SGI always did it this way. It was a nice compromise. I had the phone I wanted, with the plan I wanted, and submitted monthly for my bill. AT&T gave us a corporate discount rate, I had one phone to carry instead of two, and the company could always reach me. My last few jobs haven't been high availability so it hasn't been a problem.
I'd be willing to bet that the state isn't seeing those savings, because the people in question have both a landline and cell. I could be wrong of course, but I'd bet money that I'm not.
Maybe you failed to notice. Here, I'll point it out in big scary letters like yours: WE LIVE LONGER AND HEALTHIER LIVES THAN ANY PEOPLE IN HISTORY. Modern medicine is not perfect. Not even close. There's lots of holes in our knowledge of the exact ways and meas that out bodies work and grow. New discoveries often change previously held viewpoints. That said, it works better than anything else out there. We live one average 25-30 years longer than people even a hundred years ago, and we remain relatively active, healthy, and productive for more of those years. Out infant mortality rates are a fraction of what they were. If we had a decent single payer health care system they'd probably be even lower (they are in most of Europe).
Go find your father (you can probably do that, because he's probably still alive and healthy barring accident or freak illness) and ask him to open his mouth wide. What you will no doubt see, assuming he still has most of his natural teeth, is a patchwork and cacophony of metal and epoxy fillings. You probably don't have that. Wanna know why? Because there's fluoride in your water and has been since you were small. My father has 12 filling in his head and by the time he was my age he'd had a root canal. My mother has 6 or 7 fillings. I have none. I am 36 years old and I have never had a cavity. All signs point to me never ever having a cavity. I will most likely die with the same teeth I lived with since that magical that around 7 or so when The Toothfairy brought me my first quarter. I'll most likely do that dying at 80 or 90 years old instead of my early 60s. I'll most likely have most of my faculties be able to maintain a fairly robust life until shortly before that death or even right up until it. I could also get hit by a bus tomorrow, but there's not a lot to be done about that. I'll take the modern medicine, thanks.
This may sound callous to your friend, who no doubt doesn't think of himself as some sort of Typhoid Mary, but there is a common factor here well outside of vaccinations. Autism has been pretty strongly linked to lots of factors, many of them genetic. I'm sure not going to come one here and say for sure one way or the other, but has this person considered that he or his wife (or even both, given that all four children seem affected) is probably a more likely cause than vaccines? I mean there's like millions of kids born every year and with or without vaccines the vast majority of them won't have Autism, but all four of his do? There's a statistically *much* higher linkage between his and his wife's genes than exists with vaccines no matter how you mess with the numbers. Even Wakefield never claimed that every child who gets vaccinated will get Autism.
the fact that they don't even bother to prescribe medicines to you you actually know will help you from previous experience.
Did you ask why? Maybe that medicine has proven to have previously unrealized and serious side affects. Maybe it's addictive in certain quantities and the doctor, knowing that you'd had it before, didn't want to keep giving to you. Maybe your symptoms were subtly different in a way that made him think something else was better. Maybe he just thought something else would work even better. Maybe the medicine addressed symptoms very well, but didn't address the underlying problem (hence the relapse). There's about a million maybe's. Doctors will talk to you and answer direct questions. If they won't, find a new doctor. They're like everyone else, some are good, some are bad, some are good but terrible with people, some are bad but very good with people (so they seem better to the outsider).
Look at the TV show House. Yeah, it's fiction,yeah the format is bullshit, just look at he character. Think of the people you know in your own industry. If you're in the tech industry I'm sure you know a guy like House. We all know a guy like him. Brilliant, certified in everything, able to make every system in the place sit up and beg, but a complete nightmare to work with. His patients (users) hate him, though all their stuff always works; his colleagues grudgingly respect his results, but make every effort to avoid working with him.
The Internet does not make you a doctor. At best it's a tool you can use to complement your doctor's work. How many times have you been called with a tech problem and a firm diagnosis from your "patient", only to realize immediately that this person had no idea what they were talking about? Do you think that happens a lot to doctors?
I cringe every time I see my one friend's Facebook entries about her doctor visits. She clearly sees them as some sort of competition whereby she must "correct" every "misdiagnosis" she receives (essentially anything the doctor tells her). She had pregnancy hypertension. Her blood pressure was *extremely* high every time she went to the doctor. She was convinced that anything else was at fault other than her poor diet: blaming the equipment, the position they were measuring her pressure in, everything. She's self diagnosed herself with at least five extremely rare illnesses two of which would have killed her by now if she actually had them. She spends significant time every visit trying to convince her doctor she has one or another of them. Of course most of her problem are the result of being overweight, over 40 and having had two babies in the last three years; but hey, what do I know?
