I intentionally disabled the internal memory on my phone so the phonebook would always save entries to the SIM card memory. That way, should my phone have an accident of some sort rendering it inoperable, or I decide to just get a new phone, I don't lose my contacts because I can't transfer them off the old phone and onto the new one.
But this discussion is about Smartphones, not legacy feature phones.
Iphones and Android phones, and even Winphones back up the contact list to the cloud, and any ability to back up to the sim is pretty much gone by now. I don't believe its even possible in Android, (although you can import from the sim). Its just not necessary, your contacts are syned with your computer, or your Apple account, or your Google account, or your Carrier's account, or your phone manufacturer account. There are at least a dozen services that will backup your contacts. Its all in the cloud.
Your method is flawed. You are living in an accident waiting to happen.
Phone falls out of your pocket somewhere, and all your contacts are lost. If they are in the cloud, you get a new phone, log in, and BAM all your contacts are back.
With a sim, when the manufacturers do decide on another sim standard, that carefully maintained sim contact list CAN'T be imported.
Further, all you can store in the sim is name and phone number. But smart phones remember multiple phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses, birthdays and notes. And these are ALL backed up in what every backup system you use.
Seriously, its not 1985 any more. Get you contacts off your sim and put them someplace smart.
Look at the the video in TFA. Note especially the cut in the editing; it would appear that it took some time for one of the black outboard engines of a stationary boat bursts into flames. The laser they're talking about building is only 7x as powerful as the one used in the demonstration. It's questionable whether such a laser could have that particular effect against a fast moving boat, much less something like a missile.
Exactly my thoughts.
It seems to me that the use case for burning thru hull plating (to take out inboard engines) seems pretty unlikely.
Optically guided missiles might succumb to having their sensors fried at well beyond the range that a burn-through could happen. Interdiction use (coast guard) might make more sense, making the bridge of a running vessel a pretty inhospitable place to be without using naval gunfire and risking the lives of all on board.
If this stays as a (relatively) short range weapon, which is likely given the way lasers work in the atmosphere, then I doubt that being able to trace the beam back to its source will matter much. A modern US destroyer is over 500 ft long. Based on the one mile range listed in the summary, it would be clearly visible, even to the naked eye.
Further, something big enough to take out an outboard motor, even scaled up, is at best, a point defense weapon (cruise missiles, very small surface craft, close in helicopters, etc.) Even something 10 times as powerful does not completely disable a frigate sized surface vessel before it can return fire with missiles, guns, and torpedo.
However, looking at the video, the time it takes to burn thru a thin-skinned outboard motor, on a boat that was barely moving, and making no effort to avoid the engagement, suggests that there is a long way to go before this could be a missile defense.
So the use case shrinks even further.
Most anti-ship missiles tend to cluster around a speed of 1000 km/h, which means they cover that last km in.27 seconds. And some US missiles arrive at over 4000 km/h.
Unless a massively scaled up version can track an incoming missile traveling that fast, and engage it, burn it, or blind it in that.27 seconds, its use as fleet CIWS seems limited at best. The only saving grace is the last km is usually (but not always) a head on straight in attack, making tracking easier.
Ah, this ALREADY happens in many countries. Flying to the old Soviet Union used to be a nightmare, even if you were just stopping over on your way to somewhere else.
Its all handled for you by the airline, unless the airline knows nothing about you.
But they can deny landing rights to any airline carrying any such individual.
All these planes are landing in the US (a fact the summary conveniently leaves out just to stir the pot, and send you up. There is nothing new here. Countries (even the UK) have the right to control who they allow in, or who can transit their ports.
This is an interesting step; in general countries are a lot more strict on entering their territory than leaving it. There are some circumstances where you'd want to control exit (if someone is fleeing law enforcement for some reason, avoiding child custody or the like), but I wonder if that's the intent of this policy shift or if it's something else.
These passengers are flying to the US, regardless of their final destination. As such they will likely be in a plane full of US citizens, over US cities. I suspect that in all these cases the plane will land in the US before continuing to their destination.
Direct flights that do not enter US Airspace would not be affected.
The intent of the policy is to prevent another World Trade Center. It may be a bit overwrought, especially in a plane full of jumpy American passengers who will even take down a aircraft crew member that acts up.
