Oh, don't worry, citizen! If you own a phone that still has a swappable battery, it's probably ancient junk anyway, so throwing it away is just helping you out!
Now... about keeping your AppleCare after the TSA's tech experts remove your iPhone battery...
If you can't power the things up there is no way to tell what they actually are.
Unless a given widget has heroic inrush current on start, if you can power the thing up there is no way to tell whether it's the genuine article or the genuine article with a teeny li-poly cell(or even a higher-density lithium primary cell, no need to recharge in paradise after all...) providing ~10 minutes of runtime and leaving most of the battery volume for even more energetic contents...
Apropos of this; (but absurdly NSFW, so cube drones who aren't also the IT guy who controls the local censorship appliance watch with caution) TSA Gangstaz!
Short of 'eh, just buy a display model on ebay and pack it full of semtex, the TSA won't notice...' slacker-terrorist stuff, how useful is the 'turn it on' test?
With the relentless demand for miniaturization and battery life, most consumer electronics should be able to get enough power to boot-and-display-innocence out of a battery pack markedly smaller than their real one, even without further clever surgery. In the case of products that have substantial spec variations available in the same chassis (like most 'workstation' laptops) or very similar ones(most cellphone flavors that have a high-end and a cheap-seats variant that share a design language, and often a number of parts), the slightly more adept attacker has even more room, literally, to build a low-drain device and its teeny battery into the chassis designed to run a fairly firebreathing set of components for a couple of hours.
Does the TSA expect that most of their enemies are as dumb as they are, or is this a 'well, it isn't worth much; but it's easy to impose so it's probably worth what you pay...' measure?
The fact that people in other countries are lining up to do the same work for cheap is concrete proof that it isn't as difficult work as you think.
Or, y'know, that cost-of-living varies by location and that salaries are a function of the relative strengths of the parties' positions (which are in part influenced by how difficult a job is; but only in part)...
The people 'getting so worked up' are doing so because the company's best interests are directly at odds with their own, and if they had any lingering doubts about how the story ends, they can just ask those once-practically-middle-class manufacturing workers in rustbelt hellholes. Its...totally unshocking... how touchy people get when you threaten their continued economic viability.
If you have to ask, you'd probably find getting linux running on a randomly selected phone (especially if you don't mean 'Android/bionic libc' when you say that) to be a bit of an adventure...
The Broadcom part in the rPi isn't actually all that open, even by the low standards of eccentric arm SoCs(graphics support, especially if you want X rather than Android, isn't a pretty picture on the ARM side; but the 'VideoCore' graphics system is a particular oddball, and dominates the rPi's chip); but it has the advantage of Broadcom in a helpful mood, as well as a large userbase working with exactly the same hardware.
Assorted phones and tablets of the world...less so. At the higher end, people who buy them tend to be disinclined to tear them open looking for GPIO connectors (if there even are any, which isn't necessarily the case), and the low end of the market churns fast enough that knowing what hardware you are getting can be a bit of a challenge.
The use case for swapping the CPU/RAM module yourself looks pretty weak; but it would appear to make sense for the manufacturer: This 'hummingboard' appears to be their existing 'MicroSOM' product attached to a fairly rPi-like breakout board.
If they already make and sell those, they'd likely have to churn out a lot of hummingboards before the savings on connectors makes it worthwhile to integrate the CPU directly with the board.
Oh, I'd be the last to defend the assumptions about 'acceptable' losses built into occupational exposure levels(or the massive regulatory capture that has prevented many standards from being updated, a surprising number of OSHA's are 1968 ACGIH "threshold limit values" for various chemicals that they've very rarely managed to update since, even when new toxicology is available. As for keeping pace with new compounds... hardly.)
My point was purely that surviving acute exposures hundreds or thousands of times the legal limit for occupational exposure isn't terribly exceptional. Not good practice; but very possible for the broad range of chemicals that are not at all good for humans; but which aren't swift poisons.
As for nuclear physicists, I suspect that they have better health plans than miners, and people prefer not to waste them (given that even a person of natural mathematical talent takes years to train into a replacement, and such people are not necessarily in ample supply); but occupational exposures do get them from time to time. Beryllium seems to crop up in a number of cases: it's a fantastic material, light, strong, a good beam window; but exposure to its dust can cause Berylliosis; and once that happens, we have only symptomatic treatments to make the progressive, irreversible, and eventually fatal, loss of lung capacity slightly less ghastly.
The important thing to remember here is that he survived 500 times the maximum dose a worker can be legally exposed to.
Try that with any chemical in any chemical plant.
