But don't employers routinely game this system by creating jobs for which there is no reasonable salary average in the real world, or using job descriptions with low(er) salary descriptions and then putting the H1-Bs to work for real jobs with higher salary averages?
To me this entire "salary average" system seems easily abused to get what employers want, desperate serfs willing to work for any wage.
This just seems like another form of manufactured wealth creation, where business isn't really producing anything new or novel but instead rearranging what already exists.
I know that was "only a movie" and "facts were changed" make it more dramatic, but why do I get the sinking feeling that between the constant changes to privacy settings, the shady, over-valued IPO that the basic leitmotif of the movie -- that Zuckerberg is a morally deficient opportunist -- is the basic leitmotif of the entire operation?
There seems to be nothing about Facebook and the way it is run that is honest or straightforward. I read the article on the NY Times this morning and the naked, unapologetic dishonesty on display was fairly breathtaking although totally and completely expected.
I can't say I will stop using the site, but I've always been reluctant to put much "serious" information in my profile. Most of it is silly (Religion: "I believe I'll have another") and I regularly check my privacy settings to see what has been unset.
Although lately it seems that people use it less for even meaningful textual communication -- it's just reposting dumb jpeg humor and I find myself using it less and less. More changes like this and I might just decide to jettison it completely.
Disclaimer: I'm on my second iPad (1, 3) and I really like it for what it is, and about the only two things I wish it had were bluetooth mouse support for my RDP app and a touch-lock functionality that kept the screen active but locked the touch functionality so accidental touches wouldn't activate whatever the screen touch would do.
That being said, why not a bigger touch screen instead of focusing on smaller? IMHO, going smaller just further cuts functionality. Yes, more DPI enables you to do more things in a small space, but at a high ergonomic price (at least for those of us settling into presbyopia).
One of the problems with touch is that the resolution of my FINGER is kind of fixed -- making on-screen elements smaller via DPI increases or shrinking element sizes doesn't help the UI.
Making the screen larger seems to enhance what you can do with it (like magazines at actual size) or the kinds of apps and data you can work with via touch because you can see everything on the screen at once at a workable size. And it would allow the device to claim functionality areas that have been off limits to tablets generally because they are 10" or smaller.
I'm sure lots of people would complain that it wouldn't work because it doesn't fit in a purse, but so what? Going against the grain of the expectations is kind of the idea here, and what seems to hurt tablet development is some unwritten set of expectations over what a tablet is "supposed" to do or be.
Public education has been a big target since the early part of the 1920s when Progressive reformers realized it was the perfect tool for turning dirty immigrants into model citizens. Of course, prior to that it was something to occupy kids in the winter when there was little farm work to do until they were old enough to work full time, at about the 9th grade.
Catholics never trusted it -- they were often the dirty immigrants targeted -- which is why there is such a huge Catholic school system in the US, which is becoming kind of the discount private school system in many areas as public schools disintegrate and desperate parishes de-emphasize religious education and chase fallen/non-Catholic money to keep their schools and parishes from becoming ghost towns.
Since the 1920s, though, the public education system has been repeatedly targeted by political activists. Option 1 was always get your propaganda to be the curriculum -- hence the emphasis on anti-communism and values in the 1950s and early sixties.
In the mid-late 1960s, the emphasis changed to the war on poverty and schools became both educational institutions and social welfare delivery systems (free lunches, immunization clinics, etc). In the 1970s it was desegregation as the mission --- we were going to fix race by putting the kids together.
In the early 70s, though, there were a glut of new teachers thanks to the baby boom and draft deferments for college students studying education. This basically was the liberal/academic colonization of education where you get all kinds of weird curriculum and a relentless focus on the "education gap", which I find to be like the emperor's new clothes -- a failure to realize that minority kids do badly in school not because we aren't teaching them right, but because they come from a failed social milieu. But accepting that means being racist and giving up your cultural relativism.
An external display was my first thought, and it seems like the forward thinking idea -- which is kinda-sorta here already -- is that the phone WILL be the laptop/PC for many people, and jacking it into a dock or a slot or via some kind of wireless device mirroring mode so you can use a full keyboard/mouse/display.
But building a phone that does that would cut off PC OS and app sales and Microsoft would rather sell you a limited device so that you have to turn around and buy another device chock full of MS hardware later on.
