The world's 4th largest sporting event suffered a power outage - The Super Bowl - and it didn't really matter all that much.
Arguably, that's the other vice(as though it needed more) of various OMG TOTAL SECURITY schemes: anybody chasing some Panopticon-silver-bullet scheme is likely tempted(and funding constrained) to ignore the basic, boring, highly useful, local redundancy and resilience measures that come in handy in all kinds of situations. A fire in the electrical closet would also have brought down the power during the Olympic games; but there wouldn't have been a whisper on the internet; because it would have been a mere accident. So would a zillion other misadventures of large-scale electrical wiring, most of which are entropy, accident, or laziness, not pre-planned malice.
Even if prevention of pre-planned malice actually works(possible; but debatable) isn't it better to have resilience in place that will serve you in both malice and in accident?
The trouble with protecting yourself against insiders is that you are trying to protect yourself against people who need access to do whatever it is you pay them to do. Protecting yourself against external attackers is a massive matter of practical difficulty; but at least it's a coherent objective: keep people who shouldn't have access away from access. Against insiders, virtually everything you do either reduces productivity(so you disabled USB, good thing that there are never any legitimate applications for sneakernet, right?), erodes the warm-and-fuzzy primate emotions that help keep your non-sociopaths from even wanting to hurt you(As a member of the FooCorp family, keep in mind that we log absolutely everything you do because we don't trust you at all, and those logs are just sitting in the IT office should your vindictive manager ever want to hold the five minutes you spent on personal email about your sick kid against you!) or, if you are really good at screwing it up, actually end up concentrating power among certain insiders, or creating incentives among the clueless to learn more about circumvention(Do you know how to get an entire class full of high schoolers to stop shoving geeks into lockers and start begging them for help? Block facebook.)
This isn't to say that it is impossible; but it consists of making a lot of unpleasant choices about how much pain you want to inflict on the mostly innocent in order to scare and/or catch the guilty, who may or may not exist, depending on the time and circumstances.
Exactly. If an employer is doing nothing wrong, then at least long-term, it has nothing to hide.:-D
There are still merely-self-interested insiders: It's practically a tradition for Mr. Sleazy McSales to abscond with all the customer data when he accepts a position with the competition, and his engineering counterparts to lift design docs and the like for the same purpose.
Doing good does have the advantage of reducing disillusionment among your otherwise-least-corruptable people, and helps prevent economically-irrational leaking; but you still have to worry about the merely mercenary.
What a clever jerk, come on. This green battery stuff is just more buffoonery.
I suspect that the 'green' angle is overstated, as it usually is; but exploiting naturally produced small-scale structures, when they can be made to suit our purposes, is hardly a scam. Biology is extremely good at building microscale features, in bulk, for peanuts. When we can make that work to our advantage, we gain the benefit of what would otherwise require some rather tricky and expensive fabrication.
Carnot efficiency is all about the temperature difference available to a heat engine. While you might be right in asserting that overly small ones may not be efficient this would be an engineering problem, not anything to do with good ol' Sadie's magic formula.
True. My assumption, though, is that almost any engineering advance that improves the delta-t of small, reasonably cheap and safe heat engines would likely also be applicable(possibly to even greater advantage) to large heat engines with substantial capital budgets and professional operators. This isn't a thermodynamic truth, and there could be exceptions; but I suspect that on average, improvements in small heat engines usually accrue to large ones as well, with the large ones enjoying various engineering advantages that the small ones don't.
"When you've decided that you no longer need an instance, you can terminate it. As soon as the status of an instance changes to shutting down or terminated, you stop incurring charges for that instance."
You can sleep easy when your *nix sysadmin has a beard like that. That's a beard you can trust.
I'm pretty sure that beard isn't merely trustworthy; but actually capable of handling routine shell scripting tasks independently of the head it is attached to.
You know, it seems fairly simple to conceive of some kind of storage medium for solar energy that is cheap, easy, and environmentally sound. If only there were a way to gather up immense amounts of solar energy and store it in some medium that had a reasonably high energy density, was easy to store and cheap to maintain in storage, and where it was quite easy to extract the stored energy, that could even be stored as solid fuel. If only there were a way to easily manufacture such a fuel locally, at or near the point of consumption, and even better, without the use of harsh chemicals and boatloads of energy.
It's too bad nothing even remotely like that exists today.
Alas, the vengeful ghost of Sadie Carnot is sitting on your woodpile and whispering dark mockery of the efficiency of any heat engine small enough to fit in the places where we want electricity...