I wouldn't try it for just any chemical; but occupational exposure limits tend to be set (often with the aid of generous quantities of guesswork) around chronic occupational exposure and with the objective of not killing, or crippling too seriously, too high a percentage of the workforce. Asking "What can they breath all shift every shift for years or more without too many of them dropping dead, getting some freaky obscure cancer, or having the liver function of an elderly alcoholic before age 50?" tends to lead to lower, sometimes dramatically lower, numbers than "What can you probably survive, with intensive treatment and ongoing health effects?"
The only major difference is that (in an effort that started before this board came out, and which they've pushed hardest for their 64-bit design, though the assorted ARM licencees seem to be tiring a bit of pointless differentiation on their own) ARM has recently been trying to stamp out some of the vendor-specific weirdness that has historically surrounded the architecture.
Presumably building "ARM's reference board", rather than letting the licensees of the A57 spawn theirs and leaving it at that, is part of their effort to ensure that crazy stuff like 'actually being able to boot without a blood-oath and a BSP' works across ARM based systems.
That's one thing that, while stultifying in many respects, the 'wintel' duopoly did for x86. Nothing stops an x86 CPU from being extremely weird (and there are a few oddities available) but the 'if it can't boot Windows it might as well not be an x86...' demands of the market, along with the fact that (unlike even MS' embedded OSes, never mind the embedded industry at large) 3rd parties pretty much don't get to touch Windows' internals until it has booted up far enough to load device drivers, has driven (ugly, hacky, largely de-facto) 'standardization'. ARM? Not. So. Much, something that they are trying to change at least for their more powerful parts.
This similar to the case of Google profiting from illegal ads. Personally I think the complaint should be sent to questionable subscription service rather than shoot the messenger.
When the 'messenger' is the one who hides the charge and collects the proceeds of the fraud(taking a cut), you bloody well should shoot him. Then shoot whoever he was working with, of course; but no need to choose.
You don't suspect that the NSA may have taken advantage of the...creative flexibility... offered by the authorization to collect "not just the communications of its overseas targets, but any communications about its targets as well"?
There was at least one seller on silk road shipping only legal stuff like glassware. Did he get his coins returned?
Not to worry, he is free to make himself known to us and fight a legal battle that will cost more than the coins were worth. We will then classify his wares into 'crack pipes', 'bongs (for the mexican loco-weed)' and 'miscellaneous, probably for meth cooks' and charge him accordingly.
And he had better not have shipped any to Texas without a suitable license...
Somebody should probably get out their protractor and see if the Winklevoss twins are smirking slightly more than usual today, that might be informative...
If you actually like gardening it would be largely pointless (and if you don't, why exactly would you pretend with a bunch of expensive gadgets?); but calculating, at a quite granular level, the length and intensity of exposure to sunlight in various areas across the course of a day should actually be relatively tractable by machine vision standards...
Advanced Mycorrhizal networking technology, as pioneered by fungi at least 400 million years ago, has been providing advanced inter-plant networking technology (as well as a robust nutrient exchange infrastructure) since you were small, shrew-like, creatures busy 'disrupting' dinosaurs.
Even assuming that tooling up mass production Just Isn't Doable, because reasons, this seems like Google's game to lose: Google is better at writing software than the automakers are, and all they need is one automaker to crack, admit that their software blows, and start OEMing for Google. The first hit might even be free...
Unless they really manage to alienate people, or stagnate to the point where the incrementalists overtake them, game over, man.
This is "social", the fucking pox of the internet, we are talking about here: "too far" and "social network norm" are usually synonymous...
In a way, though, the fact that it doesn't go even further too far helps make it pathetic: what happens on 'social' services are the ethical transgressions of our best and brightest, equipped with nigh-unlimited funds, the assurance that they are Just That Good, and that 'disruption' is the ultimate virtue, and yet their imaginations seem to extend no further than being bigger assholes about selling ads...
Very likely, definitely doesn't advertise compatibility with anything else, and actually includes 4 slightly different shells to snap different iphone and ipod touch devices to the viewer unit, so clearly tolerances are a little fiddly even within Apple's line.
If anyone is actually considering it, I'd imagine that bodging one of the 'shells' into something that fits a different phone wouldn't be too hard; and you get 4 tries. The optics would still presumably cut the edges off your view of the screen, though, since I assume that they were set to maximize the amount of screen, and minimize the amount of darkened-tube-periphery, for iphone screen sizes.
Silence, Silence! It's people like you that ruin perfectly good patent applications!
