Here we have the same problem, but in our case it affects anything and everything that comes from overseas. I have to pay three times what you Americans pay for an SSD, ridiculous is not it?
This is not the same thing.
In your case, there may still be price discrimination, but the price difference is mostly because your government wants to extract a pound of flesh from every transaction, either to protect Brazilian jobs or to gather extra income for its own government coffers/expenditures.
And please don't bid on Ebay auctions that say (no international bidders), or if you bid on an item that accepts (international bidders), don't ever assume that we'll be willing to lie for you on the customs manifest and say that the contents have zero value. Experience has proven, that even if you claim that you don't care if a shipment gets confiscated by your own customs (or claim that you don't mind paying the extra penalties for evading those customs), that you actually will care about it when it does happen (as it inevitably will), and you will be so pissed off that you will actually rate the seller super negatively (despite the seller in the US having obeyed and followed your instructions perfectly to the letter).
Doesn't Google now own Yelp? Why would they have to ask for permission? Here is Yelps' Privacy policy. It looks ok to me.
Or does Microsoft want Google to ask permission from the business owners actually being reviewed? Allowing only positive reviews would make the entire point of having reviews completely useless if you ask me, but then, may be that's Microsoft's aim, to make the web more difficult to search and more difficult to filter for everyone.
For instance, my Optimus's Wi-Fi again shows an error, although I am sure that a hack is causing since when I reset the device when it's out of range from this home's signal the Wi-Fi works fine. And now the tablet (as of recently) can't access this home's open Wi-Fi, though it works fine when at other outside hot-spots.
The ssid could be hidden, other hotspots could be using the same ssid, the DHCP on the router could be misconfigured, your phone could be buggy (in addition to the DHCP misconfiguration), and yes, someone could even be intercepting your traffic by spoofing the open hotspot. Etc.
Considering the ambiguity of your report, the only thing that "I'm sure" of -- is actually almost nothing. For instance, this "my Optimus's Wi-Fi again shows an error" really doesn't tell me anything unless you specify the exact error it's giving you. And when I hear someone say "I reset the device" when talking about an Android phone, I really have no idea what they meant by "reset". Does that mean the user reset to factory defaults? Turned off the wi-fi on the phone? Long-pressed and clicked on forget the network? Turned off the phone? Turned off the phone and pulled out the battery for 30 seconds?
Are there any good (free?) security apps out there that would actually prevent this from occurring?
Security tools?
Yes, the hotspot is probably already equipped with one, it's just no enabled -- which is too bad. You should really ask your landlord to change the ssid, enable DHCP, disable ssid hiding (if enabled), use WPA2 authentication and use a good password on the hotspot itself.
And speaking of good third party security (or battery-saving) apps on Android, if you have some already installed, you should consider uninstalling them for a little while to see if they're not the ones causing the actual problem you're having. Third-party security apps on Android are pretty awful in terms of generating bugs, since many of them use undocumented and unsupported features of Android to try achieve their aim.
And yes, you could consider going through a VPN and encrypt your communications as much as you can, if you really don't want someone to able to impersonate the open hotspot and steal your data that way, but if the hotspots' DHCP server is the one that's causing the problem, then there is really nothing a VPN can do to fix your DHCP issues (if that's the case, your VPN won't work properly either anyway, and you'll probably still be get the same error message).
They certainly do stop ordinary motorists if something flags you to them (impaired driving, excessive speed, tax/insurance issues etc) but they're not there to "catch you out"...
That's really weird. In the US, if an unmarked police car tries to pull me over for any of those reasons, this only means one thing, and it means that it's a criminal trying to impersonate a cop.
I often hear of "Russian hackers" and the hacker scene is supposedly pretty big, and I've always wondered to what extent the government there had a hand in that. Anyone here have any experience with the Russian scene?
There used to be one in the former USSR, since they couldn't really buy Western hardware. They had government-sponsored operations to buy foreign hardware through third parties, tear the hardware apart, and cloning it. I suppose the same thing was probably happening for pirating Western software as well, thought I'm not sure if the Soviet government was directly involved in that one. Pirating and writing software patches was just something everybody did since they couldn't buy Western software through normal channels and therefore couldn't get the proper technical support for it.
And no, I don't have any direct experience with the Russian scene, I'm just reporting some of what I've read on the subject.
And why is the hacker scene so big there?
I feel this is in part a question of culture and in part a question of opportunity cost. Until it pays well to be software developer in Russia than to work as a criminal, many young unemployed Russians will just be "hackers"/crackers instead.
