Completely off-topic, but apparently it's almost impossible to join the mile high club in the US anymore after 9/11 slate has more info. If we cannot have sex on airplanes, than the terrorists have already won.
I think there are private GA flights that let you do this - basically one guy had a Piper with a bed instead of seats (and brand new bedsheets). You basically rented the plane and pilot, and they flew to 5500 feet or so for an hour or two.
Shredding the materials and degassing/compressing the foam. It doesn't sound like they're doing anything about refrigerant recovery, but they talk about the foam processing reducing greenhouse emissions.
Most likely refridgerant recovery is done ahead of the step where they recycle the rest of the first. It's trivial to do so it's probably one of the first things done as the gas can be under high pressure.
Analog-only radios are awfully limited though. Can they even send text-messages to each other? It could certainly be useful for them to be able to send text, photos, or see a map with everybody's location on it, for example. I don't know if they'll be getting, but it should be, the DoD has paid companies lots of money to work all this out over the years.
Yes, you can. Again, hams have done it.
Text messaging - packet radio. Operates on HF, VHF, UHF.
Photos - slow-scan TV. HF, VHF, UHF.
Locations - APRS (really just a special form of packet radio with GPS).
And none of this is new - most are relatively old and simple technology, over analog radio.
The best part is, the equipment is available now, relatively simple to understand, relatively cheap and easily available. Heck, there probably are handheld radios that support all the above with maybe a computer paired with it.
For better or worse, patents don't have to be functional to work. There's a patent out there from 1970 for a flying saucer powered by a fusion reactor with massive magnetic fields to direct the thrust. Feasible? Obviously not. Novel? Sure is.
You could've just used one of the many perpetual motion machine patents out there. So many that the patent office has long stopped granting them unless there's a working demonstration available.
They were exotic fast things, and they didn't always behave properly, but at least they were actual products. Isn't that the ostensible reason why companies exist, to make products?
While they don't make the chips themselves, they still do sell RDRAM.
In fact, it's been used in at least two generations of popular consoles. The PS2 had 32MiB of RDRAM in it. The PS3 has 256MiB of XDRDRAM (and 256MiB of GDDR3, I think).
Sony's gone RAMBUS for over a decade. The licensing fees alone for the PS2 and PS3 probably amount to a good chunk of their income.
Hopefully they've also banned TVs, VCRs, microwave ovens, cars, police and fire transmitters and church PA systems.
According to that Wired article, *all* electronics are basically banned - power cables have to be shielded, no WiFi at all, etc. Now, police/fire/etc radios, as public safety do trump the EM quiet-zone, but even then a lot of work goes into making sure the antennas don't interfere with the telescopes. Apparently something like a WiFi card can generate a strong enough signal that blows the amplifiers of the telescopes.
Of course, what I'd like is a blind test of these people - even the old grandma stating "it was the TV making me sick - the remote controlled my pain" is not an example (psychosomatic response). Add in some fancy blinking lights that have nothing to do with the test would help as well.
(And yes, if they blame WiFi for it, why don't they blame their microwave oven? That thing produces more leakage and they're often closer to it when it's on...).
If a company is sued by a patent holder and forced to pay licensing fees, and that patent is later invalidated, is that company entitled to reimbursement?
It depends. If they reach a settlement, then the terms of the settlement determine what happens if the patents are found invalid in the future. Since the terms of such settlements are often confidential, we'll never know.
For court-ordered settlements, most likely not, because if the patents were contested, the court will wait to see if the USPTO revokes those patents. If they're later overturned, well, it depends how good the lawyers are - perhaps they can wiggle some way of suing for that money back (the appeal avenue would've been lost).
Now, if a company is paying license fees, it too also depends on the licensing agreement - some will offer refunds (not a popular option, but depends on the customer), others partial, and of course, many none. A justification of that is that those who paid had a temporary advantage over those who didn't, so the license fees paid would've been made up by time-to-market.
Astronaut food doesn't have to last 10 years without refridgeration or heating, though. It only has to last a few months. Also, it can't be too liquid as liquids ball up and float away (they also break easily). Also, adding water isn't easy to do (lack of gravity means water doesn't really "pour").
For something like a shuttle mission, they only had to last a couple of weeks or so (it's freshly prepared and packed). For ISS missions, it has to last a bit longer.
Finally, astronauts often get to pick their menus.
As for crumbliness, yes, it's a huge issue. It's why the only type of bread available is a tortilla.
Astronaut food is a lot different from the old MRE.
Did it occur to you that 50 well made apps are worth more (to a paltform) than 20,000 shitty apps?
True, but if one of those 20,000 shitty apps does what you want, even if it's shitty, it's still better than having none of the 50 quality apps do what you want.
