I don't understand what aspects, exactly, of the "magsafe" connector Apple actually possess exclusive rights to.
Deep fat fryers, possibly among other appliances, have been using magnetic breakaway cords for decades to avoid the hazards associated with people snagging cords and being rewarded with a hot oil bath. Surely, using this principle in DC cabling can't qualify as novel...
I'm not going to say that it was good; because it was "built right down to price" back when good hardware cost a lot more than it does today; but the Geode's virtualized hardware was actually rather clever.
It's a sordid tale going back to the Cyrix MediaGX(a cost and heat-optimized cutdown of the already cheap-seats Cyrix 6x86 line). The MediaGX creatively abused x86 System Management Mode to emulate the presence of a hardware VGA and sound card that did not actually exist. Working in concert with a specially modified BIOS, the chip would drop into SMM whenever the VGA or sound hardware was supposed to be active, do the job on the CPU, and then pop back into normal execution mode. The fake VGA also used system memory rather than dedicated video RAM, just to keep things even cheaper.
You have to admire the pluck and creativity of this approach; but not the performance it resulted in.
When Cyrix was sold to National Semiconductor(their designs went to Nat Semi, their trademarks to VIA), the MediaGX became the National Semiconductor GeodeGXm. Traces of the MediaGX design persisted through the GXLV and GX1. The GX2 might have been a clean break.
Then AMD took over. They issued the GeodeGX and GeodeLX, both of which were direct descendants of the National Semiconductor designs, though the LX was speed boosted a fair bit. Because this was insufficiently confusing, the GeodeNX appeared, which was derived from the Athlon XP-M. To complete the confusion, the GeodeNX 2001 was, in fact, just an Athlon 2200+ with a different label.
A few reasons: With Geode, you have your choice between the two main branches of the family: the original Geodes, descendants of the embedded x86 line that AMD bought from National Semiconductor; and the AMD-designed Geode, which is basically their 32 bit athlon design with some modifications to make it embedding friendly.
The first are genuinely low power and heavily integrated; but those suckers are slow. The second are pretty zippy by embedded standards; but only low-power by the standards of the desktop/laptop athlons they were derived from(ie. not very). Neither is an especially compelling choice. The former is slow enough that x86 compatibility doesn't really help you in the consumer market(virtually nothing remotely modern will run fast enough, and if you are going to roll a custom ultra-zippy OS and application suite, x86 isn't a huge feature) and the latter is power hungry enough that you can't really get it into anything smaller than a netbook(where, if it weren't for the fact that it tends to get paired with a fucking SiS chipset, it would actually be OK).
Second, "ARM" gets to piggiback on development work done for contemporary high-end smartphones. The board going into a "smartbook" will be virtually identical to that going into a high end smartphone, just with a bigger screen, battery, and keyboard, and quite possibly some bumped clock speeds made possible by the larger battery and greater heat-dissipation capacity of the form factor.
"Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include —
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work."
Let's see, here. I feel a little queasy describing anything related to political campaigning as "educational"; but it could definitely fall under "criticism, comment, news reporting".
The "copyrighted work" in question was a candidate's platform website, intended for broad public distribution in order to promote that candidate. Not something whose value would be decreased by broader distribution, unlike a commercial book, film, or CD. The fact that it is now embarrassing is too fucking bad and(if anything) increases the strength of the fair use "criticism, comment, news reporting" angle.
Amount and substantiality: Ok, I can see a case here. Things like the stock patriotic clip-art and site design elements(unless specifically part of the overall criticism or commentary) might well not be fair use.
Effect upon the market for or value of: This is a funny one: being a noncommercial advertisement, spread as widely as possible by its creator at no cost, there is obviously no loss of "market or value" in the sense that a book, movie, or CD would suffer such a loss; but, if the "criticism, comment, and news reporting" makes the candidate look like a fucking nutjob, it arguably reduces the value of their advertising. One hopes, though, for the sake of free speech and press, that the court would spit on such an argument.
Now, everybody knows that Ticketmaster is evil, ruthless, money-grubbing, and generally a suppurating pustule on the face of live music and events. It would be totally in character to tie tickets to purchases to "protect consumers from those evil scalpers"(and themselves from the horrors of the secondary market...)
However, making it impossible to purchase tickets for somebody else is just leaving money on the table. It seems like it would be absurdly trivial to have a system where the customer/hapless sucker can purchase a ticket and either tie it to their own name or immediately tie it to some other name(the bearer of which would need to then prove using state ID of some sort). For kiddie stuff, you could tie to 1 or 2 parents/guardians, since a child might not have ID.