The smartest thing Microsoft could have done five years ago would be to have setup a mobile division someplace like Manhattan or Orange County, given them $5 billion and access to the panoply of MS IP and then left them alone until they had a finished product for MS to sell.
Microsoft consistently hinders their own new product development by allowing existing product managers to cripple new products in order to save existing products. Thus you end up with a phone that will never compete with a desktop, despite the fact that the future stand-alone desktop looks an awful lot like a cell phone with a keyboard and a monitor.
No, but there a lot of ways for them individually to benefit.
Larger programs, headcounts or facilities make their positions inherently more valuable when viewed from a "competitive salary" perspective, so they may get raises simply because they are administering a larger entity.
Job transfers, within the school or to another school -- you can climb the career ladder by showing that you've done a better job bringing in funding, expanding programs, etc.
There's no profit motive for the institution, but the individual actors have personal motivations to increase their personal profits (pay). This is actually a great example of collective self interest at work.
1) Enshrine censorship forever, including "agreements" that allow Country A to enforce censorship of "sensitive content" in Countries B, C, etc. For example, no more worries about information hostile to the Iranian government or supportive of resistance movements being hosted in a country that doesn't respect their propaganda needs.
2) Enable local monopolies on content and services by blocking large multinational content providers unless they pay some local tax. Either way, the local strongman's family gets either a check from Zuckerberg or his son-in-law gets to start the local version of Facebook, which will be the only game in town and have no competition. Fill in the blank for Facebook, YouTube, movie services, etc, etc.
What's so astounding is how crude and simple minded these power grabs are and how threatened these dictatorships are from a propaganda/information perspective. Putin, the Iranians and the Chinese Central Committee must lay awake at night just fuming about how their propaganda reality is deconstructed just outside their grasp.
The economic element of this is also not insignificant. Most tin pot dictatorships have shitty economies because the strongman's family gets a cut of everything or a local monopoly. This works with Coke because you bottle it there, but it doesn't work with Facebook or Google and it must make the local batshit knowing that all kinds of money is being made they can't extort.
I have a third party browser called "AtomicWeb" which does some basic ad blocking and tab browsing. I installed it a couple of years ago but I've always suspected it was basically just a slightly different UI with a few more features added on but essentially under the hood it was Safari.
When the money in play gets big enough I would think that physical reprisals would become an increasing likelihood. The money providing private security in Iraq and Afghanistan was good, but these guys are looking for new markets and selling an anti-hacking service that involves your attacker winding up dead in a car crash or of an accidental overdose has a certain appeal.
There's two phenomenons (well, probably more..) driving anonymous racism.
The most important is the general public hostility towards disparaging comments about blacks specifically and non-white racial minorities generally. And I don't mean just overt racial hostility (ie, calling someone a nigger or a spic), but more subtle questions about "Why is the crime/unemployment/out-of-wedlock birth rate so high among blacks?" People will jump on you for even asking the question unless your parrot the answer that white people are racist, classist oppressors. So nobody says anything in a public arena unless it's a safe audience that would agree with them anyway.
The other factor is that people develop their racial attitudes experientially -- if you get hassled in the street, robbed or view uncivilized behavior on a regular basis by $RACIAL_GROUPING you tend to associate those traits with that grouping. The same thing happens intraracially as well, but a negative attitude against "white trash" lacks the public hostility.
But these two features combined cause people to build up real-world experiences about other races that are negative but in a public climate that suppresses discussion of these issues. So people tend to "know" that these things are true but resent being told they aren't, and ultimately given the chance like to blurt out their feelings.
Worse yet, it makes a pretty big leap of faith in assuming what Obama "should have won" versus what Kerry won in the previous election and presumes that the negative difference is due to racism.
Why? Kerry was a much different candidate than Obama -- longer-serving Senator, Viet Nam and armed forces veteran -- it's easy to see where some percentage of swing voters may have found these kinds of factors compelling for Kerry but not for Obama and either not voted at all or voted for McCain or a third party candidate.
They are borrowing the app store model from Apple and the advertising-supported model from Google to produce low-end smart phones for the "facebook generation", probably with some kind of data plan subsidy to make them cost competitive for the lower-income types who'd own a real smartphone if the data plans weren't so expensive.
