> It's a bad thing for circuit shitty, which always depended on selling some crap which isn't actually worth what they're charging to people who don't know any better
Yeah their prices were high. One way they could have tried to survive would have been to reduce prices and costs. Be more like Fry's. Get rid of unnecessary expenses, such as commissioned sales people, who didn't actually know the product well, they knew how to sell crap to consumers who didn't know better.
As I recall, TFA links to another article, which in turn links to the actual policy statement. The actual policy covers sexual harassment, which unfortunately has a very subjective definition. Apparently it's very hard to define in a way that everyone is satisfied with.
> Assault is physical.
If there is actual touching, that's battery. Assault by itself is an attempt . That's why you typically only hear battery mentioned as "assault and battery" - because if they DID touch, then they first attempted to touch. So you pretty much can't have battery by itself without assault. You hear assault mentioned separately because someone can make an attempt without actually doing it. A problem with assault is one must deduce what was in the person's mind, what they were trying to do. Sometimes that's obvious, sometimes it's not.
The above are the classical definitions of just "assault" and "battery", without adding "sexual". Battery is touch that intentionally or knowingly causes injury, assault is an attempt to do so.
Once you get into "sexual assault", the terms used depend on the state. There is no such crime as "sexual assault" in California. It's sexual battery. Sexual assault *would* mean "tried to touch my boobs", but that's not in California law. California (and some other states) have a crime of "sexual battery" - non-consensual touching of sexual body parts for sexual pleasure. Texas is an example of a state which uses the term "sexual assault" for what would more accurately be called sexual battery, or rape.
> don't fucking hit on passengers in your cab unless they hit on you first
Well yeah.
I don't know about your friends, but most of my friends are really, really bad at knowing if someone is hitting on them. Some think people are when they aren't, most don't see it when someone is. That creates two opportunities for confusion with "don't hit on people in your cab unless they hit on you first". Was the driver hitting on the passenger? Maybe. Was the passenger flirting with the driver? Whichever he thinks, yes or no, there seems to be about a 50% chance he's wrong.
That doesn't even account for how people can get after a drink or two - exactly when people are most likely to call Uber. People sometimes sound awfully flirty after they've had a couple drinks. That doesn't mean they won't decide the next day that they didn't like the response. So the best general policy is probably "don't flirt at work". That doesn't mean you should be able to successfully sue someone because someone else responded positively to your flirty behavior.
The arbitration clause wouldn't affect a criminal case. A passenger who felt they were mistreated (rightly or wrongly) could sue Uber for not preventing it somehow, such as by having a more thorough background check of drivers or whatever.
I say "felt they were mistreated" because in many cases people have different viewpoints. There are instances where a clearly a crime was committed, obviously. This new policy also applies to alleged sexual harassment, though. That's a) not a crime (it is a reason to sue) and b) very, very subjective. The definition of sexual harassment is "unwelcome...", so while one person might think they are both having fun laughing at a joke, the other person might internally feel the joke is unwelcome, and therefore potentially sexual harassment. The EOEC commission definition of sexual harassment also includes things like "offensive comments about women in general". I think most of us have seen a possibly innocent comment construed as "offensive about women in general", because someone heard something different than what the speaker intended or whatever. So there can be instances where everyone agrees no crime was committed, but one person feels a comment was offensive, and therefore sexual harassment.
True, at the end of section 10 it almost says that. The government has demonstrated time and time again the difference between engaging in war and declaring war, but close enough.
(Think Korean War, Vietnam War, Persian Gulf War, Bosnia, Haiti, Libya, all the way back the Revolutionary War).
It was just funny that you said they can't declare war, it says so right here, then copy/pasted an entirely different section, which doesn't say that.
Selection bias and confirmation bias certainly are very real.
Also very real are the reasons that after we hired IT majors, we needed to train them for a few weeks before they were able to do simpler installations by themselves, getting help when they ran into non-typical configurations. Some things really do benefit from knowing what you're doing.
As you may be aware, we tend to remember the exceptional cases. That which isn't normal stands out. I remember the two customers (of thousands) who could do their own installs because they had dozens or hundreds of of their own systems all according to the same template. For them, installing our stuff consisted partly of copying exactly the way we set it up on their last dozen systems. They could put the red peg in the green hole, copying the last install, without understanding WHY the green peg was in the red hole for them, and why it would be in the yellow hole for a different customer.
