Given that more or less every month we find out some new organism, some new life process, or other similar thing on this planet, I think the only "right" place to be on a body is "everywhere". So any one spot is definitely the wrong spot to observe all the possible processes that are occurring on Mars. I mean, hell, one very simple explanation is that all the CH4 is being created by microorganisms that live in a specific stratum of the atmosphere.
(Note: I am ENTIRELY in favor of disbanding government space exploration programs and privatizing them. I think people looking for freedom, fame and riches will make inroads into space much faster than scientists looking for research papers funded by governments looking for military applications or ego boosts. We won't really understand for sure if Mars does or did have life until we have a lot - a LOT - of prospectors accidentally finding fossil Martian trilobites while looking for uranium or whatever).
The semantic engine is part of all modern speech recognition libraries (grammar hints are used, and the application provides the grammar based on what commands it expects to receive). And by "all modern speech recognition libraries" I basically mean Nuance, since they own the field and buy anyone who does anything interesting in it.
... Border officers are officers of the USCIS. They can be (or I should say, they are) trusted with passenger data because they are considerably better trained (and I daresay better paid) than the occasionally-background-checked high school dropout failed mall cop candidates employed by the TSA.
FML. "major applications have not transitioned to touch paradigms" because touch DOES NOT WORK for a great many major applications. It's a fucking gimmick like 3DTV, and Microsoft in particular is guilty of overpromoting it by requiring touchscreens in Win8 laptop computers simply to make their OS look niftier. As soon as that requirement gets relaxed, touchscreens on anything other than laptops will become a rare breed again. Re apps: anything that involves substantial text entry requires a keyboard. Adding a keyboard changes the ergonomics of the workstation such that touchscreens become unusable (cf: billions of words under the heading "gorilla arm"). You can add a starburst to MS-Word or MS-Excel saying "NOW! 85% MORE TOUCHIER THAN WORDPERFECT AND LOTUS 1-2-3 FOR DOS!" but it does not change the fact that a use case that involves nontrivial amounts of writing text into that application requires a physical keyboard, and touchscreens are a distraction. Similar arguments apply to some other kinds of apps.
I get significantly pissed off when I see people foaming at the mouth with fantasies that speech input, touchscreens or teledildonic inputs will replace all current user interface types. They don't and won't. They enable new types of interactions, and in many cases new kinds of applications (I can't imagine playing Fruit Ninja with anything other than a touchscreen, but I also can't see myself earning a living playing Fruit Ninja). They don't replace the "old" input methods, they extend them. Nothing kills a technology faster than being misapplied to inappropriate use cases.
Ha! Another one like me!:) I can't tell you how much email I read on my phone, decide I'll reply to it when I have a decent input method in front of me, and then forget about it. If I didn't read it on the phone, and just saw it as a new mail when I sat at my laptop, I'd probably be replying to it.
Nope. Pausing only to mutter "There is no user interface problem which has not already been adequately solved by emacs", I'll point out that mouse and GUI never pretended to replace the keyboard for text entry. I don't know what you do with your computers, but most of my useful life in front of a screen is interacting with bulk quantities of text. This is a blazing pain in the ass on a tablet. The Preparation H which cures this blazing pain and soothes the flaming sphincter is to add a keyboard. Once you've done this you no longer have a tiny portable tablet, you have an annoying collection of peripherals in a bag, trying to be a small laptop. Better to buy an Ultrabook form factor device and be done with it. The paragraph I've just written is more than I'd want to write on a touchscreen keyboard. I consider email on my mobile devices to be essentially readonly. The only text I enter is social media status updates, and then only when not discussing complex issues (on Google+ for instance, I get into a lot of multi-paragraph tech or political discussions, which I just can't do on a touchscreen).
It's not just this specific tablet - I find typing on touchscreens (via whatever method - Swype, regular tappable keyboard, etc) extremely irksome. I've had/have a LOT of devices, from an original 1st gen iPhone to a Galaxy S4 (my current phone), and tablets ranging from the 1st gen Galaxy Tab 7" to an Optimus Prime 10.1", Acer Iconia A700, and my current 7" tablet - 7" being the ideal form factor for me to carry on the road.
