Mostly because people want to involve complexity. There are a LOT of optical only solutions that will work better than any webcam+PC+TV setup on this planet.
I suggest NOT helping grandma this way. get them something that does not need to be booted and will work without a virus scanner.
Yeah, it seems ye olde camcorder, while costing maybe a bit more than a decent webcam (still, you can find an HD camcorder on clearance for under $200) would fulfill the need quite nicely.
If it's an HDTV, use an HDMI cable and you have a practically zero lag reading magnifier.
I'm sure a digital camera can serve the purpose just as well too. Maybe even an old smartphone with a rear camera and "flash".
Actually, banks, and such already ran into Y2K problems in the 70s when long term loans starting overflowing them. For them the Y2K scenario had many years to be fixed slowly (mostly a continuous updating thing - as things broke, they fixed it) so there was no big rush for them as they were experienced in such issues.
If there are any 2038 issues, the banks have already been ahead of the curve and seeing them in 2008. Hell, a good conspiracy theory....
time_t has also been 64 bit for a number of years now (you don't need a 64-bit system to deal with 64-bit numbers - it's just dealing with them is a lot slower as the compiler emits library calls to perform the arithmetic). So it's not a real problem even on embedded systems (ARM only added 64-bit support in the ARMv8 instruction set - and only in the high-end A (applications) profile processors - the lower end R (real-time) and M (microcontroller) profiles are still ARMv7 only).
However, even those compiled with 64-bit time_t aren't necessarily safe - you'd probably find most of them assume it's still a 32-bit quantity and end up storing it as such - ignoring the compiler warnings or casting to get rid of them. So even programs of today with 64-bit time_t's won't necessarily make it past 2038 either.
And if stuff like that is done, recompiling does diddly - the bug will still strike despite a 64-bit everything. Hell, someone may have decided during the conversio nto increase the timestamp size from 32 to 64 bit, but didn't realize someone squashed it down to 32-bit upstream.
the funny part is that on one hand you have users trying to protect their privacy while marketers are trying to actively exploit it. from what i have read on forbes (links here and here) graph search is more for marketers rather than users. after all, which users care about searching for anything besides people on facebook?
and all of this is happening on the same website! so essentially facebook is now creating products/features which are basically opposing eachother.
it must be tough to work in privacy department at facebook. privacy at facebook is being slowly shoved aside in favor of the marketers. and we all know how this story plays out.
It's actually quite easy, one you realize that online privacy is a myth perpetrated by those who want to sell your information.
There is no "online privacy", and even the simple act of "friends only" can still mean "everyone" (as Mark Zuckerberg's sister found out - there was nothing wrong with her settings. Just one of her "friends" decided to re-tweet the photo to the world).
Online "privacy" is an illusion created to get people to share stuff they wouldn't otherwise, thinking they have control over it. Well, think of it this way - everything you put on facebook, google+, twitter, etc? Try doing the same thing - except as an email to your friends. It's the same effect, your email with your information is "friends only", but nothing stops them from forwarding it to the entire world or posting it on their blog or whatever.
The smart ones online realize this, realize that "don't post online what you don't want the world to know" still applies, and carefully crafts an online persona that reflects their desired image. No drunken photos (or going out with friends with a propensity to do so), photos in neutral settings or "doing community work" or other stuff, etc.
Merchant accounts aren't too different from what Paypal does in the end - except retailers are often forbidden by contracts to speak about it.
The other thing is, the average Joe cannot get a merchant account, so accepting credit cards is impossible (they often have minimum transactions per month of minimum amount to qualify, else you get the high rate account). Paypal does, however, let the average Joe do that, so if you're running a small shop and can't qualify, Paypal is pretty much your only option.
Especially if you want to sell online (imagine how online auctions go if you can't pay via credit card).
The problem is, most sellers just assume that it's like a cash account and Paypal will hide al lthe fees and crap from them. But given a chargeback can occur easily 6 months from the transaction date, and by default the credit cards refund the money unless the seller can prove the transaction (at which point it's paid back), well, most people are in for a surprise.
I suppose one could take cash or cheques sent through the mail. I'm sure that's viable in this day and age of buying stuff and getting it the next day.
They will fire you for taking an uncooked patty out of the store. It is a fireable offense, even if your buddy pays for a burger and you send it out the drive through. All the counts come out right. You're still fired if they catch you.
Makes a lot of sense, actually. Because the raw uncooked beef can cause some serious diseases and the last thing anyone ones is to give a customer e. coli or other obnoxious disease (these are easily gotten rid of by proper cooking).
An uncooked patty has no guarantee that it will be cooked right, so from a food safety and liability issue, letting the uncooked patty out the door should be a firing offense because it's a really dangerous thing to do.
This is different from the store as the store you expect uncooked meats and are expected to properly cook them. A restaurant or fast food joint, you expected cooked food.
The only irony is that the readership of Slashdot is well in the affirmative for freedom of citizens, gun ownership, freedom from censorship and tyranny, yet some how manages to be split on the idea of having some corporate entity decide what can and can't do in the name of malware prevention.
I think it's due ot direct exposure. Most of those rights get abused by an irresponsible few (who often ruin it for the responsible many).
Very few/.'ers have experienced the tragedy that strikes from say, irresponsible gun ownership (like loaded storing guns in an oven, or on the coffee table accessible to any kid walking by, nevermind mass shootings), or lived in countries where censorship and tyranny are common (because they won't be able to get/. typically), and such.
