If you switch it to OFF, your iPhone will automatically join any open WiFi access point. Better to live with the annoying "Do you want to join?" dialogs all the time, because the alternative allows the tracking described in the article.
I don't get it. How do they call it "in the cloud" if the servers are located on-site? Isn't that what we started with decades ago –– a server and dumb terminals (er, excuse me, a thin client)? And storage is so cheap these days!
Yes, it's safer to have everything physically in-house (or securely co-located). But, what I can't fathom is how any of the purchasing-department types and manager-types fall for this "new" setup that offers no advantages. It's just handcuffing your company to that one vendor.
/CSB: At a former company, upper management studied options for getting off of Lotus Notes, the biggest heap of crap I've ever seen. The conclusion of their expensive study was that, "We can't afford to get off of Lotus Notes. The change-over would be too expensive."
I think IBM got wind of the study, and raised their price even more for the next renewal.
Does MS not realize how vividly anti-consumer this is? Even to non-tech types?
What if your auto dealership end-of-life'd your Honda Civic? And thereafter refused to service the vehicle? Would you buy another Honda, or start looking elsewhere for your next car?
And to keep our analogies clear, let's consider that an XP patch (of a security hole) is equivalent to a recall for a manufacturing defect that is fixed for free.
I learned about the HeLa cell line recently, because I've begun working with them. In the field, they are a sort of de-facto standard. It's amazing that the culture of her tumor has lived this long –– far longer than it took to kill its host –– in fact for decades more. Henrietta Lacks deserves respect and remembrance for her unwitting gift to humankind, which arose from her own personal tragedy.
Fun fact: There are cancers that one can "catch" from another infected individual. If you are a Tasmanian devil, Syrian hamster, or sexually promiscuous dog, that is.
And that type of warning should be defined in the beginning of the manual as "operations that may cause data transcription errors resulting in financial harm, damage to property, injury or death".
If it's in a multi-user office, how many of the users are going to sit down and read the whole 328-page manual before making a copy?
Heck, how many will even know where the manual is kept?
In 2008, Ikea had Google "Sketchup" models available for download. I had some, so went all-out before moving to a much-smaller place.
I measured the (funky-shaped) condo I was buying to make a 3D model. Downloaded and inserted models of actual Ikea shelves & dressers, then close-enough models of my various other furniture, available everywhere, and re-sized as appropriate. It was then effortless to arrange the furniture, and to try out all possible arrangements. NOTE: It is much easier to move bookcases and couches around with a mouse.
OK, so how to work with the movers? I wrote big numbers on Post-Its, and stuck them every big item. Then, printed a bird's-eye screen grab of the SketchUp model with furniture in-place. Finally, I magic-markered a big corresponding number on each item, and printed 4 copies.
The next step was to sit around drinking wine while they put everything exactly where it went. No confusion. Magically, everything fit, down to the inch.
...if you file and are granted a patent for something that is later ruled invalid, there should be substantial penalties for the filer...
The thing is, you can't know. Applications are made "public," but you'll need to know an exact application number to get to the application claims and description vie the public PAIR interface.
That is, pending applications are not available in a searchable database.
Yes. And add to that that the earth's atmospheric-oceanic system is not currently in a steady state (with unchanging boundary conditions or unchanging time-averaged conditions), and the idea of any XXX-year storm becomes even less useful.
...During the last election the IRS targeted conservative non profit organizations...
Minor correction. It was later shown that they also targeted liberal organizations. It was not necessarily political, but really due to laziness. They used (political) keywords to find organizations that they thought might be more likely to engage in political speech (thus not non-profit), rather than education (non-profit), etc. activities.
The rest of your point is entirely appropriate. The "I've got nothing to hide" belief is indeed ignorant. Governments change. Leaders change. The "enemies of the State" change. You never know, you could one day find yourself in that group, by no fault of your own. (Frankly, we seem to already have a witch-hunt mechanism in place. Just call the NSA/FBI and say your neighbor is casually discussing bomb-making.)
