Air "travel" (as in, transporting people) cannot be powered using solar energy with our current technology. This craft is the result of a lot of brainpower and hard work and good technology, but can't carry a single person. So translating solar power into human travel isn't really even near-term practical for ground-based transportation until we are ready to abandon the 2-ton SUV and even the hybrid and go REALLY light, as in bicycle weight, and maybe provide some of the motive power ourselves.
Still, experiments like this move the technology forward and allow humanity to learn and refine what we know.
More interesting in the near term, however, is that a craft like this could theoretically replace a satellite, or several dozen cell towers (assuming you could get enough power up there to run the transmitters), at a comparatively low cost.
Have it fly in lazy circles up above most of the weather where the sun is always out during daytime, and you have easily-replaced communications repeaters located far closer than Near Earth Orbit. To maintain the equipment on one, you simply tell it to land. You can afford to have spares flying around ready to take over for lost capacity if one fails or needs to come down for maintenance.
Facebook themselves probably do clean geolocation data, but there are plenty of services that can feed to FB that do not.
A friend of mine used to use a service which I believe was called BrightKite or something like that. She posted pictures from her cell phone, and it in turn posted links to the pictures to her Facebook wall. This service stored higher-quality pictures than Facebook would handle, and also retained all geolocation data for the pictures. And all of her Facebook friends can see both the picture and the geolocation on a map.
I think she stopped using it when Facebook came out with the "email pictures to a unique email address, have them dumped to your wall automagically" feature.
Which is especially interesting because Wicked Lasers never used the term "Lightsaber" at all. Nor did they imply in any way that this was anything like a lightsaber. It's an industrial-grade laser tool. They market it as such.
The media did make the comparison, because it's cool and the unit vaguely resembles a lightsaber in that it's a large handheld cylinder that emits some form of light energy from one end.
What other device does that remind you of? Oh, yeah, a flashlight. Why isn't Lucasfilms suing all flashlight manufacturers? Because the media doesn't make stupid comparisons between flashlights and lightsabers. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that Lucas himself originally conceived of the lightsaber by combining the concepts of a sword and a flashlight, both commonly available items at the time.
Now, admittedly, the Wicked Laser unit does have grippy bits that make it look a bit more bit like some lightsaber handles from the earlier movies, but anything that prevents it from being a perfect cylinder might. I seem to recall from the movies that lightsabers are built by the Jedi who uses them and/or handed down, not mass manufactured, and each one is unique. I also seem to recall a few lightsabers that looked almost exactly like the 3-cell Mag light I have at home. Some have more grippy bits sticking out here and there, but pretty much any handheld cylindrical object between about 8 and 18 inches long (with or without stuff glued to it) will resemble one of the dozens of lightsaber prop designs Lucasarts has used in the Star Wars franchise over the years.
Lucasarts should be suing media sites for making the comparison, not Wicked Lasers. Or they could just do a simple press release saying that lasers are potentially dangerous tools and call the media to task for comparing an industrial tool to a fantasy weapon that is frequently sold as a toy, and reminding people not to confuse the two when choosing age-appropriate toys for their offspring.
Wicked Lasers does not appear to have "copied" anything other than the form factor of the humble flashlight, which is a very logical design to copy. They added grippy bits, but that's a equally logical design choice - it's a high-powered laser. You don't want it slipping out of your hand when the business end is lit up. Grippy bits are your friends. The handle may also get pretty warm with all the current that laser demands, so grippy bits may also be a good separation between the heat sink (cylinder) and the bit your hand comes in contact with (grippy bits).
What's next? Will Lucasarts sue open-ended wrench companies when some media wag observes that the Millenium Falcon looks a whole lot like an open-ended wrench with the handle ground off?
First, as I stated, I own only one Apple product and I won that in a contest. The point about the advantages (few as they are in my opinion) stands - if you control your users you have the power to protect them to some extent. I don't like it either. That's why I've never purchased an iFruit product. But there are some people who have, and the fact that Apple was able to reach in and rip out these applications and track down who was exposed by them is, to someone who wants Big Brother Steve to protect them, exactly the point of doing business with Apple.
Second, accusing me of fellatio and "foe"ing me because you disagree with that? Really? Have fun with that bitter little existence you got there, sparky.
Seriously, though, this should not come as a surprise. The important point is not that a rogue developer was able to get it, but that Apple was able to catch him, stop him, and let their users know about it quickly. And, just as importantly, it's unlikely this particular miscreant will be able to exploit the app store again. The "walled garden" approach doesn't mean you won't have problems, and when you have so many developers signing up for accounts it's basically impossible to ensure that none of them will ever misbehave. The problems that do occur stand a good chance of being contained and eliminated quickly, however.
