Baytrail/Atom chips can run fanless, and they are powerful enough to run full Windows 8. HP is going to be selling some 11 inch laptops for $200 in November, so cancel out the screen, case, battery, storage, and other components that don't come on a Pi, and you can probably get close to $80-$100 for just the board. More expensive than a Pi, but way more capable in what you can run. If you want really cheap and low power, go for something like the Arduino. If you want something you can run emulators, media players, and do some programming on, you'd get 10 times the machine by spending only 2-3 times as much. Personally i think the Pi is in a weird in between spot where it's too expensive and powerful for toy projects, yet too weak to pull of running desktop applications, which they try and purport it can do.
Personally I think that floating point binary has it's advantages as it allows you to do lots of calculations really fast. However, with the number of financial and money processing applications out there, it's amazing that more languages don't have better support for decimal numbers. Even simple numbers like 0.1 can't be properly represented with floating point numbers..Net has a native data type called decimal that does uses decimal floating point and is accurate to 28 or 29 digits, which makes it a great thing to use when dealing with money. I wish more languages would support something similar. Using binary floating point is a premature optimization that most applications don't need, and many programmers aren't aware of the side effects and the problems it could cause.
Today it's bittorrent, tomorrow it's some other protocol. Bittorrent isn't the only way to clog up the network. If the coffeeshop depends on some technically competent user to do all the work for them, then it doesn't solve anything. The network will continue to operate poorly as soon as you leave the premises. Like you said, the coffee shop has no technical expertise. They probably get a lot of complaints about the network being slow, and probably have no idea how to deal with it. It would be much more constructive to talk to the management and try to get them to realize that a problem exists, and that there are technological solutions that could help. Taking the network into your own hands and deciding who is and who isn't allowed to do what on the network will just lead to more problems than it solves.
If they didn't want you using the free wifi for bittorrent, then presumably the operator of the wifi network would use this or other tools to ensure that users aren't using it. If the operators aren't enforcing the rules, complain to them. Don't start doing other nefarious things to because the operators aren't doing their job. It's not up to the users of the free wifi network to police it.
Ideally the tunnels should be designed so that he passengers can find their own way to the back of the train and to the nearest exit with or without a driver. If the train has become incapacitated, there's no guarantee that the driver would be able to help anyway. As far as people falling on the tracks, I would think that the computer system would be much more likely to be paying attention 100% of the time to check for people on the tracks, and it would be able to apply the brakes. The computer could even have infrared vision and other sensors which could warn them well before they enter the station that there was a person or other obstruction on the track. Even if you need humans to look out for people on the tracks, it would be much easier and cheaper for it to be a person paid specifically to look out for people on the tracks at each station, and be able to signal incoming trains to stop, than it would be to have a highly paid subway operator to do this task.
Yeah, I think that VB.Net offers a good compromise though. In the default configuration you can do things like assign an integer to a string variable without explicitly casting it, because the conversion of obvious and does not lose any data, but you can't do crazy things like assign a List to a string, because it doesn't know how to do a conversion. It's nice because print functions and other things that would usually take a string can be called without casting if you just want to print out an integer, but you still get most of the advantages of strong typing.
Subway trains, at least the ones I've been on, never been to London, tend to be pretty brutal towards those with disabilities anyway. It's usually stairs or escalators. There's usually only a few stops that have elevators. I'm not sure what a good solution is though. On one hand I think that people with disabilities should be afforded the same opportunities and services as every other citizen. On the other hand, sometimes putting in the needed infrastructure for those with disabilities makes the system more costly and work less efficiently. In my city the buses have retractable wheelchair ramps. It's great because everybody can use the bus, but it does slow down the system. Who knows once automated cars become a thing, maybe it will be cheaper to design buses for able bodied people only, and have the relatively few disabled people chauffeured around in private vehicles.
They have trains like this in Toronto. The open-car/few seats part of the design, not the driverless part. I was on vacation there in the summer, and I found they work quite well. At low volume times, there was few passengers so you could mostly find a seat. At high volume times, there was no way you could find a seat no matter how many seats they had on the train. Having less seats left more room for standing and more room for maneuvering to get on and off the train.
