What specifically is the issue? We agree that I can know her whereabouts only to protect her, not to pry. I'm not sitting in the Bat Cave tracking her every move. We have a high degree of trust anyway -- she tells me everything -- so it's not an issue between us. Or is that not what you're saying?
> you do realize that if someone was to abduct her the first thing they would do is probably throw the phone in the back of a passing pickup truck.
Oddly enough, criminals often aren't that smart. I've read about several cases where the kid was able to make a call after being abducted. While some have proven to be fakes, some are legit.
But a subcutaneous device, (assuming it would work like lojack and not like current chipping, which can only be detected from a few feet away) can still be detected and removed. I imagine when "Taken" is remade in a few years, there will be a scene of impromtu surgery during the abduction. If an abductor is smart enough to search the kid for a cell phone, then, well, you get the idea.
And, in any case, the most common function of the device is for me to find her when she's lost, or a way for her to communicate to me or someone in a lockdown situation, and only secondarily for tracking an abduction. It's a matter of managed risk.
Unless you're relentlessly geeky, don't try to build or assemble such a system. There are commercial solutions out there, pick one of those. Why depend on an amateur solution for your daughter's safety?
The simplest solution is to give the child a cell phone with GPS as a birthday present. I know, cell phones aren't allowed in many schools, but if it's a small one and she can put it on "ignore" and hide it on her person or in her backpack, for use before or after school, no harm no foul.
And -- this is important -- that cell may be key if there's ever an incident at the school. The most chilling text message I ever got from my daughter was that there had been a shooting and the school was in lockdown. (It turned out ok, but that's a message I wouldn't wish on anyone.) That's what brought it home to me. It's not just the news, it can happen to you too.
As it happens, my daughter's current school does allow cell phones, but they are absolutely forbidden at her summer camp. Screw that -- I tell her to put it in the bottom of her luggage and make sure nobody sees it.
My daughter started carrying a cell phone in 6th grade for precisely this reason. It's paid off three times: Twice she got on the wrong school bus, and once we lost her in the press of the crowd during a parade. (That was really scary.)
Before GPS became common, I had to rely on her description of where she was. Once (the parade incident) she had to go into a store and ask the attendant for the address. (I discourage her from asking strangers on the street, and she's afraid of the police, due to an incident a few years earlier, so we compromised on convenience store attendants. It wasn't a perfect solution.)
Now, none of that is necessary. She carries a Blackberry Curve and I can check her location via Google Latitude on my own Blackberry. She knows that this is not because I don't trust her, but because I don't trust everyone else. Besides, she can also see my location, which forestalls "Daddy, when are you going to get here?"
There are other tracking services, but Latitude was good enough for our purpose, and free.
Hell, I'm so sick of working on cars, I'd consider one like that. The thing is, it would really have to keep running no matter what. Being stuck on the side of the road with a busted fan belt would be unacceptable.
It's not possible to know what women want. I think it must have something to do with the Heisenberg principle. My wife says women will not tell you what they want because you should "just know", so asking them doesn't work. I could see where this could scale up to opinion polls and product marketing.
Replicating one online server to another online server is not a backup, any more than a raid or a mirror is a backup, for many of the same reasons. This is abuse of the word "backup". Unless you have cold copies of your data in storage, (preferably offsite) you're just fooling yourself.
Seems like there's been several stories like this lately. Why does this keep happening? Is some salesperson out there convincing customers that offline backups are a waste of capital?
Not that I condone buckets-o-pr0n in hotel rooms, but one way around this is for the user to tunnel from an instance running on their laptop. The instance is completely locked down by the VPN connection (assuming it's configured correctly), but the host computer is still free to rove the raw internet.
I do this at home so I can still reach my local printers, media center, local shares, and "banned" websites like Facebook while logged into work.
If we're talking about the same outage that caused google advertisements to hang forever this morning, it caused access to many unrelated websites to hang, including slashdot itself. This seems like a really bad single-point-of-failure issue. If a site can't display ads, shouldn't it come up anyway?
It's bad enough that I have to wait tens of seconds for Captcha content to pop up long after a login page has loaded.
This is starting to get annoying. If this is "cloud computing", I'd rather stay on earth.
> But it was what the movie claimed, amongst a whole lot of other nonsense.
I took that as hyperbole (which admittedly would be out of character for Spock). And you're right, there was a lot of nonsense. Not quite as much as Star Trek V, but nevertheless.
