You're doing God's work here, LateArthurDent. Thanks for defending the right definition. It's ridiculous how often people posit two theories which don't predict the same outcomes, then side with the simpler theory on the basis of its simplicity alone, invoking the razor as though the theories were in quantum flux, and they collapsed the multiple theories into truth by having observed the name Occam.
Electricity consumption include Final consumption, in process consumption, and losses
So transmission losses are part of this. It's not surprising that there'd be a lot more power loss when distributing power over an area 2.5 times as large (EU 3,892,685 sq. km, US 9,826,630 sq. km). It doesn't make us more energy efficient, but it doesn't mean we're more wasteful of energy.
Meanwhile while the EU is burning 18.40 KW daily per capita, while Ethiopia is only 0.12 KW daily per capita. Why is Europe so wasteful? Why can't you be more like Ethiopia? Or perhaps per capita usage is only a tiny part of the story.
Aah, I assumed you were upset about Unity's global menu (I know that bugs the crap out of me, but then so does a lot of things in Unity). The new Application Menu makes sense in a way, it's not a replacement for window menus, it's truly an application menu. So each window has menus which are relevant to that window's context, while you have a separate menu for the whole application. Contextualization like that seems like a win to me, but I guess we'll have to see if apps use it the way it's intended (a mix of window and application menus), or if they end up abusing it by jamming all the menus into one form or the other.
Will the application/global menu replace the normal window menus (in the long term)?
Nope, the application menu is strictly for global actions affecting the whole application rather than those in the window context.
I wonder how Canonical's Unity Global Menu will account for this, they put the context menus in the location App menus are going to be taking, and while the Unity Global Menu only allows for a single menu to be on the screen at a time, the Gnome 3.4 Application Menu is a separate menu from the window context menus (thus requiring at least two menus on the screen at a time for an app which uses both).
Maybe I misunderstood you when you said that food aid is a great idea because it ruins the local economy - and them being more or less of an enemy of our state, I took this to mean that you meant it was good in a military offensive sense (which is not good in the same way most humanitarian efforts are). If so, sorry for the confusion.
You're right, with this international food going to the peasants, the food which would have gone to them will be directed upwards. But I doubt that changes much, the bureaucratic classes and above were already the first consideration for food supplies, with the peasants getting whatever was left. I doubt their meager rations are even that attractive above their ranks.
Start dumping cheap/free food on their markets, put all the local farmers out of business.
Those don't exist in DPRK, at least not legally. The "Market" was extinguished in the 60's. Almost everything you get comes from the government, and money is almost symbolic. Until the later part of the 80's peasants were not even permitted a private garden for producing their own food.
Also, only about 1/5 of North Korea is arable. This is a country which falls far short of being able to produce enough food to feed its people even under ideal circumstances. Since most farms of any significant size are government owned or controlled, and those working them are not guaranteed any share of what they produce. Aid to the people is a good thing, and trying to spin it otherwise is disingenuous.
Documentation is part of the job. Are you saying that managers do not give you time to do your job?
Lack of documentation is a form of technical debt. Many managers are happy to accept technical debt if it means they can meet customer demands in the short term. I bumped into a good analogy on technical debt a few days back. It's short, and highly recommended. On Technical Debt - Now With Chickens!
The rear reversing sensors that come standard on many cars seem pretty good at detecting stuff. So why cameras for all cars? How many more would these cameras save compared to those sensors?
My father-in-law's truck has one, and our mailbox trips it as he's backing out of our driveway. Also I think they only pick up things at or above a certain height, a kid sitting on the ground behind the vehicle won't trip it. These cameras aren't expensive except that they're currently considered premium, and car manufacturers charge a huge markup on them.
This is the problem. People back over other people because they aren't looking behind them (OK, there are accidents, but 9 times out of 10 it's because some idiot just drives out without checking over their shoulders and mirrors).
I'd love to know what you base that information on.
That's a death rate of 1.1% of accidents. That's a pretty good survival rate for car accident.
What about the serious or permanent injury rate? A family friend drove over his daughter who was playing on the ground behind his truck in their driveway, which she knew she was not allowed to do, but was doing so anyway. She missed a year of school while recovering, and still walks with a limp. Their marriage barely survived, and the father still has difficulty talking about it.
