Here we are on a site where strangers can rate what we say, potentially burying it where others won't get the chance to read it, and we're complaining that governments are vaguely coming around to the same idea?
Yes, but if we don't like the type of moderation on Slashdot, we're free to go to another site. With the government, we're not free to do that (at least, not if they have their way).
This system, if implemented, will just drive radicalized speech underground and out of the public eye. It's not going to solve anything, except increase the number of people who want to rebel against the government, and make them better at hiding their trails.
so-called 'free applications' or services are bullshit since they can and will be pulled at any time google so chooses.
This payment api they're retiring was far from their usual free offering. It was a payment api. It was getting a cut of every transaction.
That being said, the article is click-baiting us, it's discontinuing a service that nobody uses. Google Wallet isn't being discontinued for other goods, just digital goods. And it isn't being discontinued for in-app payments on Android, or on Google Play, only third party web sites selling digital goods with Google Wallet are going to be affected, which means practically no one.
If you had a third party global web site selling digital goods, it never made any sense to use Google Wallet in the first place. So it's not so much Google abandoning a product feature. It's actually a digital market that never saw the need for Google Wallet over competing options, and finally Google waking up to that fact.
Competition is a bitch; a government never likes it.
It isn't even competition in this case. Cabs and "ride sharing" augment the capabilities of public transportation. They do not subtract from it. Most people do not live right next to a convenient hub of public transportation. You often need to drive there, or have someone drive you to it. Also for the very few customers that "ride sharing" might actually take away from public transportation, it's a drop in the ocean. "Ride Sharing" simply can't scale like Public Transportation can.
Lyft and Uber drivers should have to follow the same not-free regs as taxi drivers. things like displaying a hack lic, certification of insurance or bonding, and penalties for systematic race discrimination are things that taxi drivers and their companies are required to follow. Undercutting these is not a good idea.
Uber's insurance is explained here, and its legalese can be found here. I haven't looked for Lyft's policy, but I assume that Lyft's policy can be just as easily found.
penalties for systematic race discrimination are things that taxi drivers and their companies are required to follow.
And yet despite all those penalties, racial discrimination still happens systematically during peak hours. During peak hours, taxi drivers can easily pretend not to have seen someone hailing them down if they know they can easily pick up someone else just as easily.
And in a way, Uber and Lyft's processes nicely solve that problem, since for them, they're not allowed to pick up people who are hailing them visually. They can only pick up the people that have hailed them electronically through a mobile app. So choosing your customer based on skin color is much less of a possibility for Uber and Lyft drivers, because now there is an electronic paper trail if a driver suddenly decides not to pick up a potential customer he has agreed to pick up electronically.
The electronic process of ordering rides through a mobile app also solves the problem of displaying a license. By ordering a ride through Uber, you see the picture, you see the id, and you see the rating of who's going pick you up before they do pick you up. Just try to get that level of information the next time you call for a Yellow cab, you won't get it.
Not only that but in a few big cities, where the number of medaillons stays stagnant despite the desperate need of additional taxis on the road during peak hours, Uber and Lyft are serving the needs of an underserved market. Because I can tell you, in my personal experience, it's not just black people that can't find a cab sometimes. As a white person who sometimes really needs a cab in San Francisco during peak hours, I've simply given up trying to find one. I can only assume that only customers from five star hotels and hot supermodels can catch cabs during those hours, because I see many cabs during those times, and I've used my phone to call cab companies as well, but those cabs are certainly not stopping for me, or they have the light on signaling that they're on their way to pick up someone else.
If I really need a car after work for some reason, I'll drive my car in, clogging up the system even more, and I'll risk paying insane parking fees for the entire day (despite the fact that I might only need the car for a fraction of that time, to go somewhere after 5 PM, that's not easily reached with public transportation).
I agree with your comment about data privacy, but what do you mean by flexible mail aliases? I have about a dozen email aliases linked to each email address on Google Apps Premier/Business, they all seem to work just fine. The filtering and dot notation also seem to work well.
So it could also mean that stupid people are more likely to drink pond/lake water than non-stupid people. Or that people living in rural areas are more likely to drink pond/lake water than city folks. Etc.