And that's the point - having half a million apps implies a ton of crap (always has). However, there's a pretty damn good chance that there's one app that does what you want, even if it's shitty. And to a user, even if it's shitty, it beats not having it at all.
Number is but a simple metric to which we judge the chance of success with. If you're trying to find a particular thing, you'd want to try the one with the most things first as it's likely to have it. The ones with less things would generally be more mainstream, and while essential, it's the "fringe" apps that often improve the user experience.
The stuff that was shot on film probably doesn't need "upscaling", just rescanning at higher resolution.
The stuff that only ever existed on video... there's no way in hell they'll ever be able to upscale that in a worthwhile manner. The quality of NTSC video just isn't good enough to do that, and it would stick out like sore thumb if they tried to integrate those bits with the rescanned film. They'll have to redo them.
It really depends. The original broadcast masters were probalby 1" tape, and not 3/8" VHS.
What happens is the raw footage is scanned onto tape, and the tape is then edited (with sfx and other stuff put in). As we all know, tape suffers from generational loss, so editing tape does lose quality. However the broadcast masters generally are very high quality to prevent much loss through editing. That tape is then broadcast to stations (who normally use 1/2" tape for the equipment).
That 1" tape may be NTSC-optimized, but it has much more resolution in order to be editable.
In fact, the problem is that the broadcast master was what was used - integrating the new film scans can mean a worse transfer as a lot of fixups were done in editing (because the broadcast masters literally were falling apart and disintegrating, so the film masters had to be used).
Your second point is easily solved: don't park in their deck. You can always park in the lot of one of those little strip shopping centers that always surround malls, and simply walk across the street. Consider it as an opt-out.
Or take transit. or...
Just because most people drive their cars to the mall doesn't mean you have to. If you live close enough, perhaps walking is an option (especially if you work nearby). If a bit further, there's always public transit, or biking. (Malls are generally transit hubs, too).
Or not use the mall - there's no law stating one must spend a day shopping in a mall... working near a mall, I'm surprised how many of my coworkers simply never visited the mall - despite it being attached to the lobby.
A few months ago, there was an impressively done phishing email done. I believe it was something like "Adobe Photoshop CS at the Apple Store" - it really looked legit.
Of course, it presented you immediately with a fake Apple ID login in order to view the "special offer". It was a really-well done phishing email by someone with skill.
There are other phishing attacks as well.
And there are those who re-use passwords - I wonder if those complaining ever checked those online lists of accounts that were recovered by Anon or Lulzsec. Heck, perhaps it's a few accounts from the Sony PSN hack as well.
Perhaps instead of password reminder apps and such, we should have an app that takes the site name, username and hashes it with some master password to generate a site-specific password. Passwords won't be reused because they're salted with the site name and username.
I would love to leave a nice safe gap in between me and the car in front of me so if _anything_ happens, I have time to stop gracefully. The problem is that if I do that, some schmuck will just slide right in. Sounds fine, why not just leave ample space behind the new guy? Because someone else will do the same, and then another, and another.
Even worse when they cut you off. You can leave a nice big gap, but instead of going ahead, then cutting in, they cut in right in front of you, causing you to slam on your brakes (because he may brake suddenly). Compound that with the inability for them to speed up, and what was a nice safe gap for you becomes their nice gap, and you're havingto slam on the brakes. Then the guy behind you has to brake as well...
End result - those mysterious waves where traffic comes to a standstill then start up again, all because one idiot decided they wanted to have a nice gap in front of them, screwing you into making a gap just to avoid riding their bumper.
It works something like this: 1) Someone invests money, holding the stock for many years. 2) They decide to sell it
3) N high frequency traders buy it from them, on average making a bit of money.
4) Eventually another long term investor buys it. On average, for what the first guy sold it for plus what the HFT people made.
Thus, the money they skimmed off should have either gone to the first long term investor or kept by the second. They are both doing something useful. The HFT guys are not.
That's how the market works. When you sell shares, you set the price to which you want to sell them at. It can be at the last traded price (the one you see), it can be higher, or lower. The seller sets the price. And when a buyer wants to buy, they set the price at which they will purchase at. This is called the bid (what the highest buyer is willing to pay) and ask (what the lowest seller is willing to sell at) spread.
What happens now is that the stock doesn't trade unless someone is willing to BUY it at the price. That someone could be the purchaser you mentioned, or an HFT computer.
You didn't specify how long the time is between the time person A wants to sell, and person B wants to buy. But let's put numbers to the example.
Let's say the last trade price is $10. The seller wishes to sell 1000 shares at $11. The buyers want ot buy at $9. No trades happen because the sellers aren't willing to sell that low, and the buyers aren't willing to pay that much.
