Many employers have specific requirements to use Andoid in the workplace. I know that I don't sync my mail/calendar/etc for this reason (they only support a handful of phones, and I'm not going to spend my own money buying a phone to meet somebody else's specs). Virtualization might meed the needs of both parties.
Of course, most of the corporate requirements are still silly. They want you to have a phone that somebody can steal, but they can't read the data off of it. Unless that phone requires a strong boot-up password that is used to encrypt the drive that you have to re-enter on every unlock that isn't really possible. I've yet to see a phone that actually implements security that isn't fairly trivially breakable (by pulling the battery and directly reading data off the flash chips).
Your "thoughtful" reply did nothing more than point out an issue with something somebody else said, and hasn't offered any kind of alternative. That might be in part because it would have taken you 30 minutes to come up with a longer reply.
I don't mean to start a war over iPads vs whatever. I've deployed tablets at work to solve problems and there are some problems they're great at solving.
However, the guy's point is that they do tend to fit the media consumer model. I'd struggle to work out a complex math problem on an iPad, or even on a laptop with a keyboard. I might be able to do it with a pen-based tablet. On the other hand, if I needed to compose an essay a laptop might be a perfect tool for the job (though a full-sized keyboard/monitor would be better).
What is the best use of a kid's time in class? Is it really media consumption? If so, then why do we even send them to class? If it is something else, then what is best optimized to that purpose. I think that smartboards probably are a lot more useful than laptops in a classroom, and the smartboard is only useful if you leverage its unique capabilities, otherwise a whiteboard is better still. And, I think there is something to be said for the Kahn Academy model - why pay teachers to deliver content that a DVD player can deliver more effectively?
I tend to agree. I'd probably just augment the paper with scanning and OCR if possible for long-term retention. On the other hand, I rarely refer to notes from classes - they're more about learning the material and you tend to not need the notes long after.
Sure, and that is why I was a mediocre "math" student up until Algebra, and afterwards I was exceptional by just about any standard. The best kids at math in elementary and early middle school were mostly people who really were careful with their homework and no doubt triple-checked everything lest they make a mistake. To be honest I don't think many of them really even were in the highest-tier classes at the high school level (back when they actually had different tiers based on difficulty/ability).
Almost every mistake I made in advanced math classes amounted to errors in elementary math. In the end they were inconsequential - maybe I'd get a 97% or 95% on a test whose next lower score was an 85%. In the real world a computer would be doing that part of the work anyway, or somebody else would be paid to check calculations.
We might call it all "math," but I see a vast difference between understanding and applying the concepts of mathematics to solve problems and spending years becoming very good at doing column arithmetic.
Mod parent up - back in high school I had a nice pile of math awards and commendations from various organizations, and yet when working as a cashier it was annoying as anything when somebody decided to start swapping change with me.
Typical process is to count customer's cash, ring up transaction, put customer's cash in drawer, count out change, and hand it to the customer after closing the drawer.
Counting 97 cents in change takes me all of two seconds. Putting all that change back and then stopping to think through what I'm doing since I've been doing mindless checking work all day long takes time. Now, suppose I put that cash back in the drawer. How much was the original total? How much did the customer give me originally? A bunch of memory tasks need to be solved, or I need to add 0.25 to 14.97 in my head quickly and hope I pick add and not subtract. And then what happens when the customer decides to give me three more cents on top of that?
And, if I get it wrong I'm the guy who gets in trouble for it if I mess up. I also get in trouble if somebody runs by and grabs a stack of 20s from my drawer while I'm busy fumbling with 5th grade math.
I'd just smile and tell the customer that I couldn't accommodate them. I could really have cared less what they thought of my 5th grade math skills. I'm sure today I'm making significantly more than many of them despite their having a 20-year head start on me. My employer doesn't pay me to make change, as they're smart enough to realize that people good at math are expensive replacements for a cash register.
I doubt you make less than teachers starting out. A big problem with teaching is that it has a huge salary ladder - you can barely afford to eat at the lower levels. At the higher levels you can basically sit back and re-teach the same curriculum and give the same tests year after year for very nice salaries and only work 2/3rds of the year or so.
