Android now supports remote wipe. Just google for DevicePolicyManager. Their implementation does make it clear to the phone user that they're granting that permission to an app.
Oh, and doing similar grepping of the source will make it fairly easy to patch your phone so that it tells your corporate email program, "oh yeah, we're locked down like fort knox, the remote-wipe is on a hair trigger, you're the boss, and the device times-out in 10 seconds with a 32-char alphanumeric password set to self-destruct on one failed attempt" while the device silently ignores whatever security policies the program commands it to install.
If you chose to mix them (for convenience) then understand the risk.
Nobody does anything work-related because it is "convenient." They do it to keep their jobs.
So, an employee has two choices - unpack and fire up a company laptop a few times every evening to stay on top of work email. Or, they can just use their smartphone. The company doesn't care which they do of course, but they do expect the employee to be as productive as all the other people who do these things.
So, the employee gets to choose between a few options, all of which are highly intrusive on their personal life. Then you criticize them for picking what for them is the lesser evil and then being upset when it bites them.
How about this - we pass a law that any data on my phone is my property without regard to any agreements I sign to the contrary. If the employer wants to let me use my phone to sync to their systems that is fine, but I get to keep anything I download when I quit. I suspect that most employers will suddenly be able to afford providing phones to those who need them, or telling employees not to stress out about working from home as much...
Employees ought not to be able to give consent to these sorts of things - just like they can't give consent to indentured servitude no matter how many pieces of paper they sign.
Otherwise you just end up with a slippery slope, and I'd argue that we've already gone past the point where things are onerous.
The problem is that if the employee isn't responsive to emails during off-hours, they are considered less valuable than somebody else who is. That means they get fired in the next round of layoffs.
So if you want remote access to your corporate mail, you do it on a company-supplied device and accept they have full control.
No problem with this at all, as long as the device doesn't do GPS-monitoring or some other intrusive behavior.
If you want the convenience of using your personal phone with their exchange server, you accept that this includes the remote wipe nuclear option.
No, the company should not allow access from personal devices if they care about their data. The only reason they do so is that they can coerce employees into agreeing to these kinds of terms, and paying for the privilege.
The company gets to choose the policies for securing its own data, you get to choose if you bring your personal device to the party or not.
Nobody gets to make that choice. Oh sure, they in theory can choose not to use their personal device, which just puts them at a competitive disadvantage. The kinds of companies that institute remote access policies like the one you describe also tend to fire the worst performers every year. That means that your choice is to spend 2 hours per day of personal time doing work without using a personal device, or less with a personal device. Guess which people will choose?
It only becomes a problem if a company does something dumb like mandates you use personal phones to connect to their exchange environment and in my experience this pretty much never happens.
No company "mandates" that employees use personal devices. Instead they simply mandate that employees be in the top 90% of their department to keep their job.
In any case, there is a simple solution - just use a mail client that happily syncs to exchange and communicates compliance with the remote security policies, and silently ignores them. If necessary just spoof a different client. There would be absolutely no way for IT to detect this. Their only solution will be to do what they should be doing in the first place - provide their own hardware and service, and then they can use TPM/etc to protect data. Most likely nobody will ever find out that this was done. If data does leak then the employee just claims ignorance, and most likely the corporate execs will be busy holding IT to the coals for implementing insufficient security, since at the end of the day they failed to prevent the breach. So, relying on these kinds of features is just going to boomerang sooner or later.
If your only goal is to check the SOX box or whatever, then consider it checked. The employer can just point to their policies when an employee circumvents the security, and after some wrist-slapping everybody is happy.
Of course, this is only possible when the employer doesn't simply provide the employee with a phone that provides secure access. Why would anybody jump through hoops if they were handed a working solution?
The problem is that employers WANT the employee to do work on personal time via remote access, but they don't want to pay for it. So, they write up an official policy that says that employees don't have to use personal phones, but they can if the essentially let the company treat it like a company-owned phone. Then they let the line managers fire the slowest employees every year so that everybody signs up to be abused.
You'd be crazy to use your own phone for work related email or any other tasks.
Sure, or you just like to keep your job. Everybody wants to get ahead in the workplace, and they'll cross any personal boundary to do it. Those who do it the least end up at the bottom of the bell curve. In a company that institutes "HR best practices" that automatically gets them fired - at least in most at-will states.