Also in terms of culture, studying sciences in Russia seems to be more respected than in the US, and also since the previous communist regime didn't work very well for the needs of its people, it seems almost everyone in former communist Russia has had to learn to hack the system (metaphorically speaking) just to get some of their every day needs met, so in my opinion, this kind of culture is much more likely to be ripe for this kind of criminal behavior.
2 - If I had a choice between something checked by the Russians, the US and the Chinese, the only one I would flat out reject would be the Chinese one. I see US spooks as no more concerned with my happiness and wellbeing than Russian ones.
What are you? Some kind of multinational Corporation? Or are you originally from Tibet?
Personally, I'm just a nobody living in the US. I'm much more afraid of the US authorities than any other foreign government.
Now if I was a nobody living in China, then yes, I might fear the Chinese government, but as it stands, China can't audit my taxes, only the US can audit my taxes. The same goes for my personal life, my voting record, my patriotism, my religious fervor, my sexual preference, or my music collection. China couldn't care less about me as an individual. It has 1 billion + people within its own border it can oppress and manipulate. It has no need to try to oppressing me, someone who's not Chinese, someone who does not live in China, and someone who has no connection to China whatsoever.
That actually won't happen. None of the sites mentioned are actually blocking Google from indexing their sites. They may have stopped providing nicely formatted headlines to Google News, but they haven't dared blocking Google to those same articles with a robots.txt through their online sites (which essentially contains the same newspaper content, plus some extra blog content which does not normally appear in the official version of their newspapers).
Essentially, they're hoping to lead a Worldwide revolt, hoping that others will jump into the fray and finish the suicidal charge they've just started, but they themselves are keeping their options opened and their page rank mostly intact, just in case the revolt doesn't work out.
NFC technology and PassBooks' technology are orthogonal to each other.
In other words, NFC can work with, or without, Apple's PassBook, and Apple's PassBook can work with, or without, NFC. And no, you don't even need to take my word for it, you can just take Apples' words instead.
Apple has recently won patents for using NFC on an iPhone to control home appliances, using NFC to control iWallet transactions with parental controls, and using NFC for checking-in with an airline (at the time, it called it iTravel, but that same airline ticketing information can be found within PassBook).
Also, that percentage doesn't take into account the iPhone users that bought the tickets but got lost on the way there, nor the iPhone users that bought the tickets that were just waved in by staff (or had to reprint their ticket on actual paper at the park itself) because the barcode couldn't be scanned in because of the glare on their screen, and nor does it count the iPhone users that were only trying to remove the unremovable PassBook icon from their homescreen and that ended up buying a ticket to the game by accident instead.:)
Actually, I was only kidding about that last one, iPhone users didn't accidentally buy post season tickets (at least not to my knowledge), but the part about iPhone owners being pissed off at having an unremovable PassBook icon on their homescreen, when most of them have no interest in buying Baseball tickets, nor any interest in PassBook. That part is completely true. Comments of these very upset iPhone users can be found all over the Internet.
You'll find these comments just next to some of the Android phone users complaining about having a NASCAR app on their phone, the only difference being that not all Android phones come with commercial bloatware, only some do, and that when they do, that bloatware can still be removed the homescreen even if it can't be removed from the phone.
And so Apple makes their products incompatible with the rest of the universe in yet one more way! It's not easy being an Apple customer, is it?
I disagree completely (The only problem I do see with this move is that they'd try to patent such an obvious alternative to the technology). As an Android developer and as someone who is optimistic about NFC (not necessarily about payment NFC, but about the simpler use cases of NFC that do not require access to the hardware secure element). Whenever I speak to a potential client about using NFC, the conversation always gets steered to a way to make it backwards compatible for other devices.
And this is perfectly normal. When bar-code scanning technology came out, the human-readable version of that id wasn't removed (and for good reason, sometimes you'd need to manually enter that information with a keypad). Or when printing a QR code, it would be pretty stupid not to print the human-readable version of the same information (that is, at least unless you were making a QR puzzle or something, or you didn't have enough room to print out all the relevant information).
So developing alternative backwards-compatible solutions to NFC, like using Bump-like technology, or using Qualcomm All-Joyn-like technology, isn't meant to make it less compatible with other NFC devices, its main purpose is to provide a temporary backwards-compatible solution for the devices that do not have NFC in them yet, as this is really the only way most businesses will accept investing in NFC-technology in the first place -- only if you provide a backwards-compatible technology with it.
