Windows mobile was maybe the worst platform there was in the mobile field.
For this reason, Microsoft and Nokia would be wise to drop the Windows name. When people hear Windows, they think back to their experiences with a virus-ridden Windows PC and run the other direction. And the folks who have used Windows-based phones over the years have even more reason to run away at maximum speed.
A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but if you call the rose "cow dung", you're not going to see very many people sniff it.
Scenario 3 (interceptor): U.S. missile shield: Who are you? And what do you want? U.S. missile shield missile: I'm a U.S. missile shield missile on my way to destroy the Soviet missile that is about to wipe out New Jersey. But I'm afraid my key got corrup... U.S. missile shield: **BAM**
Even a corporate death penalty—an easier way to dissolve a corporation for committing crimes—would be a great win. Here's why: corporations are ultimately beholden to stockholders. If the government dissolves a corporation and seizes its assets, the stockholders are screwed. And unlike the greedy corporate CEOs who can't see anything farther out than short-term profits, most of the largest stockholders—mutual funds and the like—are looking to hold, not for a few weeks or months, but for years, ideally.
This means that a credible threat of dissolving a business for its crimes would result in those mutual funds becoming very, very careful about who they invest in, and exercising pressure on those companies through their bloc voting to put directors and CEOs in place who actually think long-term.
Given that nearly everybody misunderstood your sentence, I think it is you who needs to understand what a comma does not do.
Don't buy anything that requires a non-standard (sic) data cable, such as micro USB (sic).
"such as micro USB (sic)" modifies "cable" here, which means that the only correct way to interpret this sentence results in the inevitable conclusion that you consider micro-USB to be nonstandard. I think you meant:
Don't buy anything that requires a data cable that is not based on a well-defined standard, such as micro-USB.
Now, "such as micro-USB" modifies "standard", which means that you consider micro-USB to be a well-defined standard. Alternatively, I would accept:
Always buy products with standard data cables, such as micro-USB.
or
Never buy products with nonstandard data cables; demand micro-USB.
Given the time period (1980s), I'm guessing the GP was talking about the early Macintosh, not the Apple II series. Many of the classic Macs could only be opened up with a super-long-stemmed torx wrench and a special case cracker tool, and once you got inside, there was still no way to expand their RAM without a soldering iron (if at all).
Sorry, submitted that before I was quite finished. The point of that explanation was that as long as you are booted from that flash card, you should be able to mount the uRamdisk to modify the files in/etc without rooting the device itself.
I'm not sure which Android devices can boot off a flash card, but any that do should be modifiable without the need to root the device.
Not necessarily. I rooted a Nook Simple Touch a while back, but before I rooted it, I booted from an easily downloadable older version of the rooting tool that, rather than doing the rooting itself, instead presents the entire built-in flash via USB as a mountable, multi-partition volume so that you could manually root it. By combining that tool with 'dd', I was able to make a virginal copy of the device.
Thanks to statewide franchise laws, they have a right to run the cables through your property, and if you dig them up maliciously, they will sue you for the repair bill, and they will win.
Ah, but you're still missing my point. Even a standard paperback book hitting you binding-edge-first would cause about the same level of injury as an eBook reader. And the probability is not that different, either, given the surface area of those edges proportional to the book's total surface area. The safety difference is, at best, minute.
If you take away the issue of electronic interference, there really is no other justification that holds up under careful scrutiny.
You don't need pounds and pounds of shielding. A little metal foil cage over one or both sides of the high-gain amplifier stages should be sufficient at the relatively low frequencies we're talking about. So no, the extra fraction of an ounce of weight needed to protect a critical flight system isn't an issue at all in an aircraft.
Besides, even without consumer electronics, reasonable levels of shielding would still be needed to prevent one part of the plane's electronics from interfering with another part of its electronics anyway. It isn't as though they can just run miles of unshielded cables throughout the aircraft or build their circuits without any shielding, even if the body of the aircraft does act as a Faraday cage with respect to outside interference at low enough frequencies.
You're pulling your punches. Apple has a little over a hundred bucks per share in cash position, and made about $20 per share in Q4 2011. So the GP is suggesting that Apple's value should be based on their current cash position plus one quarter worth of sales, which means after you take out the cash, the company would have an effective P/E ratio of 0.25.... That's so far removed from proper investing advice that it's absurd. Such a low P/E ratio would make sense only for a company on the verge of bankruptcy.