In all seriousness, that's definitely the earliest I've heard of computer-generated stereoscopic display. The ones based on photographs taken from slightly different angles are downright ancient; but that's a fairly distinct technique. What I'd be interested to know is whether anyone tried their hand at manually rendered stereoscopic viewer pairs... All the early examples I can think of were photographs, that seems to have been what the mass market wanted; but achieving the effect by hand should have been doable since the invention of perspective drawing... I may have to hit the books.
I can't seem to find the exact date of introduction anywhere; but the PR shots are all taken with a 30-pin iDevice that doesn't look like a 4, lacking the distinctive 'holding it wrong' antenna-edge, so it can't be terribly new. I don't think you get the fancy NFC tag; but it's $8 and preassembled...
The basic principles are sound, at least for static display: the venerable View-Master had that working and cheap enough for sale as a toy sometime before WWII, with assorted stereoscopic viewer gadgets of varying levels of refinement going back another century or so.
Where life gets difficult is if you want the images on your stereoscopic viewer to be 'VR' without making the user revisit their last meal. Humans turn out to be moderately demanding when it comes to agreement between their own inertial sensors and their visual perception of movement.
I'd be downright impressed if Google's little toy passes the 'VR' test for more than very brief and very lightweight use; but as a stereoscope where the images have the option of moving, not a problem.
I don't have a problem with not being a revolving door hack (indeed, it's generally better than the alternative). My point was merely that Alexander's CV has very little on it that isn't either irrelevant to his potential customers (at least I hope our financial sector isn't looking for armored warfare expertise...) or closely connected to a series of fed jobs that just keep getting more heavily classified as time goes on. I am notably unsympathetic to the "zOMG! Noncompete! your employer owns every idea and/or life experience you had at any time" school; but in his case it would appear that he knowingly worked on a series of all-kinds-of-classified activities, and not much else.
That being so, any discrepancy between his consulting rate (which is steep) and that of a skilled and experienced; but less notable, security analyst with management capabilities starts to look suspiciously like trading on the sorts of job experience he would have agreed not to disclose, and for no noble motive.
It's not as though he is obligated to forget everything he ever knew about computers and security when he goes job hunting; but it's hard not to feel a twinge of suspicion at what he's charging, and wonder exactly what experience he brings to the table that is worth that much.
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Oh, don't worry, citizen! If you own a phone that still has a swappable battery, it's probably ancient junk anyway, so throwing it away is just helping you out!
Now... about keeping your AppleCare after the TSA's tech experts remove your iPhone battery...
If you can't power the things up there is no way to tell what they actually are.
Unless a given widget has heroic inrush current on start, if you can power the thing up there is no way to tell whether it's the genuine article or the genuine article with a teeny li-poly cell(or even a higher-density lithium primary cell, no need to recharge in paradise after all...) providing ~10 minutes of runtime and leaving most of the battery volume for even more energetic contents...
Apropos of this; (but absurdly NSFW, so cube drones who aren't also the IT guy who controls the local censorship appliance watch with caution) TSA Gangstaz!
Takin' Suckaz Assets.
Short of 'eh, just buy a display model on ebay and pack it full of semtex, the TSA won't notice...' slacker-terrorist stuff, how useful is the 'turn it on' test?
With the relentless demand for miniaturization and battery life, most consumer electronics should be able to get enough power to boot-and-display-innocence out of a battery pack markedly smaller than their real one, even without further clever surgery. In the case of products that have substantial spec variations available in the same chassis (like most 'workstation' laptops) or very similar ones(most cellphone flavors that have a high-end and a cheap-seats variant that share a design language, and often a number of parts), the slightly more adept attacker has even more room, literally, to build a low-drain device and its teeny battery into the chassis designed to run a fairly firebreathing set of components for a couple of hours.
Does the TSA expect that most of their enemies are as dumb as they are, or is this a 'well, it isn't worth much; but it's easy to impose so it's probably worth what you pay...' measure?
The fact that people in other countries are lining up to do the same work for cheap is concrete proof that it isn't as difficult work as you think.
Or, y'know, that cost-of-living varies by location and that salaries are a function of the relative strengths of the parties' positions (which are in part influenced by how difficult a job is; but only in part)...
The people 'getting so worked up' are doing so because the company's best interests are directly at odds with their own, and if they had any lingering doubts about how the story ends, they can just ask those once-practically-middle-class manufacturing workers in rustbelt hellholes. Its...totally unshocking... how touchy people get when you threaten their continued economic viability.
If you have to ask, you'd probably find getting linux running on a randomly selected phone (especially if you don't mean 'Android/bionic libc' when you say that) to be a bit of an adventure...
