This. Run video through a matrix HDMI switch, (4x2 or 4x4) will allow you to route the video any way you want, any input to any output. Then use a normal USB KVM for keyboard and mouse control.
Except for gun control laws, and the whole "assault weapon" registration thing a couple years ago. At least a lot of the people stood up to that, but it still passed and went into effect.
ADP on android even blocks ads embedded in apps as well in my experience. The app was available as a side-load for quite a while, and I've tried it out, and it killed any and all ads, regardless of whether they were on a webpage, or in an app.
The bad part of it is that many websites and apps are written poorly, and crash/won't load when the app servers don't respond. I've seen many websites with this behavior... they start loading, and then try to reach the web server, which is blocked, and boom, the whole page load comes to a halt and won't complete. When I come across sites written this way, I have 2 options, disable ADP, or leave the site, I choose the latter.
You may be right, but the law and the retention policies need to change to reflect this. Otherwise, it's the digital equivalent of "if a cop goes into a persons house, then all their neighbors are free to follow them inside and look around too". Since this situation is currently not the case when cameras are not present, it should not be acceptable with cameras. It's still private property, and nosy neighbors can't use a police visit to wander into other peoples home and snoop around.
I understand what you are saying, that your conversation is somewhat public record, since the police can and do include your statements in an official report, but that is totally different than entering into public record a complete visual recording of the inside of your house, complete with HD video of your half naked self (or family members), the trash, dirty laundry, piled up dishes and the whole nine yards. Even if you are always "decent" and company ready when this happens, it should be noted that it could be a safety issue to show all the valuables that are in the house as well to "the world". A thief's dream come true, to know the layout of the house, along with what goodies are in there to steal later, and all the family members that may get in your way in the process. That kind of detail does not currently exist in written reports that become public record.
Not to mention other factors, that are less grey area, like the recording of innocent 3rd parties that may be at your house, but not involved in the situation that brings the cops, as well as protecting minors and children/babies from repercussions of video taping them and distributing to the world.
How long will it take before some FOIA request turns up naked people (within the confines of their own home, expecting privacy), and is released and posted on the internet, for everyone including their family and employers to see. Is that NOT a blatent violation of privacy? It's illegal when ex-boyfriends post photos like that without the person's permission, and in the existing context, most of the photos are taken by the person posing nude, and transmitted/given away with consent implied.
I don't think having the police bust down your door, and catching you naked in bed and having that footage get out on the internet constitutes a willful consent of disseminating naked pictures of yourself. Most people in that context don't ASK for the police to come to their house and don't have the choice to not let them in. I'm sure it's embarrassing enough when it happens when there are only a hand-ful of officers there, but having a permanent record of that, could be life ruining in some contexts...
I beg to differ. If a cop had some reason to enter my house (or anyones for that matter), with or without consent, I would still expect privacy from the rest of the world. The fact that I wouldn't let a police officer into my house voluntarily, doesn't mean that if they had some warrant, or chased some bad guy into the house, or was responding to a fake 911 call and had to do a "check-up", does not mean the public at large has right to view that footage (unless a justifiable case evolved from it).
It's bad enough that police can use whatever excuse they can think of to violate peoples privacy, the last thing we want is for violation of privacy to be followed by millions of "youtube" viewers following behind them when they do it.
Mod this up as informative. This is all true from I've learned as well. The OT was written on scrolls at the time, many feet long, and stored in the synagogs. The Jews had scholars that would copy and duplicate the scrolls by hand. When ever new ancient scroll fragments are recovered (like the dead sea scrolls), current theologians and scholars compare what is found to the existing versions of what they have, to see how accurate they are, and if any changes had been made along the way through the duplication process. Very little changes have occurred from the oldest fragments, to the newest, especially not major changes in content. In fact, it's been found that it was impeccably transcribed and copied, with great effort to keep the original content without alterations.
It's also true, that Jesus, and others in the NT were referenced as going to the synagogs and reading directly from the scrolls of the OT. Basically, the OT was the bible of Jesus's time, since He was the NT.
The NT was completed while most of the eye witnesses of Jesus were still alive, meaning if any deliberate lying, or exaggerations took place in the writing of the NT, the original crowds of eye witnesses would have been around to contest it. Which is also why Christians take the claims made in the NT as historical, since it was written by eye witnesses, to the generation of people that also included eye witnesses. Yes, it was written after the fact, (rather than the apostles walking around with a pen and paper at the time), but that is how most historical documents of that time were created.
