To put that in perspective, light in a vacuum travels around 20 nm in 67 attoseconds, so the width of the pulse is about the same as the width of the smallest virus or about 1/350th the 7um diameter of a human blood cell.
>>>Sorry Amazon, nice try, but your walled garden isn't for me.
One could say the same about the BBC and their "walled garden". Why on earth did you think you could use an amazon tablet outside of its home country? I certainly don't expect to be able to hear/watch BBC outside of the UK.
Because I paid for the tablet, but I don't pay for the BBC?
If your a CEO of a motorcycle company you should know something about motorcycles If your CEO of a Twinkies factory you should know something about baking.
Sure the motorcycle needs to know something about motorcycles, but he doesn't need to know how to make one, that's what the guys in the factory are for.
If the CEO of Hostess is spending his time learning how to bake a twinkie, then I'm not surprised they are having so much trouble -- the CEO of a large corporate doesn't need to know the implementation details of their products, but they do need to know how they are used and how to sell them.
If they were learning to architect software systems, that might be useful and help them to understand what's possible and what's not.
But learning to code doesn't help them at all, and is more likely to give them a false sense of the complexity of large software systems. He'll say stuff like "Hey, what's so hard about doing this, I can write a function to add this feature in 10 minutes, so go make it happen!", while the engineer is saying "But this is a fundamental change in the data model and means touching nearly our entire code base"
"just doing their job" is NEVER a valid defense. Especially ones that have signed up to be TSA goons after it has been established that people don't like them.
Many people don't like meter maids, but without them, parking in cities would be chaos (and cities would earn less revenue).
Many people don't like policemen on the highways since they write tickets for no reason "But officer, my car was *made* to drive 120mph, there's hardly anyone on the road, what's the danger?"
Many people don't like street sweepers because they make noise early in the morning, and cause annoying parking restrictions.
Should we just get rid of *all* jobs that people don't like?
What are you, nuts? Sovereignty is a basic concept of nations. Having a say in who comes and goes is...basic. You can't get any more basic-er. I live in a foreign country and it's beyond any shred of a doubt that I should have the proper visa at all times. It's also beyond any shred of a doubt that my host nation has the right to do this...and its history is much "worse" than "evil USA".
But who decides when Sovereignty starts? Obviously it's the guys with the bigger guns, but just because a land is populated by an unsophisticated society (by european standards) that did not value land ownership, shouldn't mean that they lose control of their land and get relegated to small reservations with a fraction of the territory they used to live in.
How can they prevent someone from reverse engineering the pinout based on published specs, examining whatever 9 pin adapter comes with the new phone, and trial and error? I don't it would be legal to take apart an Apple adapter and copy it, but if they can figure out how to make an adapter by other means using a cleanroom methodology without ever looking at the official adapter, and come up with their own connector design that fits the phone connector, can Apple stop them?
Also, the US Constitution grants citizens the right to unrestricted interstate travel. The TSA is pretty restrictive. So The TSA is breaking the FUCKING CONSTITUTION on at least two counts. I'll bet they'll be granted more and more ability to trample on citizen's rights until we have FUCKING NO RIGHTS AT ALL
I think the TSA answer to that is that they aren't restricting all travel, just airline (and other public transport). You are still free to drive across the country without a single strip search. (unless, of course, you're caught speeding and the police officer is in a particularly bad mood).
Nobody in first class is scared of the dull stick that the airline attempts to pass off as a "knife".
If you want to bring in a knife, bring in a ceramic blade tucked inside your DSLR or video camera body and they'll never see it on the x-ray.
Not that it matters, a blade or box cutter is no longer sufficient to bring down a plane - the pilots aren't opening the door no matter how many passengers you kill or injure. If you want to take down the plane you'll need a different method, which is what the TSA is trying to prevent.
Of course, it's an impossible task because TSA is protecting against known attacks, and it's the novel and previously unknown attack that will eventually slip by.
The worst effect of TSA and other USA security is that I actually hesitated before posting this, wondering if this was going to earn me a visit from a team of agents to question why I'm distributing information that could help a terrorist (even though I know deep down that something that I thought of in 2 minutes in my livingroom is not going to be useful information to someone who's actually planning an attack), maybe even get me on a no-fly list.
