Something like that has industrial embedded applications, but they need to get past "UL approval - pending" and a peak external operating temp of 104F. You don't want something that's marginal on temp specs in an application where it's controlling something. They talk about putting them side by side on an outlet strip, but that's going to make the cooling problem tougher. Fanless devices should not push the temperature ratings of the components. That never ends well.
Solidly reliable little compute bricks have their uses, but many of the low-end ones tend to be flaky. The industrial ones that really work are expensive, because they're produced in low quantity.
Looks like somebody got an exception put in for search engines:
(a) In General- Except as provided in subsection (b), no person shall be liable for a violation of the requirements of this Act... to the extent such person--
(1)...
(2) provides an information location tool, such as a directory, index, reference, pointer, menu, guide, user interface, or hypertext link, through which an end user obtains access to such video programming, online content, applications, services, advanced communications services, or equipment used to provide or access advanced communications services.
I run Facebook with almost everything turned off. And Flash with almost everything turned off. And Firefox with the privacy settings on high.
About half of sites with video won't play. Other sites produce errors because their Flash cookies won't work. YouTube's "Press ESC to exit full screen mode" message stays up forever. (I suspect YouTube does that just to keep people from running with high privacy settings.)
It's interesting to see who's evil, but somewhat annoying. Still, for every site that's blocked, there seems to be a competitor just as good.
Only if the company formally declares bankruptcy can they get out of their "lifetime warranty". See the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act for general information about warranties. "Lifetime Warranty" has specific legal meaning in the US.
Second, where is "BFG Technologies, Inc."? That information isn't on the web site. (This is why anonymous web sites are bad, and why our SiteTruth system gives them a low rating.) But it can be found. Dun and Bradstreet gives us the information that they are in Illinois, and Illinois corporate records gives us this:
BFG TECHNOLOGIES, INC. File Number 62377402
Status ACTIVE
Entity Type CORPORATION
Type of Corp DOMESTIC BCA
Incorporation Date (Domestic) 08/27/2002 State ILLINOIS
Agent Name: PHILLIP A HEWES, 550 WEST VAN BUREN ST STE 1450, CHICAGO IL 60607 (That's Fitzgerald & Hewes LLP, their lawyers.)
Secretary Name & Address: PHILIP HEWES, 441 S ASHLAND AVENUE, LAGRANGE 60525
Forbes has background info on John J. Vosicky. He was the chief financial officer before he was CEO. He was also previously CFO of Comdisco, which went into bankruptcy in 2001.
Golfers spend considerable money on things which are supposed to improve their game. It's usually mediocre players buying stuff that won't help them. There's a lot of that in running shoes, too. (Much to the annoyance of Nike, their sponsor, the Stanford University track team trains running barefoot.)
It's time to consign Star [Trek|Wars|Gate|Craft] to the bargain bin and move forward.
Not that what's in the pipeline looks good. Coming up, "Skyline" (yet another alien invasion), "Independence Day 2 and 3" (still more alien invasion), "Battle-Los Angeles (alien invasion, again) another Planet of the Apes movie (why?), and "Oblivion" (yet another post-apocalyptic movie)
"The Adjustment Bureau", another Philip K. Dick movie, has potential. "Iron Sky" (Nazis in Space!) could be the next Sky Captain.
Those are the high points.
"Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" is better than you might expect.
Phone voice quality is marginal for conference calls. Cell phone compression barely works at all if it has to handle two people talking at once.
Better video conferencing systems have higher-bandwidth audio; it's a small bandwidth cost compared to the video channel.
True, software patents are very bad for small innovators who want to create companies that they will make a living running.
Actually, over 60% of VC-funded software startups hold patents, and about 97% of biotech startups do. This number tends to be underestimated by studies that look only at patents assigned to the compan. But in many startups, the founders hold patents that are not assigned outright to the company, so they don't show as property of the company in a USPTO search.