Compared to the buses in my city (we only have busses), leaving more room for standing becomes immediately apparent. In many parts you can only stand 1 person wide. If you're at the back, it takes a long time maneuvre between all the people to make it to the door. You either have to start moving towards the door 2 or so stops before you disembark, or you'll end up holding up the bus for minutes while your trying to get to the door. It's not uncommon for people to miss their stop because they couldn't get to the door before the door closed. The driver can't see that far to the back to tell if anybody is trying to make their way to the door. And apparently some people don't like to use their voice to alert the driver to wait up for a moment.
Actually, in Basic/VisualBasic, the keword(s) for required you to define variables was Option Explicit. "Option Strict" required that you define the type of variables and that you cast between things properly when converting between different types. As far as I'm aware, "use strict" in Javascript does not stop you from reusing a variable to store different types, which is a whole other class of error I like to avoid by using a strongly typed language.
Whitespace is great, I use it all the time. I use the IDE to automatically fix the indenting of my code. That doesn't mean the compiler should attach any specific meaning to how things are indented. For one thing, once you let the level of indentation govern the execute, you lose the ability to auto-format your code. You can't autoindent the code based on where the blocks start and end, because the level of indentation defines where the blocks start and end. If you messed up the indentation at some spot, there is little to no indication that something went wrong. It's the same reason I don't like languages that don't require that you define that variables exist. Letting you define variables just by using them leaves you open to spelling mistakes and all the bugs it causes just so you can save a couple lines of code.
I see people make the decision that free (as in beer) is the same as open source. They literally don't even grasp that there could possibly be a difference.
I never understood why it mattered if you used L/100km or MPG. The people who don't understand that going from 18 MPG to 28 MPG saves more fuel than going from 34 MPG to 50 MPG are the exact same people who are going to think that there is very little difference between a car that uses 3 L/100km and one that uses 4 L/100km because it's only a difference of 1, which is a very small number. They don't understand that the car that uses 4 L/100km uses 33% more fuel than the other one.
I think the thing that bothers me most that might be closely related is finding information on the internet, and not having a date attached to it. You'll search for something, find something that looks like a news article, and there's no dates. No information about when it happened.
I'm kind of the same way. Personally, I think my next phone just might be the bare minimum phone I can find that does phone calls, texting, and allows for wifi tethering. I'll spend the remaining money on a 7 inch tablet. I can take the cheap phone anywhere I want and don't have to worry about breaking it, and it would fit in a pocket very easily. I can take the tablet just about anywhere that I would want to take a 5 inch smartphone, an it would do a much better job at actually doing smartphone tasks because of the increased screen size.
Well $100 is almost 3 times as much as $35, so it's hard to compare a $100 phone to a $35 one. $65 is a lot of money when you're living in poverty. It's probably what you spend on food in a couple months. To get the phone down to $35, they had to make a lot of compromises. Considering that's the same price as a Raspberry Pi, I'm surprised they were able to get the price so low. The raspberry pi probably has the minimum specs (or close to it) that would be required for a smartphone OS. Any lower specs (like the 128 MB of memory on this phone), and you are getting into the territory of not being able to do a significant number of things while probably not saving much money anyway. My old Nokia with 128 MB of RAM would constantly choke on big web pages complaining of being out of memory. The Raspberry Pi does not have a case, a screen, a battery, a cell phone chip and antenna, a storage device, and a lot of other components you need to make an actual cell phone. I'm actually surprised they were able to make a phone at all for such a price.
That's a stupid law. My phone has GPS, but it's abhorable. When it does get a signal, it takes around 5 minutes. If there's any kind of major obstruction like tall buildings then it will not get a signal. If I'm moving at high speed, like driving down the highway, it will not get a signal. Inside the house? Might get a signal depending on where in the house you are. Inside an office building or shopping centre? Forget about it. Having a law that requires a phone to have a GPS does not make any sense because it fails to account for all the situations where the phone wouldn't be able to get a signal. Even a proper dedicated GPS might have trouble getting a signal in a few of the above situations. I bet that throughout the day, my phone is in a location where it can get a decent signal about half the time. The other half of they time, even if I tried to make a 911 call, it would be completely unable to get a GPS signal.