In my neighborhood, the little brats assume cars can always see them no matter what. If a ball rolls in front of your car, they'll run out to get it and assume you'll stop. I've even had them play chicken with my car, requiring me to come to a complete stop less than a foot away from them. If I'm backing out of my driveway, I try to watch all directions, but since you can only look in one given direction at a time it's a challenging task, and even if you get out and physically check the space behind your car before you back up, nothing says a kid doesn't go back there while you're still getting back into your car or while you're watching that you don't clip the idiot who parked over the edge of your driveway (i.e. there are other road hazards you sometimes have to watch out for as well).
On our most recent car purchase, we wanted to get a backup camera. The model car we wanted didn't come with the option, we would have had to upgrade to the next class up (about $2500 more). Also it was a premium option, the backup camera itself was $400 (cheap, some places want up to $1,000), and it required a $2,000 navigation system upgrade (the navigation system provides the screen for the backup camera, you see). After taxes, we're tacking almost an extra $5,000 onto a $17,000 car - a roughly 30% premium for about $50 in parts.
These things aren't expensive, except that car makers know people will pay a huge premium for them, and they can tie several other upgrades together to force your hand if you want the safety feature.
Because there is the idea that what you enter into one app on your phone is not available to another app.
And that is in fact the default operating method for both major smartphone platforms. But there's value in being able to share certain kinds of data between apps. For example, if you want to write a better SMS client, that task is pretty much impossible if the user has to recreate their entire contact list and loses all their existing SMS history. That's why (on Android at least) the app has to request permission for that access. Unfortunately your only choices are to grant every permission the app requests, or not install the app at all. So if Facebook asks for access to your SMS history, your choices are only to grant it or lose access to the reason most people have smartphones to begin with - broadcasting more detail about their life than anyone but them cares about.
If I accept the "terms of use" for facebook, I do not also consent to having them go through my text messages.
Have you read their terms? If you accepted them, you're giving them a lot more access than that.
Yeah, I use cash for petty expenses as well, it's a good way to keep that from getting out of control. I use debit for most other things, having a hard record of exact dollar amounts in a downloadable format from my bank helps with budgeting.
If you watch the video GP linked, it's basically only sound, the image is all of sky and the interior of a car. The audio is the important evidence there.
Digital watermarks survive re-encoding unless the re-encoding is very aggressive (at a substantial quality loss). You can use different strength watermarks which survive greater amounts of distortion. It's not impossible to remove them, but it can be challenging without really impacting image quality.
Also, couldn't pirates remove the "digital watermark" functionality from the executable file? (Theoretically?)
Yes, of course. That's why it's important to make the watermark not very intrusive (why I recommended not including a logo overlay). If the watermark just looks like film grain or ISO noise, most free uses of the software won't mind - maybe won't even notice - and so won't be compelled to find a pirated version. The commercial users who'd be inclined to find a pirated version because of the watermarking would have been inclined to pirate it either way; you'll never get a license fee out of them except through litigation. At least the watermark makes it likely they either don't notice they're leaving behind digital fingerprints, or don't care.
My recommendation would be to provide a not-for-commercial-use free version which is almost totally identical to the premium version. Have this version embed a digital watermark so you can identify if videos pop up commercially which haven't paid for a commercial license. Make it non-obtrusive so home users don't mind (I recommend it not being a visible logo or anything of that sort, just the digital watermark).
You're not going to be able to prevent a pirated version from cropping up except that you make the pirated version not attractive compared to the legitimate version. Those inclined to not pay for the software are not going to pay for the software. Provide it for free with the forensic ability to detect license violations. The paid version places no watermark, so you get the best quality and the legal right to use videos commercially after it's paid for.
Although additional staffing will probably help with the backlog, it might not be the right solution. For one thing, depending on the complexity of the systems involved, new hires may for a while reduce the efficiency of the existing staff. Sometimes new hires cause dates to slip which would have been met without the hire.
Also, just because your business units are requesting work be done doesn't mean that work is necessarily worth the investment. The individual business unit can't provide a good ROI evaluation because their investment is minimal when the work is done by staff developers. In a large shop, that analysis should be being performed by the project manager or business analyst, but not everyone has this luxury.
In small to mid-sized shops, you make due with what you have, hiring more guys won't necessarily be a win for the business even if it makes Engineering's job less stressful.