It's a common observation that small companies hire more people than big ones. This is a myth. The small company jobs don't last as long. The numbers on people hired are easy to get, but the longitudinal studies which track workers over many years tell a different story. It's necessary to distinguish between career progress and churn.
Most startups fail. The median life of newly formed businesses in the US is about three years. (That's pre-recession.) Most venture-funded companies fail. (From talks I've been to by VCs, the most likely outcome is what VCs call a "zombie" - not successful enough to pay back its investors, but just barely able, after downsizing, to pay its current bills and keep operating. Many dot-coms ended up in zombie mode, limping along for years.)
There's a long-term effect that's even more troublesome. Knowledge, as an economic resource, may be mined out. The cost of obtaining new knowledge can exceed its commercial value. Big corporate R&D labs doing basic research, as GE, AT&T, Xerox, HP and IBM once did, are a thing of the past. That trend peaked in the 1950s and 1960s. Venture capital took up some of the slack, but even that is no longer working. Venture capital funds, as a class, have lost money each year since 2000. That's new; from 1970 to 2000, most VC firms were profitable.
It's about time the phone companies recognized that phone calls are just data passing through their networks.
Actually, no. Voice over IP over cellular data is an incredibly inefficient way to send voice. Worse, all the ad-related blithering in "free" applications uses more bandwidth than the call.
The best phone audio quality today is with an ISDN voice phone. End to end digital, end to end synchronized at the bit level, full duplex, no need for echo cancellation, no lag beyond speed of light lag. Many home phones in Switzerland have worked that way for a decade.
It's disappointing. We ought to have CD-quality telephony by now. But instead, audio quality has gotten worse. The phone network is 64Kb/s: 8KHz sampling of 8-bit samples. That's PC audio circa late 1980s. Cell phones don't even deliver that; they use very lossy compression.
Was there actually something like Google Maps and Google Earth before Google released those? Something that I'm not aware of?
Yes. Google obtained that technology by acquiring Keyhole in 2004. Google Earth is just Keyhole rebranded. Keyhole had the zoom-in from orbit, the ability to fly over terrain, and the smooth dynamic switching to higher resolution data, just like Google Earth has now. But it was a pay product, one that cost about $79 a year. There was an NVidia promotion; a free version that only worked with NVidia graphics cards. I had a Keyhole subscription in my DARPA Grand Challenge days.
Many years ago, I was at Ford Aerospace, where we had some slight involvement with the Ford EEC IV engine control module. The designers of that were paranoid about a failure of the module making the car immobile. So they did the following:
The device was designed for a 30 year life span. (Many 1980s Fords are still running with EEC IV modules, so they did it.)
The program for the device was etched into the silicon of the CPU. There is no way to change it without replacing the entire module.
Huge amounts of effort were put into getting this small program right, including some proof of correctness work. It was successful; there's never been a recall.
There is a removable module with a ROM that has engine parameters. (The format is known; people have made their own for racing purposes.) It's just tables, no code. It's a bulky metal-cased plug-in module, hard to damage.
The device starts from a clean ground state at power-up. There is no persistent state that can prevent startup.
There's a dumb backup mode in the program. If the complex engine control algorithm fails, it reverts to a simple backup mode. Performance isn't very good.
There's a second hardware backup mode in the ignition controller. This was referred to internally as "limp-home mode". If a timer in the ignition controller detects that the EEC isn't responding, it drops into a mode where the spark fires each time a pulse from the crankshaft position sensor comes in. In this mode, there's no spark advance, no smart fuel injection, no active emissions control, no engine/transmission coordination, and top speed is about 25MPH. You can still drive the car.
Designers today are not being sufficiently paranoid. They're assuming that the entire system stays up and that tow trucks are easily available.
Re:Yahoo! *didn't have* their own search-engine
on
What Went Wrong At Yahoo
·
· Score: 4, Informative
AltaVista wasn't even started as a business. It was a demo for DEC Alpha machines, one of the first big systems built from huge numbers of rackmount machines interconnected by local area networks. Before that, most big data centers were built around mainframes.