I'm not saying your doctor is right and you are wrong. I'm not saying you shouldn't take an interest in your own health care, get second opinions, or research your symptoms. I am saying that realistically your doctor probably knows a lot more about this stuff than you do. He may not (won't) be right every time, but most likely if you lay the odds out he's a lot more likely to be right than you are. Talk to him. Find out why he did what he did. If he won't talk to you, or you discover that you just have completely different philosophies (and that can happen, quite often), find a new doctor. Unless your insurance is complete crap or you live in total BFE there's got to be other options.
This is the part of the whole thing I never understood. Even if we accept that vaccines increase the risk of Autism (which they don't), the problem they solve is much more serious. People die or get permanent life altering disabilities from the diseases we vaccinate against. To employ the very over the top rhetoric of the movement itself: "Don't these people understand that they're killing babies?!?!" Sure we don't have a lot of experience with most of these diseases, but that's precisely because we are nearly immune to them as a society. Remove the herd immunity and they go right back to killing people.
I'm not going to say "I've never have had this happen", because in the nearly five years I've owned an iPhone it has... three times I think. It's not actually all that common because of a factor you're not considering. You can simultaneously use voice and wifi. Usually (not always obviously, but usually) when I need to reference Internet stuffs while on the phone I'm in a static location where there's wifi. I wouldn't complain about the problem going away, mind you, but it's not really a huge issue most of the time.
Except for the stag. I'm pretty sure he doesn't have an onboard computer (yet). Never the less, I agree in general. A computer (at least not the current models and likely not for some years to come) is unlikely to be able to drive with the level of skill and awareness of the best drivers, but as your sibling points out they're likely even now to be able to be close as good as the average driver. More to the point they can drive as well as an average driver consistently. Even the best human drivers are not at their best every time they sit behind the wheel. They get distracted, tired, hungry, or bored.
Add in a smart road grid that can talk to the cars and manage traffic flow, cars that can talk to each other to negotiate following distance, lanes and speed, and GPS to make sure it's all happening where it's supposed to... You could be talking revolutionary levels of driving safety. On the other hand we're no where near there yet, and if we got there we'd also have a mountain of privacy issues to work through. Nothing is ever simple:-)
Some do, but obviously only the relatively rich. On the other hand LOTS of the third world has cell phones. I've never seen any statistics, but I'd not be completely shocked to discover that more people have access to a cellphone in the world than have access to a traditional phone. Wireless technology is cheap to deploy relative to wired technology. Based on the trends, it's reasonable to think that in 5 years there might be widespread distribution of "smartphones" in the third world. They might be the equivalent of a Treo 650, but it's Internet access. Maybe not 5 years, maybe 10, maybe 20... Or maybe never. I'm not saying it will happen, but I can guarantee you that in the 80's no one though the massive distribution of mobile phones we see now would happen.
The idea of the third world deploying mobile Internet is no where near as far fetched as it sounds, though certainly not inevitable.
I agree in principle, but I think Google may have found the sauce. Not the website, Google.com, but the company. They've made tremendous use of their time in the Sun to become more than a search engine. As long as they keep innovating and coming up with new variation on their essential theme (basically their common thread is advertising, but doing it in such a way that people are connected with advertisements they may actually want) they may be a long haul company. People in 50 years may never actually search on Google, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they worked with Google products of some sort, and knew the name. Of course 50 years is also a lot of time for stuff to go wrong, but much more so than lot of other Internet companies I think Google *could* do it.
There's also the extreme cognitive dissonance that would be created by the many, many facets of the world that would refuse to agree with the pretty new "history". Art, literature, government documents, the memories of people who lived through the more recent events... How would you sanitize ALL of that? Archeologists and historians can often piece together remarkably accurate chains of events and cultural models based little more than a few building layouts and refuse piles. More modern history with its extravagant generation of documentation and cultural artifacts could never be sanitized without people constantly finding little pieces of evidence that contradict the established "history".
Regardless of the philosophical questions about the advisability of something like this, from a practical point of view it would be impossible.
I'm using TouchTerm for iPhone and I've found it fairly nice. It has an "enhanced" virtual keyboard with a lot of the extra useful keys like ~, tab, and several ctrl escapes. It saves your connections, can handle keys, and is generally a fully functional SSH client. That said, I'd rather use a real computer with a keyboard unless it's an emergency.
