Outside of the "upper middle class", middle class Americans on average have minimal liquid savings -- they might have an IRA and some home equity, but almost no "savings".
If you look at how student aid is calculated, the formula expects a 4-year degree program student to spend nearly all student assets on tuition -- Student assets disclosed on FAFSA reduce eligibility for need-based aid by 20 percent of the net worth of the asset, each year. Any savings a student has, and 5.64% of the parent's non-IRA savings, is counted towards the "Expected Family Contribution" (EFC) each year.
I had savings when I first enrolled in college. To pay my first year's EFC, I wiped out my savings account and drew my checking account down to the minimum "no fee" balance.
If you are middle class you can't get financial aid.
If you are upper middle class, your aid options are very limited, regular old middle class can get some financial aid. Our family income was smack dab in the center of "middle" class for Chicago metro area, but I qualified for a few need-based financial aid programs.
I attended IIT, a moderately expensive private research/tech school, and I received a Federal Pell grant, a subsidized (Stafford) loan, and made up the rest from the Federal Work-Study program, and of course wiped out my personal savings account. If I had instead attended University of Illinois at Chicago, a public research university, I would have received a full scholarship -- based primarily on my test scores, not on need.
"Secure" and "Available" are related but not synonymous.
It is possible to have a system that is secure against data exfiltration, but still susceptible to intentional corruption. I'm not saying this is necessarily true in this case, but it is certainly a possibility.
Fear of data leakage is just one of many reasons why a black market will continue to exist, even with "medical" and decriminalization. There's still a social stigma against pot and THC users (stronger in certain areas and cultures than others). I still want to see Obama reschedule it, not so much because I care about the legal status of marijuana, but more because it would really piss off Mike Pence.
The iPhone 6/6S build "Hey Siri" recognition into the same co-processor (really a subprocessor as it's part of the M9 CPU) as the step counter and other always-on features, so even when sleeping it is always checking the stream from the microphone for the hotword.
This reduces power consumption significantly, and only starts spooling audio to a buffer in RAM after the hotword is detected. Once the possible command is in RAM, some phones will at least attempt to do speech recognition locally, while others always ship the audio buffer up to a cloud service for analysis
You got an android phone? It has the ability to listen when the phone is off to hear you say "OK Google".
When the phone is off? Either you are confusing "locked" or "asleep" with "Off", or intentionally spreading FUD.
Most newer Android phones implement "OK Google" hotword detection using hardware, meaning that a dedicated low-power chip listens for the hotword to wake up the audio processor, but is not constantly recording audio to storage in order to analyze it for the hotword.
Amazon Echo and Apple products have their own mechanism for hotword detection. Some of these do record a continuous multi-second rolling buffer, others do it in a dedicated chip. It's not just a Google thing. In any case, the always-on listening buffer isn't stored, but some devices will upload what it thinks is a query or command, an audio stream containing all the audio after it detects the hotword.
So I guess the moral of the story is that if you are being strangled in a hot tub, you could do worse than yelling "Hey Siri! Call the police!" with your final breath.
Running your plate and taking your ID isn't about making sure they assign points to the right person, but also about looking for wants and warrants. Getting you to roll down the window and talk to the officer isn't really about checking whether you smell like booze or pot, or seem nervous. There is no right to remain silent when an automobile is involved., and traffic stops are one of the most productive ways to find and arrest people with outstanding warrants.
... we all have to have mag stripes on our cards as well just in case we ever go there. I never go to the USA, so the mag stripes on my cards are entirely useless other than for skimmers. Does anyone know of any UK banks which offer a "I am never going to go to North America so please send me a card with a blank mag stripe" service or even a "I sometimes go to North America so please send me two cards, one with mag and one without" service?
In the time that it took you to type that post, you could have erased all the mag stripes on all your credit cards.
It doesn't take much -- a strong magnet will do it, or you could just use a bit of fine sandpaper to physically remove the stripe.
I haven't kept track, but ISPs used to shit bricks if you tried to run a home server (without paying for a business class connection). Their (somewhat legitimate) reasoning was that home servers were more likely to be hacked and used for things like anonymous e-mail relays for spam.
For the most part, American ISPs have backed down from this, and block inbound only for TCP/25 and the high-risk Windows ports. A few block port 80.
