It would certainly seem that tablets should be in the realm of netbook pricing giving computing power, storage, display size, etc (especially when considering how much less mass and mechanical parts are involved with a tablet compared to a netbook).
True, the Apple iPad is somewhat pricier (and for that you get good build quality and a supporting infrastructure, which is either worth the cost or not based on your own personal preferences). But there are plenty of tablets in the netbook price range.
The tablet is the replacement of a clipboard, not a computer. It's a flat rectangular device with few or no moving parts that you can hand someone easily, or set it on a table with 8 people around the table, and everyone can see it. You interact with it by touching it, not by opening it up and trying to use a mouse and keyboard.
And if you didn't have a laptop and were to be making a choice between the two types of devices, I wonder if the actual PROS/CONS of the tablet would outweigh those of a laptop.
Honestly? It depends on what you intend to do with it. If you are in the market for a laptop, then a tablet is probably not for you. In the same way that I did not purchase a 2-seater sedan when shopping for a plow truck, nor do I buy motor oil when in the market for a refreshing beverage.
Tablets are a different type of computing device. As different as desktops and laptops, and distinct from both. As different as a pickup truck and a bicycle. They are built to fit a different need than what you are trying to compare them to. True, in many cases that need is a narcissistic desire for the latest shiny to impress friends, but there are real-life applications where a tablet beats a keyboard-based computer, or can supplement one quite nicely.
I walked around for several years at a company carrying a laptop, and I would have KILLED for a tablet factor back then. The company used Instant Messenger to stay in touch, I was very busy, and I spent a lot of my time walking from meeting to meeting, holding a laptop in one hand while typing with the other to keep up with my Instant Messages and email. I needed it for programming (via greenscreen telnet), email, office documents, and instant messenger. Pretty much any tablet on the market today has more power than I'd EVER need for those applications.
If you had taken my 6-pound laptop of the day (please!) and given me something that weighed less than a pound, allow me to hold it in the crook of one arm rather than clumsily balanced/held in one hand, and up my 2 hour battery life to even 5 hours and I'd have been happy as a pig in shit. A seven-to-ten-inch screen would have been a very acceptable compromise while walking and sitting in meetings.
I also traveled a lot on that job, so reducing my carryon bag by 5 pounds would have been a delight. Especially if you gave me something easier to use on the plane, with better battery life, and no spinning drives subject to data loss. Give me an office with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and a docking station that backed it up and gave me a larger screen while docked, and I'd have been in heaven.
Since you can get tablets in the same price range as netbooks, the decision really depends on what you intend to use it for.
This just in! A $1 piece of plastic is better at scraping ice of my windshield than a (formerly) shiny new $150 Android tablet!
Pure silver is cheaper, pound-for-pound, than a lot of things we buy. That's the difference between buying a lump of base metal and a manufactured electronic item.
I hit some black ice this morning while slowing down to help a driver who had managed to get her car up on a tall snowbank (probably after hitting the exact same patch of ice). Several cars that went by also hit the same patch of black ice and a couple of them nearly hit my car as they went by.
That and this technology makes me wonder. What if you could combine this type of interface, traction control, and a few decent sensors?
I know what my thoughts were when the car stopped doing what I asked, and thanks to ABS and some experience with slippy conditions, my pulling over to the side of the road was very uneventful. However, it would have been even cooler if the car could have detected my thought (allow me to transcribe it for clarity: "FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK! FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK! SHIIIIT! Whew.") and turned it into optimal control inputs that would have saved me some effort.
I'd also like to have the same in the 4-5 cars that whooshed by at 15 miles an hour over the speed limit, a couple of them sideways.
People would be better served by a properly designed and well funded public transit system.
Sure, for those areas where public transit is possible.
How would someone who is so profoundly handicapped that he cannot move a steering wheel be able to get himself in and out of the car anyway?
You're thinking of a car designed for you, a person with (presumably) unrestricted mobility.
A motorized wheelchair that could simply park itself into the front portion of the car and transfer control to the car when docked would solve this problem handily.
I mean, it's not like we don't already have the beginnings of this today. I've seen a number of actual handicapped vehicles where the vehicle has a lift capable of raising a wheelchair on board, and the driver simply rides their wheelchair up through the van and locks it in place where a driver's seat would normally be. The vehicle is, in those cases, adapted for hands-only operation. No pedals, just a steering wheel with a brake and accelerator integrated in. But it does require that the operator have arms to operate the lift, move the wheelchair, and drive the car.
A machine can be built to do anything if you can figure out how to tell it what to do.
Summary is confusing, but the article is a bit better. Here's a (hopefully clearer) summary.
- Veloz (pedestrian victim who was killed ) was on the phone with 911 at or about the time he was struck in regards to a separate minor accident that had just happened between him and another driver. For clarity, let's call this driver "Frank".
- Beas (driver who killed Veloz) struck and killed Veloz while Veloz was on the phone with 911 operator discussing the separate minor accident. Veloz had exited his vehicle and was talking to "Frank" about their minor accident, which means Veloz was presumably either in the road, or just at the road's edge.
- Facebook published a post from Beas' cell phone at some time very close to the time of the accident.
- Veloz's daughter is suing for wrongful death and is alleging that Beas was paying attention to her cell at the time.