I don't think anyone in their right mind with any concept of security would expect Apple to keep each and every rogue developer out 100% of the time. Maybe that's what Apple's marketing division wants you to think, but Apple's security division knows better. Make the security as good as you can make it, then set up a system to catch those who manage to circumvent it, because there will always be people who can manage to circumvent it.
The walls aren't enough. You also need gardeners. Apple just proved they have gardeners on the job for when the walls get breached.
It appears that the system worked about as well as could be realistically expected.
I'm still not a proponent of the walled garden - I don't like giving up control. The only Apple device I own is an iPod I won in a contest and it doesn't see a lot of use. But for those who prefer it for their protection this should be good news.
The second layer of defense kicked in, precisely as it should, the crack in the wall was patched, and life in the walled garden moves on.
To be fair, this isn't limited to loyalty cards. There are a lot of items that suffer a mysterious large markup simultaneous with going "on sale" at some lesser percentage off, then the base price drops back down the instant the sale is over.
I don't go into stores often, but I have observed several cases where (for example) a $5 item suddenly turns into a $8 item "on sale" for $6 for a week, then once the sale is over the item is $5 again.
Loyalty cards just take that same old scam and have you pay for it twice. Once by overpaying, but by less than the unwashed heathen who don't carry a card of course! And of course a second time by gathering salable data about you and your purchase preferences.
Advice: Get multiple cards, under different names, none of them your own. Rotate them. If at all possible, get into or start a "loyalty card swap" program in your area where people swap loyalty cards at random. It won't save you from the markup, but it'll at least make your data marginally less salable.
You don't need to totally mask your purchase history, just make it "noisy" enough that it's not useful for trending.
True, my wife's Nokia 5800 will lose a marginal (1-2 bar) signal if she holds it the wrong way, but I think the issue here is the design of the iPhone 4 that makes it susceptible to very significant drops in signal, not the fact that it's subject to the laws of physics like every other phone.
Most phones have antennae that are shielded behind plastic or some other non-conductive material. You introduce signal loss by blocking the signal with your hand or body, but you don't lose a LOT of signal. The signal loss can be significant, and can easily bring you from a marginal signal to signal loss, or a good signal to a marginal one, but it generally won't bring you from a good signal down to tower loss.
The iPhone's antenna is not covered with anything. You could easily touch both antenna surfaces and make your body an extension of the antenna, thereby mucking up the signal sensitivity of the antenna. This is a much more profound loss of signal than simply blocking the antenna using your body as an inefficient shield, this is changing the antenna characteristics entirely.
Assuming the stories are true, which is a big "if", the iPhone 4 can potentially lose about 27 dbm as a worst case. For my AT&T Blackberry, that's about three bars' worth of signal if I'm down below the 5th bar. So you could go from 3 bars to no signal if you hold the phone wrong. That type of signal loss is in a completely different league than "I dropped from two bars to one bar", or "I lost a one-bar call because I held the phone wrong".
Fortunately, it can be solved by simply covering the iPhone with a very thin case that prevents skin-to-antenna contact. That would make the iPhone 4 subject to only the same common shielding issues every other phone on the planet has. Any Apple user affected by this could order an under-$4 skin from Meritline and make the problem go away. http://www.meritline.com/iphone-4-skin-case---p-46556.aspx - and I mean, c'mon, if you spent $200 to $600 on the phone to start with, what's $4 including shipping to make it work better?
Or Apple could buy these suckers in bulk for probably $1.50 each and make them available in all of their stores or ship you one for the cost of shipping (about 50 cents, probably) and make the problem go away entirely.
I'm not saying it's a FATAL flaw, in fact it seems like the antenna design is such that even with a 27dbm signal loss it's still better than all previous-generation phones. But it is a shame they put so much work into building an awesome antenna/radio system and apparently didn't let it reach its full potential by (for example) simply putting a thin layer of plastic over it.
It's only significant if you needed more than 5% of the original signal to maintain a connection. Digital signals are very much a "it works or it doesn't" sort of thing. And 95% of signal isn't a significant loss until it's the 95% you need. Your call might get a little scratchy way down in the 99.999% signal loss range, though.
