Here's what my dogs have to say about being on the wrong side of the door at breakfast-time: Bark-bark-bark-bark-bark-bark-bark-bark-bark bark-bark-bark-bark-bark-bark arf-bark, scritch-scratch, bark-bark-bark-...
Of course, that's pretty much the same thing they say when they're on the right side of the door, too. Can't blame them. It's breakfast time, after all.
Wrong. Aircraft, and more specifically helicopters, are a finite resource that are quickly used up through usage. Fuel is burned by the hour at a crazy rate, and the engine hour meter counts the number of hours remaining until the next major overhaul, which must take place every few thousand hours according to the manufacturer's schedule, and can easily cost half the price of a brand new aircraft.
Cheap helicopters can cost anywhere from $300-$600 an hour to operate. The turbine engine helicopters used by the police probably cost a good deal more. I don't want my police department burning up their limited air support budget on writing up a few speeders.
Apple pulled Google maps because they didn't want to agree to the privacy rules Google wanted. The cost to Apple has ben hundreds of millions if they aren't up a billion yet. You can agree with Apple's call here or not, but screwing the customers financially was not the motivation.
They may have said "privacy", but that was a smokescreen. It was about nothing but money. Apple is in head-to-head competition with Google, and allowing their primary competitor a choice seat on their home screen and garnering the search, location, and resultant ad revenue was an affront they could no longer abide.
Apple truly believed they could get away with it and that customers wouldn't care. They believed that they would deliver such a hot-shit mapping app with useful turn-by-turn screens that consumers would just love it like they loved everything else Apple produced. They committed themselves to delivering on that belief. And as release day arrived, and initial reviews came back, they began to realize that buying TomTom's map was buying little more than a pig in a poke, and began to wonder if it wasn't a mistake. But they had no idea of the size of the PR nightmare they were creating, and they did not expect the backlash that came out of betraying their fans.
I seriously doubt that iOS7 will be adopted at the rate iOS6 was. But I may be underestimating the power of auto-updates. A large number of people just won't care no matter what Apple does.
That's a really good point. Much of the violence we still see in the world is due to cult leaders whipping up the sentiments of some truly impoverished people, and using them as "holy warriors". It's a role they're happy to take on because they literally have nothing else; and what could be better than an important man who says God himself wants them! (Trick question, the right answer is "a steady job and food on my family's table", but a charismatic leader never permits his followers to use logic to arrive at the correct answer, he always claims his book provides "all the logic you need.")
Instead of giving bales of money to the Pentagon, we could have used that same money to build tens of thousands of worker-owned factories across Iraq and Afghanistan, and given their people jobs and income instead of reasons to blow themselves up. It sure would have cost the U.S. taxpayers a lot less, and would have led to a more sustainable peaceful outcome. Think of it as the Marshall Plan executed thousands of times at the mosque level, instead of once at the Emperor's level like we did in Japan after WW2.
So to get back to America, creating public works jobs (like the Works Progress Administration did back in the first Great Depression) would be one way to get people feeling valued, and getting value out of them. And that's going to lead to stability.
"The USB output also has specific resistances connected to the data pins to indicate to the iPhone how much current the charger can supply, through a proprietary Apple protocol.[10] An iPhone displays the message "Charging is not supported with this accessory" if the charger has the wrong resistances here. "
[10] Apple indicates the charger type through a proprietary technique of resistances on the USB D+ and D- pins. For details on USB charging protocols, see my earlier references.
[14] Ladyada reverse-engineered Apple chargers to determine how the voltages on the USB D+ and D- pins controls the charging current. Minty Boost: The mysteries of Apple device charging. Also of note is the picture of the internals of a official Apple iPhone 3Gs charger, which is somewhat more complex than the charger I disassembled, using two circuit boards.
I'm not aware of anything bad in iOS 7. Why would you not upgrade?
To preserve my jailbreak. I certainly won't downgrade to a new iOS until I know it's compatible with my Cydia apps.
New versions of iOS have become very ho-hum for the users. In the early days, they were exciting. Apple used the upgrades to add actual missing features, like copy/paste and multitasking. Consumers really wanted the latest and greatest, because the new features made an actual difference to them. Plus, iOS upgrades were required to download the latest apps, as new APIs were introduced to support things like front facing cameras, auto focus, iPad compatibility, etc.
Things became tricky, though. As they added features they bloated the OS, making the old iPhones perform poorly. But they got lucky. Most customers were already conditioned to previous phones "getting old and slow", that battery performance dropped dramatically after a year, and they wanted the new features anyway. They bought new iPhone hardware to compensate every time their 2 year contracts were up. So it turned out that it was OK with customers, because the latest iPhones were always "cool" and better, and all sins were quickly forgiven.
Apple couldn't buy enough wheelbarrows to haul away all the money they made with that strategy.
With iOS6, though, they may have finally poisoned the goose laying the golden Apples. Ordinary customers finally noticed that Apple was screwing them when they got their nice Google map app taken away and replaced with the shitty Apple Map. ("You want transit directions? You peasant! If you must, click here to download your city's transit app, and while you're at it, borrow a quarter from the guy next to you.") With that incredibly stupid mistake, lots of iPhone owners realized that Apple wasn't "benign" with their upgrades, and started to wonder just how badly they've been screwed over the years. Ordinary people are now likely to be somewhat wary of new iOS releases.