The Broadcom part in the rPi isn't actually all that open, even by the low standards of eccentric arm SoCs(graphics support, especially if you want X rather than Android, isn't a pretty picture on the ARM side; but the 'VideoCore' graphics system is a particular oddball, and dominates the rPi's chip); but it has the advantage of Broadcom in a helpful mood, as well as a large userbase working with exactly the same hardware.
Assorted phones and tablets of the world...less so. At the higher end, people who buy them tend to be disinclined to tear them open looking for GPIO connectors (if there even are any, which isn't necessarily the case), and the low end of the market churns fast enough that knowing what hardware you are getting can be a bit of a challenge.
The use case for swapping the CPU/RAM module yourself looks pretty weak; but it would appear to make sense for the manufacturer: This 'hummingboard' appears to be their existing 'MicroSOM' product attached to a fairly rPi-like breakout board.
If they already make and sell those, they'd likely have to churn out a lot of hummingboards before the savings on connectors makes it worthwhile to integrate the CPU directly with the board.
Oh, I'd be the last to defend the assumptions about 'acceptable' losses built into occupational exposure levels(or the massive regulatory capture that has prevented many standards from being updated, a surprising number of OSHA's are 1968 ACGIH "threshold limit values" for various chemicals that they've very rarely managed to update since, even when new toxicology is available. As for keeping pace with new compounds... hardly.)
My point was purely that surviving acute exposures hundreds or thousands of times the legal limit for occupational exposure isn't terribly exceptional. Not good practice; but very possible for the broad range of chemicals that are not at all good for humans; but which aren't swift poisons.
As for nuclear physicists, I suspect that they have better health plans than miners, and people prefer not to waste them (given that even a person of natural mathematical talent takes years to train into a replacement, and such people are not necessarily in ample supply); but occupational exposures do get them from time to time. Beryllium seems to crop up in a number of cases: it's a fantastic material, light, strong, a good beam window; but exposure to its dust can cause Berylliosis; and once that happens, we have only symptomatic treatments to make the progressive, irreversible, and eventually fatal, loss of lung capacity slightly less ghastly.
The important thing to remember here is that he survived 500 times the maximum dose a worker can be legally exposed to. Try that with any chemical in any chemical plant.
I wouldn't try it for just any chemical; but occupational exposure limits tend to be set (often with the aid of generous quantities of guesswork) around chronic occupational exposure and with the objective of not killing, or crippling too seriously, too high a percentage of the workforce. Asking "What can they breath all shift every shift for years or more without too many of them dropping dead, getting some freaky obscure cancer, or having the liver function of an elderly alcoholic before age 50?" tends to lead to lower, sometimes dramatically lower, numbers than "What can you probably survive, with intensive treatment and ongoing health effects?"
The only major difference is that (in an effort that started before this board came out, and which they've pushed hardest for their 64-bit design, though the assorted ARM licencees seem to be tiring a bit of pointless differentiation on their own) ARM has recently been trying to stamp out some of the vendor-specific weirdness that has historically surrounded the architecture.
Presumably building "ARM's reference board", rather than letting the licensees of the A57 spawn theirs and leaving it at that, is part of their effort to ensure that crazy stuff like 'actually being able to boot without a blood-oath and a BSP' works across ARM based systems.
That's one thing that, while stultifying in many respects, the 'wintel' duopoly did for x86. Nothing stops an x86 CPU from being extremely weird (and there are a few oddities available) but the 'if it can't boot Windows it might as well not be an x86...' demands of the market, along with the fact that (unlike even MS' embedded OSes, never mind the embedded industry at large) 3rd parties pretty much don't get to touch Windows' internals until it has booted up far enough to load device drivers, has driven (ugly, hacky, largely de-facto) 'standardization'. ARM? Not. So. Much, something that they are trying to change at least for their more powerful parts.
This similar to the case of Google profiting from illegal ads. Personally I think the complaint should be sent to questionable subscription service rather than shoot the messenger.
When the 'messenger' is the one who hides the charge and collects the proceeds of the fraud(taking a cut), you bloody well should shoot him. Then shoot whoever he was working with, of course; but no need to choose.
I'm pretty sure that "T-Mobile USA, Inc." didn't actually do much of anything by itself, being a legal and accounting entity and all.
Any word on who actually directed, authorized, permitted, etc. this little plan, and why they aren't facing a raft of fraud charges?
You don't suspect that the NSA may have taken advantage of the...creative flexibility... offered by the authorization to collect "not just the communications of its overseas targets, but any communications about its targets as well"?
There was at least one seller on silk road shipping only legal stuff like glassware. Did he get his coins returned?
Not to worry, he is free to make himself known to us and fight a legal battle that will cost more than the coins were worth. We will then classify his wares into 'crack pipes', 'bongs (for the mexican loco-weed)' and 'miscellaneous, probably for meth cooks' and charge him accordingly.