It's not practical for the way companies want you to use the cloud (ie as an essentially seamless piece of your work flow), but if you're just using the cloud as an off site backup it's pretty trivial to encrypt the data before it leave your system. You'd have to pull it back and decrypt it to actually use it, but while it's in the cloud it's just an encrypted blob. It'd be inconvenient as hell for actual work documents, but fine for a backup.
Personally I keep a number of files with no real private data on my Dropbox in a normal unencrypted form so I can grab them if I need them (things like my resume, some spreadsheets I use to model my WoW character, a copy of my insurance card (becasue I ALWAYS forget to print the damned things and put them in my glove box), etc. I also have an encrypted blob that contain some stuff that I want to make sure I don't lose, but which contains more personal information ( a copy of my DD-214 which has my social on it, some bank stuff, scanned copies of mortgage stuff, etc). If I ever want to actually USE any of that I'll have to download it and decrypt it first, but I have it and it's fairly safe. Since I also keep local copies and a local backup If Dropbox ever fails I'll just find a new provider.
Oh no, I'm quite old enough to remember. I also remember the headaches from trying to read long documents on those screens. Even back then we knew that the resolution and screen size weren't ideal to the task at hand, it was just the best we had or could afford. That's no longer the case. There's a reason it's taken this long for e-books to really take off. Until recently it's been phenomenally uncomfortable to read a book length work on a computer screen.
I can read stuff on my HDTV just fine and I don't *really* consciously see the pixels, but I'm also not trying to read, say, a 350 comment Slashdot article on my TV. I'm scrolling through menus, and those menus rather deliberately have a fairly large typeface. Very occasionally I might be forced to read an entire screenful or two worth of text, but that's about the extent of it. Much like I could easily and comfortably read several pages worth of information on my 640x480 monitor, but usually started to get a headache after reading on it for a couple hours or more.
You're talking about making the TV a monitor for a general use computer. Something I might easily spend several hours working or playing on. I don't know that a 52 inch TV at 1080p will be comfortable for that, though again I've never tried and could be wrong.
Though there could be value in making cloud booting an option for emergency situation like GP describes. Imagine this:
You go buy your new iCloud. At "boot up" it asks for your.mac account information (really this would be more like a fancy BIOS than an actual OS boot, that would occur later). It then asks if this is a new iCloud or a replacement for your old one. If it's new the system boots with a clean image either stored in its flash memory or downloaded from the site for the first time and stored for future boots. If it's a replacement the system boots with the image of your old system. All your settings, applications, etc are all there. So if you upgrade from an iCloud to an iCloud 3, your new box has all the new power and features, but all of your old familiar setup. If you have to replace your iCloud due to damage or warranty, your new one is just like your old one.
On the one hand this is sort of terrifying, on the other I can see advantages for a lot of people. Of course you'd want to system to cache your image and not download it every time, and you'd want backups to be scheduled for convenient times to avoid bandwidth limitations, but all in all it could be quite useful for some types of users.
How about if I point out that an iPhone 4 (or any equivalent smart phone... it's just quick and easy to look up the iPhone specs) has approximately half the resolution of an HDTV in approximately 1/10th to 1/15th the size. Therefore making the picture approximately 1/5th to 1/8th richer. Most computer monitors also have significantly higher pixels per inch that an HDTV even at similar resolutions (though not quite as exaggerated as a phone screen). Resolution in and of itself doesn't tell you how good your picture quality will be. Blow 1080p up to the size of a movie theater screen and it'll look awful. Shrink 980x640 down to the size of an iPhone screen and it's gorgeous (though it looks blocky and poor on even an smaller computer monitor). A 1080p display at 52 inches is more than fine for video, but I don't know that I'd want to read any great amount of text on it.
To be fair I've never really tried, it might be fine, but I suspect current HDTV's are to low a resolution for their size to make effective monitors.
Unlikely. They need us to feed the masses fart apps. I'm being a bit silly, but the point is real. One of the hallmarks of these locked down devices is their inability to be used in writing and compiling their own software. Third party software is as much a feature of iPhone or Android as the part written by Apple or Google. Witness the incalculable number of "there's an app for that" commercials.
General purpose PCs will become less common in the coming decade I think, but they will remain a large market. Programmers, designers, engineers of all stripes, media people (photo, video, or audio)... They are all greedy for either control, power, storage, screen real estate, or some combination of the four. Such people will always form a large niche market for more powerful and open systems. Apple systems already cater to several of those demographics, I don't see them in particular or computers in general leaving such a large and potentially lucrative market behind. After all, the majority of people who really need power and control are either professionals of some sort, or the type of hobbyist willing to invest cash in their hobby (I should know, I shudder to think how much money has gone into my wife photography habit over the years).