Alibaba seems extra sketchy. I get that a lot of people will go to great lengths to save a buck, but I'm probably one of the few that prefers dealing with somewhat reputable companies (a few do still exist).
Alibaba is mostly for business to business sourcing. Personally, I don't know any other reputable place where I can source custom electronics equipment from China.
Amazon doesn't do that. Ebay doesn't that. And I guess I could go on a Chinese manufacturer's web site to get something done, but without Alibaba, I have no idea where I could get started and how reliable a supplier is going to be. Alibaba has just grown to be the default place where people go for that kind of thing. It's definitely not for everybody.
How much of David Allen Van Vleet's personal information is now public record because he filed these court papers?
David Allen Van Vleet died in 2006, a good 8 years before he made his FOIA request.
Zombies don't usually worry about retaliation. They keep coming after their target, slowly but surely, filing out FOIA requests after FOIA requests, submitting court documents after court documents. They're relentless. Outside of updating their facebook page, playing the occasional farmville game, and voting in elections, they really have nothing else to do but pursue full-bosomed women.
To quote my own Mother, "I don't want to learn all that technical stuff, I just want to use my computer".
Computer hygiene should be taught like personal hygiene, at the school level for the kids and through other public programs to try to reach the adults and the elderly.
Yea, I have to say, I have to clean her machine off of crap every year. Every time I go over there, Internet Explorer has 5 or 6 toolbars installed because she clicks on everything. And no, she won't let me restrict and lock down the machine, I've tried that.
In case you're the one who usually buys her a computer, she's the perfect use case for a cheap Chromebook. That's what I did for my mom. I didn't really force it on her. I just bought it for her to keep next to her Windows XP laptop. Eventually, as her machine became much slower and slower, she just switched to using the Chromebook on her own.
The company is trying something new. It may or may not work out for them, but if they keep exploring, they are bound to find something that succeeds.
They're not trying something new. They're just trying to keep up with the free competing alternatives.
...for MS to capture back some of their former success.
This strategy isn't going to win them any new marketshare. At best, it may prevent them from losing more marketshare.
In either case, people will still think of Microsoft Office 365 as a paid-only service. Similar things happened with Hotmail and Bing. Eventually, Hotmail and Bing matched Gmail and Google in terms of quality of their features, but this change took so long to happen, it didn't improve their marketshare despite all the money they spent in marketing and advertising.
The best example of a fairness algorithm is an old one used with siblings. Tell one kid to divvy up the candy/cake/toys whatever, and let the other kid choose which half they want.
That's essentially how their web site works, except they're asking every roommate to divide up and assign a value to each space, before asking them which space they might prefer. In a way, I like their site better, because it seems to work more like a blind auction. By keeping the bids of other roommates initially secret, then they're essentially preventing them from changing their mind halfway before the process is finished. It makes the process much cleaner that way and much more haggle-free.
A better system is one where each has ultimate control over their view into wikipedia. Censorship should be at the client, not the server.
Wikipedia already has that. You can download a copy of it offline and modify your own local copy to anything you like.
For all you know, millions of people have already been editing their own private Wikipedia encyclopedia, and you would be none of the wiser, because you would never see the changes merged back into the main branch on the server.
Judge Judy threw a case out once because both parties had colluded to try to avoid paying taxes, by marking the value of a car as $1 on the title of ownership, despite contrary proof that the transaction had been for several thousand dollars.
Then she said something like:
Taxes pay for this court. Taxes pay my salary. If you choose to make a contract that goes outside the law, don't expect the justice system to support that contract when something goes wrong. The same goes for drug dealers who have a drug deal go bad, or someone who knowingly buys stolen property.
Just imagine if a judge who doesn't like bitcoins, or just doesn't understand them, had said something similar about bitcoins. That would have set a precedent and that would have been a PR-nightmare for bitcoins. In a way, I also think it helped that the Federal US Marshalls repossessed bitcoins from the Silk Road a while back and resold them for 89 million dollars. By reselling bitcoins for its own benefit, the government made it an asset that you could more legitimately purchase and sell. After all, if you can legally buy this asset from the government at an auction, this means legitimate corporations can also buy and sell such assets, not just shady startups or shady people or potential terrorists.