Government is inefficient. This is by design. You do not want a leader, who unfortunately turns bad, to have access to an efficient system to profile and quickly put-away anyone s/he considers an enemy of the regime. It can happen. Remember, Hitler was democratically elected...
The American Revolutionary fighters against Great Britain were called "insurgents," "terrorists," "guerrila fighters," etc., or at least the equivalent terms-of-the-day.
These cowardly proto-Americans didn't fight by the rules! No standing in long, red-coated phalanx-like lines to be easily shot with low-accuracy guns. Oh no! They fought in loose groups, hiding in the forests, taking pot-shots, sniping, and basically ignoring the gentlemanly rules of killing one another. How dare they!
An attorney pursues all violations (crimes) that apply to a case. This NSA stuff (IANAL) is conceivably both.
First Amendment (...the right to peaceably assemble...): Let's say that you talk on the phone with a weightlifting buddy. You "assemble" with the guy to lift weights. For reasons unknown, the NSA thinks he's a potential terrorist. Oops! Well, now, guess what? By association, under the NSA's tapping procedures, you are also swept into their dragnet of invasive surveillance, and they start examining who you call (leading, arguably, to the additional fourth-amendment violations of an unreasonable search).
The "...unreasonable search..." bit of the fourth will undoubtedly end up in the Supreme Court for final interpretation.
From a logical perspective, why would the NSA be spending all of this effort on collecting and correlating population-wide who-called-who and when information, if they didn't think it would provide them with information. Specifically, information that they couldn't get without otherwise violating known and established-by-prior-case laws?
They're essentially exploiting an area of the law that is vague in relation to the very recent explosion of electronic communication and metadata storage thereof. The constitution doesn't define "unreasonable" in terms of "envelope information" on phone calls, emails, or physical letters.
The NSA has also argued, in press releases or public discussions, that because you share your telephone call metadata with a company, that you have forsaken all rights to privacy of that information. A ludicrous argument.
I have a reasonable, but only tacit, expectation AT&T isn't going to post all of my telephone metadata from the past 10 years in the New York Times tomorrow. This should be codified into law. What legislator, attorney, negotiator, or lobbyist would agree to the idea that all of their communications metadata is public? Hmmn?
I ripped all 300 or so of my CDs 13 years ago to high-bitrate MP3s.
I still have the original CDs in storage. This turned out to be wise. Although the RIAA gestapo never came calling, they did manage to harass many others. Other media orgs caught their disease.
Slashdotters will understand that the $$$ I might have spent on music in the intervening 13 years has instead been spent on hard drives to contain copies of items I have already paid a personal-use license for.
Why? In the cassette-to-CD transition, those RIAA jerks forced me to re-buy several of my favorite albums, since new cars use a different type of media container. Well, good riddance, and hello portable MP3!
GW Bush issued a presidential order that companies are immune from the consequences of breaking any laws that the data-sharing orders might compel them to commit.
We are effectively going backwards in technology, at least from the consumer standpoint.
Look at the latest version of MS Office. You are required to have internet access even to write a simple text document. The average user has had that ability since the early 1980's (beginning of the desktop/Apple II/PCjr era), and way before that for the technically inclined (Commodore/Amiga/etc.).
Good point about the etymology of the word, but further explanation is needed.
That is, many words have their roots in something seemingly unrelated. Also, word usage in different realms differs, as the parent post implies. An original meaning of a word in a different context, however, has no bearing upon its meaning in a new context. Neither meaning is uniquely "correct." Language evolves.
Specifically, the way that newspapers use the term "casualty" is not explicitly bound to the manner in which the military uses the term "casualty."
Why is this still included in any US media article about any aviation accident, or similar event, in the news?
As an ordinary citizen, the question of terrorism is not anywhere near the top of my list of questions regarding "how" or "why" an accident may have occurred. Not at all. Now, the question of "who screwed up? Maintenance, pilot, management, etc.?" is the kind of question that springs to mind.