It remains to be seen if people will simply accept whatever they shovel into iOS7. There is already complaining about the new Fisher Price look of the interface, and that there are no real features of value. iTunes Radio is the closest thing to "new" in this device, but people who like that sort of thing already have Pandora, and they don't want to change because their player already knows their tastes. iOS7 might not get the swift uptake that their previous OSs saw.
Brian Krebs is a former Washington Post investigative journalist who has been writing about Internet security issues for a long time. He writes a lot about malicious attacks and often exposes the attackers. These are not nice people, either; they are spammers, botnet herders, guys who make, sell and buy credit card skimmers, hackers who steal credit card info, guys who run DDoS-for-hire sites, etc.
He uses aliases to get himself invited to underground forums, monitors them for as long as he can, then exposes the criminals. The bad guys are also improving their own security, and becoming more adept at turning the tables. One forum placed unique values in the "# of posts" listed in the left side column of their forum, then outed him when he posted a screenshot.
Needless to say, the people he is messing with are very annoyed at him. They are trying all the tricks they can to harass him remotely, such as ordering merchandise paid for on his credit cards, sending him unwanted (and now illegal) stuff, and using his credit cards to donate to charities. They've been trying to send him all the craziest, most annoying, most hazardous stuff they can without personally touching the merchandise themselves. The most dangerous stuff they have managed to send him so far was the SWAT van full of cops in a midnight raid. If these guys could get someone else to ship him a live cobra in a box, or a shit covered blasting cap, they wouldn't hesitate for a second.
While he may not be a "hero", Mr. Krebs has done some good work at cleaning up several of the nastier elements that infest the Internet. You get less spam in your in box thanks to him.
They're in international waters, so they shouldn't have to worry about FAA rules. And a drone would be a whole lot cheaper to operate than that helicopter. I think the bigger problem is the environment: it's cold, it's spraying sea salt, it's windy, it's rainy, it's foggy, and OMG it's cold!
Distances are a big deal on the ocean. Their ship can see another boat on radar to about 17 NM, so to be more effective than radar, their drone would have to fly 17NM away from the ship, probably circling their ship for maximum coverage. Assuming the ship continues to move, one loop around their ship would be around 100 NM, and they should try to cover that distance in about an hour. The drone would have to carry a lot of serious detecting equipment (the more the better), such a camera array including different lengths of lenses pointed in various directions, an IR camera, radar, radar detectors, radio ranging and detection equipment, etc., plus the avionics and the flight control radios. The payload will take a decent sized battery to run all that gear, a big wing to lift it all up, a bigger motor to push it around the sky, and even more fuel to carry around for the flight. And they'll need plenty of reserve fuel, because I've never seen them properly manage or time anything on that boat. Then after the flight they have to safely recover it. Will they land it on some mythical runway on the ship, catch it in a net, land on the water, or just splash it down and deploy a buoy line they can grab?
Finally, the Sea Shepherds would need to find someone smart and competent enough to actually pilot and maintain the damn thing and all its systems, yet dumb enough to sail the Antarctic Ocean under that stupid, incompetent captain. That's a rare person.
It'd actually be a very interesting problem to work on.
As a teacher, I try to relate my lectures to their specific interests (I know one is into motorcycles, one works at a bank, etc.) or prior history (over half of my current students were in the military.) Otherwise, I try to relate them to either my day job or to the job market the students will be entering. "When I'm hiring, I look for people who have demonstrated X on a past project. That tells me they have practical skills working with Y and Z. So lets talk about Z for a while, and why it's important."
That's obviously easier to do on a technical topic related to their field of choice than it would be for a generic topic addressed to an entry-level group of students. How a teacher could relate the lessons of the battle of Gettysburg to students interested only in The Next American Idol would be a lot more challenging.
And that says more about our teaching abilities than our learning capabilities. The students are not necessarily dim, but they're not interested in the subject without an application they're also interested in. That's why a tutor is often able to help these people when a classroom lecture setting has failed - a tutor picks up on their interest and relates the subject to the student in a meaningful way. A small class size lets the teacher reach out individually as needed, whereas a large class will miss those students.
Does that mean we should offer "Advanced Statistics for Sports Fans II" and "Advanced Statistics for Theatre-goers II", etc.? Should we put max headcounts in classrooms? Or should we simply weed out those people who can't hack the lecture format? At what point should the education system start leaving children behind?
It's nothing more than associating an identifier or keyword with something. The asker is bemoaning the lack of standards in those identifiers, how to apply them, how to search on them.
The question really misses the point, though. If you index the entire contents, then anyone searching will find it based on what they know, not what you think of in advance. Google seems to do pretty well at locating pages, despite many fine pages lacking meta tags (and despite many poor spam articles trying to abuse meta tags.) If the keywords aren't present in the article, it's probably not a very useful article anyway, as it obviously is lacking a common description.
Yeah, that was the point I was replying to. If we are unwilling to reduce the safety of driving (the "stick" of natural selection), breeding selection can still be achieved through status (the "carrot").
