Or the fact that DSL bridges and Cable Internet routers are universally called modems despite not modulating or demodulating anything. People think of the thing that lets them talk to the Internet as a "modem" and it was easier to continue with the terminology than to try to explain the difference to a bunch of people who wouldn't understand or much care. Fifteen years from now "modem" will be the term for "gateway out of the house" and no one will know why except a few pedantic old timers.
I'm not saying that *nix systems are not often better than Windows systems when it comes to numbers of required patches, just that they need their fair share. Your implication in the post I originally responded to ("I don't remember the last time I patched") was that you so seldom have to patch your Linux boxes that it's a completely trivial question. In fact, given a Linux box configured as a workstation, using mostly standard tools, patches are issued for at least several things a week. Patches are typically less painful than in the Windows world because so few of them require anything more arduous than a service restart, true. There are typically fewer of them, true. Just not "gosh I can't remember the last time I had to do this" fewer (unless your memory is really poor).
Questions of whether this number would go up if more people were trying to beat on the OS are difficult to answer, but it is perhaps telling that one of the more globally popular pieces of software in the "typical" Linux stack, Firefox, is also one of the ones that requires the most frequent updates. It could be that Firefox is one of the more poorly written tools in a the stack, it could also be that it's a much larger target because of its cross platform popularity.
Firefox by itself has been updated at least once a week for the last month. I suspect much depends on how you use your machines. A mail server, for instance, probably wouldn't have had any updates (other than the bzip and kernel ones already mentioned) all month. A workstation on the other hand has had (that I can remember off the top of my head, without looking at logs) at least the kernel bug, bzip bug, three or four Firefox bugs, and two Samba bugs. I also remember having to update Apache once this month so there's one for a webserver. SSL had to updated on pretty everything last month (unless you have some box that doesn't use SSL for anything). I tend to notice these things more than a lot of people because I admin several boxes that don't have Internet access and have to be patched manually. That tends to stick out in your mind more than just typing "yum update" or "apt-get upgrade".
I should also note that these were only the "critical" updates I had to do manually. My unclassified workstation has patched several minor security holes through RHN that I haven't had to manually update on the others. Just this morning I got Freetype, Poppler and KDE-utils updates. Firfox, KDE-utils, Freetype, and Poppler may not be part of the OS per se, but they're pretty important to the usage profile of a workstation machine, and fall into the same type of update as many Windows updates.
Uh... If you use 64-bit Linux it was the week before that with the 32-bit compatibility layer privilege escalation bug. I'm not saying that *nix is less secure than Windows, but lets not go pretending that RHN doesn't deliver me 2-4 security updates a week. Most of them are for applications, not the base OS, none the less there's holes and bugs in Linux as a system. SSL and/or SSH patches are pretty common too, and those are pretty much global across all *nixes.
You damage your point by pretending that *nix systems don't have their own patching issues. On the other hand I rarely have to reboot my *nix system for a patch, whereas my Windows systems reboot themselves nearly every time I patch.
Or, there is Faronics DeepFreeze that locks the hard drive to a state and discards all changes after reboot.
This is the only that really prevents users from doing dumb shit. Even it is limiting the effect of users doing dumb shit so that reboots take care of the dumb shit. It's also problematical if you'd like your users to save their work between reboots. I guess you could have them upload the work to some outside repository before reboots. The rest will prevent you from getting your system compromised at the root level, but doesn't really stop lots of types of infections.
In order for a system to be useful it must do several things. It must store the user's data somewhere, somehow; which means the user has to have write access to *something*. It has to have network access to the things the user needs network access too. The user must be able to use the software they need to use to perform their functions. So, storage, network access, and ability to execute software are the three things a user must have to make the computer useful. Those are the things most malware needs to operate at its base level. In other words, malware can operate and be effective using nothing other than the base privileges users must have.
I can install itself (on the users home directory or whatever scratch space they have, as a hidden file of course), run itself (with the user's level of privilege), and phone home (assuming it can get through you firewalls and other external limit factors). It has access to any data that the user has access too (which is probably whatever the user needs to work on and may be quite sensitive). it could even participate in a botnet (assuming the user is logged in and the botnet doesn't ask the system to do anything outside of the users level of rights).