This is exactly the process you have to use here in the US, if you have ATT UVerse data. You have to use their Modem/Router/Wifi hardware to get on. I wanted my own router, with better settings/security/quality. So you disable the Wifi on their router, turning it into a Modem/Router, then plug your Router into the LAN port, and setup a DMZ rule for your router. The only Wifi in my house is served off of my routers, and all my PC's are behind my router that I own, and ATT does not have backdoors/remote access to get into.
ATT doesn't offer a service like this, but if you setup the Virgin router similar to this, I don't see how they can force you to share it even if they didn't have an opt-out option.
I called it back in May! The government doesn't want to get rid of their shiny new toy, they spent too much money on it, and it gives them too much power to just let it die.
They're basically stating their new unofficial motto is "You can have my surveillance powers when you pry it from my cold dead hand!".
Facebook and Twitter will be its secondary purpose, we all know that the primary purpose will be to push ADS in your face while you drive so the car manufacturers can get in on the ad revenue.
The problem with this, is the shows themselves are now shorter to accommodate all the ads that get put in. In the shows I watch, the watchable content for a 30min program is about 21-22 mins tops. This statistic by itself hasn't changed much in 20 years or so, but it is getting close to lower point of program running length for that kind of time slot. So when you watch a show on Netflix or Hulu, the content is only as long as it was made if it did have ads. Meaning, you are loosing the ads by watching on Netflix, but you're getting less and less content in each episode, meaning the episodes are shorter and shorter when you strip out the commercials.
Another big problem is now more shows (especially reality shows, but even news and infotainment type shows) seem to want to show you 15-30s of what is coming up after each commercial, and then when they return from commercial they want to repeat the last 30-60s of what you already saw as if you had no attention span. This becomes very apparent when you have a DVR and skip the commercials, you end up seeing the same segment around the commercial 2-3 times total. Not only is this annoying, but it drastically cuts into the actual running length of the show. So while technically, the show might be 22mins of content, if you removed the repeated content out of the show (that is due to the commercial breaks), then you really only end up with 15-18 mins of actual content for a 30min show/slot.
Now lets say that the list of investors is empty, the code runs, and distributes $0 to no one, then his account drops by $1 mil.
Ok, I understand everything up to the "and distributes $0 to no one", and as weird as that sounds, would technically be correct. But why would the computer system then deduct $1M from the account afterwards if no money was distributed?
Seems to me, no matter how many investors there are, that the amount deducted would be equal to the sum of each investor payout. So if there is no investors, and no money is disbursed, then the sum of that money dispersed, would be $0.00 and no money would be deducted from the account.
Why would you use the original amount in the account to base what the account withdawal total would be, that is asking for problems even if there are investors. For instance if you devide the amount by a number of investors, and the results end up having fractions of cents involved, you'd want to round to the whole cent, and then add up what each investor is getting to account for the rounding of fractional cents. Otherwise, you would have pennies disappearing from the account and into thin air.
Except the 5x multiplier could be way off for a project of this size. That's what it was for the Bay Bridge, that I used as an example, but the Bay Bridge was only a single span of several miles. The HSR project is a project that is spanning several hundred miles in comparison, and will go through land that will have to be purchased, and will require train station infrastructure at all it's stopping points along the way. Not to mention it will most likely go through existing cities and towns, which will require major infrastructure changes at each of those locations as well. While they may (or may not, I dunno) have included those factors into the original cost of the HSR train, with a project of this size and scope, there a lot more places that these cost increases can, and more than likely will, occur than with a simple bridge several miles long.
As I said, the Bridge, was a single span that wen't from Oakland (right next to the original span, accross to Treasure Island. There wasn't any emenent domain issues, property didn't have to get gobbled up for span, and no stations or building/parking infrastructure had to be included. To top it off, the final cost of the Bay Bridge may not even be accurate for long, as they have found more and more problems with it, including the latest, that is a major structural problem that was revealed in a recent report.
Except if you have AT&T Uverse service, and you can't buy your own equipment. They won't sell it to you, and you can't buy their residential gateways on the open market like you can a cable/dsl modem.