I'm not sure it would become "geeky" though. Back to the licensed pilot analogy for a moment, people tend to treat airline pilots with more respect than bus drivers, even though both perform an equivalent service in society. If driving were limited to the talented few, bus driving might become a more prestigious job.
We would quickly evolve into better drivers, if the licensing laws were changed.
First, let's assume that good driving is enhanced by certain genetic characteristics - quick reaction times, fine motor control, good peripheral vision, etc. We don't have to identify them, just assume they exist.
We already know that our culture highly values cars. People who own more expensive vehicles are generally viewed as more successful, and therefore are more desirable as mates. This is no different than birds who attract mates with more colorful plumage than their rivals.
If drivers had to pass an annual competency exam, perhaps similar to the requirements for maintaining a pilot's license, fewer people would be driving. The people who could drive would therefore be even more desirable as mates. Lacking the "colorful plumage" of a shiny car, this would remove otherwise wealthy but bad drivers from the breeding pool.
Breeding pairs of successful drivers would potentially produce offspring that share the traits of their good driving parents. Congratulations, you have now evolved a new generation of people who are likely to be better drivers.
It's totally possible. Things like this have been done with animals for hundreds of years. And this path doesn't even require poor drivers to remove themselves from the gene pool through traffic accidents.
Others have gone so far as to suggest it's safer to stay low, and simply sell the vulnerabilities to the highest bidder. Pocket the money, and let someone else worry about if it's a good guy or a bad guy buying it.
It's a completely amoral stance, of course, and I don't personally agree with it. But when a well-intentioned bug report can easily turn into an accusation of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by someone sleazy company who doesn't want to pay to fix their own vulnerabilities, it's an approach that's actually less likely to get the researcher thrown in jail. Nobody ever deserves to be harassed for pointing out vulnerabilities.
I'm not disputing anything you say about the slowness of the project process, or even the potentially corrupt selection process. It can take years for an IT shop to make some of those simple ideas happen. And that doesn't say anything about the size of the shop, either. Even a large well-staffed shop can take many months just to get a new project on their priority list, let alone completed.
Did anyone look at Polly's solution to figure out the ROI, or if it is worth the risk? Did she save $20 of labor per week by outsourcing it to a $50 per week service? Is she costing the company $1,000 per year in downtime because of her ill-thought-out home grown system? Has she planned for upgrades to the other systems? Did anyone review the security of her solution? Polly's not an IT project manager, so she doesn't even know all the decisions that should be considered.
One good thing about a big, slow, IT-based process is that the people who own the business can look at all the projects competing for resources and decide "this one will make the most money, do it first," "this one will only save the accountants 5 minutes per day, do it last," and "this one is too high of a risk - don't do it." It's their money - they get to decide how to spend it.
Sure, IT's the bottleneck. Why? Because users who roll their own solution without understanding what they're creating will create a fragile business model.
Andy Accountant decides to do General Ledger on Quickbooks, while Polly Payables decides to do billing on the bank's web server. How does one update the other? It starts out as a manual process. But let's say Polly is clever and signs up for IFTTT.com to automate the integration. She also hands the task of entering the bills over to Carlos Clerical. Later, when Polly is on vacation, Andy downloads an upgrade to Quickbooks - but IFTTT was set up only to modify the original Quickbooks. Now Polly's billing doesn't work, and Carlos has no idea what's going on. Polly is the only support person, but she's on vacation. Andy only knows about the manual processes, so he can't help Carlos. So the bills don't get paid.
And the IT guy only knows about the PCs, the printers, the network, and the file server. He doesn't know about the apps, because the users got tired of waiting for him and rolled their own.
Repeat this scene for each and every system, service, and person involved with computers in the organization. It starts out easy and fast, but the dependencies quickly crust over every activity the company performs. Support becomes a nightmare, and changes go from "difficult" to "impossible".
If the IT guy put the pieces together, he (should) document the connections, provide troubleshooting knowledge, and at least know who to call for support. At least that's the theory.
This is what Shopkick is. The users earn points called "kicks" for entering the participating stores. One app, many stores.
It's certainly not my cup of tea, but there are lots of people who voluntarily install these kinds of apps, especially when they get free stuff for doing so.
> I'm hard pressed to think of anything really innovative Microsoft has done in years -- mostly they look at what others are doing and copy it (or buy it).
And how many PrimeSense gaming systems do you have in your house? Exactly.
Remember, Apple didn't invent the portable digital media player with the iPod. They looked at existing hardware like the Diamond Rio, and said "this is a great idea, and we can sell millions of these, but this crap user interface has to go." They looked at existing cell phones and said the same thing, and came out with the iPhone. So when Microsoft looks at a small company and buys their product, you trot out the other double standard and slag them for doing nothing Apple doesn't do on an annual basis?
It was a stupid decision to tie themselves to Microsoft.
Not really. Did you read the infamous Burning Platform memo? Elop explained quite well how Nokia had sat on their haunches while Apple and Google and the Chinese all hustled. Apple dominated the smartphones, Android came in a close second, while Symbian had delivered nothing of competitive value for years. And their core profitable product, simple phones, was suddenly taken away by the Chinese who had developed a basic phone design that could be made for about $10 per copy.