I don't actually know the answer to your question, but I have to say that part of me thinks that anyone storing data relevant to their potential criminal prosecution in the "cloud" kind of deserves what they get:-)
That'd be hella complicated. One thing to remember here is that a radio net is a shared resource. Only once person can talk at a time. With a large unit, say a Division, it's impossible to allow any percentage of the necessary traffic to happen on one net. Therefore there are many nets. Each one is created by using either a different freq plan or the same freq plan with a different salt (so the radios are rarely if ever trying to use the same freqs). Very large commands have two dozen or more nets for command and control, logistics, artillery, aircraft, MPs, etc, etc. Then the subunits all have their own nets for doing all of those things. Then *their* subunits have nets, and so on down the line. A Brigade has nearly as many nets as a Division, but it occupies the same geographic footprint. A Battalion has fewer, but still on the order of a dozen. Companies have fewer still, usually only two or three. A platoon usually only has one. Still add it all together and you're talking probably a good bit more than a hundred nets for a Division sized unit. You'd have to avoid all those time slices, and avoid generate avoid bleed affecting them.
Tell ya what... I don't fell like typing my response to a previous and similar comment out again, so click my name and read it. Suffice to say this is WAY more complicated. Modern frequency hopping radios are impossible to jam without taking out the entire spectrum. Which tends to screw with friendly comms.
It's actually pretty complicated. I used to be a military communications officer, so I have some idea of what they're trying to do here. The way modern military radios work is they take an entire spectrum and jump frequencies around a hundred times a second (that's what the US radios do, I assume enemy technology to be on par) based on an algorithm, a frequency plan, and a randomly generated salt which is a shared secret between all the radios. Unless you have all three pieces or you can use something like this adaptive "smart jammer" they want to develop, you can't jam the radios without jamming the entire spectrum. That's possible of course, but a) it takes a lot of power and b) it typically jams your radios too.
The trick here is that you don't want to create a radio "dead space" you want to jam enemy communications while leaving your own untouched. Your friend created a broad spectrum jammer. It crudely killed anything in the immediate area that was trying to use any frequency close to the one he was broadcasting on. Since there's a fairly limited number of channels that wifi runs on, and they're published frequency ranges, it was fairly trivial to scan each channel (which a WAP is doing anyway) to jam the correct one, or just broadcast on all of them. Now imagine your trying to jam a device that can use any frequency in the VHF range, has a list of 10,000 freqs it may be using, is changing freqs once every.001 seconds, and is jumping in away that appears random without the algorithm and salt. You probably have the algorithm, but the salt is only stored on secure devices that self wipe after either a certain number of failed password attempts or any attempt to access the internals. On top of that, since the enemy is almost certainly using more than one channel to communicate, you have to sort which devices are one which channels. All of which are that complicated. Finally, you have to do all of this without impacting your own communication systems which are doing the same thing on the same freq band.
Yeah, because it's not the least bit illegal to beat the shit out of people whom you personally determine to be guilty of a crime. Not to mention that on the Internet no one know you're a dog. How do you know this guy you're going out to "sting" isn't a 6' 5", 250 pound multiple black belt and weapons expert? Nothing can possibly go wrong with your plan
No, you believe that iPhones are "fashion accessories and social opiates" in actual fact, something on the order of 75% of the people I work with use iPhones, and we're a mostly Unix systems and development shop. Of course you will now counter that they must not be very good at their jobs or make some other obvious slur, because in your mind only people who agree with you about every aspect of technology could possibly be competent. None the less, we do quite well, our customers are usually very happy, and many of us use iPhones.
The difference, at least with the Android syncs I've seen, is that the iPhone transfers all your settings, preferences, etc. It's not a huge deal, mind you, nothing that would have taken more than an hour or two to manually sync, but it's still nice. It not just OS settings, or Apple apps either. All her apps were setup exactly as they had been.
That is the one reason I wish I still lived in Lafayette (Of course I still own property there, gogo housing market crash). All in all, my time there was fairly well tainted by my employer so I don't really love the place, but the fiber to the home initiative was exciting and interesting. I'm sad that I didn't see it brought to completion. You may recall however that Cox sued to prevent it from happening using the law GP mentioned. Something in the way Lafayette went about it (perhaps using LUS as a front) allowed them to do it anyway.
