Have you ever rented a home? By your logic, you have no expectation of privacy in a rented property or hotel room. You might be interested to know that it's already well established that (outside of television) your landlord can't even consent to a police search of your property, unless they meet the normal requirements for such consent such as if they also live there. Your email being stored on a server is like that, you're renting the space from the server owner, according to the terms they set forth when you signed up for the account.
Although I agree that e-mail providers should require warrants to release e-mail to any government agency, there really is a big difference between the two examples you cite.
The term "house" is specifically used in the text of the 4th Amendment, and courts have basically ruled that this term refers to your home, whether that's a building you own or a single room in a shared apartment...essentially your "personal living space", where a polite person would be required to ask permission to enter. On the other hand, the e-mail on the server is no different from you giving your personal papers to any random third party, mostly regardless of the relationship, with a few exceptions.
One of these exceptions would be your lawyer, so a solution to the e-mail search issue might be for you to pay the e-mail provider a retainer to be your legal counsel. Then, the effect is that you are storing your correspondence with your lawyer, and that should give you the privacy of lawyer/client privilege. The e-mail provider would, of course, have to have a lawyer who is licensed to practice law in your state for this to have a chance of being valid.
Netflix is unlikely to charge your production for "a set burning down in Botswana". What other advantages are there to working with them? Disadvantages?
Nicely working 64-bit version which enables to use 4+GB Ram (in XP 32bit with 4GB and 512 MB VGA the system could use 2.7GB).
XP had 64-bit version but it didn't work that well, especially the driver support was lacking.
I'm typing this on an XP64 machine with 12GB of RAM. I've had no problems with drivers with the exception of allowing connection to my Android phone in "sync" mode, which really isn't much of a loss. I can play Blu-Ray discs, any game that doesn't require DirectX 10/11, use a wide variety of USB devices (including USB 3.0), and pretty much any other piece of hardware that I want. This install is about 4-1/2 years old, so it pre-dates Windows 7 by over a year.
Surprisingly, the one thing that Windows 7 does do that I really would like (and that nobody ever seems to mention) is having built-in TRIM support for SSDs. I can work around it, but it would be nice to have it automatic.
And how does she get updates to Flash, Java and other programs that have their own updater program that require intervention by a user with and Administrator login?
Without administrator privileges, it's not as important to update these often, as the damage that an unpatched flaw can do is not as great.
But, Flash and Java have services that can do the updates without any user intervention at all. There are also programs that can do this for any arbitrary application, although you would have to configure them once for the specific apps installed on the machine.
The real answer is that if the user is stupid enough that you can't give them any administrator access because they will run "see the pretty kitties.exe", then you have to treat them the same way as many companies do, and restrict what they can do. Install an HTTP proxy and force them to use it, restrict the programs they can run through group policy, etc.
Even scarier for the TV networks is the reason that TV ownership has dropped - more and more YOUNG PEOPLE don't want and/or need them.
I suspect this really is just a wild-assed guess by the author of the article you reference, as the entire drop listed could easily be because of the downturn in the economy. But, it really doesn't matter, as having a TV in your home isn't as important a statistic as whether you watch TV in your home.
In the US, a TV is defined as a device with a display and a tuner, so if you connect your cable box to a computer monitor, you don't have a "TV", even though you can "watch TV" as people defined it before. Likewise, the HDHomeRun isn't a TV, but it allows you to "watch TV" on your computer.
To clarify...keep in mind you are not so much accessing CONTENT, as you are an ANTENNA! That's the key point of this right there. You're accessing an ANTENNA that is exclusively YOURS, and sending its signal to your video device. The internet is simply playing the role of the coaxial cable.
You are also paying for at least one ATSC tuner that is exclusively yours, because sharing those would also be a legal problem, since it would mean that the "same signal" might have been sent to two different subscribers.
I really don't see how any VC thought this would make money, as the upfront costs per customer of antenna and tuner are at least 6 months of subscription, plus the need for 15Mbps per customer in bandwidth. Add in normal costs of employees (customer support, technicians, etc.) plus the lawsuits (which they had to know were coming) and I can't see them ever turning a profit.
