Some article came out shortly after stating that the radiation being emitted into the atmosphere was X% that of Chernobyl... when it was really 1/10th the percentage stated. You have people spreading panic and fear, as well as people saying "see this is why nuclear power is evil."
Meanwhile you have people there saying "no alarm, nothing to see here" and later that day we find out something major happened or people were being burned by the radioactive water.
So you have fear mongers and people trying to sweep it under the rug. It makes it very hard to get an accurate picture of what's going on.
The issue most people have with warrantless wiretaps and searches is not an issue of whether one has anything to hide. Instead, they do not trust the police to be truthful and respectful in enforcing the law, and are concerned about police abuse. It's important to recognize that the real problem is the potential for police corruption, not the wiretapping itself, which would be fine if we were assured that every police officer was honest.
Obviously, that's what I mean. Hence the last line: that it's a dangerous argument to make for many many reasons.
"If you have nothing to hide" leads to it being done en-masse. Because "only" people that have something to hide are obviously against it.
Having it en-masse leads to little / no oversight. Why are we doing this again? What's going on with tap #25,653,142? Hand me form #1,265 for this morning. etc
If there's little over-sight, then it becomes abused. I'm just tapping this guy because he looks sketchy, or dating my ex.
The whole point of a subpoena is to make sure: - There is good reason for the search / tap / etc. - There's a paper trail, who requested and why. - There's some oversight: did they follow the rules of the subpoena or did they look elsewhere. Did they follow the rules.
It's to prevent people from overstepping their reach.
I've been involved in six accidents, each time where someone hit me from behind
That is a lot!
and I was never at fault.
Hmmm. Legally maybe. But, do you happen to see any correlation of the facts here?
On the one hand I see where you're going with that. After something happens to you a high number of times, you have to wonder whether you're to common denominator or the cause rather than chance or someone else. I knew a girl that got into a whole bunch of accidents, by her 2nd or 3rd accident in the same year it was hard to blame it on chance considering how little she had to drive each day.
But to play devil's advocate...
It depends on location. I've never been in an accident, but I mostly drive in the suburbs and on the highways. I've come close a lot of times because of some idiot or another, an admittedly almost caused one once or twice in the city. But my driving environment is typically mellow giving myself and other parties lots of room, distance, and time to adjust.
However I see that city driving is... bad. It's beyond hectic: people cutting people off, passing and cutting-off on the right, blowing through reds, almost hitting passengers that swing their door open, etc. I HATE driving in the cities and prefer mass transit when available. Meanwhile you have different regions.
So depending on the region, I guess it's possible to hit 6 accidents that are someone else's fault. Like some cabbies cut him off on the right 3 times and went into him.
FYI: a black box would have shown your driving was highly impossible, as well as looking at the RPM jumps.
Had you had a recording of all your events, they would have none there was a problem right away.
IN fact, this sort of thing will help mechanics out, a lot.
I imagine it could, but I supposedly have one. And yet they (a) saw it as no problem at first and (b) when they realized it was a problem they didn't know what it was.
They thought: clogged fuel line, something with the heater or whatever, etc. Something affecting the fuel flow or efficiency that the engine / fuel-injection-system was just trying to compensate for.
It didn't occur to them to say "oh it looks like the throttle position is wonky here"
- 2006 Cadillac CTS, bought brand new - Drove it for the first few weeks, not a problem and very happy with the purchase. - A couple of weeks later, the following weird problem occured.
- If engine/oil temp was below 3/8, in my case engine/oil temp stayed below that no matter how much I idled. - If I gave it at least maybe 25% or 40% acceleration
- enough to make right @ stop sign, or left @ stop sign with HARDLY any traffic - Car RPMs would go 5000 - 1000 - 5000 - 1000. It would alternate every second or so - G-Force, no G-Force. Loud engine, quiet engine. RPM needle swinging around. etc. Very scary feeling, or at the least heavily embarassing.
- Took it to dealer. - GM certified mechanics thought I was imagining things as mentioned earlier. Eventually said drive it until it gets worse - Dropped it off a couple more times. They supposedly tested it when engine/oil temp was low. - Eventually dropped it off last time before lemon law and they brought someone in from head office
- Problem was eventually tracked down to the throttle assembly (I think). It was warranty work work so no money issues
- Apparently bad data being sent to the computer, so the car was thinking I was flooring it, letting go, flooring it, letting go, etc.
