Try carrying medications requiring refrigeration but which should not be frozen. Use one of those sealed ice pack things to keep it cool during the drive to the airport and time spent in line. Chances are that the ice pack will start to melt, otherwise it would be too cold and maybe freeze the medication. Now, can that partially melted, medically necessary, ice and water mixture go through the checkpoint?
Since the TSA already allows nearly unlimited liquids to be carried on board if they are "prescription" (I once saw a guy take two 32oz bottles of prescription dandruff shampoo on board), I don't see how a medically neccessary ice pack would be a problem.
We are continuing to permit prescription liquid medications and other liquids needed by persons with disabilities and medical conditions. This includes:
...
gels or frozen liquids needed to cool disability or medically related items used by persons with disabilities or medical condition
And it scales well to all three of their international airports.
TLV handles 12M visitors a year (11M of them are international).
If they can make it work at a large airport of that scale, surely a country with the resources of the USA could figure out how to scale it to all of our large airports. There's still plenty of opportunity for ex-TSA execs to get rich, it's just that they would run agent training companies instead of selling scanning machines of dubious effectiveness and safety.
"All passengers waiting to check in speak to a polyglot agent. The agents, most of whom are female, ask a series of questions, looking for nerves or inconsistent statements. While the vast majority of travelers pass the question and answer session and have a pretty easy time going through security"
If I was talking to a hot female Israeli polygamous agent, I'd be pretty flustered and would always get selected for secondary screening - what could I do to be assured of having a body cavity search?
Email is ridiculous. It's highly prone to error. Overzealous blacklists and whitelists deny service to tens of thousands of email addresses that have done nothing wrong on a daily basis.
...
They need to abolish it outright, and move on to collaboration tools that make sense in the workplace. Any and all of which would be easier to manage, and far more reliable.
If you're having such problems with email on your corporate network (presumably the same place you'd use these collaboration tools that make sense in the workplace), maybe you need a better mail admin.
I manage email for a mid-sized business (btw 500 - 1000 mailboxes depending on how you count) and we have none of the problems you mention. We have a spam filter (well two, one open source filter for pre-filtering and one commercial filter) and users can manage their own block lists. They can search their quarantine for blocked spams and take them out of quarantine (but not blocked viruses, they can see them,but only IT can take them out of quarantine)
We get 2 or 3 helpdesk tickets a week relating to sending/receiving email to external parties - 90% of the time, they misspelled the recipient's address.
We do get a fair number of tickets relating to Outlook, but I blame that on Microsoft's implementation, not the concept of email itself.
We do send out marketing email blasts regularly (opt-in of course), and we've outsourced that to an email marketing firm because managing email campaigns and making sure we don't get on spam black lists *is* a big ball of wax that we don't want to get in to. But I see that as a good thing, since it helps keep random companies from spamming me.
We did get blocked by barracuda once (before we were filtering outbound email) and it was for a valid reason - they blocked us because one of our users had been infected by a malware sending spambot.
But if the security image is a photo with 2 people and a dog, against a white wall it's pretty likely that I can guess where the taps are, so I only have to guess the order.
In that case... don't choose an photo of 2 people and a dog.
What you're saying is "This system has very poor security, if they choose the pictures poorly and each picture has very few probable combinations". Pretty obvious answer is: Don't choose such pictures. I'd guess that before they choose a picture for this purpose, they do some testing on what kind of patterns people use and discard the pictures where there is too little distribution. Of course, users may always use the most obvious pattern and they might be able to choose a picture themselves and use too simple picture... but users can also choose very stupid passwords.
That's my point exactly - in the lab, I'm sure this is a very secure system and can be made to be much more secure than a traditional passphrase. But in the real world, people see security as something that gets in the way, so they choose something easy to use, not something secure, so this ends up being not any more secure than any other system.
Ahh, learn something new every day. Didn't know VPN hardware existed. Thanks.:)
A year or so ago, our firewall and VPN device were the same, then we upgraded the firewall and are using the old firewall hardware (a pair of Cisco ASA's) as a dedicated VPN appliance.
If I were buying one today, I'd probably go for one of the Juniper appliances.
Make it a design that provides some privacy, because the lab may be the only place that some teens can surf porn. Stain-proof surfaces and antibiotic wipes would be a nice touch too.
Even in the worst-case scenario where the computer was used for nothing but logging in with the picture password, the math works out that it's still more reliable than the 4-digit pin that many other devices use.
I'm not so sure I trust the math, since the math is only part of the equation. (no pun intended...well, maybe it was)
They claim that a 3 tap password has 2.7M combinations, but that's only true if each of the coordinates on the screen was equally likely to be tapped.