Plus, the ladder typically doesn't discriminate based on subject. So, if you want to hire a chemistry teacher you're competing with DuPont offering the same starting salary as the art department.
I think the whole education system is broken anyway - we pay teachers to create their own course materials and give lectures that have been given millions of times over hundreds of years. Why not just let the kids watch a DVD of somebody competant and then have them spend classtime doing Q&A or something more interactive? Growing up I had more than a few science teachers (even (rarely) at the university level) teach things that are factually incorrect - if nothing else using pre-created materials should help put an end to that...
You know, back when I was in college all the profs in the Chemistry department kept going on about how employers were telling them that lots of people could mix solutions, but it was hard to find people who could communicate the science effectively. When I got out into the real world, I could see that firsthand.
Then the early 2000s came along, and now every third email I get is written in strained English by some guy overseas who was hired not because he was either better at mixing solutions or at communicating, but simply because they could pay him $50 a day (I'm sure half of that is overhead).
Looking at my kids and their career guidance in High School I've figured out that High Schools are like the military. They're great at helping kids be competitive in the last generation's job market.
Yup - the opposing layer also can just file his suit pro se, and you have to take off time from work to try to go toe-to-toe with a lawyer. He can make your life miserable with delaying tactics/etc if you are paying consel.
Oh, and if you win you can't sue for the time you lost fighting the case. The only time that a court assigns value to is the time of a lawyer. It wouldn't surprise me that if you lose that the lawyer on the other side COULD charge you for his time.
The whole system is designed to ruin small people - you don't need to lose a case to lose your shirt.
That is basically my point. It is better to spend $200 on a motherboard+CPU every two years than $400 every 4 years.
If you spend $400 you get a marginally better system for the first two years, but the $200 system two years later will greatly outperform it.
Equipment like cases, optical drives, PSUs, etc that don't depreciate much is a different story - buy something decent and don't replace it.
A CPU or motherboard is a rapidly depreciating asset. Every month its value drops considerably. The best thing you can do with any rapidly depreciating asset is to not spend much upfront, and instead just replace it more often. That applies to cars, computers, or anything else that you can buy on ebay for half the price a year after it is new.
If you do decide to spend more up-front, then:
1. Realize you're doing this and will have a slower computer in the future than you would if you put the difference in your piggy bank. 2. Have a reason for doing it. If you have some CPU-bound non-distributive app that makes you money and spending an extra $1k on a CPU today will make you far more than $1k in the next six months, then spending the money is a no brainer. Obvious example would be somebody who edits videos for a living, if just having more than one PC isn't practical.
Companies don't want anything - they don't have brains or emotions. However, company executives want the same thing everywhere these days - to make as much money as possible while doing the least amount of real work.
Imagine you're a company executive. You have this American cell phone division. It is a pain in the neck - the people over there want money, and occasionally they even want you to make a decision. Now, along comes some other company that says they'll just pay you a pile of cash to take it off your hands.
If you accept the deal you get a huge pile of cash. Funneling a nice chunk of that into the executive bonus pool will be easy. You also have less work to do. And, while your company loses the long-term payments from owning a US cell phone company, you are already padding your resume to move on to some other job, so who cares. Oh, and completing a Merger/Acquisition is one of those things that looks really good on a CEO candidate's resume.
Most company actions these days can be best explained by just assuming that the senior leadership is out to pillage the company. The main exception are companies whose founders are still around - obviously they had long-term vision or they'd have spent their seed money on beer or something.
So, you decide that some frequency range is for cellphone service. Who gets to use it? If you just designate the purpose then everybody will use the whole thing and it won't work for anybody.
So, the FCC took each geographic area and put it up for auction, which is a pretty standard way of figuring out who should get what when you have a finite resource. That's how a bank or sheriff figures out who to sell a house to. In theory whoever can put the band to the most use will be able to bid the highest price.
The only thing I'd probably do differently is re-auction the bands every 5 years or so - that allows smaller competitors to work their way into the market so that the whole thing doesn't go to whoever has $50B in cash to spend up-front.