AltaVista was originally installed in an old Pacific Telephone building in Palo Alto, a few blocks from DEC's research center. Because the building was built for rows of racks and cable trays, their data center was set up like a phone central office, with aisles of open racks bolted to the floor and cable trays above. At the time (1995) the typical data center had cabinets sitting on raised floors. In many ways, AltaVista set the pattern for the next fifteen years of computing.
If you use a system that does mathematics, like MathCAD, you run into the ambiguities of the equal sign. There
are multiple meanings, and in most automated systems, there are separate symbols for them.
Assignment or evaluation. This is the meaning of "=" in C and the meaning of "=" on a simple calculator. Some programming languages use ":=" for this, to reduce ambiguity.
Evaluated comparison. "==" in C, "eq" in some programming languages.
Definition. "f(x,y) = x + y" In most programming languages, this has a unique syntax.
Identity. "x + y = y + x". This is often written as a triple bar symbol. Both sides are equal regardless of the values of the variables. The scope of variables in an identity is usually local to the identity.
Algebraic equivalence "y = m * x + b".
Then there's operator precedence and scope. In advanced mathematics, this can drive you nuts, as papers often introduce new notation without being clear on operator precedence. There's also the macho thing in mathematics of using as few parentheses as possible.
Variable scope issues in math are awful. I once encountered a symbol in a book on nonlinear differential equations which was defined in the previous volume of a two-volume set.
"Crowdsourcing" - right. You give out a file of all ticker transactions for the last year. Now what?
Anything useful in this area is going to be done by a small number of people crunching on the data. Individual items aren't significant; analysis is necessary.
The real issue here for the financial community is transparency of hedge funds. Hedge funds need to be registered with the SEC and regulated as mutual funds. It would also help if pension funds were not treated as "sophisticated investors" allowed to invest in hedge funds. That would quickly move the hedge fund industry into the regulated mutual fund category.
Crunching on publicly available data can be very effective, though. I called the dot-com crash that way, company by company, using a program which automatically ground through SEC filings and did a simple cash-flow calculation. ("Chart is not available for this symbol" means the company is long gone.)
I vaguely recall Arthur C. Clark writing something about Heywood Floyd reading a newspaper on an electronic tablet like device while en route to the moon in "2001: A Space Odyssey", which was published in 1968.
Yes. That's in the movie. For the 1960s movie, they had to build the tablet into the table and project film from underneath.
China has to do this. China's energy consumption has doubled in the last decade, and just passed that of the US. New capacity is being added very rapidly, but may not be able to keep up with demand. So they need to pull the plug on some of the energy hogs.
China has traditionally had a shortage economy. China no longer has famines, but they enforce a one-child policy to keep the population from growing further. The Chinese government estimates that it had three to four hundred million fewer people in 2008 with the one-child policy, than it would have had otherwise.
Between longer battery life and cellular data connections, I'm seeing less of this in Palo Alto. A few years ago, I did see places with people on laptops camped at every table. Neotte, a high-end tea shop on University Avenue, offered WiFi and power outlets at every table. Nobody talked; once in a while, someone would order tea from the striking young redhead behind the counter. Neotte went out of business after a year.
They were replaced by a coffee shop with fewer power outlets. Power outlets encouraged camping.
The portable gadget thing seems to have peaked. A few years back, I saw a teenage couple come into a coffee shop in a strip mall in Palo Alto (yes, Palo Alto has strip malls). Each took out and set up 1) a laptop, 2) a cell phone, 3) an iPod, 4) a graphing calculator, and 5) their homework. They went quietly to work, barely talking to each other. I haven't seen that in years now. Today, there's been enough mobile device integration that one or two devices is enough, and carrying around a backpack full of gadgets is no longer cool.
I've been to Coupa Coffee, the place mentioned in the article. This in a place with tiny round tables, no power outlets, heavy traffic, and a high noise level. The layout doesn't encourage camping. Their management doesn't really need to disable WiFi. They do have WiFi; I've been there with an overachieving friend who set up her laptop and iPhone. But that's unusual for the place.