> This would have drastically altered the entire dynamics of the Star Trek universe, and it was the chief reason for which the teleporters were a short-range, finicky devices in all the previous instances of Star Trek.
I haven't watched all previous instances of Star Trek, so I guess you've got me there. In one of the novels is a ship that travels by repeatedly teleporting itself lightyears ahead, but that's arguably not canon. (Although I spotted a couple of "novel-only" nods in the film, but that puts us in a gray area where we probably don't want to be.)
You have a compelling argument, though, and I can't immediately think of a counter to it, except that perhaps the technology was banned, as were the "phasing shields" or whatever they were in TNG, (which would explain why we've never heard of it before) and of course that transporters still won't work through shields, making this more a terrorist weapon than a weapon of war.
But the best answer was that it was just bad writing. It'd make more sense for the base to have a shuttle, but that would have required another set and additional special effects.
>> Um,... what? Sorry, I don't remember that scene.
> The Enterprise ejected Kirk, marooning him on a planet near Vulcan on which Scotty was also present. Then it immediately
No no, the original quote was as follows:
#####
> Then there are the super-teleporters [...] which are capable of delivering unstoppable warheads to planets light years away [...]
Um,... what? Sorry, I don't remember that scene.
#####
I certainly remembered the scene where they transported to the Enterprise while it's in warp. This was explained with some hand-waving. I allowed it because they didn't use the word "multiphasic", which was apparently required by law whenever someone explained anything in any Trek show made in the last two decades.
However, I must have been looking around for that errant sour patch kid when someone teleported a warhead to a planet light years away. When did that scene occur?
Slashdot Mirror
What specifically is the issue? We agree that I can know her whereabouts only to protect her, not to pry. I'm not sitting in the Bat Cave tracking her every move. We have a high degree of trust anyway -- she tells me everything -- so it's not an issue between us. Or is that not what you're saying?
Ok, to a certain extent that was hyperbole, but you know what I mean.
> you do realize that if someone was to abduct her the first thing they would do is probably throw the phone in the back of a passing pickup truck.
Oddly enough, criminals often aren't that smart. I've read about several cases where the kid was able to make a call after being abducted. While some have proven to be fakes, some are legit.
But a subcutaneous device, (assuming it would work like lojack and not like current chipping, which can only be detected from a few feet away) can still be detected and removed. I imagine when "Taken" is remade in a few years, there will be a scene of impromtu surgery during the abduction. If an abductor is smart enough to search the kid for a cell phone, then, well, you get the idea.
And, in any case, the most common function of the device is for me to find her when she's lost, or a way for her to communicate to me or someone in a lockdown situation, and only secondarily for tracking an abduction. It's a matter of managed risk.
Unless you're relentlessly geeky, don't try to build or assemble such a system. There are commercial solutions out there, pick one of those. Why depend on an amateur solution for your daughter's safety?
The simplest solution is to give the child a cell phone with GPS as a birthday present. I know, cell phones aren't allowed in many schools, but if it's a small one and she can put it on "ignore" and hide it on her person or in her backpack, for use before or after school, no harm no foul.
And -- this is important -- that cell may be key if there's ever an incident at the school. The most chilling text message I ever got from my daughter was that there had been a shooting and the school was in lockdown. (It turned out ok, but that's a message I wouldn't wish on anyone.) That's what brought it home to me. It's not just the news, it can happen to you too.
As it happens, my daughter's current school does allow cell phones, but they are absolutely forbidden at her summer camp. Screw that -- I tell her to put it in the bottom of her luggage and make sure nobody sees it.
My daughter started carrying a cell phone in 6th grade for precisely this reason. It's paid off three times: Twice she got on the wrong school bus, and once we lost her in the press of the crowd during a parade. (That was really scary.)
Before GPS became common, I had to rely on her description of where she was. Once (the parade incident) she had to go into a store and ask the attendant for the address. (I discourage her from asking strangers on the street, and she's afraid of the police, due to an incident a few years earlier, so we compromised on convenience store attendants. It wasn't a perfect solution.)
Now, none of that is necessary. She carries a Blackberry Curve and I can check her location via Google Latitude on my own Blackberry. She knows that this is not because I don't trust her, but because I don't trust everyone else. Besides, she can also see my location, which forestalls "Daddy, when are you going to get here?"