I can see individual power consumption coming down a lot in the next decade. The next computer I buy is going to have a 5 watt CPU in it, because that's all I need. The computer I have now has a CPU that requires 65 watts. I'm slowly replacing my light bulbs with LED ones as the old ones burn out. My old 27 inch CRT TV is gone, and now I have a 50 inch TV that uses a fraction of the power. More enjoyment, and I'm using less power than ever. Even reading a book on an eReader would probably be much more carbon friendly than reading a book would have been 20 years ago. 20 years ago, it would have required a 40 watt lightbulb. A modern eReader provides it's own backlight and probably runs on less than 5 watts.
Still doesn't seem to be a good strategy. First of all, to get a scholarship, you have to pick a sport. Even at the college level, the competition is fierce. You will have to spend a lot of time training in highschool at the expense of academic endeavors to get anywhere close to being competitive at the college level. Then, when in college, you will have to devote more time to the sport. They give you tutors because they know you don't have enough time to do proper studying. You'll have to choose classes that work around your training schedule rather than the ones that are important academically. You won't be able to take degrees like engineering because there are too many class and lab hours and it would conflict with the training regimen. I seriously doubt that most people could pull off a useful degree while still maintaining their obligations to the sports side of things. The coach isn't going to recommend that they stay on the team for next year when they constantly want to skip practice to study. And there's always the chance you will have an injury, and then your scholarship is gone.
Not only that, but people like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, or Steve Jobs probably would have excelled regardless of the application system or which college they went to. From a quick read up on wikipedia, it doesn't sound like any of them had trouble getting into university.
Also I think it's important not talk about anomolies in the statistical data (which is what these people are) when trying to figure out what will work best for a large population of students. Not being able to get B's or higher in highschool shows a sincere lack of effort, or general lack of intelligence needed to succeed in university, college, or future careers. Sure you might be the next Steve Jobs, but then, you don't need college anyway, so it's not important how the educational system is set up.
It's the same reason why I can't see why so many people push their kids to try to be professional athletes. Sure the professionals make a boat load of money, but they are statistical outliers, and those who don't make it to the pros, are left with very little in terms of job prospects. Had they spent the same amount of time push their kid in academic endeavors, they would have no problem getting into a decent college, and would have plenty of very good career opportunities where they could make a very comfortable living.
I'm not sure which humans you are referring to, but none of the one's I've met breed anywhere close to as much of rabbits. Rabbits can produce 1000 offspring in their lifetime. Even the most prolific humans only produce 20 or so offspring in their lifetime. Funny though, if you compare mass of the full grown humans to that of the rabbits, you might get close to the same amount. 20, 200 pound humans would weigh 4000 pounds, which would equal 1000 rabbits at 4 pounds. Which seems about the right weight for a rabbit.
Those $100 full X86 Windows tablets that HP is coming out with might do a lot to bring Windows around in the mobile space. Pair that with their phones that I've only heard good things about, and I think they stand a pretty good chance of taking back a large part of market. The only downside that people complain most about with Windows Phone and things like the Surface RT was that there wasn't enough apps, and that they were too expensive. Create a $100 tablet that runs full Windows and you get rid of the main complaints that people seem to have. On the phone side, they won't be able to run full Windows, but people don't really expect that from a phone anyway. Having lots of tablets out there and making it easy to port apps between the phone and the desktop should allow the phone to get a decent number of apps.
First it's an example. screen shots are simulated, it's not completely accurate to what you'd see on an actual phone. All commercials do that.