On a side-note: It's not really true that taxes pay Judge Judy's salary, since she's making 47 millions this year for only 52 days of work. All that money comes from TV ads, not taxes. She's mostly an entertainer, not a normal judge, but her main point still remains regarding non-TV judges, most of those other judges get paid through taxes.
The Rhode Island Convention Hall is a multi-story complex. It was never designed to be put into lockdown for a headcount.
Multi-story buildings do have capacity requirements. If you have a fire, or a small explosion, you could easily have the crowd stampeding itself at the exit points, or on the stairs.
It was never designed to be put into lockdown
The place wasn't placed on lockdown. A lockdown would imply that people were not allowed to leave. Also, all buildings and all rooms in a building are "designed" with capacity in mind and fire safety in mind. That's why it takes architects, structural engineers, building inspectors, and fire safety inspectors to sign off on every little thing before a building actually gets built or becomes operational.
Also controlling who gets in is actually quite common for conference hosts and organizers. After all, that's how they make their money, by making sure that only paid attendees are the ones to get in the conference, and that no one else does.
The fact that it was reopened a few hours later suggests that the fire marshal jumped the gun, realized he fucked up and then walked away leaving the organizers holding the bag he just took a shit in.
Personally, I have no idea if the fire marshal was right or not. I wasn't there.
But your logic escapes me. Not everyone stays at a conference all the time!
My G2 has been without a cover for 10 months now. Dropped several times on laminate floor, carpet, linoleum, and carport cement (2-4' drops). Been kicked across the floor and the driveway. And went tumbling down the stairs twice so far. Only permanent damage is two small divots on the very edge of the bezels ( in the extremely thin silver band just outside of the glass screen).
The two small divots on the very edge of the bezels is what I'm talking about. Like I said, the drop of mine "made a small chip to the glass bezel". It didn't affect the screen itself. I only thought it was worth mentioning, because now they're making the bezel even thinner. And putting a cover on it is kind of a bummer, because I really love the feel of the phone without the cover.
Despite what I said, it's a phone I really love. A couple more things about the phone:
The pull down menu looks horribly cluttered the first time you use it, but if you take the time to remove the things you don't need from it, it's actually very nice. The 13 MegaPixel camera + led flash should be a big plus, but the software of my Sony Experia Z Ultra without a flash and lower resolution takes better pictures in low light conditions than my G2 with a flash. And last but not least, the unorthodox placement of the power button and volume rocker is considered a negative by some reviewers, but now that I'm used to it, I wouldn't have it any other way, it feels the most natural usability-wise.
This has been one of the sturdiest phones I've had, and the first touchscreen phone I've kept out of a case. The only one stronger was my first cell phone, a fortified Panasonic TX-220.
Being the world's thinnest ain't worth crap if it shatters when the wind blows. How strong is this.7mm bezel?
As a proud owner of an LG G2 (their last flagship device before the G3), I can attest that the G2 feels like a precious jewel and is super fragile. I dropped it only once (before getting a cover for it, and that made a small chip to the glass bezel). And I actually know a few people with G2s and all those people I know have gotten covers for their G2s for the same reason I did, because the device chipped so easily.
Compare that to the Sony Experia Z Ultra, I let my nephews play with that one, and it must have been dropped 30 times without even as much as a scratch on it (which is really surprising, that device looks super fragile too).
That being said, the last time I had to replace a screen digitizer on an LG, a model before the G2, it cost me $30 to buy a replacement digitizer and change the digitizer myself (following a detailed youtube video). Try to do the same on a Samsung Note, and the replacement digitizer will cost you more than $150 because it uses Wacom technology. Or try to do the same with an iPhone, and I suspect that it will cost a lot as well since most people I know who have iPhones with broken screens don't bother to replace the screen at all (if they don't have the extra insurance to begin with).
Also, don't forget the thrill of flying a drone in a place that is usually not accessible to the public, and then uploading the footage to Youtube to get as many upvotes as you can, which the AR Drone app makes it very easy to do. I'm sure that Youtube is getting national security take down requests from the French government as we speak.
Russia has demonstrated that it is unwilling to engage in above-board transactions for their fuel exports.
[...]
It's a shame that Denmark can't get off of natural gas sooner than coal.