If they already provide a free over-the-air signal, in order to be available to the most viewers (and therefore to the most advertising targets), isn't another company extending that viewer base at no expense to Fox, Univision, CBS, NBC, ABC a *benefit* to them?
It's worse than that, as Fox, CBS, NBC, and ABC (the "big 4") all get paid by cable/satellite providers for the right to carry their signal. Granted, this money only goes to the network for the "owned & operated" stations, but that's still most of the US population, as all the networks have O&O stations in the largest DMAs (New York, LA, Chicago, etc.).
For OTA stations owned by other companies, they negotiate their own carriage fees, but it pretty much means that every major OTA channel on cable/satellite is getting money from the provider for carriage.
When they say "subscription model", they mean convert to the current pay-TV system where they would receive a monthly affiliate fee from your cable provider on your behalf. Hence, you automatically become a subscriber and some of your cable bill will get diverted to them.
Pretty much every major network station in every DMA already gets these fees from cable and satellite providers.
The regs allow the station to invoke "must carry" and force a cable/satellite provider to carry the station, but if the station does this, they can't ask for a fee. Instead, they basically hold the provider hostage by requiring a fee for carriage. For "the big 4", this pretty much forces a provider to accept the station's terms if there is any choice for provider in the market.
This money is huge compared to revenues from commercials, and is an income stream that basically didn't exist 20 years ago. This is why OTA stations are worried about "cord cutters" who drop their cable subscription and go back to using an antenna. Since Aereo is a service that makes using an antenna easier (in that you don't have to install your own), OTA stations don't like it.
I don't think that Aereo is a sustainable service, though, as they claim to have a separate antenna for each subscriber. No matter how you design an antenna, they need to be large enough to handle the longest wavelength you want to receive, and there's only so much folding of the elements that will still allow reception. This pretty much means that about 8" square is the absolute minimum size for US HDTV. For 10,000 subscribers, you'd need 4,000 square feet of vertical surface to attach to, which is about the entire non-window surface of one side of an average seven-story building.
Although you might be able to rent such space (maybe use billboards, which are cheap), the problem is that you have to plan for this sort of expansion early, since all the antennas need to feed tuners that are connected to the Internet. This means they need to be close to a very high speed connection, as it's not uncommon to see 10Mbps for a single HD sub-channel. For just 100 subscribers, that's a 1Gbps connection. And, the whole point of Aereo is that they can't combine or alter the signal, since that would be considered a "re-transmission", and require the OTA channel to give consent.
I'm pretty sure most broadcast licenses from the require that the content to not be encrypted.
Mostly. The regs basically say that a 480i unencrypted signal would suffice for keeping the license. This could be done in about 3Mbps, leaving nearly 16Mbps for encrypted content.
The OTA stations that are affliated with ION do this right now. Although they do have 720p as their main signal, the bitrate is about 6Mbps, which looks like crap. They have two other unencrypted sub-channels (both 480i), and 5-6 encrypted streams, including things like Starz and NFL Sunday Ticket.
If you have a machine with (a minimum of) 512Mb memory, than yeah, it's fine. On the other hand, if you've got a machine from about 1998, with 64Mb of memory, you're basically SOL. CentOS won't even install.
Since the hypervisor to run the VM (which is what TFA is about) won't install on that machine, either, it doesn't really matter.
Since disk space is cheap, I haven't done anything to tune my Linux VMs for minimal disk space, and the image is still less than 4GB, and that includes what you need to run X applications. I don't run an X server on the VM, but I can run client apps on that machine and display them somewhere else. There are a couple of admin tools that are easier as a GUI, and it's worth the 2GB or so wasted disk space to be able to run them without thinking about it.
If you are talking about a dedicated appliance VM (firewall, proxy, etc.), then those are easy to find in tiny VM images, but I really don't see the need for a tiny general purpose Linux install as a VM.
And keep in mind the slowdown which afflicts XP machines after a few years, usually remedied by an OS reinstall or a plethora of shady "registry cleaner" programs... nothing of the sort necessary with 7.