However, most/. users HAVE experienced the direct effects of malware - spam, DDoS attacks, etc. And they know most users don't care about computers enough to maintain them or such. Being somewhat pragmatic people, learning all about the ins and outs of a computer is similar to learning the ins and outs of a car and eventually being able to be a shadetree mechanic (which we know isn't true of the vast majority of drivers). Also being pragmatic, said/. users don't really want to travel around to their family member's houses and fix their computers, either, so they wish to have a simple solution to save themselves and do everyone else a favor.
Probably also due to the fact most/.'ers think everyone else is similar to them with similar goals - if you own a gun, you'd take care in storing it and ensuring you're trained and licensed and all that. Or that you'll watch what you say so that it's defensible (also why most have a disdain for those who publish their whole lives online and seeing it bite them in the ass because it gets used as evidence or reason to be denied employment).
Basically the/. profile is that of a reasonably responsible person who has enough common sense to realize when things are dangerous (e.g., loaded guns in the house) and avoid them as much as possible.
What about those of us that do not want to participate in these things? At what point will it become awkward to say state I don't use Facebook, or will it just become some terrible social stigma::whisper::"He doesn't have a social account.."::/whisper::
Just create an account then. Just because you have an account doesn't mean you're forced to provide it with personal information. Or forced to actually USE it. Facebook has no power to compel you to post all your photos on it, or to post every little thing that happened on your day, or whatever.
My account is pretty barren - I just use it every now and again to do a few things, but there's very little information on there. I don't do games, I don't do status updates, I don't do pokes, I do nothing.
It's just like Google. Despite Google asking me for my phone number every time I log in, I just hunt for the skip button (which I have to admit is getting increasingly hard - I might just have to use my Google Voice number).
When the iPhone came out, there was no third-party native apps. People were expected to build web apps.
And Apple still expects people to do so - they could choose to make an app, or choose to do it as a web "app". The latter is completely free from Apple's app store policies - no 30%, no restrictions, no approvals, etc.
Hell, Apple was one of the first promoters of HTML5 to do stuff - first as a Flash alternative, but also adding things like sensor support (accellerometer, compass, gyros, even GPS) so web apps can act like native ones.
Heck, GMail went to use HTML5 local storage to give the webapp version a "native" feel and speed.
Anyhow, it's not a big surprise - Apple lets through a lot of competitors - like say, Google. Hell, Google stopped supporting their old GMail method using IMAP and the iOS mail.app and used their own Gmail app instead. (Apple still maintains a GMail accessor, though).
With companies like Google or Coke or Sony, is it one company....say Sony is a Japanese company, that incorporates businesses in many countries which are owned by the Japanese company, and just funnel the money back into the Japanese parent corp? What is to stop the independent company from doing its own thing or making different decisions?
Or in the case of Google, how do they have say over the UK iteration of the company? Are they all controlled by the same people? What are the relationships?
It's not usually one company. It's usually a brand new company that takes on the name, e.g., Sony Corporation of American, Inc. Or Sony Canada.
What keeps them in line? The fact that the parent company provided practically all the capital and is the primary shareholder (usually the only - the owner), and can easily go and dump the executives at will. Plus, the people who head the company generally are loyal to the parent company (having worked for them before - it's very rarely a brand new person hired just for the position), mavericks typically don't get to head expansions in new companies.
Profits aren't typically forwarded to the parent - they're often held by the subsidiary to take advantage of taxes. It's why Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Google, Cisco and all the other big multinational US companies are asking the president for a "tax holiday" to repatriate money held offshore (because if the money is moved to the parent, the parent then has to pay taxes on it, and maybe even on the transfer itself).
For Google - it means well trusted Google employees are being sent over to start up Google UK (this can happen if someone wants to move back to the UK, for example, or wants to move to the UK), and Google Inc will basically put up a whole pile of money needed to start up Google UK (to sign leases or buy land and get the place renovated and infrastructure and such). Such money will probably come from Google's Irish subsidiary which is holding a lot of the cash.
Suppose I teleport an object from a height of 1000 feet to a height of 0 feet about sea level. There has been a loss of gravitational potential energy -- where does this energy end up? Conversely, if teleporting the object to a higher elevation, how is the gravitational PE imparted to the system?
Easy - it's absorbed/used by the transporter device.
Lets say Kirk asks Scotty to beam him up. The Enterprise's transporter then takes Kirk's atoms and moves them to the Enterprise in orbit. Because transporter has to move the atoms up, it puts in the required energy to move the atoms to the new PE level.
The reverse happens when you beam down. I'm sure you can figure out if you want to go from the top of a mountain to ground level by a transporter in a third location.
That assumes the atoms transported are the same ones.
If they aren't, using quantum mechanics to do an entangling based transport (e.g., two transporters contain a bunch of entangled atoms already in place and the "scanner" reads your atoms and finds appropriate entangled atoms and modifies them appropriately. The information on which atoms went where is then transmitted and hte receiver end picks the right atoms and reassembles you - not faster than light as the list containing your atoms is still transmitted at the speed of light). In this case, the energy was put into the system because the atoms were pre-entangled.
Hard disks - lots of them come from Thailand. Easier to ensure that sensitive technology is kept in-house and not leaked to up-and-coming competitors.
