Wow. Someone mod this up. I didn't get this from the summary or the article but this is dead on and kindof scary. It would be fairly simple to find 3 transactions for a real life person and then be able to cross reference it especially if you could do it over several months. Ypu could possibly even trick someone in doing a couple purchases and then just wait for the data.
The article says it can identify someone in as few as 3 transactions. But they aren't really identifying them, they are just showing that no other person hit the same exact set of shops. Well, they also mention that they get a datestamp with the transaction so assuming that datestamp has minutes or seconds then it should only take 1 transaction or 2 at the most. That being said, you really haven't identified this person as you don't know who they are in the real world just that they have a unique shopping pattern as everyone does.
You don't work in the ATM industry, do you? Retrofitting machines is a HUGE logistical and financial undertaking. Why this is scored 5 interesting is beyond me.
I was suggesting a simple solution that doesn't require a huge expensive retrofit. I almost included in my post that my solution also wasn't considering politics or red tape in my suggestion. A double sided tape solution would probably be rejected by a huge committee of bureaucrats but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't work.
No that anyone here is designing or implementing an ATM security system, but something that could/would harm an intruder would probably count as a booby trap, and those are illegal. Nothing worse than having to fork over money to the guy who tried to steal your money.
The key points there are "concealed" and "designed to harm". There are plenty of places that have electric fences and razor wires protecting their properties. As long as it's properly labeled it's perfectly legal.
There are a load of solutions that will work with new ATMs, a number of them already mentioned. What is needed is a cheap retro-fit, without modifying the strong box. Many banks don't upgrade this expensive component for years. I think the most promising ideas are ones that ink the money - but they have to get well in to the whole stack. A thin red edge that could be trimmed won't be good enough.
Retrofitting machines to ink the money shouldn't be an issue at all. It would be simple to make small fragile glass packs of various sizes filled with ink. Then you should be able to apply them with double sided tape anywhere and everywhere inside the machine there is a void. If you wanted to go one step further you could fill some of the glass packs with different chemicals that when combined produced combustion and incinerated the bills further. That should be enough to retrofit existing machines assuming they have any amount of voids. This would also prevent stealing the ATM machine as the glass packs would break if someone tried to yank the atm with a chain, etc...
Probably the most important part though is putting a sticker on the front that says that you use ink packs so that people know or assume that even if they are crazy enough to try to blow up an atm that they probably won't get anything.
You guess? Well lets just throw out the Iron Clad Law of Supply & Demand, on which almost all of the worlds productive economy is based, because you guess.
I agree completely with the rest of your post. My "guess" is not about how supply/demand works. My "guess" was that occasional short-term higher pay for drivers won't increase the supply much. From what I've heard alot of uber drivers are either people who do it as a job or people who pick up someone when they are going that way anyways. At only 3 times normal pay and only a temporary price hike, you aren't going to see a huge number of people who aren't already set up to do it jump in and start being an uber driver. You might get a few and longterm if prices stayed high then yes, people would enter the market but in most areas especially labor the supply side is much less elastic than the demand side so a price hike shortterm usually decreases demand much more quickly than it increases supply. In some areas you can even see prices stay high for long periods of time when the cost to increase production is expensive and noone is willing to invest because they are scared the demand will drop before their investment pays off.
They could still pay the drivers more, without charging the passengers more, if they actually want people to believe they are only trying to help.
Why is this rated 5? Yes, paying drivers more *might* slightly increase supply but my guess is that the number of drivers is somewhat fixed so without also charging passengers more you do nothing on the demand side. The point of demand pricing is to reduce demand so that you don't overwhelm the relatively fixed supply. If your goal is to always have cars available, then increasing the price while paying the drivers the same would actually be a better solution than increasing the pay while charging the same but that would also be idiotic. There are only two scenerios where increasing driver pay while keeping price the same makes sense. 1) If the supply drops because the regular drivers don't want to go out in the cold, etc.. and can be enticed by more pay. 2) There is a HUGE capacity of dormant drivers and Increasing the pay can cause alot of people who usually don't drive to decide to drive.
But my guess is that most of the time the reason the price goes up is because the demand is up. If the demand is up then paying more on the supply side without also increasing prices on the demand side does absolutely nothing besides making uber go broke.