My AT&T Blackberry has a function (hold the ALT key and tap N, M, L, L in sequence) that changes the "bars" display to a "signal loss" display (in -db). If the signal falls below about -110db, I lose the tower. I have no idea what they are using as a baseline for comparison, but I lose signal at somewhere between -110 and -115, so it's probably the 113dbm you refer to. So if I read -110db, then I have almost no signal left (I can still make a poor-but-understandable call and receive data slowly, it's just really likely I'll lose signal at some point). This is despite the fact that I've lost 99.999997% percent of the original signal (rough amateur calculation).
Up here in the hinterlands, a -75db signal is considered "fairly strong" under normal circumstances. Even though I've lost a hell of a lot more than 95% of the original signal, I can still make a perfectly clear call at -75 (which if my assumption is correct about the baseline means I'm receiving about 38dbm of the original 113dbm signal). Even if I had the iPhone 4 and experienced the problem as described, I'd still have about 11 dbm left to make a call (which would probably be largely unnoticeable, maybe a little light stuttering or quality loss here and there, but the call probably wouldn't drop).
However, at home, I need a cell repeater to get signal inside the house. Since that's a much weaker transmitter, I regularly get about -85 to -90 readings in some parts of the house, meaning I'm routinely running at levels where a -27db signal adjustment would mean signal would drop well below a detectable threshold and "bye bye tower".
"Full bars" is considered anything above about -75 on my phone (about 40db or so of signal). In other words, my Blackberry figures I have full signal after I've lost somewhere around 99.9998% of the base signal from the tower. And I can lose 95% of that and not even break a sweat.
So it's quite possible on my Blackberry to go from "minimal" full bars to very little signal with a 27db signal loss, but it's also quite possible to maintain three or even all four bars when suffering from the same 27db signal loss if the base signal is better than about 67db. Anecdotal evidence using signal bars is largely useless unless you know the numbers behind the bars, in other words, because the range for "full signal" is really, really large. The iPhone may translate signal to bars very differently, so your iMileage may iVary.
If I go to any decent-sized city, I routinely see -65 and even -60 sometimes, occasionally even lower, which means an additional loss of 27 would still make my signal stronger than I would get on a good day in my back yard at home.
You do know there's an easy way not to be stripped of your right to file an individual lawsuit, right?
Assuming I am made aware of the class action suit, that is true.
Apple will only be shielded from further suits in which the plaintif failed to opt out of the class action.
I should never be considered an interested party in a class action suit unless I have expressed an interest. Failing to respond to a notice I probably never got is not expressing an interest.
Yes, I always love seeing my favorite items under a "loyalty card" discount.
Monday: normal price $2. Tuesday: normal price $5, "ONLY $2.50 with your LOYALTY CARD! WOW!!!! YOU SAVE TWO DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS!!! AREN'T YOU THE SMARTEST HUMAN SINCE EINSTEIN!!!!!" Wednesday: normal price $2.
Just how cool would I look sliding sideways down the freeway on this thing with bits of melted Spandex and skin trailing behind me?
Cool enough that the resulting YouTube video might help fund my retirement. Please let me know where and when, and I'll make sure to have my video camera. Thanks.
PS: This is in no way an endorsement for you to do it. There won't be enough income from the YouTube video to even begin covering your medical costs, so I don't want any share of the liability. But if you happen to do it, just let me know when and where, OK?
Except the first time you want to access the password store in each session, you present your password that "unlocks" the password store, then THAT password is persisted for the remainder of the session. So, either way, if you visit a malicious website the chances are your password store is in a vulnerable state (the password store is open for business, and the password is available somewhere). In both the Seamonkey/Firefox and Microsoft cases, the password store is vulnerable once it's logged in. The only difference is that in the Microsoft case, you're always logged in. In the Seamonkey/Firefox case, you're only logged in after you've entered the password to access the password store, which is probably "only" 99% of the time you surf the Web, but at least the password store is pretty secure if you're not running your browser at all, or haven't used the password store yet for that session.
Of course, the alternative is use the password just long enough to perform the requested operation, then forget it. That means, though, that you'd have to ask for the security password every time a site wants to retrieve a password from the store or the user wants to add or update a password in the store. Then people would just remove the password, because that would be a pain. Think Vista/7 UAC popups that each need a password, or sudo/su in Linux, but every time you want to use a stored password in your browser. Most people would tolerate that for about as long as it takes to remove the password.
And, if you don't bother putting a password on it (Firefox leaves the password off by default, and I don't know anyone else who actually uses it), then Firefox is just as vulnerable as the Microsoft exploit.