A lot of hard drives are made in China too these days. After the flood, it seems the Chinese factories have been commissioned to build more of the hard drives. And these aren't just taking the drive and stuffing it in an enclosure, these are the actual mechanisms themselves. From low end to top end hich capacity drives as well.
And in the end, hard drive manufacture is high capital and low reward, so stealing technology isn't that big a deal.
It's why the market for spinning rust has consolidated down to two companies - making the precision components and all that is very specialized and the final product doesn't cost that much in the end.
Or to put it another way - making hard drives is hard. It requires special factories with clean rooms assembling precision mechanical bits together, solder on parts, and the final result at the end has to have a wholesale cost of $50 for a 2TB drive or so.
Making an SSD is much easier - all you need is access to electronic components and be able to solder them together. It's why there's only two hard drive manufacturers these days, but dozens of other companies that make SSDs - because anyone can stick electronic components together on a circuitboard.
Marketshare is the goal of computing devices where the largest ecosystem wins.
"Profitability" is a red herring for fanbois.
For an ecosystem to thrive and survive, it needs marketshare (enough to sustain it), but it also needs money.
If you take the situation like on PCs where Windows became the dominant OS, you see the problems. Remember stuff like shareware which was extremely popular? It pretty much died out because Windows users became cheap and stopped paying for it, leading to demoware/crapware and these days, adware. However, the concept didn't die out - Mac users, all 10 of them practically, still have a flourishing ecosystem because they were more apt to opening their wallets and paying for it.
Of course, the final nail would've been open-source, but I digress.
For mobile, we have healthy competition. We have Android at the top with over 60%, iOS with 35%, and Windows Phone 8, Blackberry, etc. with the leftovers. You would think as a developer that Android would be the best platform to write for, after all it has the most. But most of those users bought cheap smartphones - the $0-for-10 type deals in the end where the carriers are literally throwing phones at people. The end result is that Google Play doesn't really make much money - the only way to make money thorugh Google Play is to put in ads, lots of ads, and submit your contacts and other personal information to be spammed and such. (After all, developer money made through Google Play is basically a joke).
It's why the Amazon App Store, the bane of developers for being too Apple-like in its approvals process, and too bullyish for having the free app a day thing (like Amazon is to distributors) ends up making devs much more money, despite being a much smaller proportion of the market.
iOS makes devs a lot of money - turns out those same people who give Apple the profit tend to have a bit of spending money in their pockets and end up spending a lot more money in the ecosystem.
Blackberry is just an anomaly, but it surpassed the Apple App Store sometime in the past couple of years.
The other thing is - what is the biggest ecosystem? Android, for having the most devices, or as console people like to say, also most likely the worst attach rate? Or iOS, which has less devices, but higher attach rate? Or how it seems gaming has moved to consoles, which have way smaller markets than PC gamers (close to a billion on PC vs. couple hundred million tops for console), but the latter being far more profitable?
Or to consider it another way - while PC makers were all busy running themselves into the ground (see IBM, which exited the market, and HP, now in trouble, and Dell, who can see the writing on the wall). Hell, while they were all killing themselves over netbooks ($300 PCs seem to be the limit of profitability - everyone was trying to make more profitable $400+ netbooks), Apple released the iPad, which cost WAY more than any netbook (and you could probably buy two netbooks for what the iPad cost), but now PC makers were scrambling and tripping over themselves to release tablets.
In the end, the platform that makes money wins. Being biggest helps, like we saw with Windows and having 90% marketshare and everyone was forced to develop for it because to do otherwise was foolhardy (though, if you're a small developer, going for the niches like Mac would prove lucrative, like Blackberry is right now).
Of course, with Android being so big, the advantage is the apps being ported from iOS has increased significanty. Though that's usually after tapping out the iOS market first.
I know that lawn mowers, should you leave gas in them for a while, will gain a 'coating' that gums up the fuel needle in the carburetor. Cleaning out the carb is a true pain and costs a lot to get a mechanic to clean/replace. Would this kind of coating over that small and delicate part help ease/eliminate sticking?
Gasoline is volatile. It will evaporate quite rapidly at room temperature.
However, the gas you get from the pump has a bunch of additives and other stuff added to it - detergents to keep your engine clean (mandated by law, actually), as well as heavier hydrocarbons that aren't as volatile and such. So what happens is when you leave your lawnmower over the season is the light stuff evaporates out, leaving the heavy gunk behind - detergents, additives, and more importantly, varnish and the like which gum up the tiny passages in your carb.
Basicaly before putting it away, at the very least put it away without any gas in the tank - run it all the way empty which should clear the tank and most of the carb. You can optionally choose to drain the leftover out of the carb, too.
Fanboi should read something other than MacNews... Samsung has been outselling Apple for quite a while, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Your unreferenced claim is, in fact, incorrect - Apple has sold more iPhones (all models) than Samsung GALAXY phones. Not all Samsung smartphones. Samsung has led the smartphone sales for over a year and is predicted to continue to do so for the next 5 years.
Well, Dell ships more computers than Apple, as well. Samsung ships tons more phones, yes, but not many of them are their flagship ones. Every Samsung smartphone is called a Galaxy something, and they range from the completely free crap phones with crappy screens, to the S-III. Heck, Samsung just introduced their S-II something with a huge screen but... 800x480 screen.
So yes, Samsung better ship more phones, because they have probably over 50 smartphones in their entire product line, including ones that run Windows Phone, amongst others. Apple only had 3 models, 2 of which are laughable just to have a price point. Of course, Dell has a similar situation - they probably have hundreds of PCs, while Apple has what, 7 different ones?
