Interpol reversed the (deterministic) Photoshop swirl filter a child molester had been using to hide his face in the child porn pics he published.
Black bars are the obvious method for hiding someone's identity. But then idiot producers who didn't understand security or math decided they weren't aesthetic, and ordered their media compnies to use pixelation or blurring instead. Even recording video of the person in a darkened room isn't enough - the camera can pick up enough low light data to yield a passable image when enhanced.
Whom you're blocking with the piece of tape is pretty unimportant. The tape works against perverts, Microsoft, and the NSA all the same. There is simply no reason not to do it. (Which is equivalent to there being no for reason laptop vendors to not put a sliding cover over their camera, except it got eliminated as a cost-cutting measure.)
It's not a problem for A/V presentations because HDMI and Displayport carry both video and audio. There is actually a good reason for getting rid of the analog audio ports on a professional laptop. Being analog, they pick up noise from the other laptop components. HDD/SSD accesses, USB transmissions, sometimes even memory accesses can show up in the audio stream as chirps and warbles. While the analog ports work for informal recording and playback, they're not recommended for serious audio work. Most people doing professional recording use a dedicated USB mic which does the A/D conversion in the mic, and transmits the (digital) audio data to the computer over USB.
The real problem with getting rid of the headphone port is the situation GP posted - hooking up the laptop to desktop speakers so you don't have to listen to the crappy laptop speakers. The adapters which extract the audio from HDMI and convert it to an analog signal which can be played over 3.5mm / RCA / Phono cost about $20-$40, because they need to have a D/A converter inside them. (Granted you save on the price of this D/A adapter in your laptop, but do you seriously believe Apple will pass that cost savings on to you?)
You Brits should challenge this as cruel and unusual punishment. It's prohibited in UK common law by the1689 Bill of Rightw. As you and others have pointed out, it's ridiculous for this sort of petty financial crime to have punishments worse than violent crimes. Especially when financial crimes six orders of magnitude larger frequently have zero jail time.
That's a cellular carrier problem, not an Android problem. They insist on having control over things they shouldn't be in control of. Apple had enough clout to tell them to f- off. Other phone manufacturers did not. Google had almost enough clout to keep their paws off the Nexus phones (though until the Nexus 6, Verizon refused to allow Nexus phones on their network for this reason).
IMHO at this point the solution is regulation to prohibit vertical integration. Phone manufacturers make the phone and only the phone. OS vendors only make the OS. App makers only make apps. Cellular networks only own tower networks. And cellular carriers only provide service (by leasing access to towers and activating phones on their network). That maximizes competition and interoperability.
"Turning off" your phone's GPS doesn't actually disable the capability. All phones with GPS are required to be able to use it, even if it's turned off, so it can relay your location if you happen to call 911. So it's not like a hardware switch which powers down the GPS chip.
The title of the submission doesn't match the summary. Summary states this can be defeated by turning off all location services (same as the iPhone). You don't have to delete Maps and Play as the title states. This being Android, if enough people are upset about it, someone will create a widget which lets you change the setting with a single tap whenever you want.
I wrestled with it a few years back (when I finally got a phone whose battery would last all day even with GPS on), and eventually decided to leave GPS on all the time. Yes Google uses it to track me, but it's one of those things where you give up a little bit of your privacy (location) in exchange for useful services (real-time traffic updates). It's kinda like bittorrent. Nobody wants to seed because it sucks up your bandwidth, but without seeders the service stops working. People who expect real-time traffic while leaving their GPS off are essentially leechers. And I decided considering how heavily I use real-time traffic, it was my civic duty to leave the GPS on.
Also, one of the bugs I've encountered in Marshmallow is that sometimes battery life plummets with the battery use monitor saying it's the Android system which is consuming it. I eventually figured out this was linked to location services somehow getting "stuck" on in Google Play. The fix is to uninstall the updates for Google Play Services, then allow Android to re-update it. I wonder if that's the same bug causing the battery drain reported in Nougat in TFA.