So, no, Beas did not update her Facebook status instead of calling 911. The 911 call had been placed by Veloz in relation to his accident with "Frank". Beas' update to Facebook happened at about the same time as that call was going on.
In fact, while it's possible she was distracted, it's by no means proven. According to the article:
- Beas claims, and it is corroborated by relatives, that the post was typed and submitted when she was in her car two miles away waiting for it to warm up. It's quite possible that the post was published on Facebook a few minutes after it was posted from the cell phone (I have this happen on my Blackberry all the time, and the delays can be 5 minutes or so, easily enough to drive the two miles from where Beas claimed to post her update to the spot where the accident occurred). I know I've hardly ever seen a Facebook update appear from my cell within a minute. So cell company logs of data usage should prove the timing of this (yea or nay), when correlated with cell company logs of Veloz's 911 call.
- Beas claims and "Frank" corroborates that the sun was blinding and that it's quite possible that Beas simply did not see Veloz standing in the road due to sun glare. "Frank" claimed that he and Veloz were similarly blinded by the sun (it's not stated whether this was a contributing factor to the accident between Veloz and "Frank").
I'm the last person to defend someone who is actually distracted by a cell phone or electronic device while driving. But, given the information provided in a couple of articles, it just doesn't appear to be the case. Beas has testimony (albeit biased) that her Facebook update was not happening during the accident, and testimony (from "Frank", who is presumably unbiased) that the sun was a major factor (which could explain why Beas didn't see a pedestrian in the road where a reasonable driver wouldn't necessary be looking for one).
I sympathize with Veloz's daughter, but the apparent moral of this story is simple. Don't stand in the road between the sun and an oncoming car. A temporarily-dazzled driver might not see you. Even the best driver in the world can't instantly stop their car when they get dazzled by the sun.
(1) As far as encrypting the data on the phone itself, I'd recommend Blackberry if you can swing it. It's the only phone I know of that has the capability of actually encrypting the filesystem, though maybe that's changed.
(2) Having said that, any data you send/receive is going to go through Blackberry's servers and your privacy/protection depends on whether RIM is playing ball with that country or not, in addition to any snooping the local cellco might be doing. So you'd better make sure you are accessing things over SSL, or you might consider an VPN-tunneled-VNC connection to a server in a friendlier country. But again that's encrypted data and your cellco will know it's out there.
What's your risk doing something you might get caught where the government knows what you are doing, as opposed to getting caught doing something where the government doesn't know what you are doing?
Perhaps it would be an idea to test people when employing them.
Ideally, yes. In reality, ability to pick a secure password is both hard to test for and hard to enforce without rules. Plus, of course, it's not an attribute you can really select for when you have several thousand stock clerks.
True, but it also enforces that Frank in Accounting doesn't simply pick "frank" as his password. Which would happen a lot more than you think. Actually, after reading the stories about the various breaches in password lists and what people choose for their passwords, I hope that it shouldn't.
In an ideal world where everyone is trying their best to come up with signal-noise passwords and the signal-noise happens to be all lowercase letters, you're right. Allowing true randomness maximizes the available values and makes passwords more secure. The problem is that, in the real world, passwords will only be as complex as you force your users to make them. I have friends who think that "money1" is actually a clever and great password for, get this, banking sites. And this is for their own finances, not some corporate password they don't give a shit about. When I mention that a dictionary word followed by a "1" is a TERRIBLE password, they proudly proclaim that they changed it to something much more secure, "money7". Impressive!
Personally, I find it a pain. I like to use long passphrases rather than short complicated passwords for those sites that support them. I can type them faster than complex signal-noise passwords, and more characters means they are a LOT harder to try and decrypt. It's also a great way to make sure no one sees the entire password I'm typing when it's 100 characters long and I can type it at speed.
But I still have to figure out how to get an upper, lower, number, and special character (often with a list of forbidden special characters).
Fortunately, you can usually still come up with something memorable that fits the pattern. "You get 98.2% more flies from maggots than you do from honey-based attraction" has all the ingredients to pass an audit, and is still pretty memorable. Though something like the word "maggots" would fail a repeating character test, and the percent would bust the two-numbers-in-a-row rule, and the percent sign is sometimes on the "can't use" list, and every now and then you have a dictionary scanner and have to misspell every word. Which is why I'd never use that specific phrase. Well, that and I've put it on Slashdot as an example.
(cue the "same as the code for my luggage!" jokes)
I know you're kidding about the nature of your app, but to make a serious response...
Are Windows 7 phones locked into the Windows Marketplace like Apple phones are locked into the Apple App Store (with the obvious exception of jailbroken iPhones/iPads/iPods, of course)? I didn't think they were.
I was under the impression that, like Blackberry and Android, the Windows phones could install anything from anywhere, and the vendor's "app store" was simply a matter of convenience. I've only installed one thing on my BB using the Blackberry App World, and I uninstalled Blackberry App World because it's too slow and gobbles up too much RAM on my 3-year-old Blackberry 8300 (which is constantly running out of precious memory with just a few apps installed as it is!).
AFAIK there's nothing stopping you from writing and distributing your app. You just can't sell it in the Windows Marketplace. Big deal, there are plenty of fish in that sea. Sell or give it to any Windows 7 phone users you want, or make it available for install off your own server, SourceForge, freeware sites, etc.
