And how is Apple "a monopoly" when Android supposedly outsells iOS 2-1?
Apple claims that all of those Android phones are violating the patents in question, and wants to shut those sales down, which would make Apple a monopoly.
Could Google come in an offer service to residential customers? Maybe, but they are far more likely to offer service on their own terms to ISPs
The Google Fiber under discussion is residential service, launching next week in Kansas City. It's supposed to ultra high-speed connections to residential consumers at an affordable price.
Look, I know it's fun to romanticize the Revolutionary War, as if that's the One and Only Way to solve government oppression.
Who's arguing it's the One and Only Way? We're just arguing that it's foolish to give up any way if you don't have to.
As for the possible effectiveness of personal arms against the federal military, while it's true that the federal government's successful campaign to freeze the arms that can be possessed by civilians at around 1900 has significantly reduced our ability to resist by force of arms, it's still far from impossible. There are over 200 million guns in civilian hands in the United States. Should the political process ever break down to the degree that democratic processes are no longer useful, that the majority can't just express their will (when sufficiently unified) through their votes, a professional force equipped with tanks, cruise missiles, fighter jets and all the rest would still be hard-pressed to fight a foe that potentially outnumbers them by around 50 to 1.
For that matter, even a much, much smaller force equipped with hunting rifles (which are great sniping weapons) and IEDs and with the sufficient support of the populace to be able to hide effectively among the non-combatants could at least tie up a professional military force, since that force would not be able to use its full capabilities without provoking truly massive resistance (and remember those 200 million guns). That's even without considering the possibility that the insurgents could be able to use their weapons to acquire more powerful weapons from the federal forces, or that the federal forces might be unwilling in many cases to fight their own countrymen -- and that some soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines would undoubtedly change sides, bringing their weapons with them.
No, I think retaining the ability to resist tyranny by force of arms is of significant value, even though I really hope we never, ever need it. My biggest concern wouldn't be over whether or not it could succeed in wresting power from the current political system but in what would arise to replace it. I don't have a great deal of confidence that we'd have statesmen of similar caliber to set up the new system.
Electoral collect, first past the post, no alternative vote, these are concessions against fair voting in an era where it took weeks to get a message from one end of the country to the other.
Well, the other purpose of the electoral college was to keep small states from being walked over by big states. Unfortunately, the mathematics of bloc voting mean that actually backfired. The EC as is actually reduces the influence of small states as compared to a purely popular vote. The EC with proportional allocation would do what it was intended to do in that regard. You can debate whether or not that's a good thing; I think it is.
But, yeah, plurality-wins-it-all (I never thought "first past the post" was a very good description) and no alternative leads to strategic voting and Duverger's Law, which pretty much guarantees the current two parties will always stay in power. The fact that the two leading parties in the US have changed twice in 200 years doesn't disprove this, either, because in both cases the change was caused by one of the two major parties self-destructing, offering a new party the opportunity to step into the vacuum.
We really should switch to approval voting, IMO. It's not quite as expressive as ranked ballot methods but it's almost as good, effectively strategy-free, and dead simple for everyone to understand. But the entrenched parties would have to be the ones to make the change... and doing so would reduce their own power and influence. Not going to happen.
This highlights the problem with the "small government" argument.
No, it highlights the problem with having a big government which corporations can influence to divert taxpayer dollars into their own pockets.
Small government proponents don't want to outsource government functions to tax-funded private operations, they want to reduce the size and scope of government functions. In the US, many don't necessarily even want to reduce the overall government role, either, they just want to reduce the role of the federal government, moving many of the current federal functions to state and local governments where citizens have a larger say in how they're performed and where there's an opportunity for different localities to try different approaches that are perhaps better suited to their culture/geography/economy/etc., rather than the one-size-fits-all federal approach.
National security is clearly a legitimate role for the federal government, and aside from arguing that some (much?) of what the federal government does in the name of national security is of questionable value[*], advocates of a small federal government wouldn't be interested in pushing this argument. But most conservatives aren't really much more interested in shrinking the federal government than most liberals, they just want the big (and growing) government to do different things. In particular conservatives often like to leverage the big tax collection-and-distribution hammer of the federal government to support favored private enterprises, which is what this situation is all about.