And has probably been recording your location ever since you got your iPhone. Apple is also not afraid to secretly download this location history from your phone. You know how Google got in trouble with the EU because their Street View cars were also recording wifi hotspot info? Apple did the exact same thing, except instead of paying people to drive Apple cars around, they turned every iPhone owner into an unpaid contractor who would scurry around the globe gathering hotspot location information for them.
You can remove Microsoft patches if they give you problems. You can't revert back to your previous version of iOS after you upgrade, at least not without extraordinary difficulty.
So problems with Windows patches aren't really newsworthy (unless it bricks your computer making it impossible to roll back the patch). While problems with iOS updates are A Big Deal and need to be broadcast far and wide so everyone with an iOS devices knows about it before they decide to take that one-way step.
As long as the gaming population which purchases from Steam is not statistically different from the gaming population which purchases from other sources, banning the latter group won't change the review statistics they collect. All it does is eliminate a sampling population that Valve has no quality control over.
It's like taking samples to test for air quality. The samples you collect and the samples other people collect from the same location will yield the same results. But if you know and trust your sampling methodology, while you suspect someone else is manipulating the results, you can improve the accuracy of your measurements by banning the suspect samples.
That sounds like a slightly electronic version of the two-short-rings used on old PBX equipment to indicate an internal call (i.e. from a co-worker). External calls had the regular long ring. While Grupo Globo may have been using it for 30+ years in Brazil, it's been in use in the rest of the world as long as I can remember (40+ years). If it's associated with "them" in Brazil, I would guess that that's because they probably had a near-monopoly on PBX equipment in your country.
I agree with the court. It's too generic to be trademarked. If you want to trademark a ring, make a ringtone jingle.
Seems like all I hear about Tesla is "we're working to become awesome" and from their owners "it's true, they are awesome."
You can afford to be awesome when you're selling $100k luxury cars with probably a profit margin (excluding R&D costs) of $10k-$20k each.
When you're building $30k cars with razor-thin margins of a few hundred dollars each, it's a whole 'nother ballgame. I would love it if Tesla can keep up their current policies and support with the Model 3, but I seriously doubt they'll be able to. Even the free supercharges for life is questionable for the Model 3.
Most of Seagate's poor reputation is due to a couple bad drive models from around 2010. Their current lineup has above-average reliability (WD's is worse).
I've actually been steering people away from WD drives lately. They've started adding very aggressive head parking timeouts to their firmware. So far, I know all their laptop drives and their 3.5" green drives are affected. I'm starting to suspect their 3.5" blue drives are as well. The drive's built-in firmware will park the heads after about 10 seconds of inactivity. Windows seems to consider pagefile access to be critical priority. So if you have a pagefile on the drive and it parks the heads, the next time Windows tries to access the pagefile the entire OS will freeze for a fraction of a second as it waits for the heads to unpark. I've helped "fix" dozens of cases of microstuttering in games caused by this. (Move the pagefile off the drive, or disable the drive's APM if it's your only drive.)
It's opaque enough to block most of the light, but transparent enough that you can still see the light if you need. And it comes off a lot easier than marker.
It pretty much turns these LED lights from something which lights up your room, to a slight glow on the panel.
The initial motivation to create the web was as a way for scientists to access each others' research papers without having to go through the journals. When the cold fusion hype broke in 1989, the journals were too slow and researchers were using fax machines to send each other draft copies of their papers.
Existing Internet-based information sharing services like Archie, Verionica, and WAIS were based on text. Research papers frequently have charts and graphs. So a way for sites to send both images and text was needed.
ASCII text also didn't support more complex typography like mathematical symbols, which were everywhere in research papers. So more generic font support was needed. Not everyone had computers with similar graphics capabilities at the time - some had 640x480 displays, some used more cutting-edge 1024x768 or 1280x1024 displays. So a way for these fonts to be scaled to match the capabilities of your display device was needed.
Finally, one thing you younger kids today don't have to suffer through is having to go to the library and dig through old journals trying to find another paper referenced by the paper you're reading. Apple's Hypercard in 1987 showed a lot of promise for indexing information on your computer. Tim Berners-Lee realized the exact same concept could be used to index distributed information. This gave it a leg up over PDFs (which were also invented around the same time).