In most cases this happens automatically via your airline reservation, but late booking passengers always presented a challenge, and many times planes were wheels up before late arrivals proved to be on the no fly list, and in some cases planes had to be turned around.
(Note: Don't get me started on the No Fly List. If you've passed security, been searched, baggage searched, underwear and shoes searched, it seems that a permanent ban on flying is overkill. But that's for a different post).
My guess is the amount of space they take up in the phone is the problem. Basically, between the SIM itself and the hardware for reading it, that's a good amount of real estate.
Exactly.
But the problem is the insane rush to thinness. Devices are already too thin, and making them thinner just makes them harder to use, hold, and keep rigid enough to prevent glass breakage.
The problem is that current battery technology wants to be in regular shapes, and in order to allow for a sim socket you have to surrender the entire width of the phone even though the sim only takes a portion of that width. I suspect Apple would like to insert the sim in a slot that sits perpendicular to the slab. These nano-sims are also thinner.
Molded batteries would allow the use of irregular areas inside of a device, and such batteries could better use empty space.
Linear sims (toothpick) are another possible design. The phone need only read them upon insertion via a collar around the insertion hole. Nobody bothers to write to the sim any more.
It could be worse. We could be linking to digg or reddit posts.
Also, the video says it can get to the moon in 6 months. They don't mention what the initial orbit is like, so I would hope they mean that they can make it from an arbitrary orbit to the moon in that time.
Also glossed over is the earth-to-orbit costs. Once you ignore 95% (number pulled from ass) of the cost everything sounds cheap.
Grabbing and tossing spent satellites back to earth is also nonsense. At most, you only need to slow them down by some calculated amount, but then you also have to disengage, turn around, and thrust your way back to a safe orbit to pursue the next piece of space junk. You will need years of "fuel" (mass to eject) to make a dent in the junk pile orbiting earth, and an enormous bank of computers to manage the whole operation.
With an international agreement that EVERY launch must plan to re-enter its own debris, AND carry one or more of these clean up bots into orbit this might be a workable long term plan, but not at $11 million apiece.
Why should the government prohibit people from entering into a private contract for a legal product/service? Isn't that the opposite of what the government should be doing?
What makes you think its a Legal Product or Service?
What if your house loan or car loan required you to make payments long after the load was paid off, for the life of your car/house? Would that be Legal?
That's exactly what happens when you get a phone under contract. Your monthly bill does not go down after the contract is completed. And in a lot of cases (most cases actually) you can't even take your phone and go elsewhere for service. Even if you manage to remove the carrier locks, getting that Verizon Phone to run on T-Mo or At&t or small regional carrier will bring you a swift and painful education.
Look, we regulate things like loans and contracts in this country precisely because there is asymmetrical market power and these utilities are using public resources (airwaves, right of ways) to provide their services. This isn't the evil of big government its the good of small citizens voting for reasonable controls of those companies that have oligopoly markets.
You are comparing different service plans, with different data caps, from different companies. Its not the same. This might work for voice calls, but its not a solution for smartphones unless you like EDGE speeds.
After your contract expires for a subsidized phone your monthly bill does not go down. It Should.
If you have several lines on your family account, you can't just drop out after your contract expires and start up on a small regional carrier.
Sounds like a grab to boost G+'s userbase beyond Wil Wheaton and Google engineers.
Not gonna touch Google+ until they get rid of their "real names" policy and I'm not inclined since I've invested so much of my online social life with Facebook.
The real names policy has been relaxed, but that doesn't mean they don't already know precisely who you are.
What's more worrying is that this Patent they are applying for, if used by them, violates their own Privacy Policy, and their own openness pledge. After being dragged through a knot hole by the FTC and Congress, It seems unlikely they will actually put this into service any time soon.
I doubt this is being used yet. There is nothing on my Google Dashboard, even tho I've ignored multiple invites to G+. So if they are creating this phantom account its not accessible even by the user, and as such must be merely a book keeping entry to allow authentication. If G+ users hit that Invite button, they may simply record the invite in a file somewhere so that they can add both parties to each other's circles. They had been doing that with Gmail invites since day one. (back when you needed to be invited to Gmail).