For anything approaching useful speeds? Give me a break. The government regulates access to the poles, and in return for exclusive access to said poles the power company, telephone company, and cable company are bound by regulation to take government money and charge as much as they like, as long as enough of that money ends up in the pockets of the regulators.
"Tried"? As in, jury of your peers and a judge deciding the right and wrong? Umm, no. You're confusing a commercial enterprise with the legal system. One is a bunch of cronies appointed by a corrupt government to rule your life and adheres to a legal code designed to fuck you, the individual, over. The other is, err, well at least they have to fuck you over in front of a bunch of your clueless neighbors.
"Cut off", as in, company sends a letter saying you aren't a customer and thanks to regulated monopoly laws you are Internetless for life unless you sacrifice your firstborn on their doorstep in an elaborate ritual that involves money? Yes.
"Surcharged", as in, company sends a letter saying you are in violation of the AUP and you are retroactively upgraded to a commercial account for the last two years of service at an extra $100 a month, pay it or lose access? Yes.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
- Douglas Adams
Meaning no offense, but have you ever actually submitted a story? Titles are limited to 50 characters. It leads to terrible, terrible headlines.
"How Scientists are Building a Telescope That Trumps Hubble!" gets truncated to "How Scientists are Building a Telescope That Trump"
Many of the bad headlines here are actually the result of trying to get something like "How scientists are building a telescope that is superior to Hubble" in a headline field that basically only allows "Science cool! They build'um Hubbleplus Telescope!" (note that, coincidentally, my headline just happens to fit with ZERO extra spaces.)
You could say the same thing about most of the cut items, but the problem is that we can't touch the Holy Trinity (military, tax breaks, and the entitlement programs). The Trinity accounts for too large an amount of the budget for anything else to mean fuck-all to the deficit. Even if you cut pretty much everything but the Trinity, we'd still have a deficit.
Raise taxes across the board, you're a right-wing baby-killer. Raise taxes on the rich, you're a job-killing pinko communist. Cut the military, you're a terrorist-loving peacenik asshole. Assess taxes on Churches, you'll be excommunicated from your cult before you get recalled. etc etc.
So why do people still think that a telescope magically expands the size of the actual Universe and ignore the important term "Known" or "Observed" that any decent astronomer uses when describing what they can see and observe?
Universe != Known Universe.
The definition of the size of the Universe is a matter of philosophy, religion, theory, or whatever term you want to use to describe "make shit up that we'll probably never be able to prove or disprove, so we can all safely argue about it from positions of held assumption".
The definition of the size of the Known Universe is a matter of observation, mathematics, and some margin-of-error guesswork because we don't have a yardstick of sufficient length. Every time our instruments get more powerful, we see further off, and the size of the Known Universe expands. The Known Universe will not, in any finite span of time with finite method of observation, be infinite. Meanwhile, the actual Universe may well be infinite, even possibly in ways we can't imagine (parallel universes, dimensions, etc). Or it may be finite, in which case it introduces a simple question - what is it bordered by, what's outside that border, and why isn't whatever is outside that border considered part of the Universe (you see, I struggle with the concept of infinity, but I struggle with the concept of the Universe being finite even more, but I'm just a dumbass programmer).
He is most certainly releasing the source code. In his case, it's a reverse-compile, so the code is messy and doesn't have any documentation, and probably has lots of GOTO loops in it.
However, like most open-source objects, he's not including the compiler. You have to find or build your own compiler to compile the source into another being.
I'm only aware of one compiler, but I can't figure out the make file format for 100% predictable results, and speculating as to its exact nature of this compiler is a matter of biology, philosophy, or religion, depending on which "man" file you open.
If Apple is only pulling 30%, they are doing a whole lot better than the collection overhead of many charitable donations. The "gold standard" is 25%, meaning less than 25% goes to fundraising activities. Apple doesn't quite meet that standard, but they're damned close.
I'm not defending the practice, I think it should be a lot lower, just pointing out that raising money costs money and Apple's rates are relatively competitive with the overall charitable market.
Because in any case, the pilot has finished his/her message when you hear the mic click. Surely you don't think the conversation is going to continue?
More importantly, the pilot and controller speak to each other in very precisely defined and very concise language. It's pretty obvious when one of them is done yakking, the mic click is a convenience, like the "over" used to be before all radios had mic clicks.
A typical initial approach might go something like this:
"Bangor approach, Cessna five-two-five-Lima-Charlie, 12 miles west, descending 5000 with information Sierra, full stop."
This tells the controller that:
1. You are intending to make an announcement to the controller at Bangor Center in charge of approaches (in case you fucked up your frequency, they can correct you quickly and get you on the right frequency). 2. You are a Cessna, US-registered, with tail number N525LC. 3. You are 12 miles to the west of the airport, at 5000 feet, and descending. 4. You have listened to their weather/conditions report recently, which is their update "S" (Sierra), and the letter is updated whenever the information is updated (usually once an hour). That means you already know the wind speed, altimeter settings, and preferred runway, and have adjusted all of your instrumentation and expectations appropriately. 5. You are requesting approach vectors for the currently-active runway (which you already know) and you intend to land there (full stop, as opposed to a touch-and-go or a practice approach but not a landing).