For just accessing your home network for the purpose of automation, there are plenty of workarounds to get past ISP blocking, they really don't care if you run a "server" that is only ever accessed by two iPhones, one for you and one for your SO.
Many cloud-tethered products have no documentation for their protocols, no supported way to modify the firmware, and use public-key encryption to make it very difficult to "spoof" the cloud service so you can run them without talking to the vendor's proprietary server. Many vendors have realized that consumers will shop on price and ignore privacy. For example, Y-cam used to manufacture IP cameras, but based on feedback from customers now only offers a smart cloud-based security solutions, in both free and paid subscription versions
Is it really 'the cloud' that's the problem - or is it just that funding it all through advertising is the problem. If Google had all the data it currently has, but used it strictly for providing its services - and you paid for those services rather than letting Google place ads based on what it knows about you, would that be less of an issue?
Cloud based home automation and similar services would still be almost as much as an issue without the "privacy" concerns. For example, in 2014 Nest bought Revolv, a "smart home hub" maker whose product was entirely cloud-tethered. Then Google (owners of Nest) decided they didn't want to support Revolv, and so announced the End of all cloud services for Revolv customers, essentially bricking the revolv hub. So when you own a cloud-tethered device that doesn't have the option to run the essential services on your own hardware, you don't really "own" anything at all.
Regardless of business model, nearly all cloud-tethered products cheap out on protocols and update mechanisms and local components, with the concept that the smarts can be handled by the remote server so the hardware price is reduced. This is great for the vendor's ability to scale up, but not so great if they stop supporting your device, or if your connectivity to the Internet is intermittent, or if their are issues with their cloud service or cloud provider.
What gets really annoying is how many products are designed to be cloud-tethered with no provision to keep working when they can't reach the public internet.
X10 is not up to the task because it is a one-way protocol. You can not verify that the commands you send to a device are received (or successfully executed) by the device. The best you can do is send the same command multiple times and hope that at least one of them got through. And if the commands are not idempotent (as in you need to send a sequence of commands that depend on the success of the previous command) then it becomes very unreliable.
Its nice for turning on the light in the room you are already in, but that's about it.
Correct. This is why X-10 has been almost universally retired, supplanted by Insteon. And most people just getting into HA today are going with one of the newer wireless-only protocols, usually Z-Wave (Smartthings, Wink, Vera, Securifii), sometimes Zigbee (Philips, GE) or WiFI.
Similar setup here. Custom "IoT" devices, communicating using MQTT mainly (mosquitto as a broker). The downside is that it requires electronics knowledge, prorgramming knowledge and also too much free time (that's my main problem really).
Or if you don't want to get into soldering your own mains current devices and writing your own broker, there's Insteon and Z-Wave with both standalone and cloud-tethered control hubs. Neither Insteon nor Zwave sensors and load controls are directly internet linked, the devices don't phone home to the Internet and will run fine without cloud connectivity. Some of the management hubs are very much dependent on cloud services, but the more expensive ones can talk multiple automation protocols and will work fine without the Internet.
I was at ISC West earlier this year, the primary automation focus was on Z-Wave, with just about any type of sensor you can imagine being available in a Z-wave integrated package.
Making home infrastructure smart has plenty of utility, beyond simple laziness.
A smart thermostat connected to other home automation can know when nobody is home, automatically switch to energy saving mode, and then be notified when a resident is heading home so it can enter recovery mode and be back to a comfortable temperature by the time you arrive. Same goes for water heating -- if nobody is around, water in the storage heater tank can be allowed to cool down, and then brought back up to temperature before it is needed.
Speaking of hot water, having my own "smart meter" and monitoring allowed me to detect when the water heater was failing (energy use increased significantly), long before it stopped working entirely. Keeping track of power consumption by the AC system and fan can tell you when a filter is clogged or if a pump or fan motor is failing. By monitoring water usage (flow rate), you can detect plumbing leaks as well as notice when a hose is left running.
A one-way-feed out from an alarm system can be useful. If an alarm is triggered in the basement or first floor while system is "Armed-Home", then all lights on only that floor are turned on at full brightness. If "Armed-Away", all lights on all floors go into full disco stroboscope mode, and outside lights start blinking slowly on and off in the traditional S-O-S pattern. You can literally have an air gap between your alarm and home automation by using a photodiode to read the alarm LED state if you want to be paranoid.