Thanks to the North Sea, Denmark is a net exporter of oil and natural gas. It's actually the coal they need to import. And compared to natural gas, it's actually the coal that is considerably dirtier. I personally don't see anything wrong with their plan. Few countries are in the position they're in, they will even benefit from what's going on with Russia right now.
Heck, it probably makes the whole 3d printing service bureau business model obsolete, because this puts high quality 3d printers in the cost range for small businesses.
Just like for photocopy machines.
[s]Once photocopy machines could be purchased by small businesses, everybody stopped using copy shops. [/sarcasm]
-- e.g. if you have an NFC collector tacked to the bottom of a public keypad, you can be pretty sure that person was using that keypad,
Actually, in this case you couldn't. With RFID yes, but with NFC no.
Even if the user was actually left-handed and even if the keypad NFC scanner was really powerful, with the small geometric size of the tag, the tag would need to be placed at the finger tip for that kind of thing to work (without the user knowing that he was being scanned), or the embedded tag would have to be bigger.
Either, your main point still remains. All you would need is indeed a unique id.
The best thing to do is replace the H-1B visas that are tied to a specific employer and make them a general limited time employment visa.
That would mean that H-1B workers would have to be sustained with unemployment benefits and other benefits during the periods they'd transition from job to job. However, in the US there are many people that want to punish immigrants, and their judgements are too clouded to accept a sensible compromise even if it could lead to better wages and better protection for all workers.
You combine this with the fact that all major corporations and corporate lobbyists would be dead set against such a law, and you have a non-starter.
Good point. It sounds like this could almost fall under anticompeition/antitrust laws.
Visa and Mastercard already have a near-monopoly on payment systems, to the detriment of most retailers
Making their own payment system is not anti-competitive. It should provide more competition, and more freedom of choice to the retailers who don't want to give away most of their valuable customer purchase history to two advertising giants.
Slashdot Mirror
Here we are on a site where strangers can rate what we say, potentially burying it where others won't get the chance to read it, and we're complaining that governments are vaguely coming around to the same idea?
Yes, but if we don't like the type of moderation on Slashdot, we're free to go to another site. With the government, we're not free to do that (at least, not if they have their way).
This system, if implemented, will just drive radicalized speech underground and out of the public eye. It's not going to solve anything, except increase the number of people who want to rebel against the government, and make them better at hiding their trails.
so-called 'free applications' or services are bullshit since they can and will be pulled at any time google so chooses.
This payment api they're retiring was far from their usual free offering. It was a payment api. It was getting a cut of every transaction.
That being said, the article is click-baiting us, it's discontinuing a service that nobody uses. Google Wallet isn't being discontinued for other goods, just digital goods. And it isn't being discontinued for in-app payments on Android, or on Google Play, only third party web sites selling digital goods with Google Wallet are going to be affected, which means practically no one.
If you had a third party global web site selling digital goods, it never made any sense to use Google Wallet in the first place. So it's not so much Google abandoning a product feature. It's actually a digital market that never saw the need for Google Wallet over competing options, and finally Google waking up to that fact.
Competition is a bitch; a government never likes it.
It isn't even competition in this case. Cabs and "ride sharing" augment the capabilities of public transportation. They do not subtract from it. Most people do not live right next to a convenient hub of public transportation. You often need to drive there, or have someone drive you to it. Also for the very few customers that "ride sharing" might actually take away from public transportation, it's a drop in the ocean. "Ride Sharing" simply can't scale like Public Transportation can.
Lyft and Uber drivers should have to follow the same not-free regs as taxi drivers. things like displaying a hack lic, certification of insurance or bonding, and penalties for systematic race discrimination are things that taxi drivers and their companies are required to follow. Undercutting these is not a good idea.
Uber's insurance is explained here, and its legalese can be found here. I haven't looked for Lyft's policy, but I assume that Lyft's policy can be just as easily found.
penalties for systematic race discrimination are things that taxi drivers and their companies are required to follow.
And yet despite all those penalties, racial discrimination still happens systematically during peak hours. During peak hours, taxi drivers can easily pretend not to have seen someone hailing them down if they know they can easily pick up someone else just as easily.
And in a way, Uber and Lyft's processes nicely solve that problem, since for them, they're not allowed to pick up people who are hailing them visually. They can only pick up the people that have hailed them electronically through a mobile app. So choosing your customer based on skin color is much less of a possibility for Uber and Lyft drivers, because now there is an electronic paper trail if a driver suddenly decides not to pick up a potential customer he has agreed to pick up electronically.