That wouldn't substantially reduce the "security" of the system, nor would it spare the secondary market to any useful degree; but it would allow gifting, and thus presumably increase sales. Why wouldn't they have done that ages ago?
My understanding is that detection of the write-protect switch state is up to the drive. I am told(and a quick acetone teardown just confirmed, that the SD card circuit board has no knowledge of the state of that switch. There is a little notch in the circuit board to accommodate the plastic part; but no switch or sensors on the board in that area. The reader has to have a switch or optointerrupter to detect the write-protect state. The good ones certainly do; but it's a fairly safe assumption that the cheap seats save a couple of pennies by just reporting everything as readable and skipping the detector hardware...
What I don't know(and it might well vary by reader, the official "SD" specs are closed; but I'm sure that between OSS reverse engineering efforts and simple illegal duplication of the official spec, a lot of the cheapy readers are implementing a not-technically-licenced "good enough" version of the spec), is whether the reader enforces the write-protect state in hardware, or whether it just sends a polite message up the chain "dear sir, this device wishes not to be written upon."
The further complicating factor is that some "SD readers" are actual SD host devices. They need their own drivers, they support SDIO cards, etc. Others, perhaps the vast majority, are SD host devices that support only memory cards and present themselves as USB Mass Storage Class devices. In the latter case, one would expect that a USB-MSC "SD reader" with a write protected SD card in it would behave exactly as would a USB thumb drive with the write protect switch flipped. In the former case, it would be more likely(though not certain), that "write protection" would be handled by a polite message to the driver.
The problem for the TSA, in the hypothetical instances that I suggested, is not whether or not the posts are positive. I see no reason to pay people to post one way or the other on the clock; but would frown on any off-the-clock restrictions.
The problem is what patronizing sites like that suggests about the TSA staff in question. If you are a pseudo-law-enforcement division with delusions of power and strong public presumption of incompetence, the public has every reason to be concerned by evidence that you have nests of White Power enthusiasts, muslim radicals, or both on staff. Either suggests that your staffing standards really aren't up to the requirements of your organizational goals.
I know of no formal study; but hydrogen diffuses through stuff with all the enthusiasm you'd expect from such a tiny atom, so I would assume inflation time would be worse.
This was another case where the industrial designers beat the engineers. The engineers wanted a proximity sensor that responded to faces. The industrial designers wanted a proximity detector that responded to beautiful, serene, or uncharacteristically creative faces... No problems were encountered during testing.
"Surgical Fires". Less comedic than the name would suggest. Estimates suggest that there are about 550 a year in the US, generally in situations where relatively high concentrations of oxygen are around to turn a mistake into an inferno with unusual speed; but alcohol disinfectants and assorted electrical gear tend to show up on culprit lists as well...
There certainly is a moral element; but helium is a very special case, virtually unique among the elements of human relevance.
Once it hits the atmosphere, it is inert enough not to combine with anything and light enough to diffuse into space. Game over. No mining the garbage dumps for this one. The only "recycling" that occurs is that in the sense that, if a piece of hardware hasn't been breached, you can remove the helium it contains before decommissioning it.
The only earthly source of the stuff is assorted alpha-emitting radioactives, since an alpha particle is just a helium nucleus in need of electrons. Very slow. The only viable sources are places where it has had millions of years to be trapped underground, often with natural gas deposits. Once those are tapped out, we wait until some more alpha emitters decay.
Helium also has some unique properties. There are other inert gasses(nitrogen is inert enough for many purposes, argon is even more so and doesn't float into space), there are other lift gasses(hydrogen, hot air); but if you want very cold fluids, liquid helium is it. Game over. Nothing better available. Hope you guys can figure out high-temp superconductors that don't quench at trivial magnetic field strengths before you run out...
Virtually every other element or chemical of which we might "run out" we actually mean "run out of really inexpensive supplies". They also tend to be recyclable(in the case of elements and some chemicals) or synthesizable(if you have the energy), and they stay within our gravity well pretty much no matter what you do.
Unless the hydrogen cylinder is slowly leaking into an enclosed room, it is basically as harmless as the helium one.