There's this idea that you have to "own" a system to compromise it. Certainly it helps. Certainly it makes it easier to hide the infection. In no way is complete root level ownership of a system needed to do most of what malware writers want to do on a system though.
At the very least I'd contact a lawyer. Both in case of potential prosecution (they must have suspected him of something or they wouldn't have placed an expensive piece of hardware on his car, no matter what they say), and to find out what my rights are in regards to keeping the device as a souvenir.
And there's certainly an element of that too. There's a number of reasons why, but it's pretty clear that employers will meet or even exceed market rate for new hires, but rarely go though the trouble for current employees (with occasional exceptions to counteroffer on someone they really want to keep for some reason). You can also often negotiate perks and responsibilities a bit more at the beginning.
Or the five years of experience in three year old technology. You don't see that quite as often any more, but it used to be a popular one. Especially when Java was first coming into its own. The template for hiring "senior developers" at a lot of companies apparently wanted ten year of experience in the language being hired for. SO you regularly saw jobs for "Java developers with at least ten years experience" well before Java was ten years old.
Perhaps, but when they want you, they're willing to play ball at least int eh short term.
You are a company. You have a sys admin. He does shit. you don't really know what kind of shit, but he must be doing some shit because the computers mostly work. He wants more money and keeps talking about needing some training and upgrades. Fuck him... you don't even know what he does and the computers mostly work.
You are a company. Your sys admin left a month ago. The computers have stopped mostly working. They now often don't work, and sometimes threaten employee's children with things that you're almost certain will get you fined. You have found a person with a pretty good resume who appears not to be a Troll. He says he can get the computers to mostly work again. He wants more money than the old guy, but he says he can get the computers to mostly work again. He wants a training budget, but he says he can get the computers mostly working again. He says you need to spend some money on infrastructure upgrades, but PLEASE GOD GET THE COMPUTERS WORKING AGAIN.. Ahem.. sorry... yes.. we can probably pay that.
You see. There's a difference. In reality land probably not quite such a huge difference, but companies are always more willing to negotiate and play ball with a new hire into a "need to fill" vacancy than they are with a current employee.
You.. you realise that these are both devices that plug into the TV, right? I mean... if Apple wanted to sell me an actual TV for $100 I'd be all over it. You can't hardly get any kind of TV for that anymore.
OK... Now I have to ask... Any idea what, if any, advantage there is to using that thing instead of a regular breach loaded self propelled howitzer? I mean you're right, it's technically a mortar, but it seems to have none of the usual advantages of a mortar over a breach loader (portability, ease of use, and deploy-ability mostly). What an odd contraption.
You bring up an interesting point, because of course the dust and grit *is* a huge issue. Seems like the sort of thing that solar manufacturers would be old hands at dealing with though. I mean all of the *best* places to install solar are also very dry, dusty, and gritty. "Desert" and "solar power" are kind of like peanut butter and chocolate. I don't know enough about solar installation to make any educated guess here, but my assumption is that grit and dust and pretty much things solar people expect to have deal with?
Yeah, realistically I was talking more long term and large scale than the specific stuff that this one company is deploying. That particular bit seems almost like some sort of little test project. "Look we fielded this company with high tech energy saving stuff! We're doing something!" An element that small probably uses more diesel for its trucks than its generators anyway.
Solar is always auxiliary power. I don't think this stuff is to replace fossil fuel dependency, just mitigate it. You could have put enough solar cells on top of 4ID headquarters (of course it's not 4 ID headquarters any more, but whatever division is currently running that AO)to power half the damned thing, and you wouldn't have made it any more of a target. It was a huge sprawling 3 story office complex. The point isn't that you can get rid of all the generators, the point is to use less fuel. I seriously doubt the DoD is under any delusions that they can ship some solar cells over and stop worrying about diesel all together.