Yes, the tool is AVAILABLE, but the benefits it offers are somewhat marginal and it's not the default setting.
If you want passwords stored and entered automatically, then the passwords are no longer under your control to enter manually and there's going to be a way for them to be read once you make them conveniently available. By all means, use the password store (and the password that protects it, please!) for things like your Slashdot account, etc. Just for the love of [insert deity of choice] DON'T use it for passwords like your bank account or credit cards.
True, but renting isn't necessarily cheap for something you can't watch in an evening.
I did look into renting it, but the local rental place gets $3 for a 3-day rental of them, per disc, and most of the discs have 4 episodes. Assuming they had each of the 5-7 discs per season when I wanted them and I hurried up and watched all four per disc in 3 days, I'd have spent about $150-175 on rental fees.
I decided the extra $ was worth owning them so I had access to the episodes I wanted on my own time. Had Hulu+ been available at the time, I might have decided differently.
But, yeah, they are still in mint condition so I could probably sell them at less than an $80 loss if I ever decide I'm not going to watch them again. You make a really good point there.
Access to older episodes of certain shows is worth paying for, even if they have ads.
Last year, I bought the entire X-Files series on DVD. Cost me $250. I was done watching it in about 8 months. I may watch it again someday, but most likely not.
With Hulu+, I could have watched the whole damned thing for $80, had access to other shows to watch at the same time, and saved about $170. True, I would have had to put up with ads which the box set did not have, but that's something each person has to decide for themselves.
I think you'll find some people will gladly pay for access to older episodes, even if they still have to deal with the ads. I don't know if Hulu+ is worth it for me at the moment, but it certainly would have been last year.
Here's a brief comparison of the best price Cable has to offer in my area (the plan I'm on, in fact) versus Hulu+. I realize that Cable does offer different services like HD, on-demand programming, etc, but those all cost additional fees and I'm attempting to compare similarly-priced offerings in my area.
The cheapest offering around here is about $12.99 a month, Comcast's "Limited Basic" service. You get the major networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX), a couple of national news/weather stations, local access, and of course the usual padding: shopping channels, foreign-language channels, Golf, and a couple of religious channels to pad it out to 14 to make it "Less than $1 per channel per month!!!". So basically the equivalent of about 5 useful channels depending on your preferences.
Ads: Both have 'em, no winner here.
Cost: $9.99 Hulu, $12.99 Cable (limited basic package). Hulu wins there, albeit not by much.
Content Available: Hard to compare this. Hulu wins on depth of entertainment content, certainly. Cable wins on hours of programming per week and local content such as news. Winner: Depends on what content you want. If you want to watch the local government meetings on Public Access and the local news, you're probably better off with Cable.
Scheduling: Hulu allows you to watch what you want when you want it, including old reruns. Cable is when they air it, and if you miss it or forget to record it you're screwed. Winner: Hulu.
Devices: Hulu works on computers, mobile devices, and your TV if you have specific devices. Cable works on TV at your home. The winner on this one depends on whether you want to plunk down in front of a $75 analog TV at home, or watch X-Files reruns at Starbucks on your $500 iPad while sipping your overpriced halfcaff moccachino.
I'd call these different services for different markets. Free Hulu is great if you want a somewhat Cable-like experience (you can watch from their list of shows, but only pretty recent episodes). Hulu+ seems to add mobility in the form of more devices, and of course a greater depth of older episodes available. Any one of the factors can quickly disqualify Hulu, especially the lack of truly local content. But if you want to watch the X-Files, you can spend over $200 for the DVD box set or $60 for 6 months of Hulu+ (which is enough time if you watch about an episode an evening), plus you'll have access to lots of other shows. Sure, you'll have to tolerate some ads, but you'll be paid over $140 to watch them.;)
No, but it's mobile and runs completely on electricity, so it's an EV vehicle. It's got a CVT transmission and qualifies as a PZEV vehicle as well. I haven't seen the diagrams, but I assume it would run on DC current.
When it runs out of power, your SOL of luck, though. But only an astute/.dot reader would know about that if they RTFAed the article.
Slashdot Mirror
Air "travel" (as in, transporting people) cannot be powered using solar energy with our current technology. This craft is the result of a lot of brainpower and hard work and good technology, but can't carry a single person. So translating solar power into human travel isn't really even near-term practical for ground-based transportation until we are ready to abandon the 2-ton SUV and even the hybrid and go REALLY light, as in bicycle weight, and maybe provide some of the motive power ourselves.
Still, experiments like this move the technology forward and allow humanity to learn and refine what we know.