The controller will respond with something like this:
"Cessna Five-Lima-Charlie, Information Sierra current, enter 45 left downwind for runway one-eight-zero, report midfield"
This means:
1. The controller has acknowledged your presence, confirmed that you have the latest weather, and picked an abbreviation for your tail number that does not conflict with any other aircraft currently operating in his airspace. That will be your designation for the duration of your talk with this controller. 2. The controller wants you to enter the pattern at a 45-degree angle on the upwind side of the runway and call you again when you are properly established in a left downwind and abeam the middle of the runway. 3. There is no known traffic on that side of the field that will conflict with your entry, because the controller didn't mention any.
The conversation will proceed, with both the pilot and controller keeping radio use to the absolute minimum necessary to communicate what they need to say. If the frequency is really quiet, they might exchange a few jokes or snide remarks, but "over" is usually in the domain of CB radio, old timers who used to deal with really crappy radios, and bad movies.
Interruptions to what a pilot or controller is saying are obvious because of the way the language is constructed. This is done on purpose. If you say "Bangor approach, Cessna three-five..." then stop talking, you're going to hear a controller say something like "Unknown Cessna starting in three-five, please repeat, message not received." in just a very small handful of seconds.
Because it would require massive rejiggering of the POTS network, which was designed with an up and down channel over fixed frequencies. That's a completely nontrivial exercise.
If you're going to go to all that trouble, just use some other frequency on the copper that can handle even more speed and install some kind of filtering device to keep those high-pitched sounds off the normal voice circuit. Copper can handle a decent range of frequencies above the level of human hearing, and certainly above what normal voice circuits clip at.
If you want a clever name, you could call it a "Digital Subscriber Link", and shorten it to DSL.
You'll have to hurry, I hear a few other companies may be looking in to this.;)
This is really intended for people who occasionally need to access their account on shared computers in random places and want an extra layer of security. Even if a keylogger is put in place and they get your username, password, and the one-time factor you used when you logged in, the account is inaccessible to anyone else after a very brief window of opportunity. Someone else would have to read the keylogger in very near-real-time and access your account using the same one-time factor you used on a computer that Google can't differentiate from the one you are using within the expiration window (if it's anything like RSA keys, we're taking 60 seconds). And even then they'd get a different SSL session key so they'd probably be prompted for the one-time factor.
If you don't have any independent way of being reached away from home, and you ARE away from home frequently and want to use random computers to access your Google account, then you don't want to implement two-factor authentication. You probably just want a really strong password instead, and rotate it out frequently to mitigate keylogged password capture risks.
Of course, if you are away from home and using your own device, you could use IMAP with encryption to get to your email and use an application-specific password to access that service, which does not require two-factor authentication specifically. You could use the two-factor to log in from home and set your application-specific passwords (which are long and complex and have the advantage of ONLY allowing access to one singular application, rather than your whole Google account). Then configure your IMAP device with that long password, and if someone hacks that they only get access to your Gmail itself, not your master Google account. And that for only as long as it takes for you to revoke that device and change the app-specific password.
Heck, even if a thief stole your cell that had both the Google keygenerator and your configured IMAP client on it, and you were dumb enough to leave that phone unlocked, the thief would have access to only your Gmail (which would last as long as it took for you to revoke that client). Without your master password in addition to the key generator, they can't get into your account. If you kept it to SMS instead of installing a keygen, you're even more secure because you have to present your master password before Google will send out the one-time-use key.
Well, it might not any more. As I said in another post, I did this a decade ago. The laws may have changed since then. But back then, intrastate shipments and being too close to the distribution center in terms of ownership or management could bust Nexus protections in a hurry.
In this case, Amazon ran this warehouse through a subsidiary. This is not a case of a separate company doing distribution, it's a separate division of the same company. That's not arm's-length, that's married with kids.
Meanwhile Texas already screwed its people out of thousands of jobs and millions in taxes that the distribution center WAS paying.
The Distrbution Center has an unknown number of employees, but Amazon claiming that they are avoiding hiring "up to 1,000" new employees when they canceled plans to open multiple DCs. So I doubt this one DC had "thousands of jobs". Still sucks to be Texas on this one, but they'll probably make more in this sales tax revenue suit than the jobs will ever make them in income tax.
Most DCs don't employ thousands of people - by the time you reach the point where that many people are necessary you'll have put in significant automation systems because there won't be enough room for all of them. Amazon's an efficient company, and they know distribution. If that DC had 250 employees I'd be surprised.
Slashdot Mirror
It would certainly seem that tablets should be in the realm of netbook pricing giving computing power, storage, display size, etc (especially when considering how much less mass and mechanical parts are involved with a tablet compared to a netbook).