The market had forked, and Nokia, who had previously dominated a nice, safe middle ground, had no presence in the high end market, and simultaneously found they couldn't afford to compete in the low end market. When Microsoft came around wanting to do this Windows Phone deal, nobody else was breaking down their doors offering them wheelbarrows full of cash. Had they not taken the money, the best case scenario would have placed Nokia as an "also-ran" in the Android marketplace; perhaps they'd be tied in a death spiral with RIM/Blackberry; or they could simply have closed the doors. Taking the Microsoft deal was a decision that didn't have a rational alternative.
It's actually a world of difference. Microsoft is a nation of anti-Ballmers, at least down at the level of developers, technical account managers, professional services people, evangelists, and engineers that I know. They're professionals, they're courteous, and they never throw chairs. They almost never slag other OS or app choices, such as Linux or iPhones in public, and generally not even in private. Sure, if you ask they'll talk up the Surface tablet they're carrying around, and they'll trot out their Nokia phones when they ring, but that's no different than me using my company's products.
Ballmer is clinically a sociopath, but then, so are a disproportionately large number of CEOs. Apparently lacking empathy for human beings is a trait that enables one to climb shamelessly over them. And since corporate boards are made up of other CEOs from other large companies, there's a shared understanding amongst these people. (I was going to say "kindred spirit", but they obviously don't care what the others in the room actually think, either.) They're too self-centered to vote out someone for the crime of being a self-centered reprobate like themselves.
I also want a mechanical linkage between the accelerator and throttle body, clutch and flywheel and gearstick and selector fork.
I understand what you're saying, but I've had the mechanical linkages fail, too. Trust me, a stuck throttle is not a safety feature. (Interesting design factoid: cables are great at pulling things from a distance, even in the presence of mud and ice, but not so good at pushing on them!)
Mechanical linkages can rust, they can wear out, they can get dirty, they can stretch, bend or break. They can be weakened by some stress (bent in an accident) and then fail later due to a different stress (heat and force.) And of course they can be tampered with by someone with physical access. And don't forget, they can be designed, manufactured, or installed badly. Someone could design a body part that fails to provide adequate clearance for full travel. An assembly worker could fail to properly attach a brake cable to the frame, allowing it to eventually break loose and rub against a tire until it fails.
Electronic systems have different modes of failure. Shorts, faults, interference, bad programming, protocol errors, etc. And because the instructions are both fast and invisible to the naked eye, we don't intuitively understand or trust them as much as we do a push rod and a bell crank. But the thing is, you can measure them both on an equal basis. Which one lasts longer, on average, before needing maintenance? Which one operates correctly under a wider range of conditions, including ice, mud, salt spray, and heat? Which one doesn't fall apart under constant vibrations? Which one survives accidents better? Which one has been the cause of fewer accidents? How many have failed in the field? And of course, which one is cheaper? On a combined score, the electronic systems often outperform the mechanical systems they replace. But with the CAN bus being seen as "magic voodoo" open only to the priests of automotive engineers, which seems to be a state of ignorance the car companies want to perpetuate, ordinary people really don't trust them.
What I think is best is the use of independent linkages and systems for critical control functions, but I want them to be of the best technology for the task. I don't want a throttle failure to interfere with my shifting the vehicle into neutral, or steering, or depressing the brake, or switching the engine off, or of deploying the airbag in case of a crash. I don't want someone who can hack in through the stereo to use that to disable the brakes. But I don't want to be trusting my luck to the continued function of a weakened spring, or relying on my proactively recognizing and cleaning a rusty pivot point, or lubricating every cable every year, either.
I'm thinking it's better to apply only enough force to make a change, without so much force that it induces widespread panic in the general public. Panic leads to quick, stupid reactions: "OMG, hackers can take over a car with android phones? Ban android phones! Ban software! Jail hackers!"
The problem is panicked people want "preventative" kinds of laws. But good laws shouldn't restrict our freedoms to explore, they should only punish people who cause actual harm. And we already have laws that handle these situations. If you hacked a car and caused it to crash, you could and should be charged with assault, attempted criminal vehicular homicide, reckless endangerment, or whatever the law books already contain. That's the appropriate reaction. If you hacked a car and nothing happened, then nothing happened.
As for the automakers, financial pressure leads them to make better decisions. If someone takes over a car and crashes it, there will be lawsuits over whether the car was fit for purpose. Win or lose, lawsuits are expensive and the best strategy is to avoid them. It's cheaper to fix the cars than to defend an endless string of lawsuits.
There are two CAN buses in virtually every modern car. The high speed bus is the one connecting the engine control unit and safety equipment, like ABS and airbags. The low speed bus handles the other stuff, like the door locks, cabin heat, stereo, lights, etc. Some devices talk on both, (the security module unlocks the doors and enables starting the engine.) Even the infotainment console might connect to both. It may look for a signal from the airbag which it uses it to trigger a cellular call to local emergency services in the event of a crash.
There's no guarantee that you can't maliciously build a bridge from one to the other, but that would involve a separate feat of hacking. But that's hardly impossible, and I vaguely remember reading about a guy demonstrating it with a CD-ROM placed in the stereo of a car.