Oh, and a bigger change I'd make is that nobody who owns a cell tower should be allowed to provide phone service. Tower owners should run towers with standard protocols, and charge the same rate to any phone operator. Instantly every phone network would have the same coverage, and I would allow competition between tower operators in the same are so that everything is driven towards marginal cost. I think that a good way to get rid of these utility monopoly issues is to separate the pipes from the content - let a utility run the last mile to a regionally central point, and then let competitive services rent rackspace there to provide services to consumers.
Not at the same price point. For what he'd spend on the i3/i5 he could probably have water cooling or something else that is rediculous. That is the thing these kinds of comparisons always leave out - cost. I've been running AMD systems for a while now - I can upgrade a box every two years when buying Intel would mean I'd be upgrading them every four years. While in years 1-2 the Intel system would be somewhat faster, in years 3-4 the AMD system would be miles ahead. Plus I'm sinking less money into what is a quickly depreciating asset.
Honestly, I'd find these build guides if they stuck to a price range, but excluded stuff that you can cannibalize from your last PC.
I have n PCs in my house. When one gets old I want to upgrade it - I don't want to have n+1 PCs in the house. A typical PC upgrade requires a motherboard, RAM, CPU, and often a power supply. If it is a gaming setup it might require a new video card. I usually spend $300 on upgrades and get VERY modern systems because I spend it on the stuff that actually needs to be replaced, not another fancy case.
If you need to include a monitor, case, hard drive, etc, and you're spending only $200, then you're really shooting yourself in the foot. You're well in the region where marginal cost of improvements is very low and it is worth spending more.
Yup. SSL is really messed up. The best fix would be to just put certs in DNS and protect it with DNSSEC. Then you have a hierarchical system for managing them that doesn't cost anything that people aren't already paying. You could still allow for CAs when you need to add some level of real-world identification, or maybe the domain registries could provide this service (so it would be an attribute of the domain one level higher). However, the main threat is from MITM and domain-only checks are generally good-enough for that.
But, if we have to stick with the current system if I were a browser vendor I'd:
1. Include a CRL in my app for the root CAs. I'd control that CRL. So, when I need to revoke a root cert I just publish that on the CRL and I don't need to hard-code it in some kind of software upgrade.
2. My browser would fail-safe on CRLs. The CRL would have to publish a new serial number hourly. The browser would cache the last serial number seen. Every cert is checked at time of access, and if the CRL doesn't respond or gives me an expired serial number or anything else that is fishy then the cert is considered revoked. Sure, that is a pain, but right now you just need to block access to a CRL and browsers just dumbly go along with it. The browser would also cache system time in GMT and ask the user what to do if it jumps backwards to reduce the risk of clock attacks.
The whole system just needs to be a lot more paranoid. With the current design that would also make it a lot less reliable. The fix to that is to just use DNSSEC - if you can't look up the DNS record for a host you're not going to connect to it anyway.
Well, Google will have shot itself in the foot in this case. I'm sure they'd have used Honeycomb if Google had bothered to release the source for it. They're using the latest and greatest version of Android that is actually available.
I don't see any data presented in the article. The claim is made that smartphone users are leaving in droves. So, where is the chart of smartphone market share per carrier?
I switched TO T-mobile to use a smartphone, since neither Verizon nor ATT had decent options (2.5 years ago). If you want an iPhone then you're going to ditch T-Mobile, but the last time I checked most smartphone users don't use iPhones.
And the last time I checked I had 4G service just about everywhere I actually go with T-Mobile, which includes a moderate amount of travel. If you like to go fishing in the mountains then you'll do better with a different carrier, but if you actually spend your time where the population density is greater than 3/km^2 you'll almost certainly have 2G with T-Mobile, and most likely you'll have 4G as well.
However, mean free path is going to be what kills putting buckshot in retrograde orbit. Maybe once a month two pieces will collide and de-orbit. The rest of the time space is just one big void full of ball bearings whizzing past each other in near-misses.