Hydrogen will give a reasonably zesty(but ever so eco-friendly) explosion if mixed with oxygen in an enclosed space in the right concentrations; but, being less dense than air, tends to just float away unless well enclosed. Plus, at ~atmospheric pressure, H2 has crap energy density, so it is way less dangerous than larger hydrocarbon gasses and liquids.
While I am somewhat skeptical of a lot of the take-over-artistry that goes on, regardless of industry sector(there seem to be a number of places where, under the right circumstances, you can make substantial money by causing even more destruction that gets externalized in various clever legal-but-slimy ways. Any circumstances that encourage the best and brightest in finance to act as, in essence, high class smash-and-grab thieves is pathological any way you slice it.) I find the tech takeovers introduce an extra complication:
Software maintenance and development is Hard. Much ink has been spilled on the Best Practices of doing it; but a lot of firms are still just barely hanging on. Any disruption to their development process or roadmap can set them back months or years. Since, in many cases, the point of doing a tech acquisition is to offer a "total package" or a "solution" or a "suite" this means that, in addition to all the institutional and job-loss shakeups, you suddenly have two or more development teams, each bringing its own nasty legacy baggage to the party, trying to mash their products into some sort of "integrated solution".
At best, this is an evolutionary process. Over a period of time, they manage to evolve the products toward one another and eventually end up with something nice and coherent and refactored so forth. More commonly, major differences and glaring integration issues persist longer than the customer would like, and niggling little oddities persist for years. Sometimes, some mental giant decides to solve the hard problem of legacy by throwing one of the products away(generally the one that isn't his baby) and re-writing it from scratch in the idioms of the other product. Hello major feature and stability regressions...
We use Altiris some at work, and they were recently aquired by Symantec *scary background music plays* who has embarked on the "rewrite virtually from scratch" path. They have some sort of pie-in-the-sky vision of a "Symantec Total Endpoint Management Solution"; but, until they get that working, their support for the last pre-takeover version has gone to shit and the N+1 version has massive feature regressions, including stuff we use all the time, all over the place, and is thus unusable to us. Unless they get their act together fast, we may be forced to bail entirely. Win7 finally has something resembling adequate first-party imaging and deployment features, and there are other tools, including some OSS, for system inventory and remote control....
I think that might be Qualcomm's "BREW", running on its own RTOS, along with Motorola's... er... unique insights into user interface design(if you are really lucky, you are one of the people for whom the UI was a joint project between Motorola and Verizon...)
QT isn't an OS, so saying that they are "switching to QT" is indeed wrong; but saying "Symbian" has, traditionally, implied much more about the UI, widget set, and preferred programming languages than saying "Linux" has. S60, UIQ, and MOAP are all closely tied to Symbian, and all pretty different from QT, though they cover much of the same ground, so the QT switch means that a lot of the guts of those are headed for the cutting room floor.
Symbian/QT is about as similar to prior Symbian+UI/PIM layer iterations as Android is to a traditional Linux setup(possibly less so, actually, because virtually everything but the native X support is still there behind the scenes with Android, you just can't see it without some poking).
"Nine times out of ten it's an electric razor, but every once in a while... it's a dildo. Of course it's company policy never to, imply ownership in the event of a dildo... always use the indefinite article a dildo, never your dildo."
That is usually part of the rationale for the inclusion of categories like "controversial" and "hate/violence" in institutional filterware. If somebody discovers posts from an employee, timestamped during working hours, somewhere legal-but-unsavory you have just entered the world of extremely embarrassing bad PR. This is true in corporate, and probably goes double(or more) for the TSA.
You block porn because it's a timesucker, because it has some cool malware, and because if that creepy guy in sales is masturbating audibly you are probably going to get a pile of harassment lawsuits.
You block personals/dating/facebook/myspace/etc. because they are massive timesuckers(and for a broader demographic than porn) and can inject an extra dose of ghastly interpersonal drama if you aren't lucky.
Gambling, again, timesucker/malware.
Can you imagine the hell that some bumbling middle-manager would be made to pay if some TSA flunky turned out to be posting on stormfront.org or revolutionmuslim.com during working hours? It would be an utter no-win. Porn, at least, is treated as a basically apolitical symptom of waste and incompetence. Having to say, with a straight face, that the "racial realists" on staff definitely aren't contributing to an even more hostile flying atmosphere for anybody darker than hitler; or attempting to claim that that yours must be the friendly and apolitical islam enthusiasts would be difficult and probably career-limiting. Given the size, and low standards, of the TSA, it is pretty much 100% that there is at least one of each(though probably skewed a bit toward the "shallow end of the white supremacist gene pool, which is why I'm dressed as a rentacop and harassing people about carry-on liquids" side). I'm wholly unsurprised that TSA management doesn't want anything politically embarrassing to happen during work hours.
