Posts by Michael C

and sound dampening too...

Many higher end cars ore so quiet inside, you can honk a horn and they won;t hear it, even with the radio off. most others drive with the radio so loud they're not going to hear it anyway... headphones are a moot issue.

not really

They sense acceleration, not movement. it requires GPS to sense movement over a distance. Still, that could be a passenger as easily as a driver, there;s no way to pinpoint the phone to the front left sear (or right in other countries).

the enforcement here is simple:

1) you can be pulled over simply for having something (ANYTHING) in your hand while driving a car.

2) ALL voice use of cellphones by the driver must be through integrated systems starting with all new cars, and through aftermarket systems or blue tooth single-ear headsets for older models, NO exceptions.

3) All phones must support voice dial at no extra charge from this point forward.

4)If you are pulled over, and a cell phone is visible anywhere near a driver, the cop will take the phone number, call the provider on a hotline, and confirm is SMS or e-mail have or have not been sent from the device during the current trip (easily validated by noting the length of time it was traveling by tower hopping or GPS log, but that can be done without revealing WHERE they dove to/from without a further court order, aka, i can tell you were driving on a freeway for 2 hours without a stop, but i don;t have to tell the cop where to or from), then they check the log in the phone. If SMS were sent during that time, but do not appear in the log, it's not only that you're charged of texting while driving (which a court will latter disseminate from more detailed records), but of destruction of evidence too. If SMS were received, but were deleted, clearly they had to be read to do so, and you're also guilty.

5) make the penalty for using a cell phone while driving equal to the penalties for drunk driving.

6) apple vehicular manslaughter laws equally to accidents caused by distracted driving.

We don't need to block phones, we don't need to mandate additional equipment (other than OPTION equipment to use a hands free device while driving, that's your choice if you want to, with the exception that all cars should have this built in so the car itself can dial 911 in even of a wreck in order to save lives). We just need to make sure people don;t do this. Putting blocks on cell use while driving through Jammers is exactly the same as if they required a breathalyzer ignition test on all cars. They'll never pass either, so we go the easy route: very strict enforcement.

It may be a privacy concern for cops to have access to detailed call records and GPS logs in the effort to prosecute drivers texting but it is NOT a privacy concern for them to have access to a "was it used or not" report. We can easily accommodate that.

simple

In order to scan the next person, and error flag, warning alarm, etc, must be cleared. This automatically deletes the image.

it is not "saved" at all, it is simple "on screen" until cleared. it is a snapshot, stored in memory. The person has left the machine, but we need the image on screen for 30 seconds or so to analyze it. Maybe longer if they think they see something, or want the opinion of their superior.

They do NOT hold up the line when there's an anomoly, they flick the "pat him down" button, trust the other TSA guys will do their part and find what the anomaly was in the pat down, and scan the next person in line to keep it moving...

nope.

The scan is a "probable cause" for a further inspection, at which point they FIND the contraband. The image is not evidence, the CONTERABAND is.

It CAN in fact be done, but doing so means holding up the entire line while the image is maintained on the screen until a senior officer can come enter a special pass code and only then ca it be saved in secure storage while must later be accessed by technicians. You can't just plug a thumb drive into this thing...

the screening process works like this:

- agent has you stand in the scanner.

- person in another room looks at the scan and presses a "Yay/Nay" button. (or an actual alarm if they see something, like a GUN)

- upon Nay, you are escorted to an area for further screening, where another agent, under the watch of a 3rd, pats you down.

- in the meantime, the "nay" flag is cleared (deleting the image), and someone NEW is being scanned while the possible perp is still being shuffled over and patted down.

- probably 2 or 3 more people might get scanned before they FIND something on the guy getting patted.