Or, perhaps, maybe the problem is with me? Should I learn to be more afraid?
Hmmn. It looks like we agree in principle on many things, but are working from different data-sets.:-D
Regarding the rare-earth supply issue, China is the primary producer because, a couple of decades ago, they undercut other global suppliers (US and Australia for starters), and those other mines shut down. Today, now that rare earths are being recognized as important to national industrial supply and security, efforts are being made to reduce the vulnerability of the rare earth supply chain. That is, to re-open mines or to develop new mines in the US or elsewhere (likely where there are better environmental controls).
Rare earths are used in many, many things besides the high-field magnets used in electric cars. MRI contrast agents, alloys for high-strength structural steels, and so forth.
Fun fact: Rare earth elements are not really rare, just difficult to refine.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seemed to me that the author was most interested in raising his profile by generating controversy. It's an old academic trick when ideas are scarce and the bosses are hinting that it's time to get a few papers out there...or else.
This is the most insightful post of the entire thread.
If only you had been the first poster, we could have all saved a lot of wind...
Your "theory" is based on this flawed assumption, making anything that follows from your "theory" highly suspect, and likely wrong.
...Electric cars are more expensive than gasoline cars, and often would never exist except for subsidies...
Oil leases for domestic (US) drilling are effectively a subsidy to the big oil industry. If you want to sound credible, compare apples to apples, rather than simply making broad, unsupported assertions.
Slashdot Mirror
If you switch it to OFF, your iPhone will automatically join any open WiFi access point. Better to live with the annoying "Do you want to join?" dialogs all the time, because the alternative allows the tracking described in the article.
If you have an iPhone, you can prevent these "rogue" Wi-Fi points from sniffing you by changing a simple setting.
Look in "Settings/Wi-Fi/Ask to Join Networks" and just switch it on. Done.
Androids and others probably have something similar.
I don't get it. How do they call it "in the cloud" if the servers are located on-site? Isn't that what we started with decades ago –– a server and dumb terminals (er, excuse me, a thin client)? And storage is so cheap these days!
Yes, it's safer to have everything physically in-house (or securely co-located). But, what I can't fathom is how any of the purchasing-department types and manager-types fall for this "new" setup that offers no advantages. It's just handcuffing your company to that one vendor.
/CSB: At a former company, upper management studied options for getting off of Lotus Notes, the biggest heap of crap I've ever seen. The conclusion of their expensive study was that, "We can't afford to get off of Lotus Notes. The change-over would be too expensive."
I think IBM got wind of the study, and raised their price even more for the next renewal.
Does MS not realize how vividly anti-consumer this is? Even to non-tech types?
/no hate on Honda; just an example.
What if your auto dealership end-of-life'd your Honda Civic? And thereafter refused to service the vehicle? Would you buy another Honda, or start looking elsewhere for your next car?
And to keep our analogies clear, let's consider that an XP patch (of a security hole) is equivalent to a recall for a manufacturing defect that is fixed for free.
I learned about the HeLa cell line recently, because I've begun working with them. In the field, they are a sort of de-facto standard. It's amazing that the culture of her tumor has lived this long –– far longer than it took to kill its host –– in fact for decades more. Henrietta Lacks deserves respect and remembrance for her unwitting gift to humankind, which arose from her own personal tragedy.
Fun fact: There are cancers that one can "catch" from another infected individual. If you are a Tasmanian devil, Syrian hamster, or sexually promiscuous dog, that is.
See the Wiki or Harper's mag for details. http://harpers.org/archive/2008/04/contagious-cancer/ –– Don't like pay-walls? Go to your local library!
We all miss Canvas 3.5. It was all downhill after that. {sniff}
And that type of warning should be defined in the beginning of the manual as "operations that may cause data transcription errors resulting in financial harm, damage to property, injury or death".
If it's in a multi-user office, how many of the users are going to sit down and read the whole 328-page manual before making a copy?
Heck, how many will even know where the manual is kept?