I'm sitting here holding a Nook Simple Touch in one hand and an average-sized paperback book in the other (typing with my feet:-p ). The Nook weighs slightly less than the paperback book (7.6 ounces versus 8.5 ounces). It weighs significantly less than a hardcover book of comparable length (1 pound, 9.5 ounces).
I suppose you could make the argument that it would hurt more than the paperback book because if it hits edge-first, it would spread that weight over a smaller area, but even that argument falls apart when you compare it with a hardcover book.
Banning laptops, sure. Banning full-color tablets, maybe. Banning eBook readers? Unless there's a testable, verifiable interference issue, that's just backwards.
Given that even the most RFI-noisy cell phones (GSM) only affect unshielded high-gain power amplifiers within a radius of about five or six feet in open air, even after factoring in constructive interference from signals bouncing off the metal skin, a cell phone causing "static" that interferes with an ATC call would still have to be in the cockpit or the forward galley. And if those amplifiers are unshielded, the designers should be shot.
Radio communication with ATC is an analog band just above FM radio, and involves shielded cables running from a shielded radio to one or more antennas located outside the body of the aircraft (which is a Faraday cage at those frequencies unless one of the doors is open, and probably even then).
Based on that, I'd rate the odds of a cell phone call interfering with an ATC call just south of the odds of getting hit by a meteor while dancing the Macarena. Actually, scratch that. It's more like the odds of dancing the Macarena creating a statistically significant increase in your risk of getting hit by a meteor.
The problem with using incident reports as a means of determining whether something is safe or not is that correlation is not causation. The fact that the autopilot came back online after four people shut off their laptops does not mean that those laptops caused the failure. It means that the autopilot came back on after those laptops were disabled. In much the same way, it rained in the SF Bay Area after I used the bathroom this morning, so obviously my toilet causes rain.... It's a lot more likely that the autopilot kicked out due to a transient problem in some sensor, a frozen pitot tube that thawed out, a power surge that caused a self-resetting circuit interruptor to temporarily shut off power to a critical piece of equipment, or some other temporary problem that went away on its own.
However, it is human nature to look for and see patterns even when they don't exist. Thus, after years of being told that electronics can cause planes to misbehave, people immediately assume that somebody's MP3 player is at fault whenever something unexplainable happens on an aircraft. The flight crew tells people to shut down their electronics. After a while, things start working again, so the flight crew then assumes that those electronics caused the problem when the evidence supporting that conclusion is flimsy at best and nonexistent at worst. That doesn't prevent it from being reported as an incident, though.
If you really want useful data, the flight crew needs to tell those passengers to turn that equipment back on and see if the problem recurs. If it does, then it probably contributed to the problem. If it does not, it probably did not. The problem is that nobody wants to do this because they're too afraid that turning it back on might bring the plane down. And this is why incident reports are nearly useless as a means of determining safety.
Remember, when you give all your personal information to a company, the damage they can inflict goes far beyond the amount of money you are paying them. For example:
They could file a false claim about the client with a credit reporting agency.
They have the client's credit card number, which they could bill for an extra thousand bucks.
They have the client's email address, which they could sell to spammers.
They have lots of information about the client that they could sell to an identity thief or leak through inadequate server security.
They could post the client's rental history on Facebook so that everyone at the client's church knows about his or her bondage and animal porn fetish.
And so on. Mandatory binding arbitration is unconscionable except when it is agreed upon mutually as part of a contract between peers (that is, not between a large company and an individual). Whenever one party holds significantly more power than the other party, the lesser party cannot be adequately protected against fraud by mandatory binding arbitration, period. The fact that it is a contract of adhesion merely means that the lesser party had no real choice in the matter (other than not obtaining the service), which is further grounds for dismissing the contractual clause above and beyond its fundamental unfairness. In the absence of a contract of adhesion, the lesser party would have to make a strong case that he or she did not understand that clause, which is a somewhat weaker argument and more difficult to make.
Cool. I wasn't aware that anyone had actually done it. It's the obvious solution to the problem, though, which means they probably have a bunch of patents on it....
You are correct. What the GP was thinking of is called "mediation". Binding arbitration means that you agree to abide by the decision.
Worse, binding arbitration means that you lose the right to sue over afterwards. Once arbitration begins, your right to sue is gone. This is why binding arbitration should be limited to minor disputes over small sums of money. If that's not what you're dealing with, you are always better off getting a lawyer and going to court, challenging the binding arbitration clause as unconscionable.