This guy should be getting his kids The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, which is a book from 1960s which was banned because it was considered too dangerous, which is now only available as an ebook on the intertubes (it isn't available for sale anywhere, the original publisher took it off the shelves for liability reasons, but it can still be found at various places if you google for it). Although it's quite out-of-date on some of the topics it covers, it's still my favorite lab Chemistry book in the entire World !!
And of course, this isn't a book that should be given to kids without parental supervision, there is actually a very good reason this book was taken off the shelves and no, it's not because some kid blew himself up with it, which may have happened as well (without parental supervision), it's actually much weirder than that. The book was taken off the shelves because some thirteen years old successfully replicated the experiments by Marie Curie detailed in the book.
Now that I've made my recommendation, which I didn't want to get lost in my very long diatribe, here comes my long diatribe which tries to partially answer some of his better points.
Even some of my smartest friends seem to be oddly loyal to the Committee of Ten. They are not able to imagine a universe in which my son does not take chemistry his sophomore year in high school. Seriously guys, dig deep, and you may find some powers of imagination left over from all those years of industrialized schooling and, well, schooling.
Do we really have to dig that hard to imagine a world without Chemistry education? We really don't.
I still find that most people are ignorant about Chemistry (and even Physics and Biology), not that I'm very good at any of those subjects either (I've just been fortunate enough not to be born in a country that ignored Science education), but just to give you an example, my mother doesn't have an education in Chemistry (it wasn't offered during her time, especially for her gender). Had she received a basic education in that subject when she was younger, she would have probably seen through half the medical quackery that she's getting into from the internet. Right now, she's getting convinced left and right, and there is really so much I can do to dissuade her that the people she's listening to are not legitimate medical professionals.
And yes, a Chemistry education would have helped, at least a little bit. Some of those internet quacks do rely on the language of Chemistry that they've cut and pasted from various places, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense on the whole in the context of what they're saying.
Right now, the only education on Chemistry/Physics most of our mainstream population is getting, is through TV dramas and television news. And to a father who doesn't really remember chemistry (even thought he was good at it), he may not see much harm in shows like "Numb3rs", in fact, he's probably glad that such a show (now cancelled) was trying to educate the public about Math, Physics, and even Chemistry at times, while still staying interesting to watch, but he probably didn't even notice the purposeful omissions of real science in favor of increasing the drama to keep the show interesting. Nor does he have much of an idea how misleading that show is going to be to our society, because of what they mis-portrayed on it.
And ultimately, that's the real problem here, we need the citizens in our country (the younger generation at least), to be conversant in Chemistry (and other sciences), so they can help make good personal decisions about their own health, nutrition, and environment, and make good policy decisions about our society, because on the whole that knowledge is certainly not coming from our television or our parents (barring a very few exceptions).
I wish there was some alternative, where maybe Microsoft would merely control people who have other marketplaces, and it would be up to say..CNET to insure that their download was safe, etc.
I certainly would hope not. CNET/download.com is already one of the worst free software curators in the world.
It already takes free (and sometimes open source) software that's already available elsewhere on the internet for free, and most of which is already free of spyware and free of marketing toolbars, and wraps them inside their own installer that installs their own spyware and installs poorly-worded half-hidden opt-out internet browser toolbars.
Steve Hernandez, whose daughter is a sophomore, objects to the tags, saying they are similar to the "mark of the beast." "My daughter should not have to compromise (her) religion just because Northside Independent School District wants to get paid," Hernandez said. source
It does suck to be this guy's daughter, apparently she got the RFID badge #666 and her badge is the only one that came out all in Hebrew.
Never mind that this kind of technology could allow you to sleep while going to work, or sleep while going cross-country, or moon the people from the other cars, or pee outside the car drivers' window while doing 70 MPH.
Now, that's freedom! Having more options to do what you want is freedom. Now don't get me wrong, I'd also want to be able to turn off the automatic-pilot when I'd want. I just think your viewpoint on how to preserve that right is a little bit too extreme.
As to the poll, he should just have his friends run an independent poll and publish the results somewhere. That's usually how the Republicans and the Democrats do it. Why not do the same thing?
No, the court ruled correctly. The law has a very specific definition of stored communications, and as such only applies to backups and transient copies, not long-term hosted data. It's a stupid definition, but that's congress's fault not the judge's.
Could you point to the "stupid" part of the definition? I'm just not seeing what you're seeing.
(A) any temporary, intermediate storage of a wire or electronic communication incidental to the electronic transmission thereof; and (B) any storage of such communication by an electronic communication service for the purposes of backup protection of such communication. [source]
Also if you notice, you'll see that the South Carolina judges couldn't even agree on one majority opinion of why they ruled that way, so their opinion is not going to be of much help to future courts.