But if the security image is a photo with 2 people and a dog, against a white wall it's pretty likely that I can guess where the taps are, so I only have to guess the order.
Likewise, instead of a single line resulting in 1,949 unique gestures, in reality there are only 6 likely candidates. (and I bet most of the time if I draw the line from the face of the guy holding the dog's leash to the dog, then I'll have guessed correctly)
Sure, someone may decide to tap on the lower left corner of the blank wall to make their passcode more secure, but the average person will probably stick with the faces.
You allow SSH connections to your firewall from the world?
I can't even reach our firewall from outside of our network without a VPN connection.
And what exactly is securing your VPN connection, pixie dust?
Or do I just misunderstand what is meant by "allowing connections to your firewall"?
The VPN concentrator is a separate physical device (from a different vendor) - once I VPN in, *then* I need to use SSH to reach my firewall. So it takes two independent compromises to break in. With separate digital certificates needed for each device.
I ride to work on a mountain bike, 3000ft down, 1 to 3 hours, often exploring. I need GPS, Google maps and more. A bright LED screen is a must.
If you *need* GPS on a bike, you'd be better off with a dedicated hiking/biking GPS otherwise once your smartphone slides out of your pocket (or out of the handlebar holder) and ends up upside down in a puddle, you're going to be lost.
I've dropped my Garmin Legend enough to trust it to not crap out if it hits the ground (but always carry spare batteries and a map + compass in unfamiliar territory, just in case). A friend saw a spectacular end to her shiny new iPhone after one inadvertent drop from a table.
My smart phone paid for itself the afternoon I accidentally misconfigured the firewall on the company's ecommerce server (which is in a colo several hours drive from me). Misconfigured as in blocked my own IP address instead of whitelisting it. I was able to download a SSH client, open a terminal session and revert the firewall settings from my phone.
You allow SSH connections to your firewall from the world?
I can't even reach our firewall from outside of our network without a VPN connection. If I locked myself out, I'd be completely locked out unless I was on site. (and hopefully I hadn't written the config to memory so I could have someone power cycle it)
The 50 cents/GB is over an order of magnitude high for even a conservative, high-profit "fair price". And remember, this is a regulated, licensed monopoly. Their rates are supposed to reflect service costs.
For comparison, Amazon EC2 charges 12 cents/GB (if you transfer less than 10TB/month). Their top tier published pricing is for 5 cents/GB for 100 - 350TB/month. (their prices can vary depending on the region).
I live in a relatively small city in Idaho and just signed up for a 50Mbps (seriously... and I really do get that!) for ~$50 a month (this is with CableOne in case anyone is interested).
It has a cap at 50GB a month (which is already pretty generous) but it also has a couple of other niceties:
1. If you go over it's only 50 cents per gigabyte... which I think is pretty fair.
2. Any traffic between midnight and 6 AM is completely unmetered. So if you have a big download to do (like a new game on Steam) just start it after midnight and you're good to go.
Overall I'm extremely happy with the service. Streaming over Vudu and Netflix is awesome... downloading game patches happens instantly... And my wife can listen to Pandora while I play an online game without issue.
Hopefully more parts of the country will get service like this.
50GB is generous for a 50Mbps connection? That's only 3 hours of downloading at your full bandwidth. Or 25 hours of HD Netflix streaming (less than an hour per day). Or 10 DVD ISO's.
Comcast's 250GB limit seems much more reasonable, even if I "only" get 15Mbps
Protip: Don't believe everything the American Federation of Teachers says about necessary student:teacher ratios.
THIS. "Teachers" lie, especially when it comes to how effective/efficient they are....Sure, the teachers need to get paid, the building needs to be kept in decent repair, but where the FUCK is all that money going? One place it goes is to the superintendent whose salary is probably well into the six figures, and they are probably doing a shitty job of managing (just ask the unions!)
So your premise is that "Teachers lie" and to prove it, you use an example of an overpaid superintendent who teachers have no control over (and who is supposed to be in charge of the teachers).
A tablet computer, or a tablet, is a mobile computer, larger than a mobile phone or personal digital assistant, integrated into a flat touch screen and primarily operated by touching the screen rather than using a physical keyboard. It often uses an onscreen virtual keyboard, a passive stylus pen, or a digital pen.
Note that the definition is not "A tablet is an open-standard mobile computer, allowing the user to run any operating system he chooses".
The iPad is still a tablet even if it's locked down.
B&N doesn't want you rooting it and installing the Kindle App, or vice-versa.
Who gives a shit what they want, you own the hardware, you can do whatever you want with it.
Except that what you bought was a Kindle Fire, not an Android Tablet. Amazon is under no obligation to provide you with a general purpose Android Tablet.