At least in the state of California, mandatory binding arbitration clauses in contracts of adhesion (e.g. the Netflix contract) are almost always found to be unconscionable. Unfortunately, the recent Supreme Court decision undid all this, reversing some thirty years of fairly consistent case law in the name of federal preemption. At this point, the only way to get back our right to sue is to demand that Congress pass laws fixing this heinous abuse of justice.
Mandatory binding arbitration clauses in contracts of adhesion are way beyond unconscionable. They are a fundamental abrogation of the legal principles upon which this country was founded. The justices who made this decision should be ashamed of themselves for putting the profits of big corporations above the public's right to not get screwed by them.
Guessing the amount of volume compensation based on the vehicle's speed is an epic fail if I ever saw one. At highway speeds, there's at least a 6 dB difference (and probably more like 10–12 dB) between the loudest roads I drive on and the quietest roads. At 0 MPH, there is a 0 dB difference (or nearly so). That huge scaling discrepancy from one road to the next would make any speed-based scheme very nearly (if not completely) useless.
There is exactly one way to accurately determine the ambient noise level for compensation purposes: combine a microphone outside the vehicle with a carefully crafted attenuation profile that describes how well the vehicle blocks noise at various frequencies.
Well, I suppose you could have a microphone inside the car and use a reverb model of the car to cancel out the desired sound from each of the car's speakers, but that requires a fair bit more DSP and provides no real benefit over an external mic with an equalizer....:-)
And if you don't keep it above the noise floor, it gets lost in the noise. The fact that your car is compensating too much doesn't invalidate the concept. It just means that your car's particular implementation is dumb as a brick.
The degree of compensation required likely depends in part on the individual listener's preferences and in part on the type of content. Speech requires more compensation than music, quiet sounds more than loud sounds, etc. To do it right, you need to experiment with lots of different types of content at lots of different listening levels with lots of different participants, model their actions (turning it up, down, etc.), and then replicate it, interpolating between the various levels. Then repeat the process several more times until you converge upon a handful of loudness curves tuned to certain types of people. Then add the learning algorithm into the car and make it learn your preferences to pick which curve to use as a baseline and then further refine it.
In other words, it's not n dB above the noise floor, but f(n,c) dB above the noise floor where n is the noise floor, c is likely to be some simple scaling value chosen based on an analysis of the content's sonic profile, and f probably involves looking up the two values in a large table, coupled with some sort of feedback loop that updates the table or the list of scaling factors based on how the user reacts to the adjustment.
This. Which is why all the car manufacturers should be beaten upside the head with clue bats until every new car built comes with a proper sound system that compensates for volume changes relative to the vehicle's current noise floor. It isn't particularly hard to do....
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For this reason, Microsoft and Nokia would be wise to drop the Windows name. When people hear Windows, they think back to their experiences with a virus-ridden Windows PC and run the other direction. And the folks who have used Windows-based phones over the years have even more reason to run away at maximum speed.
A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but if you call the rose "cow dung", you're not going to see very many people sniff it.
FTFY.
Even a corporate death penalty—an easier way to dissolve a corporation for committing crimes—would be a great win. Here's why: corporations are ultimately beholden to stockholders. If the government dissolves a corporation and seizes its assets, the stockholders are screwed. And unlike the greedy corporate CEOs who can't see anything farther out than short-term profits, most of the largest stockholders—mutual funds and the like—are looking to hold, not for a few weeks or months, but for years, ideally.
This means that a credible threat of dissolving a business for its crimes would result in those mutual funds becoming very, very careful about who they invest in, and exercising pressure on those companies through their bloc voting to put directors and CEOs in place who actually think long-term.
Belgium...
And everyone was so offended that they forgot about the lawsuit entirely.
Given that nearly everybody misunderstood your sentence, I think it is you who needs to understand what a comma does not do.
"such as micro USB (sic)" modifies "cable" here, which means that the only correct way to interpret this sentence results in the inevitable conclusion that you consider micro-USB to be nonstandard. I think you meant:
Now, "such as micro-USB" modifies "standard", which means that you consider micro-USB to be a well-defined standard. Alternatively, I would accept:
or
HTH.
Given the time period (1980s), I'm guessing the GP was talking about the early Macintosh, not the Apple II series. Many of the classic Macs could only be opened up with a super-long-stemmed torx wrench and a special case cracker tool, and once you got inside, there was still no way to expand their RAM without a soldering iron (if at all).
Can I get an amen?
Never mind. Slashdot doesn't support UTF-8. We'll have to settle for A-U+2642.
Sorry, submitted that before I was quite finished. The point of that explanation was that as long as you are booted from that flash card, you should be able to mount the uRamdisk to modify the files in /etc without rooting the device itself.