All that has ever been demonstrated is that with an electron microscope a couple of bytes were successfully "raised" after being over written with a uniform pattern. The prior content of the drive was known, which is how they were able to determine that they weren't recovering noise. It was a proof of concept recovery of literally a few bytes from a drive with known content overwritten with known content. This was the topic of a guy named Venugopal Veeravalli, for his Masters thesis, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1987. (He went on to have a brilliant career, but nothing came of his research.)
The process involved:
Magnetic force scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) technique which uses a probe tip typically made by plating pure nickel onto a prepatterned surface, peeling the resulting thin film from the substrate it was plated onto and plating it with a thin layer of gold to minimise corrosion, and mounting it in a probe where it is placed at some small bias potential (typically a few tenths of a nanoamp at a few volts DC) so that electrons from the surface under test can tunnel across the gap to the probe tip (or vice versa).
It yields pictures (images) of the surface, AT THE BIT LEVEL, which then have to be visually analysed by humans, and they guess which grains of magnetic media represent the old data (5% of the grains), and which represent the new data (about 95%). It takes 10 minutes to yield one visual image, it takes 8 images to guess at a byte. And this was done with KNOWN prior content, and KNOWN overwrite pattern on a disk platter that had been written EXACTLY TWICE in its life.
From this theoretical capability sprang the paranoia of multiple overwrite for mil grade erasure. An entire industry followed in lock step.
In real life no one has ever recovered a full file, or even meaningful fragments from an overwritten drive. Not at the older sparse densities, and not at today's much denser packing of bits.
With tape you could SOMETIMES do this, but only because heads never aligned precisely, and you could read the bottom layer of magnetic particles right thru the plastic substrate. But even that required extremely slow manual procedures with government budget equipment. The "lost" NASA tapes were recovered this way.
The CIA relies on exactly what every body else does, the fact that data is seldom erased, merely the file allocation table is over written and data lurks in forgotten clusters on the drive.
Go read the link I posted and the links it references.
Any one of two dozen drive over-write utilities (free or paid) will make sure your drive is unreadable.
No need for multiple passes either, simply write binary zeros everywhere and you are done. The old FUD about the CIA recovering your info with electron microscopes is pure bull, and nobody has ever once successfully demonstrated that in public even when they had access to state of the art university electron microscopes.
I wish all phones were sold unlocked, and I wish all carrier subsidies were illegal. The price of phones rises to absorb all the subsidy they can extract from the carriers.
The iPhone was a huge siphon, emptying AT&Ts pockets into Apples, making Apple the richest company in sight on a phone that really does not cost that much to produce. Now Apple are doing the same thing to the other carriers.
If people had to buy their own phones the net effect would be lower prices, or they would be buying other phones. Greece, like India doesn't allow subsidies. Apple isn't selling well there. If Apple cut its profit margin in half, they would open up vast new markets.
Some of the lower-to-mid level Android phones do well in those same markets.
So they have the finger prints already. (Since they are going to all this trouble it would seem that the prior collections of prints are useless in this encoding process, and a real finger is needed.)
Presumably the new finger printing is simply encoded and placed on some form of voter id card, which you must present when you want to vote. (Story and the summary are a little vague about this). Surely they are not doing real-time hits on some central database for these encoded prints, merely validating that the cards match the hand of the carrier. Lots of remote locations in Brazil, it seems unlikely they would have a real time link.
If it does work this way, (no central database check) this opens the door to card cloning, (counterfeiting). All you need is to transfer the encoded numbers to cards that are close enough, and visit several polling places under different names. Get there early, before the real person, who's id you cloned, and vote early and often.
I assure you Sir, I may not look like Dilma Rousseff, but this is her card and my finger prints match. Who are you to argue?
Not true. Plenty of options for self-monitored systems. If you want a hard-wired system and have a land-line, you can get setup for about $400. Video would of course cost more, but I've seen systems through costco than can be setup for a few hundred. For under a grand you could be setup.
Exactly right. Google will find many such systems, some with night vision, many of them with wireless cameras which go a long way toward reducing installation costs, and allowing you to hide the recorder without a lot of wires running to it, making it harder to find and steal.