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SGI always did it this way. It was a nice compromise. I had the phone I wanted, with the plan I wanted, and submitted monthly for my bill. AT&T gave us a corporate discount rate, I had one phone to carry instead of two, and the company could always reach me. My last few jobs haven't been high availability so it hasn't been a problem.
I'd be willing to bet that the state isn't seeing those savings, because the people in question have both a landline and cell. I could be wrong of course, but I'd bet money that I'm not.
Maybe you failed to notice. Here, I'll point it out in big scary letters like yours: WE LIVE LONGER AND HEALTHIER LIVES THAN ANY PEOPLE IN HISTORY. Modern medicine is not perfect. Not even close. There's lots of holes in our knowledge of the exact ways and meas that out bodies work and grow. New discoveries often change previously held viewpoints. That said, it works better than anything else out there. We live one average 25-30 years longer than people even a hundred years ago, and we remain relatively active, healthy, and productive for more of those years. Out infant mortality rates are a fraction of what they were. If we had a decent single payer health care system they'd probably be even lower (they are in most of Europe).
Go find your father (you can probably do that, because he's probably still alive and healthy barring accident or freak illness) and ask him to open his mouth wide. What you will no doubt see, assuming he still has most of his natural teeth, is a patchwork and cacophony of metal and epoxy fillings. You probably don't have that. Wanna know why? Because there's fluoride in your water and has been since you were small. My father has 12 filling in his head and by the time he was my age he'd had a root canal. My mother has 6 or 7 fillings. I have none. I am 36 years old and I have never had a cavity. All signs point to me never ever having a cavity. I will most likely die with the same teeth I lived with since that magical that around 7 or so when The Toothfairy brought me my first quarter. I'll most likely do that dying at 80 or 90 years old instead of my early 60s. I'll most likely have most of my faculties be able to maintain a fairly robust life until shortly before that death or even right up until it. I could also get hit by a bus tomorrow, but there's not a lot to be done about that. I'll take the modern medicine, thanks.
This may sound callous to your friend, who no doubt doesn't think of himself as some sort of Typhoid Mary, but there is a common factor here well outside of vaccinations. Autism has been pretty strongly linked to lots of factors, many of them genetic. I'm sure not going to come one here and say for sure one way or the other, but has this person considered that he or his wife (or even both, given that all four children seem affected) is probably a more likely cause than vaccines? I mean there's like millions of kids born every year and with or without vaccines the vast majority of them won't have Autism, but all four of his do? There's a statistically *much* higher linkage between his and his wife's genes than exists with vaccines no matter how you mess with the numbers. Even Wakefield never claimed that every child who gets vaccinated will get Autism.
the fact that they don't even bother to prescribe medicines to you you actually know will help you from previous experience.
Did you ask why? Maybe that medicine has proven to have previously unrealized and serious side affects. Maybe it's addictive in certain quantities and the doctor, knowing that you'd had it before, didn't want to keep giving to you. Maybe your symptoms were subtly different in a way that made him think something else was better. Maybe he just thought something else would work even better. Maybe the medicine addressed symptoms very well, but didn't address the underlying problem (hence the relapse). There's about a million maybe's. Doctors will talk to you and answer direct questions. If they won't, find a new doctor. They're like everyone else, some are good, some are bad, some are good but terrible with people, some are bad but very good with people (so they seem better to the outsider).
Look at the TV show House. Yeah, it's fiction,yeah the format is bullshit, just look at he character. Think of the people you know in your own industry. If you're in the tech industry I'm sure you know a guy like House. We all know a guy like him. Brilliant, certified in everything, able to make every system in the place sit up and beg, but a complete nightmare to work with. His patients (users) hate him, though all their stuff always works; his colleagues grudgingly respect his results, but make every effort to avoid working with him.
The Internet does not make you a doctor. At best it's a tool you can use to complement your doctor's work. How many times have you been called with a tech problem and a firm diagnosis from your "patient", only to realize immediately that this person had no idea what they were talking about? Do you think that happens a lot to doctors?
I cringe every time I see my one friend's Facebook entries about her doctor visits. She clearly sees them as some sort of competition whereby she must "correct" every "misdiagnosis" she receives (essentially anything the doctor tells her). She had pregnancy hypertension. Her blood pressure was *extremely* high every time she went to the doctor. She was convinced that anything else was at fault other than her poor diet: blaming the equipment, the position they were measuring her pressure in, everything. She's self diagnosed herself with at least five extremely rare illnesses two of which would have killed her by now if she actually had them. She spends significant time every visit trying to convince her doctor she has one or another of them. Of course most of her problem are the result of being overweight, over 40 and having had two babies in the last three years; but hey, what do I know?
