I didn't see the unveiling, but I'm wondering how they're going to protect against someone coming up to you, while you've got your head down playing Candy Crush, and just holding a Square ApplePay pad to your phone trying to make a $500 transaction. Up until now, with TouchID, you'd have to be holding a registered finger on the home button, but it would authorize the transaction in less than a second. Is FaceID just going to approve it if your face happens to be in front of it?

True, but, by attaching a reward to the behavior, they're altering the risk/reward ratio. Maybe 90mph is as fast as the person is willing to go without any recognition, but, throw in the possibility of being atop some leaderboard somewhere for something, and maybe that goads him into being a little more stupid.

It also doesn't take a genius is figure out that gamifying reckless behavior is an unwise move for a company. Strava made this same mistake. They let runners/cyclists upload their fitness-gps results and it places them on leaderboards for the fastest times on various "segments" of roads. Originally, it was just uphill sections, but, later, came more flats and even downhill sections. I couldn't understand why they were maintaining leaderboards for downhill segments, as that wasn't a test of one's fitness, but, rather, their sanity. Sure enough, some dude in Berkeley, CA died while trying to reclaim his top spot on the leaderboard for a downhill (in traffic) segment, and his family sued the company. The suit was, eventually, dismissed, but Strava could have saved a lot of legal fees if they had just thought through whether downhill segments would ever entice someone into doing something ill-advised.

This is why the advice is: If you think you're about to get arrested, shut your phone off. With an iPhone, upon first boot, it requires the passcode; the fingerprints won't work. The latest precedent that I know of (late 2015) is that you can be compelled to provide your fingerprints, but not your passwords.

Right. What has the attendants so mad is that people are now being obvious about it.

.. the only problem being that, if you're in a plane with actual life-vests under the seat, the seat cushions might not be easily detachable as they're not the primary flotation device. Also, is your life-vest located under your seat or in the bin above you? If it's under your seat, can you *reach* it? More-importantly, which of the exit doors are the kind that swing in and stay there? Which ones come completely off and need to be tossed out the doorway? Do you pull the door into the cabin from the top or bottom? Which doors release by swinging a single arm? Do you swing it up or down? Which ones don't have an arm, but a pull-down lever? Which of those have an additional cover over the lever which you must pull down *first*? Which doors should you not open in a water landing? Which doors have escape-slides? Which ones auto-deploy when you remove the door? Which ones require a tab to be pulled? Which ones detach to become rafts? How do you detach them?

There *are* differences, and the time to figure out what there is not when you've got 2-3 seconds before a mass of onrushing, panicking humanity presses you up against the door. That's why I try to always "review the passenger information booklet located in [my] seat pouch". Even if I'm not on an exit row, I make sure that I know how to open the nearest door, because the dudes *in* the exit row might be thinking "Hey, I know how to operated a damn seatbelt..."

Yeah... the same thing went through my head when I read the headline. They're probably selling the car and renting the battery, and being able to brick the battery is a lot easier than trying to get into the "deadbeat battery lessee repo business". And your comment about being able to brick stolen batteries or cars has parallels to things like the new "Activation Lock" in iPhones. Still, I won't be buying one of these things...

Can we make "200" mean that the gov't is watching your traffic? The nice part is that we don't have to change any of the installed base of webservers...

"The flaws are already, or in the process of being repaired..."

Oh, so those 2% of Android devices which are running the latest Droid OS can breathe easy now...

Well, during that time, he did pull Apple back from the cliff. He rolled out those candy-colored, all-in-one iMacs and simplified the product line.

And then he got super, super lucky. Because he's a design zealot, he insisted that the iPod have headphones which match the device: white. What he didn't foresee was that this would be the only thing visible on an iPod user (who was, at the start, a Mac user... which meant they were a young, hip, fashion-conscious millenial). So, imaging you're at a street corner, waiting to cross, and you look over and there's some really cool cat, grooving to his music, and dressed cooler than you ever could. And their earbuds are a color you hardly ever see: white. In fact, just about every time you see white earbuds, they're on some cool-looking person. What piece of musical awesomeness are they hiding in their coat?

Apple quickly figured this out, however, and told people the answer with those iconic commercials showing only silhouettes and white earbuds. Apple was saying "THIS is what's on the other end of those earbuds on the cool kids". It's a classic example of drawing attention to (or creating) a distinguishing trait to highlight "social proof". (Another great example is Toyota's Prius. The first Prius looked like any other sedan, so nobody thought that anybody drove hybrids. It wasn't until they came out with that iconic flat-back shape when people started noticing just how many hybrids there are out there, so people didn't feel like they'd be the risky early-adopters).

Without the gobs of money they made on iPods, they wouldn't have had the money to do the iPhone. So, in my book, the entirety of Apple's dominance, today, is due to Jobs' obsession (for aesthetic reasons at the time) with the white earbuds.

Except in cases where they get to come off looking like a concerned, patriotic part of the community. Like I said, whether their motivations were honest or malicious, they're going to stick to the "see something, say something" story.