I call BS on this one. I'm on an 10+M connection, and movies are unwatchable. Then again, it has nothing to do with my connection, but the source.
youtube at 240p works fine at 768/128 for me as does amazon prime. I don't have netflix but I remember it working fine too. I can't watch HD and 320p requires me to buffer it first but is doable. Hulu also works fine but amusingly enough I can't see any commercials as the commercials are hardcoded at 320p or possibly something higher so it just jumps all around for me. Luckily it still only lasts the same length of time so I only ever see half the commercials. So yes, video is completely doable at 1M or slightly less if you go with the lower resolutions.
I hit the upload limit pretty frequently too, but the average user doesn't upload much. Your ISP offers the average user better service by favoring download bandwidth based on usage statistics.
We're back to the chicken/egg problem. Your average user doesn't upload much because they have a crappy upload and it's even sometimes actively discouraged. If the average user had a 25/25 connection then you would see alot more services catering to things like online storage of photos, online backups, or even storing your entire desktop environment online aka thin clients.
If I could mod you up, I would. You hit it dead on. The only counterargument I see to this though is that you still have the chicken/egg problem if 25/3 is available and most people aren't willing to pay extra for it because they just don't need it.
On, a bit of a side note, as you mentioned yourself, the upload speed still sucks. Why 25/3? That's actually a worse ratio that the current 4/1. If we really want new and interesting cloud services then upload and download should be matched. Given the choice, I would take 10/10 or even 10/5 over 25/3. 10/10 would allow much more interactive cloud services than 25/3 does.
Actually, An even better solution is make it a pipe and give them 10M, 20M, etc... and don't let them hide a crappy upload speed in the fine print. If they say it's 4M, it should be 4M whether that's 100% upload or 100% download. My 100M ethernet doesn't have a different speed for a different direction and neither should my internet.
This change should either make your 'net cheaper, or increase your speeds. Either way, you win.
I disagree. The cable company where I lived started offering a 256/64 package a few years back for $20 a month (basically the same price as dialup at the time) in order to get people to switch to cable instead of dialup. They quickly ended this because it was costing them more than it was making them as people were downgrading to it or choosing that over the other more expensive broadband connections. Upgrading to 25/4 when most people don't currently need it is going to cost alot of money and only a few people are going to be willing to pay the premium for it so in order to cover that cost they will need to increase the cost on the low end. I'm on a 1M connection and can surf the web, watch movies, etc.. with no issue.
The FCC would be much better off leaving the broadband definition alone and instead try to figure out how to get at least 3-4 independent providers in every area so there is real competition.
If you want our internet to remain third world, by all means, stand against the FCC in attempting to revise their definition of broadband.
Competition and/or expanding access would go alot further to bettering the internet than increasing the broadband definition.
Dialup or using a cellular hotspot with speeds less than 1M is painful. 4M not so much for everyday use. I'm a programmer and work remotely via vpn, ssh, plus browse the web, watch amazon prime, etc... on a 1M connection and I have no problems with it. I do wish my upload speeds were faster. The fastest upload speed I can get is 768k so I guess by the FCC's definition I'm not on broadband. Even this is not a huge problem. The only reason I wish I could do faster uploads is so that I can do online backups but that's probably a niche market.
Even if 25/3 was available where I live, I probably wouldn't pay for it. I just don't need that much and can't justify the extra cost right now.
Everyone with the normal human number of digits, I would think.
I've always just used my pointer and middle finger with my middle finger operating the right button and my left finger operating both the left button and the scroll wheel. It's feels very awkward for me to either operate the scroll with my middle finger or to operate the right button with my ring finger.
Seems like it makes more sense to build the computer into the display or into something the size of a small portable hard disk drive, so that it can have USB ports or bluetooth for the keyboard and mouse, and could literally hang on the HDMI port on the TV like the "Amazon Fire TV Stick" works.
Inside the TV is not very portable. I don't like smart tvs either because they are a one size fit all, you're stuck with a single app. Inside a usb/hdmi stick though makes a lot more sense. I could see you going to a friends house and just plugging your computer into their TV. Going one step further, a "smart tv" that would be useful would be a tv that when multiple dongles were plugged in, they would allow you to either toggle between them or even let you splitscreen the two mini-computers.
This is another indication of how far out of whack our priorities are as a country. You make money based on how much money you make for someone else, or how hard your position is to fill. But we won't spend money just because something is important; like teachers or quality infrastructure or mitigating climate change or whatever.