Except for the fact of whether they can truly tell if everything is working correctly.
I drove my car with the issue for a couple of months. It took MANY trips to the dealership for them to track the problem, heck it took about 2 trips just for them to acknowledge there was a problem. The first couple of times it was "you must be imagining things" or "you must not realize you're flooring it and letting go every-other-second"
Really?
The first couple of diagnostics showed everything as healthy, as did a basic test.
Meanwhile this is the system the black box pulls from. So you have some guy that does a quick 1-2-3 test on the above, says it's ok. Then I get into a crash and it says "you were flooring it."
Everyone here seems to be of the opinion that (s)he has some sort of right to privacy when it comes to breaking the law. Sorry, but the law is the law. If you don't like the speed limit, then vote for someone who will raise it - but if you drive over the speed limit, you should be ticketed. If you're walking alongside a cliff, you stay far away from the edge to make sure you don't die. If the law states that driving 1mph over the speed limit is illegal, then perhaps you might try driving 5mph below the limit to make sure that you won't violate the law. What a concept!
That isn't my problem so much: it's not a worry about speeding. I try not to speed now as it is, I grew out of it and don't care if it takes me the extra 2-5 minutes that speeding would shave off. If there was a literal 1MpH zero-tolerance enforceable remotely it I'd just be even more careful.
As it stands, my previous car had a black box and I'm pretty sure my new one has it as well. I've never tampered with it or removed it. But the fact that it's ILLEGAL to remove something like that from my car is just asinine.
Meanwhile another poster brings up a good point: the common replies in the realm of "if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to hide." While we're at it why don't we just have warrantless searches and warrantless wire taps. After all, if you don't have anything to hide then you shouldn't mind.
I'm not equating the black boxes to those things, but saying the response is never a good one to give popularity.
Simply because you do not own the roads, you do not clean up the mess and you don't have to pay for all the costs of hospitalisation, rehabilitation and permanent disability.
It's called vehicle registrations and drivers licence, don't like it, walk or take public transport.
Unlike keeping the car in working order, with legal power-ratings, and having the appropriate lighting (all required by registration and inspection) how does the black box clean up the mess and pay for the hospitalization / rehab / etc?
Your explanation is: it should be part of the registration / inspection process because the registration / inspection process does good things and is required to continue driving. It says nothing about why this specific issue should be enforced other than "because they say so." So you might as well be applying it to "drivers must carry a hand-held air horn with them at all times." Why?
At best, it can help determine which driver was at fault... thus determining whose Insurance should pay and perhaps who should have to face criminal/civil repercussions.
At worst it can record something incorrectly, they'll take it as hard-fact/truth and screw over someone that didn't do anything wrong.
As mentioned, I've already been in the situation where the onboard computer on a 2006+ car was reporting faulty data to the point that it was doing screwy things to car as I drove. I'd hate to see what a black box recorded from it if I got into an accident.
Meanwhile, the difference between something like a radar gun and something inside your car... in court cases it has to be proven (or provable) that a device was officially calibrated correctly following a schedule. The black boxes they already have, the only times they're ever touched is during install and during an accident.
So then you have to worry about people taking "the black box as infallible" standpoint. I've heard of a couple of court cases where they kept treating the black box as "truth" when it shouldn't have.
First off, it being illegal to disable a part on my car? Is it making it safer or reducing pollution? Then why should removing it be illegal if it's my car?
I can understand keeping your engine/power at certain levels, keeping pollution to a minimum, and keeping your lights/blinkers in a certain condition.
But why should I be forced to leave a black-box on my car if it's just going to be used retroactively to bite me in the *behind* in case of an accident.
Particularly since I have personal experience with a car's onboard computer acting screwy and recording the wrong information from my accelerator.
American Airlines has announced that it is testing an in-flight video system that allows passengers to wirelessly stream movies and TV shows from an onboard library to their laptop computers and other electronic devices.
This gives me the impression that, atleast on this flight, passengers are not required to turn off their gadgets
I don't fly that often, maybe once every 1-2 years. But my last time was only 2 months ago.
Whenever I fly, they only ask that I turn off my devices during take-off and landing / final approach. I think during at least one of those flights they would also turn off the in-flight movies/TV and such.
So my guess here is that they would do something similar, only let you watch after take-off and until maybe 10 minutes before landing.