The article you linked to gives a long list of reasons that Circuit City failed.
Spending less on customer service staff (being more like Walmart and Amazon) may have been a mistake, or may have been a good idea. I learned the hard way, by screwing up my business, that losing customers isn't always a bad thing.
Suppose you have a business and you can make a decision which will save $1 million and lose 10,000 customers. Should you do it?
Think about your answer for a second, then consider these two related questions:
Suppose you have a car dealership and you can make a decision which will save $1 million and lose 10,000 customers. Your average net profit per customer is $1,000, so losing 10,000 customers means losing $100,000,000. Should you do it?
Suppose you have a gumball machine business and you can make a decision which will save $1 million and lose 10 000 customers. Your average net profit per customer is 5 cents, so losing 10,000 customers means losing $500. Should you do it?
Whether cutting costs in a way which loses customers is a good idea entirely depends on how much your average profit per customer is, how many customers you'll lose, and how much you can save.
To put it another way - You will get more customers if you hand everyone a $50 bill when they walk in the store. Should you do that? Deciding to NOT do that is losing potential customers. And it would be stupid for businesses, because the extra sales would be less than the cost of handing out money.
Walmart and Amazon show that a retailer can make a lot of money with while spending very little on sales staff. Typical car dealerships show that you can make a lot of money by spending the money to pay great sales people. Neither is always right, you have to make the right decision for that business, in that industry, at that time. The consumer electronics industry, like Circuit City sold, has moved away from sales people.
You wrote: -- states are explicitly forbidden under Article I, Section 10 , from declaring war
You must never have read the text.
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility. --
How about we read it together. You very kindly copy/pasted it, so we both have it right in front of us. Thanks for that. Let's look together at the part that says "declare war". Do you see the two words right before that and the two words after "declare war"?
> Yes, their irrational and deceitful imposition of a fraudulent installation fee is a much better complaint. > That they lie and claim it is a state-mandated charge
Agreed, those would be much better complaints. Did they lie and say it was a state-mandated fee? Doesn't surprise me. I'm sure the fee is *allowed* by their franchise with the city, but that's quite different from mandated.
> their installations are crapppy, their techs ignorant, and their service subpar
Again, much better complaints than "their pricing is consistent and predictable".
Yes, we charged the same whether the customer installed it or we did. We installed using very well-defined procedure, mostly handled by a Perl script in the end, which always did it right - it never forgot a step. Customers trying to install it themselves fucked it all up more often than not, frequently causing damage we would have to clean up later. Customers doing it themselves wasn't good for them or us.
As someone pointed out below, they didn't charge him any more when his install out in the country cost Comcast far more than $90. They *could* charge $75/hour for installation. When customers ask how much the installation will be, Comcast would say "it depends". As I found out with my business, customers HATE that.
In my business I found out that customers would rather pay $75 than $50-$125. They really don't like it when the cost is "it depends". They especially wouldn't like paying $180 for installation when it turns out their house is a pain in the butt to run wires in, but they aren't overjoyed when it turns out their house is easy and it's only $50. They'd rather know up front.
Even if a house had service before, the cabling and connectors may not be up-to-date, they may be corroded, have too splitters to work with current speeds, etc. So "already had service previously" doesn't mean installation isn't needed. "Already had service before" means "it depends". Comcast sucks in a lot of ways, so if I wanted to complain about Comcast I wouldn't focus on them making the pricing consistent and predictable as the problem. There are much better things to complain about with Comcast.
Good advice. You should take that advice. Maybe even try using one.
Let's look at your claim regarding the length of the password. Back in the early 1990s, MD5 was the recommended algorithm. It had a short 128-bit hash. That's roughly the same entropy as an 18-20 character password. As long as two passwords were both at least 20 characters, a longer password wasn't better because they'd both get reduced to a 128-bit hash anyway. By the late 1990s weaknesses had been found in MD5 and we started recommending SHA-1 instead. I personally distributed sample code showing how to convert your MD5 password hashes to SHA1, something that sounds impossible at first.
Then about 15 years ago MD5 was completely broken. Anyone with a clue moved to SHA1 or, later, SHA2. IF your web application is using an algorithm that has been broken for 15 years, AND your pass is at least 20 characters, longer than 20 isn't much more secure.