And he had better not have shipped any to Texas without a suitable license...
Somebody should probably get out their protractor and see if the Winklevoss twins are smirking slightly more than usual today, that might be informative...
If you actually like gardening it would be largely pointless (and if you don't, why exactly would you pretend with a bunch of expensive gadgets?); but calculating, at a quite granular level, the length and intensity of exposure to sunlight in various areas across the course of a day should actually be relatively tractable by machine vision standards...
Why is releasing a re-labelled version of Windows 7 going to take until spring of 2015? Are they making a crew of interns re-type the source?
Advanced Mycorrhizal networking technology, as pioneered by fungi at least 400 million years ago, has been providing advanced inter-plant networking technology (as well as a robust nutrient exchange infrastructure) since you were small, shrew-like, creatures busy 'disrupting' dinosaurs.
Bah!
Even assuming that tooling up mass production Just Isn't Doable, because reasons, this seems like Google's game to lose: Google is better at writing software than the automakers are, and all they need is one automaker to crack, admit that their software blows, and start OEMing for Google. The first hit might even be free...
Unless they really manage to alienate people, or stagnate to the point where the incrementalists overtake them, game over, man.
This is "social", the fucking pox of the internet, we are talking about here: "too far" and "social network norm" are usually synonymous...
In a way, though, the fact that it doesn't go even further too far helps make it pathetic: what happens on 'social' services are the ethical transgressions of our best and brightest, equipped with nigh-unlimited funds, the assurance that they are Just That Good, and that 'disruption' is the ultimate virtue, and yet their imaginations seem to extend no further than being bigger assholes about selling ads...
Very likely, definitely doesn't advertise compatibility with anything else, and actually includes 4 slightly different shells to snap different iphone and ipod touch devices to the viewer unit, so clearly tolerances are a little fiddly even within Apple's line.
If anyone is actually considering it, I'd imagine that bodging one of the 'shells' into something that fits a different phone wouldn't be too hard; and you get 4 tries. The optics would still presumably cut the edges off your view of the screen, though, since I assume that they were set to maximize the amount of screen, and minimize the amount of darkened-tube-periphery, for iphone screen sizes.
Silence, Silence! It's people like you that ruin perfectly good patent applications!
In all seriousness, that's definitely the earliest I've heard of computer-generated stereoscopic display. The ones based on photographs taken from slightly different angles are downright ancient; but that's a fairly distinct technique. What I'd be interested to know is whether anyone tried their hand at manually rendered stereoscopic viewer pairs... All the early examples I can think of were photographs, that seems to have been what the mass market wanted; but achieving the effect by hand should have been doable since the invention of perspective drawing... I may have to hit the books.
Or this one.
I can't seem to find the exact date of introduction anywhere; but the PR shots are all taken with a 30-pin iDevice that doesn't look like a 4, lacking the distinctive 'holding it wrong' antenna-edge, so it can't be terribly new. I don't think you get the fancy NFC tag; but it's $8 and preassembled...
The basic principles are sound, at least for static display: the venerable View-Master had that working and cheap enough for sale as a toy sometime before WWII, with assorted stereoscopic viewer gadgets of varying levels of refinement going back another century or so.
Where life gets difficult is if you want the images on your stereoscopic viewer to be 'VR' without making the user revisit their last meal. Humans turn out to be moderately demanding when it comes to agreement between their own inertial sensors and their visual perception of movement.
I'd be downright impressed if Google's little toy passes the 'VR' test for more than very brief and very lightweight use; but as a stereoscope where the images have the option of moving, not a problem.
I don't have a problem with not being a revolving door hack (indeed, it's generally better than the alternative). My point was merely that Alexander's CV has very little on it that isn't either irrelevant to his potential customers (at least I hope our financial sector isn't looking for armored warfare expertise...) or closely connected to a series of fed jobs that just keep getting more heavily classified as time goes on. I am notably unsympathetic to the "zOMG! Noncompete! your employer owns every idea and/or life experience you had at any time" school; but in his case it would appear that he knowingly worked on a series of all-kinds-of-classified activities, and not much else.
That being so, any discrepancy between his consulting rate (which is steep) and that of a skilled and experienced; but less notable, security analyst with management capabilities starts to look suspiciously like trading on the sorts of job experience he would have agreed not to disclose, and for no noble motive.
It's not as though he is obligated to forget everything he ever knew about computers and security when he goes job hunting; but it's hard not to feel a twinge of suspicion at what he's charging, and wonder exactly what experience he brings to the table that is worth that much.