A summary of the study is available, although painful to read in English.
It seems to beabout the risks of social networking: "Especially misjudgments of reach, sustainability and dynamics of social web offers may encourage dangerous usage. Many users, for example, imagine themselves in closed and private communities and do not give much thought to the audience or the long-term consequences of their action, which remains documented on the Internet."
There's a national cultural component to that. There have been discussions here on Slashdot about embarrassing postings affecting later job success. Then again, there's the other approach - admit everything and say "So?".
The article from Tired is bogus.
The "remote generation of terahertz radiation" is described in this paper. They generate terahertz radiation
at the target by hitting it with a big enough pulse to heat it up into a plasma. This is a classic spectroscopy
technique; hit something with a big laser pulse and look at the spectra coming back.
Nobody is going to look into pockets that way, unless they burn through first. It may be useful for analyzing toxic and hazardous
materials from a distance. A possible application is something that first responders point at a spill from a distance, and it comes
back with an analysis. Assuming the energy transfer can be made small enough so as not to ignite anything.
The store had neither a cashier nor a customer service employee at the front
Many years ago, I had a similar experience in a J.C. Penny store in New Jersey. I had just moved, and was buying an armload of bedding, curtains, and towels the middle of a weekday afternoon. So I had a stack of merchandise about three feet high. I couldn't find any store staff anywhere on the floor.
So I went to a checkout, picked up the phone behind the counter, and dialed 0. I told the store operator "I'd like to speak to the store manager. This is an unhappy customer." The store manager was put on, and I told him I was in linens, ready to pay, and unable to find a store employee.
About two minutes later, five people show up. One was the store manager. He wasn't the senior person present. Higher management was visiting the store that day. The oldest, a distinguished looking man in a very good suit, quite possibly the CEO of the chain, personally unlocked the register and competently handled the sale. The others stood there silently, looking very uncomfortable. One was sent off to find the missing retail staff.
By now, there were three other customers lined up behind me with merchandise ready to check out. The person sent off to find the sales staff returned from some back rooms, reporting that he couldn't find anyone. Visible annoyance from the senior management. Fear from the store manager.
The senior manager turned the register over to one of the junior people (not a clerk, part of the corporate group) to handle the rest of the line, and the management group departed, taking the store manager off to his fate.
The Web is good for "how-to" information. If you need to know how to configure a router or unfreeze a rusty bolt, the Web is there for you. How to approach a problem, not so much.
This makes a Blackberry useless for business purposes. In most of the countries involved, the Government itself owns major businesses. Nobody in the oil business would want to discuss anything related to a Government deal (which is most of them) over a Blackberry now.
And "The getaway vehicle was described as a brown or champagne-colored late-model SUV
resembling a Chevrolet, with a license plate resembling 4TEZ960 OR 4TEZ690." Either they used their own car, in which case we'll read about the arrest in the next few days, or they stole a car far more valuable than anything in the apartment.
Slashdot Mirror
Something like that has industrial embedded applications, but they need to get past "UL approval - pending" and a peak external operating temp of 104F. You don't want something that's marginal on temp specs in an application where it's controlling something. They talk about putting them side by side on an outlet strip, but that's going to make the cooling problem tougher. Fanless devices should not push the temperature ratings of the components. That never ends well.
Solidly reliable little compute bricks have their uses, but many of the low-end ones tend to be flaky. The industrial ones that really work are expensive, because they're produced in low quantity.
Looks like somebody got an exception put in for search engines:
(a) In General- Except as provided in subsection (b), no person shall be liable for a violation of the requirements of this Act ... to the extent such person--
I run Facebook with almost everything turned off. And Flash with almost everything turned off. And Firefox with the privacy settings on high.
About half of sites with video won't play. Other sites produce errors because their Flash cookies won't work. YouTube's "Press ESC to exit full screen mode" message stays up forever. (I suspect YouTube does that just to keep people from running with high privacy settings.)