[*] Some of it is arguably of negative value to the overall well-being of US citizens, IMO. I'd far rather increase slightly my risk of dying in a terror attack than to have my own government spy on me, search me, track me and generally create an air of suspicion and even fear in my society. A few months ago I had the singular experience of seeing a beefy, M-4 toting, body-armored police officer yell at my 14 year-old son for taking a picture of the nation's capitol building. Land of the Free, indeed.
Augmented reality HUD glasses combined with a few other devices for analyzing the environment around you and then connected to any massive and fast database would yield some interesting things.
The least of which would be facial recognition and connections to people's public information - a nightmare for privacy/anonymity.
If Google does it, the system will only identify people who have opted in for facial recognition. This is exactly how it's been implemented on Google+, and it seems like the ideal balance between utility and privacy.
On the less evil side, analytical tools for first responders - air sniffer that scans for various substances and then can issue warnings tend alerts, echo-location type devices that will help map out a disaster site and pinpoint where human type noises are coming from. Real-time traffic re-routing to get people out of the way, etc. and so on.
The next 25 years are going to be fascinating in the evolution of gadgetry.
Indeed they are. The combination of distributed sensors, always-on data links and massive centralized processing power is going to change our world in dramatic ways. It can clearly be used for great good or great evil... it's going to be on all of us to keep a careful watch on the trends and to act, individually and collectively and through various channels, to make sure there's much more of the former than the latter.
Sounds like the kernel could use a good refactoring.
Because too many people contributed too many patches during a window in the development cycle when not many (or large) patches should be contributed?
Umm... I think you didn't understand what the problem is here. It's a violation of development process protocol that has nothing to do with the quality of the code. Someone trying to submit refactoring patches would have made it much worse, not better. Actually, it wouldn't have been worse, because Linus would just have rejected them at this point in time.
"You can take pictures if you want, but to publish them in any way, be it a magazine, website or artistic display, you need to get permission from the individuals in the pictures to do so. It's called a model release and every ethical photographer knows about them. "
You're not a photographer, then, because in public venues, you have no right.
Have no right to what?
It's really not clear what you're trying to say here.
To me it seems that the MIT approach takes on the hardest part of the problem, reacting correctly in the hard corner cases, while also adding yet another hard problem, which is determining when to take over from the driver, and being less valuable to boot. The only problem the Google approach has to handle that the MIT approach does not is navigation, and that's the easiest part.
The MIT system is still going to have to have full awareness of all of the surrounding obstacles, traffic, pedestrian and other, will have to know where the lines on the road are, etc., should probably know about traffic signs and signals, etc., road conditions (ice, sand, water, etc.), because all of that is necessary to make good decisions in an emergency situation. Actually, the MIT system needs to know more about all of that than the Google car does. The Google approach can rely on the human driver to notice and take over when things get difficult (which, BTW, is why I don't think the Google car will be a solution for people who are under the influence).
As to value, lots of people will see value in not having to drive themselves, in letting a computer do the boring, tedious part of getting from place to place. I think relatively few people will see value in an undoubtedly expensive system that only operates when they screw up, especially since most won't want to believe the system can actually do a better job than they can. Most people are willing to believe that a computer can drive a car safely in normal conditions, especially with a human to take over if things get difficult, but will find it far harder to believe that a computer can handle extreme conditions better than a human, to the degree that it makes sense for the computer to override the human driver.
I don't think WP is ugly, and I don't really care. It works very well for presenting articles about topics, and that's what it's supposed to do.
However, the other part of the complaint, that only geeks can edit it, does have some merit. It's overstated, of course, you don't have to be any sort of techie to figure out how to type wiki markup, but there is a non-trivial learning curve, and it's gotten worse as more features have been added to the markup language. I think it probably is an obstacle to getting people interested in editing.
But that would make commercial drivers of all kinds very nervous
I doubt it. I imagine truckers will easily be able to argue that the vehicles they drive must have a human driver. As for cabs... the Pakistani immigrant lobby isn't particularly powerful.
I don't know why everyone seems to be under the impression that these things are just going to blindly follow maps and GPS, but that's not how it works at all. They're equipped with all kinds of sensors and cameras that let them examine their environment
I believe the Google cars use LIDAR. That's the spinning thing on top.
