil, the kind that provides nutrients to plants, is also teeming with microbial and insect life. I really wonder how well plants do without all those other life forms.
I don't know much about plants in that respect - are they really stand-alone organisms that don't need the help of any others?
And for that reason, I don't encrypt. I don't want to forget my password and have everything inaccessible.
For most of the rest of the world, the photos and so that I value so much, don't have much value, if any at all. I'm not even going to put it on ftp to let the world mirror it, because I don't think there are even enough people interested in mirroring those files to make that work.
Use the on-screen keyboard of course! All these letters and the hyphen are available on that as well. Just typing "butterfly" without errors in one go may be a little tricky...
In the scientific interest, I think it's good to have a second collider.
One key aspect of the scientific method is that experiments are repeatable, preferably on a different machine. This to make sure there are no systemic errors, where you think you see something but actually it's an artifact of your machine. That artifact shouldn't be there on a different machine. So having a second one can be very useful, if only to confirm results, which while not as sexy as making the discovery is also important.
On the other hand, competition is good, it's what drives people forward. It's what got people to the moon some decades ago.
Now the problem of these colliders is of course the huge cost of building, maintaining and operating them. As a European I think it's cool that the biggest one is now in Europe, though it'd be even cooler if the US would be building an even bigger one. Or have some matching ones. Even if their power is less, I can't imagine that everything below the power levels reached by the LHC has been researched already.
Comments here all of course look at big stuff, servers that handle huge amounts of storage, that serve dozens of VMs for remote users, run busy web sites.
Most servers are not like that. EMC may be an example of the high-end stuff but most servers in this world are low-end. They have to serve files and e-mail to maybe a dozen users, they have to store the media catalog of a four-person family, that kind of things. That's where ARM may be very useful.
Besides the obvious safety and technical issues of getting solar energy back from the moon: how're you going to GUARANTEE that these thorium-subscribers will get their share? Other than nice words and maybe some paper with something nice written on it, there is no such thing as a guarantee. There is nothing a small player can do to hold the big player that owns the infrastructure to their promises. Nothing.
And then I'm sure there will be ways to use thorium to make a bomb. That it's not done before, doesn't mean it's not possible. If only a dirty bomb spreading a significant amount of radioactive thorium over an area, killing all life in the area over time.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have the idea that this phone is so small that there is no space left to add a micro USB as well, if they so insist on adding their own connector (for which there may be valid reasons, of course).
Well if you throw that baby hard enough you may very well injure someone (other than the baby) or, thrown hard enough, actually kill them. But then you have to throw really hard as babies tend to be a bit rubber-like. Not exactly hard or so. Or of course you could hold the baby at its feet and swing it around like a club, definitely hurts when you hit someone with it like that.
So, yeah, sure, babies are potentially dangerous weapons, and should be forbidden from boarding a plane.
Darn, I was with you all the way until we got to your last assumption:
Someone somewhere must have gotten some intel about this vector.
Intel? At the TSA? Not going to happen (aka "Beam me up Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here").
This "someone somewhere" is not necessarily within the TSA. Correct me if I'm wrong but my impression is that the TSA is the agency that's basically doing the security guard work, not an agency that's doing actual intelligence gathering related to potential threats.
Just wondering. Not that I can vote in your country or so, but I hear a lot about it in the news and so about your upcoming presidential elections. This Mitt Romney, hasn't he promised to create something like 12 million jobs or so? I don't recall the exact number but it was pretty much the same as the number of registered unemployed in the US. Quite impressive a promise. I always wondered how he's going to create those jobs. Just nicely asking companies to hire more people usually doesn't work very well.
Now what is his stand on the TSA? Being a republican candidate I'd guess he's all for expanding the TSA in his to-be-smaller government. Could be a way to fulfil that promise.
If you are going to check something at a checkpoint then it makes sense to stochastically sample with secondary checks to test your error rate.
This may be true in general, but not for this situation. Checking your error rate with such random checks works only if the number of items making it through is big enough. If nothing comes through, or what makes it through is only a very small percentage of the total, you have a big chance to miss that one offending item when you do your random checking.
Here we're talking about chances literally in the order of one in a billion, if not one in ten billion. The chance that someone brings a bottle of explosive liquids to an airport checkpoint is simply that small - actually afaik no-one ever really tried to bring explosive liquids through an airport checkpoint.