Lots of these also have text messaging or email alert systems and some even have remote monitoring that you can access from any web browser (including your phone).
Monthly services have such a high false alarm rate that police are starting to charge big money. Nobody will watch your home like you yourself. And you will learn to adjust it so false alarms are minimized. If you have a 24/7 internet connection a live monitoring feature can save you from panicing every time a neighbor's kid kicks a ball over the fence.
You learn SOME things better when young. Facts for rote memorization.
There is precious little science that suggests Composition is one of those things. You don't learn to turn a phrase at 6 or 16, or even appreciate a well phrased concept until you've read good writing fairly extensively, and read it because you wanted to, rather than because you had to.
So, no, for some subject matter, waiting is not stupid. There is plenty of learning that can be accomplished while you wait.
If you can't get teachers to read writing assignments, maybe you should think about the following:
- do you have enough teachers to devote the required time? - are the teachers paid enough to devote the time? - are the teachers sufficiently qualified?
If you think that what a teacher does can be done by a robot, you are either living in a science fiction world of positronic brains, or the number one reason the US education system sucks balls.
To that you have to add the question of: - Does the average person need composition skills beyond what is taught in Junior High? - Will the pilot or the farmer or HVAC installer actually need English Comp? - Would those that do need these skills later in life, be better off learning them later rather than earlier?
Why foist these tools into the school room? Why not sell them on the open market aimed at those who have a need and desire to write? Why not let them become self improvement tools.
The idea that the next great novel will some how be extinguished if little Johnny doesn't take a writing course is about as valid as the idea that if little Susie doesn't start playing her violin at age 5 the next Yo-Yo Ma will be lost to the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Surface forces have no defense against missile attacks, making them useless in a real war
Ah, not exactly true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-in_weapon_system
http://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/searam/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-116_Rolling_Airframe_Missile
Just a pen and paper.
No other device can keep up, and you get bogged down with operating the device, missing key points.
Pocket recorder as backup.
CSIRO's lawyers will use the money for yachts.
Australia != US.
A research arm of the Government of Australia has In-House lawyers in the US?
Possible, but not likely. Patent law is a highly specialized field in the US.
I intentionally disabled the internal memory on my phone so the phonebook would always save entries to the SIM card memory. That way, should my phone have an accident of some sort rendering it inoperable, or I decide to just get a new phone, I don't lose my contacts because I can't transfer them off the old phone and onto the new one.
But this discussion is about Smartphones, not legacy feature phones.
Iphones and Android phones, and even Winphones back up the contact list to the cloud, and any ability to back up to the sim is pretty much gone by now. I don't believe its even possible in Android, (although you can import from the sim). Its just not necessary, your contacts are syned with your computer, or your Apple account, or your Google account, or your Carrier's account, or your phone manufacturer account. There are at least a dozen services that will backup your contacts. Its all in the cloud.
Your method is flawed. You are living in an accident waiting to happen.
Phone falls out of your pocket somewhere, and all your contacts are lost. If they are in the cloud, you get a new phone, log in, and BAM all your contacts are back.
With a sim, when the manufacturers do decide on another sim standard, that carefully maintained sim contact list CAN'T be imported.
Further, all you can store in the sim is name and phone number. But smart phones remember multiple phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses, birthdays and notes. And these are ALL backed up in what every backup system you use.
Seriously, its not 1985 any more. Get you contacts off your sim and put them someplace smart.
Look at the the video in TFA. Note especially the cut in the editing; it would appear that it took some time for one of the black outboard engines of a stationary boat bursts into flames. The laser they're talking about building is only 7x as powerful as the one used in the demonstration. It's questionable whether such a laser could have that particular effect against a fast moving boat, much less something like a missile.
Exactly my thoughts.
It seems to me that the use case for burning thru hull plating (to take out inboard engines) seems pretty unlikely.
Optically guided missiles might succumb to having their sensors fried at well beyond the range that a burn-through could happen. Interdiction use (coast guard) might make more sense, making the bridge of a running vessel a pretty inhospitable place to be without using naval gunfire and risking the lives of all on board.
