"For example, every time an iPhone user closes out of the built-in mapping application, the phone snaps a screenshot and stores it." - TFS What?
It's called caching. When an iPhone application switches to another application it can quickly store an image of the app's current state. When the user switches back it displays that image while the real view is being built. That way the user gets an immediate view of the last state of the app rather than having to wait around for that state to be re-built.
Your desktop computer's web browser (and many other programs and devices) does the same thing, it stores data for quick access and responsiveness. You'd be surprised at just how many devices use this technique, the iPhone is far from the only device to cache data.
It's a smart technique but yeah, if you're committing crimes then too bad for you. I'd suggest that maybe you shouldn't be using ANY electronic device during a crime that you don't completely understand what data it sends and stores and how to deal with it before it becomes evidence.
Yes I would be surprised how many devices use that technique, and I don't think it's that defensible. It's a obvious security/privacy problem.
As far as I'm aware most browsers don't do this, and certainly not cache screendumps to permanent storage, with the exception of Opera and Chrome's "Speed Dial" feature requiring a thumbnail of the page.
A smart technique? It's a bit cheeky, but then such tricks are frequently used to fake responsiveness in UIs. Aside from the benefits of 'cheating', it's quite simply a security hole - a screenshot of many apps could reveal personal information that's not otherwise easily available (Examples: browser history would be easily extractable, contents of my gmail not so much).
But as more of manufacturing and even service jobs become automated, I think we're going to have to reconsider that "one man, one job" approach and adopt more socialistic policies if we're going to maintain anything like a civilized, developed society.
So what's going to happen when 1/4 of our society just doesn't have any work to do?
Basically you are wrong, as demonstrated by all history since the industrial revolution. Much like how the luddites were wrong. The luddites thought machines would take their jobs, what happend was that machines just made jobs more productive and even made jobs.
It seems that industrial society has always found work for idle hands. Most developed nations are experiencing a boom in retirees and a diminishing workforce. Even with heavy automation there will still be stuff for people to do. If robots really do invade society to do all the heavy lifting then we'll find work in owning, maintaining and commanding these robots.
In a way we already have robots, particularily in manurfacturing and construction, what else is a digger or other earth moving equipment? Because these are 100x more productive than a man with a shovel doesn't mean there are 99 shovel-men out of work. In reality we get 100x more stuff done by and every modern day 'shovel man'.
Reinventing the wheel uncessisarily and many times over, then forking the project is part of the fun. This is why Linux as a whole is not wanting for labour hours, but despite this brute force army of coders in thousands of open source projects all over world, the year of the desktop linux is always a few years away. Because when it's finished there will be nothing to do.
Thats the answer. I had a aftermarket speed HUD in car that was designed to appear to be 20 feet or more in front of the car to minimize the need to refocus on a nearer object, but close enough it doesn't seem weird when tailgating or whatever. I understand this is done in factory models as well, and aircraft HUDs are also designed this way.
James Cameron used 3D to emphasize depth, spacial movement, and scale, to great effect. It was quite simply more engaging because it was using depth for realism. Which is exactly how it should be done. Toy Story 3(D) also avoided in-you-face thrusting. Whereas many other films are saying "Look what we can do with 3D, LOOK at it DAMN YOU"
I have an aging HTC Magic thats running flash thanks to a aftermarket community ROM. Well, it works, it's damn slow but it actually freaking works, and well enough to use on most sites if I really have to get to them. Now considering thats latest version 2.2 of Android shoehorned into 2008-spec hardware that is seriously starved for RAM, it can only be better on just about every other Android handset.
Rooting your Android phone doesn't necessarily void your warranty. It's possible to backup the stock OS and re-flash that before sending in for a warranty claim and I believe it would be difficult for them to tell it had been rooted. A genuine and obvious hardware fault in some parts of the world is still covered despite what weasel words are in the EULA. At least in my part of world the consumer protection laws are pretty robust.