I'm not sure which Android devices can boot off a flash card, but any that do should be modifiable without the need to root the device.
Not necessarily. I rooted a Nook Simple Touch a while back, but before I rooted it, I booted from an easily downloadable older version of the rooting tool that, rather than doing the rooting itself, instead presents the entire built-in flash via USB as a mountable, multi-partition volume so that you could manually root it. By combining that tool with 'dd', I was able to make a virginal copy of the device.
Thanks to statewide franchise laws, they have a right to run the cables through your property, and if you dig them up maliciously, they will sue you for the repair bill, and they will win.
As long as you're within range of DSL, Covad/Megapath/Speakeasy have been pretty good as far as I can tell. Then again, you pay for it.
Ah, but you're still missing my point. Even a standard paperback book hitting you binding-edge-first would cause about the same level of injury as an eBook reader. And the probability is not that different, either, given the surface area of those edges proportional to the book's total surface area. The safety difference is, at best, minute.
If you take away the issue of electronic interference, there really is no other justification that holds up under careful scrutiny.
You don't need pounds and pounds of shielding. A little metal foil cage over one or both sides of the high-gain amplifier stages should be sufficient at the relatively low frequencies we're talking about. So no, the extra fraction of an ounce of weight needed to protect a critical flight system isn't an issue at all in an aircraft.
Besides, even without consumer electronics, reasonable levels of shielding would still be needed to prevent one part of the plane's electronics from interfering with another part of its electronics anyway. It isn't as though they can just run miles of unshielded cables throughout the aircraft or build their circuits without any shielding, even if the body of the aircraft does act as a Faraday cage with respect to outside interference at low enough frequencies.
You're pulling your punches. Apple has a little over a hundred bucks per share in cash position, and made about $20 per share in Q4 2011. So the GP is suggesting that Apple's value should be based on their current cash position plus one quarter worth of sales, which means after you take out the cash, the company would have an effective P/E ratio of 0.25.... That's so far removed from proper investing advice that it's absurd. Such a low P/E ratio would make sense only for a company on the verge of bankruptcy.
I'm sitting here holding a Nook Simple Touch in one hand and an average-sized paperback book in the other (typing with my feet :-p ). The Nook weighs slightly less than the paperback book (7.6 ounces versus 8.5 ounces). It weighs significantly less than a hardcover book of comparable length (1 pound, 9.5 ounces).
I suppose you could make the argument that it would hurt more than the paperback book because if it hits edge-first, it would spread that weight over a smaller area, but even that argument falls apart when you compare it with a hardcover book.
Banning laptops, sure. Banning full-color tablets, maybe. Banning eBook readers? Unless there's a testable, verifiable interference issue, that's just backwards.
Given that even the most RFI-noisy cell phones (GSM) only affect unshielded high-gain power amplifiers within a radius of about five or six feet in open air, even after factoring in constructive interference from signals bouncing off the metal skin, a cell phone causing "static" that interferes with an ATC call would still have to be in the cockpit or the forward galley. And if those amplifiers are unshielded, the designers should be shot.
Radio communication with ATC is an analog band just above FM radio, and involves shielded cables running from a shielded radio to one or more antennas located outside the body of the aircraft (which is a Faraday cage at those frequencies unless one of the doors is open, and probably even then).
Based on that, I'd rate the odds of a cell phone call interfering with an ATC call just south of the odds of getting hit by a meteor while dancing the Macarena. Actually, scratch that. It's more like the odds of dancing the Macarena creating a statistically significant increase in your risk of getting hit by a meteor.
The problem with using incident reports as a means of determining whether something is safe or not is that correlation is not causation. The fact that the autopilot came back online after four people shut off their laptops does not mean that those laptops caused the failure. It means that the autopilot came back on after those laptops were disabled. In much the same way, it rained in the SF Bay Area after I used the bathroom this morning, so obviously my toilet causes rain.... It's a lot more likely that the autopilot kicked out due to a transient problem in some sensor, a frozen pitot tube that thawed out, a power surge that caused a self-resetting circuit interruptor to temporarily shut off power to a critical piece of equipment, or some other temporary problem that went away on its own.
However, it is human nature to look for and see patterns even when they don't exist. Thus, after years of being told that electronics can cause planes to misbehave, people immediately assume that somebody's MP3 player is at fault whenever something unexplainable happens on an aircraft. The flight crew tells people to shut down their electronics. After a while, things start working again, so the flight crew then assumes that those electronics caused the problem when the evidence supporting that conclusion is flimsy at best and nonexistent at worst. That doesn't prevent it from being reported as an incident, though.