My next step is to install powered insulated window blinds that open on sunny winter days for passive heating, then close at night to keep the heat in, and a UV sensor that closes the blinds on really sunny days to reduce UV fading of my furnishings.
The first iPhone was launched January 9, 2007, a full year after the LG Prada (and 15 years after the first touchscreen phone). LG's Prada included many of the UI, design, and functional elements claimed as iPhone "firsts".
I'm sorry but PalmOS and even Windows Mobile did all of this way before the iPhone even hit the drawing board. There were even mobile phone versions in the the form of the Treo and Tungsten C.
The only revolutionary thing about the iPhone is it broke out of the techie niche that previous devices had been trapped in and brought it mainstream, but I suspect the biggest reason for that is fashion rather than technical.
Exactly. Multi-touch aside, the iPhone wasn't particularly innovative technologically, but it was the first mainstream non-techie smart phone.
There's a fairly easy solution to these issues, and there are cyanogenmod / rooted apps that have been available for a long time so it's technically a done deal. Allow the user to control which permissions it allows for each app,
Fixed in Android 6.0 Marshmallow, this release provides a granular per-app permissions management UI, allowing revocation of permissions from any app.
If more guns make you safer, then the US should be the safest country on earth yet last year there were 12,236 deaths and a further 24,755 injuries from shootings(3.53 per 100,000). This casualty toll includes 640 children aged 0-11 killed or injured by guns.
Canada has outstandingly low gun casualty statistics. In 2009, there were 0.5 deaths per 100,000 from gun homicide — only 173 people. Still, the ownership is comparatively high — there are 23.8 firearms per 100 people in the country.
There is no legal right to possess arms in Canada. It takes sixty days to buy a gun there, and there is mandatory licensing for gun owners. Gun owners pursuing a license must have third-party references, take a safety training course and pass a background check with a focus on mental, criminal and addiction histories.
Licensing agents are required to advise an applicant's spouse or next-of-kin prior to granting a license, and licenses are denied to applicants with any past history of domestic violence. Buyers in private sales of weapons must pass official background checks.
Canadian civilians aren't allowed to possess automatic weapons, handguns with a barrel shorter than 10.5 cm or any modified handgun, rifle or shotgun. Most semi-automatic assault weapons are also banned. As a result of exemptions, several kinds of assault weapons are still legal in Canada, although this has been the source of some controversy.
You would think there would be more crime in Canada as almost no one carries a concealed weapon yet the per capita rate of all crimes is much lower than the US
Compare Canada to New Hampshire, USA: the most machine guns per capita in the country, about 10% of the population has a concealed carry license, no paperwork is needed to purchase, posses, or even to open carry a firearm.
eliminating handguns from the USA would likely bring our rape rate up
Ok, I've seen this enough in this thread, usually from the people who are claiming the results cited in TFA are BS. So I need a citation. Show me that in similarly developed countries, but with higher levels of gun control, the rates of sexual assault and/or rape are consistently higher.
Oh, and remember, correlation != causation, right? Or does that all of a sudden change when it supports what you believe?
BTW, while I'm pro 2nd Amendment, I'm also anti made up bullshit. Show me your bullshit isn't made up.
I'm not going to do your research for you. Note that I said "likely" -- the crime of rape, in particular, is difficult if not impossible to compare nation-to-nation or even state-to-state because of reporting differences, driven as much by culture as by law enforcement.
i can too:
cities and states that lack gun control, or are barred from enacting local gun control by state law.
cities like New Orleans, St Louis, Detroit, Birmingham.
meanwhile cities with gun control dont appear on those lists. cities like chicago (not the murder capital), new york (safest in the country).
FYI, Chicago now has very little gun control, and is prohibited by the 2013 statewide preemption law from enacting new gun control. Chicago's 1982 catch-22 handgun registration (ban) law has been overturned, it's now possible (if you have time and money to spare), to obtain a concealed carry permit even if you are a Chicago resident.
As with the rest of the country, changes in gun laws show no correlation with changes in homicide rates in Chicago. None of the changes in Chicago's gun laws have made any difference in Chicago's crime problem -- not making them stricter, and not making them looser.