90% of mobile phone problems are the battery, being able to swap a battery is indispensable.
One thing that Apple is killing itself with is lack of choice. They have only one iPad, one iPhone etc. For the record I don't consider the few internal storage options anything resembling "choice" considering Android handsets have removable SD cards. If you really don't like something about a particular Apple product the only option is non-Apple. Android at least has plenty to choose from before having to consider Apple.
i'm concerned about bugs, intentional or not, that would allow someone access to my voice calls or other personal data... how feasible are those situations when using one of these 3rd party mobile operating systems rather than the one supplied directly by the mobile vendor with the device?
You don't know it but what you are indirectly implying is that open source community developed systems could harbor more undisclosed vulnerabilities due to less peer review, either accidentally or, a via more disturbing proposition: that someone may masquerade as a coder in a community project to hide something in plain sight (certainly possible: http://underhanded.xcott.com/) obtaining sudden pwnership of thousands of phones (last I heard CyanogenMOD was on 30k Android phones now likely many more).
In all likelihood attacks against a vanilla carrier ROM on a Android handset may just not work against heavily modified aftermarket ROM. One would hope anyway. Hackers are also not going target individual ROM distributions, they'll go after mainstream devices. Any of these vulnerabilities in Android will be everyone's problem.
Still, I sold my iPhone 3G so some sucker can 'downgrade' that to iOS4 lag hell and I made a choice for an open source handset with a superior security model for a damn good reason.
It's a logistical impossibility for Apple to rigorously peer review every line of code that goes through their App store, which is why the false sense of security from a their strict walled garden is dangerous.
Android market has some protections, and Android's security model and code base is more robust anyway.
Oh and the Android open source community is fucking awesome.
The problem with jet packs has been specific impulse. You simply cannot get enough power density into something you can heft on your back and walk around with, at least not without any usable flight time or performance.
I've often thought small jet engines used in RC planes (~40lbs thrust) could be stacked up (6-8) of them to give you a jet pack. But nowadays you can buy a small jet engine designed for UAVs that might weighs 40 pounds and produces 200+ pounds of thrust, these kind of engines have been fitted to gliders.
In terms of a true jet pack. Allowing some weight for fins, a fuel tank and harness you have a 170lb dry weight with three engines. Not much of a real 'pack' then.
So the problems remain, even with the high specific impulse of a jet. You would need to add about your own weight in fuel for one hours flight time.
More ingenious gadget to me, would be a hot air balloon that fits and deploys from a backpack using the same technology that allows large parachutes to be packed into small spaces.
As with most engineering exercises, if your not intrigued by the novel and clever and application of new technology, there's little value to be seen by non-technical types. Hence observations such as the summary mentions 'Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV?" - more from TFA: " How would you store these images? What does an electronic photo album look like? When would this type of approach be available to the consumer?" - the engineers at Kodak didn't consider any real world application.
What we can learn from this is there's a lot of technology we've have had sooner if industrial design and packaging was a priority, rather than just getting something working for a cool demo, and assuming observers would understand the potential.
the researchers found that women who sit more than 6 hours a day were 37 percent more likely to die than those who sit less than 3 hours; for men, long-sitters were 17 percent more likely to die
You know... I'm pretty sure everyone is 100% likely to die...
Everyone takes life too seriously, it's why they don't get out alive!
Sci-fi obviously gets this wrong, with billowing clouds of burning petroleum shot on earth composited over CG or scale models, it's almost completely wrong on every level.
I'd love to see space battles done realistically some day. But here are some points.
Gas, debri, behaves differently and quite counterintuitive in a vacuum. Everything in space follows a parabolic/freefall trajectory, and unless it has anything to hit, it'll continue follow that vector. Gases and liquid much the same. Any explosion or rapid venting would see gas streaming out into space fast.
The closest example I can find is the rocket exhaust from a russian missle test that spiralled out of control over norway. http://paradoxoff.com/files/2009/12/norway-sky-spiral-phenomena-1.jpg This gives you some idea of the odd way things behave in a vacuum. Rocket exhaust has a velocity of many km/s.