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Here's what my dogs have to say about being on the wrong side of the door at breakfast-time: Bark-bark-bark-bark-bark-bark-bark-bark-bark bark-bark-bark-bark-bark-bark arf-bark, scritch-scratch, bark-bark-bark- ...
Of course, that's pretty much the same thing they say when they're on the right side of the door, too. Can't blame them. It's breakfast time, after all.
Wrong. Aircraft, and more specifically helicopters, are a finite resource that are quickly used up through usage. Fuel is burned by the hour at a crazy rate, and the engine hour meter counts the number of hours remaining until the next major overhaul, which must take place every few thousand hours according to the manufacturer's schedule, and can easily cost half the price of a brand new aircraft.
Cheap helicopters can cost anywhere from $300-$600 an hour to operate. The turbine engine helicopters used by the police probably cost a good deal more. I don't want my police department burning up their limited air support budget on writing up a few speeders.
Apple pulled Google maps because they didn't want to agree to the privacy rules Google wanted. The cost to Apple has ben hundreds of millions if they aren't up a billion yet. You can agree with Apple's call here or not, but screwing the customers financially was not the motivation.
They may have said "privacy", but that was a smokescreen. It was about nothing but money. Apple is in head-to-head competition with Google, and allowing their primary competitor a choice seat on their home screen and garnering the search, location, and resultant ad revenue was an affront they could no longer abide.
Apple truly believed they could get away with it and that customers wouldn't care. They believed that they would deliver such a hot-shit mapping app with useful turn-by-turn screens that consumers would just love it like they loved everything else Apple produced. They committed themselves to delivering on that belief. And as release day arrived, and initial reviews came back, they began to realize that buying TomTom's map was buying little more than a pig in a poke, and began to wonder if it wasn't a mistake. But they had no idea of the size of the PR nightmare they were creating, and they did not expect the backlash that came out of betraying their fans.
I seriously doubt that iOS7 will be adopted at the rate iOS6 was. But I may be underestimating the power of auto-updates. A large number of people just won't care no matter what Apple does.
That's a really good point. Much of the violence we still see in the world is due to cult leaders whipping up the sentiments of some truly impoverished people, and using them as "holy warriors". It's a role they're happy to take on because they literally have nothing else; and what could be better than an important man who says God himself wants them! (Trick question, the right answer is "a steady job and food on my family's table", but a charismatic leader never permits his followers to use logic to arrive at the correct answer, he always claims his book provides "all the logic you need.")
Instead of giving bales of money to the Pentagon, we could have used that same money to build tens of thousands of worker-owned factories across Iraq and Afghanistan, and given their people jobs and income instead of reasons to blow themselves up. It sure would have cost the U.S. taxpayers a lot less, and would have led to a more sustainable peaceful outcome. Think of it as the Marshall Plan executed thousands of times at the mosque level, instead of once at the Emperor's level like we did in Japan after WW2.
So to get back to America, creating public works jobs (like the Works Progress Administration did back in the first Great Depression) would be one way to get people feeling valued, and getting value out of them. And that's going to lead to stability.
Why can't Iphone / ipad have usb port for charging and not high priced apple changes
The Apple chargers just supply a USB port power. The iOS devices can all plug into any USB port to charge...
-1, wrong.
From Ken Shirrif's blog:
I'm not aware of anything bad in iOS 7. Why would you not upgrade?
To preserve my jailbreak. I certainly won't downgrade to a new iOS until I know it's compatible with my Cydia apps.
New versions of iOS have become very ho-hum for the users. In the early days, they were exciting. Apple used the upgrades to add actual missing features, like copy/paste and multitasking. Consumers really wanted the latest and greatest, because the new features made an actual difference to them. Plus, iOS upgrades were required to download the latest apps, as new APIs were introduced to support things like front facing cameras, auto focus, iPad compatibility, etc.
Things became tricky, though. As they added features they bloated the OS, making the old iPhones perform poorly. But they got lucky. Most customers were already conditioned to previous phones "getting old and slow", that battery performance dropped dramatically after a year, and they wanted the new features anyway. They bought new iPhone hardware to compensate every time their 2 year contracts were up. So it turned out that it was OK with customers, because the latest iPhones were always "cool" and better, and all sins were quickly forgiven.
Apple couldn't buy enough wheelbarrows to haul away all the money they made with that strategy.
With iOS6, though, they may have finally poisoned the goose laying the golden Apples. Ordinary customers finally noticed that Apple was screwing them when they got their nice Google map app taken away and replaced with the shitty Apple Map. ("You want transit directions? You peasant! If you must, click here to download your city's transit app, and while you're at it, borrow a quarter from the guy next to you.") With that incredibly stupid mistake, lots of iPhone owners realized that Apple wasn't "benign" with their upgrades, and started to wonder just how badly they've been screwed over the years. Ordinary people are now likely to be somewhat wary of new iOS releases.
It remains to be seen if people will simply accept whatever they shovel into iOS7. There is already complaining about the new Fisher Price look of the interface, and that there are no real features of value. iTunes Radio is the closest thing to "new" in this device, but people who like that sort of thing already have Pandora, and they don't want to change because their player already knows their tastes. iOS7 might not get the swift uptake that their previous OSs saw.