Now, let's say some crazy seller decides he had enough and sells all his shares for $9. The trades happen, and let's assume that the buyer's purchase is satisfied (the buyer gets all the shares he wanted). The next-highest buyer is bidding $8.50. So we have Last Trade $9, Bid $8.50, Ask $11. (If the buyer's trade wasn't fully satisfied, the only difference is the Bid is $9 instead).
This can repeat ad-nauseum - perhaps another seller comes and sells his shares for $8.50.
That's how it works. In your instance, you assume the seller and buyer could come together and make a deal. It may be possible, or it might not, depending on how the stock "moves" in the intervening time (if other trades happen). If no other trades happen, there can be a standoff - the seller wants to sell, but no one is wanting to pay his price. The buyer wants to buy but doesn't want to pay what the seller wants.
If the seller needs to sell his stock immediately and can't wait for the buyer, he'll have to drop his price accordingly - either by lowering the ask and hoping a buyer raises their bid, or by allowing the trade at the buyer's bid. This can be very harsh if the bid-ask spread is large and can cause volatility as sometimes you're desparate to get rid of stock to liquify your holdings, which can depress the stock price (last trade) and make the stock go down unnecessarily. Or the other way around - some buyer wants to own the stock really badly, and pays whatever the price is being asked for. This happens randomly as people sometimes need emergency cash, and others irrationally believe something is going to happen.
All HFT does is insert someone (a trader) who basically puts in bids and asks (market movers). They'[re called that because they help "move" markets about - big bid-ask spreads lead to high-volatility stock and low trade volumes as the buyers and sellers are far apart in their valuations. But a market mover trader goes and bids higher than the current bid, hoping a seller decides it's "close enough" and offers to sell at the new bid price. The market mover then goes and sells it higher, hoping to be under the price of the next-highest ask, hoping other bidders come and join in the trade.
Thinly traded stocks have poor liquidity - it's hard to turn that stock into cash. HFT or market movers hope to make quick profits, but they also add liquidity so sellers willing ot sell get their money instantly, and buyers want to buy can get the stock they want. It's easier to convert stock into cash, and becuase of the way the HFT operates, the bid-ask spread narrows, which is good as it avoid
Hopefully getting their control channel hammered with SMS noise will induce them to offer some sort of reasonably priced modest-speed data mechanism that isn't a horrible pile of hack...
Not before T-mo suffers a worse fate than AT&T in dropped calls and such.
People think AT&T's atrocious dropped call rate is because of lousy signal - that's one reason to get a dropped call, but for AT&T, it's not. It's not even tower congestion (another reason, when the tower simply says it's full and you're just out of reach of the old tower).
It's control-channel congestion. A phone like the iPhone makes and breaks data connections very frequently (maintaining a data context takes power, so if you only establish, do your tranfer, and tear down ASAP, you can extend the battery life significantly). However, doing so means a lot of control channel congestion as stuff like websurfing will establish a connection to do the HTTP transfer, then tear down while the user browses. Now get a bunch of phones doing that and if a new phone comes in, it literally can't get a word in edgewise to associate with the new tower. And the tower sits there with plenty of channels to offer up bandwidth for voice and data, but a full control channel.
It happened to T-mo as well - there was an Android IM app that presumably managed to open a data connection right after Android shut it down, causing congestion from the bringup and teardown operations.
One reason it really only happened recently is the rise of texting. Texting in Europe and Asia is huge, and the carriers had the same problems, but they adapted with control channels that can expand in bandwidth as required. Texting in North America was basically non-existent until the turn of the millennium. So carriers pretty much got stuck with the problem and since it didn't hurt things too badly, they let things be.
Then the iPhone came about with its reckless (but power efficient) use of the control channel and AT&T suffered big time with control channel congestion. Places with the highest density of phone usage had the highest droped call rates.
It's why Europe and Asia didn't see the iPhone meltdown that AT&T did, why AT&T can have the fastest network despite the dropped call rates (having spare channel capacity is meaningless if phones can't get at them because the control channel is full).
Also, MMS isn't sent through the control channel - it's notified via the control channel and the phone's MMS client then establishes a regular data connection to download the attachments via the faster data interface.
So that would be Mozilla, and other browser makers who allow this to happen by making the browsers so easily provide personal information.
Every bit of information users can use to track you with the exception of your IP address is controlled by the browser.
Cookies Cache User Agent Plugins HTTP-Accepts
Yeah, it would be nice if turning on DNT also set all those to the defaults regardless of what everyone else tries to set it. That way you've stated your request, and fingerprinting is a lot harder (pretty much IP address only) since it appears as a clean browser install.