High-profile app vendors who are on iOS, Android and Windows will just add another platform to be on, giving Facebook the "10% of the apps satisfy 90% of the people" kind of popularity, which is probably adequate for the people who would consider a Facebook phone anyway.
Besides a slight cut in seigniorage, why don't they make American dollars more difficult to counterfeit? Using materials, colors, etc that would only allow the most skilled counterfeiters (ie, North Korea or other groups with state backing) to copy them?
A lot of foreign currency has different sizes of bills, little plastic windows, metallic inks (or it could be mylar) and so on that would be extremely challenging.
I know they've tried to make American money more difficult to counterfeit (micro-printing, watermarking, etc) but it seems like people just keep bleaching out the ink and turning $1s into $20s or $100s because its so darn easy, which in turn makes it easier for the pros to turn out really good fakes, especially overseas.
It's almost enough to make a guy put on his tin hat and try to think up reasons why the government would WANT the currency counterfeited, especially overseas where it would have less impact on the native dollar economy but keep the currency supply large enough to maintain dollar-as-defacto-currency status...
Apportioning bandwidth among tenants is a nightmare, you will get complaints, lawsuits, people demanding their rent back, etc. And... 95% of the problems will come from only 5% of your tenants.
It's a Condo, they aren't tenants. All the association has to do is throw the association agreement in their face and ask them how well they like living in a dictatorship.
On the other hand, if you don't like your bandwidth, you can lobby the association to fix the problem, up to and including running for the board.
I would think any condo association thinking of high speed internet would want some kind of solution that included traffic management to ensure there were at least soft limits that would apportion bandwidth in case of congestion.
The Facebook phone is for people who look at the Internet and communications through a social media lens. They aren't thinking about a smart phone from a technology perspective or even so much as an app perspective. For them, their phone (likely a feature phone with a slideout keyboard, used primarily for texting) is really a social connector used to send text messages. For them, the internet is the web only and social media almost exclusively. They use Facebook a lot, and Facebook messaging and chat instead of email and IM.
I think there are a lot of people out there like this, especially in less well educated circles, lower income groups, among younger people and the technologically unsophisticated.
I know people who had computers but seldom used them -- emailing them was never a good idea, they might read email once a week. Once they discover Facebook, they're on the computer all the time, but almost exclusively on Facebook. It's become their predominant computer activity.
Their cell phone? Probably some ancient flip. When their carrier EOLs it and they have to upgrade, they might find a Facebook phone -- subsidized by advertising to keep it cost competitive with the lowest end phones from both a device AND service perspective.
Anyway, I think this locus of groups would probably find a Facebook phone appealing. To anyone else who remotely knows what a smartphone is or has a use for one otherwise? A non-starter. But thinking of a Facebook phone only in terms of direct competition with other phones is a mistake.
Ie, some kind of cryptographically signed "key" plus a personal passcode that you could enter into a phone that would serve the same identifying purpose as a SIM?
The signing would ensure that the key was actually issued by a carrier and the personal passcode would make sure someone wasn't hijacking your SIM key.
Of course, you'd have to set the system up so that any 'new' device automatically deactivated any other devices.
Is there any reason the SIM card would have to be physical?
According to the NSA document on securing an iPhone, mail and some other app data is encrypted and cannot be read easily, but 'normal' filesystem data uses an encryption key given out to any process (I read this after posting my original message). Apprently apps can also request their data be encrypted using the same difficult-to-decrypt methods used as mail, but many don't (I know GoodReader can do this, and I enable it).
That's what I want to know. If my iPhone is off or locked, other than being pistolwhipped into unlocking it, how safe is my data from those widgets the cops are starting to use for random device copying and snooping?
Assuming of course, auto-wipe is turned on and I used a complex passphrase for locking?
People always accuse doctors of having a God complex, and in many ways the low fat paradigm is the result of that.
Ancel Keys made some observations and weak correlations about dietary fat and cholesterol being related to heart disease in the mid 1960s. This was fertile ground for researchers and clinicians and many of them staked their careers on it and due to the fact that they could never quite get their studies to prove the relationship between heart disease and dietary fat & cholesterol (and still haven't!) they were able to string this out into an entire career.