The electronic process of ordering rides through a mobile app also solves the problem of displaying a license. By ordering a ride through Uber, you see the picture, you see the id, and you see the rating of who's going pick you up before they do pick you up. Just try to get that level of information the next time you call for a Yellow cab, you won't get it.
Not only that but in a few big cities, where the number of medaillons stays stagnant despite the desperate need of additional taxis on the road during peak hours, Uber and Lyft are serving the needs of an underserved market. Because I can tell you, in my personal experience, it's not just black people that can't find a cab sometimes. As a white person who sometimes really needs a cab in San Francisco during peak hours, I've simply given up trying to find one. I can only assume that only customers from five star hotels and hot supermodels can catch cabs during those hours, because I see many cabs during those times, and I've used my phone to call cab companies as well, but those cabs are certainly not stopping for me, or they have the light on signaling that they're on their way to pick up someone else.
If I really need a car after work for some reason, I'll drive my car in, clogging up the system even more, and I'll risk paying insane parking fees for the entire day (despite the fact that I might only need the car for a fraction of that time, to go somewhere after 5 PM, that's not easily reached with public transportation).
I agree with your comment about data privacy, but what do you mean by flexible mail aliases? I have about a dozen email aliases linked to each email address on Google Apps Premier/Business, they all seem to work just fine. The filtering and dot notation also seem to work well.
So it could also mean that stupid people are more likely to drink pond/lake water than non-stupid people. Or that people living in rural areas are more likely to drink pond/lake water than city folks. Etc.
Alibaba seems extra sketchy. I get that a lot of people will go to great lengths to save a buck, but I'm probably one of the few that prefers dealing with somewhat reputable companies (a few do still exist).
Alibaba is mostly for business to business sourcing. Personally, I don't know any other reputable place where I can source custom electronics equipment from China.
Amazon doesn't do that. Ebay doesn't that. And I guess I could go on a Chinese manufacturer's web site to get something done, but without Alibaba, I have no idea where I could get started and how reliable a supplier is going to be. Alibaba has just grown to be the default place where people go for that kind of thing. It's definitely not for everybody.
How much of David Allen Van Vleet's personal information is now public record because he filed these court papers?
David Allen Van Vleet died in 2006, a good 8 years before he made his FOIA request.
Zombies don't usually worry about retaliation. They keep coming after their target, slowly but surely, filing out FOIA requests after FOIA requests, submitting court documents after court documents. They're relentless. Outside of updating their facebook page, playing the occasional farmville game, and voting in elections, they really have nothing else to do but pursue full-bosomed women.
To quote my own Mother, "I don't want to learn all that technical stuff, I just want to use my computer".
Computer hygiene should be taught like personal hygiene, at the school level for the kids and through other public programs to try to reach the adults and the elderly.
Yea, I have to say, I have to clean her machine off of crap every year. Every time I go over there, Internet Explorer has 5 or 6 toolbars installed because she clicks on everything. And no, she won't let me restrict and lock down the machine, I've tried that.
In case you're the one who usually buys her a computer, she's the perfect use case for a cheap Chromebook. That's what I did for my mom. I didn't really force it on her. I just bought it for her to keep next to her Windows XP laptop. Eventually, as her machine became much slower and slower, she just switched to using the Chromebook on her own.
The company is trying something new. It may or may not work out for them, but if they keep exploring, they are bound to find something that succeeds.
They're not trying something new. They're just trying to keep up with the free competing alternatives.
...for MS to capture back some of their former success.
This strategy isn't going to win them any new marketshare. At best, it may prevent them from losing more marketshare.
In either case, people will still think of Microsoft Office 365 as a paid-only service. Similar things happened with Hotmail and Bing. Eventually, Hotmail and Bing matched Gmail and Google in terms of quality of their features, but this change took so long to happen, it didn't improve their marketshare despite all the money they spent in marketing and advertising.
The best example of a fairness algorithm is an old one used with siblings. Tell one kid to divvy up the candy/cake/toys whatever, and let the other kid choose which half they want.