If you bought a talking doll, Mattel doesn't have to provide you with any means to open up the baby to alter the voice. You may figure out how to do so by cutting open the doll, but Mattel doesn't have to provide a means to reprogram the voice chip.
If Amazon sold you a Amazon Car, they could use a proprietary gas tank fitting that only works at Amazon gas stations. And they could even design the engine such that it only works with Amazon branded gas. They might sell the car at a discount, in the belief that you'll be buying all of your gas at Amazon so they'll make up the money there.
You bought the car, and while you might be able to figure out how to tear out the engine (which fits in the car like a puzzle) and replace it with a CyanogenMod engine, Amazon doesn't have to sell you the patented tools that you'd need to fit their proprietary fasteners to take the old engine out.
As long as you didn't think you were getting a general purpose car that could use any brand of gas, they didn't do anything wrong. Some customers don't want to be tied to Amazon for their gas, so they'll buy gas elsewhere. Other people are happy with getting the car at a good discount and don't mind having to buy Amazon gas (many are already buying Amazon gas for their expensive iCar, so they figure they may as well get the cheap Amazon car as their second car)
Well actually, I'm not sure the car analogy applies, I think there are laws about dealer lock-in for car maintenance. Maybe replace "car" with "airplane".
That people don't try to return the product when they screw it up doing something that the product wasn't intended to do (and it costs me money)
The proper way to fix this isn't to block all rooting but to provide a working recovery means to reset the operating system to factory state, restore applications from the market, and restore the user's data from automatic backup. Then figure out a way to segregate the user's data so that it doesn't have to be restored as often; the "/sdcard" partition in some Android devices has worked well for this.
If you want to start a company to create a hobbyist tablet that is safe for rooting and experimentation, you should go ahead. But don't expect Amazon (or B&N) to sell a tablet designed to sell their own content while at the same time supporting your desire to run a different operating system on it.
They are selling it at close to the manufacturing cost (or possibly below cost) because they are counting on it to bring in revenue. B&N doesn't want you rooting it and installing the Kindle App, or vice-versa.
Neither company advertises there reader as anything but a reader designed to run their software.
Slight quibble - I think Amazon positions the Fire as more than just a reader. It's definitely a tablet.
I think they position it as a reader that has access to a wide variety of Amazon content. They don't say it's a general purpose tablet:
kindlefire Web, movies, apps, games, reading and more
19 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books Thousands of popular apps and games, including Netflix, Hulu Plus, Pandora, and more Ultra-fast web browsing - Amazon Silk Free cloud storage for all your Amazon content Vibrant color touchscreen with extra-wide viewing angle - same as an iPad Fast, powerful dual-core processor Favorite children's books, graphic novels, and magazines in rich color
The only time they even mention Android is:
The Kindle Fire is a 7-inch tablet that links seamlessly with Amazon's impressive collection of digital music, video, magazine, and book services in one easy-to-use package. It boasts a great Web browser, and its curated Android app store includes most of the big must-have apps (such as Netflix, Pandora, and Hulu)
and
Additional email apps are available in our Amazon Appstore for Android.
Why are you pushing us Canadians sooooo hard to buy your latest super-jet? It is way over budget and getting more expensive by the day. Heck, it isn't even appropriate for defence of the far north, it's really only for offensive missions in countries with lots of sand and oil.
I didn't know we were trying to sell the F-22 to Canada, but if we were, the answer is obvious - the more that are made, the lower the per-unit (and spare parts) costs.
And we'd rather have you buy military hardware from us instead of other countries so if we ever needed to, we could flip the remote control switch and watch your fleet drop from the air.
We, the people of Canada, do not want your expensive military toys. It is only our prime minister who wants that (and his lips around the cock of whoever is currently in power in the US).
Yours truly,
A. Hoser, eh
So shouldn't you be telling your prime minister and not the readership of Slashdot?
"It takes 40 pounds of pull to engage the emergency system. That's a tall order for a man who has gone nearly a minute without a breath of air, speeding faster than sound, while wearing bulky weather gear, says Michael Barr, a former Air Force fighter pilot and former accident investigation officer
Okay, this is total bullshit, I'm sorry. Pilots work out...a lot. A hell of a lot. They do a lot of strength exercises, including push-presses and other exercises that work the back, because in the course of these exercises they ALSO end up building up their legs
Hmm...an airforce pilot who has actually piloted fighter jets (and is an experienced accident investigator and knows the failure modes that get pilots into trouble) says it's hard, and a slashdot commenter says "bullshit, the pilot was just being a pussy". Who to believe!?