Possibly related, I also find it intensely uncomfortable to use trackpads, I much prefer a mouse or the rubber pointing stick type controller used on ThinkPads, older Toshibas, and some other machines.
So I find these sorts of comments interesting. You use your N7 for "checking" your email. Do you use it for REPLYING to email? I find it amazingly annoying to write anything longer than a tweet on a touchscreen, regardless of the input method. The instant you add a keyboard to a tablet, it isn't a tablet, it's an incredibly non-ergonomic mini-laptop with pieces that fall apart.
I have the email client set up on my tablet (currently a Memopad HD7, comparable to N7) and I *READ* email on it but I practically never REPLY to email on it. I save the replies for when I've got a keyboard.
Consume on tablet. Produce on laptop.
Yeaaaah... Windows is on the same trajectory as MacOS - the endgame for which is an OS that is married to the hardware (so the hardware, while capable, will refuse to boot a non-approved OS), and an OS that will only accept signed applications delivered through a curated software store.
iOS is the example of this - MacOS is following it, and Windows 8 is following MacOS more distantly still at this point in time. Microsoft wants Windows machines to be XBoxes that can run MS Office.
The answer to this totally depends on why you want to give zero notice. Maybe you have an amazing opportunity but the window is "you have to start Monday or we're going with Candidate B". Maybe you have to run to Canada to escape a fraud investigation. Maybe you just hate your current employer and want to give them the finger.
If the reason you want to leave without notice is more like my first example above, and less like the other two, then TALK TO YOUR BOSS. Explain that you've got an amazing opportunity and you have to leave at once, you know it's a big disruption to them, etc. Offer to help in your own time to clean up documentation, provide answers to questions from your replacement, etc. People, even bosses, are understanding of such things as a rule. If you've got a once in a lifetime opportunity your boss will understand that, and if you offer to work with him/her- especially if you do it in email so there's a record - you will help smooth the bump.
You will get no *official* reference from a supervisor at such a company. However it is usually permissible for a current or past employee of the company in question to give a *PEER* reference. You see this on LinkedIn all the time even at companies with no-formal-reference policy.
Not long ago, I quit a large company with a policy like this. It led to some interesting situations, e.g. person A is fired, resume-verifiers start calling supervisor-of-person-A, he can't do anything but refer them to HR, all HR will do is confirm dates of employment. Person A contacts some former coworkers at the same company, they agree to give him a peer reference, he is hired by his new company.
The reason for the no-formal-reference policy is very sensible, by the way. If Fred lists me, a former supervisor, as a reference, and HR from his potential new employer calls me in my capacity as Fred's former supervisor: if I give him a bad reference and he doesn't get hired, he can sue my employer for poisoning his career. Has happened, many times. On the other hand if I give him a good reference and he does get hired, but turns out to be a total chump/drunkard/embezzler, his new employer can sue my company for having falsely represented him. Has happened, not quite so often, but cases exist. The bottom line is that there is nothing to be gained, and real downside potential in giving someone an official reference, for any company with deep pockets. On the other hand, a peer reference ("I worked with Fred and he didn't actually steal anything or set fire to a building while I was watching") carries no liability to my employer so it's safer.
I respectfully disagree about the utility of the automatic solution, but will cordially debate it with you, if necessary coding real-time, over beers:-) Difficulty level: pick a city I can get to with my frequent flyer miles.
I'm going to go out on a (thick, short, sturdy and eminently defensible) limb here and state that automatically tagging, categorizing and usefully retrieving free-form input is a strong AI problem; the results you get out of any solution are probabilistic, and the stats of today's solutions are low.
There is so much rightness in this message that I can really only quibble with your choice of writing implement. A 2mm clutch grip pencil (also from Staedtler, because hey I grew up with their stuff) http://www.restockit.com/mars-technico-lead-holder-2mm-lead-blue-(std780c).html?ci_src=17588969&ci_sku=STD780C&source=IDx20111014x00001g&utm_source=IDx20111014x00001g&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=comparison&utm_term=STD780C&bvar10=googlepla gives a more pencil-like feeling because it's using the actual type of lead that would be in a wood pencil.