It's not necessary with XP, either. I have installs that have been running for nearly seven years, with no noticable issues. Nobody has been running Windows 7 for that long, and many people have had it for less than two years, so it's too early to tell if your "after a few years" just hasn't happened yet.
I suspect that most users with XP installs with this problem will have exactly the same problem on Windows 7, as it is likely caused by installing every thing they see on every web page.
XP -> 7 is entirely worth it. I'm no IT professional and don't know the logistics of it all but when I upgraded it was like day and night. I really don't understand the slow uptake to 7.
If I have a machine running XP just fine, why should I spend money to upgrade to Windows 7? What "got to have it" feature is included in Windows 7 that isn't in XP?
The only reason some of my machines are running Windows 7 is because of DirectX 11. If you don't need that, there really isn't anything that Windows 7 offers that can't be done in XP.
Despite the claimed superiority of Windows security - only the tech savvy seem to maintain a healthy Windows environment.
You could have just not let her run as a user that was a local adminstrator. Doing that results a similar level of security as running on Linux as a non-root user.
This does make it harder to do some things, but the vast majority of users where I have worked are not admins on their local systems and do just fine at their everyday tasks (e-mail, browsing the web, creating PowerPoint presentations, etc.). Unless your "non technically savvy" wife is doing some things that require some actual technical savvy, this likely would have worked for her.
Tons of malware, some of it installed by the likes of Compaq.
If this is in reference to "bloatware" installed by default and not actual malware, the solution is pretty much the same as you had to do with Linux: install the OS from clean media. If you are referring to actual malware, I'd be interested to know what was installed.
He and partner pioneered the 'low information' form of review, that amounted to 3 states, where all reviews were members of the set {two thumbs down, 1 thumb up, 2 thumbs up}
The idea behind the "thumbs" was that all people really wanted to know is if they should go see a movie, and no other rating system really gives that sort of yes/no answer.
Their hybrid nature does not affect data recovery. All the onboard SSD does is cache data that exists on the HDD.
There is no way to know what will happen to the overall usability of the drive if the flash fails (either through normal write exhaustion or catastrophic failure).
Hopefully, Seagate did the right thing in this case and the drive would turn into the equivalent of a pure mechanical drive. But, failure of the flash or its controller might cause the drive to become completely unusable. Unless they specifically deal with this as a "special" failure mode, it wouldn't be that different from some essential part of the controller on a purely mechanical drive failing (like the DRAM cache), and that usually turns the drive into a doorstop.
Pretty much everything you and the GP poster mention are either options that can be configured (I still have a separate stop button, and URLs display the protocol at the front), things that can be fixed with add-ons (status bar), or things that aren't an issue (The theme I chose quite a few versions ago is displayed after every update with no issue, and "Tabs on Top" has been configurable through a context menu for as long as the option has existed, but once you set it, it's done, so who needs a menu?).
The last few Firefox releases have resulted in a much faster browser that uses a lot less memory. Even if I couldn't easily configure all the changes to default settings back to my liking, I'd still call it an overall win. Right now, the Android version needs the most work, as it is lagging far behind in features, especially on tablets, where you have the screen real estate to do much more.
Citibank also has this on their credit cards, however I find it easier to just use PayPal than to: 1) log into citibank, 2) go through the steps to launch the virtual CC page, 3) generate the CC, 4) copy the CC numbers and paste them into the website 5) fill out my billing and shipping address.
I used the Citi virtual numbers standalone app a lot, because you could drag and drop all the numbers into the web page.
For some reason, they have discontinued the standalone app, and (as you say) the pain you list for their online setup is not worth it. In particular, with not even copy/paste of the credit card number, it's far too easy to make a mistake.
They can figure out who's carrying a phone by their daily habits (where you go, what time, how long you stay there).
This makes the assumption that "they" can take the habits from a phone ID and connect it to a person. With the process from the GP post, there would be no way to connect the phone to a name.