So much for living in the home of the free where free speech is highly valued -- the government has made citizens afraid to exercise free speech because appearing on a secret blacklist can cause extreme inconvenience. A visit to your workplace by government agents regardless of the ultimate outcome can be very detrimental to one's career.
Terrorism is a very serious problem that can get people killed. So is the TSA.
The 9/11 attacks caused roughly 3,000 deaths . Most years other than 2001 apparantly resulted in less than 1,000 lifes lost globally (though 5-6 times as many people tend to get wounded) Lifes lost globally to plane crashes ~1,000 to 1,500 per year The total number of lifes lost to traffic accidents last year in the US was about 33,000 Deaths caused in the US by pneumonia in 2009: about 51,000
Don't just take the accuracy of those numbers for granted. Please go take a few minutes and search for statistics. Educate yourself about the numbers and how they were determined.
Then please tell us whether or not you still consider terrorism to be a serious problem. Do you still believe the risks were so great ? Do you still consider your lost liberties as acceptable costs for that safety ?
tl;dr; Get a fucking perspective.
Of course the problem with quoting these statistics is that they are one-sided and it's impossible to know how many terrorist attacks have been thwarted by TSA. Some in the government may have some idea, but they aren't talking. Maybe the TSA stopped 10 attacks and saved thousands of lives in the past month alone. It's this uncertainty that makes people willing to tolerate TSA -- they think "Well yeah, it's inconvenient but they must be effective, there haven't been any successful attacks recently"
The only reason you or anyone else is pissy about Arizona's law is because you're 1) ignorant of existing Federal law and/or 2) supportive of people violating our borders and flooding into the country illegally.
No, I'm pissy about it because it allows a USA citizen to be detained until he produces papers just because he appears foreign and might be here illegally. My wife is a USA citizen, but she immigrated here from her home country, doesn't speak perfect English and still has a strong accent from her native language. What's to stop her from being stopped and detained until she produces documentation?
Nations have a right as part of their national sovereignty to know who is crossing their borders and they have the right to deny entry to non-citizens at will. Anyone found to have crossed illegally should be returned to their nation of origin and barred for legal entry for a long, long time.
The USA of all nations has little right to claim that only those that are here legally have a right to be here, given our history.
Nobody in first class is scared of the dull stick that the airline attempts to pass off as a "knife".
If you want to bring in a knife, bring in a ceramic blade tucked inside your DSLR or video camera body and they'll never see it on the x-ray.
Not that it matters, a blade or box cutter is no longer sufficient to bring down a plane - the pilots aren't opening the door no matter how many passengers you kill or injure. If you want to take down the plane you'll need a different method, which is what the TSA is trying to prevent.
Of course, it's an impossible task because TSA is protecting against known attacks, and it's the novel and previously unknown attack that will eventually slip by.
So is it o.k. for us to wait outside the airport, follow the TSA agents home, and then beat their heads in?
I am just asking because TSA employment seems to be a lot of former welfare recipients, and in disposing of them we would actually be benefiting society as a whole.
There's no reason to take your frustrations out on TSA agents. They are just doing a job, if you don't like the job they do, then get your government to get rid of the job, there's no need for personal attacks against the agents. I feel the same way about parking enforcement officers, I detest what they do, but I hold no animosity against the individual officers. If they write me a ticket that I feel is invalid, I protest it in court, not by yelling at the officer as she writes the ticket that her job requires her to write.
If a former welfare recipient got a job as a TSA agent, that sounds like a great thing, I'd rather pay them to do useless work than pay them to sit at home and do nothing. Though if the government really wants to create a make-work program, I wish they'd bring back the CCC and rebuild our park system.
What's the difference in the US? You can't get on a plane without ID. In Soviet Union, you could get on a plane, train, boat, whatever without ID. They just asked you for the ticket - imagine that! You only needed ID in case the police stopped you, and there were no police on planes.
Not carrying ID could get you a ticket. But then I've never known anyone that was asked for ID outside of a traffic stop (driver license, ID card).
And just today in Arizona a judge upheld Arizona's Show me your papers law. If you look foreign and are in Arizona, you better have your papers with you or you may find yourself sitting in jail until you can confirm that you're here legally.