That's essentially how their web site works, except they're asking every roommate to divide up and assign a value to each space, before asking them which space they might prefer. In a way, I like their site better, because it seems to work more like a blind auction. By keeping the bids of other roommates initially secret, then they're essentially preventing them from changing their mind halfway before the process is finished. It makes the process much cleaner that way and much more haggle-free.
I would really like to live underground. That would solve so many problems. You would be immune to aerial surveillance,
Make sure to cover up those air vents, infrared cameras could pick them up.
you would not have to worry about tornadoes or storms.
Except for the floods they bring.
The temperature is a constant. You can expand just by digging more rooms. It would be a lair. However it probably wouldn't get you laid.
Those particular tribes were found by the fields they cultivated.
We technically haven't found their homes yet.
A better system is one where each has ultimate control over their view into wikipedia. Censorship should be at the client, not the server.
Wikipedia already has that. You can download a copy of it offline and modify your own local copy to anything you like.
For all you know, millions of people have already been editing their own private Wikipedia encyclopedia, and you would be none of the wiser, because you would never see the changes merged back into the main branch on the server.
At least, it does offer "some" legitimacy.
Judge Judy threw a case out once because both parties had colluded to try to avoid paying taxes, by marking the value of a car as $1 on the title of ownership, despite contrary proof that the transaction had been for several thousand dollars.
Then she said something like:
Taxes pay for this court. Taxes pay my salary. If you choose to make a contract that goes outside the law, don't expect the justice system to support that contract when something goes wrong. The same goes for drug dealers who have a drug deal go bad, or someone who knowingly buys stolen property.
Just imagine if a judge who doesn't like bitcoins, or just doesn't understand them, had said something similar about bitcoins. That would have set a precedent and that would have been a PR-nightmare for bitcoins. In a way, I also think it helped that the Federal US Marshalls repossessed bitcoins from the Silk Road a while back and resold them for 89 million dollars. By reselling bitcoins for its own benefit, the government made it an asset that you could more legitimately purchase and sell. After all, if you can legally buy this asset from the government at an auction, this means legitimate corporations can also buy and sell such assets, not just shady startups or shady people or potential terrorists.
On a side-note: It's not really true that taxes pay Judge Judy's salary, since she's making 47 millions this year for only 52 days of work. All that money comes from TV ads, not taxes. She's mostly an entertainer, not a normal judge, but her main point still remains regarding non-TV judges, most of those other judges get paid through taxes.
The Rhode Island Convention Hall is a multi-story complex. It was never designed to be put into lockdown for a headcount.
Multi-story buildings do have capacity requirements. If you have a fire, or a small explosion, you could easily have the crowd stampeding itself at the exit points, or on the stairs.
It was never designed to be put into lockdown
The place wasn't placed on lockdown. A lockdown would imply that people were not allowed to leave. Also, all buildings and all rooms in a building are "designed" with capacity in mind and fire safety in mind. That's why it takes architects, structural engineers, building inspectors, and fire safety inspectors to sign off on every little thing before a building actually gets built or becomes operational.
Also controlling who gets in is actually quite common for conference hosts and organizers. After all, that's how they make their money, by making sure that only paid attendees are the ones to get in the conference, and that no one else does.
The fact that it was reopened a few hours later suggests that the fire marshal jumped the gun, realized he fucked up and then walked away leaving the organizers holding the bag he just took a shit in.
Personally, I have no idea if the fire marshal was right or not. I wasn't there.
But your logic escapes me. Not everyone stays at a conference all the time!
What are you dropping it on and from how high?
My G2 has been without a cover for 10 months now. Dropped several times on laminate floor, carpet, linoleum, and carport cement (2-4' drops). Been kicked across the floor and the driveway. And went tumbling down the stairs twice so far. Only permanent damage is two small divots on the very edge of the bezels ( in the extremely thin silver band just outside of the glass screen).
The two small divots on the very edge of the bezels is what I'm talking about. Like I said, the drop of mine "made a small chip to the glass bezel". It didn't affect the screen itself. I only thought it was worth mentioning, because now they're making the bezel even thinner. And putting a cover on it is kind of a bummer, because I really love the feel of the phone without the cover.