I can believe it's hard - trying to pick up a 40 pound box from beneath my chair seems like it would be quite challenging. And I'm under no stress, wearing non-bulky street clothes, and have plenty of oxygen.
Furthermore, how is this supposed to be harder based on how fast you're moving? I fly in airplanes all the time, and I don't notice that it gets harder to lift things or move around based on how fast or slow the plane flies.
You fly *in* airplanes, but do you pilot fighter jets? Or do you sit back in coach on an airline and play on your iPhone? In straight and level flight at 800mph, movement is not restricted and you're not feeling any high G-forces.... but if you deviate from straight and level, start struggling from oxygen deprivation while you try to pilot the plane, then things can get much harder -- worse, you can get into trouble much faster.
PGP is just not feasible for the general public. A major issue is key exchange of course: I don't think this can be automated due to security issues, so must be manually. And you will have to manually verify every single key to make sure that key is really from who you think it is - either by having it handed to you in person on say a USB stick, or by calling them up and asking for their key fingerprint.
if you sign and encrypt emails, you don't have to verify the keys, that's done automatically:
John Smith wants to send Jane Doe an email, so he looks up her public key at an online key repositoy.
He uses her public key to encrypt the email and his private key to sign it.
She receives the email and decrypts it with her private key, validating his signature using John's public key she looked up in the key repository. If her public key (used by John to encrypt the email) had been spoofed in the repository, she wouldn't be able to decrypt the email with her private key.
She returns an email, signing it with her private key and encrypting it with John's public key.
As long as they send one round of signed/encrypted emails between them before they send anything "secret", they can be certain that they have the correct keys for each other and no 3rd party can listen in on their conversations.
Drives aren't that expensive (even after the flood). If your data is that important to you, buy more drives.
Whatever the manufacturer, the drive return rates are about 2-5%. It makes no sense to bet that the drive model you happens to be the 2% return rate, and even so that's a 1 in 50 chance you're taking. Unless a particular model/batch is so crap, it doesn't seem worth it to take extra effort just to search around to see which is more reliable.
Whereas if you have independent copies of your data on two different drives, the odds of both drives failing would be 5% * 5% = 0.25%. Unless of course you keep both drives in the exact same place and they get destroyed by the same disaster:). If you're paranoid pick different manufacturers for each drive, and try to keep them in different places...
You're preaching to the choir here - everyone on Slashdot knows the importance of multiple redundant backups. But most people that want to back up their computer's hard drive just copy it to a single external drive and they're done. If they back it up at all.
For me personally, anything on my home RAID array that's not easily recoverable (pictures, documents, etc) is backed up to DVD's and/or Blu-ray disks which I keep at the office. I don't bother backing up DVD/Bluray Rips (which account for most of my storage) since I can rip them again. Anything that's really important (emails, source code, documents, etc) is automatically backed up to Amazon S3 (along with JPG's of all of my photos (many are large TIFF or RAW images which get written to optical media, so they are too big for me to want to back them up in the cloud). All backups are encrypted, and I rewrite data on optical media at least yearly. I don't bother with disk-to-disk backups since the data on my RAID array would exceed what I can fit on a single hard drive anyway.
I've toyed with getting a tape drive but haven't yet -- LTO-4 drives are starting to become reasonably priced now, and at 800GB per tape, I could easily back up everything on a few tapes. I check eBay from time to time, and will pick one up when i see a good deal.
honestly the 5 year warranty of some drives greatly affects which drive I buy. I am usually Seagate fan but if a Samsung has better warranty I will buy that instead. I remember when I found one time the drives form Segate I wanted were only 3 year so I bought WD and Samsung at the time. So if WD and Seagate drop their warranty period and other makers keep higher warranty then my cash goes to the bigger warranty. If you don't stand by your product then I have no reason to either.
Jeebus. I think I could actually forgive the misspelling of Seagate (at least you were consistent), but your grammar/homophone abuse kills me: where/were, there/their, buy/by.
I once had a coworker that largely taught himself English from books, newspapers and TV in his home country before moving to the USA. Very smart guy, but made English mistakes like this due to a lack of formal English education (which is difficult to correct as an adult)
This post was quite intelligible despite the grammar/spelling errors, so cut him some slack, you don't know his native language.
This. Drive reliability doesn't save data, backing up data saves data, nothing more and nothing less.
Except that for most home users who use large harddrives, disk drives are their only way to affordably back up their data. Therefore, it makes sense to purchase more reliable drives for safer backups.
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Try carrying medications requiring refrigeration but which should not be frozen. Use one of those sealed ice pack things to keep it cool during the drive to the airport and time spent in line. Chances are that the ice pack will start to melt, otherwise it would be too cold and maybe freeze the medication. Now, can that partially melted, medically necessary, ice and water mixture go through the checkpoint?