All I'm saying is that on the larger bases (where the majority of the people are), solar cells would be a much better auxiliary source than incredibly heavy, possibly dangerous, low yield mini-nuke plants. You also don't entirely understand the scale of a place like Victory (which, granted is unusually large). You can't hit large swathes of it even with mortars.
I was the battalion communications officer for a field artillery unit. Since we were largely underutilized in our primary function (never had more than a platoon worth of guns active at a time), we were primarily providing the vast majority of the gate security for Camp Victory. The types of reactors you're talking about wouldn't even begin to power Camp Victory. It was the size of a city, and had dozens if not hundreds of 1500KW or better generators powering it.
"FOB" is a generic term for all of our bases "over there". The largest base in Iraq, Camp Victory, is the size of a midsized American city and is divided into a few "FOBs". They're essentially just areas owned by a specific command, you can drive from one end of Victory to the other without across all the FOBs in perfect safety (beyond a highly unlikely indirect fire attack). There are smaller, company or battalion controlled, FOBs but most of our people are in the larger ones.
If you're talking about enough power to supply single family home, then you're not really talking about enough power to even keep a battalion in business, let alone any larger unit. If all you're powering with this thing is company base camp sized bases (and even then you'd be cutting it close, these guys need to power a *lot* of technology these days) then it's hardly worth the expense to build and transport such a massive item. You appear to have a vision of what's going on over there which is based on completely valid military service, but about 10-15 years out of date. Small company sized FOBs are typically not permanent to warrant the kind of system you're talking about. Larger headquarters FOBS are immense, use way more power than you could provide with such a thing, and really would be fine with solar panels.
Please. I spent a year in Iraq. The largest FOBs are the size of cities, you don't "hide" anything. You're right that this wouldn't be ideal for a platoon or company sized base camp, but for division or even brigade HQ it's perfectly reasonable. Even with the current focus on small units doing "on the ground" patrols, the majority of troops live and work inside the large super-FOBs. Nothing of importance is kept near enough to the walls to allow small arms fire to get close to it, and in the (unlikely, thankfully these guys are universally awful at indirect fire) event of a mortar strike, a few broken solar panels are the least of your worries. You could have stuck a *solar farm* in the middle of Camp Victory, and probably saved a fortune over the noisy and annoying (but I must admit reliable) static generators.
By the way... the noisy and annoying generators we did have? Just as vulnerable as solar panels to small arms or indirect fire, just as shiny (they were commercial jobs and most of them were bright white), and several times noisier (to better give away their positions)... I never even heard of one getting hit. We aren't talking about the little 15KW tactical generators when we're talking about power to middle and large sized FOBs. We're talking about commercial jobs the size of a room.
You misunderstand how these bases work. We aren't trying to hide; this isn't a conventional war. We want people to be able to come to the FOBs and report incidents, sell wares, in some cases even go to work (we often work with locals for everything from translators to building contracts, at least we did in Iraq). The FOBS are well guarded of course, you can't just walk in, but they aren't the traditional camp under camo nets. Indeed all the camo nets I ever saw setup were there to provide shade in places like motor pools, not hide anything. Your point would be valid for special ops units and such, but not for the vast majority of troops, at least not in these wars.
This... this is stupid. OK, yeah, Microsoft is WAY behind the power curve on ultra-portables (Slates, phones, and PDAs inclusive), but really? They still make money hand over fist. Five or ten years from now when it's perhaps starting to look like utltra-portables are making an impact on standard PC and laptop sales (rather than complementing them) I could see it. I think these devices might very well prove a serious impact on MS in the long run... Now though... we're years from that happening, and Microsoft makes more money than most nations.
Wouldn't that be a feature though? You want it to run in the background to receive incoming calls don't you? Or am I missing something? I suppose if you only wanted to use it for outgoing calls you'd prefer it die when you "close" it, but since that surely isn't everybody, it kinda makes sense to assume that people want it to stay open unless they go through the effort to fully close it. On my iPhone I have to go in and manually close my turn by turn GPS app for this reason. They figure you want to keep navigating even if you've switched over to your iPod or what ever. Probably a reasonable assumption, but of course the GPS burns serious battery, so I always make sure to fully close it.