That honey article is misleading -- there's nothing fake about ultra-filtered, pollenless honey.
That's correct. Ultra-filtered honey isn't proof-positive that it's fake.
However...
[...]
Food safety investigators from the European Union barred all shipments of honey from India because of the presence of lead and illegal animal antibiotics. Further, they found an even larger amount of honey apparently had been concocted without the help of bees, made from artificial sweeteners and then extensively filtered to remove any proof of contaminants or adulteration or indications of precisely where the honey actually originated.
An examination of international and government shipping tallies, customs documents and interviews with some of North America’s top honey importers and brokers documented the rampant honey laundering and that a record amount of the Chinese honey was being purchased by major U.S. packers.
Food Safety News contacted Suebee Co-Op, the nation’s oldest and largest honey packer and seller, for a response to these allegations and to learn where it gets its honey. The co-op did not respond to repeated calls and emails for comment. Calls and emails to other major honey sellers also were unreturned.
EU Won’t Accept Honey from India
Much of this questionable honey was officially banned beginning June 2010 by the 27 countries of the European Union and others. But on this side of the ocean, the FDA checks few of the thousands of shipments arriving through 22 American ports each year.
According to FDA data, between January and June, just 24 honey shipments were stopped from entering the country. The agency declined to say how many loads are inspected and by whom.
However, during that same period, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that almost 43 million pounds of honey entered the U.S. Of that, the Department of Commerce said 37.7 million pounds came from India, the same honey that is banned in the EU because it contained animal medicine and lead and lacked the proper paperwork to prove it didn’t come from China.
“There are still millions of pounds of transshipped Chinese honey coming in the U.S. and it’s all coming now from India and Vietnam and everybody in the industry knows that,” said Elise Gagnon, president of Odem International, a worldwide trading house that specializes in bulk raw honey.
The FDA says it has regulations prohibiting foods banned in other countries from entering the U.S. However, the agency said last month that it “would not know about honey that has been banned from other countries ”
Adee called the FDA’s response “absurd.” He said the European ban against Indian honey is far from a secret.
“Why are we the dumping ground of the world for something that’s banned in all these other countries?” asked Adee, who, with 80,000 bee colonies in five states, is the country’s largest honey producer.
“We’re supposed to have the world’s safest food supply but we’re letting in boatloads of this adulterated honey that all these other countries know is contaminated and FDA does nothing.”
And please note that for the EU, a ban against "Indian honey" is a ban against "Chinese honey", because Chinese Honey was being re-routed through India and then the UK to take advantage of their commonwealth connection so that it could get into the EU in the first place without paying huge tariffs.
And again, this is only circumstantial evidence, not definitive proof, but here is a video documentary on the start of mass disappearance of bees in China. http://w
Is it me, or is blurring/removing something from these maps the absolute ideal way to tell the entire world: "There's something really important to someone here."
Or it could just be a decoy military site.
After all, the British and the Germans both had their own decoy sites during World War II.
So why wouldn't Tawain have theirs too?
After all, if the cows that breached their security perimeter couldn't even be silenced afterwards, then perhaps there was no one there to even guard the place, or to threaten the cows into not talking to the press about what they had seen.
Speaking of which, watch out for packaged food in the supermarkets these days - a lot of it says 'Made in China' and it's just a matter of time before a major ingredients scandal hits.
But I wouldn't blame the Chinese only. Our own Federal government is the one to blame. As long as the fake cheaper substitutes do not kill us, our own government won't intervene.
Vote with your feet people. Learn which stores carry fake honey. You never know what else they might be carrying that's fake. My local Safeway for instance still carries fake honey (even after the news came out), but my local Trader Joes' doesn't (it apparently never did).
Slashdot Mirror
Here we have the same problem, but in our case it affects anything and everything that comes from overseas. I have to pay three times what you Americans pay for an SSD, ridiculous is not it?
This is not the same thing.
In your case, there may still be price discrimination, but the price difference is mostly because your government wants to extract a pound of flesh from every transaction, either to protect Brazilian jobs or to gather extra income for its own government coffers/expenditures.
And please don't bid on Ebay auctions that say (no international bidders), or if you bid on an item that accepts (international bidders), don't ever assume that we'll be willing to lie for you on the customs manifest and say that the contents have zero value. Experience has proven, that even if you claim that you don't care if a shipment gets confiscated by your own customs (or claim that you don't mind paying the extra penalties for evading those customs), that you actually will care about it when it does happen (as it inevitably will), and you will be so pissed off that you will actually rate the seller super negatively (despite the seller in the US having obeyed and followed your instructions perfectly to the letter).