Secondly, it's a date. You do not want to be late for the date. I think it's actually instilling good habits on people to arrive 10 minutes early. Sure the 3 mile drive may only take 5 minutes. Some people will think it only takes 5 minutes to get there, and start leaving 5 minutes before the date. But that's not how to estimate time to get somewhere. He should start getting ready to go 25 minutes before he has to be there. First he has to put his shoes on, find his keys, wallet, because most people don't walk around the house with this stuff on their person all the time. He has to go out to his car, start it, futz with his phone for a couple minutes so that he doesn't have to listen to the god awful radio. Now he can do his 5 minute drive. Then he has to find parking, and walk from the parking to the actual location. That could add on another 5 minutes. All included, it would probably take 15 minutes to get from, "ok I'm leaving now" to "actually at the restaurant". And he's 10 minutes early. Which is OK. Had there been some hold up in one of the previous steps, he still shows up on time or early. People who plan to get somewhere based on the exact minimal time to actually drive somewhere are the people who are always 15 minutes late for everything.
Exactly. I read the summary and immediately thought "damned if you do, damned if you don't". If they had done a bunch of fancy stuff that made the minimum specs need to be higher, then people would have complained that they were just trying to drive new computer sales. The leave the minimum specs the same, and people complain they are catering to old hardware. An operating system should take up a few resources as possible. The fact that there were able to add so much (stuff like virutal desktops (yes, i know Linux has had it for over a decade)) without raising the minimum requirements shows that they actually care about performance and are doing a good job.
electronically stored data that can be converted into a visual image of child pornography
Any electronically stored data can be converted to any image you want if you process the data correclty/incorrectly. I mean, it's a little bit easier if the data is an actual jpeg that would be displayed as such when passed through a standard jpeg rendering function, but you could construct an algorithm such that any data file ends up producing an image of child pornography.
I think that in the case of minors, that it's hard to really hard to say if something was done "voluntarily". I don't think the person taking pictures of themselves should be prosecuted. Either they were fully aware of what they were doing, and they are free to make that decision, or they were tricked/coerced/blackmailed/whatever into taking the photos and they shouldn't get in trouble for that either. If the photos weren't self-taken, or were sent to someone else, that someone else might have a much harder time convincing a jury that the didn't trick/coerce/blackmail/whatever the person into taking the photos, or allowing to be taken.
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Baytrail/Atom chips can run fanless, and they are powerful enough to run full Windows 8. HP is going to be selling some 11 inch laptops for $200 in November, so cancel out the screen, case, battery, storage, and other components that don't come on a Pi, and you can probably get close to $80-$100 for just the board. More expensive than a Pi, but way more capable in what you can run. If you want really cheap and low power, go for something like the Arduino. If you want something you can run emulators, media players, and do some programming on, you'd get 10 times the machine by spending only 2-3 times as much. Personally i think the Pi is in a weird in between spot where it's too expensive and powerful for toy projects, yet too weak to pull of running desktop applications, which they try and purport it can do.
Personally I think that floating point binary has it's advantages as it allows you to do lots of calculations really fast. However, with the number of financial and money processing applications out there, it's amazing that more languages don't have better support for decimal numbers. Even simple numbers like 0.1 can't be properly represented with floating point numbers. .Net has a native data type called decimal that does uses decimal floating point and is accurate to 28 or 29 digits, which makes it a great thing to use when dealing with money. I wish more languages would support something similar. Using binary floating point is a premature optimization that most applications don't need, and many programmers aren't aware of the side effects and the problems it could cause.
Today it's bittorrent, tomorrow it's some other protocol. Bittorrent isn't the only way to clog up the network. If the coffeeshop depends on some technically competent user to do all the work for them, then it doesn't solve anything. The network will continue to operate poorly as soon as you leave the premises. Like you said, the coffee shop has no technical expertise. They probably get a lot of complaints about the network being slow, and probably have no idea how to deal with it. It would be much more constructive to talk to the management and try to get them to realize that a problem exists, and that there are technological solutions that could help. Taking the network into your own hands and deciding who is and who isn't allowed to do what on the network will just lead to more problems than it solves.
If they didn't want you using the free wifi for bittorrent, then presumably the operator of the wifi network would use this or other tools to ensure that users aren't using it. If the operators aren't enforcing the rules, complain to them. Don't start doing other nefarious things to because the operators aren't doing their job. It's not up to the users of the free wifi network to police it.