There are other tracking services, but Latitude was good enough for our purpose, and free.
Hope this helps.
We'll make it a yellow volcano.
Trickle-down economics?
Yes, I know, and it costs more to make clothes here than it does to buy them from sweatshops in China. But is it the right thing to do?
I think the point is not to import.
It'd be their best seller.
More like 1939.
Isn't there prior art?
Makes sense. But on the other hand, the concept of a completely closed system never did take off. At least for cars.
Hell, I'm so sick of working on cars, I'd consider one like that. The thing is, it would really have to keep running no matter what. Being stuck on the side of the road with a busted fan belt would be unacceptable.
It's not possible to know what women want. I think it must have something to do with the Heisenberg principle. My wife says women will not tell you what they want because you should "just know", so asking them doesn't work. I could see where this could scale up to opinion polls and product marketing.
Replicating one online server to another online server is not a backup, any more than a raid or a mirror is a backup, for many of the same reasons. This is abuse of the word "backup". Unless you have cold copies of your data in storage, (preferably offsite) you're just fooling yourself.
Seems like there's been several stories like this lately. Why does this keep happening? Is some salesperson out there convincing customers that offline backups are a waste of capital?
Not that I condone buckets-o-pr0n in hotel rooms, but one way around this is for the user to tunnel from an instance running on their laptop. The instance is completely locked down by the VPN connection (assuming it's configured correctly), but the host computer is still free to rove the raw internet.
I do this at home so I can still reach my local printers, media center, local shares, and "banned" websites like Facebook while logged into work.
If we're talking about the same outage that caused google advertisements to hang forever this morning, it caused access to many unrelated websites to hang, including slashdot itself. This seems like a really bad single-point-of-failure issue. If a site can't display ads, shouldn't it come up anyway?
It's bad enough that I have to wait tens of seconds for Captcha content to pop up long after a login page has loaded.
This is starting to get annoying. If this is "cloud computing", I'd rather stay on earth.
> But it was what the movie claimed, amongst a whole lot of other nonsense.
I took that as hyperbole (which admittedly would be out of character for Spock). And you're right, there was a lot of nonsense. Not quite as much as Star Trek V, but nevertheless.
> This would have drastically altered the entire dynamics of the Star Trek universe, and it was the chief reason for which the teleporters were a short-range, finicky devices in all the previous instances of Star Trek.
I haven't watched all previous instances of Star Trek, so I guess you've got me there. In one of the novels is a ship that travels by repeatedly teleporting itself lightyears ahead, but that's arguably not canon. (Although I spotted a couple of "novel-only" nods in the film, but that puts us in a gray area where we probably don't want to be.)
You have a compelling argument, though, and I can't immediately think of a counter to it, except that perhaps the technology was banned, as were the "phasing shields" or whatever they were in TNG, (which would explain why we've never heard of it before) and of course that transporters still won't work through shields, making this more a terrorist weapon than a weapon of war.
But the best answer was that it was just bad writing. It'd make more sense for the base to have a shuttle, but that would have required another set and additional special effects.
That's what's missing -- a blow-by-blow critique of everything in the movie that didn't match the... er... books? Well, anyway, something like:
Kirk bangs his head on a beam in the shuttle, which never happened in the book!!! Er, I mean never happened in the original series!!! [1]
But I knew the movie was gonna suck when they put Arwen at the Ford... I mean Spock at the ice hole... No wait...
A little help here.
[1] I deny the existence of Star Trek V
No no no.
It's all for antitrust lawsuits.
It would kind-of make sense.
>> Um,... what? Sorry, I don't remember that scene.
> The Enterprise ejected Kirk, marooning him on a planet near Vulcan on which Scotty was also present. Then it immediately
No no, the original quote was as follows:
#####
> Then there are the super-teleporters [...] which are capable of delivering unstoppable warheads to planets light years away [...]
Um,... what? Sorry, I don't remember that scene.
#####
I certainly remembered the scene where they transported to the Enterprise while it's in warp. This was explained with some hand-waving. I allowed it because they didn't use the word "multiphasic", which was apparently required by law whenever someone explained anything in any Trek show made in the last two decades.
However, I must have been looking around for that errant sour patch kid when someone teleported a warhead to a planet light years away. When did that scene occur?
> no supernova could produce a burst powerful enough to wipe life in the entire galaxy.
's not what I said.