Once you have careers and reputations on the line, you have a self-sustaining paradigm -- nobody wants to come out after 30 years of being dedicated to this idea to say "Gee, we were wrong all along." So they never promote research that questions their beliefs -- and that's probably putting it mildly, they actively attack and discount it.
Despite nearly 40 years of this advice, though, obesity is skyrocketing and the low fat paradigm is starting to crumble.
I think there's another unspoken element in this, and that's an American cultural predisposition to promote paradigms which are judgmental and involve denial of pleasure. Certainly by the mid 1960s, overall economic success had made meat an everyday staple for most Americans. It tasted good and made you feel good -- so a solution to heart disease and obesity was penance -- don't eat what you enjoy and what makes you feel good. And if you don't get thin on low-fat? Why you're not trying hard enough -- not enough exercise, not enough self well, it's a weakness of character problem!
Part of why they reacted so severely to Atkins was that he never preached that -- he said "Hey, eat as much of that steak as you like! Put a tab of butter on it! Eat until you're full, don't go hungry!" This was like religious blasphemy, not only did it contradict the fact of low-fat proponents, it contradicted the morality of their position.
At most places you don't get to buy SAN often enough or large enough to have the luxury of allocating a dozen spindles to three RAID-10 sets. Eventually management's store everything spend nothing philosphy causes those dedicated RAID-10 sets to get merged and restriped into the larger storage pool, with the (vain) hope that more overall spindles in the shared pool will make the suck less sucky.
In that kind of situation, it's not always crazy to spec a big box with a dozen of its own spindles for something performance oriented because you can't be forced to merge it back into the pool when the pool gets full.
Part of the problem with government contracts is that the project isn't just a business process with a uniform management struture. There's an operational hierachy that is trying to manage the actual project completion AND a political process capable, willing and actively engaged in influencing key elements of the project which effect it's effective completetion.
In some ways an in-house staff is worse than contrators. Contractors aren't really captured by the political process and once they are awarded a contract should be more willing to resist outside influence. Full-time employees are captured by the political process and more likely to engage in horse trading with the political leadership.
Slashdot Mirror
But don't employers routinely game this system by creating jobs for which there is no reasonable salary average in the real world, or using job descriptions with low(er) salary descriptions and then putting the H1-Bs to work for real jobs with higher salary averages?
To me this entire "salary average" system seems easily abused to get what employers want, desperate serfs willing to work for any wage.
This just seems like another form of manufactured wealth creation, where business isn't really producing anything new or novel but instead rearranging what already exists.
I know that was "only a movie" and "facts were changed" make it more dramatic, but why do I get the sinking feeling that between the constant changes to privacy settings, the shady, over-valued IPO that the basic leitmotif of the movie -- that Zuckerberg is a morally deficient opportunist -- is the basic leitmotif of the entire operation?
There seems to be nothing about Facebook and the way it is run that is honest or straightforward. I read the article on the NY Times this morning and the naked, unapologetic dishonesty on display was fairly breathtaking although totally and completely expected.
I can't say I will stop using the site, but I've always been reluctant to put much "serious" information in my profile. Most of it is silly (Religion: "I believe I'll have another") and I regularly check my privacy settings to see what has been unset.
Although lately it seems that people use it less for even meaningful textual communication -- it's just reposting dumb jpeg humor and I find myself using it less and less. More changes like this and I might just decide to jettison it completely.
Disclaimer: I'm on my second iPad (1, 3) and I really like it for what it is, and about the only two things I wish it had were bluetooth mouse support for my RDP app and a touch-lock functionality that kept the screen active but locked the touch functionality so accidental touches wouldn't activate whatever the screen touch would do.
That being said, why not a bigger touch screen instead of focusing on smaller? IMHO, going smaller just further cuts functionality. Yes, more DPI enables you to do more things in a small space, but at a high ergonomic price (at least for those of us settling into presbyopia).
One of the problems with touch is that the resolution of my FINGER is kind of fixed -- making on-screen elements smaller via DPI increases or shrinking element sizes doesn't help the UI.
Making the screen larger seems to enhance what you can do with it (like magazines at actual size) or the kinds of apps and data you can work with via touch because you can see everything on the screen at once at a workable size. And it would allow the device to claim functionality areas that have been off limits to tablets generally because they are 10" or smaller.