These days, Apple's not about marketshare. Just the part of the market they want to make money on. (It helps that that part of the market is willing to spend money as well, because it's why iOS App Store is #2 in developer money (#1 is Blackberry, believe it or not), followed by Amazon App Store at #3 (about 50% of the Apple App Store). Distant last is Google Play - under 50% of what the Amazon app store brings.)
There are a few culture thieves (publishers) that have been taking expired copyright/public domain stuff and tacking on a new copyright to it. As if this minimal sweat of the brow is enough to re-copyright.
Actually, it's only the part the publishers add that's copyrighted. If you take a public domain work, and only repackage it, it's actually not under copyright at all, only the repackaged part of it is. If they add a foreword or analysis, that too is copyrighted. But the public domain work is still in public domain and someone could take that work and republish it.
Of course, publishers don't want you knowing that... so they slap a "All rights reserved. Copyright 2013 blah blah blah" hopin gyou assume it's the entire thing and not whatever value add they put on.
Otherwise stuff like Project Gutenberg really would have a hard time adding new content as the editions they often use are technically under copyright (because finding an old enough edition is difficult).
Large size Lithium batteries (over 8 to 25 grams of lithium) are not even allowed on aircraft as baggage or carry on, due to the propensity to burn when shorted or punctured, but some how Boeing talked the FAA into certifying this plane with these batteries to save a weight. Bad enough that these batteries are prone to catch fire when shorted, but Lithium fires are almost impossible to put out with the fire suppression systems found on planes (page 9). How Boeing talked the FAA into allowing this on the plane (in multiple locations) is beyond me.
Not just that, actually. Lithion reacts with aluminum, rapidly causing the oxidation of the latter. Basically put lithium next to aluminum (which builds a coat of protective oxide instantly), and the lithium works through the aluminum oxide and exposes the bare aluminum, which oxidizes.
And most aircraft are built out of aluminum. a small amount of lithium escaping, even if it doesn't catch on fire, will rapidly eat through the aluminum structure.
We have some terminal Apps at work. I have mine with a black background... You will be surprised how many complain about that black background color, saying how hard it is to see. I expect most of the bitching and moaning isn't that it is harder to see, but what they are use too.
There is a legitimacy to that - white-on-black generally causes the black to "creep" into the white font, so a designer who uses the color scheme generally has to increase the font size and/or bold it so it retains the same apparent visibility as it would if it was black-on-white. It's a curious optical illusion. If you use a very skinny font where the body is a thin line, then white on black turns it to a very low contrast grey-on-black.
It's something to do with black - like that optical illusion where you have black squares arranged in a 4x4 grid, and a thin white line between them and how the intersections of the white lines appeared a grey dot.
Unless the user is in Europe. I don't see why many users would be loath to give up their phone numbers anyway, they've already given up photographs, locations, areas of residence, email addresses, basically everything else.
Hell, for a time Facebook required you to give them a number to send you a text if you wanted to avoid seeing a captcha every other click. So I'm not really sure that people wouldn't have shared a phone number with Facebook to begin with.
It's not quite like Google's request for your phone number, but it was one way to avoid the captcha.
People who do gaming have widescreen TV's and monitors now. The days of teenagers gaming on tiny screens are over now. If they are looking at tiny screens its because they're busy cyberbullying their peers,not gaming. Too little too late.
No, they're playing games on their phones with ever-larger (5"/6"+) screens. Hell, even a 3.5" screen is considered "tiny" (which is why Apple had to go 4" on the iPhone 5, and even people consider that too damn small).
US banks are so uncaring about user's security. Even in third-world countries like Indonesia, all major banks have incorporated token/OTP (or at least SMS) for all personal/business accounts.
That's because it costs money. In North America, it's all about the money - it costs more to issue everyone a challenge-response token (not OTP) than to just pay up whatever fraud happens.
And no, OTP keys are useless unless they're challenge response based. Because these same phish sites often do MITM attacks on the real account, popping up an OTP request and faking the responses as appropriate while they siphon money out of your account.
A challenge-response one would require you to enter in two things: the amount to be transferred, and the challenge code, which get key-hashed (e.g., HMAC) to a response code. This protects you because a site doing a transfer would have to tell you how much it's transferring. And which can be used for OTP if the amount is set to zero (so the user who changes the password can be requested for the key as well). So if you're forced to "change your password" or "verify your identify" and you have ot enter in an amount, it's a red flag since the actions don't involve the transfer of money.
When Christmas shopping, I saw a "Words with Friends" board game. I turned to my girlfriend and said, "It's like the board game Scrabble, but online, and then taken offline and made into a board game."
WWF has different letter scores and different positions for the double/triple letter/word score blocks.
To novice players, it's not a huge deal. To expert players, it is because a lot of strategy involves the correct placment, and knowing where every bonus is and point value of letters is critical to getting high scores.
For aircraft, the real reason is lithium + aluminum leads to rapid oxidation of the aluminum. Basically a small blob of lithium in contact with aluminum will eat a hole in the aluminum. That's why there's lithium restrictions. The containment vessel has to be made of another metal (steel, normally) so that the lithium will not come into contact with any aluminum structure.