As for explosions, only ionized glowing gas would be visible, or ice particles reflecting light, as well as any debri.
In earths atmosphere explosives generate a shockwave traveling at many kilometres per second. In a vacuum this is relatively unimpeded, so would be faster.
Yet in a vacuum shockwaves from gas alone would be relatively benign after a short distance. There is no overpressure/underpressure effect the same as in an atmosphere. If anything the shockwave from explosives nearby would give a vessel a sideways shove with rather even pressure exerted by high velocity gas impacting the hull.
However in space, any debri or shrapnel is extra deadly.
Consider that Project Orion was intending to use nuclear warheads detonated behind a vessel to propell it along. They were talking about distances of 100 metres, which with a mutli-kiloton bomb would only ablate a thin layer of steel off the pusher plate with each pulse.
So a nuke could go off pretty close to the hull of a vessel and do little more than give it a nudge and a does of EM and gamma radiation - if enough nudge it might splatter the canned primates against the inside of the ship and cause some structural damage.
Considering lasers are defeated by a reflective surface it seems to me the only plausible space weapon is projectiles. A high velocity delta would mean putting your packed lunch out a airlock at a 8km/s differnce would give it it's own weight in TNT and put a hole through a foot of steel.
Thankfully Battlestar Galactica reboot got this right - they ditched lasers for more realistic old fashioned projectile rounds.
A smaller projectile accelerated to relativistic speeds would be almost impossible to dodge for anything large and slow moving. If you could detect it at tens of thousands of kilometres away you'd have only a split second to move your vessel.
Realistically this would be helpfull for installing Linux for friends and family. Looking and working exactly like Windows 7 which my aging parents use, is a huge selling point. Especially since they only do basic web, email, the OS choice matters little, only the interface needs only to be familiar and just work. While my dad has expressed interest in linux (use ubuntu happily on occasion) I don't want to go through the trauma of re-training my mother to use a different interface, in this case she would honestly not pick the difference.
Unfortunatley desktop linux has yet to catch up on some of the usability smarts Windows 7. One killer redeeming feature of 7 is the way the start menu search feature includes a lot of administrative functions. I recall a phone conversation with my dad:
Dad: "How do I change my account password?"
Me: "Click on start menu and type 'password' in the box you see there"
Dad: "Oh there it is, change password, it came up before I finished typing, I click on that ja?"
This is refreshingly easy and saves me time - he'll likely remember the trick for other tasks, and not call back.
In gnome or something else it would be several layers deep under a drop down menu that isn't even categorized correctly, and I'd likely have to boot up one of my gnome machines to talk him through it.
It's perhaps unfair to beat up on gnome over it's infamously poor menu system, it's an easy targt.
Needless to say I'm not into supporting novices in linux in the same way i'm not into plucking hairs individually with tweasers.
In Google Earth it is less than one mile from a four lane highway "M-10" to the NW. There is a railroad and other roads within 1/4 mile of it. There's a whole web of roads leading right up to it.
This is hardly an isolated outpost, although there is no street view in that area so I can't confirm if it's full of bears and wolves.
Use a high definition video feed. Speed can be calculated from angles, measured distance to objects near the car. For best results capture traffic from several different angles. This can be done in software with human back up. Software can quite easily pick out moving objects from a static background.
This would be massively more indisputable in court than radar.
Does your country have laws about following distance? This is a huge and often over looked contributor to accidents.
Slashdot Mirror
"For example, every time an iPhone user closes out of the built-in mapping application, the phone snaps a screenshot and stores it." - TFS What?
It's called caching. When an iPhone application switches to another application it can quickly store an image of the app's current state. When the user switches back it displays that image while the real view is being built. That way the user gets an immediate view of the last state of the app rather than having to wait around for that state to be re-built.