So the chance that someone will bring such an item to your airport is extremely small. So basically on normal days, as in well any day actually, there is nothing to detect. Your "non-toxic test liquid" may as well be plain water as the test is going to be negative anyway. It's total and utter nonsense. Testing liquids people have bought in the restricted area, and that they are drinking at the same time, makes even less sense. It's hard to imagine that an explosive liquid would make for a good drink.
Make this "black box" record the events but destroy the data after say 15-60 minutes unless an accident occurred (accident detection isn't that hard: hard breaking, impact, strange manoeuvring, etc), or unless the car comes to a stop. So the part of the ride before the accident is there. Such a simple measure would solve both the insurance ("what happened here?") and the privacy issues.
I agree with the use of having a log of what happened just before an accident, but there is no need to keep all the data of all your trips at all times just because an accident might happen. And most people luckily can drive for many years without being involved in an accident.
A six-year-old usually can not yet read and write. Or at least not at a high level.
My son, now six, is starting to learn reading/writing seriously now after learning the letters and some simple words over the past year (in kindergarten). Most countries start teaching reading/writing at 6 yo, some even later.
Now he can operate a computer in so far that if we present him with a folder with video files he looks at the icon and selects which one he wants to watch using the mouse. Opening the correct folder he can not do: he can't read the names of the folders.
That's also the reason he can not use a web browser: he can't read.
And he can't do programming: he can't write either.
To start teaching maths, you first have to teach the numbers, and how to write them. To teach almost anything else you first need to teach them reading and writing. That'd also definitely be a prerequisite for programming.
You may not read license plates, but you are identifying and remembering cars near you all the time.
... and you're forgetting them as soon as they are out of the "danger zone". You don't keep track of cars you encountered (unless it's something very special maybe).
The rule of thumb: if it can be done, it will be done. No matter whether it's illegal or not.
This collected data may leak in so many ways, ranging from malicious computer break-ins to corrupt employees selling it out to the company itself selling it out. The only way to truly prevent data being leaked, is to not have this data at all.
And that means collecting only the data you really need, storing it only for as long as you really need it to be stored, after which it is to be destroyed.
Think about it, would have it been better if gay activists in 60-s used privacy protection to shield their private lives instead of openly admitting their sexual orientation and fighting for their rights?
To this day I think most gays will hide their orientation to a certain extent. It's not common to see men walk hand in hand on the streets (for women it's far more common to hold hands - female friends often do so, no sexual/physical attraction needed).
And regarding activists, they can also use privacy protection to protect themselves while being activist for whatever cause. Speaking about being gay, promoting gay rights, joining gay-pride parades, etc. doesn't mean you have to give everyone your personal details such as telephone number and home address. There are activists that do their work largely anonymously, staunchly protecting their privacy for security reasons.
Driving with the flow of traffic is one thing, speeding is another. Just because someone else is speeding doesn't make it OK for you to speed as well. A cop may pull over just the first one, or a random in-between one, a speed camera will take photos of everyone and fines will be mailed to everyone.
And on the "too slow" driving: the only roads that I know with minimum speeds are motorways. Cyclists are not allowed there of course, nor are vehicles like mopeds, farm vehicles, and other motor vehicles that can't make the minimum speed. On any other road you're allowed to drive as slow as you want, even if it's as slow as a pedestrian. Common courtesy dictates you'd regularly pull over to let other traffic pass, but I have never heard of it being an offence.
Driving with the flow of traffic is also a courtesy rule: if you can, you should try to keep up with the rest of traffic. It can never justify speeding though.
For networking cars and collission avoidance, you don't need to know which individual car is where. Just like when you're driving now, you see "oh, there's a car", not "oh, there's car nr KW1234". Which car there is, doesn't matter. Just that there is a car.
Network communication can for sure also be set up in that manner. Using a random ID for each connection (of course you need something to identify a connection) should be good enough. No need to log which cars you encountered, it's not even needed to log that you encountered a car.
Ask a human driver about their trip, how many cars they enountered, and they don't know. No-one remembers, as it's totally unimportant. You often don't remember which traffic light was red, and which was green. Unless something out of the ordinary happens most people don't have any memory of a routine trip, other than that they did it.
When a person breathes out a gramme of CO2, they lost a gramme of body weight. It's nminerals.ot magically created; it has to be replenished. To increase overall biomass, you must have a source of CO2, water, and other elements (effectively the complete range of the periodic system, as almost every single element is used in your body and is needed for survival).