Since the TSA already allows nearly unlimited liquids to be carried on board if they are "prescription" (I once saw a guy take two 32oz bottles of prescription dandruff shampoo on board), I don't see how a medically neccessary ice pack would be a problem.
Indeed, they do allow it:
http://www.tsa.gov/assets/pdf/special_needs_memo.pdf
We are continuing to permit prescription liquid medications and other liquids needed by
persons with disabilities and medical conditions. This includes:
gels or frozen liquids needed to cool disability or medically related items used by
persons with disabilities or medical condition
And it scales well to all three of their international airports.
TLV handles 12M visitors a year (11M of them are international).
If they can make it work at a large airport of that scale, surely a country with the resources of the USA could figure out how to scale it to all of our large airports. There's still plenty of opportunity for ex-TSA execs to get rich, it's just that they would run agent training companies instead of selling scanning machines of dubious effectiveness and safety.
"All passengers waiting to check in speak to a polyglot agent. The agents, most of whom are female, ask a series of questions, looking for nerves or inconsistent statements. While the vast majority of travelers pass the question and answer session and have a pretty easy time going through security"
If I was talking to a hot female Israeli polygamous agent, I'd be pretty flustered and would always get selected for secondary screening - what could I do to be assured of having a body cavity search?
Email is ridiculous. It's highly prone to error. Overzealous blacklists and whitelists deny service to tens of thousands of email addresses that have done nothing wrong on a daily basis.
They need to abolish it outright, and move on to collaboration tools that make sense in the workplace. Any and all of which would be easier to manage, and far more reliable.
If you're having such problems with email on your corporate network (presumably the same place you'd use these collaboration tools that make sense in the workplace), maybe you need a better mail admin.
I manage email for a mid-sized business (btw 500 - 1000 mailboxes depending on how you count) and we have none of the problems you mention. We have a spam filter (well two, one open source filter for pre-filtering and one commercial filter) and users can manage their own block lists. They can search their quarantine for blocked spams and take them out of quarantine (but not blocked viruses, they can see them,but only IT can take them out of quarantine)
We get 2 or 3 helpdesk tickets a week relating to sending/receiving email to external parties - 90% of the time, they misspelled the recipient's address.
We do get a fair number of tickets relating to Outlook, but I blame that on Microsoft's implementation, not the concept of email itself.
We do send out marketing email blasts regularly (opt-in of course), and we've outsourced that to an email marketing firm because managing email campaigns and making sure we don't get on spam black lists *is* a big ball of wax that we don't want to get in to. But I see that as a good thing, since it helps keep random companies from spamming me.
We did get blocked by barracuda once (before we were filtering outbound email) and it was for a valid reason - they blocked us because one of our users had been infected by a malware sending spambot.
But if the security image is a photo with 2 people and a dog, against a white wall it's pretty likely that I can guess where the taps are, so I only have to guess the order.
In that case... don't choose an photo of 2 people and a dog.
What you're saying is "This system has very poor security, if they choose the pictures poorly and each picture has very few probable combinations". Pretty obvious answer is: Don't choose such pictures. I'd guess that before they choose a picture for this purpose, they do some testing on what kind of patterns people use and discard the pictures where there is too little distribution. Of course, users may always use the most obvious pattern and they might be able to choose a picture themselves and use too simple picture... but users can also choose very stupid passwords.
That's my point exactly - in the lab, I'm sure this is a very secure system and can be made to be much more secure than a traditional passphrase. But in the real world, people see security as something that gets in the way, so they choose something easy to use, not something secure, so this ends up being not any more secure than any other system.
Ahh, learn something new every day. Didn't know VPN hardware existed. Thanks. :)
A year or so ago, our firewall and VPN device were the same, then we upgraded the firewall and are using the old firewall hardware (a pair of Cisco ASA's) as a dedicated VPN appliance.
If I were buying one today, I'd probably go for one of the Juniper appliances.
Make it a design that provides some privacy, because the lab may be the only place that some teens can surf porn. Stain-proof surfaces and antibiotic wipes would be a nice touch too.
Even in the worst-case scenario where the computer was used for nothing but logging in with the picture password, the math works out that it's still more reliable than the 4-digit pin that many other devices use.
I'm not so sure I trust the math, since the math is only part of the equation. (no pun intended...well, maybe it was)
They claim that a 3 tap password has 2.7M combinations, but that's only true if each of the coordinates on the screen was equally likely to be tapped.
But if the security image is a photo with 2 people and a dog, against a white wall it's pretty likely that I can guess where the taps are, so I only have to guess the order.