I'm not saying your doctor is right and you are wrong. I'm not saying you shouldn't take an interest in your own health care, get second opinions, or research your symptoms. I am saying that realistically your doctor probably knows a lot more about this stuff than you do. He may not (won't) be right every time, but most likely if you lay the odds out he's a lot more likely to be right than you are. Talk to him. Find out why he did what he did. If he won't talk to you, or you discover that you just have completely different philosophies (and that can happen, quite often), find a new doctor. Unless your insurance is complete crap or you live in total BFE there's got to be other options.
This is the part of the whole thing I never understood. Even if we accept that vaccines increase the risk of Autism (which they don't), the problem they solve is much more serious. People die or get permanent life altering disabilities from the diseases we vaccinate against. To employ the very over the top rhetoric of the movement itself: "Don't these people understand that they're killing babies?!?!" Sure we don't have a lot of experience with most of these diseases, but that's precisely because we are nearly immune to them as a society. Remove the herd immunity and they go right back to killing people.
I'm not going to say "I've never have had this happen", because in the nearly five years I've owned an iPhone it has... three times I think. It's not actually all that common because of a factor you're not considering. You can simultaneously use voice and wifi. Usually (not always obviously, but usually) when I need to reference Internet stuffs while on the phone I'm in a static location where there's wifi. I wouldn't complain about the problem going away, mind you, but it's not really a huge issue most of the time.
Except for the stag. I'm pretty sure he doesn't have an onboard computer (yet). Never the less, I agree in general. A computer (at least not the current models and likely not for some years to come) is unlikely to be able to drive with the level of skill and awareness of the best drivers, but as your sibling points out they're likely even now to be able to be close as good as the average driver. More to the point they can drive as well as an average driver consistently. Even the best human drivers are not at their best every time they sit behind the wheel. They get distracted, tired, hungry, or bored.
Add in a smart road grid that can talk to the cars and manage traffic flow, cars that can talk to each other to negotiate following distance, lanes and speed, and GPS to make sure it's all happening where it's supposed to... You could be talking revolutionary levels of driving safety. On the other hand we're no where near there yet, and if we got there we'd also have a mountain of privacy issues to work through. Nothing is ever simple :-)
Some do, but obviously only the relatively rich. On the other hand LOTS of the third world has cell phones. I've never seen any statistics, but I'd not be completely shocked to discover that more people have access to a cellphone in the world than have access to a traditional phone. Wireless technology is cheap to deploy relative to wired technology. Based on the trends, it's reasonable to think that in 5 years there might be widespread distribution of "smartphones" in the third world. They might be the equivalent of a Treo 650, but it's Internet access. Maybe not 5 years, maybe 10, maybe 20... Or maybe never. I'm not saying it will happen, but I can guarantee you that in the 80's no one though the massive distribution of mobile phones we see now would happen.
The idea of the third world deploying mobile Internet is no where near as far fetched as it sounds, though certainly not inevitable.
I agree in principle, but I think Google may have found the sauce. Not the website, Google.com, but the company. They've made tremendous use of their time in the Sun to become more than a search engine. As long as they keep innovating and coming up with new variation on their essential theme (basically their common thread is advertising, but doing it in such a way that people are connected with advertisements they may actually want) they may be a long haul company. People in 50 years may never actually search on Google, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they worked with Google products of some sort, and knew the name. Of course 50 years is also a lot of time for stuff to go wrong, but much more so than lot of other Internet companies I think Google *could* do it.
There's also the extreme cognitive dissonance that would be created by the many, many facets of the world that would refuse to agree with the pretty new "history". Art, literature, government documents, the memories of people who lived through the more recent events... How would you sanitize ALL of that? Archeologists and historians can often piece together remarkably accurate chains of events and cultural models based little more than a few building layouts and refuse piles. More modern history with its extravagant generation of documentation and cultural artifacts could never be sanitized without people constantly finding little pieces of evidence that contradict the established "history".
Regardless of the philosophical questions about the advisability of something like this, from a practical point of view it would be impossible.
I'm using TouchTerm for iPhone and I've found it fairly nice. It has an "enhanced" virtual keyboard with a lot of the extra useful keys like ~, tab, and several ctrl escapes. It saves your connections, can handle keys, and is generally a fully functional SSH client. That said, I'd rather use a real computer with a keyboard unless it's an emergency.