You are assuming that people will actually ride the HSR when it's done. If you look at Amtrak and other train transportation within the state, they are all subsidized and still don't run at capacity. Not to mention that the HSR won't be finished anytime soon, if ever. Many have already nicknamed it a lifetime project, meaning people in construction trades can literally start out on their first day working on the HSR project, and the project would take them to retirement before it's completed. There will be many in the construction trade who work on a single project, the HSR, their entire careers.
Plus, if you think it's ONLY going to cost $68B by the time it's finished, you are being quite naive. The Bay Bridge project here in the Bay Area seemed to rise in cost every year since it was started. The original bridge estimate in 1997 was $1.3B. All said and done, by 2013 it cost us over $6.4B. I should point out that this was only for HALF the bridge, the other half hasn't been replaced yet. The final cost off by almost 5X what the original estimate was.
Many in California would not be surprised if the same boondoggle happens with the HSR project.
What the heck laptop have you been using that this is the case. I would say either you are mistaken completely, or yours is the exception, and not the rule. Every laptop I've ever owned, the F-keys are the F-keys and if you want the laptop specific functions (like screen brightness, volume, or trackpad on/off), then you have to press the Fn key with the F-key, not the other way around as you described.
So if quitting a program required Alt+F4, then you press Alt+F4 to make it work. The Fn key wouldn't come into play, unless you were trying to change a laptop setting (on the laptop I'm typing right now, the Fn+F4 key is keyboard backlight brightness up for instance).
So if I'm streaming music from Pandora or Spotify, and I switch to another app, my music goes away? I think if it doesn't, then there is a network connection even when the app isn't focused.
And I found out the hard way that their OneDrive account will NOT work under Windows 8.1 if you have a legacy login username. Many apps will work fine using this type of windows account, while bugging you, still work. Many apps that require the cloud to work, allow you to associate your Microsoft credentials specifically for the app in question. But the one-drive app, does not allow this. If you want to use it, you HAVE to convert your entire windows login over to a live login account (something I am unwilling to do for various reasons). This is complete, utter BS. It's not as if it can't work, as apparently the app did allow usage under a regular windows login if installed under Windows 8.0, but when they pushed out 8.1 they started forcing the user to convert their account to a live account to use it.
You must not have ever received a call from someone inside a company. As usually, their CallerID shows up as the main office or company number, but you have no idea what person out of 10,000 people that work there called you. Maybe if you've only dealt with a single person at this company, then great, you can take a guess that it was them, but often times, with business calls, you may deal with more than a single point of contact at the same company.
Caller ID is ok if the number belongs to a single person, but not so much when it's a corporate main number that shows up masking who it actually was.
Or, if it's someone you've never been contacted by before, they just show up as a strange number with no number attached. Then you have decide if it's a telemarketer, or a legit person that you need to call back.
When you do call them back, you sound like an embicil, "yes this so-and-so, and I received a call on my phone from 'I-don't-know-who' and am trying to call them back about 'I-don't-know-what', was this person you or someone else who also is behind this number? Oh it was you, well who are you anyway?". OR worse yet, you call back and get a company directory or operator, and have no idea who may have called you or who to ask for.
To answer your question on the lack my of enthusiasm, is because personally, I would bet money on the fact, that even if the provisions do expire, it won't change a thing that is going on with many of the spying and data collection methods.
These systems were put into place over a long period of time, and at great expense, and it will take more than a bill expiring to force these systems to actually be dismantled. If the bill expires, but the systems are still in place, including all the taps at the ISP's facilities like the backroom fiber splitters, and the BIG data center in Utah that still has the paint drying on it, do you REALLY think in your heart of hearts that the NSA/FBI/DHS/CIA (name your TLA) is going to flick the switch and actually shut these things down? I don't.
And even if they said they were going to follow the law/constitution and not use them anymore, I wouldn't believe it since they've already shown that they will do what ever they can get away with, inside and outside the law. And I would also bet money that you'll never see them actually go in and remove their equipment that they've put into place over the last decade or so in all these locations and facilities. They won't sell off the Utah data center building and servers, turn the lights off, and move out. They aren't going to remove their back-doors on all the networking hardware out in the market, they aren't going to forget their capabilities to break many forms of encryption... This just isn't going to happen any time soon. If they did this, then I would start to believe they got out of the data collection/spying on American's business, but then again, it would also make one curious if they were continuing the same work on a different path that we don't yet know about.
