I currently get a couple of months from the batteries in my remote.
That's terrible battery life for a remote!
Even the "smart" remotes like my Harmony get around 6 months per 4 AAA batteries, while other remotes can go for at least a year, if not two or practically never (I've had some still with the original factory batteries - a wonder they didn't leak, and then the remote with new batteries works from the other side of the house bouncing the IR off the walls).
In fact, it's usually why lots of jokes are written about remotes and batteries - they fail so infrequently that many people develop elaborate procedures to get them to continue working. And some people forget they take batteries altogether.
Itâ(TM)s not a continuous broadcast. When key & car are in range, car broadcasts a challenge, and key replies. Most models only do it at door open & engine start. They donâ(TM)t continuously require it since if the process failed for some reason as youâ(TM)re going down the highway & the engine just cut out... Not good
It's not continuous, but on all the models I've seen, when the engine is running the key is checked quite often. If you have the engine running and then walk out with the key, the dashboard display immediately displays a warning that the key is no longer in the vehicle. Usually if this condition persists for about 5 minutes, the engine will shut off.
I presume the condition is checked when there is a status change in the car - e.g., the doors are opened or closed, but also checked at random intervals as well. (I've had it where the car starts, then it says the key is not detected, but then finds the key and continues on. This I attribute to some EMI in the area as things stopped working like garage door openers and such).
Our lives aren't significantly enhanced by wireless keys. Are they?
If you've ever carried bags of groceries to the car, being able to click the button on the door with the key in the pocket is a godsend. Of course, later cars have the ability to wave your foot and the trunk or rear door opens automatically.
Yes, there are ways around it, but it's just easier and more convenient to be able to carry your groceries to the car without fumbling or keys or putting the cart away afterwards.
This cutting edge paradigm shift, I need it, my purse is pounding. Tell me right away where I can purchase your synergistic software suite.
You realize that CodeWeavers are the support behind WineHQ, right? CrossOver is a commercially-supported version of WINE, and all the patches CodeWeavers does makes it into WINE. Likewise, when people ask WINE for commercial support, they point them at CodeWeavers.
The phone running iOS 7 was the case in the Eastern District of New York -- which of course Apple's own law enforcement compliance statement says it will unlock when presented with a warrant, but I guess it didn't feel like it this time.
No, Apple wasn't presented with a warrant to unlock that phone.
Instead, the feds simply asked the court to force Apple to do it, using the All Writs Act. Basically the argument was since Apple could do it, and has, they should continue to do it. Apple however requires a legal document saying they should, in this case, a warrant (which means the judge was convinced there is significant merit in the case that it should be searched).
No warrant was ever issued. In fact, the defendant pleaded guilty, which means it's even more unlikely the judge will issue a warrant. Instead the feds want to compel Apple to unlock the phone anyways (using All Writs) absent said warrant. Apple said no.
The court case Apple won is basically saying that this was not a valid use of All Writs and the court refused to issue a court order.
Apple had basically changed the conditions to which they will unlock phones when they realized All Writs was being abused, and demanded a court order or warrant.
Gamers are that stupid. They key demographic for most game publishers, console or PC, are the younger people who only want to play what's currently popular. They don't save the game to replay later. They would never play it again because it's now old and therefore not cool. One of their friends declares "this week we're going to play MegaMechaShooter3000" and then they all go out to buy that. So that group would consider this to be a 10% discount.
Hell, this was a cornerstone of the original Xbox One DRM system. Yes, online sucked. And having to get publisher permission to sell your games sucked (as well as giving them a cut). But it also meant you could sell your digital games as well.
But no, they wanted the discs. Even Sony mocked them for that.
And two and a half years later - what do we have? Sony and Microsoft (especially Sony) are pushing digital downloads HARD. Discs are for chumps - everyone's buying it digitally, and unless you're the primary console, online authentication!
So gamers hating the Xbone DRM system have been lead straight into it - yeah, you can find a disc now and again, but even companies like GameStop are seeing the writing on the wall.
So what's Microsoft doing? They're basically trying to bring back the "innovative" parts of the original DRM system, because for all intents and purposes, we're already there.
It's just spun differently because everyone got so misinformed about the DRM system that they basically reverted it to "the way things are now" without realizing that yes, parts of it it sucked, but parts of it are better than status quo. And today, a lot of sales are digital, so they're already screwing themselves into an online-authentication system.
Boiling pot of water and tossing a frog in (Xbone original DRM system) versus frog in water being heated ("The way things are now" and what Sony/Microsoft do with promoting digital downloads).
Better late than never. If they're better than their competition then they deserve some kudos. I doubt they'll make a great deal of money on recycling, the aluminum content will be a few cans worth... they will also recover some of the previous metals in the phone but there's precious little of those.
This is probably about a combination of good marketing to a public which is increasingly concerned about environmental impact as well as a portion or corporate environmental responsibility.
Actually, e-waste as it's traditionally recycled is still quite valuable - in fact, if you're a miner, mining e-waste is more profitable than trying to mine the ground - the concentration of precious metals is far higher and thus it's not only far easier to extract, it's more profitable.
Using a robot means it's actually even more valuable - a lot of effort in the recycling industry is purification - an iPhone is made of glass, aluminum, steel, copper, gold, and other materials. The first stage of an e-waste recycler for small portable electronics is shredding - the pieces are then sorted in order to purify the materials - glass, metals (ferrous/non-ferrous) and plastics. The recyclers then buy those materials and pay based on purity.
