Re: Another solution...
I have no use for a camera, but being able to read the screen when it's dark is essential. The other thing I need to be able to do is root the thing and replace the OS with generic Android.
5648 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Feb 2015
I wonder if their "rigorous testing" involves actually handing some phones out to real people to use in the real world this time? But then, I also wonder how any smartphone can justify that sort of price tag no matter how bendy the screen is (I think anything north of about $500 is in the ridiculous price range for smartphones), so I'm clearly not the sort of person they are intending this phone for anyway.
"If I set up a WiFi that is not encrypted, I am giving implicit permission for anyone to connect to and use it."
Sadly, legally this isn't true.
Fortunately, most people don't know or care. I run an intentionally open WiFi access point specifically for my guests and any neighbors or others within range to use. There is no shortage of people who use it.
"No, you don't have to join the network, you can passively sniff the unencrypted packets out of the air."
Indeed. Many years ago, I lived near a courthouse and accidentally captured WiFi packets from the courthouse WiFi, which was being run open. I did not join the network, I passively captured the data in the air.
Since the data included emails from lawyers about cases they were involved in, I (anonymously, just in case I was on the wrong side of the law) informed the courthouse of the issue. I never checked to see if they fixed it.
The settlement is better than nothing, but hardly enough. $13m is pocket change for Google.
The Wi_Spy scandal (or, more accurately, Google's response to it) was what finally opened my eyes to the fact that Google had become nefarious. So, in a weird sort of way, I'm grateful that Google was so brazen. If they had been more careful, they could probably have spied on everyone for a lot longer without many people wising up.
Ceramic heatsinks pull heat away a little bit faster than aluminum ones, but that's not the reason that they are used. The benefits of ceramic heatsinks are that they weigh less and are nonconductive (so you can do cool things like print circuitry directly on the heatsink).
The primary downside is that they are more fragile.
"but generally use more suitable - ake expensive - boards for my own projects"
I mostly use Pis for toys and prototyping. I don't tend to use them in "serious" projects, primarily because they're too large (usually too tall) for the sorts of projects I tend to do. I have field-stripped all of the connectors and such off of Pis to reduce their profile, but that's a lot of work.
Instead, I tend to just use naked microcontrollers, or rarely a more serious SBC as you're talking about, depending on the project.
Personally, I figure that it doesn't matter until it matters. That is, it doesn't matter which way the fan is blowing. All that matters is that the cooling system is keeping the temperatures within specifications. My gut (and experience) tells me that for the vast majority of installations, a fan will achieve that regardless of which direction it blows.
I can imagine situations where air direction might actually be a critical consideration, and I'm guessing which way is best depends on the hardware. If, for instance, the heat issue is overall buildup in a case rather than a single problematic chip, then sucking is probably best. If the heat issue is a specific chip, then blowing is probably best.
"the complainant's phone had evidence where they were arranging to meet the defendant for sex"
Such evidence isn't really evidence against rape, though (all by itself, anyway). You may have changed your mind about the sex after meeting up. Consent for sex can be withdrawn at any time.
"and what nefarious activities you might be hiding."
If I were engaged in nefarious activities, I'd be sure to have a false electronic "identity" just to avoid that sort of suspicion.
But I'm not, so I'll accept the risk of any increased scrutiny that may result from my practice of minimizing my attack surface.
"Difficulties for blind people, postal votes (the entire military), when a polling station has to close, massive problems with queues at some if there's a problem"
Those are all solved problems, though. All that's required is for the states who haven't adopted the solutions to do so. There's literally no need to have the extra attack surface that electronic voting brings.
"make voting secure and posting the code for the world to see."
I don't think the security of this system has been determined, and there is no mechanism that I can see that ensures the code that has been open-sourced is the code that will end up being used.
Regardless, it still seems like electronic voting is a terrible idea. It doesn't solve any problems and introduces a lot of new risk vectors. It looks to me like the better way to go is to stop doing it entirely.
I am not a neuroscientist, but I worked for years developing software in a neuroscience lab, and everything that you've said here is entirely consistent with what I learned and observed in that role.
"Those wires btw are nowhere near fine enough to record from dentrites let alone individual synapses, they are only getting the big neural action potential spikes which are just the summed output"
Thanks for bringing back many sleepless nights! This is exactly correct, but with multiple electrodes and some fairly hefty processing power, you can make some magic here. We were able to isolate and analyze individual synaptic behavior with the proper setup.
But that sort of thing wouldn't really be possible with what Musk is talking about.
"Yes, because all those phones with the door that wouldn't stay put or batteries that would pop out every time you dropped the phone are what we should go back to!"
It's not hard to design phones so that doesn't happen. It's never happened once in the 5+ years I've been dropping mine.
"buy one of those and quit complaining about the phones that don't have what you want."
I believe that's essentially what I was saying here -- I won't buy a phone that won't let me easily replace the battery. There's nothing wrong with me expressing my opinion about this, even if you don't like that I do that.
"this isn't something very many people care about."
It's something a lot of people care about, although it may be a minority. However, that's a completely unimportant point.
I was being a bit snarky with the soldering iron line (although it wasn't that long ago that you really did need to do that with several models).
"iFixit sells kits for popular phones both iPhone and Android and has instructions including pictures"
But the need to buy a kit and have detailed instructions with pictures underlines the problem. On my phone, I can just pop the back off, lift out the battery, and pop a new one in. It's dead simple to do, impossible to get wrong, you don't need to buy a kit, and no instructions are necessary.
This is important to me because it's important to me to be able to carry spare batteries that I can quickly swap in.
It doesn't contradict the narrative. Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, said that last month's global smartphone sales were down by 40%, and they're expecting revenues to fall by $30 billion over the next two years.
I think the reason that Huawei shouldn't be considered when looking at how smartphone sales are doing is because they're experiencing serious business issues that aren't related to smartphone market movements.
I do like having a real computer on me when I'm out and about, though. That's the main thing I liked about smartphones when they came around -- they let me carry one device instead of two. I don't really want to go back to carrying two, but if I'm limited to what's available on the open market, then that's my only real choice.
"Unless it actually breaks, why buy a complete new box?"
I agree entirely. I only buy a new box in two circumstances -- if one of my boxen actually breaks, or if I need another machine to add to my fleet. The days when machines were wimpy enough that replacing working ones because you need something more powerful ended years ago (outside of someone with specialized needs, anyway).
"After that it's all fluff."
Sorta. There are major categories that need to be learned differently -- procedural languages, object oriented languages, and massively parallel languages. The differences between languages within a given category is essentially a difference in syntax, but the differences between categories is deeper than that.
That said, certain syntaxes make certain types of tasks harder or easier to accomplish in a high-quality way. That's why I have learned and used over a dozen different languages during my career so far.