Almost nobody wants the nearfield cards except for merchants and the banks.
If the merchants and banks want them... they'll happen. And, actually, consumers like them too once they use them.
Several of the fast food resturants around here, Mc Donalds for example had the readers outside the drive up windows and have cince removed them as nobody was using them.
Sure, because hardly anyone has the cards, or phones with virtual wallets, yet, and there's no liability-related reason for merchants to care. But both parts of that are changing.
Visa and MasterCard have announced that they'll implement the chip card liability shift next year in North America. What that means is that starting in 2013 all liability for fraudulent transactions will accrue to whichever links in the chain (issuing bank, merchant, merchant acquiring bank, clearinghouse) do not have the chip-based technology implemented. Since merchants pay for nearly all of the credit card fraud, you'll see a very fast response from them to add the necessary technology at the point of sale.
While the liability shift doesn't address the question of contact vs contactless (RF) payment chip technology, at this point everyone will be deploying contactless. From a security perspective it doesn't matter whether it's contact or contactless, because any contact design has to assume that attackers will be able to eavesdrop or even MITM the contact connections, and the contactless technology has a lot of advantages. More to the point, the north american banks tried contact cards a decade ago and it failed -- not due to any problem with the technology, but still the failure left a bad taste in their mouth. So bank execs see "contact failed, so maybe contactless will work better". And it will, but not due to any advantage of the technology. It does have advantages, but they aren't the reason it's going to succeed.
So, what we have now is a confluence of events that will drive adoption. The merchants will deploy the infrastructure because it will save them huge amounts of money. Banks will deploy chip cards because they don't want to absorb that fraud. Because of Google Wallet, ISIS, Apple's initiative (whatever it will be), etc. more and more smartphones will have NFC, to the point that over the next 2-3 years you can expect basically ALL new smartphones to have NFC. And while you may not like it, people really DO like being able to pay with their phone, and to use a virtual wallet.
I notice this especially among the younger population. When I use Google Wallet at stores, the cashier's reaction is very strongly correlated with age... the younger the cashier, the more they like it. This shouldn't surprise anyone given how central mobile phones have become to young peoples' lives.
The obvious next step, once you're using your phone for payment, is to integrate loyalty and coupons. It sounds like these banks are taking a slightly different approach than Google or ISIS, but the fundamental idea is the same. For manufacturers and retailers, it provides a smoother path to deliver incentives to consumers and -- even more important -- a path that allows them to close the loop. When General Mills puts cereal coupons in the newspaper, they know roughly how many coupons are printed and roughly how many are redeemed, but they don't have any real way to figure out how effective those coupons were at motivating people to buy who wouldn't otherwise have bought. Electronic coupons can fix that.
From a consumer perspective, there's fantastic convenience in having all of this stuff integrated. My wife often goes to the grocery store with an inch-thick stack of coupons, and it takes a lot of time for the cashier to process all of them. Many of us have a crazy number of loyalty cards we carry around, so there's big value in moving all of that into electronic form as well. And then when you get to where you can apply all loyalty discounts and relevant coupons and perform the payment in one 250ms tap, that's really nice.
Of course, there are some significant privacy questions around all of that. The whole point of loyalty cards is to enable retailers to get more detailed information about their customers at an individual, privacy-busting level. But, by and large, people are fine with that. So far, it appears that the vast majority of people will also be fine with electronic coupons giving an anonymized handle to them to manufacturers as well -- and this same anonymized handle may well be a way for individuals
There are RFIDs in credit cards? Really? Have you got more information on that?
Technically, they're contactless smart cards, not RFIDs (different standards, different frequencies, different RF characteristics that create different range, etc., characteristics, different capabilities, including the ability to use cryptographic security, and different physical security characteristics), but yes. They use the same fundamental technology and protocols as Google Wallet and the other upcoming phone-based wallets. Well, more precisely, the phone-based NFC technology is based on the contactless smart card technology, but embedded in a phone and with additional capabilities, including -- just to make it all more confusing -- the ability to act as an RFID tag or reader.