I will admit, that with a good steam engine and a few Stout Irish as stokers, my Analytical Engine does me good service; but spilling my cellphone's boiler down my collar last week was most painful.
The Olympics is a business markedly worse than most, in terms of nakedly abusive regulatory capture and overt plunder of the public who are unlucky enough to reside in its chosen location.
Just imagine the horror, the horror! The primary lights and AV systems could have gone out, forcing the audience to endure the inconvenience of use the emergency exit lighting systems that(as a new venue) would have been legally obligated to comply with the relevant portions of British Standard 5266, and possibly other similar regulations(unless some Olympic Comittee weasel bent that rule, or somebody hired G4S to handle it...)
Clearly, when a problem could either be reliably solved with some lead-acid batteries and a few LED light strips, or possibly, not guarantees solved by ubiquitous surveillance of all IP communications in, to/from, or through the United Kingdom, Our Choice Is Obvious!
Did you see the part where I mentioned it not exactly giving you the warm and fuzzies? There are basically no FOSS x86s BIOSes at all(yeah, coreboot runs on a few things, most of them old and few/none of them laptops, or you could get an OLPC from before their switch to ARM; but that's about it). As it happens, the 'AMT' stuff isn't really part of the BIOS(I'm sure there are points of integration; but they are distinct systems). It's a separate CPU, with its own firmware(never fear, it's cryptographicially signed by Intel and 100% Trustworthy(tm)!) that is active at all times the system has power(including when the computer proper is off), with the ability to piggyback on the NIC(s) for communication with the outside world, to emulate storage devices and HID events, snoop the framebuffer without assistance from the OS, and generally do useful-but-unnerving things.
I said nothing about it being FOSS(indeed, it is to Stallman's Trusted Computing Dystopia roughly what RFID is to the 'Mark of the beast', possibly not the real deal; but a very logical implementation), just that it's an example of tracking software that will survive substantially more than a simple OS re-installation.
No, there's no good Linux HW tracking software. Why? Cause there's no good software for other platforms either. It's all "make-you-feel-good-software" which doesn't survive a simple OS reinstallation...
It doesn't exactly give you the warm-and-fuzzies to know that this is possible; but some models have it baked right into the firmware. A suitably provisioned AMT 6+ device can do entertaining things like phone home and provide 'home' with an IP KVM, regardless of OS state.
Apparently, Corning's 'Fusion draw process' is what they use for LCD-quality glass(to avoid issues with defects on the contact side that the were having with float glass). And with that process you can get any shape you want, so long as it's a rectangular sheet. According to this interview, any shaping is done from the sheet stock, but before the ion-exchange toughening process:
"FLATOW: Why can't you - I'm sorry, why can't you make it the shape itself beforehand?
VELASQUEZ: Well, it's much cheaper, more effective, to make these large sheets of glass and then cut it later, as opposed to trying to mold - or mold from molten glass into a small part.
FLATOW: It's not having to do with maybe the glass being too tough or brittle to work with at that point?
VELASQUEZ: No, that's a good question, but we - the chemical strengthening process actually happens after our immediate customers have cut the parts down to the size, the shape of the parts."
So, if that is the case, presumably doing a dead-flat face just requires rounding off the corners a bit, possibly drilling out a speaker grille or front button(if either is within the glass area), and then calling it a day, while doing a 'watch glass' style curve would require starting with thicker sheet stock and grinding and polishing, in a shallow version of lenscrafting, which is presumably a more vexing process.
Probably doesn't help that(unless you got really fancy, selectively messing with refractive indices in parts of the face or something like that) the curved face introduces slight distortions of the image and makes the phone look thicker.
I'm not saying that these are sensible in the broad sense(especially given the number of phones I see out and about that were carefully designed and exhaustively manufactured to be slim, perfect, slabs of featureless unobtanium, which their owners promptly swaddle in garish silicone and blurry screen protectors, ending up with something substantially more expensive than, and neither much smaller nor much more attractive than, one of the less tacky discrete-faceplate designs; but that's my guess as to why it is what it is...
Why use a mirror when you can capture an image with your front-facing camera, digitise it, route it through state-of-the-art computing and image processing trips, break it into millions of pieces and feed it simultaneous to an equal number of tiny diodes.
So much simpler!
Kids these days... Don't you realize that you can just scan a mirror and set that as your background?