All these agencies have lost all trust, and lost all credibility with most of the American populous, especially those like slashdot'ers here that are knowledgeable about the capabilities they have and the underhanded ways they've acquired these abilities as well as the actual and possible nefarious ways these abilities can be put to use.
My weather app doesn't forcast Hell freezing over anytime soon, so I seriously doubt this is will be true. The politicians/government agencies all know a good thing when they see it. The Patriot Act gives them unfettered access to have huge budgets, grow bigger and add more departments, share information freely between unrelated agencies, spy on Americans all they want, collect data on everyone to use how they see fit, and all sorts of other goodness that big government types love.
The power hungry folks in Washington will never let this die.
Until you get mugged because you are carrying hundreds of dollars of cash around. No one will reimburse that either when it's cash. It's all your loss. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against cash in the least, but there is no fool proof method. Before debit and ATM cards were all the rage, more people got mugged for the cash they carried on them. Now that cards are more prevalent, less people have cash on them to drive the "muggings" market, but CC and bank card fraud is through the roof.
The issue has several factors involved, not all in Google's control.
First off, there is the vendors... I don't know how other vendors are, but with AT&T, they take forever to roll out new versions for their phones. I assume the phone manufacturer's as well as the service provider's like AT&T and Verizon all have to customize the new versions to add in their mandatory, non-removable bloat-ware crap that they force their users to have installed on their phones. So for instance, when Google released Lollipop, then Samsung has to get a hold of it, and add in all their Samsung crap-tastic apps that can't be removed and roll it all into a custom ROM image. Then they hand off to ATT, who then adds in all their useless apps that nobody uses or wants (or don't work until you pay more $$$), and build their own custom ROM that rolls in Samsung's ROM to theirs. Then they might push it out over the air, but by then, Android has had several new minor releases in the meantime, so the version they are pushing isn't even close to the latest build version of Android anymore.
The other factor is the users themselves. And it's not always laziness on the user's part. Here is what I mean. Since the manufacturer's want to lock down the phones to the point that you can't do anything cool with them that you really want, and they only let you do what they want you to do with them, the only real way to take control of YOUR device is to ROOT it. So a lot of users root their phone, and then customize it, either installing a custom ROM image, or removing bloat, or enabling WiFi Tethering, or other feature that doesn't work out-of-the-box because it's been crippled by the service providers. But once you root the phone, it's a major PITA to update it after that. Because the service provider updates don't work on root (or will remove root if they do work), most people with rooted phones don't take the OTA updates. It doesn't help when each OTA update includes more and more modifications and locks to try to keep users from rooting their phones in the first place, not many people want to take the chance to un-root, update, and then re-root their phone, because they might not be able to root it again after the update, or will have to learn a whole new different rooting procedure than the last one they used.
I know some of you will say, well if you have root, then you can install newer ROM's yourself without waiting for OTA updates. Sometimes this is true, but other times not so much, since the service provider's and phone manufacturer's (AT&T and Samsung I'm looking at you), go to great lengths again to make sure you don't actually own the phone you are buying and so LOCK the boot-loader, and install KNOX and everything else they can think of to keep you from making things as easy as they should be when it comes to updating your phone through other channels other than them.
None of this is Google's fault, but the phone manu. and service providers. They are the ones who want vendor lock in, and customer lock-out of these devices. I sure hope that Google doesn't FORCE mandatory OS updates moving forward, since I'm always running a rooted phone, I don't want to mess with all the head-aches attached to updating and re-rooting every time they come out with a minor new build. It would be one more thing I would have to fight with on top of the other things mentioned.
With the push for higher minimum wage for low/no skill jobs, I'm sure there will be more focus on robots that can flip burgers and serve up milk shakes. These types of robots are actually possible with todays technology, only they weren't economical, however if you have to pay McD employee's $30K a year, they will make more sense to the restaurant and fast food industry.
It doesn't matter if I read the fine print in the TOS of my ISP or not. If they are all going to be mandated to collect/store this stuff, then there are no options to NOT agree to the TOS without giving up internet connectivity altogether as well as cell phones. Its not like if you fond it in the tos fine print you can choose a different ISP that wont do it. Our ISP choices are already limitedas it is, so if you want internet, you'll have to agree to it period.
Unless your developing for an embedded platform that doesnt have a browser. Then the only was to debug is to use a laptop running wireshark to see what is going on and how to fix the bugs.