>> ""American Ninja Warrior" — the strictly-domestic production — suffers badly from human interest bloat. The Japanese program (at least as it is presented on G4) frequently features mini-portraits of the competitors, but these segments are very short — typically under 20 seconds — and they help to put a human face on the often-superhuman efforts of the program's contenders. "
Oh, just wait until the Olympics. They will do lengthy segments that try to ferret out the most painful moments in every athlete's life (with soft piano music) so the audience can have a little Rocky moment when an athlete wins an event.
What's really sad is that I really doubt that this is because the broadcasters are stupid or uninformed. They push this glurge because it actually appeals to a sufficiently-large segment of their audience.
Both the Kindle and Nexus 7 assumes that you are consuming media from the net.
Because when my phone / tablet dies I would still like to be able to get the data off of it by removing the memory card. This also makes swapping devices trivial because you can just move your memory card around.
For music (which is the biggest consumer of storage on my devices), just upload it all to Google Music. Then when you switch devices just let it download onto your new device over Wifi (which it will do automatically in the background, whenever you have Internet). The download isn't as fast as just moving an SD card, of course, but it also means that your music can easily be on multiple devices at once, and you don't have to worry about losing your SD card.
studies also show that nearly 100% of hardcore drug users have previously tried water before moving on. the connection is there is no such thing as a gateway drug but every hysterical person on the planet seems to believe that there is.
But nearly 100% of non-users have also previously tried water. This means there is no correlation between water consumption and hardcore drug usage. That's not at all the same sort of relationship that this study finds between alcohol and drugs.
Slashdot Mirror
When it comes down to regular people I would say that something like the iPad has given people more freedom than any Linux distribution.
When it comes to regular people, they would say they can't afford an iPad.
You can dispute whether patents should exist, but arguing that a patent should be revoked just because it grants a "monopoly" is just stupid.
Why, yes, that would be a stupid argument. Which is why that isn't what Google is arguing.
And how is Apple "a monopoly" when Android supposedly outsells iOS 2-1?
Apple claims that all of those Android phones are violating the patents in question, and wants to shut those sales down, which would make Apple a monopoly.
If you're not a Plus member, many links and settings in Google services no longer work or take you to 404 pages.
For example?
Could Google come in an offer service to residential customers? Maybe, but they are far more likely to offer service on their own terms to ISPs
The Google Fiber under discussion is residential service, launching next week in Kansas City. It's supposed to ultra high-speed connections to residential consumers at an affordable price.
Look, I know it's fun to romanticize the Revolutionary War, as if that's the One and Only Way to solve government oppression.
Who's arguing it's the One and Only Way? We're just arguing that it's foolish to give up any way if you don't have to.
As for the possible effectiveness of personal arms against the federal military, while it's true that the federal government's successful campaign to freeze the arms that can be possessed by civilians at around 1900 has significantly reduced our ability to resist by force of arms, it's still far from impossible. There are over 200 million guns in civilian hands in the United States. Should the political process ever break down to the degree that democratic processes are no longer useful, that the majority can't just express their will (when sufficiently unified) through their votes, a professional force equipped with tanks, cruise missiles, fighter jets and all the rest would still be hard-pressed to fight a foe that potentially outnumbers them by around 50 to 1.
For that matter, even a much, much smaller force equipped with hunting rifles (which are great sniping weapons) and IEDs and with the sufficient support of the populace to be able to hide effectively among the non-combatants could at least tie up a professional military force, since that force would not be able to use its full capabilities without provoking truly massive resistance (and remember those 200 million guns). That's even without considering the possibility that the insurgents could be able to use their weapons to acquire more powerful weapons from the federal forces, or that the federal forces might be unwilling in many cases to fight their own countrymen -- and that some soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines would undoubtedly change sides, bringing their weapons with them.
No, I think retaining the ability to resist tyranny by force of arms is of significant value, even though I really hope we never, ever need it. My biggest concern wouldn't be over whether or not it could succeed in wresting power from the current political system but in what would arise to replace it. I don't have a great deal of confidence that we'd have statesmen of similar caliber to set up the new system.
Electoral collect, first past the post, no alternative vote, these are concessions against fair voting in an era where it took weeks to get a message from one end of the country to the other.
Well, the other purpose of the electoral college was to keep small states from being walked over by big states. Unfortunately, the mathematics of bloc voting mean that actually backfired. The EC as is actually reduces the influence of small states as compared to a purely popular vote. The EC with proportional allocation would do what it was intended to do in that regard. You can debate whether or not that's a good thing; I think it is.