Using a robot to take apart iPhones means Apple can extract even more money because the purity is higher - all the cases can be separated which gives you high-purity aluminum, the cameras put together to be separated together into lenses, plastics and circuits, etc.
The actual electronics themselves, uncontaminated with anything other than gold, copper, silicon, fiberglass and plastic (circuit board and components) can be ground up in a traditional method and then mined/smelted into high purity elements.
So recycling an iPhone is profitable already. However, using Liam, recycling is likely to be way more profitable. It's just that disassembling is quite labor intensive. Apple is in a position where they can recycle iPhones over and over and over again rather than a thousand different phoens.
Electronics recyclers do crude disassembly of major components - a desktop PC will be disassembled into case, circuits and other parts like drives, but stuff like laptops may not be disassembled because of complexity. (Except Macs - they tend to be easier to disassemble since the bottom cover pops off exposing all the cuts).
but isn't this an extremely handy way to remove old, but functioning, phones from the second hand market?
Sorry kids, your'e not getting Mum's perfectly good phone, because we're giving it to the bot that will smash it. But we'll buy you an new iPad instead.
Maybe, but Apple needs to get the phones. And I don't know about you, but buying a new iPad would be more expensive than giving the kids the old iPhone.
Apple has a robot to disassemble phones. But to take them off the secondary market would require Apple to acquire those used phones in the first place. Like if I buy an iPhone SE to replace my iPhone 4S, the 4S will be in my possession, and it's my choice what I want to do with it - give it to Apple to recycle, sell it on Craigslist for a few bucks, sell it on eBay, give it to my friends, etc.
Maybe giving it to Apple will save me a few bucks? I'm presuming since Apple has long accepted old Apple products back that they do have a significant stock of them to recycle.
Just saved me some money. I said I wasn't going to buy the new phone to replace the 5s if it didn't have all of the features of the 6s. They didn't need to leave out the 3D touch to differentiate it from the 6s models. The screen size was the differentiating feature. I don't want the larger phones because I can't easily work them one-handed but I'm not going to buy a smaller phone that's deliberately lacking in features.
Or maybe it wasn't possible? Force Touch works because it measures the capacitance between the LCD and the glass. Given the iPhone SE reuses iPhone 5s parts (the case and display), I wouldn't be completely surprised if those parts lacked the necessary metal coatings to do the measurement. And given the cost, I'm guessing Apple would rather continue to use iPhone 5 parts across the iPhone 5 (warranty), iPhone 5s (warranty/refurbs) and iPhone SE line rather than have a special SKU just for the SE.
Then again, it could also be that because of the smaller screen, force touch either doesn't work well (too hard to push at the corners, or too soft), or because of the glass geometry, results in cracking of the screen.
(Yes, I thought Force Touch used some special sensing array for pressure, but it turns out it's just measuring glass displacement).
I'm honestly not sure why we're using NFC and requiring special terminals for this anyway. Look at Samsung Pay, which tries NFC, then falls back to using an electromagnetic coil to communicate with a magstripe reader. That works with every terminal. So, my question is why use NFC for this at all?
Only in the US - magstripe readers are insecure and a lot of places outside of the US won't even do swipes anymore - too much fraud. Heck, the magstripe reader probably hasn't been used in years since everyone's done chip+pin, so it may not even work if you tried it.
(NFC is used as an alternate interface to the chip for both formfactor as well as electrical interface and isolation issues). Plus, the US is moving away from magstripes as well.
Watching Gawker go bankrupt, while still having Denton personally on the hook for millions of dollars
The "LLC" at the end of "Gawker Media LLC" stands for "limited liability company", i.e. Denton won't be on the hook if the company folds.
Otherwise, I'm completely on the same page as you.
Depends.
First off, Hogan also sued Denton personally as part the case - so while Gawker is responsible for $115M, Denton may be personally responsible for a part of that as well, especially if it can be proven he had a part of it.
Secondly, the corporate veil is not absolute. Here in this case, it will not be pierced, but in general, if you can prove the company was set up purely to commit illegal acts, then it can be argued that the whole point of the company was to shield the perpetrators and the courts can argue that the veil is not valid.
It was an eff'in party. What happened to people just cutting loose and having fun every once in a while?
Which is fine in a privately hosted party that you or I might throw. No one cares if we hire hookers or strippers or whatever. Even bachelor parties.
But this wasn't a usual "party". It was a corporate sponsored social event, which means a company's reputation is on the line, you get legal and all sorts of other things as well. (Did you know? If you serve alcohol, in a lot of places you must provide transportation home? If you don't, and someone drives home drunk and causes an accident, you, the host can be held liable, and lawyers LOVE it when big pocketed companies are sponsoring.)
This is especially so since at these corporate parties, employees are still considered "on the clock" and must act appropriately.
I'm always in favor of seeing celebrity gossip "news" sites in pain. Honestly, who gives a fuck about what time Tom Cruise took a shit last night? If you read celebrity news because it gives you something to gossip to your friends about, then you are a piece of shit. This is (even if it's not gossip) by far the worst form of "journalism" that exists, and people have to have no life at all and/or a huge inferiority complex to even care about it.
Actually, the whole celebrity thing is changing - gone are the days from 30 years ago when everyone was awed by them. These days, there are few mega-celebrities - maybe a handful of actors that most people will recognize the names of.
Why? Turns out Hollywood realized something - people don't give a damn about big names anymore! Big names don't sell movies and few people go to movies to see their favorite stars. Sure there are movies with big names on them, but they're generally not the big draw they once were.