The linked article talks about how hard it is to get good teachers for computing because anyone who's any good at it can make a lot more money elsewhere. Is anyone proposing paying a computing teacher $90,000 a year, or whatever is competitive, to compensate for that?
I had an excellent electronics teacher in HS who mentioned once that he took a 50% paycut when he switched from industry to teaching so I agree with you completely but what system would you propose? Should we rank occupations and pay them what we value them? This might be possible in a controlled economy but I'm not sure how you would do it in a free market. Do people who are more skilled at that occupation get paid more? Even unions have a hard time with this, do you pay based on skill level or senority or something else?
Everyone seems to want to pay teachers less because they get summers off. Nobody wants to pay them more because for the vital function they serve in our society. Like I said, priorities out of whack.
Besides the other benefits of year round school, this might be an added benefit to help eliminate this excuse but it's not the complete fix for it as police officers, etc.. are also underpaid and don't have that excuse.
Daycares have a similiar problem. In order to make day care affordable, they cannot afford to pay the staff hardly anything because it soon becomes cost prohibitive. Where I live, daycare workers make about $8 per hour but it still costs $4 per hour to put your kid in daycare so if you have only 2 kids you need to make over $8 per hour to even pay for the cost of the daycare.
The only semi-reasonable solution I can think of to the education problem would be conscription or some sort of co-op system where everyone reaching the age of 40(or even 65) is required to teach a number of years. This would get the experienced people you want and you could even make it a condition to receive social security like mandatory registration is for college aid. The biggest problem I see with this (besides the fact that conscription isn't ideal) is that you are getting experienced teachers who are experienced in their field but not necessarily experienced at teaching.
Even this solution though only solves a fraction of the problem and doesn't do anything about the football player making millions while the other presumably more important occupations like research or people making the world a better place make a fraction of that amount.
Free software and free hosting has to make money some way. Even the more legitimate ones tend to bundle stuff like adobe acrobat, google chrome, google toolbar, or some other random search engine toolbar that presumably gives them a kickback. As long as people keep demanding free apps and free software then you will continue to see sneeky ways to monitize their software. That being said, some of the worst offenders I've seen are PAID software like norton and mcafee.
Actually, one should write a worm that exploits vulnerabilities that Google won't patch which launches a DoS attack on Google servers. That might convince Google to pay more attention to standard product support issues...
It's not just google. Even if google release the patch, the handset manufacturers don't have to make it available to their customers (the carriers). And even if google and the handset manufacturers release the patch, the carriers don't have to make it available to their customers. The final customers don't seem to care so there is no incentive for anyone else up or down the chain to care. Also, noone in the chain has any power to make the other people move. Android is mostly open source so google can't require the people downstream to release the patch. Likewise, the handset carriers have too many competitors to force the carriers to update their phones, etc, etc... Until there is some incentive for someone in the chain to act, it will probably remain this way.
In the trucking industry not only are faxes still relatively common but fax "mailing lists" are still common where people sign up to receive daily faxes from other companies. Recent regulations have made signing up harder as they have to get written permission to add you to their lists but this hasn't stopped people from using these lists.
Even more mind boggling is that we have people that have requested that we send them a blank template via fax every day so that they can fill it out and fax it back.
I've been wondering when people would start to take notice of this problem with Android.
930 million phones might be enough. Now we just need someone to write a worm that uses this to get noticed by taking down the cellular network for a few days and then maybe someone will get smart enough to require phone manufacturers to push updates for a reasonable amount of time (say 5 years after they stop selling the phone). I've seen phones stop receiving updates before their 2 year contract is even up. This should be breach of contract.
Also, the police don't go out on 24/7 shifts. They go out on 8 hour shifts.
Probably not even that. Just like other occupations, they take breaks. Even if the battery only lasted 2 hours, a simple beep that tells them to return to their car and swap to a new battery would be sufficient.
The gopro advertises 2.5 hours with their regular battery and 5 hours with their extended battery: http://gopro.com/support/artic... So using the extended battery and swapping out the battery halfway thru your shift would be sufficient even if they went with the gopro but surely they could get one optimized to have a longer battery life as there is no reason a police body cam needs the same quality as a gopro. Basically, the battery life is a non-issue.