No doubt if the resident didn't agree those cops probably would do something to make his life difficult. An article I read suggested that they were threatening to call the INS. Obviously that implies the resident didn't have clean hands, but that doesn't justify abuse of process.
My problem with the modern court system is that we've turned the constitution into some kind of game. I know somebody who has given ethics lectures and he said that lectures to lawyers are the worst - you get a bazillion questions along the lines of "well, OK, maybe that is unethical, but how about if I did this and this and this instead." Basically the goal seems to be to figure out exactly how much you can get away with and then milk the system for all it is worth.
From what I've read the owner might have been in the country illegally, and the "cops" suggested that they might look into that.
From what I've also read the local PD is willing to look into the situation, but they won't do so without a complaint from the property owner. And, if that guy is in the US illegally, what do you think the chances are that he is going to stir up even more muck?
Aside from your obvious humor, I don't think this would work. On average for every air molecule in the room I'm sitting in moving towards my left there is another air molecule moving to the right at the same speed. On average the net velocity of all the molecules in the room I'm in is zero. And yet, the air molecules in my room don't suddenly all bang into each other coming to a complete stop and then fall to the floor.
Now, if you increase the density of space junk such that it acts less like a gas and more like condensed matter, then your idea probably would work (and then we'd all have 500 tons of metal per square foot of ground dropping on us).
The problem is that every little piece of debris is in a different orbit. A spacecraft can only practically maneuver within a very narrow range of orbits (particularly around inclination) since every maneuver burns fuel. When you collide with something at a different inclination the difference in velocity is huge - thousands or tens of thousands of m/s. You'd need quite a bit of material to deflect something with that kind of impact speed.
The laser ideas aren't bad ones (maybe). For small debris using aerogel might make sense - if you can somehow blow up huge balls of the stuff. Basically you'd just inflate some huge mass of gel in some orbit, and let junk blast through it for a while, with each collision slowing it down and slowly deorbiting it. A big mass of aerogel will in itself deorbit since it has a high drag relative to its mass. However, I'm not sure that even this is practical - space is big and I'm not sure how much of it percentage-wise you can sweep with a reasonable number of gels (and obviously you have to dodge useful satellites). Plus, I'm not sure how much aerogel will actually slow down something that hits it at high velocity.
Bottom line, however, is that capturing debris with low relative velocity isn't going to be practical unless you want to de-orbit intact satellites (which of course is a legitimate part of the problem). You can't launch a robot for every screw floating around in orbit.
I also disagree that lasers aren't "politically not great" for the exact OPPOSITE reasons as you. When has getting funding for a weapons system ever been a difficult political proposition? Sure, everybody else might not like the fact that you can now shoot down their satellites, but they're not going to complain too loudly about it since:
1. Some day they might want to ask you nicely to shoot down somebody else's satellites for them. 2. They don't want you to shoot down their satellites. 3. They're going to be busy working on their own fancy lasers.
This is why I chuckle every time I see one of those "Boy, the Europeans will stick it to the US with Galileo" threads. Under just about any circumstance where the US would actually deploy selective availability, the EU would be pretty likely to freely do the same thing with their own satellite network. About the only case where that wouldn't be likely to happen would be an all-out US vs EU war, which of course would never happen, and in any case would just result in a bazillion ASAT weapons turning LEO into a cloud of buckshot. While it seems that everybody loves a good US vs EU thread, the reality is that on most issues the US and EU have far more in common than they have in opposition, and most of the political theater is to keep the various fringes in the political parties happy and focused on something other than the fact that just about everybody in office everywhere is corrupt.
I dunno - that Nova episode suggested that dogs can certainly recognize vocabulary. I don't know what defines language, however. I would tend to think that there is more to it than word recognition, but my wife has aphasia and her vocabulary was the biggest thing that was impacted (word recognition along with everything else), so there is clearly a connection.
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Many employers have specific requirements to use Andoid in the workplace. I know that I don't sync my mail/calendar/etc for this reason (they only support a handful of phones, and I'm not going to spend my own money buying a phone to meet somebody else's specs). Virtualization might meed the needs of both parties.