I see small comment numbers on "tech" and large comment numbers on "politics". If it sounds like something you'd see screencasted on Hak5 or audio podcasted on hacker public radio theres like 50 comments, if it sounds like something you'd see on fox news or dr phil its got about 200 comments. If its the kind of thing the lamestream media would interrupt dancing with the stars or a football game to report live, you'll get about 500 comments.
Well, tech generally falls into one of two categories - "cool" and "uncool".
Political stories are, by their very nature, very polarized. This site attracts people from a variety of political viewpoints - libertarian, anarchists, socialist, communist, capitalist, free market, etc. It's natural they all have conflicting viewpoints because that's what differentiates one political view from another.
And then there's politics in tech as well - Google, Apple, Microsoft - they all have their fair share of haters, fanboys, and will always attract a bunch of trolls to bait both sides.
Heck, one common irony I see is how everyone complains when "non tech people" refuse to "learn about the technology they use" and ask others to help fix it (usually the/. poster about helping friends and family). On the other hand, the same tired old arguments get brought up over and over again because said posters fail to actually learn stuff that's not tech related (e.g., IP law is a good one - how many times do people have to confuse trademarks, patents (design and utility), and copyright?), or repeat the same old crap that's been debunked for years (e.g., "Will never buy from iTunes - Amazon only because it's DRM free" despite iTunes being DRM-free for many years now as well).
Heck, I'm sure we can compare the/. popultaion with the general population and similarities - mechanics complaining about "walled gardens" of modern cars, mechanics complaining about drivers not knowing anything about their cars, etc.
"deployed years later".. isn't there a risk that the equipment would be obsolete? Field equipment is changing rather rapidly in this day and age, especially electronics.
Depends. It could be stuff like supplies (fuel/oil/grease, food, ammo) which while having a shelf life, can be stored for a bit and unlikely to be obsoleted quickly. This is the most likely case as having pre-positioned supplies at the ready gives you a strong advantage out of the gate by being able to resupply without having a nearby resupply vessel.
Less likely are general equipment - since it often depends on the mission and can be obsolete.
Supplies generally are the most desirable to preposition - after all, cutitng off supply lines is a very common military tactic, and battles have been lost (or won, depending on which side) when a cut off group runs out of supplies.
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Yeah, it seems ye olde camcorder, while costing maybe a bit more than a decent webcam (still, you can find an HD camcorder on clearance for under $200) would fulfill the need quite nicely.
If it's an HDTV, use an HDMI cable and you have a practically zero lag reading magnifier.
I'm sure a digital camera can serve the purpose just as well too. Maybe even an old smartphone with a rear camera and "flash".
On a similar note - what are the laws regarding projectile weapons in Germany?
How are your relations to your neighbours?
Actually, banks, and such already ran into Y2K problems in the 70s when long term loans starting overflowing them. For them the Y2K scenario had many years to be fixed slowly (mostly a continuous updating thing - as things broke, they fixed it) so there was no big rush for them as they were experienced in such issues.
If there are any 2038 issues, the banks have already been ahead of the curve and seeing them in 2008. Hell, a good conspiracy theory....
time_t has also been 64 bit for a number of years now (you don't need a 64-bit system to deal with 64-bit numbers - it's just dealing with them is a lot slower as the compiler emits library calls to perform the arithmetic). So it's not a real problem even on embedded systems (ARM only added 64-bit support in the ARMv8 instruction set - and only in the high-end A (applications) profile processors - the lower end R (real-time) and M (microcontroller) profiles are still ARMv7 only).
However, even those compiled with 64-bit time_t aren't necessarily safe - you'd probably find most of them assume it's still a 32-bit quantity and end up storing it as such - ignoring the compiler warnings or casting to get rid of them. So even programs of today with 64-bit time_t's won't necessarily make it past 2038 either.
And if stuff like that is done, recompiling does diddly - the bug will still strike despite a 64-bit everything. Hell, someone may have decided during the conversio nto increase the timestamp size from 32 to 64 bit, but didn't realize someone squashed it down to 32-bit upstream.
It's actually quite easy, one you realize that online privacy is a myth perpetrated by those who want to sell your information.
There is no "online privacy", and even the simple act of "friends only" can still mean "everyone" (as Mark Zuckerberg's sister found out - there was nothing wrong with her settings. Just one of her "friends" decided to re-tweet the photo to the world).
Online "privacy" is an illusion created to get people to share stuff they wouldn't otherwise, thinking they have control over it. Well, think of it this way - everything you put on facebook, google+, twitter, etc? Try doing the same thing - except as an email to your friends. It's the same effect, your email with your information is "friends only", but nothing stops them from forwarding it to the entire world or posting it on their blog or whatever.
The smart ones online realize this, realize that "don't post online what you don't want the world to know" still applies, and carefully crafts an online persona that reflects their desired image. No drunken photos (or going out with friends with a propensity to do so), photos in neutral settings or "doing community work" or other stuff, etc.
That's the problem, really.
Merchant accounts aren't too different from what Paypal does in the end - except retailers are often forbidden by contracts to speak about it.
The other thing is, the average Joe cannot get a merchant account, so accepting credit cards is impossible (they often have minimum transactions per month of minimum amount to qualify, else you get the high rate account). Paypal does, however, let the average Joe do that, so if you're running a small shop and can't qualify, Paypal is pretty much your only option.
Especially if you want to sell online (imagine how online auctions go if you can't pay via credit card).