Or, you can just use the stock android email client (the open-source one), and just edit a few key calls to DevicePolicyManager. Viola, the phone looks like stock to the server, but it doesn't actually implement any security provisions that you don't want it to.
If the employee is aware of the policy, and has accepted it, then legally there is nothing wrong here.
Just like indentured servitude. Sure, it looks like slavery, and sounds like slavery, but hey, they signed on a contract so that's why it is legal... oh, wait...
Employees agree to all kinds of policies that should be illegal, or which are illegal. Employers know that with the job market being what it is an employee will hand over their firstborn if that's what it takes to feed the rest of the family.
Moreover, if someone wants to steal company data, wiping their phone is not going to prevent it. If you want this level of control, provide the employee with the phone, and physically collect it when they leave the company.
Well, I think the concern is more about stolen phones. However, the solution is still the same - provide the phone and you can wipe it anytime you feel like it. One of these days I'll put an app in the android market that claims to fully implement exchange security policies but which does not, sell it for $5, and make a fortune. If employers care that much about phone wiping then they should supply the phones so that they know they actually do get wiped.
It would seem most unusual to me for an employer to require their employees to provide expensive equipment for company use, and with the agreement that the company may treat it as its own.
Why do you think the USA has such a high level of productivity? EVERYBODY expects their employees to do this stuff. Sure, it isn't written policy, but if you don't do it you "aren't competitive."
Why would the employer pay for an employee to use a cell phone when they can just fire the slowest worker every year and pretty soon everybody is happily volunteering their personal phone numbers to keep their jobs?
My company doesn't require me to have a smartphone, to read my emails from home, to take my laptop home, to work on evenings or weekends, or to do anything that anybody here would object to.
They also fire the few worst performers in every department just about every year.
That means that EVERYBODY uses their personal phones for work, distributes their cell-phone numbers, reads emails from home, takes their laptops home, works on evenings and weekends, and does all kinds of stuff that everybody here would object to.
Sure, it isn't "policy" but if you don't do it you just lose your job anyway.
That means that I care about stuff like this.
It isn't a big deal - when I get around to it I'll just use a patched email client that handshakes with the server and agrees to wipe my phone and do all that intrusive stuff that makes corporate happy, and then silently ignores any such requests. It will of course confirm that it is doing all of that stuff anytime the server asks it to.
The only way the company is going to know if my phone is running the code that they think it is running is when they supply the phone - so the problem has an easy solution.
Agreed on the "lardy nature of Diaspora." I saw this article and figured, hey, let's check this out. Ok, let's go grab the source and install it.
It runs on a webserver I don't have. It uses a database I don't have. It doesn't even list its dependencies - it wants me to use gems and some dependency resolver to go out and grab who-knows-what and install 40 bazillion orphan files on my system that the package manager won't ever update, leaving my system with a million security holes a year from now when those files are all stale and not being updated.
I look at appleseed. It says on the banner that I need Apache 2, PHP 5, and MySQL 5 - hmm that describes every virtual hosting sevice on the planet and the box I already have. It also means that if I didn't have those packages on my server I can just run one line in my favorite package manager and have all the dependencies running in 5 minutes with automatic security updates.
I don't even care so much that diaspora picked an exotic platform - I just wish they actually just line-item listed their dependencies so that I can go install them from a package manager.
Yup, the better science gets, the less insurance works, and the more you just need socialism (or not - depending on your views).
The whole concept of something like health insurance is that you don't know if you're going to need it, and so you buy it just in case. If you know if you're going to need it, then it loses its purpose. Either companies also know and you can't afford it, or companies aren't allowed to know and all go out of business since healthy people won't buy it.
If the goal is socialism we can just cut out the middleman and treat it like any other social program. If the goal is actually insurance then eventually we'll hit a point where we can't accomplish that goal.
Oh, I'm sure they were telling the truth and they already have a set of well-engineered processes that will comply with those statements to the letter and still result in exactly the situation nobody wants to see.
It is really easy to do:
1. Everybody goes through a highly-intrusive pre-screening process. This doesn't result in any denials or bad rates, this just gives low-risk customers the ability to get through the process more quickly and end up with a low rate.