The TSA just implemented some off-the-shelf web filtering proxy product, presumably to try to claw back some productivity from their ill-trained, ill-motivated, and generally unimpressive staff.
That list of bland, boilerplate categories just screams "generic-filterware". I'm not 100% positive which; but it sounds a lot like websense.
Don't get me wrong, the TSA is a boil on the ass of the body politic; but the fact that their cube drones are now being subjected to the same online annoyances as cube drones in thousands of other corporate, educational, and government setups strikes me as a matter of absolutely no relevance to my rights(except in that, if the TSA employees are forced to do less porn surfing, they might get some work done, and their work would probably damage my rights somehow).
The one really annoying thing, with some of the especially cheap-seats implementations, is that the RF protocol is so insecure that multiple units from the same manufacturer in moderate proximity(within a couple rooms of each other) will start accidentally dropping input into the wrong receiver from time to time. One second, you are fine. The next moment, something goes wrong and you are having sentences from the email the guy two doors down is writing dumped into your presentation.
Until somebody puts together a kit, on the difficultly level of the TV-B-Gone, the security implications really aren't that exciting, for the sorts of environments that allow you to plug random wireless USB shit into their computers, compared to the risks posed by other common threats(once every malicious kid and disgruntled employee with 30 bucks can press a "drop prebuilt 'all kinds of mixed nasties' payload" button and hit every system with an active receiver within 100 meters, things get more exciting). The fact that some of these things can't even tolerate multiple users in the same wing of a building, though, is both pathetic and inconvenient.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand what aspects, exactly, of the "magsafe" connector Apple actually possess exclusive rights to.
Deep fat fryers, possibly among other appliances, have been using magnetic breakaway cords for decades to avoid the hazards associated with people snagging cords and being rewarded with a hot oil bath. Surely, using this principle in DC cabling can't qualify as novel...
Is it the palendromic, connect-either-way bit?
I'm not going to say that it was good; because it was "built right down to price" back when good hardware cost a lot more than it does today; but the Geode's virtualized hardware was actually rather clever.
It's a sordid tale going back to the Cyrix MediaGX(a cost and heat-optimized cutdown of the already cheap-seats Cyrix 6x86 line). The MediaGX creatively abused x86 System Management Mode to emulate the presence of a hardware VGA and sound card that did not actually exist. Working in concert with a specially modified BIOS, the chip would drop into SMM whenever the VGA or sound hardware was supposed to be active, do the job on the CPU, and then pop back into normal execution mode. The fake VGA also used system memory rather than dedicated video RAM, just to keep things even cheaper.
You have to admire the pluck and creativity of this approach; but not the performance it resulted in.
When Cyrix was sold to National Semiconductor(their designs went to Nat Semi, their trademarks to VIA), the MediaGX became the National Semiconductor GeodeGXm. Traces of the MediaGX design persisted through the GXLV and GX1. The GX2 might have been a clean break.
Then AMD took over. They issued the GeodeGX and GeodeLX, both of which were direct descendants of the National Semiconductor designs, though the LX was speed boosted a fair bit. Because this was insufficiently confusing, the GeodeNX appeared, which was derived from the Athlon XP-M. To complete the confusion, the GeodeNX 2001 was, in fact, just an Athlon 2200+ with a different label.
Yeah, duplicating the site verbatim, especially irrelevant-but-definitely-protected stuff like graphic design, is a major dose of stupid here.
A few reasons: With Geode, you have your choice between the two main branches of the family: the original Geodes, descendants of the embedded x86 line that AMD bought from National Semiconductor; and the AMD-designed Geode, which is basically their 32 bit athlon design with some modifications to make it embedding friendly.
The first are genuinely low power and heavily integrated; but those suckers are slow. The second are pretty zippy by embedded standards; but only low-power by the standards of the desktop/laptop athlons they were derived from(ie. not very). Neither is an especially compelling choice. The former is slow enough that x86 compatibility doesn't really help you in the consumer market(virtually nothing remotely modern will run fast enough, and if you are going to roll a custom ultra-zippy OS and application suite, x86 isn't a huge feature) and the latter is power hungry enough that you can't really get it into anything smaller than a netbook(where, if it weren't for the fact that it tends to get paired with a fucking SiS chipset, it would actually be OK).