Ideally the tunnels should be designed so that he passengers can find their own way to the back of the train and to the nearest exit with or without a driver. If the train has become incapacitated, there's no guarantee that the driver would be able to help anyway. As far as people falling on the tracks, I would think that the computer system would be much more likely to be paying attention 100% of the time to check for people on the tracks, and it would be able to apply the brakes. The computer could even have infrared vision and other sensors which could warn them well before they enter the station that there was a person or other obstruction on the track. Even if you need humans to look out for people on the tracks, it would be much easier and cheaper for it to be a person paid specifically to look out for people on the tracks at each station, and be able to signal incoming trains to stop, than it would be to have a highly paid subway operator to do this task.
Yeah, I think that VB.Net offers a good compromise though. In the default configuration you can do things like assign an integer to a string variable without explicitly casting it, because the conversion of obvious and does not lose any data, but you can't do crazy things like assign a List to a string, because it doesn't know how to do a conversion. It's nice because print functions and other things that would usually take a string can be called without casting if you just want to print out an integer, but you still get most of the advantages of strong typing.
Subway trains, at least the ones I've been on, never been to London, tend to be pretty brutal towards those with disabilities anyway. It's usually stairs or escalators. There's usually only a few stops that have elevators. I'm not sure what a good solution is though. On one hand I think that people with disabilities should be afforded the same opportunities and services as every other citizen. On the other hand, sometimes putting in the needed infrastructure for those with disabilities makes the system more costly and work less efficiently. In my city the buses have retractable wheelchair ramps. It's great because everybody can use the bus, but it does slow down the system. Who knows once automated cars become a thing, maybe it will be cheaper to design buses for able bodied people only, and have the relatively few disabled people chauffeured around in private vehicles.
They have trains like this in Toronto. The open-car/few seats part of the design, not the driverless part. I was on vacation there in the summer, and I found they work quite well. At low volume times, there was few passengers so you could mostly find a seat. At high volume times, there was no way you could find a seat no matter how many seats they had on the train. Having less seats left more room for standing and more room for maneuvering to get on and off the train.
Compared to the buses in my city (we only have busses), leaving more room for standing becomes immediately apparent. In many parts you can only stand 1 person wide. If you're at the back, it takes a long time maneuvre between all the people to make it to the door. You either have to start moving towards the door 2 or so stops before you disembark, or you'll end up holding up the bus for minutes while your trying to get to the door. It's not uncommon for people to miss their stop because they couldn't get to the door before the door closed. The driver can't see that far to the back to tell if anybody is trying to make their way to the door. And apparently some people don't like to use their voice to alert the driver to wait up for a moment.
Actually, in Basic/VisualBasic, the keword(s) for required you to define variables was Option Explicit. "Option Strict" required that you define the type of variables and that you cast between things properly when converting between different types. As far as I'm aware, "use strict" in Javascript does not stop you from reusing a variable to store different types, which is a whole other class of error I like to avoid by using a strongly typed language.
Whitespace is great, I use it all the time. I use the IDE to automatically fix the indenting of my code. That doesn't mean the compiler should attach any specific meaning to how things are indented. For one thing, once you let the level of indentation govern the execute, you lose the ability to auto-format your code. You can't autoindent the code based on where the blocks start and end, because the level of indentation defines where the blocks start and end. If you messed up the indentation at some spot, there is little to no indication that something went wrong. It's the same reason I don't like languages that don't require that you define that variables exist. Letting you define variables just by using them leaves you open to spelling mistakes and all the bugs it causes just so you can save a couple lines of code.
I see people make the decision that free (as in beer) is the same as open source. They literally don't even grasp that there could possibly be a difference.
I never understood why it mattered if you used L/100km or MPG. The people who don't understand that going from 18 MPG to 28 MPG saves more fuel than going from 34 MPG to 50 MPG are the exact same people who are going to think that there is very little difference between a car that uses 3 L/100km and one that uses 4 L/100km because it's only a difference of 1, which is a very small number. They don't understand that the car that uses 4 L/100km uses 33% more fuel than the other one.