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This. Run video through a matrix HDMI switch, (4x2 or 4x4) will allow you to route the video any way you want, any input to any output. Then use a normal USB KVM for keyboard and mouse control.
Except for gun control laws, and the whole "assault weapon" registration thing a couple years ago. At least a lot of the people stood up to that, but it still passed and went into effect.
ADP on android even blocks ads embedded in apps as well in my experience. The app was available as a side-load for quite a while, and I've tried it out, and it killed any and all ads, regardless of whether they were on a webpage, or in an app.
The bad part of it is that many websites and apps are written poorly, and crash/won't load when the app servers don't respond. I've seen many websites with this behavior... they start loading, and then try to reach the web server, which is blocked, and boom, the whole page load comes to a halt and won't complete. When I come across sites written this way, I have 2 options, disable ADP, or leave the site, I choose the latter.
You may be right, but the law and the retention policies need to change to reflect this. Otherwise, it's the digital equivalent of "if a cop goes into a persons house, then all their neighbors are free to follow them inside and look around too". Since this situation is currently not the case when cameras are not present, it should not be acceptable with cameras. It's still private property, and nosy neighbors can't use a police visit to wander into other peoples home and snoop around.
I understand what you are saying, that your conversation is somewhat public record, since the police can and do include your statements in an official report, but that is totally different than entering into public record a complete visual recording of the inside of your house, complete with HD video of your half naked self (or family members), the trash, dirty laundry, piled up dishes and the whole nine yards. Even if you are always "decent" and company ready when this happens, it should be noted that it could be a safety issue to show all the valuables that are in the house as well to "the world". A thief's dream come true, to know the layout of the house, along with what goodies are in there to steal later, and all the family members that may get in your way in the process. That kind of detail does not currently exist in written reports that become public record.
Not to mention other factors, that are less grey area, like the recording of innocent 3rd parties that may be at your house, but not involved in the situation that brings the cops, as well as protecting minors and children/babies from repercussions of video taping them and distributing to the world.
How long will it take before some FOIA request turns up naked people (within the confines of their own home, expecting privacy), and is released and posted on the internet, for everyone including their family and employers to see. Is that NOT a blatent violation of privacy? It's illegal when ex-boyfriends post photos like that without the person's permission, and in the existing context, most of the photos are taken by the person posing nude, and transmitted/given away with consent implied.
I don't think having the police bust down your door, and catching you naked in bed and having that footage get out on the internet constitutes a willful consent of disseminating naked pictures of yourself. Most people in that context don't ASK for the police to come to their house and don't have the choice to not let them in. I'm sure it's embarrassing enough when it happens when there are only a hand-ful of officers there, but having a permanent record of that, could be life ruining in some contexts...
I beg to differ. If a cop had some reason to enter my house (or anyones for that matter), with or without consent, I would still expect privacy from the rest of the world. The fact that I wouldn't let a police officer into my house voluntarily, doesn't mean that if they had some warrant, or chased some bad guy into the house, or was responding to a fake 911 call and had to do a "check-up", does not mean the public at large has right to view that footage (unless a justifiable case evolved from it).
It's bad enough that police can use whatever excuse they can think of to violate peoples privacy, the last thing we want is for violation of privacy to be followed by millions of "youtube" viewers following behind them when they do it.
Mod this up as informative. This is all true from I've learned as well. The OT was written on scrolls at the time, many feet long, and stored in the synagogs. The Jews had scholars that would copy and duplicate the scrolls by hand. When ever new ancient scroll fragments are recovered (like the dead sea scrolls), current theologians and scholars compare what is found to the existing versions of what they have, to see how accurate they are, and if any changes had been made along the way through the duplication process. Very little changes have occurred from the oldest fragments, to the newest, especially not major changes in content. In fact, it's been found that it was impeccably transcribed and copied, with great effort to keep the original content without alterations.
It's also true, that Jesus, and others in the NT were referenced as going to the synagogs and reading directly from the scrolls of the OT. Basically, the OT was the bible of Jesus's time, since He was the NT.
The NT was completed while most of the eye witnesses of Jesus were still alive, meaning if any deliberate lying, or exaggerations took place in the writing of the NT, the original crowds of eye witnesses would have been around to contest it. Which is also why Christians take the claims made in the NT as historical, since it was written by eye witnesses, to the generation of people that also included eye witnesses. Yes, it was written after the fact, (rather than the apostles walking around with a pen and paper at the time), but that is how most historical documents of that time were created.