So yeah, the web probably would've been developed eventually. But the factors which culminated in its development were most prevalent in the scientific community, and one of the biggest close-knit scientific communities who constantly needed to share a lot of information with each other were the folks at CERN.
In that case they're telling people to go to the store where they bought their phone. Most carriers will give them a substitute Samsung phone to use in the interim. Supposedly, Samsung is also providing loaner J-series phones, though I haven't seen details.
The delay for a replacement is apparently a combination of a shortage of Note 7s using non-Samsung batteries (their battery division is new, and apparently not quite ready for prime time). And time to get FCC approval for a Note 7 with new batteries (probably made by the same Samsung battery division).
GSM was based on TDMA - everyone gets an equal timeslice of the bandwidth, even if they don't actually use it. In CDMA, everyone gets an orthogonal code and broadcasts whenever they want to. Broadcasts by other phones raise the noise floor for your phone. SNR then scales depending on how many people are transmitting at any given time, and all the bandwidth gets distributed automatically and equally between only those transmitting at that time.
TDMA was fine for voice. But when it came to high-speed data, GMS simply couldn't compete with CDMA's superior bandwidth allocation. They threw in the towel after a year - most implementations of 3G on GSM used wideband CDMA. They just named it UMTS, HSPA+, etc. because of sour grapes. This is why you could talk and use data at the same time on GSM phones - they had a TDMA radio for voice (still do), and a CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones used the same radio for voice and data (which were built on different protocols since voice was about a decade older) so couldn't do both simultaneously.
Most LTE implementations are OFDMA - does the same thing as CDMA, except using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. OFDMA requires more processing power to separate out the individual broadcasts, which is why it came after CDMA. Early OFDMA implementations like WiMax sucked up too much power with processors of the time, and would drain a cell phone battery in about 2-3 hours. It wasn't until a few years ago that low-power processors allowed us to implement OFDMA while not requiring a recharge halfway through the day. But CDMA was pretty much the proof of concept needed to make OFDMA a reality. Before CDMA, nobody knew if a real-life cellular network with hundreds of devices broadcasting simultaneously using orthogonal signaling would actually work or scale like theory said it would.
If the people saying the U.S. should've adoopted GSM had gotten their wish, our cellular data speeds today would probably be down below 1 Mbps. When a competitor introduces a far-superior product, it forces the other players in the market to improve, instead of sitting on their asses not improving things because people are paying them anyway. Now that LTE is becoming ubiquitous, loss of CDMA would be less of an issue. But any phone built without CDMA will not be able to fall back to 3G data in most areas of the world.
Airbags had to move to software control because sometimes you don't want the airbags going off even though there's an accident. e.g. A child in the front passenger seat - early airbags were designed to cushion and adult head, and were forcing the lower mass of a child's head backwards killing them. Some cars in the 1990s had a manual switch for you to turn the front passenger airbag on/off depending on whether or not a child was sitting there, but of course people forgot to flip the switch. Nowadays pretty much all cars use a weight sensor under the seat to gauge the weight of the occupant, and decide whether or not to deploy the front passenger airbag.
Same goes for side-curtain airbags. They can impede people's ability to get out of the car, so you don't want them deploying if they don't need to(e.g. the side occupants are moving away from will not trigger). And you want them to deploy at the proper time. To early and they start to deflate before the occupant's head hits them. Too late and again they force the occupant's head sideways instead of cushioning it, possibly injuring them more than the accident itself.
Seatbelts have gotten more sophisticated as well. In addition to inertia/angle sensitive latches, many cars now use pre-tensioners. The timing of these have to be coordinated with the dynamic accelerations experienced during an accident, lest they fire too early and you end up released before the main accelerations hit you. The newer ones use an explosive charge, so there are no do-overs if they trigger at the wrong time, and you definitely don't want them to trigger if there isn't an accident and the car is (say) just being towed.