Because the other TSA agents presumably WOULD know.
Would they? How long would it take to discover the rogue TSA agent? If TSA tactics are always changing and no one knows what's real and what isn't, maybe the bad guy would have time to visit all the patrons of an airport restaraunt and infect their drinks before slipping away unnoticed.
Or maybe the bad guy is a real TSA agent and slips the virus into another agent's vial, and that agent goes around infecting people without even knowing it.
Or, to really spread terror, the bad guy can just dump a TSA uniform and some testing vial half full of Anthrax (or whatever can be transmitted though liquids) in an airport restroom where it will be discovered. Then TSA won't know how many people may have been infected.
Do it in more than one airport and they won't even know how many airports it happened in.
The bad guy doesn't actually have to do anything bad to shut down air travel nationwide - just dump some clothes and a vial in a restroom stall.
This is where TSA's security theater could come back to bite them - when they rely on so much showmanship, all it takes is a different kind of showman to make them look incompetent. No amount of TSA spin is going to help when news crews are in several different airports across the country showing discarded TSA uniforms and speculating about what could have been going on. And if TSA suddenly announces "We will no longer be testing liquids", people will wonder why they were testing them in the first place if they can suddenly stop testing them.
What's the point of a random check if it's announced when passengers can choose not to participate? If I were a bad guy with a fake ID or something bad in my luggage, I'd go home and try again a different day with a different fake ID.
He'd be recorded as a no-show. If someone got ambitious and went through airport video (or a computer program did so), they just might notice that the bad guy left after hearing about the random check.
Having said that, I don't see the point, unless they're trying to catch people who repeatedly break the law, like smugglers. Or to put up a show.
If he has a fake ID, he'll just use a different one the next time.
But being a no-show is not enough to get you on a no-fly or scrutiny list - I've canceled flights a number of times even a short time before departure and have never had any trouble getting back through security the next time I flew. This was both with full-fare unrestricted tickets and restricted discount tickets.
How do you know it's a TSA agent dripping a strange liquid into your drink and not a crazy guy dripping a slow acting poison or virus that won't be noticed until hours later after hundreds of people come down with a strange affliction all across the country?
Even if you demand to see ID first (is the TSA agent obligated to show ID upon request?), how many people know what a TSA badge is really supposed to look like?
Is the strip and solution really non-toxic? Will TSA provide independent test lab results to prove it? (unlike the poorly tested backscatter x-ray machines)?
If they have a reliable test to determine if a liquid is hazardous or not, then how about letting me bring liquids through the checkpoints?
TSA security theater story of the day:
On a recent flight from IAD, just before the flight started boarding, the gate agent announced "Please have your ID available for inspection, TSA will be conduction random ID checks and baggage searches upon boarding". And sure enough, as we boarded, there was a TSA guy with his magic flashlight, randomly checking ID's for validity, and farther into the jetway was a pair of TSA agents randomly searching luggage.
What's the point of a random check if it's announced when passengers can choose not to participate? If I were a bad guy with a fake ID or something bad in my luggage, I'd go home and try again a different day with a different fake ID.
Yes, it is just numbers, but 32GB is behind the times, especially after Apple has set the standard now at 64, which no Android phone can do.
The 32GB Galaxy S3 is available today and the MicroSD slot supports cards up to 64GB, giving it up to 96GB of storage space. The 64GB model is supposed to be out next month, providing up to 128GB of storage.
Yep, and that's my point. The 820 comes with a slot for you to bring your own flash memory chip. The 920 has a chip already installed that goes, guest where...exactly where the slot would have connected. Now, when you talk Apple, the iPod Touch always has a double memory compared to an iPhone when comparing top end to top end because the GSM chip takes about the same space as the memory chip.
If they are going to have 2 separate designs anyway, why wouldn't they just use a 32GB built-in flash chip in the 920 instead of a more complicated 16GB built-in flash + 16GB inaccessible (but still socketed?) card?
Read the article. They mention adding more ports makes shielding against interference harder.
The Lumia 920, on the other hand, has only two ports: a micro-USB charging port and the headphone socket. Yet, even that meagre number of slots caused headaches for Nokia's engineers, according to Shields.