Your desktop computer's web browser (and many other programs and devices) does the same thing, it stores data for quick access and responsiveness. You'd be surprised at just how many devices use this technique, the iPhone is far from the only device to cache data.
It's a smart technique but yeah, if you're committing crimes then too bad for you. I'd suggest that maybe you shouldn't be using ANY electronic device during a crime that you don't completely understand what data it sends and stores and how to deal with it before it becomes evidence.
Yes I would be surprised how many devices use that technique, and I don't think it's that defensible. It's a obvious security/privacy problem.
As far as I'm aware most browsers don't do this, and certainly not cache screendumps to permanent storage, with the exception of Opera and Chrome's "Speed Dial" feature requiring a thumbnail of the page.
A smart technique? It's a bit cheeky, but then such tricks are frequently used to fake responsiveness in UIs. Aside from the benefits of 'cheating', it's quite simply a security hole - a screenshot of many apps could reveal personal information that's not otherwise easily available (Examples: browser history would be easily extractable, contents of my gmail not so much).
Crook: "Hold up, I gotta take this call..." *answers*... "Hello? I can't hear you you're breaking up. HELLO?"
Clerk: "You're not holding it right.. here let me show you"
Steve Jobs has worms? Would explain his reccent illness and weightloss.
Were damn fine games I'd love to play again.
But as more of manufacturing and even service jobs become automated, I think we're going to have to reconsider that "one man, one job" approach and adopt more socialistic policies if we're going to maintain anything like a civilized, developed society.
So what's going to happen when 1/4 of our society just doesn't have any work to do?
Basically you are wrong, as demonstrated by all history since the industrial revolution. Much like how the luddites were wrong. The luddites thought machines would take their jobs, what happend was that machines just made jobs more productive and even made jobs.
It seems that industrial society has always found work for idle hands. Most developed nations are experiencing a boom in retirees and a diminishing workforce. Even with heavy automation there will still be stuff for people to do. If robots really do invade society to do all the heavy lifting then we'll find work in owning, maintaining and commanding these robots.
In a way we already have robots, particularily in manurfacturing and construction, what else is a digger or other earth moving equipment? Because these are 100x more productive than a man with a shovel doesn't mean there are 99 shovel-men out of work. In reality we get 100x more stuff done by and every modern day 'shovel man'.
Reinventing the wheel uncessisarily and many times over, then forking the project is part of the fun. This is why Linux as a whole is not wanting for labour hours, but despite this brute force army of coders in thousands of open source projects all over world, the year of the desktop linux is always a few years away. Because when it's finished there will be nothing to do.
Thats the answer. I had a aftermarket speed HUD in car that was designed to appear to be 20 feet or more in front of the car to minimize the need to refocus on a nearer object, but close enough it doesn't seem weird when tailgating or whatever. I understand this is done in factory models as well, and aircraft HUDs are also designed this way.
James Cameron used 3D to emphasize depth, spacial movement, and scale, to great effect. It was quite simply more engaging because it was using depth for realism. Which is exactly how it should be done. Toy Story 3(D) also avoided in-you-face thrusting. Whereas many other films are saying "Look what we can do with 3D, LOOK at it DAMN YOU"
I have an aging HTC Magic thats running flash thanks to a aftermarket community ROM. Well, it works, it's damn slow but it actually freaking works, and well enough to use on most sites if I really have to get to them. Now considering thats latest version 2.2 of Android shoehorned into 2008-spec hardware that is seriously starved for RAM, it can only be better on just about every other Android handset.
Rooting your Android phone doesn't necessarily void your warranty. It's possible to backup the stock OS and re-flash that before sending in for a warranty claim and I believe it would be difficult for them to tell it had been rooted. A genuine and obvious hardware fault in some parts of the world is still covered despite what weasel words are in the EULA. At least in my part of world the consumer protection laws are pretty robust.
90% of mobile phone problems are the battery, being able to swap a battery is indispensable.