In 2008, Ikea had Google "Sketchup" models available for download. I had some, so went all-out before moving to a much-smaller place.
I measured the (funky-shaped) condo I was buying to make a 3D model. Downloaded and inserted models of actual Ikea shelves & dressers, then close-enough models of my various other furniture, available everywhere, and re-sized as appropriate. It was then effortless to arrange the furniture, and to try out all possible arrangements. NOTE: It is much easier to move bookcases and couches around with a mouse.
OK, so how to work with the movers? I wrote big numbers on Post-Its, and stuck them every big item. Then, printed a bird's-eye screen grab of the SketchUp model with furniture in-place. Finally, I magic-markered a big corresponding number on each item, and printed 4 copies.
The next step was to sit around drinking wine while they put everything exactly where it went. No confusion. Magically, everything fit, down to the inch.
The thing is, you can't know. Applications are made "public," but you'll need to know an exact application number to get to the application claims and description vie the public PAIR interface.
That is, pending applications are not available in a searchable database.
SOLUTION: Become active in the governance of your country.
FTA: "NT's not ancient history, in spite of its age. The NT 'core' is what's inside Windows..."
And isn't DOS's 'core' what's inside NT?
and QDOS's 'core' what's inside DOS?
Lets not fall into the Gambler's fallacy.
Yes. And add to that that the earth's atmospheric-oceanic system is not currently in a steady state (with unchanging boundary conditions or unchanging time-averaged conditions), and the idea of any XXX-year storm becomes even less useful.
Don't we already have a system for this?
It's called latitude and longitude.
...During the last election the IRS targeted conservative non profit organizations...
Minor correction. It was later shown that they also targeted liberal organizations. It was not necessarily political, but really due to laziness. They used (political) keywords to find organizations that they thought might be more likely to engage in political speech (thus not non-profit), rather than education (non-profit), etc. activities.
The rest of your point is entirely appropriate. The "I've got nothing to hide" belief is indeed ignorant. Governments change. Leaders change. The "enemies of the State" change. You never know, you could one day find yourself in that group, by no fault of your own. (Frankly, we seem to already have a witch-hunt mechanism in place. Just call the NSA/FBI and say your neighbor is casually discussing bomb-making.)
Government is inefficient. This is by design. You do not want a leader, who unfortunately turns bad, to have access to an efficient system to profile and quickly put-away anyone s/he considers an enemy of the regime. It can happen. Remember, Hitler was democratically elected...
The American Revolutionary fighters against Great Britain were called "insurgents," "terrorists," "guerrila fighters," etc., or at least the equivalent terms-of-the-day.
These cowardly proto-Americans didn't fight by the rules! No standing in long, red-coated phalanx-like lines to be easily shot with low-accuracy guns. Oh no! They fought in loose groups, hiding in the forests, taking pot-shots, sniping, and basically ignoring the gentlemanly rules of killing one another. How dare they!
Do you recall who won?
An attorney pursues all violations (crimes) that apply to a case. This NSA stuff (IANAL) is conceivably both.
First Amendment (...the right to peaceably assemble...): Let's say that you talk on the phone with a weightlifting buddy. You "assemble" with the guy to lift weights. For reasons unknown, the NSA thinks he's a potential terrorist. Oops! Well, now, guess what? By association, under the NSA's tapping procedures, you are also swept into their dragnet of invasive surveillance, and they start examining who you call (leading, arguably, to the additional fourth-amendment violations of an unreasonable search).
The "...unreasonable search..." bit of the fourth will undoubtedly end up in the Supreme Court for final interpretation.
From a logical perspective, why would the NSA be spending all of this effort on collecting and correlating population-wide who-called-who and when information, if they didn't think it would provide them with information. Specifically, information that they couldn't get without otherwise violating known and established-by-prior-case laws?
They're essentially exploiting an area of the law that is vague in relation to the very recent explosion of electronic communication and metadata storage thereof. The constitution doesn't define "unreasonable" in terms of "envelope information" on phone calls, emails, or physical letters.