"The micro-USB port is an RF [radio frequency] nightmare," he said, adding that it can interfere with the various other radios in the device without proper shielding. "Wireless charging is effectively a radio, so is NFC. Then you've got LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth - and you've got a lot of antennas."
This phone has wireless charging. What other phones have that built-in?
But the MicroSD card and port can be 100% encapsulated in metal under the battery cover, making shielding much easier than with the MicroUSB port that has to be exposed externally.
The wireless charging is a nice touch (but only if it's a standard so when I go to a friend's house, I know I can drop my phone on his Motorola branded charger and it will still charge my Nokia phone). However, if I could choose between wireless charging and a microSD slot, I'd choose the microSD. Having a couple exposed charging contacts to let me use a drop-in charger would be offer nearly the same convenience as the wireless charging.
Not having a micro-SD slot on a phone is quite stupid these days. Heck, my last 3 "dumbphones" have had SD card slots (though I think one was mini-SD) and all of my smartphones have had one. On my current phone (Samsung Captivate Glide) I've got a 32 GB one in so I can take my reasonably sized music library (~25 GB) with me without having to lug around yet another device. 8 GB is pathetic for a smartphone, sure, you might be able to get all of your applications on there, but not much else. To put this in perspective, 8 GB is the same amount of memory the lowest-end version of the iPod touch which came out back in 2007.
My 32GB Samsung Galaxy Nexus doesn't have a microSD card slot and though I thought I'd find it limiting, I've only filled it half full with music and a few movies. Though admittedly I don't listen to locally stored music much - usually only when flying.. normally I listen to streamed music.
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To put that in perspective, light in a vacuum travels around 20 nm in 67 attoseconds, so the width of the pulse is about the same as the width of the smallest virus or about 1/350th the 7um diameter of a human blood cell.
>>>Sorry Amazon, nice try, but your walled garden isn't for me.
One could say the same about the BBC and their "walled garden". Why on earth did you think you could use an amazon tablet outside of its home country? I certainly don't expect to be able to hear/watch BBC outside of the UK.
Because I paid for the tablet, but I don't pay for the BBC?
If your a CEO of a motorcycle company you should know something about motorcycles
If your CEO of a Twinkies factory you should know something about baking.
Sure the motorcycle needs to know something about motorcycles, but he doesn't need to know how to make one, that's what the guys in the factory are for.
If the CEO of Hostess is spending his time learning how to bake a twinkie, then I'm not surprised they are having so much trouble -- the CEO of a large corporate doesn't need to know the implementation details of their products, but they do need to know how they are used and how to sell them.
If they were learning to architect software systems, that might be useful and help them to understand what's possible and what's not.
But learning to code doesn't help them at all, and is more likely to give them a false sense of the complexity of large software systems. He'll say stuff like "Hey, what's so hard about doing this, I can write a function to add this feature in 10 minutes, so go make it happen!", while the engineer is saying "But this is a fundamental change in the data model and means touching nearly our entire code base"
"just doing their job" is NEVER a valid defense. Especially ones that have signed up to be TSA goons after it has been established that people don't like them.
Many people don't like meter maids, but without them, parking in cities would be chaos (and cities would earn less revenue).
Many people don't like policemen on the highways since they write tickets for no reason "But officer, my car was *made* to drive 120mph, there's hardly anyone on the road, what's the danger?"
Many people don't like street sweepers because they make noise early in the morning, and cause annoying parking restrictions.
Should we just get rid of *all* jobs that people don't like?
What are you, nuts? Sovereignty is a basic concept of nations. Having a say in who comes and goes is...basic. You can't get any more basic-er. I live in a foreign country and it's beyond any shred of a doubt that I should have the proper visa at all times. It's also beyond any shred of a doubt that my host nation has the right to do this...and its history is much "worse" than "evil USA".
But who decides when Sovereignty starts? Obviously it's the guys with the bigger guns, but just because a land is populated by an unsophisticated society (by european standards) that did not value land ownership, shouldn't mean that they lose control of their land and get relegated to small reservations with a fraction of the territory they used to live in.