I think the thing that bothers me most that might be closely related is finding information on the internet, and not having a date attached to it. You'll search for something, find something that looks like a news article, and there's no dates. No information about when it happened.
I'm kind of the same way. Personally, I think my next phone just might be the bare minimum phone I can find that does phone calls, texting, and allows for wifi tethering. I'll spend the remaining money on a 7 inch tablet. I can take the cheap phone anywhere I want and don't have to worry about breaking it, and it would fit in a pocket very easily. I can take the tablet just about anywhere that I would want to take a 5 inch smartphone, an it would do a much better job at actually doing smartphone tasks because of the increased screen size.
Well $100 is almost 3 times as much as $35, so it's hard to compare a $100 phone to a $35 one. $65 is a lot of money when you're living in poverty. It's probably what you spend on food in a couple months. To get the phone down to $35, they had to make a lot of compromises. Considering that's the same price as a Raspberry Pi, I'm surprised they were able to get the price so low. The raspberry pi probably has the minimum specs (or close to it) that would be required for a smartphone OS. Any lower specs (like the 128 MB of memory on this phone), and you are getting into the territory of not being able to do a significant number of things while probably not saving much money anyway. My old Nokia with 128 MB of RAM would constantly choke on big web pages complaining of being out of memory. The Raspberry Pi does not have a case, a screen, a battery, a cell phone chip and antenna, a storage device, and a lot of other components you need to make an actual cell phone. I'm actually surprised they were able to make a phone at all for such a price.
That's a stupid law. My phone has GPS, but it's abhorable. When it does get a signal, it takes around 5 minutes. If there's any kind of major obstruction like tall buildings then it will not get a signal. If I'm moving at high speed, like driving down the highway, it will not get a signal. Inside the house? Might get a signal depending on where in the house you are. Inside an office building or shopping centre? Forget about it. Having a law that requires a phone to have a GPS does not make any sense because it fails to account for all the situations where the phone wouldn't be able to get a signal. Even a proper dedicated GPS might have trouble getting a signal in a few of the above situations. I bet that throughout the day, my phone is in a location where it can get a decent signal about half the time. The other half of they time, even if I tried to make a 911 call, it would be completely unable to get a GPS signal.
I can see individual power consumption coming down a lot in the next decade. The next computer I buy is going to have a 5 watt CPU in it, because that's all I need. The computer I have now has a CPU that requires 65 watts. I'm slowly replacing my light bulbs with LED ones as the old ones burn out. My old 27 inch CRT TV is gone, and now I have a 50 inch TV that uses a fraction of the power. More enjoyment, and I'm using less power than ever. Even reading a book on an eReader would probably be much more carbon friendly than reading a book would have been 20 years ago. 20 years ago, it would have required a 40 watt lightbulb. A modern eReader provides it's own backlight and probably runs on less than 5 watts.
Still doesn't seem to be a good strategy. First of all, to get a scholarship, you have to pick a sport. Even at the college level, the competition is fierce. You will have to spend a lot of time training in highschool at the expense of academic endeavors to get anywhere close to being competitive at the college level. Then, when in college, you will have to devote more time to the sport. They give you tutors because they know you don't have enough time to do proper studying. You'll have to choose classes that work around your training schedule rather than the ones that are important academically. You won't be able to take degrees like engineering because there are too many class and lab hours and it would conflict with the training regimen. I seriously doubt that most people could pull off a useful degree while still maintaining their obligations to the sports side of things. The coach isn't going to recommend that they stay on the team for next year when they constantly want to skip practice to study. And there's always the chance you will have an injury, and then your scholarship is gone.
Not only that, but people like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, or Steve Jobs probably would have excelled regardless of the application system or which college they went to. From a quick read up on wikipedia, it doesn't sound like any of them had trouble getting into university.