Hollywood is using more and more "no name" actors in big movies - because no-names cost less, no-names don't care as much about the movie (nor does Hollywood) - so it's no big deal if the movie crashes and burns, and if ti does well, well, the minor celebrity will probably blow all their credibility within a few years (who was that Transformers star again?).
Plus, CGI'ing no-names is a lot easier and they're less likely to have likeness usage issues. This became a huge issue in Back to the Future part 2, where George McFly, played by Crispin Glover in the first movie, was replaced because Glover couldn't come to reasonable terms, so they used a lookalike and basically got into a huge lawsuit over "likeness" issues. Eventually SAG came up with rules saying you can't do that anymore. It's also why that scene was it - Glover was still in negotiations with the production company well into filming when the production company gave up, and rewrote all but the couple of minutes out of the movie.
So, nonames are cheaper, movies generally do just as good with or without big names, and less issues overall.
I think the number must of been designed to hurt Gawker, instead of to appease Hogan. Anything over single digit millions is a ridiculous number for emotional distress and his remaining career was not any where near worth 100 million, but I am unaware what evidence was brought forward to show that it hurt his career at all.
Easy, the defense... was laughable. Let's just say what Gawker did to internet "journalism", they attempted to do same to the judge, jury and the court.
And the jurors did not take kindly to that, which is why they awarded MORE than the requested amount!
Think of it - Hogan asked for $100M, probably expecting to settle for $10M or so and life goes on. Instead, Gawker does their usual thing and they fail to reach a settlement. So it goes to court, and Gawker thinks it's just another game - judge's orders are merely requests to be disregarded, "journalism" above all. The court is suitably not impressed and the jurors equally offended at the defense to stick it to Gawker.
Disregarding a judge's order to take down the video, defiantly as well, is also not likely to go over with the courts. The appeals court may cut down the award, but it's likely not by much - the courts are not impressed by defendants who basically insult them, and appeals go both ways - the judge may have let the contempt charge pass at first, but it can be reinstated on appeal.
Even English tabloids, known for their crass nature, generally try to be more classy.
And every Apple event, it's always funny to see Gawker sites begging Apple for passes to their event (Gawker got blackballed during a massive iPhone 4 expose they did way back in 2010) - even funnier when they could simply ante up and pay for regular public tickets and attend, but they still beg for the free press passes instead. From this they invented the meta-liveblog, where they liveblog the Apple event... based on reading other Apple liveblogs or the public live event streams.
Sadly most of the media companies haven't become savvy enough to realize the internet is global and this silly crap of geolimiting things is last century. When most media is made outside the 'normal' methods we see today then I'm sure that will change.
The problem is, while the internet is global, most media distribution systems are not. Netflix is probably the largest distributor now being in 200-odd countries. And that is the point- the media companies want to deal with single companies - if you want to distribute content worldwide, they'd rather you be exclusive and everywhere than have to deal with 1000+ companies all dealing with little chunks of geography. Because negotiations then get tough - I mean, if you have a TV station paying you $X for your content with the expectation that the only other provider is Netflix, and they won't have it for a couple of months, they'll pay more. But if provider Y then comes in and beats Netflix to the punch, then negotiations get even harder because the TV station sees provider Y, sees they no longer have exclusivity, and probably only wants to pay $(0.3X), which means provider Y better make up the difference. But then in country Z, provider Y only had to pay 0.5X, so now the negotiations get hairy.
Yes, media companies want to ensure people pay the max. One way is to sell exclusive deals. Otherwise if they get paid worldwide $100M for a TV episode with a few distributors, then when they do global distribution, they still want at least $100M, and that means giving up exclusivity in a lot of regions, so the former exclusive dealers may only be willing to pay $30M total, and now the worldwide distributors have to pay in total at least $70M. Otherwise they'll keep the old methods.
And guess what? Only Netflix is of the size where that may be possible to offer global distribution.
It all boils down to money. If Netflix alone can pay the $70M to make up for the loss of exclusivity contracts and the media companies make the same or more, then they will adjust to the new global distribution model.
I don't know why any of these "numbers of digits" things are surprising to anyone.
When you calculate a circumference, for example, you're just multiplying pi by some other number. You're not going to need more precision in pi than you have in the number of orders of magnitude of precision in the other number.
So, all of these discussions about "how many digits of pi" actually just are asking "how many order of magnitude" of length or whatever are in various sizes/comparisons within the universe.
It's really not necessary to bring pi into this discussion at all. It's just talking about precision of measurement and orders of magnitude in general.
Well, we know Pi to 133T digits. How many of those are useful to us now, on a practical sense. The answer, is 39, at which point the error boils down to half an hydrogen atom, when using the size of the observable universe as a guide.
Knowing how many practical digits of Pi means even on Earth-sized values, we can use a lot less digits and pretty much call it an exact, practical constant whose error is so small you're going to encounter quantum effects.
Yes, you can talk about significant figures and all that, but Pi can be treated as a constant - and like all constants, be of infinite precision and thus not affecting the significant figure count at all. Even though Pi is irrational, for practical purposes 39 digits will be all you need. Or given human sized items, probably far less digits - what, maybe 20 before even the error of Earth is within a Planck length?
Sure you'll never have that many sigfigs, but heck, even if you're doing a theoretical calculation, you only need to add a few more digits to ensure that your Pi approximation won't be the cause of errors in your simulations.
I worked on a code base where we took elaborate precautions to be 100% sure we had no use-after-free bugs (macros that would crash the system any time it happened). I was just shocked how many we found, and how frequently people kept generating new ones. Too many C programmers who shouldn't be, I guess.
Usually it's because of two things.