And yet when you compare the figure of 100% of US residents that murder people with guns to the Canadian gun stats, somehow the US stats are much higher. I don't know what it means but some genius should study those figures. We could have a murder-fee society in just a few years. I'm actually going to propose a study that will determine if gun manufacturers are embedding some type of ignorance drug into the metal, wood and plastics that guns are made of recently.
So it's ignorant to recognize that crime rates and laws are not uniform across provinces or across states?
There are parts of Canada with shockingly high violent crime rates, and high overall homicide rates. There are parts of the USA with shockingly high violent crime rates, and high overall homicide rates. It's almost as if homicide isn't a uniform issue in either of these nations, and firearms ownership does not show a strong correlation to homicide rate, which should lead the non-ignorant person to suspect there are other factors driving these problems.
Given that Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire have high firearms ownership (about 10% of residents carry handguns) and lower homicide rates than Canada, maybe we don't need new nationwide laws covering the entire US, maybe we should look at what is different about Maine and it's neighbors to make them safer not only than the USA average, but also safer than the Canadian average?
As you've noted, Mr. Webster runs the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Healthâ(TM)s Center for Gun Policy and Research; his job is basically to fund and promote anti-gun research, so when Daniel Webster comes out and says a [/snip]
Whilst I realise Slashdots taken somewhat of an anti-intellectual nose-dive lately (as evidenced by a preponderance of anti climate science crackpottery), I believe the term you are looking for is "gun research", not "anti-gun research". Its a university research lab. It looks at the numbers and deduces what the statistics say.
Sure, that is how it works when you have honest academic researchers. Meanwhile, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Healthâ(TM)s Center for Gun Policy and Research, they start with their desired conclusion and then devise approaches to reach the desired conclusion which will best please their primary sources of funding, Bloomberg and the Joyce Foundation.
For example, in the Connecticut study, the authors choose a ten year span from 1995-2005, carefully cutting off their data to avoid the years before and after that time frame which would lead to a different conclusion. Similar incongruous choices are made in other Webster-backed studies.
My position on guns has me yelled at by both sides. I would like something like a driver's license to be required for buying guns and ammo. The license is earned (ideally at no cost or at a very nominal fee) by demonstrating that you can shoot what you are aiming at, clean a gun safely, and store it properly. You can lose this license by committing a violent crime with a firearm, being drunk or high with a firearm on you, or leaving your firearm unsecured where small children can get to it. Apparently this stance makes me a horrible monster to both sides of the debate.
Sounds wonderful. How about we do the same thing for speech, and heck, while we're at it, religion.
You just know that there would be certain states, mostly southern, where a "religious practice license" would be trivial to get so long as your religion involves worshiping a single god and an oddly Caucasian looking dude who died on a cross and your masses are given in the king's English, but inexplicably difficult to obtain if your beliefs differ substantially from that baseline.
Well that's the same sort of thing that happens with firearms licensing in San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, or (until a few years ago) Detroit. Are you white and live in a nice neighborhood and supported your sheriff's re-election campaign? Congratulations, your license is processed in a timely manner (Except in SF, where they deny everybody). On the other hand, if you are not lucky enough to be one of the "right people", somehow your application encounters unexpected delays and involves additional interviews, visits to the police station "for reasons", or in Chicago, arbitrary denial based on your street address.
In 2012, four people were killed by guns in Japan. Three of them were Yakuza. In the same year, 22 people were killed by bee stings.
While that sounds good, also keep in mind that Japan's total murder rate is lower than America's non-firearm murder rate, so no law restricting a particular weapon is going to get us down to Japanese levels of homicide -- but eliminating handguns from the USA would likely bring our rape rate up to the true rape incidence in Japan...
It sounds like whatever stats someone shovels your way is what you believe,...
If it fits what you already believe. Which is normal. And why people like you don't get to the make the decisions.
Oddly enough, the lead author for this Boston University study refused to take outside funding; this study was paid for by Boston University, with no grants provided by groups with a strong bias on either side of the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
How were you middle class without any savings?
Outside of the "upper middle class", middle class Americans on average have minimal liquid savings -- they might have an IRA and some home equity, but almost no "savings".
If you look at how student aid is calculated, the formula expects a 4-year degree program student to spend nearly all student assets on tuition -- Student assets disclosed on FAFSA reduce eligibility for need-based aid by 20 percent of the net worth of the asset, each year. Any savings a student has, and 5.64% of the parent's non-IRA savings, is counted towards the "Expected Family Contribution" (EFC) each year.