For large volumes of writing, however, the other poster who mentioned fountain pens is on the money. I use fine-point Parker and Bruynzeel cartridge type fountain pens for day to day note taking at work, and a Retro 51 for signing checks and contracts and such. I am still saving up for a really nice Mont Blanc or Waterman.
I personally prefer grid paper (not graph paper per se), on 1/4" squares, because I find graph paper's large divisions are too large and the small divisions too small to act as writing guides. 1/4" grid paper is convenient for my small handwriting, and ideal for diagrams, including circuit diagrams, where things must remain orthogonal:)
And you are totally correct on the "won't have time for computer" point.
This. Not only this, but the OP is seriously underestimating the workload overhead of tagging CONSISTENTLY, and adding all sorts of meta-information to documents. It's an analogous problem to tagging a huge collection of photos. This is a picture of my dog. Is it a #dog, a #fido, a #poodle, or what? It's extremely hard to maintain consistent tagging rules for a large body of individual notes.
As for digital note taking, there is no solution that works as well as paper. In the course of EE studies, I have tried everything under the sun. Tablets, PDAs, laptops, digital ink pens, etc etc. If you're taking lots of text notes, a keyboard is king... but probably no faster than handwriting. If your notes include diagrams, mathematical symbols, chemical formulae, etc, you can pretty much forget keyboards (though I have seen some Mathcad mavens enter math proofs "live" off a whiteboard since they know all the keyboard shortcuts for everything). Stylus-based screens don't have the resolution nor the responsiveness of paper. The best solution I ever reached was paper notes which I then scanned, so I could carry all my notes on my laptop/tablet.
Forget about this frankly OCD-sounding desire for neatly aligned banks of metadata-encrusted Faberge eggs of notecraft. It's far more important to focus on listening to what the hell is going on in the lecture, and comprehending it, which oftentimes means participation back the other way to clarify points being made in the lecture. You won't be able to get that clarification offline studying at home. If you are studying to be a clinical professional, focus on the skills that further that goal. Wasting effort on the Quest for Perfect Electronic Notes is a more appropriate activity for someone whose goal is, say, clinical informatics specialist.
In summary: Grrrrr.
Well, it's going to be even better than that - it's going to be "Chinese intelligence community ready", or so the US Government believes - Chinese telecoms vendors have very tough going in the US market.
Re gmuslera's comment below, there's a lot more software in the phone than just the OS and apps. It seems very unlikely that the whole software stack, particularly the code running in the baseband processor, will be open source (too much proprietary magic in it), and exploits could easily be hidden in that side of the phone - or even in hardware, if it comes to that. After quickly looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS I see that there is no mention made of the coprocessors; they're just talking about the OS and application environment as being open-source. Additionally, if the NSA wants your data - scratch that, WHEN the NSA wants your data, which is all the time, they simply tap it at the source. If you're using someone's network, you're at the mercy of that someone.
This is one of those Slashdot stories where I wish there was a "and they all lived happily ever after?" button on the story where we could all get an instant link to a paragraph or two about how the story finally turned out... because my money is on "they told me to fax it, so I visited the dumpster behind the Smithsonian, found an old fax machine, and sent it to them".
It would have been helpful if you could have specified what size of organization (two guys and a lhasa apso? six billion dollar multinational?), and what the relationship is - are you a client? a prospective employee? illegitimate father of the CEO's daughter's new baby? Are you sending them your social security number, DOB and such, or are you sending them the biometric information they need to disarm the nuclear bomb you planted in their cafeteria?
The answers to those questions constrain variables like a) the actual value of this private information to the outside world, b) the degree to which the company will feel exposed to liability risk if your data is leaked in transit, and hence their motivation level for doing something about it, c) the likelihood that they actually have a formal key exchange infrastructure in place, d) the likelihood that there is someone actively intercepting this communication line looking for this type of information, among many other things.