Of course, most of the corporate requirements are still silly. They want you to have a phone that somebody can steal, but they can't read the data off of it. Unless that phone requires a strong boot-up password that is used to encrypt the drive that you have to re-enter on every unlock that isn't really possible. I've yet to see a phone that actually implements security that isn't fairly trivially breakable (by pulling the battery and directly reading data off the flash chips).
Thoughtfully written on an iPad.
Your "thoughtful" reply did nothing more than point out an issue with something somebody else said, and hasn't offered any kind of alternative. That might be in part because it would have taken you 30 minutes to come up with a longer reply.
I don't mean to start a war over iPads vs whatever. I've deployed tablets at work to solve problems and there are some problems they're great at solving.
However, the guy's point is that they do tend to fit the media consumer model. I'd struggle to work out a complex math problem on an iPad, or even on a laptop with a keyboard. I might be able to do it with a pen-based tablet. On the other hand, if I needed to compose an essay a laptop might be a perfect tool for the job (though a full-sized keyboard/monitor would be better).
What is the best use of a kid's time in class? Is it really media consumption? If so, then why do we even send them to class? If it is something else, then what is best optimized to that purpose. I think that smartboards probably are a lot more useful than laptops in a classroom, and the smartboard is only useful if you leverage its unique capabilities, otherwise a whiteboard is better still. And, I think there is something to be said for the Kahn Academy model - why pay teachers to deliver content that a DVD player can deliver more effectively?
I tend to agree. I'd probably just augment the paper with scanning and OCR if possible for long-term retention. On the other hand, I rarely refer to notes from classes - they're more about learning the material and you tend to not need the notes long after.
Sure, and that is why I was a mediocre "math" student up until Algebra, and afterwards I was exceptional by just about any standard. The best kids at math in elementary and early middle school were mostly people who really were careful with their homework and no doubt triple-checked everything lest they make a mistake. To be honest I don't think many of them really even were in the highest-tier classes at the high school level (back when they actually had different tiers based on difficulty/ability).
Almost every mistake I made in advanced math classes amounted to errors in elementary math. In the end they were inconsequential - maybe I'd get a 97% or 95% on a test whose next lower score was an 85%. In the real world a computer would be doing that part of the work anyway, or somebody else would be paid to check calculations.
We might call it all "math," but I see a vast difference between understanding and applying the concepts of mathematics to solve problems and spending years becoming very good at doing column arithmetic.
Mod parent up - back in high school I had a nice pile of math awards and commendations from various organizations, and yet when working as a cashier it was annoying as anything when somebody decided to start swapping change with me.
Typical process is to count customer's cash, ring up transaction, put customer's cash in drawer, count out change, and hand it to the customer after closing the drawer.
Counting 97 cents in change takes me all of two seconds. Putting all that change back and then stopping to think through what I'm doing since I've been doing mindless checking work all day long takes time. Now, suppose I put that cash back in the drawer. How much was the original total? How much did the customer give me originally? A bunch of memory tasks need to be solved, or I need to add 0.25 to 14.97 in my head quickly and hope I pick add and not subtract. And then what happens when the customer decides to give me three more cents on top of that?
And, if I get it wrong I'm the guy who gets in trouble for it if I mess up. I also get in trouble if somebody runs by and grabs a stack of 20s from my drawer while I'm busy fumbling with 5th grade math.
I'd just smile and tell the customer that I couldn't accommodate them. I could really have cared less what they thought of my 5th grade math skills. I'm sure today I'm making significantly more than many of them despite their having a 20-year head start on me. My employer doesn't pay me to make change, as they're smart enough to realize that people good at math are expensive replacements for a cash register.
I doubt you make less than teachers starting out. A big problem with teaching is that it has a huge salary ladder - you can barely afford to eat at the lower levels. At the higher levels you can basically sit back and re-teach the same curriculum and give the same tests year after year for very nice salaries and only work 2/3rds of the year or so.