For example, what if you planted a phone on a baby (or an object that is close to them at all times). The phone would move with their care provider, which could likely be multiple people. So even if you could say with some certainty that the "person" with the phone lived at a particular address, there would be no way to tell who at that address had the phone. By adding in data like who you called, then "they" can pin it down, but the claims from Google are that only location information is required to ID a person, and there are too many cases where that isn't really true.
That being said, someone can reprogram the phone to 'look like' its powered off. It can still be recording audio/video to the local memory, or whatever it wants to, and even use the transmitter periodically without being noticed by the owner.
I'd notice that my battery ran down a lot faster than usual, and I think most people would.
When my phone is in "standby" for voice and nothing exceptional is going on with background data (like nothing continuous), my phone can sit there for nearly 3 days before the battery is exhausted. But, when actually transmitting voice or data, the battery life is cut dramatically, even if the screen is off, so I end up with about a full day of normal use when doing things, which means only about 3-4 hours of actual interactive usage. If I place the phone in "airplane mode", though, I can use the phone for 10-12 hours. So, the radios are obviously a huge battery drain, and it would be very noticed.
I used to sell phones for Verizon. There is a 'Block Premium Text Messaging' account option. I selected it for every subscriber I signed up by default unless they indicated otherwise.
Note that blocking premium SMS also blocks some non-evil stuff, like being able to donate to charities like the Red Cross via SMS
Unfortunately, all this option blocks is the extra money that a premium SMS service can charge your account. It does not actually block the text messages.
Since I don't have an unlimited text plan, this was a huge problem for me when a pseudo-premium service started spamming my phone with SMS. After a while, it was costing me $0.20/text they sent me, and there is no way to block messages from a specific source. Since the text messages claimed I had "subscribed" (which I had not), the only thing Verizon could do was to tell me to text back "STOP" and hope that worked. It didn't, and so I spent a few days on the phone with Verizon getting the text message charges removed from my account.
Eventually, Verizon was able to solve the problem by cutting off the account of the source, but they didn't seem to be able to do that until after about 15 hours of my time (and their customer service rep time).
(most MAJOR sporting events the photos need to be uploaded from the camera back to a central repo within 4 hours of the event, so they can go to print for the following morning. )
Saving a few minutes here and there is KEY to getting ahead in that industry.
It takes about 10 seconds to remove the memory card and plug it into a tablet/laptop/whatever. Unless you need photos uploaded essentially as you shoot them (which I suspect woudn't work very well at the same time you were taking new pictures), there is no reason to have the camera able to connect to a network.
In addition, it's likely the file transfer software on the tablet/laptop/whatever is far more robust than anything on the camera. This might give you features such as automatic retry, resuming in the middle of a file, etc.
The flights I've been on, they would never let you wear head phones during that part of the flight as they would have no idea as to whether or not the device was in operation.
I've had no problem wearing my noise-canceling headphones at any time, even when they are turned on.
I have been asked several times if I am "listening to music" or "are they connected?" and I just hold up the dangling end and they are fine with it.
Install the OS to an unencrypted drive and create an image. This is easily restored (even to a different drive), and easily updated as you install more software.
Put all your data on a separate partition and encrypt that using whatever tool you want. Unless your computer has some insanely proprietary software on it, this is all that needs encryption. Whole disk encryption is usually used for cases where the supplier of the computer doesn't trust the user of the computer to be able to keep important stuff safe. This doesn't seem to be the case with you.
Back up the data using any file-based backup utility you like. The backup can be encrypted or not...either way, it should be accesible from any machine that is running the encryption software (assuming you haven't lost the password).
Paypal has grown to be a behemoth that has elbowed it's way into every online merchant's payment options, for some strange reason (what good is it unless you for some reason already have money stored at the bank of paypal?).
I can pay using Paypal, Google Checkout, etc., without ever giving my credit card number out to random websites.
That's huge, as I don't have to trust the website quite as much. It still may be a scam of some sort, but at most I would be out the cost of that single transaction, since they won't be able to run up charges on my card.