2. If the intrusive process doesn't confirm that you are low-risk, there is no problem. You just go through the regular process.
3. The regular process is: A. Deny coverage, or B. Charge three times your annual income in premiums.
This is just like offering lower rates for people who put GPS devices in their car. In two years the "low rates" are the normal rates, and the "normal rates" are unaffordable.
I would think that gain would matter more than resolution. Granted, resolution would matter for scan lines since monitors would generally all use the same frequencies.
For cell phones, as long as the resolution covered only a few towers you could probably intercept both halves of conversations. The whole idea of phones is that within any given area only one phone/station is transmitting on any frequency at any time. So, you don't need horizontal resolution beyond the range of a few cells, and if you're willing to lose some data you can probably tolerate more overlap.
Chances are that TinyCorp's 14-axis mill software works just fine on a PC-based desktop, laptop, or tablet, but getting it to run on an iPad would involve paying somebody quite a bit of money. Ditto for MicroCorp's data acquisition software for their fluid level sensing system, or NobodyCo's drivers for their dye-sublimation on drywall printer. I'm sure BlockHeadCo's concrete simulation software or LittleGuy's dental amalgum mixer software isn't going to pan out either.
Unless all you do is write letters (err, read letters), there is a TON of stuff in the corporate/industrial world that you're not going to be able to run on an iPad. If you want to actually write anything longer than LOL you'll probably want a bluetooth keyboard, which is now basically just giving you a laptop that doesn't collapse for easy transport.
Sure, a company could try to get their 34,000 software vendors to switch to the iPad, but chances are at least a few aren't going to be interested, at least not unless the company wants to by another $3M 14-axis mill.
Uh, is the laptop really heavier than an iPad plus a keyboard plus a stand? I think you're comparing apples and oranges. With my laptop I can be just about as productive on a trip as I could be in the office, with only my laptop, a charger, and a headset for phone/conferencing. I don't think that you're going to weigh in any lighter with an iPad.
Yeah, go back and read that bit about 1-2 significant figures. To one significant figure I was basically right (one significant figure is just a bit better than order-of-magnitude - and in fact that is all you need for most mental math).
Uh, when I was taught math in elementary school, concepts similar to the Mayan depiction were often used. The only difference I see is that this was all done in base 10 and not in a hybrid of base-5 embedded in base-20.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at. Sure, you can represent numbers as shapes and sizes, but I don't see how this really helps mental math except when it comes to order-of-magnitude calculations.
If I want to multiply 357x289, I can already tell you that the answer is somewhere around 90000. The challenge comes if I want to know the answer to more than 1-2 significant figures. I don't see how using something like the Mayan system or any other system is going to accomplish this.
In any case, I'm not even sure what the problem that you're trying to solve is. The average person can do math well enough to get by in the real world. Sure, it would be nice to be able to walk down the aisle at the grocery store and figure out the per-unit prices in my head to 3 sig figs, but I don't see anything you're offering as accomplishing this. If I'm going to do a model simulation run I'm going to use a computer, and that requires almost zero mental effort around performing calculations - just a TON of creativity and analysis creating the mode/etc.
Yup. Even many employees at big companies wouldn't benefit from such a plan.
I basically can take time off anytime I feel like it - I get a ton of vacation time paid. The problem is that I'm basically given a list of projects and due dates, and my boss wants to see work done on time, and is not interested in a list of good reasons why it isn't done on time. Many if not most professionals fall into similar situations.
So, if I take a week off for jury duty my boss is happy to pay me for it. However, due dates do not get extended, so now I spend the next month scrambling to catch up. If I can get a week ahead on a project I'm going to spend it doing something fun - not in some courtroom that assigns a value of $10/day to my time or whatever.
I think that today the main purpose of dynamic IP pools is to create demand for higher-cost static pools and segment the market.
I do agree that when you're deploying service to individual houses it doesn't make sense to constantly change their IPs.
Now, if I were an ISP I wouldn't promise that IPs would NEVER change - that just creates a routing headache when you need to refactor your network layout.
Yeah, that will sure put a dent in piracy. Gee, those hackers will have to resort to just downloading the DVD rip off of a torrent site and then downrezzing it for android. Actually, for some of the newer handsets they might not even have to do that, as I bet a lot of those are about the right resolution/performance to just play native DVD.