The NSA has also argued, in press releases or public discussions, that because you share your telephone call metadata with a company, that you have forsaken all rights to privacy of that information. A ludicrous argument.
I have a reasonable, but only tacit, expectation AT&T isn't going to post all of my telephone metadata from the past 10 years in the New York Times tomorrow. This should be codified into law. What legislator, attorney, negotiator, or lobbyist would agree to the idea that all of their communications metadata is public? Hmmn?
I ripped all 300 or so of my CDs 13 years ago to high-bitrate MP3s.
I still have the original CDs in storage. This turned out to be wise. Although the RIAA gestapo never came calling, they did manage to harass many others. Other media orgs caught their disease.
Slashdotters will understand that the $$$ I might have spent on music in the intervening 13 years has instead been spent on hard drives to contain copies of items I have already paid a personal-use license for.
Why? In the cassette-to-CD transition, those RIAA jerks forced me to re-buy several of my favorite albums, since new cars use a different type of media container. Well, good riddance, and hello portable MP3!
Probably #4.
GW Bush issued a presidential order that companies are immune from the consequences of breaking any laws that the data-sharing orders might compel them to commit.
It's worth caring about, at least in principal.
It is absolutely worth caring about.
We are effectively going backwards in technology, at least from the consumer standpoint.
Look at the latest version of MS Office. You are required to have internet access even to write a simple text document. The average user has had that ability since the early 1980's (beginning of the desktop/Apple II/PCjr era), and way before that for the technically inclined (Commodore/Amiga/etc.).
Good point about the etymology of the word, but further explanation is needed.
That is, many words have their roots in something seemingly unrelated. Also, word usage in different realms differs, as the parent post implies. An original meaning of a word in a different context, however, has no bearing upon its meaning in a new context. Neither meaning is uniquely "correct." Language evolves.
Specifically, the way that newspapers use the term "casualty" is not explicitly bound to the manner in which the military uses the term "casualty."
TFA: ...there was no indication of terrorism..."
Why is this still included in any US media article about any aviation accident, or similar event, in the news?
As an ordinary citizen, the question of terrorism is not anywhere near the top of my list of questions regarding "how" or "why" an accident may have occurred. Not at all. Now, the question of "who screwed up? Maintenance, pilot, management, etc.?" is the kind of question that springs to mind.
Or, perhaps, maybe the problem is with me? Should I learn to be more afraid?
Hmmn. It looks like we agree in principle on many things, but are working from different data-sets. :-D
Regarding the rare-earth supply issue, China is the primary producer because, a couple of decades ago, they undercut other global suppliers (US and Australia for starters), and those other mines shut down. Today, now that rare earths are being recognized as important to national industrial supply and security, efforts are being made to reduce the vulnerability of the rare earth supply chain. That is, to re-open mines or to develop new mines in the US or elsewhere (likely where there are better environmental controls).
Rare earths are used in many, many things besides the high-field magnets used in electric cars. MRI contrast agents, alloys for high-strength structural steels, and so forth.
Fun fact: Rare earth elements are not really rare, just difficult to refine.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seemed to me that the author was most interested in raising his profile by generating controversy. It's an old academic trick when ideas are scarce and the bosses are hinting that it's time to get a few papers out there...or else.
This is the most insightful post of the entire thread.
If only you had been the first poster, we could have all saved a lot of wind...
The physics of Priuses batteries prevent what you claim from being true.
How is that? Can you describe those physics?
A Prius uses the same battery technology as a typical military satellite, which is designed to last for 16+ years.
Think about that for a minute.
...Energy means fossil fuels....
Your "theory" is based on this flawed assumption, making anything that follows from your "theory" highly suspect, and likely wrong.
...Electric cars are more expensive than gasoline cars, and often would never exist except for subsidies...
Oil leases for domestic (US) drilling are effectively a subsidy to the big oil industry. If you want to sound credible, compare apples to apples, rather than simply making broad, unsupported assertions.