Brian Krebs is a former Washington Post investigative journalist who has been writing about Internet security issues for a long time. He writes a lot about malicious attacks and often exposes the attackers. These are not nice people, either; they are spammers, botnet herders, guys who make, sell and buy credit card skimmers, hackers who steal credit card info, guys who run DDoS-for-hire sites, etc.
He uses aliases to get himself invited to underground forums, monitors them for as long as he can, then exposes the criminals. The bad guys are also improving their own security, and becoming more adept at turning the tables. One forum placed unique values in the "# of posts" listed in the left side column of their forum, then outed him when he posted a screenshot.
Needless to say, the people he is messing with are very annoyed at him. They are trying all the tricks they can to harass him remotely, such as ordering merchandise paid for on his credit cards, sending him unwanted (and now illegal) stuff, and using his credit cards to donate to charities. They've been trying to send him all the craziest, most annoying, most hazardous stuff they can without personally touching the merchandise themselves. The most dangerous stuff they have managed to send him so far was the SWAT van full of cops in a midnight raid. If these guys could get someone else to ship him a live cobra in a box, or a shit covered blasting cap, they wouldn't hesitate for a second.
While he may not be a "hero", Mr. Krebs has done some good work at cleaning up several of the nastier elements that infest the Internet. You get less spam in your in box thanks to him.
They're in international waters, so they shouldn't have to worry about FAA rules. And a drone would be a whole lot cheaper to operate than that helicopter. I think the bigger problem is the environment: it's cold, it's spraying sea salt, it's windy, it's rainy, it's foggy, and OMG it's cold!
Distances are a big deal on the ocean. Their ship can see another boat on radar to about 17 NM, so to be more effective than radar, their drone would have to fly 17NM away from the ship, probably circling their ship for maximum coverage. Assuming the ship continues to move, one loop around their ship would be around 100 NM, and they should try to cover that distance in about an hour. The drone would have to carry a lot of serious detecting equipment (the more the better), such a camera array including different lengths of lenses pointed in various directions, an IR camera, radar, radar detectors, radio ranging and detection equipment, etc., plus the avionics and the flight control radios. The payload will take a decent sized battery to run all that gear, a big wing to lift it all up, a bigger motor to push it around the sky, and even more fuel to carry around for the flight. And they'll need plenty of reserve fuel, because I've never seen them properly manage or time anything on that boat. Then after the flight they have to safely recover it. Will they land it on some mythical runway on the ship, catch it in a net, land on the water, or just splash it down and deploy a buoy line they can grab?
Finally, the Sea Shepherds would need to find someone smart and competent enough to actually pilot and maintain the damn thing and all its systems, yet dumb enough to sail the Antarctic Ocean under that stupid, incompetent captain. That's a rare person.
It'd actually be a very interesting problem to work on.
As a teacher, I try to relate my lectures to their specific interests (I know one is into motorcycles, one works at a bank, etc.) or prior history (over half of my current students were in the military.) Otherwise, I try to relate them to either my day job or to the job market the students will be entering. "When I'm hiring, I look for people who have demonstrated X on a past project. That tells me they have practical skills working with Y and Z. So lets talk about Z for a while, and why it's important."
That's obviously easier to do on a technical topic related to their field of choice than it would be for a generic topic addressed to an entry-level group of students. How a teacher could relate the lessons of the battle of Gettysburg to students interested only in The Next American Idol would be a lot more challenging.
And that says more about our teaching abilities than our learning capabilities. The students are not necessarily dim, but they're not interested in the subject without an application they're also interested in. That's why a tutor is often able to help these people when a classroom lecture setting has failed - a tutor picks up on their interest and relates the subject to the student in a meaningful way. A small class size lets the teacher reach out individually as needed, whereas a large class will miss those students.
Does that mean we should offer "Advanced Statistics for Sports Fans II" and "Advanced Statistics for Theatre-goers II", etc.? Should we put max headcounts in classrooms? Or should we simply weed out those people who can't hack the lecture format? At what point should the education system start leaving children behind?
It's nothing more than associating an identifier or keyword with something. The asker is bemoaning the lack of standards in those identifiers, how to apply them, how to search on them.
The question really misses the point, though. If you index the entire contents, then anyone searching will find it based on what they know, not what you think of in advance. Google seems to do pretty well at locating pages, despite many fine pages lacking meta tags (and despite many poor spam articles trying to abuse meta tags.) If the keywords aren't present in the article, it's probably not a very useful article anyway, as it obviously is lacking a common description.
They were over H2O so the SFFD-AD wouldn't need to send the ARFF to stop a BBQ, but the USCG would need several MLBs to do SAR.
HTH.
Yeah, that was the point I was replying to. If we are unwilling to reduce the safety of driving (the "stick" of natural selection), breeding selection can still be achieved through status (the "carrot").
I'm not sure it would become "geeky" though. Back to the licensed pilot analogy for a moment, people tend to treat airline pilots with more respect than bus drivers, even though both perform an equivalent service in society. If driving were limited to the talented few, bus driving might become a more prestigious job.