Second, "ARM" gets to piggiback on development work done for contemporary high-end smartphones. The board going into a "smartbook" will be virtually identical to that going into a high end smartphone, just with a bigger screen, battery, and keyboard, and quite possibly some bumped clock speeds made possible by the larger battery and greater heat-dissipation capacity of the form factor.
"Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include —
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work."
Let's see, here. I feel a little queasy describing anything related to political campaigning as "educational"; but it could definitely fall under "criticism, comment, news reporting".
The "copyrighted work" in question was a candidate's platform website, intended for broad public distribution in order to promote that candidate. Not something whose value would be decreased by broader distribution, unlike a commercial book, film, or CD. The fact that it is now embarrassing is too fucking bad and(if anything) increases the strength of the fair use "criticism, comment, news reporting" angle.
Amount and substantiality: Ok, I can see a case here. Things like the stock patriotic clip-art and site design elements(unless specifically part of the overall criticism or commentary) might well not be fair use.
Effect upon the market for or value of: This is a funny one: being a noncommercial advertisement, spread as widely as possible by its creator at no cost, there is obviously no loss of "market or value" in the sense that a book, movie, or CD would suffer such a loss; but, if the "criticism, comment, and news reporting" makes the candidate look like a fucking nutjob, it arguably reduces the value of their advertising. One hopes, though, for the sake of free speech and press, that the court would spit on such an argument.
Now, everybody knows that Ticketmaster is evil, ruthless, money-grubbing, and generally a suppurating pustule on the face of live music and events. It would be totally in character to tie tickets to purchases to "protect consumers from those evil scalpers"(and themselves from the horrors of the secondary market...)
However, making it impossible to purchase tickets for somebody else is just leaving money on the table. It seems like it would be absurdly trivial to have a system where the customer/hapless sucker can purchase a ticket and either tie it to their own name or immediately tie it to some other name(the bearer of which would need to then prove using state ID of some sort). For kiddie stuff, you could tie to 1 or 2 parents/guardians, since a child might not have ID.
That wouldn't substantially reduce the "security" of the system, nor would it spare the secondary market to any useful degree; but it would allow gifting, and thus presumably increase sales. Why wouldn't they have done that ages ago?
My understanding is that detection of the write-protect switch state is up to the drive. I am told(and a quick acetone teardown just confirmed, that the SD card circuit board has no knowledge of the state of that switch. There is a little notch in the circuit board to accommodate the plastic part; but no switch or sensors on the board in that area. The reader has to have a switch or optointerrupter to detect the write-protect state. The good ones certainly do; but it's a fairly safe assumption that the cheap seats save a couple of pennies by just reporting everything as readable and skipping the detector hardware...
What I don't know(and it might well vary by reader, the official "SD" specs are closed; but I'm sure that between OSS reverse engineering efforts and simple illegal duplication of the official spec, a lot of the cheapy readers are implementing a not-technically-licenced "good enough" version of the spec), is whether the reader enforces the write-protect state in hardware, or whether it just sends a polite message up the chain "dear sir, this device wishes not to be written upon."
The further complicating factor is that some "SD readers" are actual SD host devices. They need their own drivers, they support SDIO cards, etc. Others, perhaps the vast majority, are SD host devices that support only memory cards and present themselves as USB Mass Storage Class devices. In the latter case, one would expect that a USB-MSC "SD reader" with a write protected SD card in it would behave exactly as would a USB thumb drive with the write protect switch flipped. In the former case, it would be more likely(though not certain), that "write protection" would be handled by a polite message to the driver.
The problem for the TSA, in the hypothetical instances that I suggested, is not whether or not the posts are positive. I see no reason to pay people to post one way or the other on the clock; but would frown on any off-the-clock restrictions.
The problem is what patronizing sites like that suggests about the TSA staff in question. If you are a pseudo-law-enforcement division with delusions of power and strong public presumption of incompetence, the public has every reason to be concerned by evidence that you have nests of White Power enthusiasts, muslim radicals, or both on staff. Either suggests that your staffing standards really aren't up to the requirements of your organizational goals.
I know of no formal study; but hydrogen diffuses through stuff with all the enthusiasm you'd expect from such a tiny atom, so I would assume inflation time would be worse.