1) Race conditions - you need to get rid of an object but the object is being used in another thread. Freeing the object now would mean the other thread would be using an invalid object. This is actually a very hard problem to solve and was a cause of a lot of Linux issues until the kernel fixed it for driver developers (by ensuring the exit code will only be called when all reference to other entry points were gone and there was no other code running).
2) Aliased references. An object is created, and references to it are passed around to other bits of code that may make more references to it. Freeing the object means having to invalidate all those references, which may not be completely obvious. This could be say, a buffer being passed around the application that various bits are looking at various parts of it. Usually what happens is the buffer is processed and then forgotten, except someone say a neat way to implement a feature so what was stateless now has state. Free the buffer and there you go.
It is tricky to resolve. The Linux kernel is a great way to learn all about it because you get multiple pointers to objects which is why they use the CONTAINER_OF style macros that mean you can embed a structure within another, and then using a pointer to the inner structure, get the entire object, reducing the need to alias.
Yes. Thousands of cloud connected drones are what Google needs to make money.*
* This is sarcasm.
Well, if you add a screen and speaker, they can be used to show ads to people - flitting from person to person showing an ad for 30 seconds while they hover right in front of them, staying in the direct line of sight of said person.
The "experts" in the FBI (you know, the same organization that didn't know not to reset the AppleID password) that are lying through their teeth, just to get an extremely dangerous precedent set.
You're assuming that resetting the password wasn't done intentionally.
I believe the FBI intentionally reset the password to block the iCloud backup so we'd get to where we are today.
I mean, think about it - under what SOP is it that you change account passwords? You lose a phone, you remote wipe it. You can also lock out an account from your network.
Presumably, the fact they could change the password meant they had full access to the iCloud account as well - which was done not by a request to Apple to change the password, but by the FBI.
I mean President Obama's administration studied the keystone pipeline for 7 years before deciding that it is more environmentally friendly to haul crude oil in trucks and rail.
Having worked in the oil and gas industry, your characterization of the issue is mistaken. I read nowhere in the decision that it was "more environmentally friendly" as it was more practical given all the factors. The main reason for the pipeline was to make transportation crude oil easier from the Canadian tar sands to the US for refining and export. That was it. Now, it is a bit more environmentally friendly to use pipelines; however, that is contingent upon the utilization of the pipeline. With the dramatic decrease in oil prices, it is no longer economically viable to extract from the tar sands. As for other considerations, refining tar sands crude requires special facilities as not every refinery can do it. From the last estimates, 75% of the crude was designated to be sent overseas for refining. So realistically few American facilities would touch it.
It was even worse.
Keystone exists - it goes to Chicago where most of it is refined by American refineries.
Keystone XL is an extension of Keystone, where most of the bitumen is to be shipped overseas as raw bitumen - Chicago would get less crude to refine.
The real purpose of Keystone XL is to sell it on the international market, where the rates are higher, than the US market which pays a lot less.
So it's basically a big pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf Coast where the US is treated as an annoying piece of geography. The US would get less benefit out of it (since less goes to refineries in the US)
In short, while Obama might not have made the most eco-friendly decision, he did make one where at least Americans could benefit from jobs created instead of just leasing the land.
but typically replace (at least) kernel and bootloader with custom versions
Um, how else do you expect them to do it? Ubuntu cannot support every possible board out there. ARM-hardware is a wild, wild west and not nearly as standardized as x86, with nearly each and every board requiring u-boot specifically built for that specific board -- there is no generic build that you can distribute that'd work on even a fraction of all of them.
The problem is not the customization. it's the lack of support. Basically they dump you a kernel and that's it - the changes are there, but good luck porting it to something more recent or newer.
The specs are good, but basically, the support is lousy. The rPi may have poorer hardware, but the community is big enough that getting support for later kernels and such is pretty easy.
Sure if it's a one off product, Odroid is fine as a ship it and forget it product. But if you want to play around with it after a year the software stack is too old to be usable, and there'll be help in getting more recent software.
I had a talk with a person a while ago about that scenario where I took the Devil's Advocate side of the discussion. Is it really such a horrible thing that Target knows before the family? The lady obviously knows, and it's her secret to tell, so what's the big deal with Target keeping the secret?
I mean, before big data and big stores, the same clerk might have seen you buy the pregnancy test and then the next day see you buy prenatal vitamins. If it was a small town, even if it wasn't the same cashier, their might be enough gossip to connect the two and then they would know before pretty much anyone else. Before that, it might be your bank processing checks, or the credit card company, or whatever. That particular example wasn't super-secret stuff that only a big computer with big data could have figured out.
Except Target didn't keep it a secret.
You see, Target has done their market research. They found that the birth of child is the ideal time to shape shopping habits - if a husband and wife shopped at Target for a few basic essentials, then went elsewhere for clothes, groceries and other things before a birth, after a birth, they are highly suggestible to change their shopping habits. So Target wants to find those that are pregnant and send them coupons for essentials they may need with the hopes of attracting them to shop more stuff at Target - get more of their shopping dollars with a family who may be pressed for time and unable to do their usual shopping rounds.
The problem was, the daughter was making those kind of purchases, and the father wondered why Target was sending her coupons for pregnancy products. Target's analytics found her profile was basically that of a pregnant woman. So the father confronted Target management asking them why they're sending pregnancy-related coupons to their daughter (who you know, is very virtuous and wouldn't have a child out of wedlock, etc. etc. etc).
Said father later revealed their daughter was a teenage parent a couple of weeks later.
Target didn't tell them, but she fit the profile, and the parents didn't know until Target basically revealed it to them.