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Have you ever rented a home? By your logic, you have no expectation of privacy in a rented property or hotel room. You might be interested to know that it's already well established that (outside of television) your landlord can't even consent to a police search of your property, unless they meet the normal requirements for such consent such as if they also live there. Your email being stored on a server is like that, you're renting the space from the server owner, according to the terms they set forth when you signed up for the account.
Although I agree that e-mail providers should require warrants to release e-mail to any government agency, there really is a big difference between the two examples you cite.
The term "house" is specifically used in the text of the 4th Amendment, and courts have basically ruled that this term refers to your home, whether that's a building you own or a single room in a shared apartment...essentially your "personal living space", where a polite person would be required to ask permission to enter. On the other hand, the e-mail on the server is no different from you giving your personal papers to any random third party, mostly regardless of the relationship, with a few exceptions.
One of these exceptions would be your lawyer, so a solution to the e-mail search issue might be for you to pay the e-mail provider a retainer to be your legal counsel. Then, the effect is that you are storing your correspondence with your lawyer, and that should give you the privacy of lawyer/client privilege. The e-mail provider would, of course, have to have a lawyer who is licensed to practice law in your state for this to have a chance of being valid.
Netflix is unlikely to charge your production for "a set burning down in Botswana". What other advantages are there to working with them? Disadvantages?
Nicely working 64-bit version which enables to use 4+GB Ram (in XP 32bit with 4GB and 512 MB VGA the system could use 2.7GB). XP had 64-bit version but it didn't work that well, especially the driver support was lacking.
I'm typing this on an XP64 machine with 12GB of RAM. I've had no problems with drivers with the exception of allowing connection to my Android phone in "sync" mode, which really isn't much of a loss. I can play Blu-Ray discs, any game that doesn't require DirectX 10/11, use a wide variety of USB devices (including USB 3.0), and pretty much any other piece of hardware that I want. This install is about 4-1/2 years old, so it pre-dates Windows 7 by over a year.
Surprisingly, the one thing that Windows 7 does do that I really would like (and that nobody ever seems to mention) is having built-in TRIM support for SSDs. I can work around it, but it would be nice to have it automatic.
And how does she get updates to Flash, Java and other programs that have their own updater program that require intervention by a user with and Administrator login?
Without administrator privileges, it's not as important to update these often, as the damage that an unpatched flaw can do is not as great.
But, Flash and Java have services that can do the updates without any user intervention at all. There are also programs that can do this for any arbitrary application, although you would have to configure them once for the specific apps installed on the machine.
The real answer is that if the user is stupid enough that you can't give them any administrator access because they will run "see the pretty kitties.exe", then you have to treat them the same way as many companies do, and restrict what they can do. Install an HTTP proxy and force them to use it, restrict the programs they can run through group policy, etc.
Even scarier for the TV networks is the reason that TV ownership has dropped - more and more YOUNG PEOPLE don't want and/or need them.
I suspect this really is just a wild-assed guess by the author of the article you reference, as the entire drop listed could easily be because of the downturn in the economy. But, it really doesn't matter, as having a TV in your home isn't as important a statistic as whether you watch TV in your home.
In the US, a TV is defined as a device with a display and a tuner, so if you connect your cable box to a computer monitor, you don't have a "TV", even though you can "watch TV" as people defined it before. Likewise, the HDHomeRun isn't a TV, but it allows you to "watch TV" on your computer.
To clarify...keep in mind you are not so much accessing CONTENT, as you are an ANTENNA! That's the key point of this right there. You're accessing an ANTENNA that is exclusively YOURS, and sending its signal to your video device. The internet is simply playing the role of the coaxial cable.
You are also paying for at least one ATSC tuner that is exclusively yours, because sharing those would also be a legal problem, since it would mean that the "same signal" might have been sent to two different subscribers.
I really don't see how any VC thought this would make money, as the upfront costs per customer of antenna and tuner are at least 6 months of subscription, plus the need for 15Mbps per customer in bandwidth. Add in normal costs of employees (customer support, technicians, etc.) plus the lawsuits (which they had to know were coming) and I can't see them ever turning a profit.