You mean they're not?
http://www.amazon.com/Superpad-Tablet-Google-Android-Webcam/dp/B004HIXDEQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1298052461&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/Viewsonic-G-Tablet-Multi-Touch-Screen-Android/dp/B004EPV7TK/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&qid=1298052461&sr=8-14
http://www.amazon.com/10-2-Google-Android-2-1-Tablet/dp/B004H3ZXCG/ref=sr_1_14?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1298054094&sr=1-14
http://www.amazon.com/ASUS-1001PX-EU17-BK-10-1-Inch-Netbook-Black/dp/B004AP90R0/ref=sr_1_6?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1298054126&sr=1-6
http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-NB255-N245-10-1-Inch-Netbook-Black/dp/B003LPUU5G/ref=sr_1_8?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1298054154&sr=1-8
True, the Apple iPad is somewhat pricier (and for that you get good build quality and a supporting infrastructure, which is either worth the cost or not based on your own personal preferences). But there are plenty of tablets in the netbook price range.
Was it too hard to hold the laptop up?
The tablet is the replacement of a clipboard, not a computer. It's a flat rectangular device with few or no moving parts that you can hand someone easily, or set it on a table with 8 people around the table, and everyone can see it. You interact with it by touching it, not by opening it up and trying to use a mouse and keyboard.
And if you didn't have a laptop and were to be making a choice between the two types of devices, I wonder if the actual PROS/CONS of the tablet would outweigh those of a laptop.
Honestly? It depends on what you intend to do with it. If you are in the market for a laptop, then a tablet is probably not for you. In the same way that I did not purchase a 2-seater sedan when shopping for a plow truck, nor do I buy motor oil when in the market for a refreshing beverage.
Tablets are a different type of computing device. As different as desktops and laptops, and distinct from both. As different as a pickup truck and a bicycle. They are built to fit a different need than what you are trying to compare them to. True, in many cases that need is a narcissistic desire for the latest shiny to impress friends, but there are real-life applications where a tablet beats a keyboard-based computer, or can supplement one quite nicely.
I walked around for several years at a company carrying a laptop, and I would have KILLED for a tablet factor back then. The company used Instant Messenger to stay in touch, I was very busy, and I spent a lot of my time walking from meeting to meeting, holding a laptop in one hand while typing with the other to keep up with my Instant Messages and email. I needed it for programming (via greenscreen telnet), email, office documents, and instant messenger. Pretty much any tablet on the market today has more power than I'd EVER need for those applications.
If you had taken my 6-pound laptop of the day (please!) and given me something that weighed less than a pound, allow me to hold it in the crook of one arm rather than clumsily balanced/held in one hand, and up my 2 hour battery life to even 5 hours and I'd have been happy as a pig in shit. A seven-to-ten-inch screen would have been a very acceptable compromise while walking and sitting in meetings.
I also traveled a lot on that job, so reducing my carryon bag by 5 pounds would have been a delight. Especially if you gave me something easier to use on the plane, with better battery life, and no spinning drives subject to data loss. Give me an office with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and a docking station that backed it up and gave me a larger screen while docked, and I'd have been in heaven.
Since you can get tablets in the same price range as netbooks, the decision really depends on what you intend to use it for.
True.
This just in! A $1 piece of plastic is better at scraping ice of my windshield than a (formerly) shiny new $150 Android tablet!
Pure silver is cheaper, pound-for-pound, than a lot of things we buy. That's the difference between buying a lump of base metal and a manufactured electronic item.
So most cars will be ending up at porn shops?
What a difference a single letter makes.
I hit some black ice this morning while slowing down to help a driver who had managed to get her car up on a tall snowbank (probably after hitting the exact same patch of ice). Several cars that went by also hit the same patch of black ice and a couple of them nearly hit my car as they went by.
That and this technology makes me wonder. What if you could combine this type of interface, traction control, and a few decent sensors?
I know what my thoughts were when the car stopped doing what I asked, and thanks to ABS and some experience with slippy conditions, my pulling over to the side of the road was very uneventful. However, it would have been even cooler if the car could have detected my thought (allow me to transcribe it for clarity: "FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK! FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK! SHIIIIT! Whew.") and turned it into optimal control inputs that would have saved me some effort.
I'd also like to have the same in the 4-5 cars that whooshed by at 15 miles an hour over the speed limit, a couple of them sideways.
People would be better served by a properly designed and well funded public transit system.
Sure, for those areas where public transit is possible.
How would someone who is so profoundly handicapped that he cannot move a steering wheel be able to get himself in and out of the car anyway?
You're thinking of a car designed for you, a person with (presumably) unrestricted mobility.
A motorized wheelchair that could simply park itself into the front portion of the car and transfer control to the car when docked would solve this problem handily.
I mean, it's not like we don't already have the beginnings of this today. I've seen a number of actual handicapped vehicles where the vehicle has a lift capable of raising a wheelchair on board, and the driver simply rides their wheelchair up through the van and locks it in place where a driver's seat would normally be. The vehicle is, in those cases, adapted for hands-only operation. No pedals, just a steering wheel with a brake and accelerator integrated in. But it does require that the operator have arms to operate the lift, move the wheelchair, and drive the car.
A machine can be built to do anything if you can figure out how to tell it what to do.
Getting the gender of the driver wrong is an obvious sign that you are unqualified to comment about any of the facts in the article.
Summary is confusing, but the article is a bit better. Here's a (hopefully clearer) summary.
- Veloz (pedestrian victim who was killed ) was on the phone with 911 at or about the time he was struck in regards to a separate minor accident that had just happened between him and another driver. For clarity, let's call this driver "Frank".