I had savings when I first enrolled in college. To pay my first year's EFC, I wiped out my savings account and drew my checking account down to the minimum "no fee" balance.
If you are middle class you can't get financial aid.
If you are upper middle class, your aid options are very limited, regular old middle class can get some financial aid. Our family income was smack dab in the center of "middle" class for Chicago metro area, but I qualified for a few need-based financial aid programs.
I attended IIT, a moderately expensive private research/tech school, and I received a Federal Pell grant, a subsidized (Stafford) loan, and made up the rest from the Federal Work-Study program, and of course wiped out my personal savings account. If I had instead attended University of Illinois at Chicago, a public research university, I would have received a full scholarship -- based primarily on my test scores, not on need.
"Secure" and "Available" are related but not synonymous.
It is possible to have a system that is secure against data exfiltration, but still susceptible to intentional corruption. I'm not saying this is necessarily true in this case, but it is certainly a possibility.
Fear of data leakage is just one of many reasons why a black market will continue to exist, even with "medical" and decriminalization. There's still a social stigma against pot and THC users (stronger in certain areas and cultures than others). I still want to see Obama reschedule it, not so much because I care about the legal status of marijuana, but more because it would really piss off Mike Pence.
The chips from Sensory date back to around 2010, at which point they were all of two bucks each. I don't recall which Android phones do or do not have chipset based hotword detection, but suspect that it's all but ubiquitous these days.
The iPhone 6/6S build "Hey Siri" recognition into the same co-processor (really a subprocessor as it's part of the M9 CPU) as the step counter and other always-on features, so even when sleeping it is always checking the stream from the microphone for the hotword.
This reduces power consumption significantly, and only starts spooling audio to a buffer in RAM after the hotword is detected. Once the possible command is in RAM, some phones will at least attempt to do speech recognition locally, while others always ship the audio buffer up to a cloud service for analysis
You got an android phone? It has the ability to listen when the phone is off to hear you say "OK Google".
When the phone is off? Either you are confusing "locked" or "asleep" with "Off", or intentionally spreading FUD.
Most newer Android phones implement "OK Google" hotword detection using hardware, meaning that a dedicated low-power chip listens for the hotword to wake up the audio processor, but is not constantly recording audio to storage in order to analyze it for the hotword.
Amazon Echo and Apple products have their own mechanism for hotword detection. Some of these do record a continuous multi-second rolling buffer, others do it in a dedicated chip. It's not just a Google thing. In any case, the always-on listening buffer isn't stored, but some devices will upload what it thinks is a query or command, an audio stream containing all the audio after it detects the hotword.
So I guess the moral of the story is that if you are being strangled in a hot tub, you could do worse than yelling "Hey Siri! Call the police!" with your final breath.
This ignores the unspoken policy that traffic stops are not always about enforcing traffic law and collecting small fines, but rather the police want that interaction with the driver so they can fish for bigger violations. Traffic stops are "pretext stops", a loophole to get around the 4th amendment.
Running your plate and taking your ID isn't about making sure they assign points to the right person, but also about looking for wants and warrants. Getting you to roll down the window and talk to the officer isn't really about checking whether you smell like booze or pot, or seem nervous. There is no right to remain silent when an automobile is involved., and traffic stops are one of the most productive ways to find and arrest people with outstanding warrants.
... we all have to have mag stripes on our cards as well just in case we ever go there. I never go to the USA, so the mag stripes on my cards are entirely useless other than for skimmers. Does anyone know of any UK banks which offer a "I am never going to go to North America so please send me a card with a blank mag stripe" service or even a "I sometimes go to North America so please send me two cards, one with mag and one without" service?
In the time that it took you to type that post, you could have erased all the mag stripes on all your credit cards. It doesn't take much -- a strong magnet will do it, or you could just use a bit of fine sandpaper to physically remove the stripe.
Literally there were 370 "mass shootings" (i.e. more than 4 people killed) last year in the US.
Sorry, but that is a falsehood -- there were not 370 incidents where more than 4 people were killed in the United States in 2015. It's widely agreed that this claim is nothing more than political propaganda.