If they already provide a free over-the-air signal, in order to be available to the most viewers (and therefore to the most advertising targets), isn't another company extending that viewer base at no expense to Fox, Univision, CBS, NBC, ABC a *benefit* to them?
It's worse than that, as Fox, CBS, NBC, and ABC (the "big 4") all get paid by cable/satellite providers for the right to carry their signal. Granted, this money only goes to the network for the "owned & operated" stations, but that's still most of the US population, as all the networks have O&O stations in the largest DMAs (New York, LA, Chicago, etc.).
For OTA stations owned by other companies, they negotiate their own carriage fees, but it pretty much means that every major OTA channel on cable/satellite is getting money from the provider for carriage.
When they say "subscription model", they mean convert to the current pay-TV system where they would receive a monthly affiliate fee from your cable provider on your behalf. Hence, you automatically become a subscriber and some of your cable bill will get diverted to them.
Pretty much every major network station in every DMA already gets these fees from cable and satellite providers.
The regs allow the station to invoke "must carry" and force a cable/satellite provider to carry the station, but if the station does this, they can't ask for a fee. Instead, they basically hold the provider hostage by requiring a fee for carriage. For "the big 4", this pretty much forces a provider to accept the station's terms if there is any choice for provider in the market.
This money is huge compared to revenues from commercials, and is an income stream that basically didn't exist 20 years ago. This is why OTA stations are worried about "cord cutters" who drop their cable subscription and go back to using an antenna. Since Aereo is a service that makes using an antenna easier (in that you don't have to install your own), OTA stations don't like it.
I don't think that Aereo is a sustainable service, though, as they claim to have a separate antenna for each subscriber. No matter how you design an antenna, they need to be large enough to handle the longest wavelength you want to receive, and there's only so much folding of the elements that will still allow reception. This pretty much means that about 8" square is the absolute minimum size for US HDTV. For 10,000 subscribers, you'd need 4,000 square feet of vertical surface to attach to, which is about the entire non-window surface of one side of an average seven-story building.
Although you might be able to rent such space (maybe use billboards, which are cheap), the problem is that you have to plan for this sort of expansion early, since all the antennas need to feed tuners that are connected to the Internet. This means they need to be close to a very high speed connection, as it's not uncommon to see 10Mbps for a single HD sub-channel. For just 100 subscribers, that's a 1Gbps connection. And, the whole point of Aereo is that they can't combine or alter the signal, since that would be considered a "re-transmission", and require the OTA channel to give consent.
You forgot one important thing.
I'm pretty sure most broadcast licenses from the require that the content to not be encrypted.
Mostly. The regs basically say that a 480i unencrypted signal would suffice for keeping the license. This could be done in about 3Mbps, leaving nearly 16Mbps for encrypted content.
The OTA stations that are affliated with ION do this right now. Although they do have 720p as their main signal, the bitrate is about 6Mbps, which looks like crap. They have two other unencrypted sub-channels (both 480i), and 5-6 encrypted streams, including things like Starz and NFL Sunday Ticket.
If you have a machine with (a minimum of) 512Mb memory, than yeah, it's fine. On the other hand, if you've got a machine from about 1998, with 64Mb of memory, you're basically SOL. CentOS won't even install.
Since the hypervisor to run the VM (which is what TFA is about) won't install on that machine, either, it doesn't really matter.
Since disk space is cheap, I haven't done anything to tune my Linux VMs for minimal disk space, and the image is still less than 4GB, and that includes what you need to run X applications. I don't run an X server on the VM, but I can run client apps on that machine and display them somewhere else. There are a couple of admin tools that are easier as a GUI, and it's worth the 2GB or so wasted disk space to be able to run them without thinking about it.
If you are talking about a dedicated appliance VM (firewall, proxy, etc.), then those are easy to find in tiny VM images, but I really don't see the need for a tiny general purpose Linux install as a VM.
And keep in mind the slowdown which afflicts XP machines after a few years, usually remedied by an OS reinstall or a plethora of shady "registry cleaner" programs... nothing of the sort necessary with 7.