One thing that Apple is killing itself with is lack of choice. They have only one iPad, one iPhone etc. For the record I don't consider the few internal storage options anything resembling "choice" considering Android handsets have removable SD cards. If you really don't like something about a particular Apple product the only option is non-Apple. Android at least has plenty to choose from before having to consider Apple.
The Android open source community is fucking awesome.
Thank you.
i'm concerned about bugs, intentional or not, that would allow someone access to my voice calls or other personal data... how feasible are those situations when using one of these 3rd party mobile operating systems rather than the one supplied directly by the mobile vendor with the device?
You don't know it but what you are indirectly implying is that open source community developed systems could harbor more undisclosed vulnerabilities due to less peer review, either accidentally or, a via more disturbing proposition: that someone may masquerade as a coder in a community project to hide something in plain sight (certainly possible: http://underhanded.xcott.com/) obtaining sudden pwnership of thousands of phones (last I heard CyanogenMOD was on 30k Android phones now likely many more).
In all likelihood attacks against a vanilla carrier ROM on a Android handset may just not work against heavily modified aftermarket ROM. One would hope anyway. Hackers are also not going target individual ROM distributions, they'll go after mainstream devices. Any of these vulnerabilities in Android will be everyone's problem.
Still, I sold my iPhone 3G so some sucker can 'downgrade' that to iOS4 lag hell and I made a choice for an open source handset with a superior security model for a damn good reason.
It's a logistical impossibility for Apple to rigorously peer review every line of code that goes through their App store, which is why the false sense of security from a their strict walled garden is dangerous.
Android market has some protections, and Android's security model and code base is more robust anyway.
Oh and the Android open source community is fucking awesome.
"Studies" are trash where they are industry funded.
I have a collection of fine vintage Whisky. Does this mean I can get to drink my best whisky twice?
Amen. Some tools like that would be a godsend. It could be coming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data http://linkeddata.org/ - Not what you are talking about, but what you describe may result from it.
The problem with jet packs has been specific impulse. You simply cannot get enough power density into something you can heft on your back and walk around with, at least not without any usable flight time or performance.
I've often thought small jet engines used in RC planes (~40lbs thrust) could be stacked up (6-8) of them to give you a jet pack. But nowadays you can buy a small jet engine designed for UAVs that might weighs 40 pounds and produces 200+ pounds of thrust, these kind of engines have been fitted to gliders.
In terms of a true jet pack. Allowing some weight for fins, a fuel tank and harness you have a 170lb dry weight with three engines. Not much of a real 'pack' then.
So the problems remain, even with the high specific impulse of a jet. You would need to add about your own weight in fuel for one hours flight time.
More ingenious gadget to me, would be a hot air balloon that fits and deploys from a backpack using the same technology that allows large parachutes to be packed into small spaces.
As with most engineering exercises, if your not intrigued by the novel and clever and application of new technology, there's little value to be seen by non-technical types. Hence observations such as the summary mentions 'Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV?" - more from TFA: " How would you store these images? What does an electronic photo album look like? When would this type of approach be available to the consumer?" - the engineers at Kodak didn't consider any real world application.
What we can learn from this is there's a lot of technology we've have had sooner if industrial design and packaging was a priority, rather than just getting something working for a cool demo, and assuming observers would understand the potential.
the researchers found that women who sit more than 6 hours a day were 37 percent more likely to die than those who sit less than 3 hours; for men, long-sitters were 17 percent more likely to die
You know... I'm pretty sure everyone is 100% likely to die...
Everyone takes life too seriously, it's why they don't get out alive!
But now it's confirmed.
Sci-fi obviously gets this wrong, with billowing clouds of burning petroleum shot on earth composited over CG or scale models, it's almost completely wrong on every level.
I'd love to see space battles done realistically some day. But here are some points.
Gas, debri, behaves differently and quite counterintuitive in a vacuum. Everything in space follows a parabolic/freefall trajectory, and unless it has anything to hit, it'll continue follow that vector. Gases and liquid much the same. Any explosion or rapid venting would see gas streaming out into space fast.