You might be thinking "there is a four character password with the same hash". No, there isn't, in all likelihood. There are very few 4-character passwords, and very many possible 128-bit hashes. For any given long password, there probably is no short password with the same hash.
SHA-1 is a 160-bit hash. It's even less likely that a short password of say 36 bits entropy is going to have the same 160-bit hash as a longer password. ALL possible 36-bit passwords combined only cover 1/2^124 of the outputs. In other words, the odds against getting a match, even trying ALL of the short passwords, are far less than the odds that you will win the lottery without even playing, by finding a winning ticket.
SHA-2 came out in 2001. There are no rainbow tables for SHA2, because the key space is too large. So if your application has been *properly* updated in the last 10-15 years, rainbow tables simply do not apply.
That certainly could be. Also, he says that he gave 50-100 people access to his server, so they could share files. Any of those people could have dumped alt.binaries.porn.lolita there. His legal liability would be questionable.
Or it could have been something like The Fappening and included pictures of people like McKayla Maroney or Liz Lee, who were under 18 at the time. There are a lot of ways a computer nerd could end up with a big stash of porn, possibly downloaded by a script, and have that large stash include a number of under 18 images, even if they didn't intend to.
Published reports from early in the investigation also mention that he used Tor. Surfing around on Tor one might encounter illegal material without actively looking for it.
You're referring to Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution:
The Congress shall have Power To... [list of powers, including regulate interstate commerce]
And the 10th Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The 10th says that any powers other those given to the federal government remain with the states, or individuals.
What it does NOT say is that states may act in federal territory when Congress decides NOT to act. For example, Congress has the power to declare war. If Congress chooses not to declare war, that doesn't mean a state can. Because Congress *can* declare war, states cannot. The feds can coin money from tin. Therefore the states can't - even if the feds decide not to issue tin coins.
As you may know, John Sununu is widely known as having one of the highest IQs ever measured. A member of Mega Society, Sununu scored higher than Stephen Hawking and other well-known geniuses on the standard high IQ test.
In order to support your claim that Ryan is stupid, you linked to a ranting article with very few facts, but one of the few facts it mentions is this gem: -- Ryan emerged as a player by sponsoring, along with then-Sen. John Sununu... ---
Well gee, if Paul Ryan agrees with and collaborates with one of the smartest men alive, he must be a moron.
Keep talking, you're hilarious. Keep on linking, this is fun.
I haven't researched this particular case enough to have an opinion on this case, but the interstate commerce clause says that business dealings which cross state lines are regulated by the FEDERAL government, not by Illinois. The interstate commerce clause is an argument why Facebook would NOT be bound by the laws of Illinois - because it's the feds, not Illinois, who can make laws about interstate commerce.
There are other arguments why Illinois law should apply, by the interstate commerce clause isn't one of them.
A Chinese retailer is selling 10nm Intel processors cheap. A Chinese retailer is also selling OtterBox cases for $1.50, and Genuine Applà McBook chargers for $12.
"Noodle bowls and cans of chili" and frozen food is about what I do. Which better than fast food or restaurants. It's not what I think of when people say "cooking". Just the way I was raised, cooking involves ingredients. Things like eggs, milk, flour, etc.
I do sometimes enjoy a hybrid, combining fresh and frozen. Things like putting some fresh cilantro and diced tomatoes or onions on top of a frozen burrito.
That's a brilliantly simple idea, for the speaker. The sound could also come through a very thin slit at the top of the phone.
Speaker in the back wouldn't work so well for videos and touch-tone menus, but you could certainly have a tip-firing or bottom-firing speaker for speakerphone and video, along with a rear-mounted earpiece.
You still want a camera and light sensor on the screen side, for selfies.
For myself, I put a case on mine because I don't WANT the corners and edges, the part that hits the ground when I drop it, to be the screen. I'm perfectly happy with small amount of non-screen space at the top and bottom.
Slashdot Mirror
As others have pointed out, a popular stunt is pulling a airliner with one's teeth.
https://bulawayo24.com/index-i...
What part of "yes, it's there. Well close enough" do you not understand?