I'm sure lots of people would complain that it wouldn't work because it doesn't fit in a purse, but so what? Going against the grain of the expectations is kind of the idea here, and what seems to hurt tablet development is some unwritten set of expectations over what a tablet is "supposed" to do or be.
Public education has been a big target since the early part of the 1920s when Progressive reformers realized it was the perfect tool for turning dirty immigrants into model citizens. Of course, prior to that it was something to occupy kids in the winter when there was little farm work to do until they were old enough to work full time, at about the 9th grade.
Catholics never trusted it -- they were often the dirty immigrants targeted -- which is why there is such a huge Catholic school system in the US, which is becoming kind of the discount private school system in many areas as public schools disintegrate and desperate parishes de-emphasize religious education and chase fallen/non-Catholic money to keep their schools and parishes from becoming ghost towns.
Since the 1920s, though, the public education system has been repeatedly targeted by political activists. Option 1 was always get your propaganda to be the curriculum -- hence the emphasis on anti-communism and values in the 1950s and early sixties.
In the mid-late 1960s, the emphasis changed to the war on poverty and schools became both educational institutions and social welfare delivery systems (free lunches, immunization clinics, etc). In the 1970s it was desegregation as the mission --- we were going to fix race by putting the kids together.
In the early 70s, though, there were a glut of new teachers thanks to the baby boom and draft deferments for college students studying education. This basically was the liberal/academic colonization of education where you get all kinds of weird curriculum and a relentless focus on the "education gap", which I find to be like the emperor's new clothes -- a failure to realize that minority kids do badly in school not because we aren't teaching them right, but because they come from a failed social milieu. But accepting that means being racist and giving up your cultural relativism.
An external display was my first thought, and it seems like the forward thinking idea -- which is kinda-sorta here already -- is that the phone WILL be the laptop/PC for many people, and jacking it into a dock or a slot or via some kind of wireless device mirroring mode so you can use a full keyboard/mouse/display.
But building a phone that does that would cut off PC OS and app sales and Microsoft would rather sell you a limited device so that you have to turn around and buy another device chock full of MS hardware later on.
The smartest thing Microsoft could have done five years ago would be to have setup a mobile division someplace like Manhattan or Orange County, given them $5 billion and access to the panoply of MS IP and then left them alone until they had a finished product for MS to sell.
Microsoft consistently hinders their own new product development by allowing existing product managers to cripple new products in order to save existing products. Thus you end up with a phone that will never compete with a desktop, despite the fact that the future stand-alone desktop looks an awful lot like a cell phone with a keyboard and a monitor.
No, but there a lot of ways for them individually to benefit.
Larger programs, headcounts or facilities make their positions inherently more valuable when viewed from a "competitive salary" perspective, so they may get raises simply because they are administering a larger entity.
Job transfers, within the school or to another school -- you can climb the career ladder by showing that you've done a better job bringing in funding, expanding programs, etc.
There's no profit motive for the institution, but the individual actors have personal motivations to increase their personal profits (pay). This is actually a great example of collective self interest at work.
Easy to say and you can add extra 'O's for emphasis.
All this sounds like to me is a way to:
1) Enshrine censorship forever, including "agreements" that allow Country A to enforce censorship of "sensitive content" in Countries B, C, etc. For example, no more worries about information hostile to the Iranian government or supportive of resistance movements being hosted in a country that doesn't respect their propaganda needs.
2) Enable local monopolies on content and services by blocking large multinational content providers unless they pay some local tax. Either way, the local strongman's family gets either a check from Zuckerberg or his son-in-law gets to start the local version of Facebook, which will be the only game in town and have no competition. Fill in the blank for Facebook, YouTube, movie services, etc, etc.
What's so astounding is how crude and simple minded these power grabs are and how threatened these dictatorships are from a propaganda/information perspective. Putin, the Iranians and the Chinese Central Committee must lay awake at night just fuming about how their propaganda reality is deconstructed just outside their grasp.
The economic element of this is also not insignificant. Most tin pot dictatorships have shitty economies because the strongman's family gets a cut of everything or a local monopoly. This works with Coke because you bottle it there, but it doesn't work with Facebook or Google and it must make the local batshit knowing that all kinds of money is being made they can't extort.