How is it possible their network isn't designed for data traffic? I mean, it's not like the increase of data consumption was completely unpredictable.
To play devil's advocate, data usage had a *sharp* increase in the last couple of years. Their upgrade plans probably didn't account for it, and now are having to play catchup. Networks are huge, so between the lag before noticing "our network is going to max out sooner than thought" and actually doing something about it, a lot of time passes.
I'm not saying it was the iPhones fault, but at least in the US the timing matches up. The iPhone made smartphones more popular and more mainstream, and other companies started getting more into the smartphone game. Kind of like there were mp3 players before the iPhone and they were a little popular, but Joe Sixpack didn't start buying them in droves until the iPod fad hit the nation.
All of a sudden you had a huge number of users that were starting to use data services that never even considered doing it in the past... and that number is growing and growing. Then you had people that maybe just used their phones to check their mail and the weather, and now they're using it for everything including streaming Netflix.
At that point it because a race between the increasing demand, and the current bandwidth + the old plans for upgrading.
Do you love what you do? If so, I find it hard to believe that you have never, not once, been inclined to create something on your own.
Still... yes. Not as much as I used to since my job description got changed to include server support and early morning calls besides the coding. When I have to do more coding or server stuff for work when I get home every evening, be reading for a support call before I go to bed every evening, it's hard to get psyched up to do something as a hobby.
I had a few projects that I was starting on a personal-side before the job description changed and back when my work day ended when I left my desk. But it changed before the projects got off the ground, and a Visual C++ app for Windows 2000 isn't exactly worth showing or continuing.
I get home at 6:30 6:30 to 7 (ot 7:30) I'm usually catching up on some emails from people on the west coast or doing some server stfuff Weekends, at least 2 or 3 hours each weekend doing "something" for the web apps or the servers Then a couple of times a month I get woken up @ 3AM for server support (another 1-2 hours) Then there's the personal life
I'm not saying my time is 100% booked, but I'd rather not spend what time afterwards on doing even more coding or server stuff.
I've been at my current job for 10 years, coding. I'm supposed to work from 8 to 4:30 but it usually turns into 8 to 5:30 as well as having to check emails in the evening. All of my apps are behind the company's firewall so I can't show them off to anyone.
Meanwhile I'm also a 2nd-level admin for our servers and web apps. Meaning at least a couple of times during the month I have to do something to the server over the weekend, get a support call at 3AM in the morning, test things after a server move, etc.
As much as I like coding, after 10 years of the above I'll be honest... I don't have any personal projects of my own to show.
The above takes too much of of day/week/etc as it stands. I really don't want to have to sit behind my computer and then do a personal project on top of everything else.
Skype was huge way before their android and apple apps. Just sayin...
Agreed: Skype became "the" thing way before it found a life on SmartPhones.
I have to agree with the earlier poster... I'm sure there are more open solutions out there, but I've yet to hear of anything large enough to even be considered a blip on Skype's radar.
I had a really good Sony DLP HDTV (Digital Projector). The lamp lasted forever and the picture was great. Sure it was "older" tech and "only" ran @ 720P but it was great.
A few years later my parents bought a Sony DLP because they liked mine so much. The picture quality wasn't as good (even though it was1020P) and the lamp blew out really quickly (I think just over a year). Finding a replacement was a major pain and now the TV is slowly dying (green spot growing on the screen).
My TV purchase was some years back, I've switched brands since. The only physical Sony product I've purchased since then was a PS3 (for which I purchased some games).
However I also signed up for PSN *and* their DC Universe Online PC game... so I'm probably impacted by all of this.
Sony just wanted your money, they don't give a crap about you, your rights to privacy, or even making an attempt at keeping your data secure.
Personally I'm more annoyed at the people that performed the hack than Sony. Granted Sony has lost what little company loyalty I had, I already stopped buying most of their products.
But in this case is the perpetrators that make me angry. It's one thing to screw with a company, it's another to screw with the average Joe that just wanted to play the latest Ratchet and Clank episode.
Name, address, birthdate, credit card number... that's more than enough for identity theft. Meaning not only do I need to take emergency steps on top of my pro-active steps, but I have the extra worry if it will be used.
If this was flat-out theft, then that stinks.
But if this was about "fighting the man," then what's the point of fighting "the man" if you trample all over the little guys to do it.
If I used voice transcribing for to the phone directly: as in I spoke to my phone to do a google search or write a text, it came out fairly well. There was the occasional error but mostly on things like names.