If this stays as a (relatively) short range weapon, which is likely given the way lasers work in the atmosphere, then I doubt that being able to trace the beam back to its source will matter much. A modern US destroyer is over 500 ft long. Based on the one mile range listed in the summary, it would be clearly visible, even to the naked eye.
Further, something big enough to take out an outboard motor, even scaled up, is at best, a point defense weapon (cruise missiles, very small surface craft, close in helicopters, etc.) Even something 10 times as powerful does not completely disable a frigate sized surface vessel before it can return fire with missiles, guns, and torpedo.
However, looking at the video, the time it takes to burn thru a thin-skinned outboard motor, on a boat that was barely moving, and making no effort to avoid the engagement, suggests that there is a long way to go before this could be a missile defense.
So the use case shrinks even further.
Most anti-ship missiles tend to cluster around a speed of 1000 km/h, which means they cover that last km in .27 seconds. And some US missiles arrive at over 4000 km/h.
Unless a massively scaled up version can track an incoming missile traveling that fast, and engage it, burn it, or blind it in that .27 seconds, its use as fleet CIWS seems limited at best. The only saving grace is the last km is usually (but not always) a head on straight in attack, making tracking easier.
You have a right to board an aircraft that doesn't cross US airspace I suppose.
Ah, this ALREADY happens in many countries. Flying to the old Soviet Union used to be a nightmare, even if you were just stopping over on your way to somewhere else.
Its all handled for you by the airline, unless the airline knows nothing about you.
But they can deny landing rights to any airline carrying any such individual.
All these planes are landing in the US (a fact the summary conveniently leaves out just to stir the pot, and send you up.
There is nothing new here. Countries (even the UK) have the right to control who they allow in, or who can transit their ports.
This is an interesting step; in general countries are a lot more strict on entering their territory than leaving it. There are some circumstances where you'd want to control exit (if someone is fleeing law enforcement for some reason, avoiding child custody or the like), but I wonder if that's the intent of this policy shift or if it's something else.
These passengers are flying to the US, regardless of their final destination. As such they will likely be in a plane full of US citizens, over US cities. I suspect that in all these cases the plane will land in the US before continuing to their destination.
Direct flights that do not enter US Airspace would not be affected.
The intent of the policy is to prevent another World Trade Center. It may be a bit overwrought, especially in a plane full of jumpy American passengers who will even take down a aircraft crew member that acts up.
In most cases this happens automatically via your airline reservation, but late booking passengers always presented a challenge, and many times planes were wheels up before late arrivals proved to be on the no fly list, and in some cases planes had to be turned around.
(Note: Don't get me started on the No Fly List. If you've passed security, been searched, baggage searched, underwear and shoes searched, it seems that a permanent ban on flying is overkill. But that's for a different post).
My guess is the amount of space they take up in the phone is the problem. Basically, between the SIM itself and the hardware for reading it, that's a good amount of real estate.
Exactly.
But the problem is the insane rush to thinness. Devices are already too thin, and making them thinner just makes them harder to use, hold, and keep rigid enough to prevent glass breakage.
The problem is that current battery technology wants to be in regular shapes, and in order to allow for a sim socket you have to surrender the entire width of the phone even though the sim only takes a portion of that width. I suspect Apple would like to insert the sim in a slot that sits perpendicular to the slab. These nano-sims are also thinner.
Molded batteries would allow the use of irregular areas inside of a device, and such batteries could better use empty space.
Linear sims (toothpick) are another possible design. The phone need only read them upon insertion via a collar around the insertion hole. Nobody bothers to write to the sim any more.
It could be worse. We could be linking to digg or reddit posts.
Also, the video says it can get to the moon in 6 months. They don't mention what the initial orbit is like, so I would hope they mean that they can make it from an arbitrary orbit to the moon in that time.
Also glossed over is the earth-to-orbit costs. Once you ignore 95% (number pulled from ass) of the cost everything sounds cheap.
Grabbing and tossing spent satellites back to earth is also nonsense. At most, you only need to slow them down by some calculated amount, but then you also have to disengage, turn around, and thrust your way back to a safe orbit to pursue the next piece of space junk. You will need years of "fuel" (mass to eject) to make a dent in the junk pile orbiting earth, and an enormous bank of computers to manage the whole operation.