I haven't kept track, but ISPs used to shit bricks if you tried to run a home server (without paying for a business class connection). Their (somewhat legitimate) reasoning was that home servers were more likely to be hacked and used for things like anonymous e-mail relays for spam.
For the most part, American ISPs have backed down from this, and block inbound only for TCP/25 and the high-risk Windows ports. A few block port 80.
For just accessing your home network for the purpose of automation, there are plenty of workarounds to get past ISP blocking, they really don't care if you run a "server" that is only ever accessed by two iPhones, one for you and one for your SO.
Many cloud-tethered products have no documentation for their protocols, no supported way to modify the firmware, and use public-key encryption to make it very difficult to "spoof" the cloud service so you can run them without talking to the vendor's proprietary server. Many vendors have realized that consumers will shop on price and ignore privacy. For example, Y-cam used to manufacture IP cameras, but based on feedback from customers now only offers a smart cloud-based security solutions, in both free and paid subscription versions
Is it really 'the cloud' that's the problem - or is it just that funding it all through advertising is the problem. If Google had all the data it currently has, but used it strictly for providing its services - and you paid for those services rather than letting Google place ads based on what it knows about you, would that be less of an issue?
Cloud based home automation and similar services would still be almost as much as an issue without the "privacy" concerns. For example, in 2014 Nest bought Revolv, a "smart home hub" maker whose product was entirely cloud-tethered. Then Google (owners of Nest) decided they didn't want to support Revolv, and so announced the End of all cloud services for Revolv customers, essentially bricking the revolv hub. So when you own a cloud-tethered device that doesn't have the option to run the essential services on your own hardware, you don't really "own" anything at all.
Regardless of business model, nearly all cloud-tethered products cheap out on protocols and update mechanisms and local components, with the concept that the smarts can be handled by the remote server so the hardware price is reduced. This is great for the vendor's ability to scale up, but not so great if they stop supporting your device, or if your connectivity to the Internet is intermittent, or if their are issues with their cloud service or cloud provider.
What gets really annoying is how many products are designed to be cloud-tethered with no provision to keep working when they can't reach the public internet.
X10 is not up to the task because it is a one-way protocol. You can not verify that the commands you send to a device are received (or successfully executed) by the device. The best you can do is send the same command multiple times and hope that at least one of them got through. And if the commands are not idempotent (as in you need to send a sequence of commands that depend on the success of the previous command) then it becomes very unreliable.
Its nice for turning on the light in the room you are already in, but that's about it.
Correct. This is why X-10 has been almost universally retired, supplanted by Insteon. And most people just getting into HA today are going with one of the newer wireless-only protocols, usually Z-Wave (Smartthings, Wink, Vera, Securifii), sometimes Zigbee (Philips, GE) or WiFI.
Similar setup here. Custom "IoT" devices, communicating using MQTT mainly (mosquitto as a broker). The downside is that it requires electronics knowledge, prorgramming knowledge and also too much free time (that's my main problem really).
Or if you don't want to get into soldering your own mains current devices and writing your own broker, there's Insteon and Z-Wave with both standalone and cloud-tethered control hubs. Neither Insteon nor Zwave sensors and load controls are directly internet linked, the devices don't phone home to the Internet and will run fine without cloud connectivity. Some of the management hubs are very much dependent on cloud services, but the more expensive ones can talk multiple automation protocols and will work fine without the Internet.
I was at ISC West earlier this year, the primary automation focus was on Z-Wave, with just about any type of sensor you can imagine being available in a Z-wave integrated package.
Making home infrastructure smart has plenty of utility, beyond simple laziness.
A smart thermostat connected to other home automation can know when nobody is home, automatically switch to energy saving mode, and then be notified when a resident is heading home so it can enter recovery mode and be back to a comfortable temperature by the time you arrive. Same goes for water heating -- if nobody is around, water in the storage heater tank can be allowed to cool down, and then brought back up to temperature before it is needed.
Speaking of hot water, having my own "smart meter" and monitoring allowed me to detect when the water heater was failing (energy use increased significantly), long before it stopped working entirely. Keeping track of power consumption by the AC system and fan can tell you when a filter is clogged or if a pump or fan motor is failing. By monitoring water usage (flow rate), you can detect plumbing leaks as well as notice when a hose is left running.