NES was huge in the USA. Everyone I knew owned a NES which came with mario and duck hunt. Some of the games I remember were metal gear, double dragon, zelda, ninja turtles, tetris, and mario 1, 2, and 3. c64 never really caught on with the non-geek crowd where I lived, they went straight from the atari to the NES to the IBM PC. At home everyone had a NES and all the schools had some variation of the apple II. NES and the super nes remained popular until ibm overtook the apple II at school which happened about the same time that wolfenstein, doom, and the internet came out. We started getting ibms and internet connectivity at school in the mid to late 90s.
You know , you could always try being more careful and not treating the phone like a piece of junk. I've got a perfectly working phone from 2009 which I use every day.
It's not about being careful, it's about how much use it gets. My tablet stays safely in a drawer when not in use and is used maybe an hour or two a day while my phone is used several hours a day and even when not in use is still being carried around almost 24/7. When my phone does break, it's not from abuse but rather from either constant use (i.e. one of the buttons stops working) or from accidently slipping out of my hand when I try to answer it and hitting the concrete. Tablets don't get used as much nor are carried around as much as cell phones.
Disruptive technology always starts out inferior if measured using traditional metrics in that area. Why would someone want an oily, messy car that breaks down when you can have a carriage pulled by a nice, reliable horse? The driverless car will probably first hit early adopters and niches. One niche I expect to see it first is the RV market. Even if it could only drive interstates, that would be a major selling point for an RV. Once all the kinks are worked out and it takes off, it's too late for established players to play catch up at that point and anyone who was waiting on the sidelines is going to be left in the dust.
Why? What is wrong with a 4 year old smartphone that still works?
Nothing is wrong with a 4 year old smartphone but my smartphone takes alot more daily abuse than my computer or tablet so it usually doesn't last as long as my other devices. I probably average 2 years with a smartphone. Some last over 4 years but most tend to meet an untimely demise before then. I'm past the point where I replace them to keep up but rather replace them only when they die.
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Wow. Someone mod this up. I didn't get this from the summary or the article but this is dead on
and kindof scary. It would be fairly simple to find 3 transactions for a real life person and then be
able to cross reference it especially if you could do it over several months. Ypu could possibly
even trick someone in doing a couple purchases and then just wait for the data.
The article says it can identify someone in as few as 3 transactions.
But they aren't really identifying them, they are just showing that no other person hit the same exact set of shops.
Well, they also mention that they get a datestamp with the transaction so assuming that datestamp has minutes
or seconds then it should only take 1 transaction or 2 at the most. That being said, you really haven't identified
this person as you don't know who they are in the real world just that they have a unique shopping pattern as
everyone does.
You don't work in the ATM industry, do you? Retrofitting machines is a HUGE logistical and financial undertaking. Why this is scored 5 interesting is beyond me.
I was suggesting a simple solution that doesn't require a huge expensive retrofit.
I almost included in my post that my solution also wasn't considering politics or red tape
in my suggestion. A double sided tape solution would probably be rejected by a huge
committee of bureaucrats but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't work.
No that anyone here is designing or implementing an ATM security system, but something that could/would harm an intruder would probably count as a booby trap, and those are illegal. Nothing worse than having to fork over money to the guy who tried to steal your money.
The key points there are "concealed" and "designed to harm". There are plenty of places that
have electric fences and razor wires protecting their properties. As long as it's properly labeled it's
perfectly legal.
There are a load of solutions that will work with new ATMs, a number of them already mentioned. What is needed is a cheap retro-fit, without modifying the strong box. Many banks don't upgrade this expensive component for years. I think the most promising ideas are ones that ink the money - but they have to get well in to the whole stack. A thin red edge that could be trimmed won't be good enough.
Retrofitting machines to ink the money shouldn't be an issue at all. It would be simple to make small fragile glass packs of various
sizes filled with ink. Then you should be able to apply them with double sided tape anywhere and everywhere inside the machine
there is a void. If you wanted to go one step further you could fill some of the glass packs with different chemicals that when
combined produced combustion and incinerated the bills further. That should be enough to retrofit existing machines assuming
they have any amount of voids. This would also prevent stealing the ATM machine as the glass packs would break if someone
tried to yank the atm with a chain, etc...
Probably the most important part though is putting a sticker on the front that says that you use ink packs so that people know
or assume that even if they are crazy enough to try to blow up an atm that they probably won't get anything.