Too many people try to categorize things as "always better" or "always worse" based on a few data points. These safety systems have moved to electronic software control because it makes them more effective in the vast majority of cases, even though in a few cases it may cause them to function worse than older mechanical systems.
e.g. You plug in all the numbers for your flight path. It should then display a world map with your flight path overlaid, so you can easily check that the numbers you entered have you at least landing on the right continent. This sort of sanity-checking is common in other fields, like accountants check to see if a discrepancy is divisible by 9 to quickly identify a transposition error.
This is one of the reasons I still advocate doing navigation in nautical miles instead of km. One nautical mile is defined as 1 arc-minute of longitude at the equator, which is also pretty close to 1 arc-minute of latitude anywhere on Earth. So basically you look on your big navigation chart with latitude lines labeled in degrees and minutes, and you immediately have a sense of scale in terms of nautical miles (each degree is 60 nm). You do a bunch of complex navigation calculations in nautical miles, plot it on the chart, and say, "Hey that doesn't look right. My destination is over 30 arc-minutes away, but my calculations say I'll only be sailing less than 30 nm. I must've made a math error somewhere..." Whereas if you do it in km, the sense of scale is not as intuitive and you may not uncover the error until you're far along the route and wondering why the landmarks you were expecting aren't showing up.
That really gets to the heart of the matter. The problem isn't that you can build a device which does this. The problem is people's inclination to plug unknown hardware into their computers (same as their inclination to run unknown software on their computers).
Somehow, we need to teach people that just as you wouldn't eat a donut you find on the ground, you shouldn't plug in a USB stick you find on the ground.
The vast majority of Airbnb (and VRBO) listings are not owner-occupied homes. They're second, third, etc. homes owned by someone who rents them out full-time as a business.
It's kinda like how most eBay listings used to be people getting rid of unused crap in their homes, but now it's mostly people running businesses with eBay as a storefront. Or Uber and Lyft, which started out as "these people want to go to the same place you are, why not give them a ride and make a few bucks?" But now the drivers are all doing it as a full-time business.
That's been a big problem with a lot of EU rulings. They say what you're doing is wrong, without laying out what's the right way to do it. e.g. The Google search monopoly case. They wouldn't say what Google was doing wrong. They just said it was wrong and kept requiring Google to come to them with proposed fix after fix to avoid a multi-billion dollar judgment, rejecting them one after another.
It's a marked philosophical difference between the EU and U.S. law. The U.S. is based on the concept that all people are originally free, and that governments and laws are created to limit those freedoms in order to make society function better. So if there isn't a law prohibiting something, it's legal. I'm not sure what philosophy the EU is following, but it seems to be "whatever we think is wrong is illegal, and we won't tell you what we think is wrong until after you've done it, and we won't tell you what we think is right."
All-in-ones use the same parts as a laptop or desktop. So they're no quieter than a desktop or tower. The tower is only noisier if it's been designed as a server with excessive and aggressive cooling. In most situations the tower will actually be quieter because you can shove it under or even behind the desk, while the AIO will be sitting on your desk close to your ears. If you're not building it yourself, try the Dell desktops. A Dell my friend bought was quieter than the system I custom-built using low-noise fans and components. When I researched to find out why, I learned that noise signature is one of the criteria Dell designs and tests for in their systems.
For professional photo work, a good screen will run you upwards of $1000. This is not a component you want to have to throw away and replace in 3-5 years when it's time to upgrade the computer. You want to buy it once, then use it for 10-15 years (how long a monitor typically lasts). AIOs don't allow you to reuse the screen, unless you want a kludge where you end up using the AIO as just a monitor for your next computer (thus losing out on resale value of the computer portion).
I am a photographer, and I see clients in my office. So it has to look good on my desk.
Not much you can do about cords (except a wireless mouse and keyboard). But I've always been able to shove the power and monitor cable out of sight behind the desk. The better desks have a hole on the top for cables.