A one-way-feed out from an alarm system can be useful. If an alarm is triggered in the basement or first floor while system is "Armed-Home", then all lights on only that floor are turned on at full brightness. If "Armed-Away", all lights on all floors go into full disco stroboscope mode, and outside lights start blinking slowly on and off in the traditional S-O-S pattern. You can literally have an air gap between your alarm and home automation by using a photodiode to read the alarm LED state if you want to be paranoid.
My next step is to install powered insulated window blinds that open on sunny winter days for passive heating, then close at night to keep the heat in, and a UV sensor that closes the blinds on really sunny days to reduce UV fading of my furnishings.
I'm sorry but PalmOS and even Windows Mobile did all of this way before the iPhone even hit the drawing board. There were even mobile phone versions in the the form of the Treo and Tungsten C.
The only revolutionary thing about the iPhone is it broke out of the techie niche that previous devices had been trapped in and brought it mainstream, but I suspect the biggest reason for that is fashion rather than technical.
Exactly. Multi-touch aside, the iPhone wasn't particularly innovative technologically, but it was the first mainstream non-techie smart phone.
This sounds similar to the search of Free Talk Live in Keene, NH about 2 weeks ago. Early on a Sunday morning, the FBI served a warrant , under which FBI agents walked off with anything with a USB or SATA interface.
There's a fairly easy solution to these issues, and there are cyanogenmod / rooted apps that have been available for a long time so it's technically a done deal. Allow the user to control which permissions it allows for each app,
Fixed in Android 6.0 Marshmallow, this release provides a granular per-app permissions management UI, allowing revocation of permissions from any app.
If more guns make you safer, then the US should be the safest country on earth yet last year there were 12,236 deaths and a further 24,755 injuries from shootings(3.53 per 100,000). This casualty toll includes 640 children aged 0-11 killed or injured by guns.
Canada has outstandingly low gun casualty statistics. In 2009, there were 0.5 deaths per 100,000 from gun homicide — only 173 people. Still, the ownership is comparatively high — there are 23.8 firearms per 100 people in the country.
There is no legal right to possess arms in Canada. It takes sixty days to buy a gun there, and there is mandatory licensing for gun owners. Gun owners pursuing a license must have third-party references, take a safety training course and pass a background check with a focus on mental, criminal and addiction histories.
Licensing agents are required to advise an applicant's spouse or next-of-kin prior to granting a license, and licenses are denied to applicants with any past history of domestic violence. Buyers in private sales of weapons must pass official background checks.
Canadian civilians aren't allowed to possess automatic weapons, handguns with a barrel shorter than 10.5 cm or any modified handgun, rifle or shotgun. Most semi-automatic assault weapons are also banned. As a result of exemptions, several kinds of assault weapons are still legal in Canada, although this has been the source of some controversy.
You would think there would be more crime in Canada as almost no one carries a concealed weapon yet the per capita rate of all crimes is much lower than the US
Compare Canada to New Hampshire, USA: the most machine guns per capita in the country, about 10% of the population has a concealed carry license, no paperwork is needed to purchase, posses, or even to open carry a firearm.
Yet somehow, New Hampshire Is Safer Than Canada.
eliminating handguns from the USA would likely bring our rape rate up
Ok, I've seen this enough in this thread, usually from the people who are claiming the results cited in TFA are BS. So I need a citation. Show me that in similarly developed countries, but with higher levels of gun control, the rates of sexual assault and/or rape are consistently higher.
Oh, and remember, correlation != causation, right? Or does that all of a sudden change when it supports what you believe?
BTW, while I'm pro 2nd Amendment, I'm also anti made up bullshit. Show me your bullshit isn't made up.
I'm not going to do your research for you. Note that I said "likely" -- the crime of rape, in particular, is difficult if not impossible to compare nation-to-nation or even state-to-state because of reporting differences, driven as much by culture as by law enforcement.
i can too: cities and states that lack gun control, or are barred from enacting local gun control by state law. cities like New Orleans, St Louis, Detroit, Birmingham.
meanwhile cities with gun control dont appear on those lists. cities like chicago (not the murder capital), new york (safest in the country).
FYI, Chicago now has very little gun control, and is prohibited by the 2013 statewide preemption law from enacting new gun control. Chicago's 1982 catch-22 handgun registration (ban) law has been overturned, it's now possible (if you have time and money to spare), to obtain a concealed carry permit even if you are a Chicago resident.