To be honest, what I'd really like is anti-shatter.
And what I'd really like are wings so I can fly. Just thought I'd point that out, since we aren't being realistic.
To answer you more seriously, what you are asking for just isn't something that's going to happen predictably. They can't just focus on making it anti-shatter. If it ever happens, it's going to be more or less on accident. And even then, unless it's a HUGE breakthrough, you probably wouldn't be satisfied with it. The reason I say that is because look at what we currently have. The closest you'll currently find to what you are asking for is bullet proof glass, and despite the fact that it has no real restrictions for thickness, weight, scratch resistance, or clarity, when it does take a big impact it still leaves a tremendous scar (much like a rock chipping your car's windshield).
Arguably, it isn't that 'anti-shatter' is unrealistic; but that it is unrealistic without sacrificing the other things that people want. Your old school, now-downright-shameful Nokia candybar was pretty damn shatter resistant. The screen portion of the outer shell is some sort of plastic(PC or PC+ABS, I think, don't have one in front of me), modestly thick, with a bit of curvature. The relatively soft plastic doesn't have that 'I am a slab of unobtanium carved out of the future by laser robots' thing going, and it scratches and dings pretty easily; but, if dropped, it usually just flexes a bit and dissipates most of the force harmlessly. A nontrivial gab between the outer shell and the (much more vulnerable) LCD also helps(as does the fact that, in their heyday, a replacement for a cracked/damaged faceplate was ~$5 at your local skeezy phone kiosk and could be installed by hand in seconds).
Once you impose the requirement that the material be substantially scratch/ding resistant(thus demanding a very hard material), and the phone be very thin and the screen very bright(thus, along with the touch-sense requirements, demanding that the screen be packed closely against, or fused directly to, the outer shell, and that the outer shell be dead flat, with no room for strengthening geometry or flexing, even if it were flexible) You want something maybe a mm thick, dead flat, and optimized for hardness, to survive impacts without cracking? Now that is where you get into 'serious breakthrough' territory.
My Nokia 5630 had a transflective LCD. This was always readable in the sun and even when the backlight was turned off. It works by having a partially reflecting layer between the LCD matrix and the backlight.
I really miss that feature on today's phones. I think they stopped selling this kind of displays because they look less good in the light conditions that you have in shops, since the partially reflecting layer also reflects some of the backlight.
You are probably one of those commerce-hating commies who thinks that 'Retail Thermonuclear' isn't a valid display ICC profile, and that some technobabble involving 'Hz' and 'linearity' is more important to audio performance than 'Best Buy Car Audio bootay-thump' is...
The article isn't clear on what the antimicrobial coating does, but I'd hazard a guess that it is not an antibiotic but a surface that is too slippery for bacteria to attach to. An antibiotic agent would be pretty stupid and would degrade rapidly compared to the lifetime of the device (think: ATM), as opposed to a surface where bacteria just doesn't stick.
This is an equally uninformed guess; but it could also be something similar to the Titanium dioxide photocatalytic coatings that they sell for, or bake into, certain classier construction materials.
Reasonably tough, and not 'used up'(except by sheer mechanical weathering/abrasion); but when sunlight hits them, anything vulnerable to oxidizers; be it living or dead, gets chewed up pretty brutally.
I'm not familiar with the peripheral airports, and their capabilities; but this thing has almost exactly the same wingspan as a 777. It doesn't weigh much of anything; and it isn't particularly long; but you'll need a good size runway to put it down.
I'm not saying that you would, that little anecdote was there mostly because it was rather striking when it happened(and, indeed, we were able to simply tilt the paper and pour the letters off, so we didn't exactly 'trust' the output). My point was merely that, while rare under proper conditions(and why my original post recommended toner over ink) it is certainly possible for fusing to fail.
Well, since refugee's are usually fleeing their home country the problem probably exists outside your ability to gracefully intervene. Your solutions are pretty much limited to maintaining indefinite refugee camps, shipping the refugees elsewhere (if anyone will take them), or granting them citizenship or at least work visas so they can become contributing members of their new country of residence (with all the problems that causes to the local labor markets). Or of course getting deeply mired in the internal politics of your neighbors who have already been shooting at each other for years. Not really a lot of good options there.