It's not practical for the way companies want you to use the cloud (ie as an essentially seamless piece of your work flow), but if you're just using the cloud as an off site backup it's pretty trivial to encrypt the data before it leave your system. You'd have to pull it back and decrypt it to actually use it, but while it's in the cloud it's just an encrypted blob. It'd be inconvenient as hell for actual work documents, but fine for a backup.
Personally I keep a number of files with no real private data on my Dropbox in a normal unencrypted form so I can grab them if I need them (things like my resume, some spreadsheets I use to model my WoW character, a copy of my insurance card (becasue I ALWAYS forget to print the damned things and put them in my glove box), etc. I also have an encrypted blob that contain some stuff that I want to make sure I don't lose, but which contains more personal information ( a copy of my DD-214 which has my social on it, some bank stuff, scanned copies of mortgage stuff, etc). If I ever want to actually USE any of that I'll have to download it and decrypt it first, but I have it and it's fairly safe. Since I also keep local copies and a local backup If Dropbox ever fails I'll just find a new provider.
Oh no, I'm quite old enough to remember. I also remember the headaches from trying to read long documents on those screens. Even back then we knew that the resolution and screen size weren't ideal to the task at hand, it was just the best we had or could afford. That's no longer the case. There's a reason it's taken this long for e-books to really take off. Until recently it's been phenomenally uncomfortable to read a book length work on a computer screen.
I can read stuff on my HDTV just fine and I don't *really* consciously see the pixels, but I'm also not trying to read, say, a 350 comment Slashdot article on my TV. I'm scrolling through menus, and those menus rather deliberately have a fairly large typeface. Very occasionally I might be forced to read an entire screenful or two worth of text, but that's about the extent of it. Much like I could easily and comfortably read several pages worth of information on my 640x480 monitor, but usually started to get a headache after reading on it for a couple hours or more.
You're talking about making the TV a monitor for a general use computer. Something I might easily spend several hours working or playing on. I don't know that a 52 inch TV at 1080p will be comfortable for that, though again I've never tried and could be wrong.
Though there could be value in making cloud booting an option for emergency situation like GP describes. Imagine this:
You go buy your new iCloud. At "boot up" it asks for your .mac account information (really this would be more like a fancy BIOS than an actual OS boot, that would occur later). It then asks if this is a new iCloud or a replacement for your old one. If it's new the system boots with a clean image either stored in its flash memory or downloaded from the site for the first time and stored for future boots. If it's a replacement the system boots with the image of your old system. All your settings, applications, etc are all there. So if you upgrade from an iCloud to an iCloud 3, your new box has all the new power and features, but all of your old familiar setup. If you have to replace your iCloud due to damage or warranty, your new one is just like your old one.
On the one hand this is sort of terrifying, on the other I can see advantages for a lot of people. Of course you'd want to system to cache your image and not download it every time, and you'd want backups to be scheduled for convenient times to avoid bandwidth limitations, but all in all it could be quite useful for some types of users.
How about if I point out that an iPhone 4 (or any equivalent smart phone... it's just quick and easy to look up the iPhone specs) has approximately half the resolution of an HDTV in approximately 1/10th to 1/15th the size. Therefore making the picture approximately 1/5th to 1/8th richer. Most computer monitors also have significantly higher pixels per inch that an HDTV even at similar resolutions (though not quite as exaggerated as a phone screen). Resolution in and of itself doesn't tell you how good your picture quality will be. Blow 1080p up to the size of a movie theater screen and it'll look awful. Shrink 980x640 down to the size of an iPhone screen and it's gorgeous (though it looks blocky and poor on even an smaller computer monitor). A 1080p display at 52 inches is more than fine for video, but I don't know that I'd want to read any great amount of text on it.
To be fair I've never really tried, it might be fine, but I suspect current HDTV's are to low a resolution for their size to make effective monitors.
Unlikely. They need us to feed the masses fart apps. I'm being a bit silly, but the point is real. One of the hallmarks of these locked down devices is their inability to be used in writing and compiling their own software. Third party software is as much a feature of iPhone or Android as the part written by Apple or Google. Witness the incalculable number of "there's an app for that" commercials.
General purpose PCs will become less common in the coming decade I think, but they will remain a large market. Programmers, designers, engineers of all stripes, media people (photo, video, or audio)... They are all greedy for either control, power, storage, screen real estate, or some combination of the four. Such people will always form a large niche market for more powerful and open systems. Apple systems already cater to several of those demographics, I don't see them in particular or computers in general leaving such a large and potentially lucrative market behind. After all, the majority of people who really need power and control are either professionals of some sort, or the type of hobbyist willing to invest cash in their hobby (I should know, I shudder to think how much money has gone into my wife photography habit over the years).