Plus, the ladder typically doesn't discriminate based on subject. So, if you want to hire a chemistry teacher you're competing with DuPont offering the same starting salary as the art department.
I think the whole education system is broken anyway - we pay teachers to create their own course materials and give lectures that have been given millions of times over hundreds of years. Why not just let the kids watch a DVD of somebody competant and then have them spend classtime doing Q&A or something more interactive? Growing up I had more than a few science teachers (even (rarely) at the university level) teach things that are factually incorrect - if nothing else using pre-created materials should help put an end to that...
You know, back when I was in college all the profs in the Chemistry department kept going on about how employers were telling them that lots of people could mix solutions, but it was hard to find people who could communicate the science effectively. When I got out into the real world, I could see that firsthand.
Then the early 2000s came along, and now every third email I get is written in strained English by some guy overseas who was hired not because he was either better at mixing solutions or at communicating, but simply because they could pay him $50 a day (I'm sure half of that is overhead).
Looking at my kids and their career guidance in High School I've figured out that High Schools are like the military. They're great at helping kids be competitive in the last generation's job market.
Yup - the opposing layer also can just file his suit pro se, and you have to take off time from work to try to go toe-to-toe with a lawyer. He can make your life miserable with delaying tactics/etc if you are paying consel.
Oh, and if you win you can't sue for the time you lost fighting the case. The only time that a court assigns value to is the time of a lawyer. It wouldn't surprise me that if you lose that the lawyer on the other side COULD charge you for his time.
The whole system is designed to ruin small people - you don't need to lose a case to lose your shirt.
That is basically my point. It is better to spend $200 on a motherboard+CPU every two years than $400 every 4 years.
If you spend $400 you get a marginally better system for the first two years, but the $200 system two years later will greatly outperform it.
Equipment like cases, optical drives, PSUs, etc that don't depreciate much is a different story - buy something decent and don't replace it.
A CPU or motherboard is a rapidly depreciating asset. Every month its value drops considerably. The best thing you can do with any rapidly depreciating asset is to not spend much upfront, and instead just replace it more often. That applies to cars, computers, or anything else that you can buy on ebay for half the price a year after it is new.
If you do decide to spend more up-front, then:
1. Realize you're doing this and will have a slower computer in the future than you would if you put the difference in your piggy bank.
2. Have a reason for doing it. If you have some CPU-bound non-distributive app that makes you money and spending an extra $1k on a CPU today will make you far more than $1k in the next six months, then spending the money is a no brainer. Obvious example would be somebody who edits videos for a living, if just having more than one PC isn't practical.
Companies don't want anything - they don't have brains or emotions. However, company executives want the same thing everywhere these days - to make as much money as possible while doing the least amount of real work.
Imagine you're a company executive. You have this American cell phone division. It is a pain in the neck - the people over there want money, and occasionally they even want you to make a decision. Now, along comes some other company that says they'll just pay you a pile of cash to take it off your hands.
If you accept the deal you get a huge pile of cash. Funneling a nice chunk of that into the executive bonus pool will be easy. You also have less work to do. And, while your company loses the long-term payments from owning a US cell phone company, you are already padding your resume to move on to some other job, so who cares. Oh, and completing a Merger/Acquisition is one of those things that looks really good on a CEO candidate's resume.
Most company actions these days can be best explained by just assuming that the senior leadership is out to pillage the company. The main exception are companies whose founders are still around - obviously they had long-term vision or they'd have spent their seed money on beer or something.
Well, yes and no.
So, you decide that some frequency range is for cellphone service. Who gets to use it? If you just designate the purpose then everybody will use the whole thing and it won't work for anybody.
So, the FCC took each geographic area and put it up for auction, which is a pretty standard way of figuring out who should get what when you have a finite resource. That's how a bank or sheriff figures out who to sell a house to. In theory whoever can put the band to the most use will be able to bid the highest price.
The only thing I'd probably do differently is re-auction the bands every 5 years or so - that allows smaller competitors to work their way into the market so that the whole thing doesn't go to whoever has $50B in cash to spend up-front.