If you really want useful data, the flight crew needs to tell those passengers to turn that equipment back on and see if the problem recurs. If it does, then it probably contributed to the problem. If it does not, it probably did not. The problem is that nobody wants to do this because they're too afraid that turning it back on might bring the plane down. And this is why incident reports are nearly useless as a means of determining safety.
Even that would be much more easily done with microphones located outside the car.
Remember, when you give all your personal information to a company, the damage they can inflict goes far beyond the amount of money you are paying them. For example:
And so on. Mandatory binding arbitration is unconscionable except when it is agreed upon mutually as part of a contract between peers (that is, not between a large company and an individual). Whenever one party holds significantly more power than the other party, the lesser party cannot be adequately protected against fraud by mandatory binding arbitration, period. The fact that it is a contract of adhesion merely means that the lesser party had no real choice in the matter (other than not obtaining the service), which is further grounds for dismissing the contractual clause above and beyond its fundamental unfairness. In the absence of a contract of adhesion, the lesser party would have to make a strong case that he or she did not understand that clause, which is a somewhat weaker argument and more difficult to make.
Cool. I wasn't aware that anyone had actually done it. It's the obvious solution to the problem, though, which means they probably have a bunch of patents on it....
Which was covered in my post, but as I said, it is a heck of a lot harder to do correctly.
You are correct. What the GP was thinking of is called "mediation". Binding arbitration means that you agree to abide by the decision.
Worse, binding arbitration means that you lose the right to sue over afterwards. Once arbitration begins, your right to sue is gone. This is why binding arbitration should be limited to minor disputes over small sums of money. If that's not what you're dealing with, you are always better off getting a lawyer and going to court, challenging the binding arbitration clause as unconscionable.
At least in the state of California, mandatory binding arbitration clauses in contracts of adhesion (e.g. the Netflix contract) are almost always found to be unconscionable. Unfortunately, the recent Supreme Court decision undid all this, reversing some thirty years of fairly consistent case law in the name of federal preemption. At this point, the only way to get back our right to sue is to demand that Congress pass laws fixing this heinous abuse of justice.
Mandatory binding arbitration clauses in contracts of adhesion are way beyond unconscionable. They are a fundamental abrogation of the legal principles upon which this country was founded. The justices who made this decision should be ashamed of themselves for putting the profits of big corporations above the public's right to not get screwed by them.
Guessing the amount of volume compensation based on the vehicle's speed is an epic fail if I ever saw one. At highway speeds, there's at least a 6 dB difference (and probably more like 10–12 dB) between the loudest roads I drive on and the quietest roads. At 0 MPH, there is a 0 dB difference (or nearly so). That huge scaling discrepancy from one road to the next would make any speed-based scheme very nearly (if not completely) useless.
There is exactly one way to accurately determine the ambient noise level for compensation purposes: combine a microphone outside the vehicle with a carefully crafted attenuation profile that describes how well the vehicle blocks noise at various frequencies.
Well, I suppose you could have a microphone inside the car and use a reverb model of the car to cancel out the desired sound from each of the car's speakers, but that requires a fair bit more DSP and provides no real benefit over an external mic with an equalizer.... :-)
And if you don't keep it above the noise floor, it gets lost in the noise. The fact that your car is compensating too much doesn't invalidate the concept. It just means that your car's particular implementation is dumb as a brick.
The degree of compensation required likely depends in part on the individual listener's preferences and in part on the type of content. Speech requires more compensation than music, quiet sounds more than loud sounds, etc. To do it right, you need to experiment with lots of different types of content at lots of different listening levels with lots of different participants, model their actions (turning it up, down, etc.), and then replicate it, interpolating between the various levels. Then repeat the process several more times until you converge upon a handful of loudness curves tuned to certain types of people. Then add the learning algorithm into the car and make it learn your preferences to pick which curve to use as a baseline and then further refine it.
In other words, it's not n dB above the noise floor, but f(n,c) dB above the noise floor where n is the noise floor, c is likely to be some simple scaling value chosen based on an analysis of the content's sonic profile, and f probably involves looking up the two values in a large table, coupled with some sort of feedback loop that updates the table or the list of scaling factors based on how the user reacts to the adjustment.
This. Which is why all the car manufacturers should be beaten upside the head with clue bats until every new car built comes with a proper sound system that compensates for volume changes relative to the vehicle's current noise floor. It isn't particularly hard to do....