It's not necessary with XP, either. I have installs that have been running for nearly seven years, with no noticable issues. Nobody has been running Windows 7 for that long, and many people have had it for less than two years, so it's too early to tell if your "after a few years" just hasn't happened yet.
I suspect that most users with XP installs with this problem will have exactly the same problem on Windows 7, as it is likely caused by installing every thing they see on every web page.
XP -> 7 is entirely worth it. I'm no IT professional and don't know the logistics of it all but when I upgraded it was like day and night. I really don't understand the slow uptake to 7.
If I have a machine running XP just fine, why should I spend money to upgrade to Windows 7? What "got to have it" feature is included in Windows 7 that isn't in XP?
The only reason some of my machines are running Windows 7 is because of DirectX 11. If you don't need that, there really isn't anything that Windows 7 offers that can't be done in XP.
Despite the claimed superiority of Windows security - only the tech savvy seem to maintain a healthy Windows environment.
You could have just not let her run as a user that was a local adminstrator. Doing that results a similar level of security as running on Linux as a non-root user.
This does make it harder to do some things, but the vast majority of users where I have worked are not admins on their local systems and do just fine at their everyday tasks (e-mail, browsing the web, creating PowerPoint presentations, etc.). Unless your "non technically savvy" wife is doing some things that require some actual technical savvy, this likely would have worked for her.
Tons of malware, some of it installed by the likes of Compaq.
If this is in reference to "bloatware" installed by default and not actual malware, the solution is pretty much the same as you had to do with Linux: install the OS from clean media. If you are referring to actual malware, I'd be interested to know what was installed.
He and partner pioneered the 'low information' form of review, that amounted to 3 states, where all reviews were members of the set {two thumbs down, 1 thumb up, 2 thumbs up}
The idea behind the "thumbs" was that all people really wanted to know is if they should go see a movie, and no other rating system really gives that sort of yes/no answer.
Both Siskel and Ebert were good-humored enough to laugh at parodies of themselves.
They were even willing to particpate in the parody as themselves.
Their hybrid nature does not affect data recovery. All the onboard SSD does is cache data that exists on the HDD.
There is no way to know what will happen to the overall usability of the drive if the flash fails (either through normal write exhaustion or catastrophic failure).
Hopefully, Seagate did the right thing in this case and the drive would turn into the equivalent of a pure mechanical drive. But, failure of the flash or its controller might cause the drive to become completely unusable. Unless they specifically deal with this as a "special" failure mode, it wouldn't be that different from some essential part of the controller on a purely mechanical drive failing (like the DRAM cache), and that usually turns the drive into a doorstop.
Pretty much everything you and the GP poster mention are either options that can be configured (I still have a separate stop button, and URLs display the protocol at the front), things that can be fixed with add-ons (status bar), or things that aren't an issue (The theme I chose quite a few versions ago is displayed after every update with no issue, and "Tabs on Top" has been configurable through a context menu for as long as the option has existed, but once you set it, it's done, so who needs a menu?).
The last few Firefox releases have resulted in a much faster browser that uses a lot less memory. Even if I couldn't easily configure all the changes to default settings back to my liking, I'd still call it an overall win. Right now, the Android version needs the most work, as it is lagging far behind in features, especially on tablets, where you have the screen real estate to do much more.
Citibank also has this on their credit cards, however I find it easier to just use PayPal than to: 1) log into citibank, 2) go through the steps to launch the virtual CC page, 3) generate the CC, 4) copy the CC numbers and paste them into the website 5) fill out my billing and shipping address.
I used the Citi virtual numbers standalone app a lot, because you could drag and drop all the numbers into the web page.
For some reason, they have discontinued the standalone app, and (as you say) the pain you list for their online setup is not worth it. In particular, with not even copy/paste of the credit card number, it's far too easy to make a mistake.
They can figure out who's carrying a phone by their daily habits (where you go, what time, how long you stay there).
This makes the assumption that "they" can take the habits from a phone ID and connect it to a person. With the process from the GP post, there would be no way to connect the phone to a name.