The problem is, most sellers just assume that it's like a cash account and Paypal will hide al lthe fees and crap from them. But given a chargeback can occur easily 6 months from the transaction date, and by default the credit cards refund the money unless the seller can prove the transaction (at which point it's paid back), well, most people are in for a surprise.
I suppose one could take cash or cheques sent through the mail. I'm sure that's viable in this day and age of buying stuff and getting it the next day.
They will fire you for taking an uncooked patty out of the store. It is a fireable offense, even if your buddy pays for a burger and you send it out the drive through. All the counts come out right. You're still fired if they catch you.
Makes a lot of sense, actually. Because the raw uncooked beef can cause some serious diseases and the last thing anyone ones is to give a customer e. coli or other obnoxious disease (these are easily gotten rid of by proper cooking).
An uncooked patty has no guarantee that it will be cooked right, so from a food safety and liability issue, letting the uncooked patty out the door should be a firing offense because it's a really dangerous thing to do.
This is different from the store as the store you expect uncooked meats and are expected to properly cook them. A restaurant or fast food joint, you expected cooked food.
I think it's due ot direct exposure. Most of those rights get abused by an irresponsible few (who often ruin it for the responsible many).
Very few /.'ers have experienced the tragedy that strikes from say, irresponsible gun ownership (like loaded storing guns in an oven, or on the coffee table accessible to any kid walking by, nevermind mass shootings), or lived in countries where censorship and tyranny are common (because they won't be able to get /. typically), and such.
However, most /. users HAVE experienced the direct effects of malware - spam, DDoS attacks, etc. And they know most users don't care about computers enough to maintain them or such. Being somewhat pragmatic people, learning all about the ins and outs of a computer is similar to learning the ins and outs of a car and eventually being able to be a shadetree mechanic (which we know isn't true of the vast majority of drivers). Also being pragmatic, said /. users don't really want to travel around to their family member's houses and fix their computers, either, so they wish to have a simple solution to save themselves and do everyone else a favor.
Probably also due to the fact most /.'ers think everyone else is similar to them with similar goals - if you own a gun, you'd take care in storing it and ensuring you're trained and licensed and all that. Or that you'll watch what you say so that it's defensible (also why most have a disdain for those who publish their whole lives online and seeing it bite them in the ass because it gets used as evidence or reason to be denied employment).
Basically the /. profile is that of a reasonably responsible person who has enough common sense to realize when things are dangerous (e.g., loaded guns in the house) and avoid them as much as possible.
Just create an account then. Just because you have an account doesn't mean you're forced to provide it with personal information. Or forced to actually USE it. Facebook has no power to compel you to post all your photos on it, or to post every little thing that happened on your day, or whatever.
My account is pretty barren - I just use it every now and again to do a few things, but there's very little information on there. I don't do games, I don't do status updates, I don't do pokes, I do nothing.
It's just like Google. Despite Google asking me for my phone number every time I log in, I just hunt for the skip button (which I have to admit is getting increasingly hard - I might just have to use my Google Voice number).
And Apple still expects people to do so - they could choose to make an app, or choose to do it as a web "app". The latter is completely free from Apple's app store policies - no 30%, no restrictions, no approvals, etc.
Hell, Apple was one of the first promoters of HTML5 to do stuff - first as a Flash alternative, but also adding things like sensor support (accellerometer, compass, gyros, even GPS) so web apps can act like native ones.
Heck, GMail went to use HTML5 local storage to give the webapp version a "native" feel and speed.
Anyhow, it's not a big surprise - Apple lets through a lot of competitors - like say, Google. Hell, Google stopped supporting their old GMail method using IMAP and the iOS mail.app and used their own Gmail app instead. (Apple still maintains a GMail accessor, though).
It's not usually one company. It's usually a brand new company that takes on the name, e.g., Sony Corporation of American, Inc. Or Sony Canada.
What keeps them in line? The fact that the parent company provided practically all the capital and is the primary shareholder (usually the only - the owner), and can easily go and dump the executives at will. Plus, the people who head the company generally are loyal to the parent company (having worked for them before - it's very rarely a brand new person hired just for the position), mavericks typically don't get to head expansions in new companies.
Profits aren't typically forwarded to the parent - they're often held by the subsidiary to take advantage of taxes. It's why Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Google, Cisco and all the other big multinational US companies are asking the president for a "tax holiday" to repatriate money held offshore (because if the money is moved to the parent, the parent then has to pay taxes on it, and maybe even on the transfer itself).
For Google - it means well trusted Google employees are being sent over to start up Google UK (this can happen if someone wants to move back to the UK, for example, or wants to move to the UK), and Google Inc will basically put up a whole pile of money needed to start up Google UK (to sign leases or buy land and get the place renovated and infrastructure and such). Such money will probably come from Google's Irish subsidiary which is holding a lot of the cash.
Easy - it's absorbed/used by the transporter device.
Lets say Kirk asks Scotty to beam him up. The Enterprise's transporter then takes Kirk's atoms and moves them to the Enterprise in orbit. Because transporter has to move the atoms up, it puts in the required energy to move the atoms to the new PE level.
The reverse happens when you beam down. I'm sure you can figure out if you want to go from the top of a mountain to ground level by a transporter in a third location.
That assumes the atoms transported are the same ones.