Of course, it's all a moot point once we get to IPv6 and can identify individual machines again (at least within a short period of time - who changes their IP address every second?). Stupid NAT making it possible to have multiple machines hiding behind a single IP.
We're all stupid at something no matter how much knowledge and experience we acquire. (In fact, it's a well known adage that smart people are the most likely to fall for a scam".)
Not only that, there are some pretty remarkable apps out there.
Magic Mover, an app that vibrates the phone in a particular way to push stuff around. Or just have the phone move in a particular direction, just like in the old days where you could design a series of disk accesses to "walk" the disk drive across the floor.
Blower - real air plays a specially modulated sound that moves air around.
With strange and wonderful apps like that, it's easy to see how some other apps can proclaim to cure acne or other things.
The problem here is you need an outside audit which they won't agree to as it might introduce liability. An independent audit doesn't mean anything (I used to be an auditor) as the audit firm wants repeat business.
Easy. Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, Opera pay auditors to audio every CA on their list. Auditors report to this consortium with yea or nay. If it's nay, vendors don't include CA on list of approved root CAs.
CAs that don't agree to independent audio - certificate not included.
CAs that fail - certificate not included.
CAs that pass - their certificate is there until the next audit.
Auditors paid by consortium - it doesn't matter if CA passes or fails - in fact, if the CA fails, they may resubmit for audits, giving auditors more reason to fail a CA (more business for them).
Basically, the root CAs are very valuable - a CA can't sell certs otherwise. Microsoft, Apple, Opera, Mozilla - they hold the key to the list of CAs on that list. Maybe Google too for Android.
Presumably, that's not a big enough market to sustain production. There are, after all, very few cases where this is really true.
These days, yes. Back in the "old days" where digitals took crappy photos to begin with, having photos available quickly was quite an advantage over having to finish the roll and waiting 3 days to get it developed and get prints.
With digital cameras being quite good, and instant enough, the market basically vanished. No longer having to wait weeks after a vacation to get back photos to use up the roll, or taking pictures of the airport to use up the roll so you can develop it on the way back has meant well, getting photos done minutes after it was taken is a much smaller niche than just taking the photos, and a few hours later broadcasting it all over twitter and facebook.
The niche now are for those sponaneous moments between strangers where neither wants to share personal information, and documentation for legal or scientific reasons because the photos can be captured right then and there, with no time for doctoring.
This law was much more far reaching than just Facebook; it effectively prohibited ALL online communication between students and teachers. My mom is a high school teacher, and after the law was passed, they were prohibited from using their school provided email accounts to communicate to students via their school provided email accounts.
At which point, your mom should've asked for IT to create a mailing list for the class, and thta all communications take place between on the list. Benefits include everyone in the class seeing problems, and parents and others are allowed to join in to offer assistance and other such things. Private problems can still be brought up in one-on-one sessions after class.
Honestly, if I was a teacher, I'd avoid one-on-one emails as well - the system is too easily stacked against teachers for stuff like sexual misconduct and the like, and it's way too easy for a student to make a false accusation that gets blown way out of proportion.
Maybe I'm just a traditionalist who thinks teachers using email and facebook for communications is strange (at best the parents had ot call the school to call the teacher - the only direct "access" I had was in class and before/after school). Heck, even in university most students automatically preferred to use the course website's forums rather than one-on-one emails with the professor, and have one-on-one sessions during office hours.
seriously, the reason for not airing bad laundry is the interview for the next job - you do not want to turn up to an interview with the guy hiring you reading all about the nasty bitchy things you said about your previous company in the newspaper.
Depends on the CEO. It's a very small elite group that's very clique-y. Hell, you see board members of one company can be CEOs of others (Eric Schmidt of Google was an Apple board member for a few years until he quit after the iPhone was released). Bad or good, most CEOs find a new job regardless of what they did in the past, or what they said about their previous employer.
Part of the golden parachute is more as an NDA payment - that you don't take stuff you learned from the previous company and use it in the next one, or air dirty laundry. And face it - read the news - some fired CEO or other is always spouting bad things about the company that fired him. The ones that got paid well, they shut up and take the blame. Both will find new jobs in short order - the CEO that blabbed and the CEO that was blamed for the downfall of the company.
And yes, the whole NDA/not blabbing costs a lot - the golden parachute can disappear in an instant if the CEO breaks their severance agreement. Even paying back everything that was paid out.
Stacking these things is all well and good, but at what point do heat considerations become a primary concern? Lately I haven't gotten the impression that volume of ICs is our biggest bottleneck.
