Posts by Charles 9

Re: EMP briefcase

I don't know if that's going to work. See, you forgot about the speakers, which emit EM as a matter of course (speakers rely on electromagnets to work), so it wouldn't be unheard of for the components in the boot to have EM shielding so they don't interfere with each other. Plus there's the matter of having an EMP device compact enough to fit into a briefcase.

Re: Household gear

What makes the audio-bomb cars so annoying isn't the music but the bass. They're literally blasting the air around them, shaking everything around them (exactly the intention—gotta be loud to be proud). So I don't know how you can cancel out what's basically a miniature concussion blast without either (a) doing the same thing back to them as anti-noise or (b) having so much insulation you would be too bulky to move practically. Much easier to prevent their sale and use (of course, in the US, that goes into freedom of speech issues).

Re: Platforms

Connecting social media together, I use google+ for pictures, my friends use snapfish, FB, and other services, why can we not pool across platforms, why do i have to download and upload,

Because they're competing against each other. Collaborating as you describe is like giving information to "the enemy". Never gonna happen as it would be against each company's fiduciary duty.

I have outlook for skype, google for android, whatsApp, lastFM etc etc why can i not manage my contacts in one place and have a single list of contacts with duplicates removed in all accounts.

Again, because they're competing against each other. That includes Google who's in the best position to unite the contacts, but since some of the apps you list are competing against Google...

Defo want a laptop i can use indoors and out where the battery lasts a full working day.

Depends on what you want to do with it. If you want to play movies on it all day, you'd be talking a battery so big it feels like you're back in the days of the suitcase computer. It's physics dictating this; live with it.

Defo want a phone with just an OS and let me decide what SW to install

You can rule out Apple and Google, then. We can pray for Sailfish, but then again, while Linux has made ground in the backroom, there still isn't a consumer-level Linux distro that can penetrate the mass market. Thus why Microsoft is still in control. IOW, the only companies that can penetrate that market can't be trusted to keep it clean.

If i buy a VW and Apple have shoehorned in their media services, i want use my Android phone in said car not an iPad and vicsa versa.

Only way around that is to not buy a VW. If Apple and VW have a contract, you have to take that into consideration. The contract makes it a Hobson's Choice: Take It Or Leave It.

To answer #8, YES. For the money Google makes for rich contact information, you couldn't pay them enough to stop. Plus there are genuine benefits to their crowd-sourced data (traffic maps, et al). So it's basically a deal with the devil with no way around it.

As for the permission, remember it's YOUR phone but it's THEIR app. And they wouldn't have published the app on Android without that level of control. The only way you're going to change the game is to basically make the Android app permission model toxic by either defecting from Android altogether or sticking to ONLY stock apps: not downloading anything. Are you prepared to go the long haul?

Re: Never look a gift horse in the mouth.

I thought the three rules of thermodynamics were (1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. and (3) You can't quit.

Re: And the cost, in energy terms

Trying to learn more about it. Now, if the plant can be grown in land otherwise unsuitable for food crops, that's a potential boon. A smaller footprint on arable land at least opens the way for some give and take. I'm also particularly interested in the yield: particularly the average final product yield for a given area of land used to grow it.

But the article didn't completely answer the question. There are no hard numbers being bounced around. If you, for example, take one hectare of this plant through the fast pryolysis process being proposed, just how many liters of useable fuel will result? Because let's face it; flying is pretty fuel-intensive, to the point that weight is a constant consideration in terms of flightworthiness.

Re: You want to reform?

You realize the USPTO is one of the most understaffed bureaus in the American Executive Branch? If they're rubber-stamping stuff, it's because they lack the resources (both time and money) to do much else. And they STILL get chewed out no matter what they do. Frankly, a position in the USPTO is probably one of the more thankless positions in American government.

Re: ... !!! ...

Anyone interested in returning to Congress next January, that's who. These businesses are powerful enough that they can ruin any campaign that goes against them. Campaign restrictions don't bother them, as they have enough shills and shells to conceal their actions and enough palm grease to make anyone else turn the other way.

About the only way something serious will get done is if it hits a crisis level: as in people DIE as a result.

Re: "...where private networks connect to public networks."

Public/private as in "Can anyone use the connection or not?" As in a privately- vs. publicly-owned company. Google's network is mostly private: for Google's use only. Meanwhile, consumer ISPs are by definition public.

Usually, a service open to the public is subject to fairness laws and such to prevent extortion and scalping. Now, where it gets interesting is when a private (for one's use only) net connects to a public one (that anyone can use).

Re: Monopoly & regulatory capture vs. Competition

The thing is, there has to be incentive to actually build rival last mile infrastructure. England is not that big a country, so building out to the rural areas isn't as great a stretch. But in the US, you can be hundreds of miles from any community of note. At these distances, communities couldn't GIVE the last mile away because there was basically a first mile, a last mile, but nothing in between. So ANYONE who wanted to reach that community basically had to built the entire linkup from scratch. The costs involved pretty much meant the only way to do it AT ALL was through sweetheart deals.