- Beas (driver who killed Veloz) struck and killed Veloz while Veloz was on the phone with 911 operator discussing the separate minor accident. Veloz had exited his vehicle and was talking to "Frank" about their minor accident, which means Veloz was presumably either in the road, or just at the road's edge.
- Facebook published a post from Beas' cell phone at some time very close to the time of the accident.
- Veloz's daughter is suing for wrongful death and is alleging that Beas was paying attention to her cell at the time.
So, no, Beas did not update her Facebook status instead of calling 911. The 911 call had been placed by Veloz in relation to his accident with "Frank". Beas' update to Facebook happened at about the same time as that call was going on.
In fact, while it's possible she was distracted, it's by no means proven. According to the article:
- Beas claims, and it is corroborated by relatives, that the post was typed and submitted when she was in her car two miles away waiting for it to warm up. It's quite possible that the post was published on Facebook a few minutes after it was posted from the cell phone (I have this happen on my Blackberry all the time, and the delays can be 5 minutes or so, easily enough to drive the two miles from where Beas claimed to post her update to the spot where the accident occurred). I know I've hardly ever seen a Facebook update appear from my cell within a minute. So cell company logs of data usage should prove the timing of this (yea or nay), when correlated with cell company logs of Veloz's 911 call.
- Beas claims and "Frank" corroborates that the sun was blinding and that it's quite possible that Beas simply did not see Veloz standing in the road due to sun glare. "Frank" claimed that he and Veloz were similarly blinded by the sun (it's not stated whether this was a contributing factor to the accident between Veloz and "Frank").
I'm the last person to defend someone who is actually distracted by a cell phone or electronic device while driving. But, given the information provided in a couple of articles, it just doesn't appear to be the case. Beas has testimony (albeit biased) that her Facebook update was not happening during the accident, and testimony (from "Frank", who is presumably unbiased) that the sun was a major factor (which could explain why Beas didn't see a pedestrian in the road where a reasonable driver wouldn't necessary be looking for one).
I sympathize with Veloz's daughter, but the apparent moral of this story is simple. Don't stand in the road between the sun and an oncoming car. A temporarily-dazzled driver might not see you. Even the best driver in the world can't instantly stop their car when they get dazzled by the sun.
(1) As far as encrypting the data on the phone itself, I'd recommend Blackberry if you can swing it. It's the only phone I know of that has the capability of actually encrypting the filesystem, though maybe that's changed.
(2) Having said that, any data you send/receive is going to go through Blackberry's servers and your privacy/protection depends on whether RIM is playing ball with that country or not, in addition to any snooping the local cellco might be doing. So you'd better make sure you are accessing things over SSL, or you might consider an VPN-tunneled-VNC connection to a server in a friendlier country. But again that's encrypted data and your cellco will know it's out there.
What's your risk doing something you might get caught where the government knows what you are doing, as opposed to getting caught doing something where the government doesn't know what you are doing?
Is the move itself absolutely necessary?
Perhaps it would be an idea to test people when employing them.
Ideally, yes. In reality, ability to pick a secure password is both hard to test for and hard to enforce without rules. Plus, of course, it's not an attribute you can really select for when you have several thousand stock clerks.
True, but it also enforces that Frank in Accounting doesn't simply pick "frank" as his password. Which would happen a lot more than you think. Actually, after reading the stories about the various breaches in password lists and what people choose for their passwords, I hope that it shouldn't.
In an ideal world where everyone is trying their best to come up with signal-noise passwords and the signal-noise happens to be all lowercase letters, you're right. Allowing true randomness maximizes the available values and makes passwords more secure. The problem is that, in the real world, passwords will only be as complex as you force your users to make them. I have friends who think that "money1" is actually a clever and great password for, get this, banking sites. And this is for their own finances, not some corporate password they don't give a shit about. When I mention that a dictionary word followed by a "1" is a TERRIBLE password, they proudly proclaim that they changed it to something much more secure, "money7". Impressive!
Personally, I find it a pain. I like to use long passphrases rather than short complicated passwords for those sites that support them. I can type them faster than complex signal-noise passwords, and more characters means they are a LOT harder to try and decrypt. It's also a great way to make sure no one sees the entire password I'm typing when it's 100 characters long and I can type it at speed.
But I still have to figure out how to get an upper, lower, number, and special character (often with a list of forbidden special characters).
Fortunately, you can usually still come up with something memorable that fits the pattern. "You get 98.2% more flies from maggots than you do from honey-based attraction" has all the ingredients to pass an audit, and is still pretty memorable. Though something like the word "maggots" would fail a repeating character test, and the percent would bust the two-numbers-in-a-row rule, and the percent sign is sometimes on the "can't use" list, and every now and then you have a dictionary scanner and have to misspell every word. Which is why I'd never use that specific phrase. Well, that and I've put it on Slashdot as an example.
(cue the "same as the code for my luggage!" jokes)
I know you're kidding about the nature of your app, but to make a serious response...
Are Windows 7 phones locked into the Windows Marketplace like Apple phones are locked into the Apple App Store (with the obvious exception of jailbroken iPhones/iPads/iPods, of course)? I didn't think they were.