> It's a bad thing for circuit shitty, which always depended on selling some crap which isn't actually worth what they're charging to people who don't know any better
Yeah their prices were high. One way they could have tried to survive would have been to reduce prices and costs. Be more like Fry's. Get rid of unnecessary expenses, such as commissioned sales people, who didn't actually know the product well, they knew how to sell crap to consumers who didn't know better.
> TFA says that it affects sexual assault cases.
As I recall, TFA links to another article, which in turn links to the actual policy statement. The actual policy covers sexual harassment, which unfortunately has a very subjective definition. Apparently it's very hard to define in a way that everyone is satisfied with.
> Assault is physical.
If there is actual touching, that's battery. Assault by itself is an attempt . That's why you typically only hear battery mentioned as "assault and battery" - because if they DID touch, then they first attempted to touch. So you pretty much can't have battery by itself without assault. You hear assault mentioned separately because someone can make an attempt without actually doing it. A problem with assault is one must deduce what was in the person's mind, what they were trying to do. Sometimes that's obvious, sometimes it's not.
The above are the classical definitions of just "assault" and "battery", without adding "sexual". Battery is touch that intentionally or knowingly causes injury, assault is an attempt to do so.
Once you get into "sexual assault", the terms used depend on the state. There is no such crime as "sexual assault" in California. It's sexual battery. Sexual assault *would* mean "tried to touch my boobs", but that's not in California law. California (and some other states) have a crime of "sexual battery" - non-consensual touching of sexual body parts for sexual pleasure. Texas is an example of a state which uses the term "sexual assault" for what would more accurately be called sexual battery, or rape.
> don't fucking hit on passengers in your cab unless they hit on you first
Well yeah.
I don't know about your friends, but most of my friends are really, really bad at knowing if someone is hitting on them. Some think people are when they aren't, most don't see it when someone is. That creates two opportunities for confusion with "don't hit on people in your cab unless they hit on you first". Was the driver hitting on the passenger? Maybe. Was the passenger flirting with the driver? Whichever he thinks, yes or no, there seems to be about a 50% chance he's wrong.
That doesn't even account for how people can get after a drink or two - exactly when people are most likely to call Uber. People sometimes sound awfully flirty after they've had a couple drinks. That doesn't mean they won't decide the next day that they didn't like the response. So the best general policy is probably "don't flirt at work". That doesn't mean you should be able to successfully sue someone because someone else responded positively to your flirty behavior.
The arbitration clause wouldn't affect a criminal case.
A passenger who felt they were mistreated (rightly or wrongly) could sue Uber for not preventing it somehow, such as by having a more thorough background check of drivers or whatever.
I say "felt they were mistreated" because in many cases people have different viewpoints. There are instances where a clearly a crime was committed, obviously. This new policy also applies to alleged sexual harassment, though. That's a) not a crime (it is a reason to sue) and b) very, very subjective. The definition of sexual harassment is "unwelcome ...", so while one person might think they are both having fun laughing at a joke, the other person might internally feel the joke is unwelcome, and therefore potentially sexual harassment. The EOEC commission definition of sexual harassment also includes things like "offensive comments about women in general". I think most of us have seen a possibly innocent comment construed as "offensive about women in general", because someone heard something different than what the speaker intended or whatever. So there can be instances where everyone agrees no crime was committed, but one person feels a comment was offensive, and therefore sexual harassment.
As I read your comment, the quote at the bottom of the page is:
Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable. Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable. -- Gilb
True, at the end of section 10 it almost says that.
The government has demonstrated time and time again the difference between engaging in war and declaring war, but close enough.
(Think Korean War, Vietnam War, Persian Gulf War, Bosnia, Haiti, Libya, all the way back the Revolutionary War).
It was just funny that you said they can't declare war, it says so right here, then copy/pasted an entirely different section, which doesn't say that.
Selection bias and confirmation bias certainly are very real.
Also very real are the reasons that after we hired IT majors, we needed to train them for a few weeks before they were able to do simpler installations by themselves, getting help when they ran into non-typical configurations. Some things really do benefit from knowing what you're doing.
As you may be aware, we tend to remember the exceptional cases. That which isn't normal stands out. I remember the two customers (of thousands) who could do their own installs because they had dozens or hundreds of of their own systems all according to the same template. For them, installing our stuff consisted partly of copying exactly the way we set it up on their last dozen systems. They could put the red peg in the green hole, copying the last install, without understanding WHY the green peg was in the red hole for them, and why it would be in the yellow hole for a different customer.