It's interesting to see who's evil, but somewhat annoying. Still, for every site that's blocked, there seems to be a competitor just as good.
Only if the company formally declares bankruptcy can they get out of their "lifetime warranty". See the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act for general information about warranties. "Lifetime Warranty" has specific legal meaning in the US.
Second, where is "BFG Technologies, Inc."? That information isn't on the web site. (This is why anonymous web sites are bad, and why our SiteTruth system gives them a low rating.) But it can be found. Dun and Bradstreet gives us the information that they are in Illinois, and Illinois corporate records gives us this:
BFG TECHNOLOGIES, INC. File Number 62377402
Status ACTIVE
Entity Type CORPORATION
Type of Corp DOMESTIC BCA
Incorporation Date (Domestic) 08/27/2002 State ILLINOIS
Forbes has background info on John J. Vosicky. He was the chief financial officer before he was CEO. He was also previously CFO of Comdisco, which went into bankruptcy in 2001.
Golfers spend considerable money on things which are supposed to improve their game. It's usually mediocre players buying stuff that won't help them. There's a lot of that in running shoes, too. (Much to the annoyance of Nike, their sponsor, the Stanford University track team trains running barefoot.)
It's time to consign Star [Trek|Wars|Gate|Craft] to the bargain bin and move forward. Not that what's in the pipeline looks good. Coming up, "Skyline" (yet another alien invasion), "Independence Day 2 and 3" (still more alien invasion), "Battle-Los Angeles (alien invasion, again) another Planet of the Apes movie (why?), and "Oblivion" (yet another post-apocalyptic movie)
"The Adjustment Bureau", another Philip K. Dick movie, has potential. "Iron Sky" (Nazis in Space!) could be the next Sky Captain. Those are the high points.
"Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" is better than you might expect.
Why? 8 bit 64k is perfectly adequate for voice.
Phone voice quality is marginal for conference calls. Cell phone compression barely works at all if it has to handle two people talking at once. Better video conferencing systems have higher-bandwidth audio; it's a small bandwidth cost compared to the video channel.
True, software patents are very bad for small innovators who want to create companies that they will make a living running.
Actually, over 60% of VC-funded software startups hold patents, and about 97% of biotech startups do. This number tends to be underestimated by studies that look only at patents assigned to the compan. But in many startups, the founders hold patents that are not assigned outright to the company, so they don't show as property of the company in a USPTO search.
It's a common observation that small companies hire more people than big ones. This is a myth. The small company jobs don't last as long. The numbers on people hired are easy to get, but the longitudinal studies which track workers over many years tell a different story. It's necessary to distinguish between career progress and churn.
Most startups fail. The median life of newly formed businesses in the US is about three years. (That's pre-recession.) Most venture-funded companies fail. (From talks I've been to by VCs, the most likely outcome is what VCs call a "zombie" - not successful enough to pay back its investors, but just barely able, after downsizing, to pay its current bills and keep operating. Many dot-coms ended up in zombie mode, limping along for years.)
There's a long-term effect that's even more troublesome. Knowledge, as an economic resource, may be mined out. The cost of obtaining new knowledge can exceed its commercial value. Big corporate R&D labs doing basic research, as GE, AT&T, Xerox, HP and IBM once did, are a thing of the past. That trend peaked in the 1950s and 1960s. Venture capital took up some of the slack, but even that is no longer working. Venture capital funds, as a class, have lost money each year since 2000. That's new; from 1970 to 2000, most VC firms were profitable.
It's about time the phone companies recognized that phone calls are just data passing through their networks.
Actually, no. Voice over IP over cellular data is an incredibly inefficient way to send voice. Worse, all the ad-related blithering in "free" applications uses more bandwidth than the call.
The best phone audio quality today is with an ISDN voice phone. End to end digital, end to end synchronized at the bit level, full duplex, no need for echo cancellation, no lag beyond speed of light lag. Many home phones in Switzerland have worked that way for a decade.