Since you don't know the answers to these questions, I would call, not email, the person you're supposed to send this data and say "I'm uncomfortable sending the naked pictures you requested via unencryped email on the Internet. Is there a secure way I can submit them?" If they don't have an immediate answer, you can then suggest examples - but as I indicated in my opening sentence, I think the likelihood is that your path of least resistance is fax, assuming whatever you need to send them can be faxed.
Of course, whatever route your data takes, you are then totally at the mercy of their internal document security procedures. All security is an illusion. The document I really don't like submitting electronically (but am forced to all the time) is the W-9 Proof of Taxpayer #. For a $50 payment when a TV station bought one of my YouTube videos, I had to email this (nothing else was accepted and no encryption was possible). Normally I prefer to send this form via snail mail, but air dates yada yada.
Dangling plugged-in shit is not a rational solution to the problem. And it's not a price issue - the cost of the connector is under $0.20.
The N7 is useless to me at $300 because it limits the amount of media I can carry with me on the road. Sometimes I travel for a week or more at a time.
The Asus Memopad HD7 (from the same OEM) is way more useful to me at $150, solely because of the microSD slot.
20% of the reason it's +5 Insightful is because of people complaining that a +4 Insightful post doesn't deserve that score?
The iOS stuff exists in its own walled-off fetish club. Whatever; I don't own, and likely never will again own, an iOS device. The Nexus 7 competes against other Android tablets. Even the other tablets FROM THE SAME OEM that don't carry the Nexus branding have SD expansion. It's not an optional feature. Google is just trying to drive people to its ho-hum media stores, just as Microsoft is trying to drive people to write Metro-compatible apps with Win8. See how well that's working out for Microsoft on the desktop. Yep. Uh-huh.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that more or less every month we find out some new organism, some new life process, or other similar thing on this planet, I think the only "right" place to be on a body is "everywhere". So any one spot is definitely the wrong spot to observe all the possible processes that are occurring on Mars. I mean, hell, one very simple explanation is that all the CH4 is being created by microorganisms that live in a specific stratum of the atmosphere. (Note: I am ENTIRELY in favor of disbanding government space exploration programs and privatizing them. I think people looking for freedom, fame and riches will make inroads into space much faster than scientists looking for research papers funded by governments looking for military applications or ego boosts. We won't really understand for sure if Mars does or did have life until we have a lot - a LOT - of prospectors accidentally finding fossil Martian trilobites while looking for uranium or whatever).
The semantic engine is part of all modern speech recognition libraries (grammar hints are used, and the application provides the grammar based on what commands it expects to receive). And by "all modern speech recognition libraries" I basically mean Nuance, since they own the field and buy anyone who does anything interesting in it.
Actually, they kinda have put the company up for sale. http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/12/blackberry-says-its-looking-for-a-buyer-or-a-willing-partner-forms-special-committee-to-explore-strategic-alternatives/ (Some other article on this topic quoted BB as saying they are "willing to entertain the idea of acquisition", and the author commented snarkily that this is meant in the same way that his three-year-old daughter is "willing to entertain the idea of being given a pony").
... Border officers are officers of the USCIS. They can be (or I should say, they are) trusted with passenger data because they are considerably better trained (and I daresay better paid) than the occasionally-background-checked high school dropout failed mall cop candidates employed by the TSA.
FML. "major applications have not transitioned to touch paradigms" because touch DOES NOT WORK for a great many major applications. It's a fucking gimmick like 3DTV, and Microsoft in particular is guilty of overpromoting it by requiring touchscreens in Win8 laptop computers simply to make their OS look niftier. As soon as that requirement gets relaxed, touchscreens on anything other than laptops will become a rare breed again. Re apps: anything that involves substantial text entry requires a keyboard. Adding a keyboard changes the ergonomics of the workstation such that touchscreens become unusable (cf: billions of words under the heading "gorilla arm"). You can add a starburst to MS-Word or MS-Excel saying "NOW! 85% MORE TOUCHIER THAN WORDPERFECT AND LOTUS 1-2-3 FOR DOS!" but it does not change the fact that a use case that involves nontrivial amounts of writing text into that application requires a physical keyboard, and touchscreens are a distraction. Similar arguments apply to some other kinds of apps. I get significantly pissed off when I see people foaming at the mouth with fantasies that speech input, touchscreens or teledildonic inputs will replace all current user interface types. They don't and won't. They enable new types of interactions, and in many cases new kinds of applications (I can't imagine playing Fruit Ninja with anything other than a touchscreen, but I also can't see myself earning a living playing Fruit Ninja). They don't replace the "old" input methods, they extend them. Nothing kills a technology faster than being misapplied to inappropriate use cases.