Because the leap second like DST are _artificial_ and adds unnecessary complexity to an otherwise brain-dead simple algorithm. Complexity == Bugs.
The only one who gives a fuck about leap seconds are scientists.
Stop over-engineering a simple concept. Time should be monotonic, and consistent. Not this one-off shenanigans.
The problem is there is a lot of time.
You may remember GMT, nowadays known as UT (not to be confused with UTC). GMT is time based on the Earth's rotation - when the sun is directly overhead, it's noon. There are approximately 86,400 seconds in a day here, but the mean solar day varies because Earth's rotation is not uniform. UT1 is the most common form of this, which is what time is measured at the prime meridian.
UTC is time derived from the atomic clock. It closely approximates UT, but since Earth's rotation is erratic, to keep the UTC day closely aligned with the UT day, leap seconds are sometimes added to ensure the difference between the two times is under 0.9 seconds.
TAI is the time as told by atomic clocks. Here, a day is exactly 86,400 seconds and there is no such thing as leap seconds - this is purely a monotonic clock that ticks away.
The problem is, well, there are a lot of variables. UT is measured generally once a day and clocks set to its time. UTC is a close approximation and generally used as it's easier to obtain without having to have someone observe the Sun every day to calculate when noon is. TAI is just the atomic clock time.
Leap seconds are introduced to keep UTC and UT relatively close to each other. TAI is allowed to drift, and eventually you'll have noon at midnight.
Which you pick is up to your needs. Leap years were created so people in the Northern hemisphere wouldn't be celebrating summer in December as the calendar drifts away from Earth's position in its orbit..
Plus, Apple is defending the morally reprehensible position of not letting device owners install whatever software they want whenever they want.
IBM didn't allow you to install whatever OS you wanted on their mainframes. Technically you could but it would void the warranty and IBM would never help you again. (This was the same position as HP, Digital, just about every other mainframe and mini-computer maker).
Apple allows you to install whatever you want for iOS nowadays - you just need a Mac to compile and build the software. It's a regular feature of XCode and iOS 9, and there are emulators and other stuff for iOS.
Apple is enforcing it as open-source - the f.lux guys tried to do it with a binary and Apple asked them to stop abusing it. So there's something to give RMS a headache - a proprietary OS that allows/enforces open-source programs. Granted, you have to build them yourself as they don't allow binaries, but it's open source/free software so you can do that.
As for IBM - most mainframes IBM provided are leased, not sold. IBM will provide you with a mainframe, and depending on what you leased, is what you got. The hardware itself was often overprovisioned - if you asked for 32GB of RAM, IBM would give you 128 or 256GB of RAM in the unit. (The extra could be used in case a module went bad, for example). Or if you asked for 4 processors, IBM would have 8 or 16 in what you actually got. They could be used as spares ready to take over, or if you need it, you call up IBM, pay the upgrade fee, and magically your mainframe has the updated capabilities instantly.
All this is part of the lease. In fact, if you violate the lease by installing unauthorized OS software, IBM would immediately claim back their computer because it wasn't your computer to begin with - you paid IBM to lease the computer from them.
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That's terrible battery life for a remote!
Even the "smart" remotes like my Harmony get around 6 months per 4 AAA batteries, while other remotes can go for at least a year, if not two or practically never (I've had some still with the original factory batteries - a wonder they didn't leak, and then the remote with new batteries works from the other side of the house bouncing the IR off the walls).
In fact, it's usually why lots of jokes are written about remotes and batteries - they fail so infrequently that many people develop elaborate procedures to get them to continue working. And some people forget they take batteries altogether.
It's not continuous, but on all the models I've seen, when the engine is running the key is checked quite often. If you have the engine running and then walk out with the key, the dashboard display immediately displays a warning that the key is no longer in the vehicle. Usually if this condition persists for about 5 minutes, the engine will shut off.
I presume the condition is checked when there is a status change in the car - e.g., the doors are opened or closed, but also checked at random intervals as well. (I've had it where the car starts, then it says the key is not detected, but then finds the key and continues on. This I attribute to some EMI in the area as things stopped working like garage door openers and such).
If you've ever carried bags of groceries to the car, being able to click the button on the door with the key in the pocket is a godsend. Of course, later cars have the ability to wave your foot and the trunk or rear door opens automatically.
Yes, there are ways around it, but it's just easier and more convenient to be able to carry your groceries to the car without fumbling or keys or putting the cart away afterwards.
Well, they don't if you count the media that comes with it, but there are compilers available for every OS without cost.
Linux is obvious, and OS X still has free XCode downloads. Windows has Visual Studio Express.
Granted, though, Linux and OS X come with the same compilers and development environment that everyone uses - Windows requires you to pay for that.
You realize that CodeWeavers are the support behind WineHQ, right? CrossOver is a commercially-supported version of WINE, and all the patches CodeWeavers does makes it into WINE. Likewise, when people ask WINE for commercial support, they point them at CodeWeavers.
No, Apple wasn't presented with a warrant to unlock that phone.
Instead, the feds simply asked the court to force Apple to do it, using the All Writs Act. Basically the argument was since Apple could do it, and has, they should continue to do it. Apple however requires a legal document saying they should, in this case, a warrant (which means the judge was convinced there is significant merit in the case that it should be searched).
No warrant was ever issued. In fact, the defendant pleaded guilty, which means it's even more unlikely the judge will issue a warrant. Instead the feds want to compel Apple to unlock the phone anyways (using All Writs) absent said warrant. Apple said no.
The court case Apple won is basically saying that this was not a valid use of All Writs and the court refused to issue a court order.