Doesn't Google now own Yelp? Why would they have to ask for permission? Here is Yelps' Privacy policy. It looks ok to me.
Or does Microsoft want Google to ask permission from the business owners actually being reviewed? Allowing only positive reviews would make the entire point of having reviews completely useless if you ask me, but then, may be that's Microsoft's aim, to make the web more difficult to search and more difficult to filter for everyone.
Are there any good (free?) security apps out there that would actually prevent this from occurring?
iOS 6 comes free on the iPhone 5. Highly recommended!
That's kind of an expensive solution.
I can think of a few good quality dedicated wireless routers that I would use before trying to replace an open wifi hotspot with an iPhone 5.
For instance, my Optimus's Wi-Fi again shows an error, although I am sure that a hack is causing since when I reset the device when it's out of range from this home's signal the Wi-Fi works fine. And now the tablet (as of recently) can't access this home's open Wi-Fi, though it works fine when at other outside hot-spots.
The ssid could be hidden, other hotspots could be using the same ssid, the DHCP on the router could be misconfigured, your phone could be buggy (in addition to the DHCP misconfiguration), and yes, someone could even be intercepting your traffic by spoofing the open hotspot. Etc.
Considering the ambiguity of your report, the only thing that "I'm sure" of -- is actually almost nothing. For instance, this "my Optimus's Wi-Fi again shows an error" really doesn't tell me anything unless you specify the exact error it's giving you. And when I hear someone say "I reset the device" when talking about an Android phone, I really have no idea what they meant by "reset". Does that mean the user reset to factory defaults? Turned off the wi-fi on the phone? Long-pressed and clicked on forget the network? Turned off the phone? Turned off the phone and pulled out the battery for 30 seconds?
Are there any good (free?) security apps out there that would actually prevent this from occurring?
Security tools?
Yes, the hotspot is probably already equipped with one, it's just no enabled -- which is too bad. You should really ask your landlord to change the ssid, enable DHCP, disable ssid hiding (if enabled), use WPA2 authentication and use a good password on the hotspot itself.
And speaking of good third party security (or battery-saving) apps on Android, if you have some already installed, you should consider uninstalling them for a little while to see if they're not the ones causing the actual problem you're having. Third-party security apps on Android are pretty awful in terms of generating bugs, since many of them use undocumented and unsupported features of Android to try achieve their aim.
And yes, you could consider going through a VPN and encrypt your communications as much as you can, if you really don't want someone to able to impersonate the open hotspot and steal your data that way, but if the hotspots' DHCP server is the one that's causing the problem, then there is really nothing a VPN can do to fix your DHCP issues (if that's the case, your VPN won't work properly either anyway, and you'll probably still be get the same error message).
They certainly do stop ordinary motorists if something flags you to them (impaired driving, excessive speed, tax/insurance issues etc) but they're not there to "catch you out"...
That's really weird. In the US, if an unmarked police car tries to pull me over for any of those reasons, this only means one thing, and it means that it's a criminal trying to impersonate a cop.
I often hear of "Russian hackers" and the hacker scene is supposedly pretty big, and I've always wondered to what extent the government there had a hand in that. Anyone here have any experience with the Russian scene?
There used to be one in the former USSR, since they couldn't really buy Western hardware. They had government-sponsored operations to buy foreign hardware through third parties, tear the hardware apart, and cloning it. I suppose the same thing was probably happening for pirating Western software as well, thought I'm not sure if the Soviet government was directly involved in that one. Pirating and writing software patches was just something everybody did since they couldn't buy Western software through normal channels and therefore couldn't get the proper technical support for it.
And no, I don't have any direct experience with the Russian scene, I'm just reporting some of what I've read on the subject.
And why is the hacker scene so big there?
I feel this is in part a question of culture and in part a question of opportunity cost. Until it pays well to be software developer in Russia than to work as a criminal, many young unemployed Russians will just be "hackers"/crackers instead.
Also in terms of culture, studying sciences in Russia seems to be more respected than in the US, and also since the previous communist regime didn't work very well for the needs of its people, it seems almost everyone in former communist Russia has had to learn to hack the system (metaphorically speaking) just to get some of their every day needs met, so in my opinion, this kind of culture is much more likely to be ripe for this kind of criminal behavior.