Oh, and a bigger change I'd make is that nobody who owns a cell tower should be allowed to provide phone service. Tower owners should run towers with standard protocols, and charge the same rate to any phone operator. Instantly every phone network would have the same coverage, and I would allow competition between tower operators in the same are so that everything is driven towards marginal cost. I think that a good way to get rid of these utility monopoly issues is to separate the pipes from the content - let a utility run the last mile to a regionally central point, and then let competitive services rent rackspace there to provide services to consumers.
Not at the same price point. For what he'd spend on the i3/i5 he could probably have water cooling or something else that is rediculous. That is the thing these kinds of comparisons always leave out - cost. I've been running AMD systems for a while now - I can upgrade a box every two years when buying Intel would mean I'd be upgrading them every four years. While in years 1-2 the Intel system would be somewhat faster, in years 3-4 the AMD system would be miles ahead. Plus I'm sinking less money into what is a quickly depreciating asset.
Ok, nobody has 4G (to my knowledge), but T-Mobile does have the 3G+ kinds of capabilities that everybody is calling 4G. :)
Honestly, I'd find these build guides if they stuck to a price range, but excluded stuff that you can cannibalize from your last PC.
I have n PCs in my house. When one gets old I want to upgrade it - I don't want to have n+1 PCs in the house. A typical PC upgrade requires a motherboard, RAM, CPU, and often a power supply. If it is a gaming setup it might require a new video card. I usually spend $300 on upgrades and get VERY modern systems because I spend it on the stuff that actually needs to be replaced, not another fancy case.
If you need to include a monitor, case, hard drive, etc, and you're spending only $200, then you're really shooting yourself in the foot. You're well in the region where marginal cost of improvements is very low and it is worth spending more.
Android for mobiles. How quaint. :)
Uh, good luck there. Start with rooting your phone, or praying that your carrier pushes out an update. While you're at it star this bug.
Yup. SSL is really messed up. The best fix would be to just put certs in DNS and protect it with DNSSEC. Then you have a hierarchical system for managing them that doesn't cost anything that people aren't already paying. You could still allow for CAs when you need to add some level of real-world identification, or maybe the domain registries could provide this service (so it would be an attribute of the domain one level higher). However, the main threat is from MITM and domain-only checks are generally good-enough for that.
But, if we have to stick with the current system if I were a browser vendor I'd:
1. Include a CRL in my app for the root CAs. I'd control that CRL. So, when I need to revoke a root cert I just publish that on the CRL and I don't need to hard-code it in some kind of software upgrade.
2. My browser would fail-safe on CRLs. The CRL would have to publish a new serial number hourly. The browser would cache the last serial number seen. Every cert is checked at time of access, and if the CRL doesn't respond or gives me an expired serial number or anything else that is fishy then the cert is considered revoked. Sure, that is a pain, but right now you just need to block access to a CRL and browsers just dumbly go along with it. The browser would also cache system time in GMT and ask the user what to do if it jumps backwards to reduce the risk of clock attacks.
The whole system just needs to be a lot more paranoid. With the current design that would also make it a lot less reliable. The fix to that is to just use DNSSEC - if you can't look up the DNS record for a host you're not going to connect to it anyway.
Well, Google will have shot itself in the foot in this case. I'm sure they'd have used Honeycomb if Google had bothered to release the source for it. They're using the latest and greatest version of Android that is actually available.
I don't see any data presented in the article. The claim is made that smartphone users are leaving in droves. So, where is the chart of smartphone market share per carrier?
I switched TO T-mobile to use a smartphone, since neither Verizon nor ATT had decent options (2.5 years ago). If you want an iPhone then you're going to ditch T-Mobile, but the last time I checked most smartphone users don't use iPhones.
And the last time I checked I had 4G service just about everywhere I actually go with T-Mobile, which includes a moderate amount of travel. If you like to go fishing in the mountains then you'll do better with a different carrier, but if you actually spend your time where the population density is greater than 3/km^2 you'll almost certainly have 2G with T-Mobile, and most likely you'll have 4G as well.
Good point about elasticity.