But my transcripts from the voice mails I receive were often trash.
I guess it has to do with the sound-quality: it probably uses the original high-quality recording locally so it performs good Google searches. Meanwhile the compression and static over the phone line (and the voice mail recording) are probably harder to transcribe.
A journalist friend of mine has suggested the possibility that Sony is staging this "hacker" attack as a fortuitous propaganda stunt to make hackers look bad and possibly cover up a real infrastructure problem caused by Sony itself.
While it makes *some* sense, I don't buy it.
My feeling is that this whole fiasco is hurting Sony's bottom line more than the whole hacker-awareness / scapegoat thing could even provide in the long-term.
They're losing a lot of customer trust and customer loyalty, and I have to assume this is hurting their stock price. Once is a shame, twice (so close together) is a disaster.
While it's true that companies probably want to shine a large spot-light on hackers, identity theft, etc there has to be some risk management. If this were true, then Sony is performing a kamikaze with way too many aspects to be worth it even in the long term.
Don't the police already have accident reports? Why do they need more information?
Accident reports would be a great indicator if all they were looking for was preventing accidents. It wouldn't cover everything, but when the concern is public safety it's definitely a great metric.
The skeptic in me has to mention that, while I can't speak for Europe, I know that some towns in the US really rely on income generated from tickets and fines. In which case they would want to place traps in places more likely to catch offenders.
Putting aside my skepticism, it's still an OK metric. Most places would like to reduce speeding in general; all it takes is one careless driver and/or one careless pedestrian and you have an accident. The mortality rates go way way up when you get hit at 40MpH instead of 25MpH.
So if this residential area has a lot of heavy speeding, then it's probably good to put the fear of the police into the drivers.
You make it sound like they decided one day that $60 was a natural fact.
I imagine there was some math behind it, along with some research and surveys, with them determining the optimal price was around $60.
They probably constructed a graph stating how much are customers willing to pay for a video game. And I'm sure they revisit the price every few years to see if the market's changed.
Games are getting to be quite expensive: voice talent, cut scenes (FMV or CGI), more complex programming, advertising, etc. They advertise games on TV now, they didn't do that back in the day.
Part of it is our fault, because we just accept that games cost $60 (or whatever).
The local cricket club has a machine for pitching cricket balls. You drop a ball in a hole at the back and it flies out a hole on the other side. I assume it gets squished between two rotating wheels. Don't they use these in base ball?
We do, but as mentioned in the summary this was supposedly more like an arm throwing a ball that a gun-type device firing a ball.
Same result, but 2 different ways going about it.
The gun-type device (that we use for batting practice) is probably more efficient and easier to fix / maintain.
This is closer to what a thrown ball behaves and I guess serves as a decent little experiment in trying to replicate human actions in similar ways. The wind-up, the pitch, trying to hit the strike zone, etc. In the end it's not *that* fascinating, but it's still "news for nerds."
Next stop: SkyNet and a bunch of Terminators running around throwing baseballs.
Terminal velocity should be much further than a few feet. Humans, which are not particularly aerodynamic, take a couple thousand feet to hit terminal velocity. A more compact object, like an iPhone, should have a higher terminal velocity. Since this one fell 1,000 feet, it's unlikely it hit terminal velocity at all.
I don't know, an iPhone is small and slim but in a free-fall I doubt it would stick to a nice "dive" with the short-edge facing the wind-resistance. It would probably be a tumble.
Plus, the iPhone is light. While mass doesn't affect the acceleration, it does come into play with wind resistance. If you had 2 objects the same dimensions as an iPhone but one was made of lead and another made of plastic the lead one would reach a much higher terminal velocity because the force of the free-fall would be greater and could thus overpower the force from the wind resistance.
I imagine the terminal velocity is less than 150 MPH from the airplane, so I imagine the iPhone aero-braked the horizontal velocity some.
But I'll leave the real answers to the physicist posters, of which I'm sure there are many.
Slashdot Mirror
It's on both sides of the fence.
Some article came out shortly after stating that the radiation being emitted into the atmosphere was X% that of Chernobyl... when it was really 1/10th the percentage stated. You have people spreading panic and fear, as well as people saying "see this is why nuclear power is evil."
Meanwhile you have people there saying "no alarm, nothing to see here" and later that day we find out something major happened or people were being burned by the radioactive water.