2 - If I had a choice between something checked by the Russians, the US and the Chinese, the only one I would flat out reject would be the Chinese one. I see US spooks as no more concerned with my happiness and wellbeing than Russian ones.
What are you? Some kind of multinational Corporation? Or are you originally from Tibet?
Personally, I'm just a nobody living in the US. I'm much more afraid of the US authorities than any other foreign government.
Now if I was a nobody living in China, then yes, I might fear the Chinese government, but as it stands, China can't audit my taxes, only the US can audit my taxes. The same goes for my personal life, my voting record, my patriotism, my religious fervor, my sexual preference, or my music collection. China couldn't care less about me as an individual. It has 1 billion + people within its own border it can oppress and manipulate. It has no need to try to oppressing me, someone who's not Chinese, someone who does not live in China, and someone who has no connection to China whatsoever.
They'll see what happens when their visits drop.
That actually won't happen. None of the sites mentioned are actually blocking Google from indexing their sites. They may have stopped providing nicely formatted headlines to Google News, but they haven't dared blocking Google to those same articles with a robots.txt through their online sites (which essentially contains the same newspaper content, plus some extra blog content which does not normally appear in the official version of their newspapers).
Essentially, they're hoping to lead a Worldwide revolt, hoping that others will jump into the fray and finish the suicidal charge they've just started, but they themselves are keeping their options opened and their page rank mostly intact, just in case the revolt doesn't work out.
NFC technology and PassBooks' technology are orthogonal to each other.
In other words, NFC can work with, or without, Apple's PassBook, and Apple's PassBook can work with, or without, NFC. And no, you don't even need to take my word for it, you can just take Apples' words instead.
Apple has recently won patents for using NFC on an iPhone to control home appliances, using NFC to control iWallet transactions with parental controls, and using NFC for checking-in with an airline (at the time, it called it iTravel, but that same airline ticketing information can be found within PassBook).
Maybe NFC is the Betamax
Major League Baseball said that 12% of post season tickets have been used digitally via the new passbook app on iOS 6
You should qualify that percentage. It's only 12% of the single game post season tickets that were sold online, not 12% of all their single game post season tickets.
Also, that percentage doesn't take into account the iPhone users that bought the tickets but got lost on the way there, nor the iPhone users that bought the tickets that were just waved in by staff (or had to reprint their ticket on actual paper at the park itself) because the barcode couldn't be scanned in because of the glare on their screen, and nor does it count the iPhone users that were only trying to remove the unremovable PassBook icon from their homescreen and that ended up buying a ticket to the game by accident instead. :)
Actually, I was only kidding about that last one, iPhone users didn't accidentally buy post season tickets (at least not to my knowledge), but the part about iPhone owners being pissed off at having an unremovable PassBook icon on their homescreen, when most of them have no interest in buying Baseball tickets, nor any interest in PassBook. That part is completely true. Comments of these very upset iPhone users can be found all over the Internet.
You'll find these comments just next to some of the Android phone users complaining about having a NASCAR app on their phone, the only difference being that not all Android phones come with commercial bloatware, only some do, and that when they do, that bloatware can still be removed the homescreen even if it can't be removed from the phone.
And so Apple makes their products incompatible with the rest of the universe in yet one more way! It's not easy being an Apple customer, is it?
I disagree completely (The only problem I do see with this move is that they'd try to patent such an obvious alternative to the technology). As an Android developer and as someone who is optimistic about NFC (not necessarily about payment NFC, but about the simpler use cases of NFC that do not require access to the hardware secure element). Whenever I speak to a potential client about using NFC, the conversation always gets steered to a way to make it backwards compatible for other devices.
And this is perfectly normal. When bar-code scanning technology came out, the human-readable version of that id wasn't removed (and for good reason, sometimes you'd need to manually enter that information with a keypad). Or when printing a QR code, it would be pretty stupid not to print the human-readable version of the same information (that is, at least unless you were making a QR puzzle or something, or you didn't have enough room to print out all the relevant information).
So developing alternative backwards-compatible solutions to NFC, like using Bump-like technology, or using Qualcomm All-Joyn-like technology, isn't meant to make it less compatible with other NFC devices, its main purpose is to provide a temporary backwards-compatible solution for the devices that do not have NFC in them yet, as this is really the only way most businesses will accept investing in NFC-technology in the first place -- only if you provide a backwards-compatible technology with it.