I have a third party browser called "AtomicWeb" which does some basic ad blocking and tab browsing. I installed it a couple of years ago but I've always suspected it was basically just a slightly different UI with a few more features added on but essentially under the hood it was Safari.
When the money in play gets big enough I would think that physical reprisals would become an increasing likelihood. The money providing private security in Iraq and Afghanistan was good, but these guys are looking for new markets and selling an anti-hacking service that involves your attacker winding up dead in a car crash or of an accidental overdose has a certain appeal.
There's two phenomenons (well, probably more..) driving anonymous racism.
The most important is the general public hostility towards disparaging comments about blacks specifically and non-white racial minorities generally. And I don't mean just overt racial hostility (ie, calling someone a nigger or a spic), but more subtle questions about "Why is the crime/unemployment/out-of-wedlock birth rate so high among blacks?" People will jump on you for even asking the question unless your parrot the answer that white people are racist, classist oppressors. So nobody says anything in a public arena unless it's a safe audience that would agree with them anyway.
The other factor is that people develop their racial attitudes experientially -- if you get hassled in the street, robbed or view uncivilized behavior on a regular basis by $RACIAL_GROUPING you tend to associate those traits with that grouping. The same thing happens intraracially as well, but a negative attitude against "white trash" lacks the public hostility.
But these two features combined cause people to build up real-world experiences about other races that are negative but in a public climate that suppresses discussion of these issues. So people tend to "know" that these things are true but resent being told they aren't, and ultimately given the chance like to blurt out their feelings.
Worse yet, it makes a pretty big leap of faith in assuming what Obama "should have won" versus what Kerry won in the previous election and presumes that the negative difference is due to racism.
Why? Kerry was a much different candidate than Obama -- longer-serving Senator, Viet Nam and armed forces veteran -- it's easy to see where some percentage of swing voters may have found these kinds of factors compelling for Kerry but not for Obama and either not voted at all or voted for McCain or a third party candidate.
This is exactly what it is for.
They are borrowing the app store model from Apple and the advertising-supported model from Google to produce low-end smart phones for the "facebook generation", probably with some kind of data plan subsidy to make them cost competitive for the lower-income types who'd own a real smartphone if the data plans weren't so expensive.
High-profile app vendors who are on iOS, Android and Windows will just add another platform to be on, giving Facebook the "10% of the apps satisfy 90% of the people" kind of popularity, which is probably adequate for the people who would consider a Facebook phone anyway.
Besides a slight cut in seigniorage, why don't they make American dollars more difficult to counterfeit? Using materials, colors, etc that would only allow the most skilled counterfeiters (ie, North Korea or other groups with state backing) to copy them?
A lot of foreign currency has different sizes of bills, little plastic windows, metallic inks (or it could be mylar) and so on that would be extremely challenging.
I know they've tried to make American money more difficult to counterfeit (micro-printing, watermarking, etc) but it seems like people just keep bleaching out the ink and turning $1s into $20s or $100s because its so darn easy, which in turn makes it easier for the pros to turn out really good fakes, especially overseas.
It's almost enough to make a guy put on his tin hat and try to think up reasons why the government would WANT the currency counterfeited, especially overseas where it would have less impact on the native dollar economy but keep the currency supply large enough to maintain dollar-as-defacto-currency status...
Apportioning bandwidth among ... 95% of the problems will
tenants is a nightmare, you will get complaints, lawsuits, people
demanding their rent back, etc. And
come from only 5% of your tenants.
It's a Condo, they aren't tenants. All the association has to do is throw the association agreement in their face and ask them how well they like living in a dictatorship.
On the other hand, if you don't like your bandwidth, you can lobby the association to fix the problem, up to and including running for the board.
I would think any condo association thinking of high speed internet would want some kind of solution that included traffic management to ensure there were at least soft limits that would apportion bandwidth in case of congestion.
The Facebook phone is for people who look at the Internet and communications through a social media lens. They aren't thinking about a smart phone from a technology perspective or even so much as an app perspective. For them, their phone (likely a feature phone with a slideout keyboard, used primarily for texting) is really a social connector used to send text messages. For them, the internet is the web only and social media almost exclusively. They use Facebook a lot, and Facebook messaging and chat instead of email and IM.
I think there are a lot of people out there like this, especially in less well educated circles, lower income groups, among younger people and the technologically unsophisticated.