More interesting in the near term, however, is that a craft like this could theoretically replace a satellite, or several dozen cell towers (assuming you could get enough power up there to run the transmitters), at a comparatively low cost.
Have it fly in lazy circles up above most of the weather where the sun is always out during daytime, and you have easily-replaced communications repeaters located far closer than Near Earth Orbit. To maintain the equipment on one, you simply tell it to land. You can afford to have spares flying around ready to take over for lost capacity if one fails or needs to come down for maintenance.
Facebook themselves probably do clean geolocation data, but there are plenty of services that can feed to FB that do not.
A friend of mine used to use a service which I believe was called BrightKite or something like that. She posted pictures from her cell phone, and it in turn posted links to the pictures to her Facebook wall. This service stored higher-quality pictures than Facebook would handle, and also retained all geolocation data for the pictures. And all of her Facebook friends can see both the picture and the geolocation on a map.
I think she stopped using it when Facebook came out with the "email pictures to a unique email address, have them dumped to your wall automagically" feature.
Which is especially interesting because Wicked Lasers never used the term "Lightsaber" at all. Nor did they imply in any way that this was anything like a lightsaber. It's an industrial-grade laser tool. They market it as such.
The media did make the comparison, because it's cool and the unit vaguely resembles a lightsaber in that it's a large handheld cylinder that emits some form of light energy from one end.
What other device does that remind you of? Oh, yeah, a flashlight. Why isn't Lucasfilms suing all flashlight manufacturers? Because the media doesn't make stupid comparisons between flashlights and lightsabers. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that Lucas himself originally conceived of the lightsaber by combining the concepts of a sword and a flashlight, both commonly available items at the time.
Now, admittedly, the Wicked Laser unit does have grippy bits that make it look a bit more bit like some lightsaber handles from the earlier movies, but anything that prevents it from being a perfect cylinder might. I seem to recall from the movies that lightsabers are built by the Jedi who uses them and/or handed down, not mass manufactured, and each one is unique. I also seem to recall a few lightsabers that looked almost exactly like the 3-cell Mag light I have at home. Some have more grippy bits sticking out here and there, but pretty much any handheld cylindrical object between about 8 and 18 inches long (with or without stuff glued to it) will resemble one of the dozens of lightsaber prop designs Lucasarts has used in the Star Wars franchise over the years.
Lucasarts should be suing media sites for making the comparison, not Wicked Lasers. Or they could just do a simple press release saying that lasers are potentially dangerous tools and call the media to task for comparing an industrial tool to a fantasy weapon that is frequently sold as a toy, and reminding people not to confuse the two when choosing age-appropriate toys for their offspring.
Wicked Lasers does not appear to have "copied" anything other than the form factor of the humble flashlight, which is a very logical design to copy. They added grippy bits, but that's a equally logical design choice - it's a high-powered laser. You don't want it slipping out of your hand when the business end is lit up. Grippy bits are your friends. The handle may also get pretty warm with all the current that laser demands, so grippy bits may also be a good separation between the heat sink (cylinder) and the bit your hand comes in contact with (grippy bits).
What's next? Will Lucasarts sue open-ended wrench companies when some media wag observes that the Millenium Falcon looks a whole lot like an open-ended wrench with the handle ground off?
Wicked good explanation. Ayuh.
No, we'll use that for 10^69.
"Hella" refers to "hell", a religious term. If science is going to use religion, then it should at least use it accurately.
"Hella" is a perfectly valid prefix, but should be reserved for 10^666.
No, but it keeps everyone around you away, and that in turn decreases you exposure to communicable diseases. :)
I said to the lawyer "do you speaka my language?"
He just smiled and gave me an alphabet sandwich.
First, as I stated, I own only one Apple product and I won that in a contest. The point about the advantages (few as they are in my opinion) stands - if you control your users you have the power to protect them to some extent. I don't like it either. That's why I've never purchased an iFruit product. But there are some people who have, and the fact that Apple was able to reach in and rip out these applications and track down who was exposed by them is, to someone who wants Big Brother Steve to protect them, exactly the point of doing business with Apple.
Second, accusing me of fellatio and "foe"ing me because you disagree with that? Really? Have fun with that bitter little existence you got there, sparky.
Sorry, should I have gone with car?
Yeah, reality's a bitch, ain't it?