Oh, I'm definitely not saying that there are any good options, just questioning the wisdom of attempting to design 'temporary housing' if your actual use case ends up being north of a decade long. 'Temporary' usually comes with substantial tradeoffs(either in price, if it's the good stuff, or in quality, if it's the cheap seats). Those are generally worth it if 'permanent' or 'semi-permanent' are overqualified and overpriced/hard to remove for the job because you are only expecting people to be staying for a week, or six months, or whatever. If your realistic timescale is actually ten years, solving the problem with 'temporary' gear probably means you'll end up solving it three or four times over(if you are lucky) and having everybody living in squalid, leaky tents the whole time.
My(intended, I may have expressed it poorly) point was not so much 'If people are spending 10 years in refugee camps, UN=fail, shape up!"; but "If TFA says that the average stay is 12 years, shouldn't the design effort be focused not on incrementally improved 6-month tents; but split into 'short', 'medium' and 'long' SKUs, possibly with 'long' being not a set of modular buildings to be shipped in; but some sort of on-site mud-brickulator machinery(along the lines of some subset of the global village construction set)? Or, alternately, some attempt to design a short-term system that, either through addition of parts, or cannibalized for parts, has a smoother upgrade path than contemporary short-term designs do."
I'd imagine that there is a strong incentive for everyone involved to pretend that any given situation is purely temporary, it'll be over shortly; but I suspect that maintaining that illusion might be leading to sub-optimal allocation of resources and design efforts that are aiming at the wrong goals.
It can actually be a risk, if the fuser doesn't get the toner hot enough, long enough, to fully infiltrate the paper(without burning it, obviously, which is presumably what drives conservatism on that score).
Very high humidity at print time can be a problem: It's rarely this dramatic; but I've seen a few cases where paper, left unattended and non climate controlled through a ghastly humid summer, to the point where it starts to get vaguely limp, billowing steam as it passed through the fuser stage. An interesting spectacle; but, needless to say, not good for adhesion(the characters themselves, while delicate, were largely intact, and could be poured off the paper), since the enthalpy of vaporization of water was sinking significant heat at point of contact. Sometimes the classier laser printers have humidity sensors in the print path to compensate; but air conditioning still isn't a bad idea, if only for the poor humans.
Slashdot Mirror
The world's 4th largest sporting event suffered a power outage - The Super Bowl - and it didn't really matter all that much.
Arguably, that's the other vice(as though it needed more) of various OMG TOTAL SECURITY schemes: anybody chasing some Panopticon-silver-bullet scheme is likely tempted(and funding constrained) to ignore the basic, boring, highly useful, local redundancy and resilience measures that come in handy in all kinds of situations. A fire in the electrical closet would also have brought down the power during the Olympic games; but there wouldn't have been a whisper on the internet; because it would have been a mere accident. So would a zillion other misadventures of large-scale electrical wiring, most of which are entropy, accident, or laziness, not pre-planned malice.
Even if prevention of pre-planned malice actually works(possible; but debatable) isn't it better to have resilience in place that will serve you in both malice and in accident?
Does the daily mail know that you can use 3d printers and laser cutters to manufacture hoodies and knives? Monstrous!
Probably not for ec2. Less sure about Mechanical Turk, which is apparently Amazon's vision of what a 'cloud' temp agency will look like...
The trouble with protecting yourself against insiders is that you are trying to protect yourself against people who need access to do whatever it is you pay them to do. Protecting yourself against external attackers is a massive matter of practical difficulty; but at least it's a coherent objective: keep people who shouldn't have access away from access. Against insiders, virtually everything you do either reduces productivity(so you disabled USB, good thing that there are never any legitimate applications for sneakernet, right?), erodes the warm-and-fuzzy primate emotions that help keep your non-sociopaths from even wanting to hurt you(As a member of the FooCorp family, keep in mind that we log absolutely everything you do because we don't trust you at all, and those logs are just sitting in the IT office should your vindictive manager ever want to hold the five minutes you spent on personal email about your sick kid against you!) or, if you are really good at screwing it up, actually end up concentrating power among certain insiders, or creating incentives among the clueless to learn more about circumvention(Do you know how to get an entire class full of high schoolers to stop shoving geeks into lockers and start begging them for help? Block facebook.)
This isn't to say that it is impossible; but it consists of making a lot of unpleasant choices about how much pain you want to inflict on the mostly innocent in order to scare and/or catch the guilty, who may or may not exist, depending on the time and circumstances.
Exactly. If an employer is doing nothing wrong, then at least long-term, it has nothing to hide. :-D
There are still merely-self-interested insiders: It's practically a tradition for Mr. Sleazy McSales to abscond with all the customer data when he accepts a position with the competition, and his engineering counterparts to lift design docs and the like for the same purpose.