> The problem with you people is you think everyone is "excellent".
Of course everyone is excellent. They all got the trophy, didn't they?
The article you linked to gives a long list of reasons that Circuit City failed.
Spending less on customer service staff (being more like Walmart and Amazon) may have been a mistake, or may have been a good idea. I learned the hard way, by screwing up my business, that losing customers isn't always a bad thing.
Suppose you have a business and you can make a decision which will save $1 million and lose 10,000 customers. Should you do it?
Think about your answer for a second, then consider these two related questions:
Suppose you have a car dealership and you can make a decision which will save $1 million and lose 10,000 customers. Your average net profit per customer is $1,000, so losing 10,000 customers means losing $100,000,000.
Should you do it?
Suppose you have a gumball machine business and you can make a decision which will save $1 million and lose 10 000 customers. Your average net profit per customer is 5 cents, so losing 10,000 customers means losing $500.
Should you do it?
Whether cutting costs in a way which loses customers is a good idea entirely depends on how much your average profit per customer is, how many customers you'll lose, and how much you can save.
To put it another way -
You will get more customers if you hand everyone a $50 bill when they walk in the store. Should you do that? Deciding to NOT do that is losing potential customers. And it would be stupid for businesses, because the extra sales would be less than the cost of handing out money.
Walmart and Amazon show that a retailer can make a lot of money with while spending very little on sales staff. Typical car dealerships show that you can make a lot of money by spending the money to pay great sales people. Neither is always right, you have to make the right decision for that business, in that industry, at that time. The consumer electronics industry, like Circuit City sold, has moved away from sales people.
You wrote:
--
states are explicitly forbidden under Article I, Section 10 , from declaring war
You must never have read the text.
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
--
How about we read it together. You very kindly copy/pasted it, so we both have it right in front of us. Thanks for that. Let's look together at the part that says "declare war". Do you see the two words right before that and the two words after "declare war"?
> Yes, their irrational and deceitful imposition of a fraudulent installation fee is a much better complaint.
> That they lie and claim it is a state-mandated charge
Agreed, those would be much better complaints. Did they lie and say it was a state-mandated fee? Doesn't surprise me. I'm sure the fee is *allowed* by their franchise with the city, but that's quite different from mandated.
> their installations are crapppy, their techs ignorant, and their service subpar
Again, much better complaints than "their pricing is consistent and predictable".
Yes, we charged the same whether the customer installed it or we did. We installed using very well-defined procedure, mostly handled by a Perl script in the end, which always did it right - it never forgot a step. Customers trying to install it themselves fucked it all up more often than not, frequently causing damage we would have to clean up later. Customers doing it themselves wasn't good for them or us.
Comcast sucks. They do several things that suck.
As someone pointed out below, they didn't charge him any more when his install out in the country cost Comcast far more than $90. They *could* charge $75/hour for installation. When customers ask how much the installation will be, Comcast would say "it depends". As I found out with my business, customers HATE that.
In my business I found out that customers would rather pay $75 than $50-$125. They really don't like it when the cost is "it depends". They especially wouldn't like paying $180 for installation when it turns out their house is a pain in the butt to run wires in, but they aren't overjoyed when it turns out their house is easy and it's only $50. They'd rather know up front.
Even if a house had service before, the cabling and connectors may not be up-to-date, they may be corroded, have too splitters to work with current speeds, etc. So "already had service previously" doesn't mean installation isn't needed. "Already had service before" means "it depends". Comcast sucks in a lot of ways, so if I wanted to complain about Comcast I wouldn't focus on them making the pricing consistent and predictable as the problem. There are much better things to complain about with Comcast.
> Read about rainbow tables
Good advice. You should take that advice. Maybe even try using one.
Let's look at your claim regarding the length of the password. Back in the early 1990s, MD5 was the recommended algorithm. It had a short 128-bit hash. That's roughly the same entropy as an 18-20 character password. As long as two passwords were both at least 20 characters, a longer password wasn't better because they'd both get reduced to a 128-bit hash anyway. By the late 1990s weaknesses had been found in MD5 and we started recommending SHA-1 instead. I personally distributed sample code showing how to convert your MD5 password hashes to SHA1, something that sounds impossible at first.
