
Re: Increasing censorship and spammer-friendly policies
I'm curious. Care to elaborate on these two points??
3465 posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
For each year, they say they received between 0 and 999 letters… But always about a nonzero number of users! So we know that they actually received between 1 and 999 letters.
I bet the US government is going to freak out about the security implications of that slip.
See also the iPhone, and the iPad. Though they might have got ideas from many other products, whether they were superior in vision, execution or marketing, they became the products every other was compared to.
Now, it may be too early to tell, but I have the highest doubts that the iWatch will do the same.
Android should by default allow the users to selectively block access rights from apps; at least the right to send data over the network. I'm tired of arguing this point when it is such a no-brainer. All I could ever hear against is how poor developers should not have to handle their applications losing access to this or that… But anyway apps don't always have access to the network, e.g on planes, so this is pretty moot.
He should have more respect for this Thad Starner guy leading the project at Google, with reasonable credentials of his own…
The world contains many things that impede the wind from blowing. Apart from the windmills, there are trees, houses, skyscrapers, mountains…
I fail to see why a windmill would slow the wind more than any fixed structure of the same size… And frankly, we are very far from windmills being even a small percentage of all the wind-impeding crap we have built. Without even mentioning the mountains.
Google Maps need the competition, and they need as many users as they can to keep up map quality. A map service simply cannot compete on quality without user-submitted content.
If I was Apple, I would launch a desktop version of their maps as soon as possible, and offer on it a proper way to report issues. The little tool they have on their phones is just not going to be enough.
Looks to me like both sides are bargaining hard for the best they can get. I think Google would do well to remember that in the end Almunia is basically calling the shots. They make him happy, or they are in a world of pain.
I'm guessing that Google really does not want this to get serious, so they'd better make him happy.
Huuh… Not sure what your objection is. Ideally, if Glass shows you the image of an object, there should be no difference at all between the rays of light coming from Glass, and the rays of light coming from a real object say 10 meters away. If you have good eyesight you can see both without trouble.
Now if you have bad eyesight, you have prescription glasses that transform the rays of light coming from any real object 10 meters away so that your eyes can see the object properly. Rays of light coming from Glass should be transformed in exactly the same way, and allow your eye to see properly what Glass is displaying.
Now, there might be a problem if your eyesight is so bad that you cannot see an object 10 meters away even with prescription glasses. You would need to have a special Glass which mimics the rays of light coming from a closer object that you can normally see, maybe 50 centimeters away; but this would probably be very expensive because that would need custom optics inside the Glass instead of the mass-produced ones which mimic objects 10 meters away.
You are missing something: Even people who do not wear glasses cannot focus on something half an inch from their face. The optics inside Glass probably display everything to your eye as if it was a few meters away, so if you can see clearly a few meters away while wearing glasses, you should be fine wearing Glass over your glasses.
I'm curious, what makes you think that "the majority of successful hijacks are probably pulled off by shady state-sponsored types" rather than spammers? Because you hear more about it in the news?
According to my research, only rich people get married and have children. You never hear of these things happening to poor people in the news.
I love Terry Pratchett very much, but… Saying that the Harry Potter series is heavily based on his work is so much of a stretch that you must be very nimble to attempt it. In fact, apart from the fact that magic exists in both worlds, and some very common fantasy elements like "they both contain dragons and trolls at some point or other", I have trouble seeing any kind of resemblance between the two. Or are you talking about the Johnny Maxwell series? "A teenager has strange adventures with his friends" is the only common link I can see, and that's not much either…
All patents are kept secret for one year. If at anytime during that year, somebody else comes up with the same idea/concept, the patent is invalidated as being not novel enough.
When you think about it, the fact that two or more companies would be racing to patent a concept should automatically disqualify the concept from being patented. Patents are meant to reward the inventor who brings something to society. If many inventors come up with the same idea at the same time, then society would have benefited even if any of these guys had decided to go back to bed instead. At the most, the patent should be shared between the multiple inventors, certainly not awarded to the one with the fastest legs.
Seriously, you want a new law just to stop the maybe two guys in the whole state who would be willing to go to all that trouble, when there is an internet full of porn available?
Anyway, isn't it already illegal to peep on people? Why bother with a new law, which will stop people from taking some completely innocent but very cool movies?
This is very much like banning all phone cameras because there are people who will use them to take underskirt pictures in the subway. Let's ban zoom lenses, too.
…Wait, what? The damn car finally runs out of petrol, and he that's when he decides to drive the car off the road? This contradicts the info that he had a full tank of gas. Half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses.
Regarding the whole story, I'll misquote Thomas Jefferson and state that I would sooner believe that a French guy would lie than that a car would keep accelerating no matter what the driver did. Brakes, gearbox, ignition keys… There is an awful lot of things that would need to go wrong in exactly the right way for this to happen.
You can dial new numbers, listen to voicemails, see the contacts and the history.
Interestingly, if a contact has a homepage defined, you can normally tap on it and open the browser; but that did not work while using this trick. I assume that you are in a special mode where the phone app works so that you can make emergency phone calls, but nothing else does…
A word of caution: I tried making a phone call, but the results were strange. There was no way to hang up, because the normal buttons would not show up, even after I stopped holding the sleep button. It took me a while to bring it back to a normal state.
I find myself wondering. Android is a very good choice for most manufacturers; they get an OS for free, with a large ecosystem of apps (yeah, yeah, some fragmentation). What would have happened if Android did not exist? Would Symbian be the standard? Would RIM still have 30% market share? Would Microsoft stand a chance? Or maybe Samsung would rule the same way it does now, but with Bada…?
I have to say that as a user, I am still thankful for Android. Even if there is less choice of OS, compatibility is king. I prefer to have a few large dominant OSes than a smattering of incompatible systems. (Typed on iPhone)