Doing good does have the advantage of reducing disillusionment among your otherwise-least-corruptable people, and helps prevent economically-irrational leaking; but you still have to worry about the merely mercenary.
What a clever jerk, come on. This green battery stuff is just more buffoonery.
I suspect that the 'green' angle is overstated, as it usually is; but exploiting naturally produced small-scale structures, when they can be made to suit our purposes, is hardly a scam. Biology is extremely good at building microscale features, in bulk, for peanuts. When we can make that work to our advantage, we gain the benefit of what would otherwise require some rather tricky and expensive fabrication.
Carnot efficiency is all about the temperature difference available to a heat engine. While you might be right in asserting that overly small ones may not be efficient this would be an engineering problem, not anything to do with good ol' Sadie's magic formula.
True. My assumption, though, is that almost any engineering advance that improves the delta-t of small, reasonably cheap and safe heat engines would likely also be applicable(possibly to even greater advantage) to large heat engines with substantial capital budgets and professional operators. This isn't a thermodynamic truth, and there could be exceptions; but I suspect that on average, improvements in small heat engines usually accrue to large ones as well, with the large ones enjoying various engineering advantages that the small ones don't.
Electronic Plantation...
"When you've decided that you no longer need an instance, you can terminate it. As soon as the status of an instance changes to shutting down or terminated, you stop incurring charges for that instance."
Have a nice day.
You can sleep easy when your *nix sysadmin has a beard like that. That's a beard you can trust.
I'm pretty sure that beard isn't merely trustworthy; but actually capable of handling routine shell scripting tasks independently of the head it is attached to.
I assume that these are boxxen, those travel in packs.
You know, it seems fairly simple to conceive of some kind of storage medium for solar energy that is cheap, easy, and environmentally sound. If only there were a way to gather up immense amounts of solar energy and store it in some medium that had a reasonably high energy density, was easy to store and cheap to maintain in storage, and where it was quite easy to extract the stored energy, that could even be stored as solid fuel. If only there were a way to easily manufacture such a fuel locally, at or near the point of consumption, and even better, without the use of harsh chemicals and boatloads of energy.
It's too bad nothing even remotely like that exists today.
Alas, the vengeful ghost of Sadie Carnot is sitting on your woodpile and whispering dark mockery of the efficiency of any heat engine small enough to fit in the places where we want electricity...
I will admit, that with a good steam engine and a few Stout Irish as stokers, my Analytical Engine does me good service; but spilling my cellphone's boiler down my collar last week was most painful.
The Olympics is a business markedly worse than most, in terms of nakedly abusive regulatory capture and overt plunder of the public who are unlucky enough to reside in its chosen location.
Just imagine the horror, the horror! The primary lights and AV systems could have gone out, forcing the audience to endure the inconvenience of use the emergency exit lighting systems that(as a new venue) would have been legally obligated to comply with the relevant portions of British Standard 5266, and possibly other similar regulations(unless some Olympic Comittee weasel bent that rule, or somebody hired G4S to handle it...)
Clearly, when a problem could either be reliably solved with some lead-acid batteries and a few LED light strips, or possibly, not guarantees solved by ubiquitous surveillance of all IP communications in, to/from, or through the United Kingdom, Our Choice Is Obvious!
Did you see the part where I mentioned it not exactly giving you the warm and fuzzies? There are basically no FOSS x86s BIOSes at all(yeah, coreboot runs on a few things, most of them old and few/none of them laptops, or you could get an OLPC from before their switch to ARM; but that's about it). As it happens, the 'AMT' stuff isn't really part of the BIOS(I'm sure there are points of integration; but they are distinct systems). It's a separate CPU, with its own firmware(never fear, it's cryptographicially signed by Intel and 100% Trustworthy(tm)!) that is active at all times the system has power(including when the computer proper is off), with the ability to piggyback on the NIC(s) for communication with the outside world, to emulate storage devices and HID events, snoop the framebuffer without assistance from the OS, and generally do useful-but-unnerving things.
I said nothing about it being FOSS(indeed, it is to Stallman's Trusted Computing Dystopia roughly what RFID is to the 'Mark of the beast', possibly not the real deal; but a very logical implementation), just that it's an example of tracking software that will survive substantially more than a simple OS re-installation.