Seriously, though, this should not come as a surprise. The important point is not that a rogue developer was able to get it, but that Apple was able to catch him, stop him, and let their users know about it quickly. And, just as importantly, it's unlikely this particular miscreant will be able to exploit the app store again. The "walled garden" approach doesn't mean you won't have problems, and when you have so many developers signing up for accounts it's basically impossible to ensure that none of them will ever misbehave. The problems that do occur stand a good chance of being contained and eliminated quickly, however.
I don't think anyone in their right mind with any concept of security would expect Apple to keep each and every rogue developer out 100% of the time. Maybe that's what Apple's marketing division wants you to think, but Apple's security division knows better. Make the security as good as you can make it, then set up a system to catch those who manage to circumvent it, because there will always be people who can manage to circumvent it.
The walls aren't enough. You also need gardeners. Apple just proved they have gardeners on the job for when the walls get breached.
It appears that the system worked about as well as could be realistically expected.
I'm still not a proponent of the walled garden - I don't like giving up control. The only Apple device I own is an iPod I won in a contest and it doesn't see a lot of use. But for those who prefer it for their protection this should be good news.
The second layer of defense kicked in, precisely as it should, the crack in the wall was patched, and life in the walled garden moves on.
To be fair, this isn't limited to loyalty cards. There are a lot of items that suffer a mysterious large markup simultaneous with going "on sale" at some lesser percentage off, then the base price drops back down the instant the sale is over.
I don't go into stores often, but I have observed several cases where (for example) a $5 item suddenly turns into a $8 item "on sale" for $6 for a week, then once the sale is over the item is $5 again.
Loyalty cards just take that same old scam and have you pay for it twice. Once by overpaying, but by less than the unwashed heathen who don't carry a card of course! And of course a second time by gathering salable data about you and your purchase preferences.
Advice: Get multiple cards, under different names, none of them your own. Rotate them. If at all possible, get into or start a "loyalty card swap" program in your area where people swap loyalty cards at random. It won't save you from the markup, but it'll at least make your data marginally less salable.
You don't need to totally mask your purchase history, just make it "noisy" enough that it's not useful for trending.
True, my wife's Nokia 5800 will lose a marginal (1-2 bar) signal if she holds it the wrong way, but I think the issue here is the design of the iPhone 4 that makes it susceptible to very significant drops in signal, not the fact that it's subject to the laws of physics like every other phone.
Most phones have antennae that are shielded behind plastic or some other non-conductive material. You introduce signal loss by blocking the signal with your hand or body, but you don't lose a LOT of signal. The signal loss can be significant, and can easily bring you from a marginal signal to signal loss, or a good signal to a marginal one, but it generally won't bring you from a good signal down to tower loss.
The iPhone's antenna is not covered with anything. You could easily touch both antenna surfaces and make your body an extension of the antenna, thereby mucking up the signal sensitivity of the antenna. This is a much more profound loss of signal than simply blocking the antenna using your body as an inefficient shield, this is changing the antenna characteristics entirely.
Assuming the stories are true, which is a big "if", the iPhone 4 can potentially lose about 27 dbm as a worst case. For my AT&T Blackberry, that's about three bars' worth of signal if I'm down below the 5th bar. So you could go from 3 bars to no signal if you hold the phone wrong. That type of signal loss is in a completely different league than "I dropped from two bars to one bar", or "I lost a one-bar call because I held the phone wrong".
Fortunately, it can be solved by simply covering the iPhone with a very thin case that prevents skin-to-antenna contact. That would make the iPhone 4 subject to only the same common shielding issues every other phone on the planet has. Any Apple user affected by this could order an under-$4 skin from Meritline and make the problem go away. http://www.meritline.com/iphone-4-skin-case---p-46556.aspx - and I mean, c'mon, if you spent $200 to $600 on the phone to start with, what's $4 including shipping to make it work better?
Or Apple could buy these suckers in bulk for probably $1.50 each and make them available in all of their stores or ship you one for the cost of shipping (about 50 cents, probably) and make the problem go away entirely.
I'm not saying it's a FATAL flaw, in fact it seems like the antenna design is such that even with a 27dbm signal loss it's still better than all previous-generation phones. But it is a shame they put so much work into building an awesome antenna/radio system and apparently didn't let it reach its full potential by (for example) simply putting a thin layer of plastic over it.
My left hand is for phone use only.
Just as well you can't get porn on the phone, then.
I'm not a radio geek, but...
It's only significant if you needed more than 5% of the original signal to maintain a connection. Digital signals are very much a "it works or it doesn't" sort of thing. And 95% of signal isn't a significant loss until it's the 95% you need. Your call might get a little scratchy way down in the 99.999% signal loss range, though.