If you're using low-power efficient processors like ARMs, heat isn't really a huge issue - even going full tilt a typical SoC would draw 2.5W or so tops. Basically, passive cooling without a heatsink is more than adequate.
Stacking the memory and flash on top of the chip (commonly done today with multi-chip packaging and package-on-package) doesn't make the whole unit all that much hotter either.
The primary reason is that SoCs have one huge limitation - the number of pins that can be on a package (basically I/O bound). You want a smaller cellphone, it requires a smaller chip package, which means the pins (balls) have to be tightly packed. The problem is the PCB can only have the pads so close together - and there has to be room for vias and such which further dictate how dense the package can be.
So stacking vertically eliminates the need for so many pins (the I/O pad density on a chip can be much higher as the wire bond machine can make very fine connections with optical feedback) having to be brought to the PCB, and less space is needed for support chips on the PCB, making for smaller devices.
Incidentally, memory chips (flash and RAM) are silicon-bound - their limits are dictated by the size of the silicon they cna use, rather than the number of I/O pads.
With this, the ability for other devices to use more power-hungry chips (e.g., x86 processors) that require more support components is increased - so maybe that embedded x86 system can take less space and be more reliable if we can bond the CPU to the chipset, and leave the remaining I/O pads for stuff like PCI Express buses and the like. Since it's embedded, we can toss in tons of RAM (going up) as well, making for more compact embedded x86 boards.
Self signed certs would probably be a better idea for businesses you already have a relationship with, like banks... You already have offline contact with the bank via mail or even walking into a branch, so they could use this to send you their certs and you won't have to trust anyone else.
Why not have the bank be the CA for the businesses it does business with? That way, any business needing an SSL cert can go to their bank and get one. The bank's reputation is on the line and there's a definite trust entity in that way - the bank has to know you and will have access to your real contact details. It could be just like their merchant accounts.
Of course, this only works for businesses, not those doing HTTPS because it's in general a Good Idea(tm).
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I think there are private GA flights that let you do this - basically one guy had a Piper with a bed instead of seats (and brand new bedsheets). You basically rented the plane and pilot, and they flew to 5500 feet or so for an hour or two.
Most likely refridgerant recovery is done ahead of the step where they recycle the rest of the first. It's trivial to do so it's probably one of the first things done as the gas can be under high pressure.
Yes, you can. Again, hams have done it.
Text messaging - packet radio. Operates on HF, VHF, UHF.
Photos - slow-scan TV. HF, VHF, UHF.
Locations - APRS (really just a special form of packet radio with GPS).
And none of this is new - most are relatively old and simple technology, over analog radio.
The best part is, the equipment is available now, relatively simple to understand, relatively cheap and easily available. Heck, there probably are handheld radios that support all the above with maybe a computer paired with it.
You could've just used one of the many perpetual motion machine patents out there. So many that the patent office has long stopped granting them unless there's a working demonstration available.
While they don't make the chips themselves, they still do sell RDRAM.
In fact, it's been used in at least two generations of popular consoles. The PS2 had 32MiB of RDRAM in it. The PS3 has 256MiB of XDRDRAM (and 256MiB of GDDR3, I think).
Sony's gone RAMBUS for over a decade. The licensing fees alone for the PS2 and PS3 probably amount to a good chunk of their income.
According to that Wired article, *all* electronics are basically banned - power cables have to be shielded, no WiFi at all, etc. Now, police/fire/etc radios, as public safety do trump the EM quiet-zone, but even then a lot of work goes into making sure the antennas don't interfere with the telescopes. Apparently something like a WiFi card can generate a strong enough signal that blows the amplifiers of the telescopes.
Of course, what I'd like is a blind test of these people - even the old grandma stating "it was the TV making me sick - the remote controlled my pain" is not an example (psychosomatic response). Add in some fancy blinking lights that have nothing to do with the test would help as well.
(And yes, if they blame WiFi for it, why don't they blame their microwave oven? That thing produces more leakage and they're often closer to it when it's on...).
It depends. If they reach a settlement, then the terms of the settlement determine what happens if the patents are found invalid in the future. Since the terms of such settlements are often confidential, we'll never know.
For court-ordered settlements, most likely not, because if the patents were contested, the court will wait to see if the USPTO revokes those patents. If they're later overturned, well, it depends how good the lawyers are - perhaps they can wiggle some way of suing for that money back (the appeal avenue would've been lost).
Now, if a company is paying license fees, it too also depends on the licensing agreement - some will offer refunds (not a popular option, but depends on the customer), others partial, and of course, many none. A justification of that is that those who paid had a temporary advantage over those who didn't, so the license fees paid would've been made up by time-to-market.