Despite what I said, it's a phone I really love. A couple more things about the phone:
The pull down menu looks horribly cluttered the first time you use it, but if you take the time to remove the things you don't need from it, it's actually very nice. The 13 MegaPixel camera + led flash should be a big plus, but the software of my Sony Experia Z Ultra without a flash and lower resolution takes better pictures in low light conditions than my G2 with a flash. And last but not least, the unorthodox placement of the power button and volume rocker is considered a negative by some reviewers, but now that I'm used to it, I wouldn't have it any other way, it feels the most natural usability-wise.
This has been one of the sturdiest phones I've had, and the first touchscreen phone I've kept out of a case. The only one stronger was my first cell phone, a fortified Panasonic TX-220.
Let's agree to disagree then.
Being the world's thinnest ain't worth crap if it shatters when the wind blows. How strong is this .7mm bezel?
As a proud owner of an LG G2 (their last flagship device before the G3), I can attest that the G2 feels like a precious jewel and is super fragile. I dropped it only once (before getting a cover for it, and that made a small chip to the glass bezel). And I actually know a few people with G2s and all those people I know have gotten covers for their G2s for the same reason I did, because the device chipped so easily.
Compare that to the Sony Experia Z Ultra, I let my nephews play with that one, and it must have been dropped 30 times without even as much as a scratch on it (which is really surprising, that device looks super fragile too).
That being said, the last time I had to replace a screen digitizer on an LG, a model before the G2, it cost me $30 to buy a replacement digitizer and change the digitizer myself (following a detailed youtube video). Try to do the same on a Samsung Note, and the replacement digitizer will cost you more than $150 because it uses Wacom technology. Or try to do the same with an iPhone, and I suspect that it will cost a lot as well since most people I know who have iPhones with broken screens don't bother to replace the screen at all (if they don't have the extra insurance to begin with).
Or use your eleventh finger to unlock your phone.
Tell that to the people who used to live around Fukushima.
Wow! a 9.0 earthquake followed by a 30 ft tsunami! That must have been a big ass drone.
Also, don't forget the thrill of flying a drone in a place that is usually not accessible to the public, and then uploading the footage to Youtube to get as many upvotes as you can, which the AR Drone app makes it very easy to do. I'm sure that Youtube is getting national security take down requests from the French government as we speak.
Russia has demonstrated that it is unwilling to engage in above-board transactions for their fuel exports.
[...]
It's a shame that Denmark can't get off of natural gas sooner than coal.
Thanks to the North Sea, Denmark is a net exporter of oil and natural gas. It's actually the coal they need to import. And compared to natural gas, it's actually the coal that is considerably dirtier. I personally don't see anything wrong with their plan. Few countries are in the position they're in, they will even benefit from what's going on with Russia right now.
Heck, it probably makes the whole 3d printing service bureau business model obsolete, because this puts high quality 3d printers in the cost range for small businesses.
Just like for photocopy machines.
[s]Once photocopy machines could be purchased by small businesses, everybody stopped using copy shops. [/sarcasm]
-- e.g. if you have an NFC collector tacked to the bottom of a public keypad, you can be pretty sure that person was using that keypad,
Actually, in this case you couldn't. With RFID yes, but with NFC no.
Even if the user was actually left-handed and even if the keypad NFC scanner was really powerful, with the small geometric size of the tag, the tag would need to be placed at the finger tip for that kind of thing to work (without the user knowing that he was being scanned), or the embedded tag would have to be bigger.
Either, your main point still remains. All you would need is indeed a unique id.
The best thing to do is replace the H-1B visas that are tied to a specific employer and make them a general limited time employment visa.
That would mean that H-1B workers would have to be sustained with unemployment benefits and other benefits during the periods they'd transition from job to job. However, in the US there are many people that want to punish immigrants, and their judgements are too clouded to accept a sensible compromise even if it could lead to better wages and better protection for all workers.
You combine this with the fact that all major corporations and corporate lobbyists would be dead set against such a law, and you have a non-starter.
They're blocking Apply Pay and Google Wallet.
Good point. It sounds like this could almost fall under anticompeition/antitrust laws.
Visa and Mastercard already have a near-monopoly on payment systems, to the detriment of most retailers
Making their own payment system is not anti-competitive. It should provide more competition, and more freedom of choice to the retailers who don't want to give away most of their valuable customer purchase history to two advertising giants.