We'll never evolve to be better drivers
We would quickly evolve into better drivers, if the licensing laws were changed.
First, let's assume that good driving is enhanced by certain genetic characteristics - quick reaction times, fine motor control, good peripheral vision, etc. We don't have to identify them, just assume they exist.
We already know that our culture highly values cars. People who own more expensive vehicles are generally viewed as more successful, and therefore are more desirable as mates. This is no different than birds who attract mates with more colorful plumage than their rivals.
If drivers had to pass an annual competency exam, perhaps similar to the requirements for maintaining a pilot's license, fewer people would be driving. The people who could drive would therefore be even more desirable as mates. Lacking the "colorful plumage" of a shiny car, this would remove otherwise wealthy but bad drivers from the breeding pool.
Breeding pairs of successful drivers would potentially produce offspring that share the traits of their good driving parents. Congratulations, you have now evolved a new generation of people who are likely to be better drivers.
It's totally possible. Things like this have been done with animals for hundreds of years. And this path doesn't even require poor drivers to remove themselves from the gene pool through traffic accidents.
Others have gone so far as to suggest it's safer to stay low, and simply sell the vulnerabilities to the highest bidder. Pocket the money, and let someone else worry about if it's a good guy or a bad guy buying it.
It's a completely amoral stance, of course, and I don't personally agree with it. But when a well-intentioned bug report can easily turn into an accusation of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by someone sleazy company who doesn't want to pay to fix their own vulnerabilities, it's an approach that's actually less likely to get the researcher thrown in jail. Nobody ever deserves to be harassed for pointing out vulnerabilities.
I'm not disputing anything you say about the slowness of the project process, or even the potentially corrupt selection process. It can take years for an IT shop to make some of those simple ideas happen. And that doesn't say anything about the size of the shop, either. Even a large well-staffed shop can take many months just to get a new project on their priority list, let alone completed.
Did anyone look at Polly's solution to figure out the ROI, or if it is worth the risk? Did she save $20 of labor per week by outsourcing it to a $50 per week service? Is she costing the company $1,000 per year in downtime because of her ill-thought-out home grown system? Has she planned for upgrades to the other systems? Did anyone review the security of her solution? Polly's not an IT project manager, so she doesn't even know all the decisions that should be considered.
One good thing about a big, slow, IT-based process is that the people who own the business can look at all the projects competing for resources and decide "this one will make the most money, do it first," "this one will only save the accountants 5 minutes per day, do it last," and "this one is too high of a risk - don't do it." It's their money - they get to decide how to spend it.
Sure, IT's the bottleneck. Why? Because users who roll their own solution without understanding what they're creating will create a fragile business model.
Andy Accountant decides to do General Ledger on Quickbooks, while Polly Payables decides to do billing on the bank's web server. How does one update the other? It starts out as a manual process. But let's say Polly is clever and signs up for IFTTT.com to automate the integration. She also hands the task of entering the bills over to Carlos Clerical. Later, when Polly is on vacation, Andy downloads an upgrade to Quickbooks - but IFTTT was set up only to modify the original Quickbooks. Now Polly's billing doesn't work, and Carlos has no idea what's going on. Polly is the only support person, but she's on vacation. Andy only knows about the manual processes, so he can't help Carlos. So the bills don't get paid.
And the IT guy only knows about the PCs, the printers, the network, and the file server. He doesn't know about the apps, because the users got tired of waiting for him and rolled their own.
Repeat this scene for each and every system, service, and person involved with computers in the organization. It starts out easy and fast, but the dependencies quickly crust over every activity the company performs. Support becomes a nightmare, and changes go from "difficult" to "impossible".
If the IT guy put the pieces together, he (should) document the connections, provide troubleshooting knowledge, and at least know who to call for support. At least that's the theory.
This is what Shopkick is. The users earn points called "kicks" for entering the participating stores. One app, many stores.
It's certainly not my cup of tea, but there are lots of people who voluntarily install these kinds of apps, especially when they get free stuff for doing so.
> I'm hard pressed to think of anything really innovative Microsoft has done in years -- mostly they look at what others are doing and copy it (or buy it).
Kinect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PrimeSense Kinect hardware licensed from Primesense
And how many PrimeSense gaming systems do you have in your house? Exactly.
Remember, Apple didn't invent the portable digital media player with the iPod. They looked at existing hardware like the Diamond Rio, and said "this is a great idea, and we can sell millions of these, but this crap user interface has to go." They looked at existing cell phones and said the same thing, and came out with the iPhone. So when Microsoft looks at a small company and buys their product, you trot out the other double standard and slag them for doing nothing Apple doesn't do on an annual basis?
It was a stupid decision to tie themselves to Microsoft.
Not really. Did you read the infamous Burning Platform memo? Elop explained quite well how Nokia had sat on their haunches while Apple and Google and the Chinese all hustled. Apple dominated the smartphones, Android came in a close second, while Symbian had delivered nothing of competitive value for years. And their core profitable product, simple phones, was suddenly taken away by the Chinese who had developed a basic phone design that could be made for about $10 per copy.