I know people who had computers but seldom used them -- emailing them was never a good idea, they might read email once a week. Once they discover Facebook, they're on the computer all the time, but almost exclusively on Facebook. It's become their predominant computer activity.
Their cell phone? Probably some ancient flip. When their carrier EOLs it and they have to upgrade, they might find a Facebook phone -- subsidized by advertising to keep it cost competitive with the lowest end phones from both a device AND service perspective.
Anyway, I think this locus of groups would probably find a Facebook phone appealing. To anyone else who remotely knows what a smartphone is or has a use for one otherwise? A non-starter. But thinking of a Facebook phone only in terms of direct competition with other phones is a mistake.
And let them watch you shit.
Ie, some kind of cryptographically signed "key" plus a personal passcode that you could enter into a phone that would serve the same identifying purpose as a SIM?
The signing would ensure that the key was actually issued by a carrier and the personal passcode would make sure someone wasn't hijacking your SIM key.
Of course, you'd have to set the system up so that any 'new' device automatically deactivated any other devices.
Is there any reason the SIM card would have to be physical?
According to the NSA document on securing an iPhone, mail and some other app data is encrypted and cannot be read easily, but 'normal' filesystem data uses an encryption key given out to any process (I read this after posting my original message). Apprently apps can also request their data be encrypted using the same difficult-to-decrypt methods used as mail, but many don't (I know GoodReader can do this, and I enable it).
That's what I want to know. If my iPhone is off or locked, other than being pistolwhipped into unlocking it, how safe is my data from those widgets the cops are starting to use for random device copying and snooping?
Assuming of course, auto-wipe is turned on and I used a complex passphrase for locking?
People always accuse doctors of having a God complex, and in many ways the low fat paradigm is the result of that.
Ancel Keys made some observations and weak correlations about dietary fat and cholesterol being related to heart disease in the mid 1960s. This was fertile ground for researchers and clinicians and many of them staked their careers on it and due to the fact that they could never quite get their studies to prove the relationship between heart disease and dietary fat & cholesterol (and still haven't!) they were able to string this out into an entire career.
Once you have careers and reputations on the line, you have a self-sustaining paradigm -- nobody wants to come out after 30 years of being dedicated to this idea to say "Gee, we were wrong all along." So they never promote research that questions their beliefs -- and that's probably putting it mildly, they actively attack and discount it.
Despite nearly 40 years of this advice, though, obesity is skyrocketing and the low fat paradigm is starting to crumble.
I think there's another unspoken element in this, and that's an American cultural predisposition to promote paradigms which are judgmental and involve denial of pleasure. Certainly by the mid 1960s, overall economic success had made meat an everyday staple for most Americans. It tasted good and made you feel good -- so a solution to heart disease and obesity was penance -- don't eat what you enjoy and what makes you feel good. And if you don't get thin on low-fat? Why you're not trying hard enough -- not enough exercise, not enough self well, it's a weakness of character problem!
Part of why they reacted so severely to Atkins was that he never preached that -- he said "Hey, eat as much of that steak as you like! Put a tab of butter on it! Eat until you're full, don't go hungry!" This was like religious blasphemy, not only did it contradict the fact of low-fat proponents, it contradicted the morality of their position.
At the end of the day, it's always about management decision making and resource allocation.
At most places you don't get to buy SAN often enough or large enough to have the luxury of allocating a dozen spindles to three RAID-10 sets. Eventually management's store everything spend nothing philosphy causes those dedicated RAID-10 sets to get merged and restriped into the larger storage pool, with the (vain) hope that more overall spindles in the shared pool will make the suck less sucky.
In that kind of situation, it's not always crazy to spec a big box with a dozen of its own spindles for something performance oriented because you can't be forced to merge it back into the pool when the pool gets full.
Part of the problem with government contracts is that the project isn't just a business process with a uniform management struture. There's an operational hierachy that is trying to manage the actual project completion AND a political process capable, willing and actively engaged in influencing key elements of the project which effect it's effective completetion.
In some ways an in-house staff is worse than contrators. Contractors aren't really captured by the political process and once they are awarded a contract should be more willing to resist outside influence. Full-time employees are captured by the political process and more likely to engage in horse trading with the political leadership.