So you have fear mongers and people trying to sweep it under the rug. It makes it very hard to get an accurate picture of what's going on.
The issue most people have with warrantless wiretaps and searches is not an issue of whether one has anything to hide. Instead, they do not trust the police to be truthful and respectful in enforcing the law, and are concerned about police abuse. It's important to recognize that the real problem is the potential for police corruption, not the wiretapping itself, which would be fine if we were assured that every police officer was honest.
Obviously, that's what I mean. Hence the last line: that it's a dangerous argument to make for many many reasons.
"If you have nothing to hide" leads to it being done en-masse. Because "only" people that have something to hide are obviously against it.
Having it en-masse leads to little / no oversight. Why are we doing this again? What's going on with tap #25,653,142? Hand me form #1,265 for this morning. etc
If there's little over-sight, then it becomes abused. I'm just tapping this guy because he looks sketchy, or dating my ex.
The whole point of a subpoena is to make sure:
- There is good reason for the search / tap / etc.
- There's a paper trail, who requested and why.
- There's some oversight: did they follow the rules of the subpoena or did they look elsewhere. Did they follow the rules.
It's to prevent people from overstepping their reach.
I've been involved in six accidents, each time where someone hit me from behind
That is a lot!
and I was never at fault.
Hmmm. Legally maybe.
But, do you happen to see any correlation of the facts here?
On the one hand I see where you're going with that. After something happens to you a high number of times, you have to wonder whether you're to common denominator or the cause rather than chance or someone else. I knew a girl that got into a whole bunch of accidents, by her 2nd or 3rd accident in the same year it was hard to blame it on chance considering how little she had to drive each day.
But to play devil's advocate...
It depends on location. I've never been in an accident, but I mostly drive in the suburbs and on the highways. I've come close a lot of times because of some idiot or another, an admittedly almost caused one once or twice in the city. But my driving environment is typically mellow giving myself and other parties lots of room, distance, and time to adjust.
However I see that city driving is... bad. It's beyond hectic: people cutting people off, passing and cutting-off on the right, blowing through reds, almost hitting passengers that swing their door open, etc. I HATE driving in the cities and prefer mass transit when available. Meanwhile you have different regions.
So depending on the region, I guess it's possible to hit 6 accidents that are someone else's fault. Like some cabbies cut him off on the right 3 times and went into him.
But I see where you're going there.
FYI: a black box would have shown your driving was highly impossible, as well as looking at the RPM jumps.
Had you had a recording of all your events, they would have none there was a problem right away.
IN fact, this sort of thing will help mechanics out, a lot.
I imagine it could, but I supposedly have one. And yet they (a) saw it as no problem at first and (b) when they realized it was a problem they didn't know what it was.
They thought: clogged fuel line, something with the heater or whatever, etc. Something affecting the fuel flow or efficiency that the engine / fuel-injection-system was just trying to compensate for.
It didn't occur to them to say "oh it looks like the throttle position is wonky here"
afex,
- 2006 Cadillac CTS, bought brand new
- Drove it for the first few weeks, not a problem and very happy with the purchase.
- A couple of weeks later, the following weird problem occured.
- If engine/oil temp was below 3/8, in my case engine/oil temp stayed below that no matter how much I idled.
- If I gave it at least maybe 25% or 40% acceleration
- enough to make right @ stop sign, or left @ stop sign with HARDLY any traffic
- Car RPMs would go 5000 - 1000 - 5000 - 1000. It would alternate every second or so
- G-Force, no G-Force. Loud engine, quiet engine. RPM needle swinging around. etc. Very scary feeling, or at the least heavily embarassing.
- Took it to dealer.
- GM certified mechanics thought I was imagining things as mentioned earlier. Eventually said drive it until it gets worse
- Dropped it off a couple more times. They supposedly tested it when engine/oil temp was low.
- Eventually dropped it off last time before lemon law and they brought someone in from head office
- Problem was eventually tracked down to the throttle assembly (I think). It was warranty work work so no money issues
- Apparently bad data being sent to the computer, so the car was thinking I was flooring it, letting go, flooring it, letting go, etc.
Except for the fact of whether they can truly tell if everything is working correctly.
I drove my car with the issue for a couple of months. It took MANY trips to the dealership for them to track the problem, heck it took about 2 trips just for them to acknowledge there was a problem. The first couple of times it was "you must be imagining things" or "you must not realize you're flooring it and letting go every-other-second"
Really?