Likewise, instead of a single line resulting in 1,949 unique gestures, in reality there are only 6 likely candidates. (and I bet most of the time if I draw the line from the face of the guy holding the dog's leash to the dog, then I'll have guessed correctly)
Sure, someone may decide to tap on the lower left corner of the blank wall to make their passcode more secure, but the average person will probably stick with the faces.
You allow SSH connections to your firewall from the world?
I can't even reach our firewall from outside of our network without a VPN connection.
And what exactly is securing your VPN connection, pixie dust?
Or do I just misunderstand what is meant by "allowing connections to your firewall"?
The VPN concentrator is a separate physical device (from a different vendor) - once I VPN in, *then* I need to use SSH to reach my firewall. So it takes two independent compromises to break in. With separate digital certificates needed for each device.
I ride to work on a mountain bike, 3000ft down, 1 to 3 hours, often exploring. I need GPS, Google maps and more. A bright LED screen is a must.
If you *need* GPS on a bike, you'd be better off with a dedicated hiking/biking GPS otherwise once your smartphone slides out of your pocket (or out of the handlebar holder) and ends up upside down in a puddle, you're going to be lost.
I've dropped my Garmin Legend enough to trust it to not crap out if it hits the ground (but always carry spare batteries and a map + compass in unfamiliar territory, just in case). A friend saw a spectacular end to her shiny new iPhone after one inadvertent drop from a table.
Ancedote:
My smart phone paid for itself the afternoon I accidentally misconfigured the firewall on the company's ecommerce server (which is in a colo several hours drive from me). Misconfigured as in blocked my own IP address instead of whitelisting it. I was able to download a SSH client, open a terminal session and revert the firewall settings from my phone.
You allow SSH connections to your firewall from the world?
I can't even reach our firewall from outside of our network without a VPN connection. If I locked myself out, I'd be completely locked out unless I was on site. (and hopefully I hadn't written the config to memory so I could have someone power cycle it)
The 50 cents/GB is over an order of magnitude high for even a conservative, high-profit "fair price". And remember, this is a regulated, licensed monopoly. Their rates are supposed to reflect service costs.
For comparison, Amazon EC2 charges 12 cents/GB (if you transfer less than 10TB/month). Their top tier published pricing is for 5 cents/GB for 100 - 350TB/month. (their prices can vary depending on the region).
I live in a relatively small city in Idaho and just signed up for a 50Mbps (seriously... and I really do get that!) for ~$50 a month (this is with CableOne in case anyone is interested).
It has a cap at 50GB a month (which is already pretty generous) but it also has a couple of other niceties:
1. If you go over it's only 50 cents per gigabyte... which I think is pretty fair.
2. Any traffic between midnight and 6 AM is completely unmetered. So if you have a big download to do (like a new game on Steam) just start it after midnight and you're good to go.
Overall I'm extremely happy with the service. Streaming over Vudu and Netflix is awesome... downloading game patches happens instantly... And my wife can listen to Pandora while I play an online game without issue.
Hopefully more parts of the country will get service like this.
50GB is generous for a 50Mbps connection? That's only 3 hours of downloading at your full bandwidth. Or 25 hours of HD Netflix streaming (less than an hour per day). Or 10 DVD ISO's.
Comcast's 250GB limit seems much more reasonable, even if I "only" get 15Mbps
Do you work for Cableone?
Protip: Don't believe everything the American Federation of Teachers says about necessary student:teacher ratios.
THIS. "Teachers" lie, especially when it comes to how effective/efficient they are. ...Sure, the teachers need to get paid, the building needs to be kept in decent repair, but where the FUCK is all that money going? One place it goes is to the superintendent whose salary is probably well into the six figures, and they are probably doing a shitty job of managing (just ask the unions!)
So your premise is that "Teachers lie" and to prove it, you use an example of an overpaid superintendent who teachers have no control over (and who is supposed to be in charge of the teachers).
From your own quote, they position it as a reader 5th after a vehicle to get "Web, movies, apps, games."
They list movies, TV and music before books.
Then they call it a "7-inch tablet", not a "7-inch reader"
Tablet is a formfactor, not a capability:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_computer
A tablet computer, or a tablet, is a mobile computer, larger than a mobile phone or personal digital assistant, integrated into a flat touch screen and primarily operated by touching the screen rather than using a physical keyboard. It often uses an onscreen virtual keyboard, a passive stylus pen, or a digital pen.
Note that the definition is not "A tablet is an open-standard mobile computer, allowing the user to run any operating system he chooses".
The iPad is still a tablet even if it's locked down.
Who gives a shit what they want, you own the hardware, you can do whatever you want with it.