A friend solved the client problem by getting a second monitor facing the client (sitting on the opposite side of the desk as him) and having it mirror his monitor. That way he wasn't stuck having to turn his monitor sideways so both he and the client could view the screen at the same time.
Before the pedants jump all over this, I should clarify that I mean of any airline which has been operating since the introduction of jet airliners. There are a bunch of small airlines which have been operating 1-3 decades which also have "perfect" safety records.
Initially, it wasn't because they were safer - they just got lucky and their smaller number of flights reduced the chances of an accident even if their accident rate was the same. But now that it's become something they brag about, they take extraordinary (sometimes excessive) measures to protect that record. (Some say it gets them more customers because people afraid of airliner accidents go out of their way to book on Qantas. But that's probably canceled out by people who believe the gambler's fallacy and go out of their way to avoid Qantas because they figure the airline is "overdue" for a fatal accident.)
Slashdot Mirror
Interpol reversed the (deterministic) Photoshop swirl filter a child molester had been using to hide his face in the child porn pics he published.
Black bars are the obvious method for hiding someone's identity. But then idiot producers who didn't understand security or math decided they weren't aesthetic, and ordered their media compnies to use pixelation or blurring instead. Even recording video of the person in a darkened room isn't enough - the camera can pick up enough low light data to yield a passable image when enhanced.
At least for half the population.
Whom you're blocking with the piece of tape is pretty unimportant. The tape works against perverts, Microsoft, and the NSA all the same. There is simply no reason not to do it. (Which is equivalent to there being no for reason laptop vendors to not put a sliding cover over their camera, except it got eliminated as a cost-cutting measure.)
It's not a problem for A/V presentations because HDMI and Displayport carry both video and audio. There is actually a good reason for getting rid of the analog audio ports on a professional laptop. Being analog, they pick up noise from the other laptop components. HDD/SSD accesses, USB transmissions, sometimes even memory accesses can show up in the audio stream as chirps and warbles. While the analog ports work for informal recording and playback, they're not recommended for serious audio work. Most people doing professional recording use a dedicated USB mic which does the A/D conversion in the mic, and transmits the (digital) audio data to the computer over USB.
The real problem with getting rid of the headphone port is the situation GP posted - hooking up the laptop to desktop speakers so you don't have to listen to the crappy laptop speakers. The adapters which extract the audio from HDMI and convert it to an analog signal which can be played over 3.5mm / RCA / Phono cost about $20-$40, because they need to have a D/A converter inside them. (Granted you save on the price of this D/A adapter in your laptop, but do you seriously believe Apple will pass that cost savings on to you?)
You Brits should challenge this as cruel and unusual punishment. It's prohibited in UK common law by the1689 Bill of Rightw. As you and others have pointed out, it's ridiculous for this sort of petty financial crime to have punishments worse than violent crimes. Especially when financial crimes six orders of magnitude larger frequently have zero jail time.
That's a cellular carrier problem, not an Android problem. They insist on having control over things they shouldn't be in control of. Apple had enough clout to tell them to f- off. Other phone manufacturers did not. Google had almost enough clout to keep their paws off the Nexus phones (though until the Nexus 6, Verizon refused to allow Nexus phones on their network for this reason).
IMHO at this point the solution is regulation to prohibit vertical integration. Phone manufacturers make the phone and only the phone. OS vendors only make the OS. App makers only make apps. Cellular networks only own tower networks. And cellular carriers only provide service (by leasing access to towers and activating phones on their network). That maximizes competition and interoperability.
"Turning off" your phone's GPS doesn't actually disable the capability. All phones with GPS are required to be able to use it, even if it's turned off, so it can relay your location if you happen to call 911. So it's not like a hardware switch which powers down the GPS chip.
The title of the submission doesn't match the summary. Summary states this can be defeated by turning off all location services (same as the iPhone). You don't have to delete Maps and Play as the title states. This being Android, if enough people are upset about it, someone will create a widget which lets you change the setting with a single tap whenever you want.