You guess? Well lets just throw out the Iron Clad Law of Supply & Demand, on which almost all of the worlds productive economy is based, because you guess.
I agree completely with the rest of your post. My "guess" is not about how supply/demand works.
My "guess" was that occasional short-term higher pay for drivers won't increase the supply much.
From what I've heard alot of uber drivers are either people who do it as a job or people who pick up
someone when they are going that way anyways. At only 3 times normal pay and only a temporary
price hike, you aren't going to see a huge number of people who aren't already set up to do it jump
in and start being an uber driver. You might get a few and longterm if prices stayed high then yes,
people would enter the market but in most areas especially labor the supply side is much less
elastic than the demand side so a price hike shortterm usually decreases demand much more
quickly than it increases supply. In some areas you can even see prices stay high for long
periods of time when the cost to increase production is expensive and noone is willing to invest
because they are scared the demand will drop before their investment pays off.
They could still pay the drivers more, without charging the passengers more, if they actually want people to believe they are only trying to help.
Why is this rated 5? Yes, paying drivers more *might* slightly increase supply but my guess is that the number of drivers is somewhat
fixed so without also charging passengers more you do nothing on the demand side. The point of demand pricing is to reduce demand
so that you don't overwhelm the relatively fixed supply. If your goal is to always have cars available, then increasing the price while
paying the drivers the same would actually be a better solution than increasing the pay while charging the same but that would also be
idiotic.
There are only two scenerios where increasing driver pay while keeping price the same makes sense.
1) If the supply drops because the regular drivers don't want to go out in the cold, etc.. and can be enticed by more pay.
2) There is a HUGE capacity of dormant drivers and Increasing the pay can cause alot of people who usually don't drive to decide to drive.
But my guess is that most of the time the reason the price goes up is because the demand is up. If the demand is
up then paying more on the supply side without also increasing prices on the demand side does absolutely nothing
besides making uber go broke.
I call BS on this one. I'm on an 10+M connection, and movies are unwatchable. Then again, it has nothing to do with my connection, but the source.
youtube at 240p works fine at 768/128 for me as does amazon prime. I don't have netflix but I
remember it working fine too. I can't watch HD and 320p requires me to buffer it first but is doable.
Hulu also works fine but amusingly enough I can't see any commercials as the commercials are
hardcoded at 320p or possibly something higher so it just jumps all around for me. Luckily it still only
lasts the same length of time so I only ever see half the commercials. So yes, video is completely
doable at 1M or slightly less if you go with the lower resolutions.
I hit the upload limit pretty frequently too, but the average user doesn't upload much. Your ISP offers the average user better service by favoring download bandwidth based on usage statistics.
We're back to the chicken/egg problem. Your average user doesn't upload much because they
have a crappy upload and it's even sometimes actively discouraged.
If the average user had a 25/25 connection then you would see alot more services catering to
things like online storage of photos, online backups, or even storing your entire desktop environment
online aka thin clients.
If I could mod you up, I would. You hit it dead on. The only counterargument I see to this though is that you still have the
chicken/egg problem if 25/3 is available and most people aren't willing to pay extra for it because they just don't need it.
On, a bit of a side note, as you mentioned yourself, the upload speed still sucks. Why 25/3? That's actually a worse
ratio that the current 4/1. If we really want new and interesting cloud services then upload and download should be matched.
Given the choice, I would take 10/10 or even 10/5 over 25/3. 10/10 would allow much more interactive cloud services than
25/3 does.
Actually, An even better solution is make it a pipe and give them 10M, 20M, etc... and don't let them hide a crappy upload
speed in the fine print. If they say it's 4M, it should be 4M whether that's 100% upload or 100% download. My 100M
ethernet doesn't have a different speed for a different direction and neither should my internet.
This change should either make your 'net cheaper, or increase your speeds. Either way, you win.
I disagree. The cable company where I lived started offering a 256/64 package a few years back for $20 a month (basically
the same price as dialup at the time) in order to get people to switch to cable instead of dialup. They quickly ended this
because it was costing them more than it was making them as people were downgrading to it or choosing that over the other
more expensive broadband connections. Upgrading to 25/4 when most people don't currently need it is going to cost alot of
money and only a few people are going to be willing to pay the premium for it so in order to cover that cost they will need to
increase the cost on the low end. I'm on a 1M connection and can surf the web, watch movies, etc.. with no issue.