Ha! Another one like me! :) I can't tell you how much email I read on my phone, decide I'll reply to it when I have a decent input method in front of me, and then forget about it. If I didn't read it on the phone, and just saw it as a new mail when I sat at my laptop, I'd probably be replying to it.
Nope. Pausing only to mutter "There is no user interface problem which has not already been adequately solved by emacs", I'll point out that mouse and GUI never pretended to replace the keyboard for text entry. I don't know what you do with your computers, but most of my useful life in front of a screen is interacting with bulk quantities of text. This is a blazing pain in the ass on a tablet. The Preparation H which cures this blazing pain and soothes the flaming sphincter is to add a keyboard. Once you've done this you no longer have a tiny portable tablet, you have an annoying collection of peripherals in a bag, trying to be a small laptop. Better to buy an Ultrabook form factor device and be done with it. The paragraph I've just written is more than I'd want to write on a touchscreen keyboard. I consider email on my mobile devices to be essentially readonly. The only text I enter is social media status updates, and then only when not discussing complex issues (on Google+ for instance, I get into a lot of multi-paragraph tech or political discussions, which I just can't do on a touchscreen).
It's not just this specific tablet - I find typing on touchscreens (via whatever method - Swype, regular tappable keyboard, etc) extremely irksome. I've had/have a LOT of devices, from an original 1st gen iPhone to a Galaxy S4 (my current phone), and tablets ranging from the 1st gen Galaxy Tab 7" to an Optimus Prime 10.1", Acer Iconia A700, and my current 7" tablet - 7" being the ideal form factor for me to carry on the road. Possibly related, I also find it intensely uncomfortable to use trackpads, I much prefer a mouse or the rubber pointing stick type controller used on ThinkPads, older Toshibas, and some other machines.
Like I said. iOS is close to the endgame, MacOS is not there yet but approaching it, and Windows is galloping up from the rear.
So I find these sorts of comments interesting. You use your N7 for "checking" your email. Do you use it for REPLYING to email? I find it amazingly annoying to write anything longer than a tweet on a touchscreen, regardless of the input method. The instant you add a keyboard to a tablet, it isn't a tablet, it's an incredibly non-ergonomic mini-laptop with pieces that fall apart. I have the email client set up on my tablet (currently a Memopad HD7, comparable to N7) and I *READ* email on it but I practically never REPLY to email on it. I save the replies for when I've got a keyboard. Consume on tablet. Produce on laptop.
Yeaaaah... Windows is on the same trajectory as MacOS - the endgame for which is an OS that is married to the hardware (so the hardware, while capable, will refuse to boot a non-approved OS), and an OS that will only accept signed applications delivered through a curated software store. iOS is the example of this - MacOS is following it, and Windows 8 is following MacOS more distantly still at this point in time. Microsoft wants Windows machines to be XBoxes that can run MS Office.
The answer to this totally depends on why you want to give zero notice. Maybe you have an amazing opportunity but the window is "you have to start Monday or we're going with Candidate B". Maybe you have to run to Canada to escape a fraud investigation. Maybe you just hate your current employer and want to give them the finger. If the reason you want to leave without notice is more like my first example above, and less like the other two, then TALK TO YOUR BOSS. Explain that you've got an amazing opportunity and you have to leave at once, you know it's a big disruption to them, etc. Offer to help in your own time to clean up documentation, provide answers to questions from your replacement, etc. People, even bosses, are understanding of such things as a rule. If you've got a once in a lifetime opportunity your boss will understand that, and if you offer to work with him/her- especially if you do it in email so there's a record - you will help smooth the bump.