I don't actually know the answer to your question, but I have to say that part of me thinks that anyone storing data relevant to their potential criminal prosecution in the "cloud" kind of deserves what they get :-)
That'd be hella complicated. One thing to remember here is that a radio net is a shared resource. Only once person can talk at a time. With a large unit, say a Division, it's impossible to allow any percentage of the necessary traffic to happen on one net. Therefore there are many nets. Each one is created by using either a different freq plan or the same freq plan with a different salt (so the radios are rarely if ever trying to use the same freqs). Very large commands have two dozen or more nets for command and control, logistics, artillery, aircraft, MPs, etc, etc. Then the subunits all have their own nets for doing all of those things. Then *their* subunits have nets, and so on down the line. A Brigade has nearly as many nets as a Division, but it occupies the same geographic footprint. A Battalion has fewer, but still on the order of a dozen. Companies have fewer still, usually only two or three. A platoon usually only has one. Still add it all together and you're talking probably a good bit more than a hundred nets for a Division sized unit. You'd have to avoid all those time slices, and avoid generate avoid bleed affecting them.
Tell ya what... I don't fell like typing my response to a previous and similar comment out again, so click my name and read it. Suffice to say this is WAY more complicated. Modern frequency hopping radios are impossible to jam without taking out the entire spectrum. Which tends to screw with friendly comms.
It's actually pretty complicated. I used to be a military communications officer, so I have some idea of what they're trying to do here. The way modern military radios work is they take an entire spectrum and jump frequencies around a hundred times a second (that's what the US radios do, I assume enemy technology to be on par) based on an algorithm, a frequency plan, and a randomly generated salt which is a shared secret between all the radios. Unless you have all three pieces or you can use something like this adaptive "smart jammer" they want to develop, you can't jam the radios without jamming the entire spectrum. That's possible of course, but a) it takes a lot of power and b) it typically jams your radios too.
The trick here is that you don't want to create a radio "dead space" you want to jam enemy communications while leaving your own untouched. Your friend created a broad spectrum jammer. It crudely killed anything in the immediate area that was trying to use any frequency close to the one he was broadcasting on. Since there's a fairly limited number of channels that wifi runs on, and they're published frequency ranges, it was fairly trivial to scan each channel (which a WAP is doing anyway) to jam the correct one, or just broadcast on all of them. Now imagine your trying to jam a device that can use any frequency in the VHF range, has a list of 10,000 freqs it may be using, is changing freqs once every .001 seconds, and is jumping in away that appears random without the algorithm and salt. You probably have the algorithm, but the salt is only stored on secure devices that self wipe after either a certain number of failed password attempts or any attempt to access the internals. On top of that, since the enemy is almost certainly using more than one channel to communicate, you have to sort which devices are one which channels. All of which are that complicated. Finally, you have to do all of this without impacting your own communication systems which are doing the same thing on the same freq band.
Still seem easy?
Yeah, because it's not the least bit illegal to beat the shit out of people whom you personally determine to be guilty of a crime. Not to mention that on the Internet no one know you're a dog. How do you know this guy you're going out to "sting" isn't a 6' 5", 250 pound multiple black belt and weapons expert? Nothing can possibly go wrong with your plan
No, you believe that iPhones are "fashion accessories and social opiates" in actual fact, something on the order of 75% of the people I work with use iPhones, and we're a mostly Unix systems and development shop. Of course you will now counter that they must not be very good at their jobs or make some other obvious slur, because in your mind only people who agree with you about every aspect of technology could possibly be competent. None the less, we do quite well, our customers are usually very happy, and many of us use iPhones.
The difference, at least with the Android syncs I've seen, is that the iPhone transfers all your settings, preferences, etc. It's not a huge deal, mind you, nothing that would have taken more than an hour or two to manually sync, but it's still nice. It not just OS settings, or Apple apps either. All her apps were setup exactly as they had been.
That is the one reason I wish I still lived in Lafayette (Of course I still own property there, gogo housing market crash). All in all, my time there was fairly well tainted by my employer so I don't really love the place, but the fiber to the home initiative was exciting and interesting. I'm sad that I didn't see it brought to completion. You may recall however that Cox sued to prevent it from happening using the law GP mentioned. Something in the way Lafayette went about it (perhaps using LUS as a front) allowed them to do it anyway.