As with the rest of the country, changes in gun laws show no correlation with changes in homicide rates in Chicago. None of the changes in Chicago's gun laws have made any difference in Chicago's crime problem -- not making them stricter, and not making them looser.
And yet when you compare the figure of 100% of US residents that murder people with guns to the Canadian gun stats, somehow the US stats are much higher. I don't know what it means but some genius should study those figures. We could have a murder-fee society in just a few years. I'm actually going to propose a study that will determine if gun manufacturers are embedding some type of ignorance drug into the metal, wood and plastics that guns are made of recently.
So it's ignorant to recognize that crime rates and laws are not uniform across provinces or across states?
There are parts of Canada with shockingly high violent crime rates, and high overall homicide rates. There are parts of the USA with shockingly high violent crime rates, and high overall homicide rates. It's almost as if homicide isn't a uniform issue in either of these nations, and firearms ownership does not show a strong correlation to homicide rate, which should lead the non-ignorant person to suspect there are other factors driving these problems.
Given that Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire have high firearms ownership (about 10% of residents carry handguns) and lower homicide rates than Canada, maybe we don't need new nationwide laws covering the entire US, maybe we should look at what is different about Maine and it's neighbors to make them safer not only than the USA average, but also safer than the Canadian average?
Whilst I realise Slashdots taken somewhat of an anti-intellectual nose-dive lately (as evidenced by a preponderance of anti climate science crackpottery), I believe the term you are looking for is "gun research", not "anti-gun research". Its a university research lab. It looks at the numbers and deduces what the statistics say.
Sure, that is how it works when you have honest academic researchers. Meanwhile, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Healthâ(TM)s Center for Gun Policy and Research, they start with their desired conclusion and then devise approaches to reach the desired conclusion which will best please their primary sources of funding, Bloomberg and the Joyce Foundation.
For example, in the Connecticut study, the authors choose a ten year span from 1995-2005, carefully cutting off their data to avoid the years before and after that time frame which would lead to a different conclusion. Similar incongruous choices are made in other Webster-backed studies.
My position on guns has me yelled at by both sides. I would like something like a driver's license to be required for buying guns and ammo. The license is earned (ideally at no cost or at a very nominal fee) by demonstrating that you can shoot what you are aiming at, clean a gun safely, and store it properly. You can lose this license by committing a violent crime with a firearm, being drunk or high with a firearm on you, or leaving your firearm unsecured where small children can get to it. Apparently this stance makes me a horrible monster to both sides of the debate.
Sounds wonderful. How about we do the same thing for speech, and heck, while we're at it, religion.
You just know that there would be certain states, mostly southern, where a "religious practice license" would be trivial to get so long as your religion involves worshiping a single god and an oddly Caucasian looking dude who died on a cross and your masses are given in the king's English, but inexplicably difficult to obtain if your beliefs differ substantially from that baseline.
Well that's the same sort of thing that happens with firearms licensing in San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, or (until a few years ago) Detroit. Are you white and live in a nice neighborhood and supported your sheriff's re-election campaign? Congratulations, your license is processed in a timely manner (Except in SF, where they deny everybody). On the other hand, if you are not lucky enough to be one of the "right people", somehow your application encounters unexpected delays and involves additional interviews, visits to the police station "for reasons", or in Chicago, arbitrary denial based on your street address.
"mental competence" = you are buddies with the local Sheriff or the mayor.
At least that's how it's been practiced in the past, especially in states with oppressive gun laws.
That is how it is currently practiced in many parts of Rhode Island.
In 2012, four people were killed by guns in Japan. Three of them were Yakuza. In the same year, 22 people were killed by bee stings.
While that sounds good, also keep in mind that Japan's total murder rate is lower than America's non-firearm murder rate, so no law restricting a particular weapon is going to get us down to Japanese levels of homicide -- but eliminating handguns from the USA would likely bring our rape rate up to the true rape incidence in Japan...
It sounds like whatever stats someone shovels your way is what you believe, ...
If it fits what you already believe. Which is normal. And why people like you don't get to the make the decisions.
Oddly enough, the lead author for this Boston University study refused to take outside funding; this study was paid for by Boston University, with no grants provided by groups with a strong bias on either side of the issue.