The market had forked, and Nokia, who had previously dominated a nice, safe middle ground, had no presence in the high end market, and simultaneously found they couldn't afford to compete in the low end market. When Microsoft came around wanting to do this Windows Phone deal, nobody else was breaking down their doors offering them wheelbarrows full of cash. Had they not taken the money, the best case scenario would have placed Nokia as an "also-ran" in the Android marketplace; perhaps they'd be tied in a death spiral with RIM/Blackberry; or they could simply have closed the doors. Taking the Microsoft deal was a decision that didn't have a rational alternative.
It's actually a world of difference. Microsoft is a nation of anti-Ballmers, at least down at the level of developers, technical account managers, professional services people, evangelists, and engineers that I know. They're professionals, they're courteous, and they never throw chairs. They almost never slag other OS or app choices, such as Linux or iPhones in public, and generally not even in private. Sure, if you ask they'll talk up the Surface tablet they're carrying around, and they'll trot out their Nokia phones when they ring, but that's no different than me using my company's products.
Ballmer is clinically a sociopath, but then, so are a disproportionately large number of CEOs. Apparently lacking empathy for human beings is a trait that enables one to climb shamelessly over them. And since corporate boards are made up of other CEOs from other large companies, there's a shared understanding amongst these people. (I was going to say "kindred spirit", but they obviously don't care what the others in the room actually think, either.) They're too self-centered to vote out someone for the crime of being a self-centered reprobate like themselves.
What moronic moderator modded this "off topic"??
How can it not know what it is?
I also want a mechanical linkage between the accelerator and throttle body, clutch and flywheel and gearstick and selector fork.
I understand what you're saying, but I've had the mechanical linkages fail, too. Trust me, a stuck throttle is not a safety feature. (Interesting design factoid: cables are great at pulling things from a distance, even in the presence of mud and ice, but not so good at pushing on them!)
Mechanical linkages can rust, they can wear out, they can get dirty, they can stretch, bend or break. They can be weakened by some stress (bent in an accident) and then fail later due to a different stress (heat and force.) And of course they can be tampered with by someone with physical access. And don't forget, they can be designed, manufactured, or installed badly. Someone could design a body part that fails to provide adequate clearance for full travel. An assembly worker could fail to properly attach a brake cable to the frame, allowing it to eventually break loose and rub against a tire until it fails.
Electronic systems have different modes of failure. Shorts, faults, interference, bad programming, protocol errors, etc. And because the instructions are both fast and invisible to the naked eye, we don't intuitively understand or trust them as much as we do a push rod and a bell crank. But the thing is, you can measure them both on an equal basis. Which one lasts longer, on average, before needing maintenance? Which one operates correctly under a wider range of conditions, including ice, mud, salt spray, and heat? Which one doesn't fall apart under constant vibrations? Which one survives accidents better? Which one has been the cause of fewer accidents? How many have failed in the field? And of course, which one is cheaper? On a combined score, the electronic systems often outperform the mechanical systems they replace. But with the CAN bus being seen as "magic voodoo" open only to the priests of automotive engineers, which seems to be a state of ignorance the car companies want to perpetuate, ordinary people really don't trust them.
What I think is best is the use of independent linkages and systems for critical control functions, but I want them to be of the best technology for the task. I don't want a throttle failure to interfere with my shifting the vehicle into neutral, or steering, or depressing the brake, or switching the engine off, or of deploying the airbag in case of a crash. I don't want someone who can hack in through the stereo to use that to disable the brakes. But I don't want to be trusting my luck to the continued function of a weakened spring, or relying on my proactively recognizing and cleaning a rusty pivot point, or lubricating every cable every year, either.
I'm thinking it's better to apply only enough force to make a change, without so much force that it induces widespread panic in the general public. Panic leads to quick, stupid reactions: "OMG, hackers can take over a car with android phones? Ban android phones! Ban software! Jail hackers!"
The problem is panicked people want "preventative" kinds of laws. But good laws shouldn't restrict our freedoms to explore, they should only punish people who cause actual harm. And we already have laws that handle these situations. If you hacked a car and caused it to crash, you could and should be charged with assault, attempted criminal vehicular homicide, reckless endangerment, or whatever the law books already contain. That's the appropriate reaction. If you hacked a car and nothing happened, then nothing happened.
As for the automakers, financial pressure leads them to make better decisions. If someone takes over a car and crashes it, there will be lawsuits over whether the car was fit for purpose. Win or lose, lawsuits are expensive and the best strategy is to avoid them. It's cheaper to fix the cars than to defend an endless string of lawsuits.
There are two CAN buses in virtually every modern car. The high speed bus is the one connecting the engine control unit and safety equipment, like ABS and airbags. The low speed bus handles the other stuff, like the door locks, cabin heat, stereo, lights, etc. Some devices talk on both, (the security module unlocks the doors and enables starting the engine.) Even the infotainment console might connect to both. It may look for a signal from the airbag which it uses it to trigger a cellular call to local emergency services in the event of a crash.
There's no guarantee that you can't maliciously build a bridge from one to the other, but that would involve a separate feat of hacking. But that's hardly impossible, and I vaguely remember reading about a guy demonstrating it with a CD-ROM placed in the stereo of a car.