The FCC would be much better off leaving the broadband definition alone and instead try to figure out how to get at least
3-4 independent providers in every area so there is real competition.
If you want our internet to remain third world, by all means, stand against the FCC in attempting to revise their definition of broadband.
Competition and/or expanding access would go alot further to bettering the internet than increasing the broadband definition.
Dialup or using a cellular hotspot with speeds less than 1M is painful. 4M not so much for everyday use. I'm a programmer and
work remotely via vpn, ssh, plus browse the web, watch amazon prime, etc... on a 1M connection and I have no problems with it.
I do wish my upload speeds were faster. The fastest upload speed I can get is 768k so I guess by the FCC's definition I'm not
on broadband. Even this is not a huge problem. The only reason I wish I could do faster uploads is so that I can do online backups
but that's probably a niche market.
Even if 25/3 was available where I live, I probably wouldn't pay for it. I just don't need that much and can't justify the extra cost right now.
Who puts three fingers on the surface of a mouse?
Everyone with the normal human number of digits, I would think.
I've always just used my pointer and middle finger with my middle finger operating the right button and my left finger operating both
the left button and the scroll wheel. It's feels very awkward for me to either operate the scroll with my middle finger or to operate
the right button with my ring finger.
Seems like it makes more sense to build the computer into the display or into something the size of a small portable hard disk drive, so that it can have USB ports or bluetooth for the keyboard and mouse, and could literally hang on the HDMI port on the TV like the "Amazon Fire TV Stick" works.
Inside the TV is not very portable. I don't like smart tvs either because they are a one size fit all, you're stuck with a single app.
Inside a usb/hdmi stick though makes a lot more sense. I could see you going to a friends house and just plugging your computer into their TV.
Going one step further, a "smart tv" that would be useful would be a tv that when multiple dongles were plugged in, they would allow you to
either toggle between them or even let you splitscreen the two mini-computers.
My monitor is attached to this arm
Slightly off-topic but how sturdy is that arm? Could I attach a keyboard to it? Would it be stable enough to type on without jumping all around?
This is another indication of how far out of whack our priorities are as a country. You make money based on how much money you make for someone else, or how hard your position is to fill. But we won't spend money just because something is important; like teachers or quality infrastructure or mitigating climate change or whatever.
The linked article talks about how hard it is to get good teachers for computing because anyone who's any good at it can make a lot more money elsewhere. Is anyone proposing paying a computing teacher $90,000 a year, or whatever is competitive, to compensate for that?
I had an excellent electronics teacher in HS who mentioned once that he took a 50% paycut when he switched from industry to teaching so I agree
with you completely but what system would you propose? Should we rank occupations and pay them what we value them? This might be possible
in a controlled economy but I'm not sure how you would do it in a free market. Do people who are more skilled at that occupation get paid more?
Even unions have a hard time with this, do you pay based on skill level or senority or something else?
Everyone seems to want to pay teachers less because they get summers off. Nobody wants to pay them more because for the vital function they serve in our society. Like I said, priorities out of whack.
Besides the other benefits of year round school, this might be an added benefit to help eliminate this excuse but it's not the complete fix for it as
police officers, etc.. are also underpaid and don't have that excuse.
Daycares have a similiar problem. In order to make day care affordable, they cannot afford to pay the staff hardly anything because it soon becomes
cost prohibitive. Where I live, daycare workers make about $8 per hour but it still costs $4 per hour to put your kid in daycare so if you have only 2 kids
you need to make over $8 per hour to even pay for the cost of the daycare.
The only semi-reasonable solution I can think of to the education problem would be conscription or some sort of co-op system where everyone reaching
the age of 40(or even 65) is required to teach a number of years. This would get the experienced people you want and you could even make it a condition
to receive social security like mandatory registration is for college aid. The biggest problem I see with this (besides the fact that conscription isn't ideal) is
that you are getting experienced teachers who are experienced in their field but not necessarily experienced at teaching.
Even this solution though only solves a fraction of the problem and doesn't do anything about the football player making millions while the other presumably
more important occupations like research or people making the world a better place make a fraction of that amount.