I wrestled with it a few years back (when I finally got a phone whose battery would last all day even with GPS on), and eventually decided to leave GPS on all the time. Yes Google uses it to track me, but it's one of those things where you give up a little bit of your privacy (location) in exchange for useful services (real-time traffic updates). It's kinda like bittorrent. Nobody wants to seed because it sucks up your bandwidth, but without seeders the service stops working. People who expect real-time traffic while leaving their GPS off are essentially leechers. And I decided considering how heavily I use real-time traffic, it was my civic duty to leave the GPS on.
Also, one of the bugs I've encountered in Marshmallow is that sometimes battery life plummets with the battery use monitor saying it's the Android system which is consuming it. I eventually figured out this was linked to location services somehow getting "stuck" on in Google Play. The fix is to uninstall the updates for Google Play Services, then allow Android to re-update it. I wonder if that's the same bug causing the battery drain reported in Nougat in TFA.
And has probably been recording your location ever since you got your iPhone. Apple is also not afraid to secretly download this location history from your phone. You know how Google got in trouble with the EU because their Street View cars were also recording wifi hotspot info? Apple did the exact same thing, except instead of paying people to drive Apple cars around, they turned every iPhone owner into an unpaid contractor who would scurry around the globe gathering hotspot location information for them.
You can remove Microsoft patches if they give you problems. You can't revert back to your previous version of iOS after you upgrade, at least not without extraordinary difficulty.
So problems with Windows patches aren't really newsworthy (unless it bricks your computer making it impossible to roll back the patch). While problems with iOS updates are A Big Deal and need to be broadcast far and wide so everyone with an iOS devices knows about it before they decide to take that one-way step.
As long as the gaming population which purchases from Steam is not statistically different from the gaming population which purchases from other sources, banning the latter group won't change the review statistics they collect. All it does is eliminate a sampling population that Valve has no quality control over.
It's like taking samples to test for air quality. The samples you collect and the samples other people collect from the same location will yield the same results. But if you know and trust your sampling methodology, while you suspect someone else is manipulating the results, you can improve the accuracy of your measurements by banning the suspect samples.
That sounds like a slightly electronic version of the two-short-rings used on old PBX equipment to indicate an internal call (i.e. from a co-worker). External calls had the regular long ring. While Grupo Globo may have been using it for 30+ years in Brazil, it's been in use in the rest of the world as long as I can remember (40+ years). If it's associated with "them" in Brazil, I would guess that that's because they probably had a near-monopoly on PBX equipment in your country.
I agree with the court. It's too generic to be trademarked. If you want to trademark a ring, make a ringtone jingle.
Some free advice: I don't think the name is the problem.
You can afford to be awesome when you're selling $100k luxury cars with probably a profit margin (excluding R&D costs) of $10k-$20k each.
When you're building $30k cars with razor-thin margins of a few hundred dollars each, it's a whole 'nother ballgame. I would love it if Tesla can keep up their current policies and support with the Model 3, but I seriously doubt they'll be able to. Even the free supercharges for life is questionable for the Model 3.
Most of Seagate's poor reputation is due to a couple bad drive models from around 2010. Their current lineup has above-average reliability (WD's is worse).
I've actually been steering people away from WD drives lately. They've started adding very aggressive head parking timeouts to their firmware. So far, I know all their laptop drives and their 3.5" green drives are affected. I'm starting to suspect their 3.5" blue drives are as well. The drive's built-in firmware will park the heads after about 10 seconds of inactivity. Windows seems to consider pagefile access to be critical priority. So if you have a pagefile on the drive and it parks the heads, the next time Windows tries to access the pagefile the entire OS will freeze for a fraction of a second as it waits for the heads to unpark. I've helped "fix" dozens of cases of microstuttering in games caused by this. (Move the pagefile off the drive, or disable the drive's APM if it's your only drive.)
It's opaque enough to block most of the light, but transparent enough that you can still see the light if you need. And it comes off a lot easier than marker.
It pretty much turns these LED lights from something which lights up your room, to a slight glow on the panel.
So yeah, the web probably would've been developed eventually. But the factors which culminated in its development were most prevalent in the scientific community, and one of the biggest close-knit scientific communities who constantly needed to share a lot of information with each other were the folks at CERN.