I could see the argument when they were talking about protecting HD, and back when HD was still at a premium and wasn't all over the internet yet. Now that you can hardware-capture HD with consumer equipment, and even crack HDCP, let alone blu-ray player keys/etc, it seems like the cat is really out of the bag on this one.
The only real use for a netflix app is to, well, stream paid videos from netflix. If you want to have have the movie long-term it is easier to just to download it or rip it from any of 47 different sources.
I wouldn't be surprised if the newer versions work fine. I'm not sure it is really the OS so much as the accessories/etc that contribute to RAM use.
If you stripped out some of the features that are RAM-hungry while keeping the functionality I think that it would work fine. Cut down on the graphical glitter (3D gallery, fancier home screen, etc), and focus on functionality (better Exchange support, chrome2phone, API, etc). Much of the original benefit in CM was in the stuff that was left out - some of this has been lost as the feature set is being dictated more by newer phones...
Problem is, according to those I know who have the phone, barely anyone pays any attention and just clicks "okay".
Well, WHY don't they look at it?
Simple - your only choices are agree or don't agree. It is like an EULA - what is the point of reading it? The fact is that you wouldn't have bought/downloaded/etc the software if you didn't want to run it, so what is the point in reading a bunch of text that you can't do anything about.
Now, if you could CHANGE the permissions then people might actually care what those permissions are.
While I like letting apps advertise their minimum permissions, I'd still like to be able to override them.
I'm not concerned with apps that call back to the source website and then get to the internet via a proxy. That is a perfectly safe way to provide internet access - if the app does something nasty they're doing it on the attacker's IP and not mine. If the attacker wanted to send spam from phones this way, or whatever, then they'd just do it without the phone component.
That is why java sandboxes allow connections back to the originating server only. This makes java applets impossible to use as an intrusion/etc vector, as you can only hack into a server that you already control.
I do agree that complete elimination of malicious software will not be possible. However, there are ways to improve things.
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Android now supports remote wipe. Just google for DevicePolicyManager. Their implementation does make it clear to the phone user that they're granting that permission to an app.
Oh, and doing similar grepping of the source will make it fairly easy to patch your phone so that it tells your corporate email program, "oh yeah, we're locked down like fort knox, the remote-wipe is on a hair trigger, you're the boss, and the device times-out in 10 seconds with a 32-char alphanumeric password set to self-destruct on one failed attempt" while the device silently ignores whatever security policies the program commands it to install.
If you chose to mix them (for convenience) then understand the risk.
Nobody does anything work-related because it is "convenient." They do it to keep their jobs.
So, an employee has two choices - unpack and fire up a company laptop a few times every evening to stay on top of work email. Or, they can just use their smartphone. The company doesn't care which they do of course, but they do expect the employee to be as productive as all the other people who do these things.
So, the employee gets to choose between a few options, all of which are highly intrusive on their personal life. Then you criticize them for picking what for them is the lesser evil and then being upset when it bites them.
How about this - we pass a law that any data on my phone is my property without regard to any agreements I sign to the contrary. If the employer wants to let me use my phone to sync to their systems that is fine, but I get to keep anything I download when I quit. I suspect that most employers will suddenly be able to afford providing phones to those who need them, or telling employees not to stress out about working from home as much...
Employees ought not to be able to give consent to these sorts of things - just like they can't give consent to indentured servitude no matter how many pieces of paper they sign.
Otherwise you just end up with a slippery slope, and I'd argue that we've already gone past the point where things are onerous.
The problem is that if the employee isn't responsive to emails during off-hours, they are considered less valuable than somebody else who is. That means they get fired in the next round of layoffs.
So if you want remote access to your corporate mail, you do it on a company-supplied device and accept they have full control.
No problem with this at all, as long as the device doesn't do GPS-monitoring or some other intrusive behavior.
If you want the convenience of using your personal phone with their exchange server, you accept that this includes the remote wipe nuclear option.
No, the company should not allow access from personal devices if they care about their data. The only reason they do so is that they can coerce employees into agreeing to these kinds of terms, and paying for the privilege.
The company gets to choose the policies for securing its own data, you get to choose if you bring your personal device to the party or not.