Apple had basically changed the conditions to which they will unlock phones when they realized All Writs was being abused, and demanded a court order or warrant.
Hell, this was a cornerstone of the original Xbox One DRM system. Yes, online sucked. And having to get publisher permission to sell your games sucked (as well as giving them a cut). But it also meant you could sell your digital games as well.
But no, they wanted the discs. Even Sony mocked them for that.
And two and a half years later - what do we have? Sony and Microsoft (especially Sony) are pushing digital downloads HARD. Discs are for chumps - everyone's buying it digitally, and unless you're the primary console, online authentication!
So gamers hating the Xbone DRM system have been lead straight into it - yeah, you can find a disc now and again, but even companies like GameStop are seeing the writing on the wall.
So what's Microsoft doing? They're basically trying to bring back the "innovative" parts of the original DRM system, because for all intents and purposes, we're already there.
It's just spun differently because everyone got so misinformed about the DRM system that they basically reverted it to "the way things are now" without realizing that yes, parts of it it sucked, but parts of it are better than status quo. And today, a lot of sales are digital, so they're already screwing themselves into an online-authentication system.
Boiling pot of water and tossing a frog in (Xbone original DRM system) versus frog in water being heated ("The way things are now" and what Sony/Microsoft do with promoting digital downloads).
Actually, e-waste as it's traditionally recycled is still quite valuable - in fact, if you're a miner, mining e-waste is more profitable than trying to mine the ground - the concentration of precious metals is far higher and thus it's not only far easier to extract, it's more profitable.
Using a robot means it's actually even more valuable - a lot of effort in the recycling industry is purification - an iPhone is made of glass, aluminum, steel, copper, gold, and other materials. The first stage of an e-waste recycler for small portable electronics is shredding - the pieces are then sorted in order to purify the materials - glass, metals (ferrous/non-ferrous) and plastics. The recyclers then buy those materials and pay based on purity.
Using a robot to take apart iPhones means Apple can extract even more money because the purity is higher - all the cases can be separated which gives you high-purity aluminum, the cameras put together to be separated together into lenses, plastics and circuits, etc.
The actual electronics themselves, uncontaminated with anything other than gold, copper, silicon, fiberglass and plastic (circuit board and components) can be ground up in a traditional method and then mined/smelted into high purity elements.
So recycling an iPhone is profitable already. However, using Liam, recycling is likely to be way more profitable. It's just that disassembling is quite labor intensive. Apple is in a position where they can recycle iPhones over and over and over again rather than a thousand different phoens.
Electronics recyclers do crude disassembly of major components - a desktop PC will be disassembled into case, circuits and other parts like drives, but stuff like laptops may not be disassembled because of complexity. (Except Macs - they tend to be easier to disassemble since the bottom cover pops off exposing all the cuts).
Maybe, but Apple needs to get the phones. And I don't know about you, but buying a new iPad would be more expensive than giving the kids the old iPhone.
Apple has a robot to disassemble phones. But to take them off the secondary market would require Apple to acquire those used phones in the first place. Like if I buy an iPhone SE to replace my iPhone 4S, the 4S will be in my possession, and it's my choice what I want to do with it - give it to Apple to recycle, sell it on Craigslist for a few bucks, sell it on eBay, give it to my friends, etc.
Maybe giving it to Apple will save me a few bucks? I'm presuming since Apple has long accepted old Apple products back that they do have a significant stock of them to recycle.
Or maybe it wasn't possible? Force Touch works because it measures the capacitance between the LCD and the glass. Given the iPhone SE reuses iPhone 5s parts (the case and display), I wouldn't be completely surprised if those parts lacked the necessary metal coatings to do the measurement. And given the cost, I'm guessing Apple would rather continue to use iPhone 5 parts across the iPhone 5 (warranty), iPhone 5s (warranty/refurbs) and iPhone SE line rather than have a special SKU just for the SE.
Then again, it could also be that because of the smaller screen, force touch either doesn't work well (too hard to push at the corners, or too soft), or because of the glass geometry, results in cracking of the screen.
(Yes, I thought Force Touch used some special sensing array for pressure, but it turns out it's just measuring glass displacement).
Only in the US - magstripe readers are insecure and a lot of places outside of the US won't even do swipes anymore - too much fraud. Heck, the magstripe reader probably hasn't been used in years since everyone's done chip+pin, so it may not even work if you tried it.
(NFC is used as an alternate interface to the chip for both formfactor as well as electrical interface and isolation issues). Plus, the US is moving away from magstripes as well.
Depends.
First off, Hogan also sued Denton personally as part the case - so while Gawker is responsible for $115M, Denton may be personally responsible for a part of that as well, especially if it can be proven he had a part of it.
Secondly, the corporate veil is not absolute. Here in this case, it will not be pierced, but in general, if you can prove the company was set up purely to commit illegal acts, then it can be argued that the whole point of the company was to shield the perpetrators and the courts can argue that the veil is not valid.
Only works if you can keep it symbolic. Far too many things are too hard to do symbolically so they do the calculations numerically.
Which is fine in a privately hosted party that you or I might throw. No one cares if we hire hookers or strippers or whatever. Even bachelor parties.
But this wasn't a usual "party". It was a corporate sponsored social event, which means a company's reputation is on the line, you get legal and all sorts of other things as well. (Did you know? If you serve alcohol, in a lot of places you must provide transportation home? If you don't, and someone drives home drunk and causes an accident, you, the host can be held liable, and lawyers LOVE it when big pocketed companies are sponsoring.)