This was another case where the industrial designers beat the engineers. The engineers wanted a proximity sensor that responded to faces. The industrial designers wanted a proximity detector that responded to beautiful, serene, or uncharacteristically creative faces... No problems were encountered during testing.
"Surgical Fires". Less comedic than the name would suggest. Estimates suggest that there are about 550 a year in the US, generally in situations where relatively high concentrations of oxygen are around to turn a mistake into an inferno with unusual speed; but alcohol disinfectants and assorted electrical gear tend to show up on culprit lists as well...
"Oh the Humanity!"
Yeah, the overlap between common aircraft dopes and "really flammable shit" is an unfortunate one.
Assuming you just use mylar or something, you probably won't be Hindenberging in the living room quite as often...
There certainly is a moral element; but helium is a very special case, virtually unique among the elements of human relevance.
Once it hits the atmosphere, it is inert enough not to combine with anything and light enough to diffuse into space. Game over. No mining the garbage dumps for this one. The only "recycling" that occurs is that in the sense that, if a piece of hardware hasn't been breached, you can remove the helium it contains before decommissioning it.
The only earthly source of the stuff is assorted alpha-emitting radioactives, since an alpha particle is just a helium nucleus in need of electrons. Very slow. The only viable sources are places where it has had millions of years to be trapped underground, often with natural gas deposits. Once those are tapped out, we wait until some more alpha emitters decay.
Helium also has some unique properties. There are other inert gasses(nitrogen is inert enough for many purposes, argon is even more so and doesn't float into space), there are other lift gasses(hydrogen, hot air); but if you want very cold fluids, liquid helium is it. Game over. Nothing better available. Hope you guys can figure out high-temp superconductors that don't quench at trivial magnetic field strengths before you run out...
Virtually every other element or chemical of which we might "run out" we actually mean "run out of really inexpensive supplies". They also tend to be recyclable(in the case of elements and some chemicals) or synthesizable(if you have the energy), and they stay within our gravity well pretty much no matter what you do.
Best case, being outside of our puny little gravity well tends to add 4 or 5 zeros to the terrestrial price....
Not to mention the use of superconducting(and thus typically liquid helium cooled) magnets in medical diagnostic imaging and medical research.
No helium, No MRIs.
Unless the hydrogen cylinder is slowly leaking into an enclosed room, it is basically as harmless as the helium one.
Hydrogen will give a reasonably zesty(but ever so eco-friendly) explosion if mixed with oxygen in an enclosed space in the right concentrations; but, being less dense than air, tends to just float away unless well enclosed. Plus, at ~atmospheric pressure, H2 has crap energy density, so it is way less dangerous than larger hydrocarbon gasses and liquids.
While I am somewhat skeptical of a lot of the take-over-artistry that goes on, regardless of industry sector(there seem to be a number of places where, under the right circumstances, you can make substantial money by causing even more destruction that gets externalized in various clever legal-but-slimy ways. Any circumstances that encourage the best and brightest in finance to act as, in essence, high class smash-and-grab thieves is pathological any way you slice it.) I find the tech takeovers introduce an extra complication:
Software maintenance and development is Hard. Much ink has been spilled on the Best Practices of doing it; but a lot of firms are still just barely hanging on. Any disruption to their development process or roadmap can set them back months or years. Since, in many cases, the point of doing a tech acquisition is to offer a "total package" or a "solution" or a "suite" this means that, in addition to all the institutional and job-loss shakeups, you suddenly have two or more development teams, each bringing its own nasty legacy baggage to the party, trying to mash their products into some sort of "integrated solution".
At best, this is an evolutionary process. Over a period of time, they manage to evolve the products toward one another and eventually end up with something nice and coherent and refactored so forth. More commonly, major differences and glaring integration issues persist longer than the customer would like, and niggling little oddities persist for years. Sometimes, some mental giant decides to solve the hard problem of legacy by throwing one of the products away(generally the one that isn't his baby) and re-writing it from scratch in the idioms of the other product. Hello major feature and stability regressions...
We use Altiris some at work, and they were recently aquired by Symantec *scary background music plays* who has embarked on the "rewrite virtually from scratch" path. They have some sort of pie-in-the-sky vision of a "Symantec Total Endpoint Management Solution"; but, until they get that working, their support for the last pre-takeover version has gone to shit and the N+1 version has massive feature regressions, including stuff we use all the time, all over the place, and is thus unusable to us. Unless they get their act together fast, we may be forced to bail entirely. Win7 finally has something resembling adequate first-party imaging and deployment features, and there are other tools, including some OSS, for system inventory and remote control....