Nobody gets to make that choice. Oh sure, they in theory can choose not to use their personal device, which just puts them at a competitive disadvantage. The kinds of companies that institute remote access policies like the one you describe also tend to fire the worst performers every year. That means that your choice is to spend 2 hours per day of personal time doing work without using a personal device, or less with a personal device. Guess which people will choose?
It only becomes a problem if a company does something dumb like mandates you use personal phones to connect to their exchange environment and in my experience this pretty much never happens.
No company "mandates" that employees use personal devices. Instead they simply mandate that employees be in the top 90% of their department to keep their job.
In any case, there is a simple solution - just use a mail client that happily syncs to exchange and communicates compliance with the remote security policies, and silently ignores them. If necessary just spoof a different client. There would be absolutely no way for IT to detect this. Their only solution will be to do what they should be doing in the first place - provide their own hardware and service, and then they can use TPM/etc to protect data. Most likely nobody will ever find out that this was done. If data does leak then the employee just claims ignorance, and most likely the corporate execs will be busy holding IT to the coals for implementing insufficient security, since at the end of the day they failed to prevent the breach. So, relying on these kinds of features is just going to boomerang sooner or later.
If your only goal is to check the SOX box or whatever, then consider it checked. The employer can just point to their policies when an employee circumvents the security, and after some wrist-slapping everybody is happy.
Of course, this is only possible when the employer doesn't simply provide the employee with a phone that provides secure access. Why would anybody jump through hoops if they were handed a working solution?
The problem is that employers WANT the employee to do work on personal time via remote access, but they don't want to pay for it. So, they write up an official policy that says that employees don't have to use personal phones, but they can if the essentially let the company treat it like a company-owned phone. Then they let the line managers fire the slowest employees every year so that everybody signs up to be abused.
You'd be crazy to use your own phone for work related email or any other tasks.
Sure, or you just like to keep your job. Everybody wants to get ahead in the workplace, and they'll cross any personal boundary to do it. Those who do it the least end up at the bottom of the bell curve. In a company that institutes "HR best practices" that automatically gets them fired - at least in most at-will states.
Or, you can just use the stock android email client (the open-source one), and just edit a few key calls to DevicePolicyManager. Viola, the phone looks like stock to the server, but it doesn't actually implement any security provisions that you don't want it to.
If the employee is aware of the policy, and has accepted it, then legally there is nothing wrong here.
Just like indentured servitude. Sure, it looks like slavery, and sounds like slavery, but hey, they signed on a contract so that's why it is legal... oh, wait...
Employees agree to all kinds of policies that should be illegal, or which are illegal. Employers know that with the job market being what it is an employee will hand over their firstborn if that's what it takes to feed the rest of the family.
Moreover, if someone wants to steal company data, wiping their phone is not going to prevent it. If you want this level of control, provide the employee with the phone, and physically collect it when they leave the company.
Well, I think the concern is more about stolen phones. However, the solution is still the same - provide the phone and you can wipe it anytime you feel like it. One of these days I'll put an app in the android market that claims to fully implement exchange security policies but which does not, sell it for $5, and make a fortune. If employers care that much about phone wiping then they should supply the phones so that they know they actually do get wiped.
It would seem most unusual to me for an employer to require their employees to provide expensive equipment for company use, and with the agreement that the company may treat it as its own.
Why do you think the USA has such a high level of productivity? EVERYBODY expects their employees to do this stuff. Sure, it isn't written policy, but if you don't do it you "aren't competitive."
Why would the employer pay for an employee to use a cell phone when they can just fire the slowest worker every year and pretty soon everybody is happily volunteering their personal phone numbers to keep their jobs?
My company doesn't require me to have a smartphone, to read my emails from home, to take my laptop home, to work on evenings or weekends, or to do anything that anybody here would object to.
They also fire the few worst performers in every department just about every year.
That means that EVERYBODY uses their personal phones for work, distributes their cell-phone numbers, reads emails from home, takes their laptops home, works on evenings and weekends, and does all kinds of stuff that everybody here would object to.
Sure, it isn't "policy" but if you don't do it you just lose your job anyway.
That means that I care about stuff like this.