I was under the impression that, like Blackberry and Android, the Windows phones could install anything from anywhere, and the vendor's "app store" was simply a matter of convenience. I've only installed one thing on my BB using the Blackberry App World, and I uninstalled Blackberry App World because it's too slow and gobbles up too much RAM on my 3-year-old Blackberry 8300 (which is constantly running out of precious memory with just a few apps installed as it is!).
AFAIK there's nothing stopping you from writing and distributing your app. You just can't sell it in the Windows Marketplace. Big deal, there are plenty of fish in that sea. Sell or give it to any Windows 7 phone users you want, or make it available for install off your own server, SourceForge, freeware sites, etc.
For dial-up, sure.
For anything approaching useful speeds? Give me a break. The government regulates access to the poles, and in return for exclusive access to said poles the power company, telephone company, and cable company are bound by regulation to take government money and charge as much as they like, as long as enough of that money ends up in the pockets of the regulators.
"Tried"? As in, jury of your peers and a judge deciding the right and wrong? Umm, no. You're confusing a commercial enterprise with the legal system. One is a bunch of cronies appointed by a corrupt government to rule your life and adheres to a legal code designed to fuck you, the individual, over. The other is, err, well at least they have to fuck you over in front of a bunch of your clueless neighbors.
"Cut off", as in, company sends a letter saying you aren't a customer and thanks to regulated monopoly laws you are Internetless for life unless you sacrifice your firstborn on their doorstep in an elaborate ritual that involves money? Yes.
"Surcharged", as in, company sends a letter saying you are in violation of the AUP and you are retroactively upgraded to a commercial account for the last two years of service at an extra $100 a month, pay it or lose access? Yes.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
- Douglas Adams
Meaning no offense, but have you ever actually submitted a story? Titles are limited to 50 characters. It leads to terrible, terrible headlines.
"How Scientists are Building a Telescope That Trumps Hubble!" gets truncated to "How Scientists are Building a Telescope That Trump"
Many of the bad headlines here are actually the result of trying to get something like "How scientists are building a telescope that is superior to Hubble" in a headline field that basically only allows "Science cool! They build'um Hubbleplus Telescope!" (note that, coincidentally, my headline just happens to fit with ZERO extra spaces.)
You could say the same thing about most of the cut items, but the problem is that we can't touch the Holy Trinity (military, tax breaks, and the entitlement programs). The Trinity accounts for too large an amount of the budget for anything else to mean fuck-all to the deficit. Even if you cut pretty much everything but the Trinity, we'd still have a deficit.
Raise taxes across the board, you're a right-wing baby-killer. Raise taxes on the rich, you're a job-killing pinko communist. Cut the military, you're a terrorist-loving peacenik asshole. Assess taxes on Churches, you'll be excommunicated from your cult before you get recalled. etc etc.
So why do people still think that a telescope magically expands the size of the actual Universe and ignore the important term "Known" or "Observed" that any decent astronomer uses when describing what they can see and observe?
Universe != Known Universe.
The definition of the size of the Universe is a matter of philosophy, religion, theory, or whatever term you want to use to describe "make shit up that we'll probably never be able to prove or disprove, so we can all safely argue about it from positions of held assumption".
The definition of the size of the Known Universe is a matter of observation, mathematics, and some margin-of-error guesswork because we don't have a yardstick of sufficient length. Every time our instruments get more powerful, we see further off, and the size of the Known Universe expands. The Known Universe will not, in any finite span of time with finite method of observation, be infinite. Meanwhile, the actual Universe may well be infinite, even possibly in ways we can't imagine (parallel universes, dimensions, etc). Or it may be finite, in which case it introduces a simple question - what is it bordered by, what's outside that border, and why isn't whatever is outside that border considered part of the Universe (you see, I struggle with the concept of infinity, but I struggle with the concept of the Universe being finite even more, but I'm just a dumbass programmer).
He is most certainly releasing the source code. In his case, it's a reverse-compile, so the code is messy and doesn't have any documentation, and probably has lots of GOTO loops in it.
However, like most open-source objects, he's not including the compiler. You have to find or build your own compiler to compile the source into another being.
I'm only aware of one compiler, but I can't figure out the make file format for 100% predictable results, and speculating as to its exact nature of this compiler is a matter of biology, philosophy, or religion, depending on which "man" file you open.
If Apple is only pulling 30%, they are doing a whole lot better than the collection overhead of many charitable donations. The "gold standard" is 25%, meaning less than 25% goes to fundraising activities. Apple doesn't quite meet that standard, but they're damned close.
I'm not defending the practice, I think it should be a lot lower, just pointing out that raising money costs money and Apple's rates are relatively competitive with the overall charitable market.
Because in any case, the pilot has finished his/her message when you hear the mic click. Surely you don't think the conversation is going to continue?
More importantly, the pilot and controller speak to each other in very precisely defined and very concise language. It's pretty obvious when one of them is done yakking, the mic click is a convenience, like the "over" used to be before all radios had mic clicks.
A typical initial approach might go something like this:
"Bangor approach, Cessna five-two-five-Lima-Charlie, 12 miles west, descending 5000 with information Sierra, full stop."
This tells the controller that:
1. You are intending to make an announcement to the controller at Bangor Center in charge of approaches (in case you fucked up your frequency, they can correct you quickly and get you on the right frequency).