My AT&T Blackberry has a function (hold the ALT key and tap N, M, L, L in sequence) that changes the "bars" display to a "signal loss" display (in -db). If the signal falls below about -110db, I lose the tower. I have no idea what they are using as a baseline for comparison, but I lose signal at somewhere between -110 and -115, so it's probably the 113dbm you refer to. So if I read -110db, then I have almost no signal left (I can still make a poor-but-understandable call and receive data slowly, it's just really likely I'll lose signal at some point). This is despite the fact that I've lost 99.999997% percent of the original signal (rough amateur calculation).
Up here in the hinterlands, a -75db signal is considered "fairly strong" under normal circumstances. Even though I've lost a hell of a lot more than 95% of the original signal, I can still make a perfectly clear call at -75 (which if my assumption is correct about the baseline means I'm receiving about 38dbm of the original 113dbm signal). Even if I had the iPhone 4 and experienced the problem as described, I'd still have about 11 dbm left to make a call (which would probably be largely unnoticeable, maybe a little light stuttering or quality loss here and there, but the call probably wouldn't drop).
However, at home, I need a cell repeater to get signal inside the house. Since that's a much weaker transmitter, I regularly get about -85 to -90 readings in some parts of the house, meaning I'm routinely running at levels where a -27db signal adjustment would mean signal would drop well below a detectable threshold and "bye bye tower".
"Full bars" is considered anything above about -75 on my phone (about 40db or so of signal). In other words, my Blackberry figures I have full signal after I've lost somewhere around 99.9998% of the base signal from the tower. And I can lose 95% of that and not even break a sweat.
So it's quite possible on my Blackberry to go from "minimal" full bars to very little signal with a 27db signal loss, but it's also quite possible to maintain three or even all four bars when suffering from the same 27db signal loss if the base signal is better than about 67db. Anecdotal evidence using signal bars is largely useless unless you know the numbers behind the bars, in other words, because the range for "full signal" is really, really large. The iPhone may translate signal to bars very differently, so your iMileage may iVary.
If I go to any decent-sized city, I routinely see -65 and even -60 sometimes, occasionally even lower, which means an additional loss of 27 would still make my signal stronger than I would get on a good day in my back yard at home.
You do know there's an easy way not to be stripped of your right to file an individual lawsuit, right?
Assuming I am made aware of the class action suit, that is true.
Apple will only be shielded from further suits in which the plaintif failed to opt out of the class action.
I should never be considered an interested party in a class action suit unless I have expressed an interest. Failing to respond to a notice I probably never got is not expressing an interest.
You could have suggested that he chmod them to 777, but that could lead to executions.
befriending an angle
I hope, for the sake of his soul, that it was a 90 degree angle. Nothing else is right. :)
Yes, I always love seeing my favorite items under a "loyalty card" discount.
Monday: normal price $2.
Tuesday: normal price $5, "ONLY $2.50 with your LOYALTY CARD! WOW!!!! YOU SAVE TWO DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS!!! AREN'T YOU THE SMARTEST HUMAN SINCE EINSTEIN!!!!!"
Wednesday: normal price $2.
Just how cool would I look sliding sideways down the freeway on this thing with bits of melted Spandex and skin trailing behind me?
Cool enough that the resulting YouTube video might help fund my retirement. Please let me know where and when, and I'll make sure to have my video camera. Thanks.
PS: This is in no way an endorsement for you to do it. There won't be enough income from the YouTube video to even begin covering your medical costs, so I don't want any share of the liability. But if you happen to do it, just let me know when and where, OK?
Except the first time you want to access the password store in each session, you present your password that "unlocks" the password store, then THAT password is persisted for the remainder of the session. So, either way, if you visit a malicious website the chances are your password store is in a vulnerable state (the password store is open for business, and the password is available somewhere). In both the Seamonkey/Firefox and Microsoft cases, the password store is vulnerable once it's logged in. The only difference is that in the Microsoft case, you're always logged in. In the Seamonkey/Firefox case, you're only logged in after you've entered the password to access the password store, which is probably "only" 99% of the time you surf the Web, but at least the password store is pretty secure if you're not running your browser at all, or haven't used the password store yet for that session.
Of course, the alternative is use the password just long enough to perform the requested operation, then forget it. That means, though, that you'd have to ask for the security password every time a site wants to retrieve a password from the store or the user wants to add or update a password in the store. Then people would just remove the password, because that would be a pain. Think Vista/7 UAC popups that each need a password, or sudo/su in Linux, but every time you want to use a stored password in your browser. Most people would tolerate that for about as long as it takes to remove the password.