This is exactly the process you have to use here in the US, if you have ATT UVerse data. You have to use their Modem/Router/Wifi hardware to get on. I wanted my own router, with better settings/security/quality. So you disable the Wifi on their router, turning it into a Modem/Router, then plug your Router into the LAN port, and setup a DMZ rule for your router. The only Wifi in my house is served off of my routers, and all my PC's are behind my router that I own, and ATT does not have backdoors/remote access to get into. ATT doesn't offer a service like this, but if you setup the Virgin router similar to this, I don't see how they can force you to share it even if they didn't have an opt-out option.
I called it back in May! The government doesn't want to get rid of their shiny new toy, they spent too much money on it, and it gives them too much power to just let it die.
They're basically stating their new unofficial motto is "You can have my surveillance powers when you pry it from my cold dead hand!".
Facebook and Twitter will be its secondary purpose, we all know that the primary purpose will be to push ADS in your face while you drive so the car manufacturers can get in on the ad revenue.
The problem with this, is the shows themselves are now shorter to accommodate all the ads that get put in. In the shows I watch, the watchable content for a 30min program is about 21-22 mins tops. This statistic by itself hasn't changed much in 20 years or so, but it is getting close to lower point of program running length for that kind of time slot. So when you watch a show on Netflix or Hulu, the content is only as long as it was made if it did have ads. Meaning, you are loosing the ads by watching on Netflix, but you're getting less and less content in each episode, meaning the episodes are shorter and shorter when you strip out the commercials.
Another big problem is now more shows (especially reality shows, but even news and infotainment type shows) seem to want to show you 15-30s of what is coming up after each commercial, and then when they return from commercial they want to repeat the last 30-60s of what you already saw as if you had no attention span. This becomes very apparent when you have a DVR and skip the commercials, you end up seeing the same segment around the commercial 2-3 times total. Not only is this annoying, but it drastically cuts into the actual running length of the show. So while technically, the show might be 22mins of content, if you removed the repeated content out of the show (that is due to the commercial breaks), then you really only end up with 15-18 mins of actual content for a 30min show/slot.
Now lets say that the list of investors is empty, the code runs, and distributes $0 to no one, then his account drops by $1 mil.
Ok, I understand everything up to the "and distributes $0 to no one", and as weird as that sounds, would technically be correct. But why would the computer system then deduct $1M from the account afterwards if no money was distributed?
Seems to me, no matter how many investors there are, that the amount deducted would be equal to the sum of each investor payout. So if there is no investors, and no money is disbursed, then the sum of that money dispersed, would be $0.00 and no money would be deducted from the account.
Why would you use the original amount in the account to base what the account withdawal total would be, that is asking for problems even if there are investors. For instance if you devide the amount by a number of investors, and the results end up having fractions of cents involved, you'd want to round to the whole cent, and then add up what each investor is getting to account for the rounding of fractional cents. Otherwise, you would have pennies disappearing from the account and into thin air.
Except the 5x multiplier could be way off for a project of this size. That's what it was for the Bay Bridge, that I used as an example, but the Bay Bridge was only a single span of several miles. The HSR project is a project that is spanning several hundred miles in comparison, and will go through land that will have to be purchased, and will require train station infrastructure at all it's stopping points along the way. Not to mention it will most likely go through existing cities and towns, which will require major infrastructure changes at each of those locations as well. While they may (or may not, I dunno) have included those factors into the original cost of the HSR train, with a project of this size and scope, there a lot more places that these cost increases can, and more than likely will, occur than with a simple bridge several miles long.
As I said, the Bridge, was a single span that wen't from Oakland (right next to the original span, accross to Treasure Island. There wasn't any emenent domain issues, property didn't have to get gobbled up for span, and no stations or building/parking infrastructure had to be included. To top it off, the final cost of the Bay Bridge may not even be accurate for long, as they have found more and more problems with it, including the latest, that is a major structural problem that was revealed in a recent report.
Except if you have AT&T Uverse service, and you can't buy your own equipment. They won't sell it to you, and you can't buy their residential gateways on the open market like you can a cable/dsl modem.