How can they prevent someone from reverse engineering the pinout based on published specs, examining whatever 9 pin adapter comes with the new phone, and trial and error? I don't it would be legal to take apart an Apple adapter and copy it, but if they can figure out how to make an adapter by other means using a cleanroom methodology without ever looking at the official adapter, and come up with their own connector design that fits the phone connector, can Apple stop them?
Wow, I didn't expect Godwin's Law to be invoked so soon.
Equating some inconvenience at the airport to the holocaust? Really?
Also, the US Constitution grants citizens the right to unrestricted interstate travel. The TSA is pretty restrictive. So The TSA is breaking the FUCKING CONSTITUTION on at least two counts. I'll bet they'll be granted more and more ability to trample on citizen's rights until we have FUCKING NO RIGHTS AT ALL
I think the TSA answer to that is that they aren't restricting all travel, just airline (and other public transport). You are still free to drive across the country without a single strip search. (unless, of course, you're caught speeding and the police officer is in a particularly bad mood).
Have you ever flown first class?
Nobody in first class is scared of the dull stick that the airline attempts to pass off as a "knife".
If you want to bring in a knife, bring in a ceramic blade tucked inside your DSLR or video camera body and they'll never see it on the x-ray.
Not that it matters, a blade or box cutter is no longer sufficient to bring down a plane - the pilots aren't opening the door no matter how many passengers you kill or injure. If you want to take down the plane you'll need a different method, which is what the TSA is trying to prevent.
Of course, it's an impossible task because TSA is protecting against known attacks, and it's the novel and previously unknown attack that will eventually slip by.
The worst effect of TSA and other USA security is that I actually hesitated before posting this, wondering if this was going to earn me a visit from a team of agents to question why I'm distributing information that could help a terrorist (even though I know deep down that something that I thought of in 2 minutes in my livingroom is not going to be useful information to someone who's actually planning an attack), maybe even get me on a no-fly list.
So much for living in the home of the free where free speech is highly valued -- the government has made citizens afraid to exercise free speech because appearing on a secret blacklist can cause extreme inconvenience. A visit to your workplace by government agents regardless of the ultimate outcome can be very detrimental to one's career.
Terrorism is a very serious problem that can get people killed. So is the TSA.
The 9/11 attacks caused roughly 3,000 deaths .
Most years other than 2001 apparantly resulted in less than 1,000 lifes lost globally (though 5-6 times as many people tend to get wounded)
Lifes lost globally to plane crashes ~1,000 to 1,500 per year
The total number of lifes lost to traffic accidents last year in the US was about 33,000
Deaths caused in the US by pneumonia in 2009: about 51,000
Don't just take the accuracy of those numbers for granted.
Please go take a few minutes and search for statistics. Educate yourself about the numbers and how they were determined.
Then please tell us whether or not you still consider terrorism to be a serious problem.
Do you still believe the risks were so great ? Do you still consider your lost liberties as acceptable costs for that safety ?
tl;dr; Get a fucking perspective.
Of course the problem with quoting these statistics is that they are one-sided and it's impossible to know how many terrorist attacks have been thwarted by TSA. Some in the government may have some idea, but they aren't talking. Maybe the TSA stopped 10 attacks and saved thousands of lives in the past month alone. It's this uncertainty that makes people willing to tolerate TSA -- they think "Well yeah, it's inconvenient but they must be effective, there haven't been any successful attacks recently"
The only reason you or anyone else is pissy about Arizona's law is because you're 1) ignorant of existing Federal law and/or 2) supportive of people violating our borders and flooding into the country illegally.
No, I'm pissy about it because it allows a USA citizen to be detained until he produces papers just because he appears foreign and might be here illegally. My wife is a USA citizen, but she immigrated here from her home country, doesn't speak perfect English and still has a strong accent from her native language. What's to stop her from being stopped and detained until she produces documentation?
Nations have a right as part of their national sovereignty to know who is crossing their borders and they have the right to deny entry to non-citizens at will. Anyone found to have crossed illegally should be returned to their nation of origin and barred for legal entry for a long, long time.
The USA of all nations has little right to claim that only those that are here legally have a right to be here, given our history.
Have you ever flown first class?
Nobody in first class is scared of the dull stick that the airline attempts to pass off as a "knife".