Why can't we use people in prison for low level cheap phone centers?
Because cruel and unusual punishment is unconstitutional...
I think that might be Qualcomm's "BREW", running on its own RTOS, along with Motorola's... er... unique insights into user interface design(if you are really lucky, you are one of the people for whom the UI was a joint project between Motorola and Verizon...)
Neither of you are entirely right.
QT isn't an OS, so saying that they are "switching to QT" is indeed wrong; but saying "Symbian" has, traditionally, implied much more about the UI, widget set, and preferred programming languages than saying "Linux" has. S60, UIQ, and MOAP are all closely tied to Symbian, and all pretty different from QT, though they cover much of the same ground, so the QT switch means that a lot of the guts of those are headed for the cutting room floor.
Symbian/QT is about as similar to prior Symbian+UI/PIM layer iterations as Android is to a traditional Linux setup(possibly less so, actually, because virtually everything but the native X support is still there behind the scenes with Android, you just can't see it without some poking).
"Nine times out of ten it's an electric razor, but every once in a while... it's a dildo. Of course it's company policy never to, imply ownership in the event of a dildo... always use the indefinite article a dildo, never your dildo."
That is usually part of the rationale for the inclusion of categories like "controversial" and "hate/violence" in institutional filterware. If somebody discovers posts from an employee, timestamped during working hours, somewhere legal-but-unsavory you have just entered the world of extremely embarrassing bad PR. This is true in corporate, and probably goes double(or more) for the TSA.
You block porn because it's a timesucker, because it has some cool malware, and because if that creepy guy in sales is masturbating audibly you are probably going to get a pile of harassment lawsuits.
You block personals/dating/facebook/myspace/etc. because they are massive timesuckers(and for a broader demographic than porn) and can inject an extra dose of ghastly interpersonal drama if you aren't lucky.
Gambling, again, timesucker/malware.
Can you imagine the hell that some bumbling middle-manager would be made to pay if some TSA flunky turned out to be posting on stormfront.org or revolutionmuslim.com during working hours? It would be an utter no-win. Porn, at least, is treated as a basically apolitical symptom of waste and incompetence. Having to say, with a straight face, that the "racial realists" on staff definitely aren't contributing to an even more hostile flying atmosphere for anybody darker than hitler; or attempting to claim that that yours must be the friendly and apolitical islam enthusiasts would be difficult and probably career-limiting. Given the size, and low standards, of the TSA, it is pretty much 100% that there is at least one of each(though probably skewed a bit toward the "shallow end of the white supremacist gene pool, which is why I'm dressed as a rentacop and harassing people about carry-on liquids" side). I'm wholly unsurprised that TSA management doesn't want anything politically embarrassing to happen during work hours.
The TSA just implemented some off-the-shelf web filtering proxy product, presumably to try to claw back some productivity from their ill-trained, ill-motivated, and generally unimpressive staff.
That list of bland, boilerplate categories just screams "generic-filterware". I'm not 100% positive which; but it sounds a lot like websense.
Don't get me wrong, the TSA is a boil on the ass of the body politic; but the fact that their cube drones are now being subjected to the same online annoyances as cube drones in thousands of other corporate, educational, and government setups strikes me as a matter of absolutely no relevance to my rights(except in that, if the TSA employees are forced to do less porn surfing, they might get some work done, and their work would probably damage my rights somehow).
Compared to much of the rest of the stuff that we filed under "keeping the Reds in line" nuking the moon would be downright humanitarian...
The one really annoying thing, with some of the especially cheap-seats implementations, is that the RF protocol is so insecure that multiple units from the same manufacturer in moderate proximity(within a couple rooms of each other) will start accidentally dropping input into the wrong receiver from time to time. One second, you are fine. The next moment, something goes wrong and you are having sentences from the email the guy two doors down is writing dumped into your presentation.
Until somebody puts together a kit, on the difficultly level of the TV-B-Gone, the security implications really aren't that exciting, for the sorts of environments that allow you to plug random wireless USB shit into their computers, compared to the risks posed by other common threats(once every malicious kid and disgruntled employee with 30 bucks can press a "drop prebuilt 'all kinds of mixed nasties' payload" button and hit every system with an active receiver within 100 meters, things get more exciting). The fact that some of these things can't even tolerate multiple users in the same wing of a building, though, is both pathetic and inconvenient.