You are assuming that people will actually ride the HSR when it's done. If you look at Amtrak and other train transportation within the state, they are all subsidized and still don't run at capacity. Not to mention that the HSR won't be finished anytime soon, if ever. Many have already nicknamed it a lifetime project, meaning people in construction trades can literally start out on their first day working on the HSR project, and the project would take them to retirement before it's completed. There will be many in the construction trade who work on a single project, the HSR, their entire careers.
Plus, if you think it's ONLY going to cost $68B by the time it's finished, you are being quite naive. The Bay Bridge project here in the Bay Area seemed to rise in cost every year since it was started. The original bridge estimate in 1997 was $1.3B. All said and done, by 2013 it cost us over $6.4B. I should point out that this was only for HALF the bridge, the other half hasn't been replaced yet. The final cost off by almost 5X what the original estimate was.
Many in California would not be surprised if the same boondoggle happens with the HSR project.
What the heck laptop have you been using that this is the case. I would say either you are mistaken completely, or yours is the exception, and not the rule. Every laptop I've ever owned, the F-keys are the F-keys and if you want the laptop specific functions (like screen brightness, volume, or trackpad on/off), then you have to press the Fn key with the F-key, not the other way around as you described.
So if quitting a program required Alt+F4, then you press Alt+F4 to make it work. The Fn key wouldn't come into play, unless you were trying to change a laptop setting (on the laptop I'm typing right now, the Fn+F4 key is keyboard backlight brightness up for instance).
So if I'm streaming music from Pandora or Spotify, and I switch to another app, my music goes away? I think if it doesn't, then there is a network connection even when the app isn't focused.
And I found out the hard way that their OneDrive account will NOT work under Windows 8.1 if you have a legacy login username. Many apps will work fine using this type of windows account, while bugging you, still work. Many apps that require the cloud to work, allow you to associate your Microsoft credentials specifically for the app in question. But the one-drive app, does not allow this. If you want to use it, you HAVE to convert your entire windows login over to a live login account (something I am unwilling to do for various reasons). This is complete, utter BS. It's not as if it can't work, as apparently the app did allow usage under a regular windows login if installed under Windows 8.0, but when they pushed out 8.1 they started forcing the user to convert their account to a live account to use it.
You must not have ever received a call from someone inside a company. As usually, their CallerID shows up as the main office or company number, but you have no idea what person out of 10,000 people that work there called you. Maybe if you've only dealt with a single person at this company, then great, you can take a guess that it was them, but often times, with business calls, you may deal with more than a single point of contact at the same company.
Caller ID is ok if the number belongs to a single person, but not so much when it's a corporate main number that shows up masking who it actually was.
Or, if it's someone you've never been contacted by before, they just show up as a strange number with no number attached. Then you have decide if it's a telemarketer, or a legit person that you need to call back.
When you do call them back, you sound like an embicil, "yes this so-and-so, and I received a call on my phone from 'I-don't-know-who' and am trying to call them back about 'I-don't-know-what', was this person you or someone else who also is behind this number? Oh it was you, well who are you anyway?". OR worse yet, you call back and get a company directory or operator, and have no idea who may have called you or who to ask for.
To answer your question on the lack my of enthusiasm, is because personally, I would bet money on the fact, that even if the provisions do expire, it won't change a thing that is going on with many of the spying and data collection methods.
These systems were put into place over a long period of time, and at great expense, and it will take more than a bill expiring to force these systems to actually be dismantled. If the bill expires, but the systems are still in place, including all the taps at the ISP's facilities like the backroom fiber splitters, and the BIG data center in Utah that still has the paint drying on it, do you REALLY think in your heart of hearts that the NSA/FBI/DHS/CIA (name your TLA) is going to flick the switch and actually shut these things down? I don't.
And even if they said they were going to follow the law/constitution and not use them anymore, I wouldn't believe it since they've already shown that they will do what ever they can get away with, inside and outside the law. And I would also bet money that you'll never see them actually go in and remove their equipment that they've put into place over the last decade or so in all these locations and facilities. They won't sell off the Utah data center building and servers, turn the lights off, and move out. They aren't going to remove their back-doors on all the networking hardware out in the market, they aren't going to forget their capabilities to break many forms of encryption... This just isn't going to happen any time soon. If they did this, then I would start to believe they got out of the data collection/spying on American's business, but then again, it would also make one curious if they were continuing the same work on a different path that we don't yet know about.