If they aren't, using quantum mechanics to do an entangling based transport (e.g., two transporters contain a bunch of entangled atoms already in place and the "scanner" reads your atoms and finds appropriate entangled atoms and modifies them appropriately. The information on which atoms went where is then transmitted and hte receiver end picks the right atoms and reassembles you - not faster than light as the list containing your atoms is still transmitted at the speed of light). In this case, the energy was put into the system because the atoms were pre-entangled.
A lot of hard drives are made in China too these days. After the flood, it seems the Chinese factories have been commissioned to build more of the hard drives. And these aren't just taking the drive and stuffing it in an enclosure, these are the actual mechanisms themselves. From low end to top end hich capacity drives as well.
And in the end, hard drive manufacture is high capital and low reward, so stealing technology isn't that big a deal.
It's why the market for spinning rust has consolidated down to two companies - making the precision components and all that is very specialized and the final product doesn't cost that much in the end.
Or to put it another way - making hard drives is hard. It requires special factories with clean rooms assembling precision mechanical bits together, solder on parts, and the final result at the end has to have a wholesale cost of $50 for a 2TB drive or so.
Making an SSD is much easier - all you need is access to electronic components and be able to solder them together. It's why there's only two hard drive manufacturers these days, but dozens of other companies that make SSDs - because anyone can stick electronic components together on a circuitboard.
For an ecosystem to thrive and survive, it needs marketshare (enough to sustain it), but it also needs money.
If you take the situation like on PCs where Windows became the dominant OS, you see the problems. Remember stuff like shareware which was extremely popular? It pretty much died out because Windows users became cheap and stopped paying for it, leading to demoware/crapware and these days, adware. However, the concept didn't die out - Mac users, all 10 of them practically, still have a flourishing ecosystem because they were more apt to opening their wallets and paying for it.
Of course, the final nail would've been open-source, but I digress.
For mobile, we have healthy competition. We have Android at the top with over 60%, iOS with 35%, and Windows Phone 8, Blackberry, etc. with the leftovers. You would think as a developer that Android would be the best platform to write for, after all it has the most. But most of those users bought cheap smartphones - the $0-for-10 type deals in the end where the carriers are literally throwing phones at people. The end result is that Google Play doesn't really make much money - the only way to make money thorugh Google Play is to put in ads, lots of ads, and submit your contacts and other personal information to be spammed and such. (After all, developer money made through Google Play is basically a joke).
It's why the Amazon App Store, the bane of developers for being too Apple-like in its approvals process, and too bullyish for having the free app a day thing (like Amazon is to distributors) ends up making devs much more money, despite being a much smaller proportion of the market.
iOS makes devs a lot of money - turns out those same people who give Apple the profit tend to have a bit of spending money in their pockets and end up spending a lot more money in the ecosystem.
Blackberry is just an anomaly, but it surpassed the Apple App Store sometime in the past couple of years.
The other thing is - what is the biggest ecosystem? Android, for having the most devices, or as console people like to say, also most likely the worst attach rate? Or iOS, which has less devices, but higher attach rate? Or how it seems gaming has moved to consoles, which have way smaller markets than PC gamers (close to a billion on PC vs. couple hundred million tops for console), but the latter being far more profitable?
Or to consider it another way - while PC makers were all busy running themselves into the ground (see IBM, which exited the market, and HP, now in trouble, and Dell, who can see the writing on the wall). Hell, while they were all killing themselves over netbooks ($300 PCs seem to be the limit of profitability - everyone was trying to make more profitable $400+ netbooks), Apple released the iPad, which cost WAY more than any netbook (and you could probably buy two netbooks for what the iPad cost), but now PC makers were scrambling and tripping over themselves to release tablets.
In the end, the platform that makes money wins. Being biggest helps, like we saw with Windows and having 90% marketshare and everyone was forced to develop for it because to do otherwise was foolhardy (though, if you're a small developer, going for the niches like Mac would prove lucrative, like Blackberry is right now).
Of course, with Android being so big, the advantage is the apps being ported from iOS has increased significanty. Though that's usually after tapping out the iOS market first.
Gasoline is volatile. It will evaporate quite rapidly at room temperature.
However, the gas you get from the pump has a bunch of additives and other stuff added to it - detergents to keep your engine clean (mandated by law, actually), as well as heavier hydrocarbons that aren't as volatile and such. So what happens is when you leave your lawnmower over the season is the light stuff evaporates out, leaving the heavy gunk behind - detergents, additives, and more importantly, varnish and the like which gum up the tiny passages in your carb.
Basicaly before putting it away, at the very least put it away without any gas in the tank - run it all the way empty which should clear the tank and most of the carb. You can optionally choose to drain the leftover out of the carb, too.
Well, Dell ships more computers than Apple, as well. Samsung ships tons more phones, yes, but not many of them are their flagship ones. Every Samsung smartphone is called a Galaxy something, and they range from the completely free crap phones with crappy screens, to the S-III. Heck, Samsung just introduced their S-II something with a huge screen but... 800x480 screen.
So yes, Samsung better ship more phones, because they have probably over 50 smartphones in their entire product line, including ones that run Windows Phone, amongst others. Apple only had 3 models, 2 of which are laughable just to have a price point. Of course, Dell has a similar situation - they probably have hundreds of PCs, while Apple has what, 7 different ones?
These days, Apple's not about marketshare. Just the part of the market they want to make money on. (It helps that that part of the market is willing to spend money as well, because it's why iOS App Store is #2 in developer money (#1 is Blackberry, believe it or not), followed by Amazon App Store at #3 (about 50% of the Apple App Store). Distant last is Google Play - under 50% of what the Amazon app store brings.)