With an international agreement that EVERY launch must plan to re-enter its own debris, AND carry one or more of these clean up bots into orbit this might be a workable long term plan, but not at $11 million apiece.
Why should the government prohibit people from entering into a private contract for a legal product/service? Isn't that the opposite of what the government should be doing?
What makes you think its a Legal Product or Service?
What if your house loan or car loan required you to make payments long after the load was paid off, for the life of your car/house? Would that be Legal?
That's exactly what happens when you get a phone under contract. Your monthly bill does not go down after the contract is completed. And in a lot of cases (most cases actually) you can't even take your phone and go elsewhere for service. Even if you manage to remove the carrier locks, getting that Verizon Phone to run on T-Mo or At&t or small regional carrier will bring you a swift and painful education.
Look, we regulate things like loans and contracts in this country precisely because there is asymmetrical market power and these utilities are using public resources (airwaves, right of ways) to provide their services. This isn't the evil of big government its the good of small citizens voting for reasonable controls of those companies that have oligopoly markets.
Sorry it is true.
You are comparing different service plans, with different data caps, from different companies. Its not the same. This might work for voice calls, but its not a solution for smartphones unless you like EDGE speeds.
After your contract expires for a subsidized phone your monthly bill does not go down. It Should.
If you have several lines on your family account, you can't just drop out after your contract expires and start up on a small regional carrier.
Sounds like a grab to boost G+'s userbase beyond Wil Wheaton and Google engineers.
Not gonna touch Google+ until they get rid of their "real names" policy and I'm not inclined since I've invested so much of my online social life with Facebook.
The real names policy has been relaxed, but that doesn't mean they don't already know precisely who you are.
What's more worrying is that this Patent they are applying for, if used by them, violates their own Privacy Policy, and their own openness pledge. After being dragged through a knot hole by the FTC and Congress, It seems unlikely they will actually put this into service any time soon.
I doubt this is being used yet. There is nothing on my Google Dashboard, even tho I've ignored multiple invites to G+. So if they are creating this phantom account its not accessible even by the user, and as such must be merely a book keeping entry to allow authentication. If G+ users hit that Invite button, they may simply record the invite in a file somewhere so that they can add both parties to each other's circles. They had been doing that with Gmail invites since day one. (back when you needed to be invited to Gmail).
You seem to remember wrong.
All that has ever been demonstrated is that with an electron microscope a couple of bytes were successfully "raised" after being over written with a uniform pattern. The prior content of the drive was known, which is how they were able to determine that they weren't recovering noise. It was a proof of concept recovery of literally a few bytes from a drive with known content overwritten with known content. This was the topic of a guy named Venugopal Veeravalli, for his Masters thesis, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1987. (He went on to have a brilliant career, but nothing came of his research.)
The process involved:
Magnetic force scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) technique which uses a probe tip typically made by plating pure nickel onto a prepatterned surface, peeling the resulting thin film from the substrate it was plated onto and plating it with a thin layer of gold to minimise corrosion, and mounting it in a probe where it is placed at some small bias potential (typically a few tenths of a nanoamp at a few volts DC) so that electrons from the surface under test can tunnel across the gap to the probe tip (or vice versa).
It yields pictures (images) of the surface, AT THE BIT LEVEL, which then have to be visually analysed by humans, and they guess which grains of magnetic media represent the old data (5% of the grains), and which represent the new data (about 95%). It takes 10 minutes to yield one visual image, it takes 8 images to guess at a byte. And this was done with KNOWN prior content, and KNOWN overwrite pattern on a disk platter that had been written EXACTLY TWICE in its life.
From this theoretical capability sprang the paranoia of multiple overwrite for mil grade erasure. An entire industry followed in lock step.
In real life no one has ever recovered a full file, or even meaningful fragments from an overwritten drive. Not at the older sparse densities, and not at today's much denser packing of bits.
With tape you could SOMETIMES do this, but only because heads never aligned precisely, and you could read the bottom layer of magnetic particles right thru the plastic substrate. But even that required extremely slow manual procedures with government budget equipment. The "lost" NASA tapes were recovered this way.