The first couple of diagnostics showed everything as healthy, as did a basic test.
Meanwhile this is the system the black box pulls from. So you have some guy that does a quick 1-2-3 test on the above, says it's ok. Then I get into a crash and it says "you were flooring it."
Everyone here seems to be of the opinion that (s)he has some sort of right to privacy when it comes to breaking the law. Sorry, but the law is the law. If you don't like the speed limit, then vote for someone who will raise it - but if you drive over the speed limit, you should be ticketed. If you're walking alongside a cliff, you stay far away from the edge to make sure you don't die. If the law states that driving 1mph over the speed limit is illegal, then perhaps you might try driving 5mph below the limit to make sure that you won't violate the law. What a concept!
That isn't my problem so much: it's not a worry about speeding. I try not to speed now as it is, I grew out of it and don't care if it takes me the extra 2-5 minutes that speeding would shave off. If there was a literal 1MpH zero-tolerance enforceable remotely it I'd just be even more careful.
As it stands, my previous car had a black box and I'm pretty sure my new one has it as well. I've never tampered with it or removed it. But the fact that it's ILLEGAL to remove something like that from my car is just asinine.
Meanwhile another poster brings up a good point: the common replies in the realm of "if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to hide." While we're at it why don't we just have warrantless searches and warrantless wire taps. After all, if you don't have anything to hide then you shouldn't mind.
I'm not equating the black boxes to those things, but saying the response is never a good one to give popularity.
Simply because you do not own the roads, you do not clean up the mess and you don't have to pay for all the costs of hospitalisation, rehabilitation and permanent disability.
It's called vehicle registrations and drivers licence, don't like it, walk or take public transport.
Unlike keeping the car in working order, with legal power-ratings, and having the appropriate lighting (all required by registration and inspection) how does the black box clean up the mess and pay for the hospitalization / rehab / etc?
Your explanation is: it should be part of the registration / inspection process because the registration / inspection process does good things and is required to continue driving. It says nothing about why this specific issue should be enforced other than "because they say so." So you might as well be applying it to "drivers must carry a hand-held air horn with them at all times." Why?
At best, it can help determine which driver was at fault... thus determining whose Insurance should pay and perhaps who should have to face criminal/civil repercussions.
At worst it can record something incorrectly, they'll take it as hard-fact/truth and screw over someone that didn't do anything wrong.
As mentioned, I've already been in the situation where the onboard computer on a 2006+ car was reporting faulty data to the point that it was doing screwy things to car as I drove. I'd hate to see what a black box recorded from it if I got into an accident.
Meanwhile, the difference between something like a radar gun and something inside your car... in court cases it has to be proven (or provable) that a device was officially calibrated correctly following a schedule. The black boxes they already have, the only times they're ever touched is during install and during an accident.
So then you have to worry about people taking "the black box as infallible" standpoint. I've heard of a couple of court cases where they kept treating the black box as "truth" when it shouldn't have.
First off, it being illegal to disable a part on my car? Is it making it safer or reducing pollution? Then why should removing it be illegal if it's my car?
I can understand keeping your engine/power at certain levels, keeping pollution to a minimum, and keeping your lights/blinkers in a certain condition.
But why should I be forced to leave a black-box on my car if it's just going to be used retroactively to bite me in the *behind* in case of an accident.
Particularly since I have personal experience with a car's onboard computer acting screwy and recording the wrong information from my accelerator.
American Airlines has announced that it is testing an in-flight video system that allows passengers to wirelessly stream movies and TV shows from an onboard library to their laptop computers and other electronic devices.
This gives me the impression that, atleast on this flight, passengers are not required to turn off their gadgets
I don't fly that often, maybe once every 1-2 years. But my last time was only 2 months ago.
Whenever I fly, they only ask that I turn off my devices during take-off and landing / final approach. I think during at least one of those flights they would also turn off the in-flight movies/TV and such.
So my guess here is that they would do something similar, only let you watch after take-off and until maybe 10 minutes before landing.
How is it possible their network isn't designed for data traffic? I mean, it's not like the increase of data consumption was completely unpredictable.
To play devil's advocate, data usage had a *sharp* increase in the last couple of years. Their upgrade plans probably didn't account for it, and now are having to play catchup. Networks are huge, so between the lag before noticing "our network is going to max out sooner than thought" and actually doing something about it, a lot of time passes.