Astronaut food doesn't have to last 10 years without refridgeration or heating, though. It only has to last a few months. Also, it can't be too liquid as liquids ball up and float away (they also break easily). Also, adding water isn't easy to do (lack of gravity means water doesn't really "pour").
For something like a shuttle mission, they only had to last a couple of weeks or so (it's freshly prepared and packed). For ISS missions, it has to last a bit longer.
Finally, astronauts often get to pick their menus.
As for crumbliness, yes, it's a huge issue. It's why the only type of bread available is a tortilla.
Astronaut food is a lot different from the old MRE.
True, but if one of those 20,000 shitty apps does what you want, even if it's shitty, it's still better than having none of the 50 quality apps do what you want.
And that's the point - having half a million apps implies a ton of crap (always has). However, there's a pretty damn good chance that there's one app that does what you want, even if it's shitty. And to a user, even if it's shitty, it beats not having it at all.
Number is but a simple metric to which we judge the chance of success with. If you're trying to find a particular thing, you'd want to try the one with the most things first as it's likely to have it. The ones with less things would generally be more mainstream, and while essential, it's the "fringe" apps that often improve the user experience.
It really depends. The original broadcast masters were probalby 1" tape, and not 3/8" VHS.
What happens is the raw footage is scanned onto tape, and the tape is then edited (with sfx and other stuff put in). As we all know, tape suffers from generational loss, so editing tape does lose quality. However the broadcast masters generally are very high quality to prevent much loss through editing. That tape is then broadcast to stations (who normally use 1/2" tape for the equipment).
That 1" tape may be NTSC-optimized, but it has much more resolution in order to be editable.
In fact, the problem is that the broadcast master was what was used - integrating the new film scans can mean a worse transfer as a lot of fixups were done in editing (because the broadcast masters literally were falling apart and disintegrating, so the film masters had to be used).
It's on SOME Android devices. Not all. Only the ones with some DRM mechanism on there.
Now, if you've got a rooted device, you can hack-install it on non-approved devices.
Yeah, everyone who says "the Fourth of July" is stupid. We should call it July 4, instead.
Feh. Fourth of July indeed.
Or take transit. or...
Just because most people drive their cars to the mall doesn't mean you have to. If you live close enough, perhaps walking is an option (especially if you work nearby). If a bit further, there's always public transit, or biking. (Malls are generally transit hubs, too).
Or not use the mall - there's no law stating one must spend a day shopping in a mall... working near a mall, I'm surprised how many of my coworkers simply never visited the mall - despite it being attached to the lobby.
A few months ago, there was an impressively done phishing email done. I believe it was something like "Adobe Photoshop CS at the Apple Store" - it really looked legit.
Of course, it presented you immediately with a fake Apple ID login in order to view the "special offer". It was a really-well done phishing email by someone with skill.
There are other phishing attacks as well.
And there are those who re-use passwords - I wonder if those complaining ever checked those online lists of accounts that were recovered by Anon or Lulzsec. Heck, perhaps it's a few accounts from the Sony PSN hack as well.
Perhaps instead of password reminder apps and such, we should have an app that takes the site name, username and hashes it with some master password to generate a site-specific password. Passwords won't be reused because they're salted with the site name and username.
Even worse when they cut you off. You can leave a nice big gap, but instead of going ahead, then cutting in, they cut in right in front of you, causing you to slam on your brakes (because he may brake suddenly). Compound that with the inability for them to speed up, and what was a nice safe gap for you becomes their nice gap, and you're havingto slam on the brakes. Then the guy behind you has to brake as well...
End result - those mysterious waves where traffic comes to a standstill then start up again, all because one idiot decided they wanted to have a nice gap in front of them, screwing you into making a gap just to avoid riding their bumper.
That's how the market works. When you sell shares, you set the price to which you want to sell them at. It can be at the last traded price (the one you see), it can be higher, or lower. The seller sets the price. And when a buyer wants to buy, they set the price at which they will purchase at. This is called the bid (what the highest buyer is willing to pay) and ask (what the lowest seller is willing to sell at) spread.
What happens now is that the stock doesn't trade unless someone is willing to BUY it at the price. That someone could be the purchaser you mentioned, or an HFT computer.
You didn't specify how long the time is between the time person A wants to sell, and person B wants to buy. But let's put numbers to the example.
Let's say the last trade price is $10. The seller wishes to sell 1000 shares at $11. The buyers want ot buy at $9. No trades happen because the sellers aren't willing to sell that low, and the buyers aren't willing to pay that much.
Now, let's say some crazy seller decides he had enough and sells all his shares for $9. The trades happen, and let's assume that the buyer's purchase is satisfied (the buyer gets all the shares he wanted). The next-highest buyer is bidding $8.50. So we have Last Trade $9, Bid $8.50, Ask $11. (If the buyer's trade wasn't fully satisfied, the only difference is the Bid is $9 instead).