In the past we've had bad luck with the word "priority," everyone makes their work the lowest priority they think places it above everyone else, so it's an escalation arms race. We had settled on rankings instead. Require the various business users to rank work against each other. It can't be inflated since it's a binary relationship between any two projects - A is more important than B, or it's not. It's up to them to come to a consensus as to whether the latest marketing blitz is really more important than codifying this year's new tax codes. If Marketing and Finance say the blitz is more important, then that's what you work on even if you're confused why that's the outcome.
Exactly, the Fair Labor Association at its core is a conflict of interest. They are funded by the companies they report on. What company would pay them for bad press? If they release unfavorable reports, they lose their funding.
Their charter has huge gaps in it, as though designed to provide companies loopholes to hide abuse. The biggest and most glaring example is that member companies are required to disclose only some factory locations. Meaning companies can create facade factories for inspection, while the real work continues to be done behind closed doors.
Even still they don't live up to their own chartered requirements with respect to transparency and accountability. There are supposed to be regular reports on factory conditions for all member companies. There are supposed to be reports on factory locations for all member companies. When abuses are found, the company is supposed to be named and remediation steps disclosed. The FLA has one report more recent than 6 years old on their site. That one relatively recent report (August 2010) is full of abuses across multiple manufacturers, including people who believe they are "always" expected to work for "more than 72 hours in a week" and for "more than 24 days in a row," and that they were not free to refuse overtime without repercussions. Those were the top measured tier in each of those categories. None of the manufacturers were named, and no remediation steps are outlined. Thus making the report completely toothless since there is no accountability and no attempt to repair the problems.
Apple opened up 90% of their factories for inspection. That's pretty good if accurate, it'd be hard to maintain a 90% facade. But they joined the FLA a month ago, FoxConn undoubtedly saw that there would be inspections coming through, and a month is more than enough time to clean up their act for inspection purposes. They also undoubtedly made it known to their workers that if they lose this Apple contract, those workers will be out of a job (and they really will be, nobody else will absorb that excess manufacturing capacity). So this inspection is easily whitewashed, and the workers will easily give glowing testimony so they retain their jobs. Also, wasn't it just a few days ago that they announced the inspections were going to start? They really thoroughly inspected all these factories in just a few days? Amazing!
So what exactly is this inspection supposed to prove? Plenty of time to prepare, workers who know if the inspection goes wrong that they'll lose their jobs, and a whirlwind tour of the factories by a sham organization. This is a token, "We got our hand slapped, let's make puppy eyes at the media," publicity stunt.
I've talked to some meat-space people about blacklights, and what I see is definitely more visible to me than typical blacklight light is to most people. Interestingly my brother, who is one of the people I asked, sees them like I do.
What I see is a very bright dark purple, if that makes sense. It's a very deep purple, but it's not dim at all, the room is well lit by this light. In a completely dark room lit only by blacklights, I'd have no more trouble navigating than if it were lit only by some other color of light. Some stuff appears black under this light, such as even caucasian human skin. Some stuff floresces and is a bright shade of whatever color it usually floresces (that's what I gather most people see from a blacklight). But most stuff is just heavily washed over with a purple light.
People can generally see the light from a blacklight, right? It's just an incredibly intense shade of deep purple? Or do blacklights legitimately not emit a typically-visible spectrum of light?
I can definitely see the light from a blacklight quite clearly. I can't stare right at a blacklight, it's just as uncomfortable as staring right at a normal light. It doesn't appear as intense visually, but it's *easily* visible and my squint and look-away reflex is just as strong. I can also see the IR light from some (but not all) remotes. This is much harder to see, usually I have to be looking right into the LED to see it. If it's very dark in the room, I can make out the outline of the beam, but it's tough.
I've always just assumed everyone is this way. It makes me wonder - is that abnormal?
It's certain to be destruction of government property to purposely sabotage a government drone. So if you're being actively monitored by such a device, you can be pretty sure there's an agent or twelve around the corner from you ready to pounce. You'll get arrested and subjected to search. Also government operated ones will probably be riding pretty high, so picking it off will be difficult. A laser is probably a good idea to blind it, but somehow I suspect it'll fall afoul of the same laws which prohibit lasering manned aircraft.