And, if you don't bother putting a password on it (Firefox leaves the password off by default, and I don't know anyone else who actually uses it), then Firefox is just as vulnerable as the Microsoft exploit.
Yes, the tool is AVAILABLE, but the benefits it offers are somewhat marginal and it's not the default setting.
If you want passwords stored and entered automatically, then the passwords are no longer under your control to enter manually and there's going to be a way for them to be read once you make them conveniently available. By all means, use the password store (and the password that protects it, please!) for things like your Slashdot account, etc. Just for the love of [insert deity of choice] DON'T use it for passwords like your bank account or credit cards.
True, but renting isn't necessarily cheap for something you can't watch in an evening.
I did look into renting it, but the local rental place gets $3 for a 3-day rental of them, per disc, and most of the discs have 4 episodes. Assuming they had each of the 5-7 discs per season when I wanted them and I hurried up and watched all four per disc in 3 days, I'd have spent about $150-175 on rental fees.
I decided the extra $ was worth owning them so I had access to the episodes I wanted on my own time. Had Hulu+ been available at the time, I might have decided differently.
But, yeah, they are still in mint condition so I could probably sell them at less than an $80 loss if I ever decide I'm not going to watch them again. You make a really good point there.
Access to older episodes of certain shows is worth paying for, even if they have ads.
Last year, I bought the entire X-Files series on DVD. Cost me $250. I was done watching it in about 8 months. I may watch it again someday, but most likely not.
With Hulu+, I could have watched the whole damned thing for $80, had access to other shows to watch at the same time, and saved about $170. True, I would have had to put up with ads which the box set did not have, but that's something each person has to decide for themselves.
I think you'll find some people will gladly pay for access to older episodes, even if they still have to deal with the ads. I don't know if Hulu+ is worth it for me at the moment, but it certainly would have been last year.
I agree, to a point, but...
Here's a brief comparison of the best price Cable has to offer in my area (the plan I'm on, in fact) versus Hulu+. I realize that Cable does offer different services like HD, on-demand programming, etc, but those all cost additional fees and I'm attempting to compare similarly-priced offerings in my area.
The cheapest offering around here is about $12.99 a month, Comcast's "Limited Basic" service. You get the major networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX), a couple of national news/weather stations, local access, and of course the usual padding: shopping channels, foreign-language channels, Golf, and a couple of religious channels to pad it out to 14 to make it "Less than $1 per channel per month!!!". So basically the equivalent of about 5 useful channels depending on your preferences.
Ads: Both have 'em, no winner here.
Cost: $9.99 Hulu, $12.99 Cable (limited basic package). Hulu wins there, albeit not by much.
Content Available: Hard to compare this. Hulu wins on depth of entertainment content, certainly. Cable wins on hours of programming per week and local content such as news. Winner: Depends on what content you want. If you want to watch the local government meetings on Public Access and the local news, you're probably better off with Cable.
Scheduling: Hulu allows you to watch what you want when you want it, including old reruns. Cable is when they air it, and if you miss it or forget to record it you're screwed. Winner: Hulu.
Quality: Hulu=720p, Cable=Analog (480i, right?). Winner: Hulu.
Devices: Hulu works on computers, mobile devices, and your TV if you have specific devices. Cable works on TV at your home. The winner on this one depends on whether you want to plunk down in front of a $75 analog TV at home, or watch X-Files reruns at Starbucks on your $500 iPad while sipping your overpriced halfcaff moccachino.
I'd call these different services for different markets. Free Hulu is great if you want a somewhat Cable-like experience (you can watch from their list of shows, but only pretty recent episodes). Hulu+ seems to add mobility in the form of more devices, and of course a greater depth of older episodes available. Any one of the factors can quickly disqualify Hulu, especially the lack of truly local content. But if you want to watch the X-Files, you can spend over $200 for the DVD box set or $60 for 6 months of Hulu+ (which is enough time if you watch about an episode an evening), plus you'll have access to lots of other shows. Sure, you'll have to tolerate some ads, but you'll be paid over $140 to watch them. ;)
No, but it's mobile and runs completely on electricity, so it's an EV vehicle. It's got a CVT transmission and qualifies as a PZEV vehicle as well. I haven't seen the diagrams, but I assume it would run on DC current.
When it runs out of power, your SOL of luck, though. But only an astute /.dot reader would know about that if they RTFAed the article.