However, mean free path is going to be what kills putting buckshot in retrograde orbit. Maybe once a month two pieces will collide and de-orbit. The rest of the time space is just one big void full of ball bearings whizzing past each other in near-misses.
No doubt if the resident didn't agree those cops probably would do something to make his life difficult. An article I read suggested that they were threatening to call the INS. Obviously that implies the resident didn't have clean hands, but that doesn't justify abuse of process.
My problem with the modern court system is that we've turned the constitution into some kind of game. I know somebody who has given ethics lectures and he said that lectures to lawyers are the worst - you get a bazillion questions along the lines of "well, OK, maybe that is unethical, but how about if I did this and this and this instead." Basically the goal seems to be to figure out exactly how much you can get away with and then milk the system for all it is worth.
From what I've read the owner might have been in the country illegally, and the "cops" suggested that they might look into that.
From what I've also read the local PD is willing to look into the situation, but they won't do so without a complaint from the property owner. And, if that guy is in the US illegally, what do you think the chances are that he is going to stir up even more muck?
Aside from your obvious humor, I don't think this would work. On average for every air molecule in the room I'm sitting in moving towards my left there is another air molecule moving to the right at the same speed. On average the net velocity of all the molecules in the room I'm in is zero. And yet, the air molecules in my room don't suddenly all bang into each other coming to a complete stop and then fall to the floor.
Now, if you increase the density of space junk such that it acts less like a gas and more like condensed matter, then your idea probably would work (and then we'd all have 500 tons of metal per square foot of ground dropping on us).
The problem is that every little piece of debris is in a different orbit. A spacecraft can only practically maneuver within a very narrow range of orbits (particularly around inclination) since every maneuver burns fuel. When you collide with something at a different inclination the difference in velocity is huge - thousands or tens of thousands of m/s. You'd need quite a bit of material to deflect something with that kind of impact speed.
The laser ideas aren't bad ones (maybe). For small debris using aerogel might make sense - if you can somehow blow up huge balls of the stuff. Basically you'd just inflate some huge mass of gel in some orbit, and let junk blast through it for a while, with each collision slowing it down and slowly deorbiting it. A big mass of aerogel will in itself deorbit since it has a high drag relative to its mass. However, I'm not sure that even this is practical - space is big and I'm not sure how much of it percentage-wise you can sweep with a reasonable number of gels (and obviously you have to dodge useful satellites). Plus, I'm not sure how much aerogel will actually slow down something that hits it at high velocity.
Bottom line, however, is that capturing debris with low relative velocity isn't going to be practical unless you want to de-orbit intact satellites (which of course is a legitimate part of the problem). You can't launch a robot for every screw floating around in orbit.
I also disagree that lasers aren't "politically not great" for the exact OPPOSITE reasons as you. When has getting funding for a weapons system ever been a difficult political proposition? Sure, everybody else might not like the fact that you can now shoot down their satellites, but they're not going to complain too loudly about it since:
1. Some day they might want to ask you nicely to shoot down somebody else's satellites for them.
2. They don't want you to shoot down their satellites.
3. They're going to be busy working on their own fancy lasers.
This is why I chuckle every time I see one of those "Boy, the Europeans will stick it to the US with Galileo" threads. Under just about any circumstance where the US would actually deploy selective availability, the EU would be pretty likely to freely do the same thing with their own satellite network. About the only case where that wouldn't be likely to happen would be an all-out US vs EU war, which of course would never happen, and in any case would just result in a bazillion ASAT weapons turning LEO into a cloud of buckshot. While it seems that everybody loves a good US vs EU thread, the reality is that on most issues the US and EU have far more in common than they have in opposition, and most of the political theater is to keep the various fringes in the political parties happy and focused on something other than the fact that just about everybody in office everywhere is corrupt.
I dunno - that Nova episode suggested that dogs can certainly recognize vocabulary. I don't know what defines language, however. I would tend to think that there is more to it than word recognition, but my wife has aphasia and her vocabulary was the biggest thing that was impacted (word recognition along with everything else), so there is clearly a connection.