The closest example I can find is the rocket exhaust from a russian missle test that spiralled out of control over norway. http://paradoxoff.com/files/2009/12/norway-sky-spiral-phenomena-1.jpg
This gives you some idea of the odd way things behave in a vacuum. Rocket exhaust has a velocity of many km/s.
As for explosions, only ionized glowing gas would be visible, or ice particles reflecting light, as well as any debri.
In earths atmosphere explosives generate a shockwave traveling at many kilometres per second. In a vacuum this is relatively unimpeded, so would be faster.
Yet in a vacuum shockwaves from gas alone would be relatively benign after a short distance. There is no overpressure/underpressure effect the same as in an atmosphere. If anything the shockwave from explosives nearby would give a vessel a sideways shove with rather even pressure exerted by high velocity gas impacting the hull.
However in space, any debri or shrapnel is extra deadly.
Consider that Project Orion was intending to use nuclear warheads detonated behind a vessel to propell it along. They were talking about distances of 100 metres, which with a mutli-kiloton bomb would only ablate a thin layer of steel off the pusher plate with each pulse.
So a nuke could go off pretty close to the hull of a vessel and do little more than give it a nudge and a does of EM and gamma radiation - if enough nudge it might splatter the canned primates against the inside of the ship and cause some structural damage.
Considering lasers are defeated by a reflective surface it seems to me the only plausible space weapon is projectiles. A high velocity delta would mean putting your packed lunch out a airlock at a 8km/s differnce would give it it's own weight in TNT and put a hole through a foot of steel.
Thankfully Battlestar Galactica reboot got this right - they ditched lasers for more realistic old fashioned projectile rounds.
A smaller projectile accelerated to relativistic speeds would be almost impossible to dodge for anything large and slow moving. If you could detect it at tens of thousands of kilometres away you'd have only a split second to move your vessel.
Realistically this would be helpfull for installing Linux for friends and family. Looking and working exactly like Windows 7 which my aging parents use, is a huge selling point. Especially since they only do basic web, email, the OS choice matters little, only the interface needs only to be familiar and just work. While my dad has expressed interest in linux (use ubuntu happily on occasion) I don't want to go through the trauma of re-training my mother to use a different interface, in this case she would honestly not pick the difference.
Unfortunatley desktop linux has yet to catch up on some of the usability smarts Windows 7. One killer redeeming feature of 7 is the way the start menu search feature includes a lot of administrative functions. I recall a phone conversation with my dad:
Dad: "How do I change my account password?"
Me: "Click on start menu and type 'password' in the box you see there"
Dad: "Oh there it is, change password, it came up before I finished typing, I click on that ja?"
This is refreshingly easy and saves me time - he'll likely remember the trick for other tasks, and not call back.
In gnome or something else it would be several layers deep under a drop down menu that isn't even categorized correctly, and I'd likely have to boot up one of my gnome machines to talk him through it.
It's perhaps unfair to beat up on gnome over it's infamously poor menu system, it's an easy targt.
Needless to say I'm not into supporting novices in linux in the same way i'm not into plucking hairs individually with tweasers.
In Google Earth it is less than one mile from a four lane highway "M-10" to the NW. There is a railroad and other roads within 1/4 mile of it. There's a whole web of roads leading right up to it.
This is hardly an isolated outpost, although there is no street view in that area so I can't confirm if it's full of bears and wolves.
56'4'58"N 37'5'22"E
Done, 56458N 37522E ... you first.
The effect must be small, in the parts-per-million range for example.
If the effect was significant, we would have noticed it.
Use a high definition video feed. Speed can be calculated from angles, measured distance to objects near the car. For best results capture traffic from several different angles. This can be done in software with human back up. Software can quite easily pick out moving objects from a static background.
This would be massively more indisputable in court than radar.
Does your country have laws about following distance? This is a huge and often over looked contributor to accidents.