Also I think it's important not talk about anomolies in the statistical data (which is what these people are) when trying to figure out what will work best for a large population of students. Not being able to get B's or higher in highschool shows a sincere lack of effort, or general lack of intelligence needed to succeed in university, college, or future careers. Sure you might be the next Steve Jobs, but then, you don't need college anyway, so it's not important how the educational system is set up.
It's the same reason why I can't see why so many people push their kids to try to be professional athletes. Sure the professionals make a boat load of money, but they are statistical outliers, and those who don't make it to the pros, are left with very little in terms of job prospects. Had they spent the same amount of time push their kid in academic endeavors, they would have no problem getting into a decent college, and would have plenty of very good career opportunities where they could make a very comfortable living.
I'm not sure which humans you are referring to, but none of the one's I've met breed anywhere close to as much of rabbits. Rabbits can produce 1000 offspring in their lifetime. Even the most prolific humans only produce 20 or so offspring in their lifetime. Funny though, if you compare mass of the full grown humans to that of the rabbits, you might get close to the same amount. 20, 200 pound humans would weigh 4000 pounds, which would equal 1000 rabbits at 4 pounds. Which seems about the right weight for a rabbit.
Those $100 full X86 Windows tablets that HP is coming out with might do a lot to bring Windows around in the mobile space. Pair that with their phones that I've only heard good things about, and I think they stand a pretty good chance of taking back a large part of market. The only downside that people complain most about with Windows Phone and things like the Surface RT was that there wasn't enough apps, and that they were too expensive. Create a $100 tablet that runs full Windows and you get rid of the main complaints that people seem to have. On the phone side, they won't be able to run full Windows, but people don't really expect that from a phone anyway. Having lots of tablets out there and making it easy to port apps between the phone and the desktop should allow the phone to get a decent number of apps.
First it's an example. screen shots are simulated, it's not completely accurate to what you'd see on an actual phone. All commercials do that.
Secondly, it's a date. You do not want to be late for the date. I think it's actually instilling good habits on people to arrive 10 minutes early. Sure the 3 mile drive may only take 5 minutes. Some people will think it only takes 5 minutes to get there, and start leaving 5 minutes before the date. But that's not how to estimate time to get somewhere. He should start getting ready to go 25 minutes before he has to be there. First he has to put his shoes on, find his keys, wallet, because most people don't walk around the house with this stuff on their person all the time. He has to go out to his car, start it, futz with his phone for a couple minutes so that he doesn't have to listen to the god awful radio. Now he can do his 5 minute drive. Then he has to find parking, and walk from the parking to the actual location. That could add on another 5 minutes. All included, it would probably take 15 minutes to get from, "ok I'm leaving now" to "actually at the restaurant". And he's 10 minutes early. Which is OK. Had there been some hold up in one of the previous steps, he still shows up on time or early. People who plan to get somewhere based on the exact minimal time to actually drive somewhere are the people who are always 15 minutes late for everything.
Exactly. I read the summary and immediately thought "damned if you do, damned if you don't". If they had done a bunch of fancy stuff that made the minimum specs need to be higher, then people would have complained that they were just trying to drive new computer sales. The leave the minimum specs the same, and people complain they are catering to old hardware. An operating system should take up a few resources as possible. The fact that there were able to add so much (stuff like virutal desktops (yes, i know Linux has had it for over a decade)) without raising the minimum requirements shows that they actually care about performance and are doing a good job.
Any electronically stored data can be converted to any image you want if you process the data correclty/incorrectly. I mean, it's a little bit easier if the data is an actual jpeg that would be displayed as such when passed through a standard jpeg rendering function, but you could construct an algorithm such that any data file ends up producing an image of child pornography.
I think that in the case of minors, that it's hard to really hard to say if something was done "voluntarily". I don't think the person taking pictures of themselves should be prosecuted. Either they were fully aware of what they were doing, and they are free to make that decision, or they were tricked/coerced/blackmailed/whatever into taking the photos and they shouldn't get in trouble for that either. If the photos weren't self-taken, or were sent to someone else, that someone else might have a much harder time convincing a jury that the didn't trick/coerce/blackmail/whatever the person into taking the photos, or allowing to be taken.