I think better to say "especially in NYC". It seems that the largest metro areas are among the hardest hit by this problem. Bandwidth issues on cell networks (AT&T seems worst affected, but all carriers are to some extent) seem to follow a bell curve with the highest and lowest population centers at either end. Mid population areas (like 500K-1 million people) seem to get the best service. I have quite a nice signal quality in Huntsville, Alabama; and when visiting Boston recently I was fine other than in the city proper where I got occasional signal drops.
I think the problem is that when you have as many people as use the cell networks in Chicago, New York, and LA there's simply not enough bandwidth in the airwaves; no matter how many towers you put up. Each provider only has so many channels, and each channel can only mux so many signals before you start to see degradation. Can anyone with more wireless expertise than I have confirm or deny this?
I don't per se know much about this particular situation, but I do know enough about generic Chinese history to make a general statement that China pretty much claims all of East Asia. At one point or another in its long (and often, but not always, glorious) history China has managed to conquer just about every piece of the East Asian continent; and has a habit of considering anything it once owned to belong to it forever.
So again, I'm not going to comment one way or the other on this specific situation and whether an injustice was committed here, but as a general rule of thumb any country claiming sovereignty over any piece of Asia (up to and including their own countries in some cases) risks offending China. If they're going to engage in economic warfare every time they think they have a claim to bit of territory, we could be in for a long century.
It's not as good. Oh, and it's got pretty computer visuals. These attempts to "prove" that you don't need Hollywood are terrible. Don't get me wrong, I love numerous independent films, I know that you don't per se need the backing of a major studio to make a good movie. You also can't do it by animating a couple scenes and tying them together with the thinnest of plots. Nearly all "good" independent films are made by people in the system, trying to become Hollywood (or their country's version thereof) producers.
Note: Film School helps. Professional voice actors help. Writers help. I know there was a lot of effort put into this product. I understand that people want to believe that we can just open source everything the way we have software. It just ain't so.
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Or the fact that DSL bridges and Cable Internet routers are universally called modems despite not modulating or demodulating anything. People think of the thing that lets them talk to the Internet as a "modem" and it was easier to continue with the terminology than to try to explain the difference to a bunch of people who wouldn't understand or much care. Fifteen years from now "modem" will be the term for "gateway out of the house" and no one will know why except a few pedantic old timers.
I'm not saying that *nix systems are not often better than Windows systems when it comes to numbers of required patches, just that they need their fair share. Your implication in the post I originally responded to ("I don't remember the last time I patched") was that you so seldom have to patch your Linux boxes that it's a completely trivial question. In fact, given a Linux box configured as a workstation, using mostly standard tools, patches are issued for at least several things a week. Patches are typically less painful than in the Windows world because so few of them require anything more arduous than a service restart, true. There are typically fewer of them, true. Just not "gosh I can't remember the last time I had to do this" fewer (unless your memory is really poor).
Questions of whether this number would go up if more people were trying to beat on the OS are difficult to answer, but it is perhaps telling that one of the more globally popular pieces of software in the "typical" Linux stack, Firefox, is also one of the ones that requires the most frequent updates. It could be that Firefox is one of the more poorly written tools in a the stack, it could also be that it's a much larger target because of its cross platform popularity.
Firefox by itself has been updated at least once a week for the last month. I suspect much depends on how you use your machines. A mail server, for instance, probably wouldn't have had any updates (other than the bzip and kernel ones already mentioned) all month. A workstation on the other hand has had (that I can remember off the top of my head, without looking at logs) at least the kernel bug, bzip bug, three or four Firefox bugs, and two Samba bugs. I also remember having to update Apache once this month so there's one for a webserver. SSL had to updated on pretty everything last month (unless you have some box that doesn't use SSL for anything). I tend to notice these things more than a lot of people because I admin several boxes that don't have Internet access and have to be patched manually. That tends to stick out in your mind more than just typing "yum update" or "apt-get upgrade".