More likely these will be used to perform either passive surveillance (broad sweeping inspections - eg, let's make sure everyone who built an extension on their house paid for the permit and is paying taxes on it, and watch for signs of commercial activity on residential property, and so forth), these will be built for endurance so they can scope out a wide area. A different class of drone will be active surveillance - when they're watching your movements to feed telemetry back to a ground agent who is attempting to intercept you. These will be built for speed and maneuverability so they can follow a speeding vehicle (more like the drones in Afghanistan - plane style rather than copter style). This latter class is what will eventually be weaponized once people are accustomed to the eye in the sky.
Consistent hashes require consistent input, and fingerprints are not that. Fingerprint readers are designed with an error tolerance because fingerprint scans are inconsistent. They can't be used to secure data, only to instruct software it's ok to grant access to something the software has the capacity to access anyway.
Besides, Apple is in a better position to improve conditions than any other company. Not only would pretty much any factory clamber to win an Apple contract, but Apple's ludicrous profitability demonstrates they have the capacity to improve conditions without being a threat to their share holders' pocketbooks.
Aha, I misunderstood you. Your "once they forget about CarrierIQ" read to me as "they" being Google/Android (as in, once Android drops CIQ). I understand what you meant now.
You're right, decision makers often make decisions based on gut response rather than a considered evaluation.
Sure, can happen with Android, once they forget about CarrierIQ.
You realize that CarrierIQ has nothing to do with Android other than that this company wrote an Android version of it, right? You also realize that Apple was shipping CarrierIQ on the iPhone when the Android stink was going on too, right? It was only after everyone made a big deal about this that Apple said they'd take it off. It was shipped but not "supported," leaving it up to the phone companies to manage it for themselves.
Here's the difference. There was no iPhone you could buy that didn't have CIQ on it since all iPhones run pretty much the same software stack. There were and always have been plenty of Android phones out there without CIQ since it's something the carrier has to add to the device's ROM (it's not a core part of Android). Android just gave developers better access to the device, so people could see what their phone was secretly up to. iOS never generated the same stink because the most anyone could do is speculate what might be going on inside the phone, and it took being directly questioned by congress for Apple to admit that it was on the phone. But by that time most people were losing interest.
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You're doing God's work here, LateArthurDent. Thanks for defending the right definition. It's ridiculous how often people posit two theories which don't predict the same outcomes, then side with the simpler theory on the basis of its simplicity alone, invoking the razor as though the theories were in quantum flux, and they collapsed the multiple theories into truth by having observed the name Occam.
From your source:
Electricity consumption include Final consumption, in process consumption, and losses
So transmission losses are part of this. It's not surprising that there'd be a lot more power loss when distributing power over an area 2.5 times as large (EU 3,892,685 sq. km, US 9,826,630 sq. km). It doesn't make us more energy efficient, but it doesn't mean we're more wasteful of energy.
Meanwhile while the EU is burning 18.40 KW daily per capita, while Ethiopia is only 0.12 KW daily per capita. Why is Europe so wasteful? Why can't you be more like Ethiopia? Or perhaps per capita usage is only a tiny part of the story.
Aah, I assumed you were upset about Unity's global menu (I know that bugs the crap out of me, but then so does a lot of things in Unity). The new Application Menu makes sense in a way, it's not a replacement for window menus, it's truly an application menu. So each window has menus which are relevant to that window's context, while you have a separate menu for the whole application. Contextualization like that seems like a win to me, but I guess we'll have to see if apps use it the way it's intended (a mix of window and application menus), or if they end up abusing it by jamming all the menus into one form or the other.
Will the application/global menu replace the normal window menus (in the long term)?
Nope, the application menu is strictly for global actions affecting the whole application rather than those in the window context.
https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/AppMenu
I wonder how Canonical's Unity Global Menu will account for this, they put the context menus in the location App menus are going to be taking, and while the Unity Global Menu only allows for a single menu to be on the screen at a time, the Gnome 3.4 Application Menu is a separate menu from the window context menus (thus requiring at least two menus on the screen at a time for an app which uses both).
Maybe I misunderstood you when you said that food aid is a great idea because it ruins the local economy - and them being more or less of an enemy of our state, I took this to mean that you meant it was good in a military offensive sense (which is not good in the same way most humanitarian efforts are). If so, sorry for the confusion.
You're right, with this international food going to the peasants, the food which would have gone to them will be directed upwards. But I doubt that changes much, the bureaucratic classes and above were already the first consideration for food supplies, with the peasants getting whatever was left. I doubt their meager rations are even that attractive above their ranks.