This can repeat ad-nauseum - perhaps another seller comes and sells his shares for $8.50.
That's how it works. In your instance, you assume the seller and buyer could come together and make a deal. It may be possible, or it might not, depending on how the stock "moves" in the intervening time (if other trades happen). If no other trades happen, there can be a standoff - the seller wants to sell, but no one is wanting to pay his price. The buyer wants to buy but doesn't want to pay what the seller wants.
If the seller needs to sell his stock immediately and can't wait for the buyer, he'll have to drop his price accordingly - either by lowering the ask and hoping a buyer raises their bid, or by allowing the trade at the buyer's bid. This can be very harsh if the bid-ask spread is large and can cause volatility as sometimes you're desparate to get rid of stock to liquify your holdings, which can depress the stock price (last trade) and make the stock go down unnecessarily. Or the other way around - some buyer wants to own the stock really badly, and pays whatever the price is being asked for. This happens randomly as people sometimes need emergency cash, and others irrationally believe something is going to happen.
All HFT does is insert someone (a trader) who basically puts in bids and asks (market movers). They'[re called that because they help "move" markets about - big bid-ask spreads lead to high-volatility stock and low trade volumes as the buyers and sellers are far apart in their valuations. But a market mover trader goes and bids higher than the current bid, hoping a seller decides it's "close enough" and offers to sell at the new bid price. The market mover then goes and sells it higher, hoping to be under the price of the next-highest ask, hoping other bidders come and join in the trade.
Thinly traded stocks have poor liquidity - it's hard to turn that stock into cash. HFT or market movers hope to make quick profits, but they also add liquidity so sellers willing ot sell get their money instantly, and buyers want to buy can get the stock they want. It's easier to convert stock into cash, and becuase of the way the HFT operates, the bid-ask spread narrows, which is good as it avoid
Not before T-mo suffers a worse fate than AT&T in dropped calls and such.
People think AT&T's atrocious dropped call rate is because of lousy signal - that's one reason to get a dropped call, but for AT&T, it's not. It's not even tower congestion (another reason, when the tower simply says it's full and you're just out of reach of the old tower).
It's control-channel congestion. A phone like the iPhone makes and breaks data connections very frequently (maintaining a data context takes power, so if you only establish, do your tranfer, and tear down ASAP, you can extend the battery life significantly). However, doing so means a lot of control channel congestion as stuff like websurfing will establish a connection to do the HTTP transfer, then tear down while the user browses. Now get a bunch of phones doing that and if a new phone comes in, it literally can't get a word in edgewise to associate with the new tower. And the tower sits there with plenty of channels to offer up bandwidth for voice and data, but a full control channel.
It happened to T-mo as well - there was an Android IM app that presumably managed to open a data connection right after Android shut it down, causing congestion from the bringup and teardown operations.
One reason it really only happened recently is the rise of texting. Texting in Europe and Asia is huge, and the carriers had the same problems, but they adapted with control channels that can expand in bandwidth as required. Texting in North America was basically non-existent until the turn of the millennium. So carriers pretty much got stuck with the problem and since it didn't hurt things too badly, they let things be.
Then the iPhone came about with its reckless (but power efficient) use of the control channel and AT&T suffered big time with control channel congestion. Places with the highest density of phone usage had the highest droped call rates.
It's why Europe and Asia didn't see the iPhone meltdown that AT&T did, why AT&T can have the fastest network despite the dropped call rates (having spare channel capacity is meaningless if phones can't get at them because the control channel is full).
Also, MMS isn't sent through the control channel - it's notified via the control channel and the phone's MMS client then establishes a regular data connection to download the attachments via the faster data interface.
Yeah, it would be nice if turning on DNT also set all those to the defaults regardless of what everyone else tries to set it. That way you've stated your request, and fingerprinting is a lot harder (pretty much IP address only) since it appears as a clean browser install.
Of course, it's all a moot point once we get to IPv6 and can identify individual machines again (at least within a short period of time - who changes their IP address every second?). Stupid NAT making it possible to have multiple machines hiding behind a single IP.
Not only that, there are some pretty remarkable apps out there.
Magic Mover, an app that vibrates the phone in a particular way to push stuff around. Or just have the phone move in a particular direction, just like in the old days where you could design a series of disk accesses to "walk" the disk drive across the floor.
Blower - real air plays a specially modulated sound that moves air around.
With strange and wonderful apps like that, it's easy to see how some other apps can proclaim to cure acne or other things.