PS. It's not just cable where you see this last mile problem. Natural Gas is not available in my neighborhood because there's no existing infrastructure and not enough people interested in it to make the infrastructure investment worthwhile.

Re: The schadenfreude has reached a new level of intensity with this

The Bloomberg model, IOW.

"The amount of steps you are taking on the street are not monitored (perhaps) either, nor are obese people charged more on the tube."

The tube doesn't do that because they charge by distance traveled: just another way to meter. And airlines WILL charge you for a second seat if you're too fat to fit in one.

Re: Extreme Price Gouging, Extreme Nonsense

They feel they can get away with this because the internet is "different" than cable TV was. No cable company EVER charged consumers for "how much" they watched TV, but somehow feel they can get away with this. It will be more profitable than anything these monopolists have -ever- done before.

That's because, until now, the content was never personalized. It was broadcast, in the sense that the same streams were sent to everyone, even in the digital age. Right now, television is trying to negotiate the tradeoff point: what streams should be broadcast vs. unicast. Broadcast is more efficient if lots of people are watching it because you only need to send one stream for all of them while unicast works out for less-watched content because it's not always being watched so you can swich the allocation to something else as the need calls for it.

Re: Comcast Bites!!

Google did that because most of the YouTube content flows through their (completely) private net. The public-private interface is the thing Google negotiates so ISPs only have to worry about the part that flows over their own pipes and not having to worry about backhaul.

Re: Common Carrier will nip this in the bud.

You assume the problem is that the carriers are cornering the last mile. For many places, especially in the sticks, communities couldn't give away the last mile because there was still the matter of connecting the last mile with the first mile...which at the time wasn't built, either. Many of the sweetheart deals were the only way to get better-than-dialup to these places at all.

Re: Gouging

DSL is has an easier time of it because you can more easily increase the backhaul.

DSL has its problems, too: namely switching offices. Even in a city (some would say especially in a city due to issues of existing infrastructure), distances that are just fine for POTS don't cut it for DSL (DSL can only go so far before the signal's too weak, and you can't go as the crow flies). For that, the only solution may just be a new switching office, which raises location and rewiring specters of their own.

Re: I wonder

But don't those agreements have breakout clauses if the traffic gets too imbalanced (something Netflix would know about)?

Re: I wonder

Scandinavian countries are relatively small. Geography plays a role in bandwidth costs, especially backhaul which is always metered.

Re: They'll never beat the spooks

Or a saboteur.

Or simply enough knowledge of the protocols that they can perform side channel attacks. Put bluntly, there's a demand for efficiency in data transmission. But in doing so, you necessarily make your data more unique compared to everything else and easier to identify. It's like a line of balls rolling down a rack. You have a choice. You can make your ball a unique shape or size so you can easily pick it out when it comes along, but then anyone else can do the same. Or you can make your ball the same size and shape as the other balls. They can't pick them out, but then neither can you. Pick your poison.

Re: Catch unconsciously?

No, because that STILL implies use of the brain. Reflexes don't have to go through the brain.

Re: What's "ultra fast"?

Pretty safe to assume "beyond fast" can be qualified as "beyond any human capability to perform the feat."

Re: Catch unconsciously?

No, unconsciously is the correct word, though not in this case to mean "while unconscious (ie. asleep)" but rather "without exerting conscious thought to the task", like what happens in a reflex.

Re: Impressive

I'd be more impressed if it could react to the scenario in which the handle never comes in reach, meaning the only way to catch the racket is by the rim, just as we have to sometimes react to a less-than-optimal situation and fall back to just finding some way to grab it. Or with the bottle, determining that it might be best to hesitate or else the hand will grab the half-full bottle in a position best left uncaught: upside-down.

Re: Half the problem @Charles 9

I'm talking Faraday-proof in the sense a nicker would just stuff the phone into a Faraday bag. Without radio reception, how's the phone supposed to receive the killswitch signal before it's rooted and retooled to not respond to the killswitch?

Re: @shovelDriver

The reason you start in California is that, because it's the most populous state in the nation, anything you do in California tends to ripple for the simple reason that it's easier to abide by California's tougher standards universally than to have two lines.

Here's two words that spring to mind: "California Emissions".

Re: Half the problem

"In reality, like all the prototype iPhones that were stolen, almost half (44%) were left behind somewhere like a bar, a bus or at work and only 11% were actually taken off the victim's person according to a survey conducted by mobile security outfit Lookout."

Hmm? I've heard of incidents where the owner was killed and the ONLY thing taken was their phone. Statistical outlier or not, that's pretty extreme in my book just to nick a phone.

You're assuming they don't have the ability ALREADY.

Re: Half the problem

Plus I'd be interested in seeing a killswitch system that was Faraday-proof.