But, yeah, plurality-wins-it-all (I never thought "first past the post" was a very good description) and no alternative leads to strategic voting and Duverger's Law, which pretty much guarantees the current two parties will always stay in power. The fact that the two leading parties in the US have changed twice in 200 years doesn't disprove this, either, because in both cases the change was caused by one of the two major parties self-destructing, offering a new party the opportunity to step into the vacuum.
We really should switch to approval voting, IMO. It's not quite as expressive as ranked ballot methods but it's almost as good, effectively strategy-free, and dead simple for everyone to understand. But the entrenched parties would have to be the ones to make the change... and doing so would reduce their own power and influence. Not going to happen.
This highlights the problem with the "small government" argument.
No, it highlights the problem with having a big government which corporations can influence to divert taxpayer dollars into their own pockets.
Small government proponents don't want to outsource government functions to tax-funded private operations, they want to reduce the size and scope of government functions. In the US, many don't necessarily even want to reduce the overall government role, either, they just want to reduce the role of the federal government, moving many of the current federal functions to state and local governments where citizens have a larger say in how they're performed and where there's an opportunity for different localities to try different approaches that are perhaps better suited to their culture/geography/economy/etc., rather than the one-size-fits-all federal approach.
National security is clearly a legitimate role for the federal government, and aside from arguing that some (much?) of what the federal government does in the name of national security is of questionable value[*], advocates of a small federal government wouldn't be interested in pushing this argument. But most conservatives aren't really much more interested in shrinking the federal government than most liberals, they just want the big (and growing) government to do different things. In particular conservatives often like to leverage the big tax collection-and-distribution hammer of the federal government to support favored private enterprises, which is what this situation is all about.
[*] Some of it is arguably of negative value to the overall well-being of US citizens, IMO. I'd far rather increase slightly my risk of dying in a terror attack than to have my own government spy on me, search me, track me and generally create an air of suspicion and even fear in my society. A few months ago I had the singular experience of seeing a beefy, M-4 toting, body-armored police officer yell at my 14 year-old son for taking a picture of the nation's capitol building. Land of the Free, indeed.
Augmented reality HUD glasses combined with a few other devices for analyzing the environment around you and then connected to any massive and fast database would yield some interesting things.
The least of which would be facial recognition and connections to people's public information - a nightmare for privacy/anonymity.
If Google does it, the system will only identify people who have opted in for facial recognition. This is exactly how it's been implemented on Google+, and it seems like the ideal balance between utility and privacy.
On the less evil side, analytical tools for first responders - air sniffer that scans for various substances and then can issue warnings tend alerts, echo-location type devices that will help map out a disaster site and pinpoint where human type noises are coming from. Real-time traffic re-routing to get people out of the way, etc. and so on.
The next 25 years are going to be fascinating in the evolution of gadgetry.
Indeed they are. The combination of distributed sensors, always-on data links and massive centralized processing power is going to change our world in dramatic ways. It can clearly be used for great good or great evil... it's going to be on all of us to keep a careful watch on the trends and to act, individually and collectively and through various channels, to make sure there's much more of the former than the latter.
Sounds like the kernel could use a good refactoring.
Because too many people contributed too many patches during a window in the development cycle when not many (or large) patches should be contributed?
Umm... I think you didn't understand what the problem is here. It's a violation of development process protocol that has nothing to do with the quality of the code. Someone trying to submit refactoring patches would have made it much worse, not better. Actually, it wouldn't have been worse, because Linus would just have rejected them at this point in time.
You don't need to give express permission to be filmed in public for noncommercial reasons.
But you do need express permission to install software on a computer belonging to someone else.
Cite?
"You can take pictures if you want, but to publish them in any way, be it a magazine, website or artistic display, you need to get permission from the individuals in the pictures to do so. It's called a model release and every ethical photographer knows about them. "
You're not a photographer, then, because in public venues, you have no right.
Have no right to what?
It's really not clear what you're trying to say here.
To me it seems that the MIT approach takes on the hardest part of the problem, reacting correctly in the hard corner cases, while also adding yet another hard problem, which is determining when to take over from the driver, and being less valuable to boot. The only problem the Google approach has to handle that the MIT approach does not is navigation, and that's the easiest part.