If they held up the entire scanning process as often as someone needs a pat down because something "suspicious" was on the screen, getting through security would take 5-10 times as long, and require twice the staff.

the image is deleted long before the perp is identified as having contraband. The courts don't care about the image anyway if they have physical evidence, especially physical evidence collected in plain sight of a dozen witnesses, and on camera!. They do not need the scan image, it is deleted.

chicken, egg

The App that the iBooks look is based on was released on iOS before there was and Android... It was called Delicious Library. Apple fully admitted they used the look/feel and praised on stage the original designer. Did they license it? no, but they didn't have to, it was neither copy written nor trademarked, and getting one on such an idea probably is beyond patentable and the original author admitted that as a reason why he didn't bother to. So they, as in done in Linux communities, simply cited the origin and gave credit where credit was due. He was a little upset he didn't get a phone call first, but does Linus expect a call every time someone ports one of his ideas?

As for the others on Android, they did not do the same. They simply copied. At least one of them openly claimed to be the originator of the idea...

As for your choice: not clicking either = ambivalence. Leaving a comment goes further. B/W would require the clicking of one or the other with no other options or feedback possible. You can leave a comment here without clicking either, thus getting exactly what you want, no?

duh, single carrier george?

1) only one carrier vs nationwide sales

2) Carriers PUSH android, in bundles and 2 for 1 sales, and special promotions, and millions in advertising per day, where as people ASK for iOS.

3) sub-$200 options (crap as they are, there is a market for them)

4) its still new, and the users have yet to revolt from being burned and disenfranchised (though it's spinning up).

Seriously, the tone in here is pretty grim for Android. 6 months ago, this would have been 95% pro-android, but more than half the posts hare are practically spelling its doom now. Its slow to evolve, showing its security weaknesses, Flash is exactly as Apple claimed (slow, draining, laggy, crashes and only works good at all on top end stuff), and we're seeing phone after phone come out and get left behind without Froyo materializing.

As soon as there's a Verizon iPhone you're gonna see Android sales plummet. If WM7 actually works as advertised, it's going to cannibalize the rest. Why? The carriers HATE android. They only reason they have it is to keep their customers from running to AT&T. With an alternative, it will get no love... No more special data plan pricing, no more bundles, no more advertising. Carriers love control, lock-in, and no compromises, and WP7 offers that, with it;s closed store, no side-loading, no tethering without a separate plan, and no complex support headaches. Pre failed because it failed the Devs, and the carriers noticed. No apps equaled no real iPhone competition, so they stuck with android. WP7 is a viable Palm OS equivalent, and it has motion, and money behind it. They don;t like that they can;t have their skins anymore, but they would have the same with Apple too, so no real loss to them.

I give Android 2 years before it;s relegated back to where it should have never left, geeks and tweakers. (if the courts don;t pull the plug on this whole stolen Java issue).

keep dreaming...

A coalition that depends on a single source for code, but localized modification and fragmentation of that code, carrier influences and further modification, a scattered and fragmented product line the competes with itself, and an abysmal security and patching regiment (not to mention no guarantee what so ever support for you handset won;t be dropped after as little as 6 months cutting you off from anything new). The PLATFORM is great, but the user disatisfaction and disenfrachisement is extreme. Cople this with people practically being forced into buying handsets they have no reason to have, can't figure out how to use, and don't begin to understand how to secure by pushy sales people, all of that and with Apple having $200 in headroom on their platform to drop the price and still profit?

Android is a great platform for admins, tweakers, geeks, and the technically inclined, but until Google gets control of the carriers and manufacturers and gets this party train on the tracks, its a failure headed foer the record books ()and that's if the courts don't rip it's Java heart out first and end this show even faster).

iOS is an extremely flexible platform. The UI may not have changed much over 3 years, but it;s core is still very much OS X, and very powerful. A9 chips forthcoming in lower TDP packages, and retina 10" displays, and throw in the camera 90% of people want but only 20% of people will use, and keep the price the same, and the iPad 2 will be unbeatable for another year. Android apps are simply not designed for larger screens. There are no programming hooks to take advantage of. They can play the hardware game all they like, but unless Android 3 is a major overhaul (breaking backward compatibility and pissing off even more users, but it HAS to be done), then android won't ever succeed on tablets.