Except that what you bought was a Kindle Fire, not an Android Tablet. Amazon is under no obligation to provide you with a general purpose Android Tablet.
If you bought a talking doll, Mattel doesn't have to provide you with any means to open up the baby to alter the voice. You may figure out how to do so by cutting open the doll, but Mattel doesn't have to provide a means to reprogram the voice chip.
If Amazon sold you a Amazon Car, they could use a proprietary gas tank fitting that only works at Amazon gas stations. And they could even design the engine such that it only works with Amazon branded gas. They might sell the car at a discount, in the belief that you'll be buying all of your gas at Amazon so they'll make up the money there.
You bought the car, and while you might be able to figure out how to tear out the engine (which fits in the car like a puzzle) and replace it with a CyanogenMod engine, Amazon doesn't have to sell you the patented tools that you'd need to fit their proprietary fasteners to take the old engine out.
As long as you didn't think you were getting a general purpose car that could use any brand of gas, they didn't do anything wrong. Some customers don't want to be tied to Amazon for their gas, so they'll buy gas elsewhere. Other people are happy with getting the car at a good discount and don't mind having to buy Amazon gas (many are already buying Amazon gas for their expensive iCar, so they figure they may as well get the cheap Amazon car as their second car)
Well actually, I'm not sure the car analogy applies, I think there are laws about dealer lock-in for car maintenance. Maybe replace "car" with "airplane".
That people don't try to return the product when they screw it up doing something that the product wasn't intended to do (and it costs me money)
The proper way to fix this isn't to block all rooting but to provide a working recovery means to reset the operating system to factory state, restore applications from the market, and restore the user's data from automatic backup. Then figure out a way to segregate the user's data so that it doesn't have to be restored as often; the "/sdcard" partition in some Android devices has worked well for this.
If you want to start a company to create a hobbyist tablet that is safe for rooting and experimentation, you should go ahead. But don't expect Amazon (or B&N) to sell a tablet designed to sell their own content while at the same time supporting your desire to run a different operating system on it.
They are selling it at close to the manufacturing cost (or possibly below cost) because they are counting on it to bring in revenue. B&N doesn't want you rooting it and installing the Kindle App, or vice-versa.
Neither company advertises there reader as anything but a reader designed to run their software.
Slight quibble - I think Amazon positions the Fire as more than just a reader. It's definitely a tablet.
I think they position it as a reader that has access to a wide variety of Amazon content. They don't say it's a general purpose tablet:
kindlefire
Web, movies, apps, games, reading and more
19 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books
Thousands of popular apps and games, including Netflix, Hulu Plus, Pandora, and more
Ultra-fast web browsing - Amazon Silk
Free cloud storage for all your Amazon content
Vibrant color touchscreen with extra-wide viewing angle - same as an iPad
Fast, powerful dual-core processor
Favorite children's books, graphic novels, and magazines in rich color
The only time they even mention Android is:
The Kindle Fire is a 7-inch tablet that links seamlessly with Amazon's impressive collection of
digital music, video, magazine, and book services in one easy-to-use package. It boasts a great
Web browser, and its curated Android app store includes most of the big must-have apps
(such as Netflix, Pandora, and Hulu)
and
Additional email apps are available in our Amazon Appstore for Android.
Dear America,
Why are you pushing us Canadians sooooo hard to buy your latest super-jet? It is way over budget and getting more expensive by the day. Heck, it isn't even appropriate for defence of the far north, it's really only for offensive missions in countries with lots of sand and oil.
I didn't know we were trying to sell the F-22 to Canada, but if we were, the answer is obvious - the more that are made, the lower the per-unit (and spare parts) costs.
And we'd rather have you buy military hardware from us instead of other countries so if we ever needed to, we could flip the remote control switch and watch your fleet drop from the air.
We, the people of Canada, do not want your expensive military toys. It is only our prime minister who wants that (and his lips around the cock of whoever is currently in power in the US).
Yours truly,
A. Hoser, eh
So shouldn't you be telling your prime minister and not the readership of Slashdot?
"It takes 40 pounds of pull to engage the emergency system. That's a tall order for a man who has gone nearly a minute without a breath of air, speeding faster than sound, while wearing bulky weather gear, says Michael Barr, a former Air Force fighter pilot and former accident investigation officer
Okay, this is total bullshit, I'm sorry. Pilots work out...a lot. A hell of a lot. They do a lot of strength exercises, including push-presses and other exercises that work the back, because in the course of these exercises they ALSO end up building up their legs
Hmm...an airforce pilot who has actually piloted fighter jets (and is an experienced accident investigator and knows the failure modes that get pilots into trouble) says it's hard, and a slashdot commenter says "bullshit, the pilot was just being a pussy". Who to believe!?