If you want to bring in a knife, bring in a ceramic blade tucked inside your DSLR or video camera body and they'll never see it on the x-ray.
Not that it matters, a blade or box cutter is no longer sufficient to bring down a plane - the pilots aren't opening the door no matter how many passengers you kill or injure. If you want to take down the plane you'll need a different method, which is what the TSA is trying to prevent.
Of course, it's an impossible task because TSA is protecting against known attacks, and it's the novel and previously unknown attack that will eventually slip by.
So is it o.k. for us to wait outside the airport, follow the TSA agents home, and then beat their heads in?
I am just asking because TSA employment seems to be a lot of former welfare recipients, and in disposing of them we would actually be benefiting society as a whole.
There's no reason to take your frustrations out on TSA agents. They are just doing a job, if you don't like the job they do, then get your government to get rid of the job, there's no need for personal attacks against the agents. I feel the same way about parking enforcement officers, I detest what they do, but I hold no animosity against the individual officers. If they write me a ticket that I feel is invalid, I protest it in court, not by yelling at the officer as she writes the ticket that her job requires her to write.
If a former welfare recipient got a job as a TSA agent, that sounds like a great thing, I'd rather pay them to do useless work than pay them to sit at home and do nothing. Though if the government really wants to create a make-work program, I wish they'd bring back the CCC and rebuild our park system.
What's the difference in the US? You can't get on a plane without ID. In Soviet Union, you could get on a plane, train, boat, whatever without ID. They just asked you for the ticket - imagine that! You only needed ID in case the police stopped you, and there were no police on planes.
Not carrying ID could get you a ticket. But then I've never known anyone that was asked for ID outside of a traffic stop (driver license, ID card).
And just today in Arizona a judge upheld Arizona's Show me your papers law. If you look foreign and are in Arizona, you better have your papers with you or you may find yourself sitting in jail until you can confirm that you're here legally.
Because the other TSA agents presumably WOULD know.
Would they? How long would it take to discover the rogue TSA agent? If TSA tactics are always changing and no one knows what's real and what isn't, maybe the bad guy would have time to visit all the patrons of an airport restaraunt and infect their drinks before slipping away unnoticed.
Or maybe the bad guy is a real TSA agent and slips the virus into another agent's vial, and that agent goes around infecting people without even knowing it.
Or, to really spread terror, the bad guy can just dump a TSA uniform and some testing vial half full of Anthrax (or whatever can be transmitted though liquids) in an airport restroom where it will be discovered. Then TSA won't know how many people may have been infected.
Do it in more than one airport and they won't even know how many airports it happened in.
The bad guy doesn't actually have to do anything bad to shut down air travel nationwide - just dump some clothes and a vial in a restroom stall.
This is where TSA's security theater could come back to bite them - when they rely on so much showmanship, all it takes is a different kind of showman to make them look incompetent. No amount of TSA spin is going to help when news crews are in several different airports across the country showing discarded TSA uniforms and speculating about what could have been going on. And if TSA suddenly announces "We will no longer be testing liquids", people will wonder why they were testing them in the first place if they can suddenly stop testing them.
What's the point of a random check if it's announced when passengers can choose not to participate? If I were a bad guy with a fake ID or something bad in my luggage, I'd go home and try again a different day with a different fake ID.
He'd be recorded as a no-show. If someone got ambitious and went through airport video (or a computer program did so), they just might notice that the bad guy left after hearing about the random check.
Having said that, I don't see the point, unless they're trying to catch people who repeatedly break the law, like smugglers. Or to put up a show.
If he has a fake ID, he'll just use a different one the next time.
But being a no-show is not enough to get you on a no-fly or scrutiny list - I've canceled flights a number of times even a short time before departure and have never had any trouble getting back through security the next time I flew. This was both with full-fare unrestricted tickets and restricted discount tickets.
How do you know it's a TSA agent dripping a strange liquid into your drink and not a crazy guy dripping a slow acting poison or virus that won't be noticed until hours later after hundreds of people come down with a strange affliction all across the country?
Even if you demand to see ID first (is the TSA agent obligated to show ID upon request?), how many people know what a TSA badge is really supposed to look like?
