Are these devices even legal? What country?

I know know that FCC regulations in the U.S. are regularly flouted by the use of similar "range booster" devices that you can get at Fry's, etc. but they are illegally imported and sold.

I'd imagine there are exceptions for law enforcement, but I'd also imagine that the law enforcement agency has to at least do some sort of registration with the FCC.

I'm guessing that the manufacturer just doesn't want to get in trouble with the FCC...

- "I don't understand. How is Google supposed to fix every wrong map listing?"

By relying primarily on official and/or reliable sources.

- Business licenses
- Property tax rolls
- yellow pages listings

Yea, I get it. Google wants to make things more up-to-date by crowd-sourcing data. But you can't trust the "crowd". They need to make sure that new/changed listings are confirmed by multiple independent reports. And it would't hurt to at least glance at Street View to confirm...

"Here comes the Google van! Quick, put up the "FBI" sign!"

^ A much more appropriate analogy, that almost fits.

Add to this the fact that the builder (employer) told the bricklayer (employee) to leave out every other brick on the bottom row in order to save time and expense, and you'd have an analogy that is spot-on...

Oh. These are the people who ruined C|Net?

Haven't been there in years.

"accelerometers can be wrong - due to rotation"

    That's why you also have a 3-d gyro.

"deceleration"

    Um. Accelerometers measure both acceleration and deceleration...

  "and acceleration when there is no feedback"

    Like when the user has dropped their phone and broken the accelerometer?

Modern phones, including Android, iPhone, etc. etc. etc. have this ability. Whether or not a given navigation app uses it is another matter.

You don't have to use wheel sensors or the odometer (did you mean speedometer?), although those are useful inputs.

A more applicable and general term than "dead reckoning" is "sensor fusion".

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about dead reckoning:

"In navigation, dead reckoning (also ded (for deduced) reckoning or DR) is the process of calculating one's current position by using a previously determined position, or fix, and advancing that position based upon known or estimated speeds over elapsed time and course."

But we can do better than that, today, and there are a number of sensors that - with the right math - can be "fused" to provide a more accurate estimate of position than would be possible using any one. GPS, then, is just one potential input.

Wikipedia gives a very broad definition, as this isn't just applied to navigation:

"Sensor fusion is the combining of sensory data or data derived from sensory data from disparate sources such that the resulting information is in some sense better than would be possible when these sources were used individually. The term better in this case can mean more accurate, more complete, or more dependable, or refer to the result of an emerging view, such as stereoscopic vision (calculation of depth information by combining two-dimensional images from two cameras at slightly different viewpoints)."

Phones today typically have GPS, accelerometer, magnetometer, and gyro sensors. While additional inputs such as auto speedometer (not very accurate, though, by law only required to be +- 1.5% or so) and wheel sensors might be useful, they certainly aren't required.

I'd assume that major navigation apps already do this, probably using Kalman Filtering:

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~welch/k...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...

So, this is nothing new. But, then again - there's no claim that it is. (Just the incorrect reading between the lines here...) They've just conveniently put the needed sensors and a means of performing the calculations in a single chip.

You know, just like Apple did for the iPhone 5S...

And why is it that you are owed free content?

Eclipse is the single best argument against the Java language.

So, there are only two kinds of software, eh?

You've got your server software.

And you've got your client software. And your client software is a mess.

Wish I were in "IT" and could sum things up so succinctly.

W3Schools certainly does have a very skewed demographic - given that it's only used by developers not smart enough to block W3Schools.

I suspect the IE figure among those who have blocked them is much lower than 9%.

Of course, a site aimed at developers is not representative of the general public.

Did you really expect GoDaddy to care about protecting your interests?

Some excellent alternatives were offered by respondents on the OPs blog, and I'll add another - moniker. Their claim to fame? They have "never lost a domain". And, so, they have a really good reason to keep others from taking your domain - they'd have to give-up that claim. They also offer a reasonably-priced enhanced security feature, though I feel it's unnecessary given the company's history. (And just checked, they still make the claim:

"Moniker is serious about security. In fact, in our history, we’ve never “lost” a domain. Not one."

https://www.moniker.com/domain...

While they aren't under their original ownership neither policies, convenience, nor responsiveness seem to have suffered. (You can always get ahold of them on the phone when there is a problem.)

I don't have any affiliation with moniker, other than being a happy customer. Happy to use a professional registrar that doesn't have a name that makes people snicker.

Duh, wait for it, wait for it... ... you were going to say "I'm not on Facebook".

But what you really mean is, you don't have a Facebook account.

But you ARE on Facebook!

Somebody else posted this suggestion, and it got promptly shot down (in typical Slashdot fashion) by people who know nothing about the subject...

For at least Apple and Microsoft products, you can install a caching server that will cache the first download of any given update and then deliver from the cache on subsequent updates.

This is not the same as a caching HTTP server. (That what was shot-down...) These are specific servers made available by Apple and Microsoft, and meant specifically for caching software updates.

In fact, I have the Apple server installed on my Mac Mini. (It comes bundled with Mavericks Server, which is now just an optional package that installs on top of OSX.) It caches both iOS and OSX updates. I did an Xcode update (>1GB) on my Macbook in 2 minutes flat.

This would improve performance for your own updates, and would also permit you to offer updates to guests with little overhead, if you so choose.

Linux is more difficult, as there are quite a number of distributions with different update schemes. But I have to assume that a similar solution is available in most to all cases.

In High School, we had a program we would run on the IBM 1620 (this was in ancient history...) that would play a song on a transistor radio placed on the console. Somebody figured out what instructions to run to create different frequencies.

We used to just leave the radio there even when not running that program.

"That's a loop!"

"Whoa! A "FORMAT" statement!"

One can easily see how A leads to B.

^ "A codex might be..."