It isn't a big deal - when I get around to it I'll just use a patched email client that handshakes with the server and agrees to wipe my phone and do all that intrusive stuff that makes corporate happy, and then silently ignores any such requests. It will of course confirm that it is doing all of that stuff anytime the server asks it to.
The only way the company is going to know if my phone is running the code that they think it is running is when they supply the phone - so the problem has an easy solution.
Agreed on the "lardy nature of Diaspora." I saw this article and figured, hey, let's check this out. Ok, let's go grab the source and install it.
It runs on a webserver I don't have. It uses a database I don't have. It doesn't even list its dependencies - it wants me to use gems and some dependency resolver to go out and grab who-knows-what and install 40 bazillion orphan files on my system that the package manager won't ever update, leaving my system with a million security holes a year from now when those files are all stale and not being updated.
I look at appleseed. It says on the banner that I need Apache 2, PHP 5, and MySQL 5 - hmm that describes every virtual hosting sevice on the planet and the box I already have. It also means that if I didn't have those packages on my server I can just run one line in my favorite package manager and have all the dependencies running in 5 minutes with automatic security updates.
I don't even care so much that diaspora picked an exotic platform - I just wish they actually just line-item listed their dependencies so that I can go install them from a package manager.
Yup, the better science gets, the less insurance works, and the more you just need socialism (or not - depending on your views).
The whole concept of something like health insurance is that you don't know if you're going to need it, and so you buy it just in case. If you know if you're going to need it, then it loses its purpose. Either companies also know and you can't afford it, or companies aren't allowed to know and all go out of business since healthy people won't buy it.
If the goal is socialism we can just cut out the middleman and treat it like any other social program. If the goal is actually insurance then eventually we'll hit a point where we can't accomplish that goal.
Oh, I'm sure they were telling the truth and they already have a set of well-engineered processes that will comply with those statements to the letter and still result in exactly the situation nobody wants to see.
It is really easy to do:
1. Everybody goes through a highly-intrusive pre-screening process. This doesn't result in any denials or bad rates, this just gives low-risk customers the ability to get through the process more quickly and end up with a low rate.
2. If the intrusive process doesn't confirm that you are low-risk, there is no problem. You just go through the regular process.
3. The regular process is: A. Deny coverage, or B. Charge three times your annual income in premiums.
This is just like offering lower rates for people who put GPS devices in their car. In two years the "low rates" are the normal rates, and the "normal rates" are unaffordable.
I would think that gain would matter more than resolution. Granted, resolution would matter for scan lines since monitors would generally all use the same frequencies.
For cell phones, as long as the resolution covered only a few towers you could probably intercept both halves of conversations. The whole idea of phones is that within any given area only one phone/station is transmitting on any frequency at any time. So, you don't need horizontal resolution beyond the range of a few cells, and if you're willing to lose some data you can probably tolerate more overlap.
With a dish the size of a football field I wouldn't be surprised if it could read the scan line on a CRT. Think about that...
Well, you have to pay $100 and write it yourself.
Chances are that TinyCorp's 14-axis mill software works just fine on a PC-based desktop, laptop, or tablet, but getting it to run on an iPad would involve paying somebody quite a bit of money. Ditto for MicroCorp's data acquisition software for their fluid level sensing system, or NobodyCo's drivers for their dye-sublimation on drywall printer. I'm sure BlockHeadCo's concrete simulation software or LittleGuy's dental amalgum mixer software isn't going to pan out either.
Unless all you do is write letters (err, read letters), there is a TON of stuff in the corporate/industrial world that you're not going to be able to run on an iPad. If you want to actually write anything longer than LOL you'll probably want a bluetooth keyboard, which is now basically just giving you a laptop that doesn't collapse for easy transport.
Sure, a company could try to get their 34,000 software vendors to switch to the iPad, but chances are at least a few aren't going to be interested, at least not unless the company wants to by another $3M 14-axis mill.
Uh, is the laptop really heavier than an iPad plus a keyboard plus a stand? I think you're comparing apples and oranges. With my laptop I can be just about as productive on a trip as I could be in the office, with only my laptop, a charger, and a headset for phone/conferencing. I don't think that you're going to weigh in any lighter with an iPad.