Actually, it's only the part the publishers add that's copyrighted. If you take a public domain work, and only repackage it, it's actually not under copyright at all, only the repackaged part of it is. If they add a foreword or analysis, that too is copyrighted. But the public domain work is still in public domain and someone could take that work and republish it.
Of course, publishers don't want you knowing that... so they slap a "All rights reserved. Copyright 2013 blah blah blah" hopin gyou assume it's the entire thing and not whatever value add they put on.
Otherwise stuff like Project Gutenberg really would have a hard time adding new content as the editions they often use are technically under copyright (because finding an old enough edition is difficult).
Not just that, actually. Lithion reacts with aluminum, rapidly causing the oxidation of the latter. Basically put lithium next to aluminum (which builds a coat of protective oxide instantly), and the lithium works through the aluminum oxide and exposes the bare aluminum, which oxidizes.
And most aircraft are built out of aluminum. a small amount of lithium escaping, even if it doesn't catch on fire, will rapidly eat through the aluminum structure.
There is a legitimacy to that - white-on-black generally causes the black to "creep" into the white font, so a designer who uses the color scheme generally has to increase the font size and/or bold it so it retains the same apparent visibility as it would if it was black-on-white. It's a curious optical illusion. If you use a very skinny font where the body is a thin line, then white on black turns it to a very low contrast grey-on-black.
It's something to do with black - like that optical illusion where you have black squares arranged in a 4x4 grid, and a thin white line between them and how the intersections of the white lines appeared a grey dot.
Hell, for a time Facebook required you to give them a number to send you a text if you wanted to avoid seeing a captcha every other click. So I'm not really sure that people wouldn't have shared a phone number with Facebook to begin with.
It's not quite like Google's request for your phone number, but it was one way to avoid the captcha.
No, they're playing games on their phones with ever-larger (5"/6"+) screens. Hell, even a 3.5" screen is considered "tiny" (which is why Apple had to go 4" on the iPhone 5, and even people consider that too damn small).
That's because it costs money. In North America, it's all about the money - it costs more to issue everyone a challenge-response token (not OTP) than to just pay up whatever fraud happens.
And no, OTP keys are useless unless they're challenge response based. Because these same phish sites often do MITM attacks on the real account, popping up an OTP request and faking the responses as appropriate while they siphon money out of your account.
A challenge-response one would require you to enter in two things: the amount to be transferred, and the challenge code, which get key-hashed (e.g., HMAC) to a response code. This protects you because a site doing a transfer would have to tell you how much it's transferring. And which can be used for OTP if the amount is set to zero (so the user who changes the password can be requested for the key as well). So if you're forced to "change your password" or "verify your identify" and you have ot enter in an amount, it's a red flag since the actions don't involve the transfer of money.
WWF has different letter scores and different positions for the double/triple letter/word score blocks.
To novice players, it's not a huge deal. To expert players, it is because a lot of strategy involves the correct placment, and knowing where every bonus is and point value of letters is critical to getting high scores.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/tools-toys/words-with-friends-not-your-parents-scrabble
This one contains a comparison of Scrabble vs. WWF tile values:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/tools-toys/data-mining-scrabble
WWF apparently is tweaked in such a way that the balance of the game can shift since some tiles have higher point values so the underdog can catch up.
For aircraft, the real reason is lithium + aluminum leads to rapid oxidation of the aluminum. Basically a small blob of lithium in contact with aluminum will eat a hole in the aluminum. That's why there's lithium restrictions. The containment vessel has to be made of another metal (steel, normally) so that the lithium will not come into contact with any aluminum structure.
Well, tech generally falls into one of two categories - "cool" and "uncool".
Political stories are, by their very nature, very polarized. This site attracts people from a variety of political viewpoints - libertarian, anarchists, socialist, communist, capitalist, free market, etc. It's natural they all have conflicting viewpoints because that's what differentiates one political view from another.
And then there's politics in tech as well - Google, Apple, Microsoft - they all have their fair share of haters, fanboys, and will always attract a bunch of trolls to bait both sides.
Heck, one common irony I see is how everyone complains when "non tech people" refuse to "learn about the technology they use" and ask others to help fix it (usually the /. poster about helping friends and family). On the other hand, the same tired old arguments get brought up over and over again because said posters fail to actually learn stuff that's not tech related (e.g., IP law is a good one - how many times do people have to confuse trademarks, patents (design and utility), and copyright?), or repeat the same old crap that's been debunked for years (e.g., "Will never buy from iTunes - Amazon only because it's DRM free" despite iTunes being DRM-free for many years now as well).
Heck, I'm sure we can compare the /. popultaion with the general population and similarities - mechanics complaining about "walled gardens" of modern cars, mechanics complaining about drivers not knowing anything about their cars, etc.
Depends. It could be stuff like supplies (fuel/oil/grease, food, ammo) which while having a shelf life, can be stored for a bit and unlikely to be obsoleted quickly. This is the most likely case as having pre-positioned supplies at the ready gives you a strong advantage out of the gate by being able to resupply without having a nearby resupply vessel.
Less likely are general equipment - since it often depends on the mission and can be obsolete.
Supplies generally are the most desirable to preposition - after all, cutitng off supply lines is a very common military tactic, and battles have been lost (or won, depending on which side) when a cut off group runs out of supplies.