It's disappointing. We ought to have CD-quality telephony by now. But instead, audio quality has gotten worse. The phone network is 64Kb/s: 8KHz sampling of 8-bit samples. That's PC audio circa late 1980s. Cell phones don't even deliver that; they use very lossy compression.
Was there actually something like Google Maps and Google Earth before Google released those? Something that I'm not aware of?
Yes. Google obtained that technology by acquiring Keyhole in 2004. Google Earth is just Keyhole rebranded. Keyhole had the zoom-in from orbit, the ability to fly over terrain, and the smooth dynamic switching to higher resolution data, just like Google Earth has now. But it was a pay product, one that cost about $79 a year. There was an NVidia promotion; a free version that only worked with NVidia graphics cards. I had a Keyhole subscription in my DARPA Grand Challenge days.
Many years ago, I was at Ford Aerospace, where we had some slight involvement with the Ford EEC IV engine control module. The designers of that were paranoid about a failure of the module making the car immobile. So they did the following:
Designers today are not being sufficiently paranoid. They're assuming that the entire system stays up and that tow trucks are easily available.
AltaVista wasn't even started as a business. It was a demo for DEC Alpha machines, one of the first big systems built from huge numbers of rackmount machines interconnected by local area networks. Before that, most big data centers were built around mainframes.
AltaVista was originally installed in an old Pacific Telephone building in Palo Alto, a few blocks from DEC's research center. Because the building was built for rows of racks and cable trays, their data center was set up like a phone central office, with aisles of open racks bolted to the floor and cable trays above. At the time (1995) the typical data center had cabinets sitting on raised floors. In many ways, AltaVista set the pattern for the next fifteen years of computing.
If you use a system that does mathematics, like MathCAD, you run into the ambiguities of the equal sign. There are multiple meanings, and in most automated systems, there are separate symbols for them.
Then there's operator precedence and scope. In advanced mathematics, this can drive you nuts, as papers often introduce new notation without being clear on operator precedence. There's also the macho thing in mathematics of using as few parentheses as possible. Variable scope issues in math are awful. I once encountered a symbol in a book on nonlinear differential equations which was defined in the previous volume of a two-volume set.
This isn't a trivial issue for new students.
"Crowdsourcing" - right. You give out a file of all ticker transactions for the last year. Now what? Anything useful in this area is going to be done by a small number of people crunching on the data. Individual items aren't significant; analysis is necessary.
The real issue here for the financial community is transparency of hedge funds. Hedge funds need to be registered with the SEC and regulated as mutual funds. It would also help if pension funds were not treated as "sophisticated investors" allowed to invest in hedge funds. That would quickly move the hedge fund industry into the regulated mutual fund category.
Crunching on publicly available data can be very effective, though. I called the dot-com crash that way, company by company, using a program which automatically ground through SEC filings and did a simple cash-flow calculation. ("Chart is not available for this symbol" means the company is long gone.)
I vaguely recall Arthur C. Clark writing something about Heywood Floyd reading a newspaper on an electronic tablet like device while en route to the moon in "2001: A Space Odyssey", which was published in 1968.
Yes. That's in the movie. For the 1960s movie, they had to build the tablet into the table and project film from underneath.
China has to do this. China's energy consumption has doubled in the last decade, and just passed that of the US. New capacity is being added very rapidly, but may not be able to keep up with demand. So they need to pull the plug on some of the energy hogs.
China has traditionally had a shortage economy. China no longer has famines, but they enforce a one-child policy to keep the population from growing further. The Chinese government estimates that it had three to four hundred million fewer people in 2008 with the one-child policy, than it would have had otherwise.
Are they big on nuke plans there? or the old COAL.
China: 12 reactors operating, 24 under construction. Plans are to quadruple those figures by 2020.