The MIT system is still going to have to have full awareness of all of the surrounding obstacles, traffic, pedestrian and other, will have to know where the lines on the road are, etc., should probably know about traffic signs and signals, etc., road conditions (ice, sand, water, etc.), because all of that is necessary to make good decisions in an emergency situation. Actually, the MIT system needs to know more about all of that than the Google car does. The Google approach can rely on the human driver to notice and take over when things get difficult (which, BTW, is why I don't think the Google car will be a solution for people who are under the influence).
As to value, lots of people will see value in not having to drive themselves, in letting a computer do the boring, tedious part of getting from place to place. I think relatively few people will see value in an undoubtedly expensive system that only operates when they screw up, especially since most won't want to believe the system can actually do a better job than they can. Most people are willing to believe that a computer can drive a car safely in normal conditions, especially with a human to take over if things get difficult, but will find it far harder to believe that a computer can handle extreme conditions better than a human, to the degree that it makes sense for the computer to override the human driver.
You can catch up on work, use the iPad, etc. while the car is driving along.
Only if I want to vomit copiously on my iPad, etc. For the travel-sick amongst us, autonomous cars are a bad thing.
You could sleep.
I don't think WP is ugly, and I don't really care. It works very well for presenting articles about topics, and that's what it's supposed to do.
However, the other part of the complaint, that only geeks can edit it, does have some merit. It's overstated, of course, you don't have to be any sort of techie to figure out how to type wiki markup, but there is a non-trivial learning curve, and it's gotten worse as more features have been added to the markup language. I think it probably is an obstacle to getting people interested in editing.
But that would make commercial drivers of all kinds very nervous
I doubt it. I imagine truckers will easily be able to argue that the vehicles they drive must have a human driver. As for cabs... the Pakistani immigrant lobby isn't particularly powerful.
I don't know why everyone seems to be under the impression that these things are just going to blindly follow maps and GPS, but that's not how it works at all. They're equipped with all kinds of sensors and cameras that let them examine their environment
I believe the Google cars use LIDAR. That's the spinning thing on top.
How will pedestrians cross the street?
I can't imagine autonomous cars being allowed in places where there's pedestrians. They'll be restricted to freeways.
And even if they go slower than normals cars it won't matter. You can catch up on work, use the iPad, etc. while the car is driving along.
Even if it's ten minutes longer I'm betting the commute will seem much shorter than before - because you'll be doing other stuff.
It'll probably save a lot of gas, too.
Google's cars work just fine around pedestrians. They see them and respond appropriately.
But contactless payment is a definite no for me unless it requires I enter my pin, which all the ones I've seen don't require.
The virtual wallets will all require a PIN, I think. Google Wallet does, and ISIS will according to their documentation.
Almost nobody wants the nearfield cards except for merchants and the banks.
If the merchants and banks want them... they'll happen. And, actually, consumers like them too once they use them.
Several of the fast food resturants around here, Mc Donalds for example had the readers outside the drive up windows and have cince removed them as nobody was using them.
Sure, because hardly anyone has the cards, or phones with virtual wallets, yet, and there's no liability-related reason for merchants to care. But both parts of that are changing.
You're wrong, this is going to happen.
Visa and MasterCard have announced that they'll implement the chip card liability shift next year in North America. What that means is that starting in 2013 all liability for fraudulent transactions will accrue to whichever links in the chain (issuing bank, merchant, merchant acquiring bank, clearinghouse) do not have the chip-based technology implemented. Since merchants pay for nearly all of the credit card fraud, you'll see a very fast response from them to add the necessary technology at the point of sale.
While the liability shift doesn't address the question of contact vs contactless (RF) payment chip technology, at this point everyone will be deploying contactless. From a security perspective it doesn't matter whether it's contact or contactless, because any contact design has to assume that attackers will be able to eavesdrop or even MITM the contact connections, and the contactless technology has a lot of advantages. More to the point, the north american banks tried contact cards a decade ago and it failed -- not due to any problem with the technology, but still the failure left a bad taste in their mouth. So bank execs see "contact failed, so maybe contactless will work better". And it will, but not due to any advantage of the technology. It does have advantages, but they aren't the reason it's going to succeed.