I'm not saying it was the iPhones fault, but at least in the US the timing matches up. The iPhone made smartphones more popular and more mainstream, and other companies started getting more into the smartphone game. Kind of like there were mp3 players before the iPhone and they were a little popular, but Joe Sixpack didn't start buying them in droves until the iPod fad hit the nation.
All of a sudden you had a huge number of users that were starting to use data services that never even considered doing it in the past... and that number is growing and growing. Then you had people that maybe just used their phones to check their mail and the weather, and now they're using it for everything including streaming Netflix.
At that point it because a race between the increasing demand, and the current bandwidth + the old plans for upgrading.
I flew recently, the first time in a while.
At Logan airport in Boston, MA I saw the full body scanner. They didn't make me go through it, no anyone else I was with.
We went through the metal detector right next to it.
7 Think of how boring WoW or Eve Online (I'm not a big console player) would be in single player mode, for example. 7
Single Player World of Warcraft...
You mean Diablo 1 and Diablo 2? Or Neverwinter Knights?
Granted it's not EXACTLY the same, but single-player 3rd-person fantasy RPGs are fun and used to be popular.
Do you love what you do? If so, I find it hard to believe that you have never, not once, been inclined to create something on your own.
Still... yes. Not as much as I used to since my job description got changed to include server support and early morning calls besides the coding. When I have to do more coding or server stuff for work when I get home every evening, be reading for a support call before I go to bed every evening, it's hard to get psyched up to do something as a hobby.
I had a few projects that I was starting on a personal-side before the job description changed and back when my work day ended when I left my desk. But it changed before the projects got off the ground, and a Visual C++ app for Windows 2000 isn't exactly worth showing or continuing.
I wish.
I get home at 6:30
6:30 to 7 (ot 7:30) I'm usually catching up on some emails from people on the west coast or doing some server stfuff
Weekends, at least 2 or 3 hours each weekend doing "something" for the web apps or the servers
Then a couple of times a month I get woken up @ 3AM for server support (another 1-2 hours)
Then there's the personal life
I'm not saying my time is 100% booked, but I'd rather not spend what time afterwards on doing even more coding or server stuff.
I've been at my current job for 10 years, coding. I'm supposed to work from 8 to 4:30 but it usually turns into 8 to 5:30 as well as having to check emails in the evening. All of my apps are behind the company's firewall so I can't show them off to anyone.
Meanwhile I'm also a 2nd-level admin for our servers and web apps. Meaning at least a couple of times during the month I have to do something to the server over the weekend, get a support call at 3AM in the morning, test things after a server move, etc.
As much as I like coding, after 10 years of the above I'll be honest... I don't have any personal projects of my own to show.
The above takes too much of of day/week/etc as it stands. I really don't want to have to sit behind my computer and then do a personal project on top of everything else.
Skype was huge way before their android and apple apps. Just sayin...
Agreed: Skype became "the" thing way before it found a life on SmartPhones.
I have to agree with the earlier poster... I'm sure there are more open solutions out there, but I've yet to hear of anything large enough to even be considered a blip on Skype's radar.
I had a really good Sony DLP HDTV (Digital Projector). The lamp lasted forever and the picture was great. Sure it was "older" tech and "only" ran @ 720P but it was great.
A few years later my parents bought a Sony DLP because they liked mine so much. The picture quality wasn't as good (even though it was1020P) and the lamp blew out really quickly (I think just over a year). Finding a replacement was a major pain and now the TV is slowly dying (green spot growing on the screen).
My TV purchase was some years back, I've switched brands since. The only physical Sony product I've purchased since then was a PS3 (for which I purchased some games).
However I also signed up for PSN *and* their DC Universe Online PC game... so I'm probably impacted by all of this.
Time to change CC numbers.
So, when are all you losers going to wake up?
Sony just wanted your money, they don't give a crap about you, your rights to privacy, or even making an attempt at keeping your data secure.
Personally I'm more annoyed at the people that performed the hack than Sony. Granted Sony has lost what little company loyalty I had, I already stopped buying most of their products.
But in this case is the perpetrators that make me angry. It's one thing to screw with a company, it's another to screw with the average Joe that just wanted to play the latest Ratchet and Clank episode.