Between longer battery life and cellular data connections, I'm seeing less of this in Palo Alto. A few years ago, I did see places with people on laptops camped at every table. Neotte, a high-end tea shop on University Avenue, offered WiFi and power outlets at every table. Nobody talked; once in a while, someone would order tea from the striking young redhead behind the counter. Neotte went out of business after a year. They were replaced by a coffee shop with fewer power outlets. Power outlets encouraged camping.
The portable gadget thing seems to have peaked. A few years back, I saw a teenage couple come into a coffee shop in a strip mall in Palo Alto (yes, Palo Alto has strip malls). Each took out and set up 1) a laptop, 2) a cell phone, 3) an iPod, 4) a graphing calculator, and 5) their homework. They went quietly to work, barely talking to each other. I haven't seen that in years now. Today, there's been enough mobile device integration that one or two devices is enough, and carrying around a backpack full of gadgets is no longer cool.
I've been to Coupa Coffee, the place mentioned in the article. This in a place with tiny round tables, no power outlets, heavy traffic, and a high noise level. The layout doesn't encourage camping. Their management doesn't really need to disable WiFi. They do have WiFi; I've been there with an overachieving friend who set up her laptop and iPhone. But that's unusual for the place.
A summary of the study is available, although painful to read in English. It seems to beabout the risks of social networking: "Especially misjudgments of reach, sustainability and dynamics of social web offers may encourage dangerous usage. Many users, for example, imagine themselves in closed and private communities and do not give much thought to the audience or the long-term consequences of their action, which remains documented on the Internet."
There's a national cultural component to that. There have been discussions here on Slashdot about embarrassing postings affecting later job success. Then again, there's the other approach - admit everything and say "So?".
Tired Magazine blows it again.
The article from Tired is bogus. The "remote generation of terahertz radiation" is described in this paper. They generate terahertz radiation at the target by hitting it with a big enough pulse to heat it up into a plasma. This is a classic spectroscopy technique; hit something with a big laser pulse and look at the spectra coming back.
Nobody is going to look into pockets that way, unless they burn through first. It may be useful for analyzing toxic and hazardous materials from a distance. A possible application is something that first responders point at a spill from a distance, and it comes back with an analysis. Assuming the energy transfer can be made small enough so as not to ignite anything.
The store had neither a cashier nor a customer service employee at the front
Many years ago, I had a similar experience in a J.C. Penny store in New Jersey. I had just moved, and was buying an armload of bedding, curtains, and towels the middle of a weekday afternoon. So I had a stack of merchandise about three feet high. I couldn't find any store staff anywhere on the floor. So I went to a checkout, picked up the phone behind the counter, and dialed 0. I told the store operator "I'd like to speak to the store manager. This is an unhappy customer." The store manager was put on, and I told him I was in linens, ready to pay, and unable to find a store employee.
About two minutes later, five people show up. One was the store manager. He wasn't the senior person present. Higher management was visiting the store that day. The oldest, a distinguished looking man in a very good suit, quite possibly the CEO of the chain, personally unlocked the register and competently handled the sale. The others stood there silently, looking very uncomfortable. One was sent off to find the missing retail staff.
By now, there were three other customers lined up behind me with merchandise ready to check out. The person sent off to find the sales staff returned from some back rooms, reporting that he couldn't find anyone. Visible annoyance from the senior management. Fear from the store manager.
The senior manager turned the register over to one of the junior people (not a clerk, part of the corporate group) to handle the rest of the line, and the management group departed, taking the store manager off to his fate.
The Web is good for "how-to" information. If you need to know how to configure a router or unfreeze a rusty bolt, the Web is there for you. How to approach a problem, not so much.
Will the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice have access?
This makes a Blackberry useless for business purposes. In most of the countries involved, the Government itself owns major businesses. Nobody in the oil business would want to discuss anything related to a Government deal (which is most of them) over a Blackberry now.
And "The getaway vehicle was described as a brown or champagne-colored late-model SUV resembling a Chevrolet, with a license plate resembling 4TEZ960 OR 4TEZ690." Either they used their own car, in which case we'll read about the arrest in the next few days, or they stole a car far more valuable than anything in the apartment.