You will get no *official* reference from a supervisor at such a company. However it is usually permissible for a current or past employee of the company in question to give a *PEER* reference. You see this on LinkedIn all the time even at companies with no-formal-reference policy. Not long ago, I quit a large company with a policy like this. It led to some interesting situations, e.g. person A is fired, resume-verifiers start calling supervisor-of-person-A, he can't do anything but refer them to HR, all HR will do is confirm dates of employment. Person A contacts some former coworkers at the same company, they agree to give him a peer reference, he is hired by his new company. The reason for the no-formal-reference policy is very sensible, by the way. If Fred lists me, a former supervisor, as a reference, and HR from his potential new employer calls me in my capacity as Fred's former supervisor: if I give him a bad reference and he doesn't get hired, he can sue my employer for poisoning his career. Has happened, many times. On the other hand if I give him a good reference and he does get hired, but turns out to be a total chump/drunkard/embezzler, his new employer can sue my company for having falsely represented him. Has happened, not quite so often, but cases exist. The bottom line is that there is nothing to be gained, and real downside potential in giving someone an official reference, for any company with deep pockets. On the other hand, a peer reference ("I worked with Fred and he didn't actually steal anything or set fire to a building while I was watching") carries no liability to my employer so it's safer.
I respectfully disagree about the utility of the automatic solution, but will cordially debate it with you, if necessary coding real-time, over beers :-) Difficulty level: pick a city I can get to with my frequent flyer miles.
I still assert this is wasted cognitive effort and a poor focus for a student trying to absorb and comprehend complex material in class.
I'm going to go out on a (thick, short, sturdy and eminently defensible) limb here and state that automatically tagging, categorizing and usefully retrieving free-form input is a strong AI problem; the results you get out of any solution are probabilistic, and the stats of today's solutions are low.
There is so much rightness in this message that I can really only quibble with your choice of writing implement. A 2mm clutch grip pencil (also from Staedtler, because hey I grew up with their stuff) http://www.restockit.com/mars-technico-lead-holder-2mm-lead-blue-(std780c).html?ci_src=17588969&ci_sku=STD780C&source=IDx20111014x00001g&utm_source=IDx20111014x00001g&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=comparison&utm_term=STD780C&bvar10=googlepla gives a more pencil-like feeling because it's using the actual type of lead that would be in a wood pencil. For large volumes of writing, however, the other poster who mentioned fountain pens is on the money. I use fine-point Parker and Bruynzeel cartridge type fountain pens for day to day note taking at work, and a Retro 51 for signing checks and contracts and such. I am still saving up for a really nice Mont Blanc or Waterman. I personally prefer grid paper (not graph paper per se), on 1/4" squares, because I find graph paper's large divisions are too large and the small divisions too small to act as writing guides. 1/4" grid paper is convenient for my small handwriting, and ideal for diagrams, including circuit diagrams, where things must remain orthogonal :)
And you are totally correct on the "won't have time for computer" point.
This. Not only this, but the OP is seriously underestimating the workload overhead of tagging CONSISTENTLY, and adding all sorts of meta-information to documents. It's an analogous problem to tagging a huge collection of photos. This is a picture of my dog. Is it a #dog, a #fido, a #poodle, or what? It's extremely hard to maintain consistent tagging rules for a large body of individual notes. As for digital note taking, there is no solution that works as well as paper. In the course of EE studies, I have tried everything under the sun. Tablets, PDAs, laptops, digital ink pens, etc etc. If you're taking lots of text notes, a keyboard is king... but probably no faster than handwriting. If your notes include diagrams, mathematical symbols, chemical formulae, etc, you can pretty much forget keyboards (though I have seen some Mathcad mavens enter math proofs "live" off a whiteboard since they know all the keyboard shortcuts for everything). Stylus-based screens don't have the resolution nor the responsiveness of paper. The best solution I ever reached was paper notes which I then scanned, so I could carry all my notes on my laptop/tablet. Forget about this frankly OCD-sounding desire for neatly aligned banks of metadata-encrusted Faberge eggs of notecraft. It's far more important to focus on listening to what the hell is going on in the lecture, and comprehending it, which oftentimes means participation back the other way to clarify points being made in the lecture. You won't be able to get that clarification offline studying at home. If you are studying to be a clinical professional, focus on the skills that further that goal. Wasting effort on the Quest for Perfect Electronic Notes is a more appropriate activity for someone whose goal is, say, clinical informatics specialist. In summary: Grrrrr.