In that case they're telling people to go to the store where they bought their phone. Most carriers will give them a substitute Samsung phone to use in the interim. Supposedly, Samsung is also providing loaner J-series phones, though I haven't seen details.
The delay for a replacement is apparently a combination of a shortage of Note 7s using non-Samsung batteries (their battery division is new, and apparently not quite ready for prime time). And time to get FCC approval for a Note 7 with new batteries (probably made by the same Samsung battery division).
GSM was based on TDMA - everyone gets an equal timeslice of the bandwidth, even if they don't actually use it. In CDMA, everyone gets an orthogonal code and broadcasts whenever they want to. Broadcasts by other phones raise the noise floor for your phone. SNR then scales depending on how many people are transmitting at any given time, and all the bandwidth gets distributed automatically and equally between only those transmitting at that time.
TDMA was fine for voice. But when it came to high-speed data, GMS simply couldn't compete with CDMA's superior bandwidth allocation. They threw in the towel after a year - most implementations of 3G on GSM used wideband CDMA. They just named it UMTS, HSPA+, etc. because of sour grapes. This is why you could talk and use data at the same time on GSM phones - they had a TDMA radio for voice (still do), and a CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones used the same radio for voice and data (which were built on different protocols since voice was about a decade older) so couldn't do both simultaneously.
Most LTE implementations are OFDMA - does the same thing as CDMA, except using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. OFDMA requires more processing power to separate out the individual broadcasts, which is why it came after CDMA. Early OFDMA implementations like WiMax sucked up too much power with processors of the time, and would drain a cell phone battery in about 2-3 hours. It wasn't until a few years ago that low-power processors allowed us to implement OFDMA while not requiring a recharge halfway through the day. But CDMA was pretty much the proof of concept needed to make OFDMA a reality. Before CDMA, nobody knew if a real-life cellular network with hundreds of devices broadcasting simultaneously using orthogonal signaling would actually work or scale like theory said it would.
If the people saying the U.S. should've adoopted GSM had gotten their wish, our cellular data speeds today would probably be down below 1 Mbps. When a competitor introduces a far-superior product, it forces the other players in the market to improve, instead of sitting on their asses not improving things because people are paying them anyway. Now that LTE is becoming ubiquitous, loss of CDMA would be less of an issue. But any phone built without CDMA will not be able to fall back to 3G data in most areas of the world.
Airbags had to move to software control because sometimes you don't want the airbags going off even though there's an accident. e.g. A child in the front passenger seat - early airbags were designed to cushion and adult head, and were forcing the lower mass of a child's head backwards killing them. Some cars in the 1990s had a manual switch for you to turn the front passenger airbag on/off depending on whether or not a child was sitting there, but of course people forgot to flip the switch. Nowadays pretty much all cars use a weight sensor under the seat to gauge the weight of the occupant, and decide whether or not to deploy the front passenger airbag.
Same goes for side-curtain airbags. They can impede people's ability to get out of the car, so you don't want them deploying if they don't need to(e.g. the side occupants are moving away from will not trigger). And you want them to deploy at the proper time. To early and they start to deflate before the occupant's head hits them. Too late and again they force the occupant's head sideways instead of cushioning it, possibly injuring them more than the accident itself.
Seatbelts have gotten more sophisticated as well. In addition to inertia/angle sensitive latches, many cars now use pre-tensioners. The timing of these have to be coordinated with the dynamic accelerations experienced during an accident, lest they fire too early and you end up released before the main accelerations hit you. The newer ones use an explosive charge, so there are no do-overs if they trigger at the wrong time, and you definitely don't want them to trigger if there isn't an accident and the car is (say) just being towed.
Too many people try to categorize things as "always better" or "always worse" based on a few data points. These safety systems have moved to electronic software control because it makes them more effective in the vast majority of cases, even though in a few cases it may cause them to function worse than older mechanical systems.
e.g. You plug in all the numbers for your flight path. It should then display a world map with your flight path overlaid, so you can easily check that the numbers you entered have you at least landing on the right continent. This sort of sanity-checking is common in other fields, like accountants check to see if a discrepancy is divisible by 9 to quickly identify a transposition error.