Name, address, birthdate, credit card number... that's more than enough for identity theft. Meaning not only do I need to take emergency steps on top of my pro-active steps, but I have the extra worry if it will be used.
If this was flat-out theft, then that stinks.
But if this was about "fighting the man," then what's the point of fighting "the man" if you trample all over the little guys to do it.
My experience with a Nexus One...
If I used voice transcribing for to the phone directly: as in I spoke to my phone to do a google search or write a text, it came out fairly well. There was the occasional error but mostly on things like names.
But my transcripts from the voice mails I receive were often trash.
I guess it has to do with the sound-quality: it probably uses the original high-quality recording locally so it performs good Google searches. Meanwhile the compression and static over the phone line (and the voice mail recording) are probably harder to transcribe.
A journalist friend of mine has suggested the possibility that Sony is staging this "hacker" attack as a fortuitous propaganda stunt to make hackers look bad and possibly cover up a real infrastructure problem caused by Sony itself.
While it makes *some* sense, I don't buy it.
My feeling is that this whole fiasco is hurting Sony's bottom line more than the whole hacker-awareness / scapegoat thing could even provide in the long-term.
They're losing a lot of customer trust and customer loyalty, and I have to assume this is hurting their stock price. Once is a shame, twice (so close together) is a disaster.
While it's true that companies probably want to shine a large spot-light on hackers, identity theft, etc there has to be some risk management. If this were true, then Sony is performing a kamikaze with way too many aspects to be worth it even in the long term.
Don't the police already have accident reports? Why do they need more information?
Accident reports would be a great indicator if all they were looking for was preventing accidents. It wouldn't cover everything, but when the concern is public safety it's definitely a great metric.
The skeptic in me has to mention that, while I can't speak for Europe, I know that some towns in the US really rely on income generated from tickets and fines. In which case they would want to place traps in places more likely to catch offenders.
Putting aside my skepticism, it's still an OK metric. Most places would like to reduce speeding in general; all it takes is one careless driver and/or one careless pedestrian and you have an accident. The mortality rates go way way up when you get hit at 40MpH instead of 25MpH.
So if this residential area has a lot of heavy speeding, then it's probably good to put the fear of the police into the drivers.
You make it sound like they decided one day that $60 was a natural fact.
I imagine there was some math behind it, along with some research and surveys, with them determining the optimal price was around $60.
They probably constructed a graph stating how much are customers willing to pay for a video game. And I'm sure they revisit the price every few years to see if the market's changed.
Games are getting to be quite expensive: voice talent, cut scenes (FMV or CGI), more complex programming, advertising, etc. They advertise games on TV now, they didn't do that back in the day.
Part of it is our fault, because we just accept that games cost $60 (or whatever).
The local cricket club has a machine for pitching cricket balls. You drop a ball in a hole at the back and it flies out a hole on the other side. I assume it gets squished between two rotating wheels. Don't they use these in base ball?
We do, but as mentioned in the summary this was supposedly more like an arm throwing a ball that a gun-type device firing a ball.
Same result, but 2 different ways going about it.
The gun-type device (that we use for batting practice) is probably more efficient and easier to fix / maintain.
This is closer to what a thrown ball behaves and I guess serves as a decent little experiment in trying to replicate human actions in similar ways. The wind-up, the pitch, trying to hit the strike zone, etc. In the end it's not *that* fascinating, but it's still "news for nerds."
Next stop: SkyNet and a bunch of Terminators running around throwing baseballs.
Terminal velocity should be much further than a few feet. Humans, which are not particularly aerodynamic, take a couple thousand feet to hit terminal velocity. A more compact object, like an iPhone, should have a higher terminal velocity. Since this one fell 1,000 feet, it's unlikely it hit terminal velocity at all.
I don't know, an iPhone is small and slim but in a free-fall I doubt it would stick to a nice "dive" with the short-edge facing the wind-resistance. It would probably be a tumble.
Plus, the iPhone is light. While mass doesn't affect the acceleration, it does come into play with wind resistance. If you had 2 objects the same dimensions as an iPhone but one was made of lead and another made of plastic the lead one would reach a much higher terminal velocity because the force of the free-fall would be greater and could thus overpower the force from the wind resistance.
I imagine the terminal velocity is less than 150 MPH from the airplane, so I imagine the iPhone aero-braked the horizontal velocity some.
But I'll leave the real answers to the physicist posters, of which I'm sure there are many.