All these agencies have lost all trust, and lost all credibility with most of the American populous, especially those like slashdot'ers here that are knowledgeable about the capabilities they have and the underhanded ways they've acquired these abilities as well as the actual and possible nefarious ways these abilities can be put to use.
My weather app doesn't forcast Hell freezing over anytime soon, so I seriously doubt this is will be true. The politicians/government agencies all know a good thing when they see it. The Patriot Act gives them unfettered access to have huge budgets, grow bigger and add more departments, share information freely between unrelated agencies, spy on Americans all they want, collect data on everyone to use how they see fit, and all sorts of other goodness that big government types love.
The power hungry folks in Washington will never let this die.
Until you get mugged because you are carrying hundreds of dollars of cash around. No one will reimburse that either when it's cash. It's all your loss. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against cash in the least, but there is no fool proof method. Before debit and ATM cards were all the rage, more people got mugged for the cash they carried on them. Now that cards are more prevalent, less people have cash on them to drive the "muggings" market, but CC and bank card fraud is through the roof.
The issue has several factors involved, not all in Google's control.
First off, there is the vendors... I don't know how other vendors are, but with AT&T, they take forever to roll out new versions for their phones. I assume the phone manufacturer's as well as the service provider's like AT&T and Verizon all have to customize the new versions to add in their mandatory, non-removable bloat-ware crap that they force their users to have installed on their phones. So for instance, when Google released Lollipop, then Samsung has to get a hold of it, and add in all their Samsung crap-tastic apps that can't be removed and roll it all into a custom ROM image. Then they hand off to ATT, who then adds in all their useless apps that nobody uses or wants (or don't work until you pay more $$$), and build their own custom ROM that rolls in Samsung's ROM to theirs. Then they might push it out over the air, but by then, Android has had several new minor releases in the meantime, so the version they are pushing isn't even close to the latest build version of Android anymore.
The other factor is the users themselves. And it's not always laziness on the user's part. Here is what I mean. Since the manufacturer's want to lock down the phones to the point that you can't do anything cool with them that you really want, and they only let you do what they want you to do with them, the only real way to take control of YOUR device is to ROOT it. So a lot of users root their phone, and then customize it, either installing a custom ROM image, or removing bloat, or enabling WiFi Tethering, or other feature that doesn't work out-of-the-box because it's been crippled by the service providers. But once you root the phone, it's a major PITA to update it after that. Because the service provider updates don't work on root (or will remove root if they do work), most people with rooted phones don't take the OTA updates. It doesn't help when each OTA update includes more and more modifications and locks to try to keep users from rooting their phones in the first place, not many people want to take the chance to un-root, update, and then re-root their phone, because they might not be able to root it again after the update, or will have to learn a whole new different rooting procedure than the last one they used.
I know some of you will say, well if you have root, then you can install newer ROM's yourself without waiting for OTA updates. Sometimes this is true, but other times not so much, since the service provider's and phone manufacturer's (AT&T and Samsung I'm looking at you), go to great lengths again to make sure you don't actually own the phone you are buying and so LOCK the boot-loader, and install KNOX and everything else they can think of to keep you from making things as easy as they should be when it comes to updating your phone through other channels other than them.
None of this is Google's fault, but the phone manu. and service providers. They are the ones who want vendor lock in, and customer lock-out of these devices. I sure hope that Google doesn't FORCE mandatory OS updates moving forward, since I'm always running a rooted phone, I don't want to mess with all the head-aches attached to updating and re-rooting every time they come out with a minor new build. It would be one more thing I would have to fight with on top of the other things mentioned.
With the push for higher minimum wage for low/no skill jobs, I'm sure there will be more focus on robots that can flip burgers and serve up milk shakes. These types of robots are actually possible with todays technology, only they weren't economical, however if you have to pay McD employee's $30K a year, they will make more sense to the restaurant and fast food industry.
It doesn't matter if I read the fine print in the TOS of my ISP or not. If they are all going to be mandated to collect/store this stuff, then there are no options to NOT agree to the TOS without giving up internet connectivity altogether as well as cell phones. Its not like if you fond it in the tos fine print you can choose a different ISP that wont do it. Our ISP choices are already limitedas it is, so if you want internet, you'll have to agree to it period.
Unless your developing for an embedded platform that doesnt have a browser. Then the only was to debug is to use a laptop running wireshark to see what is going on and how to fix the bugs.