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Comment Re:How about implementing parental controls on And (Score 1) 81

I'd suggest looking into user profiles, which you can use for your kids and hand select the apps you want them to be able to use (like YouTube Kids: YES, YouTube: NO). I'm guessing you'd want Chrome/Browser disabled also. If you think Youtube is full of garbage, you should check out this whole internet thing. I think this only works for Android Tablets, though (as of 4.2 I think). They added user accounts for 5.0 for phone, but not the limited profiles part.

Comment Re:Inherent 4th amendment problem... (Score 3, Insightful) 232

Yeah, that's pretty much the routine because your license and registration have no inherent value. Your phone on the other hand, is a VERY personal and rather expensive device. It would be pretty insane to devise a policy where you *wanted* all your police officers to take temporary possession and responsibility for expensive fragile devices to accidentally drop on the asphalt and what not. If such a policy was created, no one would use it because no one would hand their phone to the cops. How would they occupy their time while waiting for the cop to write the ticket? I appreciate paranoia for paranoia sake, but no implementation that has you surrendering possession of your phone just to show ID will ever fly.

Comment Re:I'm thinking there's a bigger problem... (Score 1) 119

It says in TFA. They specifically don't use an orbiting probe to reduce cost. The thing would transmit directly from the surface:

Due to the large amount of data that needs to sent to Earth, the submarine needs a large dorsal fin that includes a planar phased-array antenna. While operating, the submarine would surface for 16 hours per day for Earth communications during which it would study its surroundings using a mast camera.

Comment Re:Feds tipped hand (Score 2) 129

And how did they know to stalk him until they found him with his laptop open and unlocked to begin with? I haven't followed the case closely, but from the article I didn't see what technological failure led them to him to begin with. Every point seemed to be: Once they had his laptop, they could prove he did XXX because of this technology. Maybe I missed the part where they explained how he became a suspect worth stalking to a library to begin with. Until that's explained, seems like secret NSA method is the most likely.

This article seems to agree there's something odd about the investigation: http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Comment Re:Less creepiness (Score 3, Insightful) 324

I've only been around one person with Glass and I never felt self-conscious or worried that they might be recording me. I constantly see cellphones in positions that *could* be recording me, but probably aren't. I wonder why we're okay with people always having their phones out, but seeing someone in fancy glasses makes us paranoid? Sure, it's more subtle with Glass, so? I suspect people only care because the media made such a big deal about it, enough so that they had to coin the term "Glassholes". But most people have never seen a Glasshole. I haven't. I mean the penetration of Glass is so tiny, how could you encounter people wearing Glass enough to form a stereotype about them?

That said, maybe next iteration could feature a bright white LED that flashes to let everyone know you are recording. And Google can then make a big push to inform people that No-Light=No-Recording. Would that reduce the creepiness? I'd hate to lose the camera, it enables a ton of awesome use cases. I suppose then we'd just hear ghost stories about people crippling the LED so they could once again be creepy.

Comment Re:Data may not be valid (Score 2) 786

I was curious about this, also. Basically anytime shows a graph that's supposed to compare men and women, yet actually graphs women vs. some other factor (like time) is suspicious to me. (Btw, this isn't a man/woman thing, just a data correlation thing.) I found at least this site which has some data on majors and you can actually break it down by men, women, or both.


I'm not drawing too many conclusions, but there's clearly a peak for both genders in 1985. Yes, it seems a sharper decline for women (dropping from 3% to 1% over 10 years, vs. men who fell from about 5.5% to 3.2% in the same time). More interesting than the decline in the 80s to me, which seemed fairly uniform between genders, was the short peak of women returning to the major in the early 2000s, where men surpassed the high point from '85 (5.5%) to go up to 7.5%, while women never recovered to their high point from '85 (3%) and maxed out around 2%.

TLDR; maybe someone should make a study trying to figure out what happened during the revival in interest in CS in the early 2000s and stop blaming the 80's.