Start dumping cheap/free food on their markets, put all the local farmers out of business.
Those don't exist in DPRK, at least not legally. The "Market" was extinguished in the 60's. Almost everything you get comes from the government, and money is almost symbolic. Until the later part of the 80's peasants were not even permitted a private garden for producing their own food.
Also, only about 1/5 of North Korea is arable. This is a country which falls far short of being able to produce enough food to feed its people even under ideal circumstances. Since most farms of any significant size are government owned or controlled, and those working them are not guaranteed any share of what they produce. Aid to the people is a good thing, and trying to spin it otherwise is disingenuous.
I'm running Gnome 3.2 currently, and I don't have the global menu. I think you're thinking of the Unity overlay from Ubuntu.
It's not the value to you that they're measuring, it's the value of you. The longer you spend, the more ads you see, and the more valuable you are.
Documentation is part of the job. Are you saying that managers do not give you time to do your job?
Lack of documentation is a form of technical debt. Many managers are happy to accept technical debt if it means they can meet customer demands in the short term. I bumped into a good analogy on technical debt a few days back. It's short, and highly recommended. On Technical Debt - Now With Chickens!
The rear reversing sensors that come standard on many cars seem pretty good at detecting stuff. So why cameras for all cars? How many more would these cameras save compared to those sensors?
My father-in-law's truck has one, and our mailbox trips it as he's backing out of our driveway. Also I think they only pick up things at or above a certain height, a kid sitting on the ground behind the vehicle won't trip it. These cameras aren't expensive except that they're currently considered premium, and car manufacturers charge a huge markup on them.
This is the problem. People back over other people because they aren't looking behind them (OK, there are accidents, but 9 times out of 10 it's because some idiot just drives out without checking over their shoulders and mirrors).
I'd love to know what you base that information on.
That's a death rate of 1.1% of accidents. That's a pretty good survival rate for car accident.
What about the serious or permanent injury rate? A family friend drove over his daughter who was playing on the ground behind his truck in their driveway, which she knew she was not allowed to do, but was doing so anyway. She missed a year of school while recovering, and still walks with a limp. Their marriage barely survived, and the father still has difficulty talking about it.
In my neighborhood, the little brats assume cars can always see them no matter what. If a ball rolls in front of your car, they'll run out to get it and assume you'll stop. I've even had them play chicken with my car, requiring me to come to a complete stop less than a foot away from them. If I'm backing out of my driveway, I try to watch all directions, but since you can only look in one given direction at a time it's a challenging task, and even if you get out and physically check the space behind your car before you back up, nothing says a kid doesn't go back there while you're still getting back into your car or while you're watching that you don't clip the idiot who parked over the edge of your driveway (i.e. there are other road hazards you sometimes have to watch out for as well).
On our most recent car purchase, we wanted to get a backup camera. The model car we wanted didn't come with the option, we would have had to upgrade to the next class up (about $2500 more). Also it was a premium option, the backup camera itself was $400 (cheap, some places want up to $1,000), and it required a $2,000 navigation system upgrade (the navigation system provides the screen for the backup camera, you see). After taxes, we're tacking almost an extra $5,000 onto a $17,000 car - a roughly 30% premium for about $50 in parts.
These things aren't expensive, except that car makers know people will pay a huge premium for them, and they can tie several other upgrades together to force your hand if you want the safety feature.
Because there is the idea that what you enter into one app on your phone is not available to another app.
And that is in fact the default operating method for both major smartphone platforms. But there's value in being able to share certain kinds of data between apps. For example, if you want to write a better SMS client, that task is pretty much impossible if the user has to recreate their entire contact list and loses all their existing SMS history. That's why (on Android at least) the app has to request permission for that access. Unfortunately your only choices are to grant every permission the app requests, or not install the app at all. So if Facebook asks for access to your SMS history, your choices are only to grant it or lose access to the reason most people have smartphones to begin with - broadcasting more detail about their life than anyone but them cares about.
If I accept the "terms of use" for facebook, I do not also consent to having them go through my text messages.
Have you read their terms? If you accepted them, you're giving them a lot more access than that.
Here is the link to Ubuntu's custom install CD article: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallCDCustomization. Create your own custom installer, and use that to image all the laptops.
Yeah, I use cash for petty expenses as well, it's a good way to keep that from getting out of control. I use debit for most other things, having a hard record of exact dollar amounts in a downloadable format from my bank helps with budgeting.