Yeah, go back and read that bit about 1-2 significant figures. To one significant figure I was basically right (one significant figure is just a bit better than order-of-magnitude - and in fact that is all you need for most mental math).
Uh, when I was taught math in elementary school, concepts similar to the Mayan depiction were often used. The only difference I see is that this was all done in base 10 and not in a hybrid of base-5 embedded in base-20.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at. Sure, you can represent numbers as shapes and sizes, but I don't see how this really helps mental math except when it comes to order-of-magnitude calculations.
If I want to multiply 357x289, I can already tell you that the answer is somewhere around 90000. The challenge comes if I want to know the answer to more than 1-2 significant figures. I don't see how using something like the Mayan system or any other system is going to accomplish this.
In any case, I'm not even sure what the problem that you're trying to solve is. The average person can do math well enough to get by in the real world. Sure, it would be nice to be able to walk down the aisle at the grocery store and figure out the per-unit prices in my head to 3 sig figs, but I don't see anything you're offering as accomplishing this. If I'm going to do a model simulation run I'm going to use a computer, and that requires almost zero mental effort around performing calculations - just a TON of creativity and analysis creating the mode/etc.
Yup. Even many employees at big companies wouldn't benefit from such a plan.
I basically can take time off anytime I feel like it - I get a ton of vacation time paid. The problem is that I'm basically given a list of projects and due dates, and my boss wants to see work done on time, and is not interested in a list of good reasons why it isn't done on time. Many if not most professionals fall into similar situations.
So, if I take a week off for jury duty my boss is happy to pay me for it. However, due dates do not get extended, so now I spend the next month scrambling to catch up. If I can get a week ahead on a project I'm going to spend it doing something fun - not in some courtroom that assigns a value of $10/day to my time or whatever.
I think that today the main purpose of dynamic IP pools is to create demand for higher-cost static pools and segment the market.
I do agree that when you're deploying service to individual houses it doesn't make sense to constantly change their IPs.
Now, if I were an ISP I wouldn't promise that IPs would NEVER change - that just creates a routing headache when you need to refactor your network layout.
Yeah, that will sure put a dent in piracy. Gee, those hackers will have to resort to just downloading the DVD rip off of a torrent site and then downrezzing it for android. Actually, for some of the newer handsets they might not even have to do that, as I bet a lot of those are about the right resolution/performance to just play native DVD.
I could see the argument when they were talking about protecting HD, and back when HD was still at a premium and wasn't all over the internet yet. Now that you can hardware-capture HD with consumer equipment, and even crack HDCP, let alone blu-ray player keys/etc, it seems like the cat is really out of the bag on this one.
The only real use for a netflix app is to, well, stream paid videos from netflix. If you want to have have the movie long-term it is easier to just to download it or rip it from any of 47 different sources.
I wouldn't be surprised if the newer versions work fine. I'm not sure it is really the OS so much as the accessories/etc that contribute to RAM use.
If you stripped out some of the features that are RAM-hungry while keeping the functionality I think that it would work fine. Cut down on the graphical glitter (3D gallery, fancier home screen, etc), and focus on functionality (better Exchange support, chrome2phone, API, etc). Much of the original benefit in CM was in the stuff that was left out - some of this has been lost as the feature set is being dictated more by newer phones...
Problem is, according to those I know who have the phone, barely anyone pays any attention and just clicks "okay".
Well, WHY don't they look at it?
Simple - your only choices are agree or don't agree. It is like an EULA - what is the point of reading it? The fact is that you wouldn't have bought/downloaded/etc the software if you didn't want to run it, so what is the point in reading a bunch of text that you can't do anything about.
Now, if you could CHANGE the permissions then people might actually care what those permissions are.
While I like letting apps advertise their minimum permissions, I'd still like to be able to override them.
I'm not concerned with apps that call back to the source website and then get to the internet via a proxy. That is a perfectly safe way to provide internet access - if the app does something nasty they're doing it on the attacker's IP and not mine. If the attacker wanted to send spam from phones this way, or whatever, then they'd just do it without the phone component.
That is why java sandboxes allow connections back to the originating server only. This makes java applets impossible to use as an intrusion/etc vector, as you can only hack into a server that you already control.
I do agree that complete elimination of malicious software will not be possible. However, there are ways to improve things.