No, there's no good Linux HW tracking software. Why? Cause there's no good software for other platforms either. It's all "make-you-feel-good-software" which doesn't survive a simple OS reinstallation...
It doesn't exactly give you the warm-and-fuzzies to know that this is possible; but some models have it baked right into the firmware. A suitably provisioned AMT 6+ device can do entertaining things like phone home and provide 'home' with an IP KVM, regardless of OS state.
I'd suspect cost.
Apparently, Corning's 'Fusion draw process' is what they use for LCD-quality glass(to avoid issues with defects on the contact side that the were having with float glass). And with that process you can get any shape you want, so long as it's a rectangular sheet. According to this interview, any shaping is done from the sheet stock, but before the ion-exchange toughening process:
"FLATOW: Why can't you - I'm sorry, why can't you make it the shape itself beforehand?
VELASQUEZ: Well, it's much cheaper, more effective, to make these large sheets of glass and then cut it later, as opposed to trying to mold - or mold from molten glass into a small part.
FLATOW: It's not having to do with maybe the glass being too tough or brittle to work with at that point?
VELASQUEZ: No, that's a good question, but we - the chemical strengthening process actually happens after our immediate customers have cut the parts down to the size, the shape of the parts."
So, if that is the case, presumably doing a dead-flat face just requires rounding off the corners a bit, possibly drilling out a speaker grille or front button(if either is within the glass area), and then calling it a day, while doing a 'watch glass' style curve would require starting with thicker sheet stock and grinding and polishing, in a shallow version of lenscrafting, which is presumably a more vexing process.
Probably doesn't help that(unless you got really fancy, selectively messing with refractive indices in parts of the face or something like that) the curved face introduces slight distortions of the image and makes the phone look thicker.
I'm not saying that these are sensible in the broad sense(especially given the number of phones I see out and about that were carefully designed and exhaustively manufactured to be slim, perfect, slabs of featureless unobtanium, which their owners promptly swaddle in garish silicone and blurry screen protectors, ending up with something substantially more expensive than, and neither much smaller nor much more attractive than, one of the less tacky discrete-faceplate designs; but that's my guess as to why it is what it is...
Why use a mirror when you can capture an image with your front-facing camera, digitise it, route it through state-of-the-art computing and image processing trips, break it into millions of pieces and feed it simultaneous to an equal number of tiny diodes.
So much simpler!
Kids these days... Don't you realize that you can just scan a mirror and set that as your background?
To be honest, what I'd really like is anti-shatter.
And what I'd really like are wings so I can fly. Just thought I'd point that out, since we aren't being realistic.
To answer you more seriously, what you are asking for just isn't something that's going to happen predictably. They can't just focus on making it anti-shatter. If it ever happens, it's going to be more or less on accident. And even then, unless it's a HUGE breakthrough, you probably wouldn't be satisfied with it. The reason I say that is because look at what we currently have. The closest you'll currently find to what you are asking for is bullet proof glass, and despite the fact that it has no real restrictions for thickness, weight, scratch resistance, or clarity, when it does take a big impact it still leaves a tremendous scar (much like a rock chipping your car's windshield).
Arguably, it isn't that 'anti-shatter' is unrealistic; but that it is unrealistic without sacrificing the other things that people want. Your old school, now-downright-shameful Nokia candybar was pretty damn shatter resistant. The screen portion of the outer shell is some sort of plastic(PC or PC+ABS, I think, don't have one in front of me), modestly thick, with a bit of curvature. The relatively soft plastic doesn't have that 'I am a slab of unobtanium carved out of the future by laser robots' thing going, and it scratches and dings pretty easily; but, if dropped, it usually just flexes a bit and dissipates most of the force harmlessly. A nontrivial gab between the outer shell and the (much more vulnerable) LCD also helps(as does the fact that, in their heyday, a replacement for a cracked/damaged faceplate was ~$5 at your local skeezy phone kiosk and could be installed by hand in seconds).
Once you impose the requirement that the material be substantially scratch/ding resistant(thus demanding a very hard material), and the phone be very thin and the screen very bright(thus, along with the touch-sense requirements, demanding that the screen be packed closely against, or fused directly to, the outer shell, and that the outer shell be dead flat, with no room for strengthening geometry or flexing, even if it were flexible) You want something maybe a mm thick, dead flat, and optimized for hardness, to survive impacts without cracking? Now that is where you get into 'serious breakthrough' territory.