I should also note that these were only the "critical" updates I had to do manually. My unclassified workstation has patched several minor security holes through RHN that I haven't had to manually update on the others. Just this morning I got Freetype, Poppler and KDE-utils updates. Firfox, KDE-utils, Freetype, and Poppler may not be part of the OS per se, but they're pretty important to the usage profile of a workstation machine, and fall into the same type of update as many Windows updates.
Uh... If you use 64-bit Linux it was the week before that with the 32-bit compatibility layer privilege escalation bug. I'm not saying that *nix is less secure than Windows, but lets not go pretending that RHN doesn't deliver me 2-4 security updates a week. Most of them are for applications, not the base OS, none the less there's holes and bugs in Linux as a system. SSL and/or SSH patches are pretty common too, and those are pretty much global across all *nixes.
You damage your point by pretending that *nix systems don't have their own patching issues. On the other hand I rarely have to reboot my *nix system for a patch, whereas my Windows systems reboot themselves nearly every time I patch.
Or, there is Faronics DeepFreeze that locks the hard drive to a state and discards all changes after reboot.
This is the only that really prevents users from doing dumb shit. Even it is limiting the effect of users doing dumb shit so that reboots take care of the dumb shit. It's also problematical if you'd like your users to save their work between reboots. I guess you could have them upload the work to some outside repository before reboots. The rest will prevent you from getting your system compromised at the root level, but doesn't really stop lots of types of infections.
In order for a system to be useful it must do several things. It must store the user's data somewhere, somehow; which means the user has to have write access to *something*. It has to have network access to the things the user needs network access too. The user must be able to use the software they need to use to perform their functions. So, storage, network access, and ability to execute software are the three things a user must have to make the computer useful. Those are the things most malware needs to operate at its base level. In other words, malware can operate and be effective using nothing other than the base privileges users must have.
I can install itself (on the users home directory or whatever scratch space they have, as a hidden file of course), run itself (with the user's level of privilege), and phone home (assuming it can get through you firewalls and other external limit factors). It has access to any data that the user has access too (which is probably whatever the user needs to work on and may be quite sensitive). it could even participate in a botnet (assuming the user is logged in and the botnet doesn't ask the system to do anything outside of the users level of rights).
There's this idea that you have to "own" a system to compromise it. Certainly it helps. Certainly it makes it easier to hide the infection. In no way is complete root level ownership of a system needed to do most of what malware writers want to do on a system though.
At the very least I'd contact a lawyer. Both in case of potential prosecution (they must have suspected him of something or they wouldn't have placed an expensive piece of hardware on his car, no matter what they say), and to find out what my rights are in regards to keeping the device as a souvenir.
And there's certainly an element of that too. There's a number of reasons why, but it's pretty clear that employers will meet or even exceed market rate for new hires, but rarely go though the trouble for current employees (with occasional exceptions to counteroffer on someone they really want to keep for some reason). You can also often negotiate perks and responsibilities a bit more at the beginning.
Or the five years of experience in three year old technology. You don't see that quite as often any more, but it used to be a popular one. Especially when Java was first coming into its own. The template for hiring "senior developers" at a lot of companies apparently wanted ten year of experience in the language being hired for. SO you regularly saw jobs for "Java developers with at least ten years experience" well before Java was ten years old.
Perhaps, but when they want you, they're willing to play ball at least int eh short term.
You are a company. You have a sys admin. He does shit. you don't really know what kind of shit, but he must be doing some shit because the computers mostly work. He wants more money and keeps talking about needing some training and upgrades. Fuck him... you don't even know what he does and the computers mostly work.
You are a company. Your sys admin left a month ago. The computers have stopped mostly working. They now often don't work, and sometimes threaten employee's children with things that you're almost certain will get you fined. You have found a person with a pretty good resume who appears not to be a Troll. He says he can get the computers to mostly work again. He wants more money than the old guy, but he says he can get the computers to mostly work again. He wants a training budget, but he says he can get the computers mostly working again. He says you need to spend some money on infrastructure upgrades, but PLEASE GOD GET THE COMPUTERS WORKING AGAIN.. Ahem.. sorry... yes.. we can probably pay that.