Is the strip and solution really non-toxic? Will TSA provide independent test lab results to prove it? (unlike the poorly tested backscatter x-ray machines)?
If they have a reliable test to determine if a liquid is hazardous or not, then how about letting me bring liquids through the checkpoints?
TSA security theater story of the day:
On a recent flight from IAD, just before the flight started boarding, the gate agent announced "Please have your ID available for inspection, TSA will be conduction random ID checks and baggage searches upon boarding". And sure enough, as we boarded, there was a TSA guy with his magic flashlight, randomly checking ID's for validity, and farther into the jetway was a pair of TSA agents randomly searching luggage.
What's the point of a random check if it's announced when passengers can choose not to participate? If I were a bad guy with a fake ID or something bad in my luggage, I'd go home and try again a different day with a different fake ID.
But the MicroSD card and port can be 100% encapsulated in metal under the battery cover
What battery cover? The battery is non-removable.
You know, that big flat area on the back of the phone -- the part that covers the battery (and the rest of the inside of the phone).
Just because it's not removable doesn't mean it's not covering the battery (and doesn't mean that it's not part of the RF shielding for the phone).
It's a phone.... why do you need 32GB of storage, LOCAL to the phone? Do you have that many friends? Is your addressbook THAT large ?
Some people listen to music on their phone, or watch photos on it....
And it's nice to load up some movies to watch on the plane.
I think the grandparent poster thinks that smartphones are used only as phones.
My 4s has 64GB of internal disk.
My Atrix 2 ends up at 48GB.
Yes, it is just numbers, but 32GB is behind the times, especially after Apple has set the standard now at 64, which no Android phone can do.
The 32GB Galaxy S3 is available today and the MicroSD slot supports cards up to 64GB, giving it up to 96GB of storage space. The 64GB model is supposed to be out next month, providing up to 128GB of storage.
Yep, and that's my point. The 820 comes with a slot for you to bring your own flash memory chip. The 920 has a chip already installed that goes, guest where...exactly where the slot would have connected. Now, when you talk Apple, the iPod Touch always has a double memory compared to an iPhone when comparing top end to top end because the GSM chip takes about the same space as the memory chip.
If they are going to have 2 separate designs anyway, why wouldn't they just use a 32GB built-in flash chip in the 920 instead of a more complicated 16GB built-in flash + 16GB inaccessible (but still socketed?) card?
Read the article. They mention adding more ports makes shielding against interference harder.
The Lumia 920, on the other hand, has only two ports: a micro-USB charging port and the headphone socket. Yet, even that meagre number of slots caused headaches for Nokia's engineers, according to Shields.
"The micro-USB port is an RF [radio frequency] nightmare," he said, adding that it can interfere with the various other radios in the device without proper shielding. "Wireless charging is effectively a radio, so is NFC. Then you've got LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth - and you've got a lot of antennas."
This phone has wireless charging. What other phones have that built-in?
But the MicroSD card and port can be 100% encapsulated in metal under the battery cover, making shielding much easier than with the MicroUSB port that has to be exposed externally.
The wireless charging is a nice touch (but only if it's a standard so when I go to a friend's house, I know I can drop my phone on his Motorola branded charger and it will still charge my Nokia phone). However, if I could choose between wireless charging and a microSD slot, I'd choose the microSD. Having a couple exposed charging contacts to let me use a drop-in charger would be offer nearly the same convenience as the wireless charging.
Not having a micro-SD slot on a phone is quite stupid these days. Heck, my last 3 "dumbphones" have had SD card slots (though I think one was mini-SD) and all of my smartphones have had one. On my current phone (Samsung Captivate Glide) I've got a 32 GB one in so I can take my reasonably sized music library (~25 GB) with me without having to lug around yet another device. 8 GB is pathetic for a smartphone, sure, you might be able to get all of your applications on there, but not much else. To put this in perspective, 8 GB is the same amount of memory the lowest-end version of the iPod touch which came out back in 2007.
My 32GB Samsung Galaxy Nexus doesn't have a microSD card slot and though I thought I'd find it limiting, I've only filled it half full with music and a few movies. Though admittedly I don't listen to locally stored music much - usually only when flying.. normally I listen to streamed music.