If you watch the video GP linked, it's basically only sound, the image is all of sky and the interior of a car. The audio is the important evidence there.
Digital watermarks survive re-encoding unless the re-encoding is very aggressive (at a substantial quality loss). You can use different strength watermarks which survive greater amounts of distortion. It's not impossible to remove them, but it can be challenging without really impacting image quality.
Also, couldn't pirates remove the "digital watermark" functionality from the executable file? (Theoretically?)
Yes, of course. That's why it's important to make the watermark not very intrusive (why I recommended not including a logo overlay). If the watermark just looks like film grain or ISO noise, most free uses of the software won't mind - maybe won't even notice - and so won't be compelled to find a pirated version. The commercial users who'd be inclined to find a pirated version because of the watermarking would have been inclined to pirate it either way; you'll never get a license fee out of them except through litigation. At least the watermark makes it likely they either don't notice they're leaving behind digital fingerprints, or don't care.
My recommendation would be to provide a not-for-commercial-use free version which is almost totally identical to the premium version. Have this version embed a digital watermark so you can identify if videos pop up commercially which haven't paid for a commercial license. Make it non-obtrusive so home users don't mind (I recommend it not being a visible logo or anything of that sort, just the digital watermark).
You're not going to be able to prevent a pirated version from cropping up except that you make the pirated version not attractive compared to the legitimate version. Those inclined to not pay for the software are not going to pay for the software. Provide it for free with the forensic ability to detect license violations. The paid version places no watermark, so you get the best quality and the legal right to use videos commercially after it's paid for.
Although additional staffing will probably help with the backlog, it might not be the right solution. For one thing, depending on the complexity of the systems involved, new hires may for a while reduce the efficiency of the existing staff. Sometimes new hires cause dates to slip which would have been met without the hire.
Also, just because your business units are requesting work be done doesn't mean that work is necessarily worth the investment. The individual business unit can't provide a good ROI evaluation because their investment is minimal when the work is done by staff developers. In a large shop, that analysis should be being performed by the project manager or business analyst, but not everyone has this luxury.
In small to mid-sized shops, you make due with what you have, hiring more guys won't necessarily be a win for the business even if it makes Engineering's job less stressful.
In the past we've had bad luck with the word "priority," everyone makes their work the lowest priority they think places it above everyone else, so it's an escalation arms race. We had settled on rankings instead. Require the various business users to rank work against each other. It can't be inflated since it's a binary relationship between any two projects - A is more important than B, or it's not. It's up to them to come to a consensus as to whether the latest marketing blitz is really more important than codifying this year's new tax codes. If Marketing and Finance say the blitz is more important, then that's what you work on even if you're confused why that's the outcome.
Exactly, the Fair Labor Association at its core is a conflict of interest. They are funded by the companies they report on. What company would pay them for bad press? If they release unfavorable reports, they lose their funding.
Their charter has huge gaps in it, as though designed to provide companies loopholes to hide abuse. The biggest and most glaring example is that member companies are required to disclose only some factory locations. Meaning companies can create facade factories for inspection, while the real work continues to be done behind closed doors.
Even still they don't live up to their own chartered requirements with respect to transparency and accountability. There are supposed to be regular reports on factory conditions for all member companies. There are supposed to be reports on factory locations for all member companies. When abuses are found, the company is supposed to be named and remediation steps disclosed. The FLA has one report more recent than 6 years old on their site. That one relatively recent report (August 2010) is full of abuses across multiple manufacturers, including people who believe they are "always" expected to work for "more than 72 hours in a week" and for "more than 24 days in a row," and that they were not free to refuse overtime without repercussions. Those were the top measured tier in each of those categories. None of the manufacturers were named, and no remediation steps are outlined. Thus making the report completely toothless since there is no accountability and no attempt to repair the problems.
Apple opened up 90% of their factories for inspection. That's pretty good if accurate, it'd be hard to maintain a 90% facade. But they joined the FLA a month ago, FoxConn undoubtedly saw that there would be inspections coming through, and a month is more than enough time to clean up their act for inspection purposes. They also undoubtedly made it known to their workers that if they lose this Apple contract, those workers will be out of a job (and they really will be, nobody else will absorb that excess manufacturing capacity). So this inspection is easily whitewashed, and the workers will easily give glowing testimony so they retain their jobs. Also, wasn't it just a few days ago that they announced the inspections were going to start? They really thoroughly inspected all these factories in just a few days? Amazing!