You see. There's a difference. In reality land probably not quite such a huge difference, but companies are always more willing to negotiate and play ball with a new hire into a "need to fill" vacancy than they are with a current employee.
You .. you realise that these are both devices that plug into the TV, right? I mean... if Apple wanted to sell me an actual TV for $100 I'd be all over it. You can't hardly get any kind of TV for that anymore.
OK... Now I have to ask... Any idea what, if any, advantage there is to using that thing instead of a regular breach loaded self propelled howitzer? I mean you're right, it's technically a mortar, but it seems to have none of the usual advantages of a mortar over a breach loader (portability, ease of use, and deploy-ability mostly). What an odd contraption.
You bring up an interesting point, because of course the dust and grit *is* a huge issue. Seems like the sort of thing that solar manufacturers would be old hands at dealing with though. I mean all of the *best* places to install solar are also very dry, dusty, and gritty. "Desert" and "solar power" are kind of like peanut butter and chocolate. I don't know enough about solar installation to make any educated guess here, but my assumption is that grit and dust and pretty much things solar people expect to have deal with?
Yeah, realistically I was talking more long term and large scale than the specific stuff that this one company is deploying. That particular bit seems almost like some sort of little test project. "Look we fielded this company with high tech energy saving stuff! We're doing something!" An element that small probably uses more diesel for its trucks than its generators anyway.
Solar is always auxiliary power. I don't think this stuff is to replace fossil fuel dependency, just mitigate it. You could have put enough solar cells on top of 4ID headquarters (of course it's not 4 ID headquarters any more, but whatever division is currently running that AO)to power half the damned thing, and you wouldn't have made it any more of a target. It was a huge sprawling 3 story office complex. The point isn't that you can get rid of all the generators, the point is to use less fuel. I seriously doubt the DoD is under any delusions that they can ship some solar cells over and stop worrying about diesel all together.
All I'm saying is that on the larger bases (where the majority of the people are), solar cells would be a much better auxiliary source than incredibly heavy, possibly dangerous, low yield mini-nuke plants. You also don't entirely understand the scale of a place like Victory (which, granted is unusually large). You can't hit large swathes of it even with mortars.
I was the battalion communications officer for a field artillery unit. Since we were largely underutilized in our primary function (never had more than a platoon worth of guns active at a time), we were primarily providing the vast majority of the gate security for Camp Victory. The types of reactors you're talking about wouldn't even begin to power Camp Victory. It was the size of a city, and had dozens if not hundreds of 1500KW or better generators powering it.
"FOB" is a generic term for all of our bases "over there". The largest base in Iraq, Camp Victory, is the size of a midsized American city and is divided into a few "FOBs". They're essentially just areas owned by a specific command, you can drive from one end of Victory to the other without across all the FOBs in perfect safety (beyond a highly unlikely indirect fire attack). There are smaller, company or battalion controlled, FOBs but most of our people are in the larger ones.
If you're talking about enough power to supply single family home, then you're not really talking about enough power to even keep a battalion in business, let alone any larger unit. If all you're powering with this thing is company base camp sized bases (and even then you'd be cutting it close, these guys need to power a *lot* of technology these days) then it's hardly worth the expense to build and transport such a massive item. You appear to have a vision of what's going on over there which is based on completely valid military service, but about 10-15 years out of date. Small company sized FOBs are typically not permanent to warrant the kind of system you're talking about. Larger headquarters FOBS are immense, use way more power than you could provide with such a thing, and really would be fine with solar panels.
Please. I spent a year in Iraq. The largest FOBs are the size of cities, you don't "hide" anything. You're right that this wouldn't be ideal for a platoon or company sized base camp, but for division or even brigade HQ it's perfectly reasonable. Even with the current focus on small units doing "on the ground" patrols, the majority of troops live and work inside the large super-FOBs. Nothing of importance is kept near enough to the walls to allow small arms fire to get close to it, and in the (unlikely, thankfully these guys are universally awful at indirect fire) event of a mortar strike, a few broken solar panels are the least of your worries. You could have stuck a *solar farm* in the middle of Camp Victory, and probably saved a fortune over the noisy and annoying (but I must admit reliable) static generators.