This is especially so since at these corporate parties, employees are still considered "on the clock" and must act appropriately.
Actually, the whole celebrity thing is changing - gone are the days from 30 years ago when everyone was awed by them. These days, there are few mega-celebrities - maybe a handful of actors that most people will recognize the names of.
Why? Turns out Hollywood realized something - people don't give a damn about big names anymore! Big names don't sell movies and few people go to movies to see their favorite stars. Sure there are movies with big names on them, but they're generally not the big draw they once were.
Hollywood is using more and more "no name" actors in big movies - because no-names cost less, no-names don't care as much about the movie (nor does Hollywood) - so it's no big deal if the movie crashes and burns, and if ti does well, well, the minor celebrity will probably blow all their credibility within a few years (who was that Transformers star again?).
Plus, CGI'ing no-names is a lot easier and they're less likely to have likeness usage issues. This became a huge issue in Back to the Future part 2, where George McFly, played by Crispin Glover in the first movie, was replaced because Glover couldn't come to reasonable terms, so they used a lookalike and basically got into a huge lawsuit over "likeness" issues. Eventually SAG came up with rules saying you can't do that anymore. It's also why that scene was it - Glover was still in negotiations with the production company well into filming when the production company gave up, and rewrote all but the couple of minutes out of the movie.
So, nonames are cheaper, movies generally do just as good with or without big names, and less issues overall.
Easy, the defense ... was laughable. Let's just say what Gawker did to internet "journalism", they attempted to do same to the judge, jury and the court.
And the jurors did not take kindly to that, which is why they awarded MORE than the requested amount!
Think of it - Hogan asked for $100M, probably expecting to settle for $10M or so and life goes on. Instead, Gawker does their usual thing and they fail to reach a settlement. So it goes to court, and Gawker thinks it's just another game - judge's orders are merely requests to be disregarded, "journalism" above all. The court is suitably not impressed and the jurors equally offended at the defense to stick it to Gawker.
Disregarding a judge's order to take down the video, defiantly as well, is also not likely to go over with the courts. The appeals court may cut down the award, but it's likely not by much - the courts are not impressed by defendants who basically insult them, and appeals go both ways - the judge may have let the contempt charge pass at first, but it can be reinstated on appeal.
Even English tabloids, known for their crass nature, generally try to be more classy.
And every Apple event, it's always funny to see Gawker sites begging Apple for passes to their event (Gawker got blackballed during a massive iPhone 4 expose they did way back in 2010) - even funnier when they could simply ante up and pay for regular public tickets and attend, but they still beg for the free press passes instead. From this they invented the meta-liveblog, where they liveblog the Apple event... based on reading other Apple liveblogs or the public live event streams.
The problem is, while the internet is global, most media distribution systems are not. Netflix is probably the largest distributor now being in 200-odd countries. And that is the point- the media companies want to deal with single companies - if you want to distribute content worldwide, they'd rather you be exclusive and everywhere than have to deal with 1000+ companies all dealing with little chunks of geography. Because negotiations then get tough - I mean, if you have a TV station paying you $X for your content with the expectation that the only other provider is Netflix, and they won't have it for a couple of months, they'll pay more. But if provider Y then comes in and beats Netflix to the punch, then negotiations get even harder because the TV station sees provider Y, sees they no longer have exclusivity, and probably only wants to pay $(0.3X), which means provider Y better make up the difference. But then in country Z, provider Y only had to pay 0.5X, so now the negotiations get hairy.
Yes, media companies want to ensure people pay the max. One way is to sell exclusive deals. Otherwise if they get paid worldwide $100M for a TV episode with a few distributors, then when they do global distribution, they still want at least $100M, and that means giving up exclusivity in a lot of regions, so the former exclusive dealers may only be willing to pay $30M total, and now the worldwide distributors have to pay in total at least $70M. Otherwise they'll keep the old methods.
And guess what? Only Netflix is of the size where that may be possible to offer global distribution.
It all boils down to money. If Netflix alone can pay the $70M to make up for the loss of exclusivity contracts and the media companies make the same or more, then they will adjust to the new global distribution model.
Well, we know Pi to 133T digits. How many of those are useful to us now, on a practical sense. The answer, is 39, at which point the error boils down to half an hydrogen atom, when using the size of the observable universe as a guide.
Knowing how many practical digits of Pi means even on Earth-sized values, we can use a lot less digits and pretty much call it an exact, practical constant whose error is so small you're going to encounter quantum effects.
Yes, you can talk about significant figures and all that, but Pi can be treated as a constant - and like all constants, be of infinite precision and thus not affecting the significant figure count at all. Even though Pi is irrational, for practical purposes 39 digits will be all you need. Or given human sized items, probably far less digits - what, maybe 20 before even the error of Earth is within a Planck length?
Sure you'll never have that many sigfigs, but heck, even if you're doing a theoretical calculation, you only need to add a few more digits to ensure that your Pi approximation won't be the cause of errors in your simulations.
Usually it's because of two things.
1) Race conditions - you need to get rid of an object but the object is being used in another thread. Freeing the object now would mean the other thread would be using an invalid object. This is actually a very hard problem to solve and was a cause of a lot of Linux issues until the kernel fixed it for driver developers (by ensuring the exit code will only be called when all reference to other entry points were gone and there was no other code running).
2) Aliased references. An object is created, and references to it are passed around to other bits of code that may make more references to it. Freeing the object means having to invalidate all those references, which may not be completely obvious. This could be say, a buffer being passed around the application that various bits are looking at various parts of it. Usually what happens is the buffer is processed and then forgotten, except someone say a neat way to implement a feature so what was stateless now has state. Free the buffer and there you go.