Comment Re:Can we opt out? (Score 1) 233

The end-user can opt-out. It's written into the law (suggested configuration and opt-out during initial device setup). Manufacturers cannot. I found the definition of "Sold in California" to be pretty broad, it includes buying a phone online with a shipping destination in California. Good luck enforcing that one. The law seemed fairly reasonable as written. It's stupid to a point, considering Android and iOS are both doing this. It's a lot like California trying to look tough by demanding what's already being done, which is to say the bill's authors showing off and adding some bullet points to their resumes for next election.

Comment Re:ya no (Score 1) 475

Having cars include technology that prevents collisions pretty much means "receiving remote information and making decisions". Maybe that isn't commands, but it's pretty easy to imagine "information" that would make the car think the only safe course is a full stop (e.g. there's a row of stopped cars directly in front of you).

Comment Re:ya no (Score 1) 475

I was waiting for that whitehouse announcement to make /. by itself. I guess we just lump that in with google speeding now? I had about the same reaction. The government mentioned things like "anonymous" but we all know that's a joke. Whatever protocol they come up with will still need some UID to identify the specific car so you know that there are two cars side by side right behind you and not one car bouncing back and forth due to GPS reflections. Then it's just an SQL join to connect you with all the other data mining. Even if they didn't already know the UID/license# pairing, a few trips by a traffic camera solves that. And then there's your idea, the police just sending your car an "OMG! There's another car RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU! BRAKE! BRAKE!". And then the hackers idea, once they break the digital signature so they can report their own fake data. Actually, that would be kind of nice when I want the car in front of me to move out of the way. Maybe I shouldn't knock the government's idea. I can probably live with old used cars the rest of my life...

Comment Re:Very original (Score 3, Informative) 182

It's not like they provide NO information. You can check out their website for FREE and see that the reduction test was done in a fixed size room over fixed time and plots the particulates over time. http://smartairfilters.com/ind.... I won't kid you, it's marketing material, but their graphs are totally better than the ones I've seen on your Tiger-Rock. They also mentioned in TFA that the $33 is for parts costs. Probably just another trick from these shysters.

Comment Re:Blame Google. (Score 4, Insightful) 239

I totally agree with the malicious compliance, only I'm glad to see Google doing it. This is a stupid law that seems vaguely like DMCA for removing true information that violates no one's copyright. The EU was nice enough to let Google (pay an army of paralegals to) make a first pass at figuring out which things violated their general terms, so I'm glad Google's using that freedom to point out ludicrous examples before people have forgotten all about this new censorship.

Comment media is for kids! (Score 1) 116

Almost all of my purchased media these days is because of my daughter. She goes over to friends houses and grandmas and other grandmas and brings with her movies to watch. Streaming is still so locked down in the draconian, paranoid past that they've only barely made it convenient for me to do in my own home/network/devices. It's no where near convenient enough to "take with you". Also, there's little to no cost savings for all the downsides.

Comment Re:WTF does it do for me? (Score 2) 272

I was kind of excited about Google Wallet, but it's been almost entirely a disappointment. The one place I semi-regularly have a chance to use it is at Jack in the Box, but the NFC scanner is attached to the credit card reader, and some miscreant cut the cable between the credit card reader and the machine. This has no impact on the function of the NFC scanner, mind you, yet each time I tell them I'm paying with my phone they inform me it's broken because someone cut the cable. I've shown them it still works, but every single time I get a new person who thinks it doesn't (or the same person who's forgotten) and I have to argue with them that it does actually work. I gave up. Now I just hand them my card through the window. Less arguing, thus faster. This is pretty much true even without scanner damage, too. "I'd like to pay with my phone." "What? You can do that? I don't know. What do I hit?" "Nevermind. Here's the plastic rectangle you know what to do with." Also, I'm still waiting on the solution to include those other wallet things: license, insurance cards, train pass. Some things are *almost* there.. like my train pass actually uses NFC, but there's no way to have the pass on my phone that has NFC. My insurance cards are no more "secure" than a photocopy of them, but storing pictures of the cards in my phone is going to be a tough sell when the Dr's office wants to make their own photocopy. Police can always look up your license, so a picture might be okay there, but not as proof of legal age at a bar or liquor store. So yeah.. what does it do for me? Still have to carry the same number of things and makes nothing go faster and some things even slower.