The CIA relies on exactly what every body else does, the fact that data is seldom erased, merely the file allocation table is over written and data lurks in forgotten clusters on the drive.
Go read the link I posted and the links it references.
It doesn't happen.
More interesting is that it only affects pennies and nickles. Probably the only coin worth less than the metal of which they are made.
Any one of two dozen drive over-write utilities (free or paid) will make sure your drive is unreadable.
No need for multiple passes either, simply write binary zeros everywhere and you are done. The old FUD about the CIA recovering your info with electron microscopes is pure bull, and nobody has ever once successfully demonstrated that in public even when they had access to state of the art university electron microscopes.
Platter level forensics are a hoax.
I wish all phones were sold unlocked, and I wish all carrier subsidies were illegal.
The price of phones rises to absorb all the subsidy they can extract from the carriers.
The iPhone was a huge siphon, emptying AT&Ts pockets into Apples, making Apple the
richest company in sight on a phone that really does not cost that much to produce.
Now Apple are doing the same thing to the other carriers.
If people had to buy their own phones the net effect would be lower prices, or they would be buying other phones. Greece, like India doesn't allow subsidies. Apple isn't selling well there. If Apple cut its profit margin in half, they would open up vast new markets.
Some of the lower-to-mid level Android phones do well in those same markets.
So they have the finger prints already. (Since they are going to all this trouble it would seem that the prior collections of prints are useless in this encoding process, and a real finger is needed.)
Presumably the new finger printing is simply encoded and placed on some form of voter id card, which you must present
when you want to vote. (Story and the summary are a little vague about this). Surely they are not doing real-time hits on some central database for these encoded prints, merely validating that the cards match the hand of the carrier. Lots of remote locations in Brazil, it seems unlikely they would have a real time link.
If it does work this way, (no central database check) this opens the door to card cloning, (counterfeiting). All you need is to transfer the encoded numbers to cards that are close enough, and visit several polling places under different names. Get there early, before the real person, who's id you cloned, and vote early and often.
I assure you Sir, I may not look like Dilma Rousseff, but this is her card and my finger prints match. Who are you to argue?
Not true. Plenty of options for self-monitored systems. If you want a hard-wired system and have a land-line, you can get setup for about $400. Video would of course cost more, but I've seen systems through costco than can be setup for a few hundred. For under a grand you could be setup.
Exactly right.
Google will find many such systems, some with night vision, many of them with wireless cameras which go a long way toward reducing installation costs, and allowing you to hide the recorder without a lot of wires running to it, making it harder to find and steal.
Lots of these also have text messaging or email alert systems and some even have remote monitoring that you can access from any web browser (including your phone).
Monthly services have such a high false alarm rate that police are starting to charge big money. Nobody will watch your home like you yourself. And you will learn to adjust it so false alarms are minimized. If you have a 24/7 internet connection a live monitoring feature can save you from panicing every time a neighbor's kid kicks a ball over the fence.
You learn SOME things better when young. Facts for rote memorization.
There is precious little science that suggests Composition is one of those things.
You don't learn to turn a phrase at 6 or 16, or even appreciate a well phrased concept until you've read good writing fairly extensively, and read it because you wanted to, rather than because you had to.
So, no, for some subject matter, waiting is not stupid. There is plenty of learning that can be accomplished while you wait.
If you can't get teachers to read writing assignments, maybe you should think about the following:
- do you have enough teachers to devote the required time?
- are the teachers paid enough to devote the time?
- are the teachers sufficiently qualified?
If you think that what a teacher does can be done by a robot, you are either living in a science fiction world of positronic brains, or the number one reason the US education system sucks balls.
To that you have to add the question of:
- Does the average person need composition skills beyond what is taught in Junior High?
- Will the pilot or the farmer or HVAC installer actually need English Comp?
- Would those that do need these skills later in life, be better off learning them later rather than earlier?
Why foist these tools into the school room? Why not sell them on the open market aimed at those who have a need and desire to write? Why not let them become self improvement tools.
The idea that the next great novel will some how be extinguished if little Johnny doesn't take a writing course is about as valid as the idea that if little Susie doesn't start playing her violin at age 5 the next Yo-Yo Ma will be lost to the world.