The story says that the searches took place on the employee's "workplace computer". That leads me to believe the searches happened before he left the company, so I don't think I'm buying the "Dude was researching bombs after he got fired" notion. Also, I don't know what article you're reading, but the one's I've read only make reference to "former employer". They don't say whether the dude was fired (which wouldn't make sense, then, for the employer to want to dick with him like this) or if, maybe, the employee left to go freelance (in which case, I've met plenty of employers in my day who'd be vindictive about something like that).

From the aricle, they specify that it's a former boss, and there's no mention of how amicable the termination was. So, it's also possible that the employer, due to a grudge, discovered the suspicious searches and decided that it would be an easy way to make their life difficult for a little bit.

Actually, we'll probably never know they entire story. The employer, no matter what their motivation, is going to stick to "Hey... if you see something, say something...".

That's why they're called "teachers" and not "graders". If you want people who grade papers all day, then have the job listing say "graders wanted".

I disagree. I'm learning Spanish and I have apps which let me practice my conjugation. It gives me a verb, conjugation, and tense, and then I have to produce the proper conjugation. I can practice them for hours. That is much, *much* more time that I would dare ask a human to sit there and quiz/grade me.

Correction: For your son, it stopped being about learning and became just about satisfying the machine. Apparently, he doesn't get that learning is a two-part process: 1) learning the "concept" (which requires either a teacher at a blackboard or reading it in a book or whatever), and 2) practicing it over and over in order to etch it into your brain until you really grok it. Now, your son's teacher really might suck ass at part #1 (lots of physics teachers do), but that would be a separate issue from their decision to automate part #2... or your son's (apparent) notion that the homework problems are not a whetstone upon which he is meant to hone his skills, but rather just a barrier between him and getting to go play on the XBox.

Possibly. But, if I were a grader for a composition class, I would want to slash my wrists every. goddamn. minute. I think back to the stuff I wrote in my essay classes in college and, internally, I'm horribly embarrassed. What absolute drivel... and I thought I was being all deep and insightful. And I was just one dude in a class of 35... and one class out of 3-4 that prof was teaching. My hunch is that, when the profs grade those, they actually do turn their brains into automaton mode and just flag punctuation and grammatical errors. They've probably gotten really good at just spotting common errors without even giving the text much attention from their higher brain functions. Y'know how you can drive to work not even remember stopping at all of the stop-lights and stop-signs on the way, because driving is so automatic that it's almost a reflex? My hunch is that that's what the profs are like when grading a mountain of poorly-developed blather from students. So, moving the grading to a computer isn't changing what the grading process is actually looking at; it's just moving the process to something which is better at it.

What I enjoyed most were the headlines in the "legit" financial sites, looking for any excuse to dismiss Bitcoin. Basically, they all said that the value of Bitcoin "tanked" because it got up to $145 earlier in the day, before "crashing down" to $125. I wanted to ask them "So, it was $95 two days ago. Yesterday, it was $115. Today, it's $125... what was that about 'tanking', again?". And, of course, today, it's at $135. I'll take that tank, any day.

This is one of the things which isn't mentioned when the topic of global warming comes up. GW is going to benefit some parts of the world. There will be some winners and some losers. Sure, it's going to suck in Florida and Arizona, but the northern states are going to start sucking less. Canadians, as well, will have much more fun with two, full weeks of Summer.

I was trying to explain to a friend's parents what "all of this stuff with texting is all about". I explained to them that, when I call you on the phone, there's a lot of "Hey", "How's it goin'?", "Good, good. And you?"... until you get to the "..so, the reason I called is:". All of this is to "bring up" the connection. If we were modems, this would be all of that hiss and warbling you hear. If we were dogs, we'd be sniffing each other's butts. And then, at the end, there's the same "tearing down" of the connection you constructed: "So, that's all I called about", "Oh, okay. I guess I'll talk to you later, then", "okay, later", "okay, bye", "bye".

That's a lot of overhead when you just want a quick answer or are delivering a quick bit of info.

And another friend of mine has an interesting theory about the Japanese fetish with vending machines. In Japan, I'm told, there are vending machines everywhere and you can get anything from them. My buddy thinks that this is because Japan has so much protocol for human interaction: how you greet people depending up your relative statuses, when you bow, how you receive business cards, etc. Often, they just want a goddamn box of Cheese Nips (ba-dump-bump!) without the hassle. So... vending machines.

So, I agree... bring on the machines!

This is true even for non-engineering, real-life stuff. For example, when you get up in the morning, start announcing what "percent" done you are toward your goal of leaving the house for work/play/etc. Sometimes, you'll be accurate. Other times, you'll notice that it's trash-day and you need to take the trash out... or that you need to throw the laundry into the washer... or take a phone call from your mom... or take the dog to the vet, and it will cause your "progress bar" to stop, indefinitely.

Now, with things like copying/moving files, you *could* first go make a to-do list of all of the files and sizes that you need to copy, but, with large copy jobs, even *that* takes time... what do you do during *that*? No easy solution.