By the way... the noisy and annoying generators we did have? Just as vulnerable as solar panels to small arms or indirect fire, just as shiny (they were commercial jobs and most of them were bright white), and several times noisier (to better give away their positions)... I never even heard of one getting hit. We aren't talking about the little 15KW tactical generators when we're talking about power to middle and large sized FOBs. We're talking about commercial jobs the size of a room.
You misunderstand how these bases work. We aren't trying to hide; this isn't a conventional war. We want people to be able to come to the FOBs and report incidents, sell wares, in some cases even go to work (we often work with locals for everything from translators to building contracts, at least we did in Iraq). The FOBS are well guarded of course, you can't just walk in, but they aren't the traditional camp under camo nets. Indeed all the camo nets I ever saw setup were there to provide shade in places like motor pools, not hide anything. Your point would be valid for special ops units and such, but not for the vast majority of troops, at least not in these wars.
This... this is stupid. OK, yeah, Microsoft is WAY behind the power curve on ultra-portables (Slates, phones, and PDAs inclusive), but really? They still make money hand over fist. Five or ten years from now when it's perhaps starting to look like utltra-portables are making an impact on standard PC and laptop sales (rather than complementing them) I could see it. I think these devices might very well prove a serious impact on MS in the long run... Now though... we're years from that happening, and Microsoft makes more money than most nations.
Wouldn't that be a feature though? You want it to run in the background to receive incoming calls don't you? Or am I missing something? I suppose if you only wanted to use it for outgoing calls you'd prefer it die when you "close" it, but since that surely isn't everybody, it kinda makes sense to assume that people want it to stay open unless they go through the effort to fully close it. On my iPhone I have to go in and manually close my turn by turn GPS app for this reason. They figure you want to keep navigating even if you've switched over to your iPod or what ever. Probably a reasonable assumption, but of course the GPS burns serious battery, so I always make sure to fully close it.
I think better to say "especially in NYC". It seems that the largest metro areas are among the hardest hit by this problem. Bandwidth issues on cell networks (AT&T seems worst affected, but all carriers are to some extent) seem to follow a bell curve with the highest and lowest population centers at either end. Mid population areas (like 500K-1 million people) seem to get the best service. I have quite a nice signal quality in Huntsville, Alabama; and when visiting Boston recently I was fine other than in the city proper where I got occasional signal drops.
I think the problem is that when you have as many people as use the cell networks in Chicago, New York, and LA there's simply not enough bandwidth in the airwaves; no matter how many towers you put up. Each provider only has so many channels, and each channel can only mux so many signals before you start to see degradation. Can anyone with more wireless expertise than I have confirm or deny this?
I don't per se know much about this particular situation, but I do know enough about generic Chinese history to make a general statement that China pretty much claims all of East Asia. At one point or another in its long (and often, but not always, glorious) history China has managed to conquer just about every piece of the East Asian continent; and has a habit of considering anything it once owned to belong to it forever.
So again, I'm not going to comment one way or the other on this specific situation and whether an injustice was committed here, but as a general rule of thumb any country claiming sovereignty over any piece of Asia (up to and including their own countries in some cases) risks offending China. If they're going to engage in economic warfare every time they think they have a claim to bit of territory, we could be in for a long century.
Like the link to the article? That's pretty good attribution.
It's not as good. Oh, and it's got pretty computer visuals. These attempts to "prove" that you don't need Hollywood are terrible. Don't get me wrong, I love numerous independent films, I know that you don't per se need the backing of a major studio to make a good movie. You also can't do it by animating a couple scenes and tying them together with the thinnest of plots. Nearly all "good" independent films are made by people in the system, trying to become Hollywood (or their country's version thereof) producers.
Note: Film School helps. Professional voice actors help. Writers help. I know there was a lot of effort put into this product. I understand that people want to believe that we can just open source everything the way we have software. It just ain't so.