2. You are a Cessna, US-registered, with tail number N525LC.
3. You are 12 miles to the west of the airport, at 5000 feet, and descending.
4. You have listened to their weather/conditions report recently, which is their update "S" (Sierra), and the letter is updated whenever the information is updated (usually once an hour). That means you already know the wind speed, altimeter settings, and preferred runway, and have adjusted all of your instrumentation and expectations appropriately.
5. You are requesting approach vectors for the currently-active runway (which you already know) and you intend to land there (full stop, as opposed to a touch-and-go or a practice approach but not a landing).
The controller will respond with something like this:
"Cessna Five-Lima-Charlie, Information Sierra current, enter 45 left downwind for runway one-eight-zero, report midfield"
This means:
1. The controller has acknowledged your presence, confirmed that you have the latest weather, and picked an abbreviation for your tail number that does not conflict with any other aircraft currently operating in his airspace. That will be your designation for the duration of your talk with this controller.
2. The controller wants you to enter the pattern at a 45-degree angle on the upwind side of the runway and call you again when you are properly established in a left downwind and abeam the middle of the runway.
3. There is no known traffic on that side of the field that will conflict with your entry, because the controller didn't mention any.
The conversation will proceed, with both the pilot and controller keeping radio use to the absolute minimum necessary to communicate what they need to say. If the frequency is really quiet, they might exchange a few jokes or snide remarks, but "over" is usually in the domain of CB radio, old timers who used to deal with really crappy radios, and bad movies.
Interruptions to what a pilot or controller is saying are obvious because of the way the language is constructed. This is done on purpose. If you say "Bangor approach, Cessna three-five..." then stop talking, you're going to hear a controller say something like "Unknown Cessna starting in three-five, please repeat, message not received." in just a very small handful of seconds.
Because it would require massive rejiggering of the POTS network, which was designed with an up and down channel over fixed frequencies. That's a completely nontrivial exercise.
If you're going to go to all that trouble, just use some other frequency on the copper that can handle even more speed and install some kind of filtering device to keep those high-pitched sounds off the normal voice circuit. Copper can handle a decent range of frequencies above the level of human hearing, and certainly above what normal voice circuits clip at.
If you want a clever name, you could call it a "Digital Subscriber Link", and shorten it to DSL.
You'll have to hurry, I hear a few other companies may be looking in to this. ;)
Agreed.
This is really intended for people who occasionally need to access their account on shared computers in random places and want an extra layer of security. Even if a keylogger is put in place and they get your username, password, and the one-time factor you used when you logged in, the account is inaccessible to anyone else after a very brief window of opportunity. Someone else would have to read the keylogger in very near-real-time and access your account using the same one-time factor you used on a computer that Google can't differentiate from the one you are using within the expiration window (if it's anything like RSA keys, we're taking 60 seconds). And even then they'd get a different SSL session key so they'd probably be prompted for the one-time factor.
If you don't have any independent way of being reached away from home, and you ARE away from home frequently and want to use random computers to access your Google account, then you don't want to implement two-factor authentication. You probably just want a really strong password instead, and rotate it out frequently to mitigate keylogged password capture risks.
Of course, if you are away from home and using your own device, you could use IMAP with encryption to get to your email and use an application-specific password to access that service, which does not require two-factor authentication specifically. You could use the two-factor to log in from home and set your application-specific passwords (which are long and complex and have the advantage of ONLY allowing access to one singular application, rather than your whole Google account). Then configure your IMAP device with that long password, and if someone hacks that they only get access to your Gmail itself, not your master Google account. And that for only as long as it takes for you to revoke that device and change the app-specific password.
Heck, even if a thief stole your cell that had both the Google keygenerator and your configured IMAP client on it, and you were dumb enough to leave that phone unlocked, the thief would have access to only your Gmail (which would last as long as it took for you to revoke that client). Without your master password in addition to the key generator, they can't get into your account. If you kept it to SMS instead of installing a keygen, you're even more secure because you have to present your master password before Google will send out the one-time-use key.
Well, it might not any more. As I said in another post, I did this a decade ago. The laws may have changed since then. But back then, intrastate shipments and being too close to the distribution center in terms of ownership or management could bust Nexus protections in a hurry.
In this case, Amazon ran this warehouse through a subsidiary. This is not a case of a separate company doing distribution, it's a separate division of the same company. That's not arm's-length, that's married with kids.
Meanwhile Texas already screwed its people out of thousands of jobs and millions in taxes that the distribution center WAS paying.
The Distrbution Center has an unknown number of employees, but Amazon claiming that they are avoiding hiring "up to 1,000" new employees when they canceled plans to open multiple DCs. So I doubt this one DC had "thousands of jobs". Still sucks to be Texas on this one, but they'll probably make more in this sales tax revenue suit than the jobs will ever make them in income tax.
Most DCs don't employ thousands of people - by the time you reach the point where that many people are necessary you'll have put in significant automation systems because there won't be enough room for all of them. Amazon's an efficient company, and they know distribution. If that DC had 250 employees I'd be surprised.
PS: Just looked it up. http://www.statesman.com/business/119-to-lose-jobs-when-amazon-closes-texas-1248784.html 119 jobs lost.
I did RTFA, and I don't think you really understand the issue. A subsidiary is not a separate company.