Android is a users nightmare (slow to patch, complex, more powerful than required for daily use), a devs nightmare (fragmentation, slow code releases, no long and extreme term forthought on design), a manufacturer's nightmare (pissed off users and lots of competition), and a carrier's nightmare (lock-in issues, no hard controls, heavier network use than iPhones). WP7 will be their golden child and Android is gonna get a back seat. Verizon iPhones will take 30-50% of Androinds market within a year as well. Manufacturer profits will drop and handset options will have to become fewer to compete on price, not to mention fragmentation of their own internal dev teams and testing teams supporting 2 or 3 OS platforms??? it can not win, it has no end game.

Google on it;s won, making devices and software, sold direct as well as through carriers, that had a chance. What we have today, does not.

Also...

Variety on a theme is hard to plan capacity for. Which one will be more popular than another? how to manage supply? The color of a case is not a big deal. The size of the chips on-board, that can be managed with minute supply line changes. One screen size vs another and a slight misjudge in consumer demand could lead to sellouts of one and tens thousands of another unsold. When products are dramatically different, and have a large price difference, user choice is easily binned and planned for.

Apple has only a few major products, and it works VERY well for them. Profit margins are massive. Dell outsells Apple 4 to 1, but Apple has more total annual revenue and significantly more profit on the same revenue. When they release a new model, its easy for them to spin down one line and bring up another one, managing the supply chain with expert precision. This factors heavily into how they can price the device.

Keep in mind, the iPad's $599 price tag is "an experiment" and Apple admitted to having great flexibility in that price. Sooner or later the competition will come out with something better (though at this rate, not before iPad Gen 2). When they do, Apple can drop $200 or more and still be profitable, but the competition simply can not go that low, having spent too much in R&D, licensing, manufacturing, and logistics. Apple's simplicity may not please everyone, far from it, but in consumer devices it means they can offer more for less most of the time, and enjoy premium profits when the competition can barely break even.

look at this

Apple is SO big of a buyer, of almost exclusively top shelf components, that they can essentially CHANGE the design of any product they want such that it suits them, whether they make it themselves or not. Intel custom designs chips for Apple's needs and always gives them first runs on new chips. IBM didn't do this, and Apple dropped them as soon as it was able (and planned that 4 years earlier as a contingency, right from day 1 designing OS X on Power, x86, and AMD concurrently). They got the retina display not only designed for them, no one else knew about it until they had millions of them and an exclusive distribution contract covering 3-6 months? They get not only top bin pricing from suppliers, they get first dibs. Suppliers make quantities Apple asks for of parts Apple want, and then make everyone else's stuff. They know Apple's marketing machine will actually deliver on sales metrics (if not strain capacity) and they'll not be left holding top shelf chips no one else wants...

Apple may not make the parts, but they might as well. This way, they're flexible, and are not stuck will million in manufacturing line equipment that can't be used on their next gen product. Sony will make retina displays for years after Apple stops using them, and apple will have a better technology in use, maybe from Sony if they play nice, or from their competition if they can't deliver, and either way Sony got a cutting edge system made excessively popular with no marketing muscle of their own needed. Win Win.

blown out of proportion?

"deleted" and "scrubbed from all possible disk records" are 2 very different things man.

They're certainly not expecting you to purge a customer record from your systems down to the block on disk, let alone pull backup tapes that might have that record too... They're talking about hitting the delete key and MARKING it as deleted, simply such that a user who looks it up won't find the record (except maybe to SEE it was deleted, in case someone tries to add the record back later), or so it won;t pull in reports, and so unassociated fields not needed can be cleared. (you might need to keep a name, address, and phone number ON record such to ensure you NEVER call that person, but this can easily be considered a "deleted" record so long as its marked as "do not use" and can not be accessed by employees outside of IT).