It is tricky to resolve. The Linux kernel is a great way to learn all about it because you get multiple pointers to objects which is why they use the CONTAINER_OF style macros that mean you can embed a structure within another, and then using a pointer to the inner structure, get the entire object, reducing the need to alias.
Well, if you add a screen and speaker, they can be used to show ads to people - flitting from person to person showing an ad for 30 seconds while they hover right in front of them, staying in the direct line of sight of said person.
You're assuming that resetting the password wasn't done intentionally.
I believe the FBI intentionally reset the password to block the iCloud backup so we'd get to where we are today.
I mean, think about it - under what SOP is it that you change account passwords? You lose a phone, you remote wipe it. You can also lock out an account from your network.
Presumably, the fact they could change the password meant they had full access to the iCloud account as well - which was done not by a request to Apple to change the password, but by the FBI.
It just seems ... odd.
It was even worse.
Keystone exists - it goes to Chicago where most of it is refined by American refineries.
Keystone XL is an extension of Keystone, where most of the bitumen is to be shipped overseas as raw bitumen - Chicago would get less crude to refine.
The real purpose of Keystone XL is to sell it on the international market, where the rates are higher, than the US market which pays a lot less.
So it's basically a big pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf Coast where the US is treated as an annoying piece of geography. The US would get less benefit out of it (since less goes to refineries in the US)
In short, while Obama might not have made the most eco-friendly decision, he did make one where at least Americans could benefit from jobs created instead of just leasing the land.
The problem is not the customization. it's the lack of support. Basically they dump you a kernel and that's it - the changes are there, but good luck porting it to something more recent or newer.
The specs are good, but basically, the support is lousy. The rPi may have poorer hardware, but the community is big enough that getting support for later kernels and such is pretty easy.
Sure if it's a one off product, Odroid is fine as a ship it and forget it product. But if you want to play around with it after a year the software stack is too old to be usable, and there'll be help in getting more recent software.
Except Target didn't keep it a secret.
You see, Target has done their market research. They found that the birth of child is the ideal time to shape shopping habits - if a husband and wife shopped at Target for a few basic essentials, then went elsewhere for clothes, groceries and other things before a birth, after a birth, they are highly suggestible to change their shopping habits. So Target wants to find those that are pregnant and send them coupons for essentials they may need with the hopes of attracting them to shop more stuff at Target - get more of their shopping dollars with a family who may be pressed for time and unable to do their usual shopping rounds.
The problem was, the daughter was making those kind of purchases, and the father wondered why Target was sending her coupons for pregnancy products. Target's analytics found her profile was basically that of a pregnant woman. So the father confronted Target management asking them why they're sending pregnancy-related coupons to their daughter (who you know, is very virtuous and wouldn't have a child out of wedlock, etc. etc. etc).
Said father later revealed their daughter was a teenage parent a couple of weeks later.
Target didn't tell them, but she fit the profile, and the parents didn't know until Target basically revealed it to them.
The problem is there is a lot of time.
You may remember GMT, nowadays known as UT (not to be confused with UTC). GMT is time based on the Earth's rotation - when the sun is directly overhead, it's noon. There are approximately 86,400 seconds in a day here, but the mean solar day varies because Earth's rotation is not uniform. UT1 is the most common form of this, which is what time is measured at the prime meridian.
UTC is time derived from the atomic clock. It closely approximates UT, but since Earth's rotation is erratic, to keep the UTC day closely aligned with the UT day, leap seconds are sometimes added to ensure the difference between the two times is under 0.9 seconds.
TAI is the time as told by atomic clocks. Here, a day is exactly 86,400 seconds and there is no such thing as leap seconds - this is purely a monotonic clock that ticks away.
The problem is, well, there are a lot of variables. UT is measured generally once a day and clocks set to its time. UTC is a close approximation and generally used as it's easier to obtain without having to have someone observe the Sun every day to calculate when noon is. TAI is just the atomic clock time.
Leap seconds are introduced to keep UTC and UT relatively close to each other. TAI is allowed to drift, and eventually you'll have noon at midnight.
Which you pick is up to your needs. Leap years were created so people in the Northern hemisphere wouldn't be celebrating summer in December as the calendar drifts away from Earth's position in its orbit..
Then there's TAI, which is the true atomic time
Apple allows you to install whatever you want for iOS nowadays - you just need a Mac to compile and build the software. It's a regular feature of XCode and iOS 9, and there are emulators and other stuff for iOS.
Apple is enforcing it as open-source - the f.lux guys tried to do it with a binary and Apple asked them to stop abusing it. So there's something to give RMS a headache - a proprietary OS that allows/enforces open-source programs. Granted, you have to build them yourself as they don't allow binaries, but it's open source/free software so you can do that.
As for IBM - most mainframes IBM provided are leased, not sold. IBM will provide you with a mainframe, and depending on what you leased, is what you got. The hardware itself was often overprovisioned - if you asked for 32GB of RAM, IBM would give you 128 or 256GB of RAM in the unit. (The extra could be used in case a module went bad, for example). Or if you asked for 4 processors, IBM would have 8 or 16 in what you actually got. They could be used as spares ready to take over, or if you need it, you call up IBM, pay the upgrade fee, and magically your mainframe has the updated capabilities instantly.
All this is part of the lease. In fact, if you violate the lease by installing unauthorized OS software, IBM would immediately claim back their computer because it wasn't your computer to begin with - you paid IBM to lease the computer from them.