My Nokia 5630 had a transflective LCD. This was always readable in the sun and even when the backlight was turned off. It works by having a partially reflecting layer between the LCD matrix and the backlight.
I really miss that feature on today's phones. I think they stopped selling this kind of displays because they look less good in the light conditions that you have in shops, since the partially reflecting layer also reflects some of the backlight.
You are probably one of those commerce-hating commies who thinks that 'Retail Thermonuclear' isn't a valid display ICC profile, and that some technobabble involving 'Hz' and 'linearity' is more important to audio performance than 'Best Buy Car Audio bootay-thump' is...
The article isn't clear on what the antimicrobial coating does, but I'd hazard a guess that it is not an antibiotic but a surface that is too slippery for bacteria to attach to. An antibiotic agent would be pretty stupid and would degrade rapidly compared to the lifetime of the device (think: ATM), as opposed to a surface where bacteria just doesn't stick.
This is an equally uninformed guess; but it could also be something similar to the Titanium dioxide photocatalytic coatings that they sell for, or bake into, certain classier construction materials.
Reasonably tough, and not 'used up'(except by sheer mechanical weathering/abrasion); but when sunlight hits them, anything vulnerable to oxidizers; be it living or dead, gets chewed up pretty brutally.
I'm not familiar with the peripheral airports, and their capabilities; but this thing has almost exactly the same wingspan as a 777. It doesn't weigh much of anything; and it isn't particularly long; but you'll need a good size runway to put it down.
I'm not saying that you would, that little anecdote was there mostly because it was rather striking when it happened(and, indeed, we were able to simply tilt the paper and pour the letters off, so we didn't exactly 'trust' the output). My point was merely that, while rare under proper conditions(and why my original post recommended toner over ink) it is certainly possible for fusing to fail.
Well, since refugee's are usually fleeing their home country the problem probably exists outside your ability to gracefully intervene. Your solutions are pretty much limited to maintaining indefinite refugee camps, shipping the refugees elsewhere (if anyone will take them), or granting them citizenship or at least work visas so they can become contributing members of their new country of residence (with all the problems that causes to the local labor markets). Or of course getting deeply mired in the internal politics of your neighbors who have already been shooting at each other for years. Not really a lot of good options there.
Oh, I'm definitely not saying that there are any good options, just questioning the wisdom of attempting to design 'temporary housing' if your actual use case ends up being north of a decade long. 'Temporary' usually comes with substantial tradeoffs(either in price, if it's the good stuff, or in quality, if it's the cheap seats). Those are generally worth it if 'permanent' or 'semi-permanent' are overqualified and overpriced/hard to remove for the job because you are only expecting people to be staying for a week, or six months, or whatever. If your realistic timescale is actually ten years, solving the problem with 'temporary' gear probably means you'll end up solving it three or four times over(if you are lucky) and having everybody living in squalid, leaky tents the whole time.
My(intended, I may have expressed it poorly) point was not so much 'If people are spending 10 years in refugee camps, UN=fail, shape up!"; but "If TFA says that the average stay is 12 years, shouldn't the design effort be focused not on incrementally improved 6-month tents; but split into 'short', 'medium' and 'long' SKUs, possibly with 'long' being not a set of modular buildings to be shipped in; but some sort of on-site mud-brickulator machinery(along the lines of some subset of the global village construction set)? Or, alternately, some attempt to design a short-term system that, either through addition of parts, or cannibalized for parts, has a smoother upgrade path than contemporary short-term designs do."
I'd imagine that there is a strong incentive for everyone involved to pretend that any given situation is purely temporary, it'll be over shortly; but I suspect that maintaining that illusion might be leading to sub-optimal allocation of resources and design efforts that are aiming at the wrong goals.
It can actually be a risk, if the fuser doesn't get the toner hot enough, long enough, to fully infiltrate the paper(without burning it, obviously, which is presumably what drives conservatism on that score).
Very high humidity at print time can be a problem: It's rarely this dramatic; but I've seen a few cases where paper, left unattended and non climate controlled through a ghastly humid summer, to the point where it starts to get vaguely limp, billowing steam as it passed through the fuser stage. An interesting spectacle; but, needless to say, not good for adhesion(the characters themselves, while delicate, were largely intact, and could be poured off the paper), since the enthalpy of vaporization of water was sinking significant heat at point of contact. Sometimes the classier laser printers have humidity sensors in the print path to compensate; but air conditioning still isn't a bad idea, if only for the poor humans.