This is one of the reasons I still advocate doing navigation in nautical miles instead of km. One nautical mile is defined as 1 arc-minute of longitude at the equator, which is also pretty close to 1 arc-minute of latitude anywhere on Earth. So basically you look on your big navigation chart with latitude lines labeled in degrees and minutes, and you immediately have a sense of scale in terms of nautical miles (each degree is 60 nm). You do a bunch of complex navigation calculations in nautical miles, plot it on the chart, and say, "Hey that doesn't look right. My destination is over 30 arc-minutes away, but my calculations say I'll only be sailing less than 30 nm. I must've made a math error somewhere..." Whereas if you do it in km, the sense of scale is not as intuitive and you may not uncover the error until you're far along the route and wondering why the landmarks you were expecting aren't showing up.
That really gets to the heart of the matter. The problem isn't that you can build a device which does this. The problem is people's inclination to plug unknown hardware into their computers (same as their inclination to run unknown software on their computers).
Somehow, we need to teach people that just as you wouldn't eat a donut you find on the ground, you shouldn't plug in a USB stick you find on the ground.
The vast majority of Airbnb (and VRBO) listings are not owner-occupied homes. They're second, third, etc. homes owned by someone who rents them out full-time as a business.
It's kinda like how most eBay listings used to be people getting rid of unused crap in their homes, but now it's mostly people running businesses with eBay as a storefront. Or Uber and Lyft, which started out as "these people want to go to the same place you are, why not give them a ride and make a few bucks?" But now the drivers are all doing it as a full-time business.
That's been a big problem with a lot of EU rulings. They say what you're doing is wrong, without laying out what's the right way to do it. e.g. The Google search monopoly case. They wouldn't say what Google was doing wrong. They just said it was wrong and kept requiring Google to come to them with proposed fix after fix to avoid a multi-billion dollar judgment, rejecting them one after another.
It's a marked philosophical difference between the EU and U.S. law. The U.S. is based on the concept that all people are originally free, and that governments and laws are created to limit those freedoms in order to make society function better. So if there isn't a law prohibiting something, it's legal. I'm not sure what philosophy the EU is following, but it seems to be "whatever we think is wrong is illegal, and we won't tell you what we think is wrong until after you've done it, and we won't tell you what we think is right."
For professional photo work, a good screen will run you upwards of $1000. This is not a component you want to have to throw away and replace in 3-5 years when it's time to upgrade the computer. You want to buy it once, then use it for 10-15 years (how long a monitor typically lasts). AIOs don't allow you to reuse the screen, unless you want a kludge where you end up using the AIO as just a monitor for your next computer (thus losing out on resale value of the computer portion).
Not much you can do about cords (except a wireless mouse and keyboard). But I've always been able to shove the power and monitor cable out of sight behind the desk. The better desks have a hole on the top for cables.
A friend solved the client problem by getting a second monitor facing the client (sitting on the opposite side of the desk as him) and having it mirror his monitor. That way he wasn't stuck having to turn his monitor sideways so both he and the client could view the screen at the same time.
Before the pedants jump all over this, I should clarify that I mean of any airline which has been operating since the introduction of jet airliners. There are a bunch of small airlines which have been operating 1-3 decades which also have "perfect" safety records.
Qantas has the unique distinction of not having suffered a fatality during the jet airliner era. So they take unusual steps to try to preserve that record.
Initially, it wasn't because they were safer - they just got lucky and their smaller number of flights reduced the chances of an accident even if their accident rate was the same. But now that it's become something they brag about, they take extraordinary (sometimes excessive) measures to protect that record. (Some say it gets them more customers because people afraid of airliner accidents go out of their way to book on Qantas. But that's probably canceled out by people who believe the gambler's fallacy and go out of their way to avoid Qantas because they figure the airline is "overdue" for a fatal accident.)