I have one mod point left and I read this reply and my finger doesn't know what to click ;)
Well, it's going to be even better than that - it's going to be "Chinese intelligence community ready", or so the US Government believes - Chinese telecoms vendors have very tough going in the US market. Re gmuslera's comment below, there's a lot more software in the phone than just the OS and apps. It seems very unlikely that the whole software stack, particularly the code running in the baseband processor, will be open source (too much proprietary magic in it), and exploits could easily be hidden in that side of the phone - or even in hardware, if it comes to that. After quickly looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS I see that there is no mention made of the coprocessors; they're just talking about the OS and application environment as being open-source. Additionally, if the NSA wants your data - scratch that, WHEN the NSA wants your data, which is all the time, they simply tap it at the source. If you're using someone's network, you're at the mercy of that someone.
This is one of those Slashdot stories where I wish there was a "and they all lived happily ever after?" button on the story where we could all get an instant link to a paragraph or two about how the story finally turned out... because my money is on "they told me to fax it, so I visited the dumpster behind the Smithsonian, found an old fax machine, and sent it to them". It would have been helpful if you could have specified what size of organization (two guys and a lhasa apso? six billion dollar multinational?), and what the relationship is - are you a client? a prospective employee? illegitimate father of the CEO's daughter's new baby? Are you sending them your social security number, DOB and such, or are you sending them the biometric information they need to disarm the nuclear bomb you planted in their cafeteria? The answers to those questions constrain variables like a) the actual value of this private information to the outside world, b) the degree to which the company will feel exposed to liability risk if your data is leaked in transit, and hence their motivation level for doing something about it, c) the likelihood that they actually have a formal key exchange infrastructure in place, d) the likelihood that there is someone actively intercepting this communication line looking for this type of information, among many other things. Since you don't know the answers to these questions, I would call, not email, the person you're supposed to send this data and say "I'm uncomfortable sending the naked pictures you requested via unencryped email on the Internet. Is there a secure way I can submit them?" If they don't have an immediate answer, you can then suggest examples - but as I indicated in my opening sentence, I think the likelihood is that your path of least resistance is fax, assuming whatever you need to send them can be faxed. Of course, whatever route your data takes, you are then totally at the mercy of their internal document security procedures. All security is an illusion. The document I really don't like submitting electronically (but am forced to all the time) is the W-9 Proof of Taxpayer #. For a $50 payment when a TV station bought one of my YouTube videos, I had to email this (nothing else was accepted and no encryption was possible). Normally I prefer to send this form via snail mail, but air dates yada yada.
I'm not sure I can fully interpret the implications of this, but it's certainly an interesting viewpoint I never considered before. Thanks.
Dangling plugged-in shit is not a rational solution to the problem. And it's not a price issue - the cost of the connector is under $0.20. The N7 is useless to me at $300 because it limits the amount of media I can carry with me on the road. Sometimes I travel for a week or more at a time. The Asus Memopad HD7 (from the same OEM) is way more useful to me at $150, solely because of the microSD slot.
Take a quick look at the Android device landscape. Practically all, if not actually all, non-Nexus Android devices have expansion slots.
20% of the reason it's +5 Insightful is because of people complaining that a +4 Insightful post doesn't deserve that score? The iOS stuff exists in its own walled-off fetish club. Whatever; I don't own, and likely never will again own, an iOS device. The Nexus 7 competes against other Android tablets. Even the other tablets FROM THE SAME OEM that don't carry the Nexus branding have SD expansion. It's not an optional feature. Google is just trying to drive people to its ho-hum media stores, just as Microsoft is trying to drive people to write Metro-compatible apps with Win8. See how well that's working out for Microsoft on the desktop. Yep. Uh-huh.