Easy. Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, Opera pay auditors to audio every CA on their list. Auditors report to this consortium with yea or nay. If it's nay, vendors don't include CA on list of approved root CAs.
CAs that don't agree to independent audio - certificate not included.
CAs that fail - certificate not included.
CAs that pass - their certificate is there until the next audit.
Auditors paid by consortium - it doesn't matter if CA passes or fails - in fact, if the CA fails, they may resubmit for audits, giving auditors more reason to fail a CA (more business for them).
Basically, the root CAs are very valuable - a CA can't sell certs otherwise. Microsoft, Apple, Opera, Mozilla - they hold the key to the list of CAs on that list. Maybe Google too for Android.
These days, yes. Back in the "old days" where digitals took crappy photos to begin with, having photos available quickly was quite an advantage over having to finish the roll and waiting 3 days to get it developed and get prints.
With digital cameras being quite good, and instant enough, the market basically vanished. No longer having to wait weeks after a vacation to get back photos to use up the roll, or taking pictures of the airport to use up the roll so you can develop it on the way back has meant well, getting photos done minutes after it was taken is a much smaller niche than just taking the photos, and a few hours later broadcasting it all over twitter and facebook.
The niche now are for those sponaneous moments between strangers where neither wants to share personal information, and documentation for legal or scientific reasons because the photos can be captured right then and there, with no time for doctoring.
At which point, your mom should've asked for IT to create a mailing list for the class, and thta all communications take place between on the list. Benefits include everyone in the class seeing problems, and parents and others are allowed to join in to offer assistance and other such things. Private problems can still be brought up in one-on-one sessions after class.
Honestly, if I was a teacher, I'd avoid one-on-one emails as well - the system is too easily stacked against teachers for stuff like sexual misconduct and the like, and it's way too easy for a student to make a false accusation that gets blown way out of proportion.
Maybe I'm just a traditionalist who thinks teachers using email and facebook for communications is strange (at best the parents had ot call the school to call the teacher - the only direct "access" I had was in class and before/after school). Heck, even in university most students automatically preferred to use the course website's forums rather than one-on-one emails with the professor, and have one-on-one sessions during office hours.
Depends on the CEO. It's a very small elite group that's very clique-y. Hell, you see board members of one company can be CEOs of others (Eric Schmidt of Google was an Apple board member for a few years until he quit after the iPhone was released). Bad or good, most CEOs find a new job regardless of what they did in the past, or what they said about their previous employer.
Part of the golden parachute is more as an NDA payment - that you don't take stuff you learned from the previous company and use it in the next one, or air dirty laundry. And face it - read the news - some fired CEO or other is always spouting bad things about the company that fired him. The ones that got paid well, they shut up and take the blame. Both will find new jobs in short order - the CEO that blabbed and the CEO that was blamed for the downfall of the company.
And yes, the whole NDA/not blabbing costs a lot - the golden parachute can disappear in an instant if the CEO breaks their severance agreement. Even paying back everything that was paid out.
If you're using low-power efficient processors like ARMs, heat isn't really a huge issue - even going full tilt a typical SoC would draw 2.5W or so tops. Basically, passive cooling without a heatsink is more than adequate.
Stacking the memory and flash on top of the chip (commonly done today with multi-chip packaging and package-on-package) doesn't make the whole unit all that much hotter either.
The primary reason is that SoCs have one huge limitation - the number of pins that can be on a package (basically I/O bound). You want a smaller cellphone, it requires a smaller chip package, which means the pins (balls) have to be tightly packed. The problem is the PCB can only have the pads so close together - and there has to be room for vias and such which further dictate how dense the package can be.
So stacking vertically eliminates the need for so many pins (the I/O pad density on a chip can be much higher as the wire bond machine can make very fine connections with optical feedback) having to be brought to the PCB, and less space is needed for support chips on the PCB, making for smaller devices.
Incidentally, memory chips (flash and RAM) are silicon-bound - their limits are dictated by the size of the silicon they cna use, rather than the number of I/O pads.
With this, the ability for other devices to use more power-hungry chips (e.g., x86 processors) that require more support components is increased - so maybe that embedded x86 system can take less space and be more reliable if we can bond the CPU to the chipset, and leave the remaining I/O pads for stuff like PCI Express buses and the like. Since it's embedded, we can toss in tons of RAM (going up) as well, making for more compact embedded x86 boards.
Why not have the bank be the CA for the businesses it does business with? That way, any business needing an SSL cert can go to their bank and get one. The bank's reputation is on the line and there's a definite trust entity in that way - the bank has to know you and will have access to your real contact details. It could be just like their merchant accounts.
Of course, this only works for businesses, not those doing HTTPS because it's in general a Good Idea(tm).