I can believe it's hard - trying to pick up a 40 pound box from beneath my chair seems like it would be quite challenging. And I'm under no stress, wearing non-bulky street clothes, and have plenty of oxygen.
Furthermore, how is this supposed to be harder based on how fast you're moving? I fly in airplanes all the time, and I don't notice that it gets harder to lift things or move around based on how fast or slow the plane flies.
You fly *in* airplanes, but do you pilot fighter jets? Or do you sit back in coach on an airline and play on your iPhone? In straight and level flight at 800mph, movement is not restricted and you're not feeling any high G-forces.... but if you deviate from straight and level, start struggling from oxygen deprivation while you try to pilot the plane, then things can get much harder -- worse, you can get into trouble much faster.
PGP is just not feasible for the general public. A major issue is key exchange of course: I don't think this can be automated due to security issues, so must be manually. And you will have to manually verify every single key to make sure that key is really from who you think it is - either by having it handed to you in person on say a USB stick, or by calling them up and asking for their key fingerprint.
if you sign and encrypt emails, you don't have to verify the keys, that's done automatically:
John Smith wants to send Jane Doe an email, so he looks up her public key at an online key repositoy.
He uses her public key to encrypt the email and his private key to sign it.
She receives the email and decrypts it with her private key, validating his signature using John's public key she looked up in the key repository. If her public key (used by John to encrypt the email) had been spoofed in the repository, she wouldn't be able to decrypt the email with her private key.
She returns an email, signing it with her private key and encrypting it with John's public key.
As long as they send one round of signed/encrypted emails between them before they send anything "secret", they can be certain that they have the correct keys for each other and no 3rd party can listen in on their conversations.
Drives aren't that expensive (even after the flood). If your data is that important to you, buy more drives.
Whatever the manufacturer, the drive return rates are about 2-5%. It makes no sense to bet that the drive model you happens to be the 2% return rate, and even so that's a 1 in 50 chance you're taking. Unless a particular model/batch is so crap, it doesn't seem worth it to take extra effort just to search around to see which is more reliable.
Whereas if you have independent copies of your data on two different drives, the odds of both drives failing would be 5% * 5% = 0.25%. Unless of course you keep both drives in the exact same place and they get destroyed by the same disaster :). If you're paranoid pick different manufacturers for each drive, and try to keep them in different places...
You're preaching to the choir here - everyone on Slashdot knows the importance of multiple redundant backups. But most people that want to back up their computer's hard drive just copy it to a single external drive and they're done. If they back it up at all.
For me personally, anything on my home RAID array that's not easily recoverable (pictures, documents, etc) is backed up to DVD's and/or Blu-ray disks which I keep at the office. I don't bother backing up DVD/Bluray Rips (which account for most of my storage) since I can rip them again. Anything that's really important (emails, source code, documents, etc) is automatically backed up to Amazon S3 (along with JPG's of all of my photos (many are large TIFF or RAW images which get written to optical media, so they are too big for me to want to back them up in the cloud). All backups are encrypted, and I rewrite data on optical media at least yearly. I don't bother with disk-to-disk backups since the data on my RAID array would exceed what I can fit on a single hard drive anyway.
I've toyed with getting a tape drive but haven't yet -- LTO-4 drives are starting to become reasonably priced now, and at 800GB per tape, I could easily back up everything on a few tapes. I check eBay from time to time, and will pick one up when i see a good deal.
honestly the 5 year warranty of some drives greatly affects which drive I buy. I am usually Seagate fan but if a Samsung has better warranty I will buy that instead. I remember when I found one time the drives form Segate I wanted were only 3 year so I bought WD and Samsung at the time. So if WD and Seagate drop their warranty period and other makers keep higher warranty then my cash goes to the bigger warranty. If you don't stand by your product then I have no reason to either.
Jeebus. I think I could actually forgive the misspelling of Seagate (at least you were consistent), but your grammar/homophone abuse kills me: where/were, there/their, buy/by.
I once had a coworker that largely taught himself English from books, newspapers and TV in his home country before moving to the USA. Very smart guy, but made English mistakes like this due to a lack of formal English education (which is difficult to correct as an adult)
This post was quite intelligible despite the grammar/spelling errors, so cut him some slack, you don't know his native language.
This. Drive reliability doesn't save data, backing up data saves data, nothing more and nothing less.
Except that for most home users who use large harddrives, disk drives are their only way to affordably back up their data. Therefore, it makes sense to purchase more reliable drives for safer backups.
Have you really just blamed manufacturing plant floods on wall street ? really ?
Sounded like he's saying that the hard drive manufacturers are blaming the floods for an excuse to boost their profit.