This guy should be getting his kids The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, which is a book from 1960s which was banned because it was considered too dangerous, which is now only available as an ebook on the intertubes (it isn't available for sale anywhere, the original publisher took it off the shelves for liability reasons, but it can still be found at various places if you google for it). Although it's quite out-of-date on some of the topics it covers, it's still my favorite lab Chemistry book in the entire World !!
And of course, this isn't a book that should be given to kids without parental supervision, there is actually a very good reason this book was taken off the shelves and no, it's not because some kid blew himself up with it, which may have happened as well (without parental supervision), it's actually much weirder than that. The book was taken off the shelves because some thirteen years old successfully replicated the experiments by Marie Curie detailed in the book.
Now that I've made my recommendation, which I didn't want to get lost in my very long diatribe, here comes my long diatribe which tries to partially answer some of his better points.
Even some of my smartest friends seem to be oddly loyal to the Committee of Ten. They are not able to imagine a universe in which my son does not take chemistry his sophomore year in high school. Seriously guys, dig deep, and you may find some powers of imagination left over from all those years of industrialized schooling and, well, schooling.
Do we really have to dig that hard to imagine a world without Chemistry education? We really don't.
I still find that most people are ignorant about Chemistry (and even Physics and Biology), not that I'm very good at any of those subjects either (I've just been fortunate enough not to be born in a country that ignored Science education), but just to give you an example, my mother doesn't have an education in Chemistry (it wasn't offered during her time, especially for her gender). Had she received a basic education in that subject when she was younger, she would have probably seen through half the medical quackery that she's getting into from the internet. Right now, she's getting convinced left and right, and there is really so much I can do to dissuade her that the people she's listening to are not legitimate medical professionals.
And yes, a Chemistry education would have helped, at least a little bit. Some of those internet quacks do rely on the language of Chemistry that they've cut and pasted from various places, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense on the whole in the context of what they're saying.
Right now, the only education on Chemistry/Physics most of our mainstream population is getting, is through TV dramas and television news. And to a father who doesn't really remember chemistry (even thought he was good at it), he may not see much harm in shows like "Numb3rs", in fact, he's probably glad that such a show (now cancelled) was trying to educate the public about Math, Physics, and even Chemistry at times, while still staying interesting to watch, but he probably didn't even notice the purposeful omissions of real science in favor of increasing the drama to keep the show interesting. Nor does he have much of an idea how misleading that show is going to be to our society, because of what they mis-portrayed on it.
And ultimately, that's the real problem here, we need the citizens in our country (the younger generation at least), to be conversant in Chemistry (and other sciences), so they can help make good personal decisions about their own health, nutrition, and environment, and make good policy decisions about our society, because on the whole that knowledge is certainly not coming from our television or our parents (barring a very few exceptions).
I wish there was some alternative, where maybe Microsoft would merely control people who have other marketplaces, and it would be up to say..CNET to insure that their download was safe, etc.
I certainly would hope not. CNET/download.com is already one of the worst free software curators in the world.
It already takes free (and sometimes open source) software that's already available elsewhere on the internet for free, and most of which is already free of spyware and free of marketing toolbars, and wraps them inside their own installer that installs their own spyware and installs poorly-worded half-hidden opt-out internet browser toolbars.
Steve Hernandez, whose daughter is a sophomore, objects to the tags, saying they are similar to the "mark of the beast."
"My daughter should not have to compromise (her) religion just because Northside Independent School District wants to get paid," Hernandez said.
source
It does suck to be this guy's daughter, apparently she got the RFID badge #666 and her badge is the only one that came out all in Hebrew.
Never mind that this kind of technology could allow you to sleep while going to work, or sleep while going cross-country, or moon the people from the other cars, or pee outside the car drivers' window while doing 70 MPH.
Now, that's freedom! Having more options to do what you want is freedom. Now don't get me wrong, I'd also want to be able to turn off the automatic-pilot when I'd want. I just think your viewpoint on how to preserve that right is a little bit too extreme.
How do these things perform in weather? ex. Blizzards
I'd hate to wind up in a snow drift in the middle of the road rather than backing up and finding an alt. route... or going home.
Golf Carts have never traditionally done well in snow blizzards.
As to the poll, he should just have his friends run an independent poll and publish the results somewhere. That's usually how the Republicans and the Democrats do it. Why not do the same thing?
Or he should just accept a $50,000 check in escrow, and later just give back the money as soon the live debate has ended.
Not asking a question, not suggesting to act.
So what is it, just a story to tell?
Hey! He's a libertarian. He doesn't tell people what to do.
No, the court ruled correctly. The law has a very specific definition of stored communications, and as such only applies to backups and transient copies, not long-term hosted data. It's a stupid definition, but that's congress's fault not the judge's.