For example, what if you planted a phone on a baby (or an object that is close to them at all times). The phone would move with their care provider, which could likely be multiple people. So even if you could say with some certainty that the "person" with the phone lived at a particular address, there would be no way to tell who at that address had the phone. By adding in data like who you called, then "they" can pin it down, but the claims from Google are that only location information is required to ID a person, and there are too many cases where that isn't really true.
That being said, someone can reprogram the phone to 'look like' its powered off. It can still be recording audio/video to the local memory, or whatever it wants to, and even use the transmitter periodically without being noticed by the owner.
I'd notice that my battery ran down a lot faster than usual, and I think most people would.
When my phone is in "standby" for voice and nothing exceptional is going on with background data (like nothing continuous), my phone can sit there for nearly 3 days before the battery is exhausted. But, when actually transmitting voice or data, the battery life is cut dramatically, even if the screen is off, so I end up with about a full day of normal use when doing things, which means only about 3-4 hours of actual interactive usage. If I place the phone in "airplane mode", though, I can use the phone for 10-12 hours. So, the radios are obviously a huge battery drain, and it would be very noticed.
I used to sell phones for Verizon. There is a 'Block Premium Text Messaging' account option. I selected it for every subscriber I signed up by default unless they indicated otherwise.
Note that blocking premium SMS also blocks some non-evil stuff, like being able to donate to charities like the Red Cross via SMS
Unfortunately, all this option blocks is the extra money that a premium SMS service can charge your account. It does not actually block the text messages.
Since I don't have an unlimited text plan, this was a huge problem for me when a pseudo-premium service started spamming my phone with SMS. After a while, it was costing me $0.20/text they sent me, and there is no way to block messages from a specific source. Since the text messages claimed I had "subscribed" (which I had not), the only thing Verizon could do was to tell me to text back "STOP" and hope that worked. It didn't, and so I spent a few days on the phone with Verizon getting the text message charges removed from my account.
Eventually, Verizon was able to solve the problem by cutting off the account of the source, but they didn't seem to be able to do that until after about 15 hours of my time (and their customer service rep time).
(most MAJOR sporting events the photos need to be uploaded from the camera back to a central repo within 4 hours of the event, so they can go to print for the following morning. )
Saving a few minutes here and there is KEY to getting ahead in that industry.
It takes about 10 seconds to remove the memory card and plug it into a tablet/laptop/whatever. Unless you need photos uploaded essentially as you shoot them (which I suspect woudn't work very well at the same time you were taking new pictures), there is no reason to have the camera able to connect to a network.
In addition, it's likely the file transfer software on the tablet/laptop/whatever is far more robust than anything on the camera. This might give you features such as automatic retry, resuming in the middle of a file, etc.
The flights I've been on, they would never let you wear head phones during that part of the flight as they would have no idea as to whether or not the device was in operation.
I've had no problem wearing my noise-canceling headphones at any time, even when they are turned on.
I have been asked several times if I am "listening to music" or "are they connected?" and I just hold up the dangling end and they are fine with it.
Great, I completely agree.
How?
Install the OS to an unencrypted drive and create an image. This is easily restored (even to a different drive), and easily updated as you install more software.
Put all your data on a separate partition and encrypt that using whatever tool you want. Unless your computer has some insanely proprietary software on it, this is all that needs encryption. Whole disk encryption is usually used for cases where the supplier of the computer doesn't trust the user of the computer to be able to keep important stuff safe. This doesn't seem to be the case with you.
Back up the data using any file-based backup utility you like. The backup can be encrypted or not...either way, it should be accesible from any machine that is running the encryption software (assuming you haven't lost the password).
Paypal has grown to be a behemoth that has elbowed it's way into every online merchant's payment options, for some strange reason (what good is it unless you for some reason already have money stored at the bank of paypal?).
I can pay using Paypal, Google Checkout, etc., without ever giving my credit card number out to random websites.
That's huge, as I don't have to trust the website quite as much. It still may be a scam of some sort, but at most I would be out the cost of that single transaction, since they won't be able to run up charges on my card.