Free software and free hosting has to make money some way. Even the more legitimate ones tend to bundle stuff like
adobe acrobat, google chrome, google toolbar, or some other random search engine toolbar that presumably gives them
a kickback. As long as people keep demanding free apps and free software then you will continue to see sneeky ways
to monitize their software. That being said, some of the worst offenders I've seen are PAID software like norton and
mcafee.
Actually, one should write a worm that exploits vulnerabilities that Google won't patch which launches a DoS attack on Google servers. That might convince Google to pay more attention to standard product support issues...
It's not just google. Even if google release the patch, the handset manufacturers don't have to make it available to their customers (the carriers).
And even if google and the handset manufacturers release the patch, the carriers don't have to make it available to their customers.
The final customers don't seem to care so there is no incentive for anyone else up or down the chain to care. Also, noone in the chain has
any power to make the other people move. Android is mostly open source so google can't require the people downstream to release the patch.
Likewise, the handset carriers have too many competitors to force the carriers to update their phones, etc, etc... Until there is some incentive
for someone in the chain to act, it will probably remain this way.
In the trucking industry not only are faxes still relatively common but fax "mailing lists" are still common where people
sign up to receive daily faxes from other companies. Recent regulations have made signing up harder as they have
to get written permission to add you to their lists but this hasn't stopped people from using these lists.
Even more mind boggling is that we have people that have requested that we send them a blank template via fax
every day so that they can fill it out and fax it back.
I've been wondering when people would start to take notice of this problem with Android.
930 million phones might be enough. Now we just need someone to write a worm that uses this to get noticed by taking
down the cellular network for a few days and then maybe someone will get smart enough to require phone manufacturers
to push updates for a reasonable amount of time (say 5 years after they stop selling the phone).
I've seen phones stop receiving updates before their 2 year contract is even up. This should be breach of contract.
Also, the police don't go out on 24/7 shifts. They go out on 8 hour shifts.
Probably not even that. Just like other occupations, they take breaks. Even if the battery only lasted 2 hours,
a simple beep that tells them to return to their car and swap to a new battery would be sufficient.
The gopro advertises 2.5 hours with their regular battery and 5 hours with their extended battery: http://gopro.com/support/artic...
So using the extended battery and swapping out the battery halfway thru your shift would be sufficient even if they went with the gopro
but surely they could get one optimized to have a longer battery life as there is no reason a police body cam needs the same quality
as a gopro. Basically, the battery life is a non-issue.
NES was huge in the USA. Everyone I knew owned a NES which came with mario and duck hunt. Some of the games
I remember were metal gear, double dragon, zelda, ninja turtles, tetris, and mario 1, 2, and 3.
c64 never really caught on with the non-geek crowd where I lived, they went straight from the atari to the NES to the IBM PC.
At home everyone had a NES and all the schools had some variation of the apple II. NES and the super nes remained
popular until ibm overtook the apple II at school which happened about the same time that wolfenstein, doom, and the
internet came out. We started getting ibms and internet connectivity at school in the mid to late 90s.
You know , you could always try being more careful and not treating the phone like a piece of junk. I've got a perfectly working phone from 2009 which I use every day.
It's not about being careful, it's about how much use it gets. My tablet stays safely in a drawer when not in use and is used maybe an hour or two a day
while my phone is used several hours a day and even when not in use is still being carried around almost 24/7. When my phone does break, it's not
from abuse but rather from either constant use (i.e. one of the buttons stops working) or from accidently slipping out of my hand when I try to answer it
and hitting the concrete. Tablets don't get used as much nor are carried around as much as cell phones.
Disruptive technology always starts out inferior if measured using traditional metrics in that area.
Why would someone want an oily, messy car that breaks down when you can have a carriage pulled
by a nice, reliable horse? The driverless car will probably first hit early adopters and niches.
One niche I expect to see it first is the RV market. Even if it could only drive interstates, that would
be a major selling point for an RV. Once all the kinks are worked out and it takes off, it's too late
for established players to play catch up at that point and anyone who was waiting on the sidelines is
going to be left in the dust.
Why? What is wrong with a 4 year old smartphone that still works?
Nothing is wrong with a 4 year old smartphone but my smartphone takes alot more daily abuse than my computer or tablet so
it usually doesn't last as long as my other devices. I probably average 2 years with a smartphone. Some last over 4 years
but most tend to meet an untimely demise before then. I'm past the point where I replace them to keep up but rather replace
them only when they die.