The idea here is to make them stop using and selling your records. That's something we can, within reason, police, especially if there's a national system like a do-not-call for the internet.... Having internal audits to scan your databases for "deleted" records is beyond the scope (or concern) of the government.

The idea of this new office is exactly this: to determine what IS reasonable and feasible, to come up with simple streamlined laws covering not just how to get rid of data but controlling how you get it in the first place, to give consumers avenues to complain to, and a system to "opt-out" into, and to set newer, easier to enforce, and much stricter penalties for those who abuse consumers.

exactly

Every one of these people are far more exposed on a far more frequent bases to people who can see them up close and personal. Every one of the women spread-em wide for a Gyno typically (hopefully) at least once a year. Men let their balls be cupped by a doc when they cough. Everyone goes through a routine physical at lease every few years, almost or complely naked, with not only a doc who knows them personally in the room, but the passing nurses and staff as well.

Every one of these people are also full willing to strap on a bathing suet, pretty much equally if not MORE revealing on a regular basis, in public.

LOOK at these images. They're gray-scale, faces are blurred, they highlight dense material not identifying skin marks, and are low enough in resolution to see an object, but not the DETAIL of an object. They can't pan, zoom, rotate these images, or focus on specific parts. More over, the people seeing them see then 1) all day long (dunning sensitivity to them), 2) are in another room, where they can not see you, and have no idea who you are, and 3) are looking for DANGEROUS THINGS, not boobies.

So what. Someone who will never see you in person gets to see a slightly more penetrating, but far from superior view of you that any Joe Bob at the beach, and far less than you let your doctor see. These people are forced to see not just your curves you might like to hide, but the curves of people that should be hidden... For every half nice looking (in fuzzy B&W) body that comes through, they're forced to see 50 they'd rather not see.

There's many ways to get around using these scanners: get a far more invasive pat down, get national security clearance levels sufficient to walk right on by, or DON'T FLY! The plane must be secure from terorists. Do you seriously care so much about someone you'll never meet seeing a bad image of you on a screen (and having no association of it to you personally) that you'll risk another 9/11, even when you let a doctor, someone who knows you personally, not only see you, but feel you up and sick things inside you? Get your priorities straight... these people are themselves screened and chosen for these jobs. Trust me, they'de rather not be seeing you this way, but they feel it has to be done.

disks

lol. BR disk has almost the exact same manufacturing process. A blank disk is far more complicated than a factory pressed disk, and more expensive to make, and I can buy a 100 pack of DVDs for under $30 easy. I've seen them as cheap as $).10 a disk. There's no complex technology in one vs the other, but BR blanks are $30 each, and DVD are a fraction of a dollar. The tech is in the DRIVE (aka the lasing system), but the disk is just some layering of some materials, nothing ridiculously special.

Its the licensing that you pay for, not the thing itself. Maybe MS puts $25-30 of parts in it, but assuming they say 1 million units (generous given sales thus far), they put what, $250m in development into it? They'll be loosing money if they don;t move 3m units by end 2011.

Back to disk media, I can understand why a movie costs (licensing of content), but I don't understand why a blank costs more than a licensed disk, or 50x the price of a very, very similar technology.

exactly

A mind that wanders to internal thoughts, daydreams, or worries can be a problem, leads to depression, and sometimes stress. A mind that seeks and finds interactive distraction is looking for (and receiving) release. Sometimes this is the result of a mind that wandered to worry, and that triggered you pulling out an iPhone and checking in on something, which ends the worry, and it is not dwelled on all day long, making you both less stressed and possessing one less mental distraction.

Periodic distractions that involve interaction, release, entertainment, communication, etc are healthy (maybe not to your productivity), but the same frequency of distraction into the subconscious is very much not healthy, unless we're talking about daydreaming of positive things. Wishing you were away is bad, getting away is good.

iPhones let people get away more often, which frees up other negative mental distractions. That can be a positive not only for personal happiness and stress reduction, but so long as it is controlled, it can actually INCREASE productivity at work as well.