So, what we have now is a confluence of events that will drive adoption. The merchants will deploy the infrastructure because it will save them huge amounts of money. Banks will deploy chip cards because they don't want to absorb that fraud. Because of Google Wallet, ISIS, Apple's initiative (whatever it will be), etc. more and more smartphones will have NFC, to the point that over the next 2-3 years you can expect basically ALL new smartphones to have NFC. And while you may not like it, people really DO like being able to pay with their phone, and to use a virtual wallet.
I notice this especially among the younger population. When I use Google Wallet at stores, the cashier's reaction is very strongly correlated with age... the younger the cashier, the more they like it. This shouldn't surprise anyone given how central mobile phones have become to young peoples' lives.
The obvious next step, once you're using your phone for payment, is to integrate loyalty and coupons. It sounds like these banks are taking a slightly different approach than Google or ISIS, but the fundamental idea is the same. For manufacturers and retailers, it provides a smoother path to deliver incentives to consumers and -- even more important -- a path that allows them to close the loop. When General Mills puts cereal coupons in the newspaper, they know roughly how many coupons are printed and roughly how many are redeemed, but they don't have any real way to figure out how effective those coupons were at motivating people to buy who wouldn't otherwise have bought. Electronic coupons can fix that.
From a consumer perspective, there's fantastic convenience in having all of this stuff integrated. My wife often goes to the grocery store with an inch-thick stack of coupons, and it takes a lot of time for the cashier to process all of them. Many of us have a crazy number of loyalty cards we carry around, so there's big value in moving all of that into electronic form as well. And then when you get to where you can apply all loyalty discounts and relevant coupons and perform the payment in one 250ms tap, that's really nice.
Of course, there are some significant privacy questions around all of that. The whole point of loyalty cards is to enable retailers to get more detailed information about their customers at an individual, privacy-busting level. But, by and large, people are fine with that. So far, it appears that the vast majority of people will also be fine with electronic coupons giving an anonymized handle to them to manufacturers as well -- and this same anonymized handle may well be a way for individuals
There are RFIDs in credit cards? Really? Have you got more information on that?
Technically, they're contactless smart cards, not RFIDs (different standards, different frequencies, different RF characteristics that create different range, etc., characteristics, different capabilities, including the ability to use cryptographic security, and different physical security characteristics), but yes. They use the same fundamental technology and protocols as Google Wallet and the other upcoming phone-based wallets. Well, more precisely, the phone-based NFC technology is based on the contactless smart card technology, but embedded in a phone and with additional capabilities, including -- just to make it all more confusing -- the ability to act as an RFID tag or reader.
>> ""American Ninja Warrior" — the strictly-domestic production — suffers badly from human interest bloat. The Japanese program (at least as it is presented on G4) frequently features mini-portraits of the competitors, but these segments are very short — typically under 20 seconds — and they help to put a human face on the often-superhuman efforts of the program's contenders. "
Oh, just wait until the Olympics. They will do lengthy segments that try to ferret out the most painful moments in every athlete's life (with soft piano music) so the audience can have a little Rocky moment when an athlete wins an event.
What's really sad is that I really doubt that this is because the broadcasters are stupid or uninformed. They push this glurge because it actually appeals to a sufficiently-large segment of their audience.
Why the obsession with physical media?
Both the Kindle and Nexus 7 assumes that you are consuming media from the net.
Because when my phone / tablet dies I would still like to be able to get the data off of it by removing the memory card. This also makes swapping devices trivial because you can just move your memory card around.
For music (which is the biggest consumer of storage on my devices), just upload it all to Google Music. Then when you switch devices just let it download onto your new device over Wifi (which it will do automatically in the background, whenever you have Internet). The download isn't as fast as just moving an SD card, of course, but it also means that your music can easily be on multiple devices at once, and you don't have to worry about losing your SD card.
studies also show that nearly 100% of hardcore drug users have previously tried water before moving on. the connection is there is no such thing as a gateway drug but every hysterical person on the planet seems to believe that there is.
But nearly 100% of non-users have also previously tried water. This means there is no correlation between water consumption and hardcore drug usage. That's not at all the same sort of relationship that this study finds between alcohol and drugs.