Any time the police have a large haul they will issue a press release bragging about it. There appears no such thing from the FBI in this case.
"Location-Based iAds"
It is these little things that makes one recognise a true fanboi :-)
Eventuall there'd be enough N, P, K and micronutrients that recycling would be enough.
Only if 1) you have no waste at all, and 2) the amount of plant material taken out is less than what's going in.
Everything, including CO2 and water must be provided to the plants. That has to come from somewhere. On Mars there should be enough CO2 and maybe water, the moon is a much harder problem there.
And these micronutrients also have to come from somewhere. They don't magically appear. If you start growing a human population, you may start to recycle dead bodies for their nutrition, but more humans mean more nutrients taken out of your already tiny ecosystem. You will have to find some kind of a local source for those additional nutrients - probably minerals, which are usually not easy to digest by animals, let alone plants.
And then there is the issue of fertilisation that many plants need to grow fruits (or at least to grow seeds for a next generation). We normally will use insects for that. It can be done by hand, but it's not exactly efficient.
I know about hydroponic farming, and that's likely the way any extraterrestrial farming would go.
But the ones we have now are still in our ecosystem, not in an absolutely sterile environment like on the Moon. That may prove a key difference. These baths or glass fibre mats or whatever they use the roots are hanging in will contain lots of bacteria they picked up from the environment, totally naturally. What these bacteria do I don't know but good chance they do influence growth.
This urban legend well pre-dates the Internet (as in: the commonly available Internet for the masses, not the network as such). I know it since at least the early 90s. Possibly longer.
The moon and Mars have gravity - albeit less than Earth. No idea whether that's enough.
OTOH I wonder how well those plants do in absence of a complete ecosystem. Thinking of our own bodies, we have more foreign microbe cells in our gut than we have cells of our own. Without those bacteria we can't survive, we need them to digest our food. Healthy soil, the kind that provides nutrients to plants, is also teeming with microbial and insect life. I really wonder how well plants do without all those other life forms.
I don't know much about plants in that respect - are they really stand-alone organisms that don't need the help of any others?
Well, of course. As much as many people would love to, shutting down the government is not a practical option.
My data is really valuable. To me.
And for that reason, I don't encrypt. I don't want to forget my password and have everything inaccessible.
For most of the rest of the world, the photos and so that I value so much, don't have much value, if any at all. I'm not even going to put it on ftp to let the world mirror it, because I don't think there are even enough people interested in mirroring those files to make that work.
Use the on-screen keyboard of course! All these letters and the hyphen are available on that as well. Just typing "butterfly" without errors in one go may be a little tricky...
In the scientific interest, I think it's good to have a second collider.
One key aspect of the scientific method is that experiments are repeatable, preferably on a different machine. This to make sure there are no systemic errors, where you think you see something but actually it's an artifact of your machine. That artifact shouldn't be there on a different machine. So having a second one can be very useful, if only to confirm results, which while not as sexy as making the discovery is also important.
On the other hand, competition is good, it's what drives people forward. It's what got people to the moon some decades ago.
Now the problem of these colliders is of course the huge cost of building, maintaining and operating them. As a European I think it's cool that the biggest one is now in Europe, though it'd be even cooler if the US would be building an even bigger one. Or have some matching ones. Even if their power is less, I can't imagine that everything below the power levels reached by the LHC has been researched already.
Comments here all of course look at big stuff, servers that handle huge amounts of storage, that serve dozens of VMs for remote users, run busy web sites.
Most servers are not like that. EMC may be an example of the high-end stuff but most servers in this world are low-end. They have to serve files and e-mail to maybe a dozen users, they have to store the media catalog of a four-person family, that kind of things. That's where ARM may be very useful.
Besides the obvious safety and technical issues of getting solar energy back from the moon: how're you going to GUARANTEE that these thorium-subscribers will get their share? Other than nice words and maybe some paper with something nice written on it, there is no such thing as a guarantee. There is nothing a small player can do to hold the big player that owns the infrastructure to their promises. Nothing.
And then I'm sure there will be ways to use thorium to make a bomb. That it's not done before, doesn't mean it's not possible. If only a dirty bomb spreading a significant amount of radioactive thorium over an area, killing all life in the area over time.