So what exactly is this inspection supposed to prove? Plenty of time to prepare, workers who know if the inspection goes wrong that they'll lose their jobs, and a whirlwind tour of the factories by a sham organization. This is a token, "We got our hand slapped, let's make puppy eyes at the media," publicity stunt.
I've talked to some meat-space people about blacklights, and what I see is definitely more visible to me than typical blacklight light is to most people. Interestingly my brother, who is one of the people I asked, sees them like I do.
What I see is a very bright dark purple, if that makes sense. It's a very deep purple, but it's not dim at all, the room is well lit by this light. In a completely dark room lit only by blacklights, I'd have no more trouble navigating than if it were lit only by some other color of light. Some stuff appears black under this light, such as even caucasian human skin. Some stuff floresces and is a bright shade of whatever color it usually floresces (that's what I gather most people see from a blacklight). But most stuff is just heavily washed over with a purple light.
People can generally see the light from a blacklight, right? It's just an incredibly intense shade of deep purple? Or do blacklights legitimately not emit a typically-visible spectrum of light?
I can definitely see the light from a blacklight quite clearly. I can't stare right at a blacklight, it's just as uncomfortable as staring right at a normal light. It doesn't appear as intense visually, but it's *easily* visible and my squint and look-away reflex is just as strong. I can also see the IR light from some (but not all) remotes. This is much harder to see, usually I have to be looking right into the LED to see it. If it's very dark in the room, I can make out the outline of the beam, but it's tough.
I've always just assumed everyone is this way. It makes me wonder - is that abnormal?
It's certain to be destruction of government property to purposely sabotage a government drone. So if you're being actively monitored by such a device, you can be pretty sure there's an agent or twelve around the corner from you ready to pounce. You'll get arrested and subjected to search. Also government operated ones will probably be riding pretty high, so picking it off will be difficult. A laser is probably a good idea to blind it, but somehow I suspect it'll fall afoul of the same laws which prohibit lasering manned aircraft.
More likely these will be used to perform either passive surveillance (broad sweeping inspections - eg, let's make sure everyone who built an extension on their house paid for the permit and is paying taxes on it, and watch for signs of commercial activity on residential property, and so forth), these will be built for endurance so they can scope out a wide area. A different class of drone will be active surveillance - when they're watching your movements to feed telemetry back to a ground agent who is attempting to intercept you. These will be built for speed and maneuverability so they can follow a speeding vehicle (more like the drones in Afghanistan - plane style rather than copter style). This latter class is what will eventually be weaponized once people are accustomed to the eye in the sky.
then generate a hash from the thumbprint
Consistent hashes require consistent input, and fingerprints are not that. Fingerprint readers are designed with an error tolerance because fingerprint scans are inconsistent. They can't be used to secure data, only to instruct software it's ok to grant access to something the software has the capacity to access anyway.
Besides, Apple is in a better position to improve conditions than any other company. Not only would pretty much any factory clamber to win an Apple contract, but Apple's ludicrous profitability demonstrates they have the capacity to improve conditions without being a threat to their share holders' pocketbooks.
Aha, I misunderstood you. Your "once they forget about CarrierIQ" read to me as "they" being Google/Android (as in, once Android drops CIQ). I understand what you meant now.
You're right, decision makers often make decisions based on gut response rather than a considered evaluation.
Sure, can happen with Android, once they forget about CarrierIQ.
You realize that CarrierIQ has nothing to do with Android other than that this company wrote an Android version of it, right? You also realize that Apple was shipping CarrierIQ on the iPhone when the Android stink was going on too, right? It was only after everyone made a big deal about this that Apple said they'd take it off. It was shipped but not "supported," leaving it up to the phone companies to manage it for themselves.
Here's the difference. There was no iPhone you could buy that didn't have CIQ on it since all iPhones run pretty much the same software stack. There were and always have been plenty of Android phones out there without CIQ since it's something the carrier has to add to the device's ROM (it's not a core part of Android). Android just gave developers better access to the device, so people could see what their phone was secretly up to. iOS never generated the same stink because the most anyone could do is speculate what might be going on inside the phone, and it took being directly questioned by congress for Apple to admit that it was on the phone. But by that time most people were losing interest.
So what was your point?