Then about 15 years ago MD5 was completely broken. Anyone with a clue moved to SHA1 or, later, SHA2. IF your web application is using an algorithm that has been broken for 15 years, AND your pass is at least 20 characters, longer than 20 isn't much more secure.
You might be thinking "there is a four character password with the same hash". No, there isn't, in all likelihood. There are very few 4-character passwords, and very many possible 128-bit hashes. For any given long password, there probably is no short password with the same hash.
SHA-1 is a 160-bit hash. It's even less likely that a short password of say 36 bits entropy is going to have the same 160-bit hash as a longer password. ALL possible 36-bit passwords combined only cover 1/2^124 of the outputs. In other words, the odds against getting a match, even trying ALL of the short passwords, are far less than the odds that you will win the lottery without even playing, by finding a winning ticket.
SHA-2 came out in 2001. There are no rainbow tables for SHA2, because the key space is too large. So if your application has been *properly* updated in the last 10-15 years, rainbow tables simply do not apply.
That certainly could be. Also, he says that he gave 50-100 people access to his server, so they could share files. Any of those people could have dumped alt.binaries.porn.lolita there. His legal liability would be questionable.
Or it could have been something like The Fappening and included pictures of people like McKayla Maroney or Liz Lee, who were under 18 at the time. There are a lot of ways a computer nerd could end up with a big stash of porn, possibly downloaded by a script, and have that large stash include a number of under 18 images, even if they didn't intend to.
Published reports from early in the investigation also mention that he used Tor. Surfing around on Tor one might encounter illegal material without actively looking for it.
Your comment reminds me of this old meme:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals...
Anyway, anyone have anything to say about cybersecurity policy?
You're referring to Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution:
The Congress shall have Power To ... [list of powers, including regulate interstate commerce]
And the 10th Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The 10th says that any powers other those given to the federal government remain with the states, or individuals.
What it does NOT say is that states may act in federal territory when Congress decides NOT to act. For example, Congress has the power to declare war. If Congress chooses not to declare war, that doesn't mean a state can. Because Congress *can* declare war, states cannot. The feds can coin money from tin. Therefore the states can't - even if the feds decide not to issue tin coins.
As you may know, John Sununu is widely known as having one of the highest IQs ever measured. A member of Mega Society, Sununu scored higher than Stephen Hawking and other well-known geniuses on the standard high IQ test.
In order to support your claim that Ryan is stupid, you linked to a ranting article with very few facts, but one of the few facts it mentions is this gem: ...
--
Ryan emerged as a player by sponsoring, along with then-Sen. John Sununu
---
Well gee, if Paul Ryan agrees with and collaborates with one of the smartest men alive, he must be a moron.
Keep talking, you're hilarious. Keep on linking, this is fun.
I haven't researched this particular case enough to have an opinion on this case, but the interstate commerce clause says that business dealings which cross state lines are regulated by the FEDERAL government, not by Illinois. The interstate commerce clause is an argument why Facebook would NOT be bound by the laws of Illinois - because it's the feds, not Illinois, who can make laws about interstate commerce.
There are other arguments why Illinois law should apply, by the interstate commerce clause isn't one of them.
A Chinese retailer is selling 10nm Intel processors cheap.
A Chinese retailer is also selling OtterBox cases for $1.50, and Genuine Applà McBook chargers for $12.
I make four or five sandwiches a year, so yeah, it will.
"Noodle bowls and cans of chili" and frozen food is about what I do. Which better than fast food or restaurants. It's not what I think of when people say "cooking". Just the way I was raised, cooking involves ingredients. Things like eggs, milk, flour, etc.
I do sometimes enjoy a hybrid, combining fresh and frozen. Things like putting some fresh cilantro and diced tomatoes or onions on top of a frozen burrito.
That's a brilliantly simple idea, for the speaker. The sound could also come through a very thin slit at the top of the phone.
Speaker in the back wouldn't work so well for videos and touch-tone menus, but you could certainly have a tip-firing or bottom-firing speaker for speakerphone and video, along with a rear-mounted earpiece.
You still want a camera and light sensor on the screen side, for selfies.
For myself, I put a case on mine because I don't WANT the corners and edges, the part that hits the ground when I drop it, to be the screen. I'm perfectly happy with small amount of non-screen space at the top and bottom.