Could you point to the "stupid" part of the definition? I'm just not seeing what you're seeing.
(A) any temporary, intermediate storage of a wire or electronic communication incidental to the electronic transmission thereof; and (B) any storage of such communication by an electronic communication service for the purposes of backup protection of such communication.
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Also if you notice, you'll see that the South Carolina judges couldn't even agree on one majority opinion of why they ruled that way, so their opinion is not going to be of much help to future courts.
That honey article is misleading -- there's nothing fake about ultra-filtered, pollenless honey.
That's correct. Ultra-filtered honey isn't proof-positive that it's fake.
However...
[...]
Food safety investigators from the European Union barred all shipments of honey from India because of the presence of lead and illegal animal antibiotics. Further, they found an even larger amount of honey apparently had been concocted without the help of bees, made from artificial sweeteners and then extensively filtered to remove any proof of contaminants or adulteration or indications of precisely where the honey actually originated.
An examination of international and government shipping tallies, customs documents and interviews with some of North America’s top honey importers and brokers documented the rampant honey laundering and that a record amount of the Chinese honey was being purchased by major U.S. packers.
Food Safety News contacted Suebee Co-Op, the nation’s oldest and largest honey packer and seller, for a response to these allegations and to learn where it gets its honey. The co-op did not respond to repeated calls and emails for comment. Calls and emails to other major honey sellers also were unreturned.
EU Won’t Accept Honey from India
Much of this questionable honey was officially banned beginning June 2010 by the 27 countries of the European Union and others. But on this side of the ocean, the FDA checks few of the thousands of shipments arriving through 22 American ports each year.
According to FDA data, between January and June, just 24 honey shipments were stopped from entering the country. The agency declined to say how many loads are inspected and by whom.
However, during that same period, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that almost 43 million pounds of honey entered the U.S. Of that, the Department of Commerce said 37.7 million pounds came from India, the same honey that is banned in the EU because it contained animal medicine and lead and lacked the proper paperwork to prove it didn’t come from China.
“There are still millions of pounds of transshipped Chinese honey coming in the U.S. and it’s all coming now from India and Vietnam and everybody in the industry knows that,” said Elise Gagnon, president of Odem International, a worldwide trading house that specializes in bulk raw honey.
The FDA says it has regulations prohibiting foods banned in other countries from entering the U.S. However, the agency said last month that it “would not know about honey that has been banned from other countries ”
Adee called the FDA’s response “absurd.” He said the European ban against Indian honey is far from a secret.
“Why are we the dumping ground of the world for something that’s banned in all these other countries?” asked Adee, who, with 80,000 bee colonies in five states, is the country’s largest honey producer.
“We’re supposed to have the world’s safest food supply but we’re letting in boatloads of this adulterated honey that all these other countries know is contaminated and FDA does nothing.”
[...]
[Source]
And please note that for the EU, a ban against "Indian honey" is a ban against "Chinese honey", because Chinese Honey was being re-routed through India and then the UK to take advantage of their commonwealth connection so that it could get into the EU in the first place without paying huge tariffs.
And again, this is only circumstantial evidence, not definitive proof, but here is a video documentary on the start of mass disappearance of bees in China. http://w
Ultimately, it's your choice whether you want to deal with a business which has integrity. It's not mine.
I wasn't expecting everyone to agree with my suggestion anyway.
Is it me, or is blurring/removing something from these maps the absolute ideal way to tell the entire world: "There's something really important to someone here."
Or it could just be a decoy military site.
After all, the British and the Germans both had their own decoy sites during World War II.
So why wouldn't Tawain have theirs too?
After all, if the cows that breached their security perimeter couldn't even be silenced afterwards, then perhaps there was no one there to even guard the place, or to threaten the cows into not talking to the press about what they had seen.
Those poor 2-stars generals, first it's the cows that attack and expose their secret base.
Now Apple does the same.
Speaking of which, watch out for packaged food in the supermarkets these days - a lot of it says 'Made in China' and it's just a matter of time before a major ingredients scandal hits.
Too late: Study: Most Honey Is Just Fake, Pollenless Goo
But I wouldn't blame the Chinese only. Our own Federal government is the one to blame. As long as the fake cheaper substitutes do not kill us, our own government won't intervene.
Vote with your feet people. Learn which stores carry fake honey. You never know what else they might be carrying that's fake. My local Safeway for instance still carries fake honey (even after the news came out), but my local Trader Joes' doesn't (it apparently never did).