Considering we've seen a story about how everyone is using the same password everywhere, and how Sony got hacked again , exposing even more passwords, is it any surprise that a number of people are having their iTunes and PayPal accounts attacked and drained to buy game gold?
iTunes and PayPal are pretty huge targets, but who'd attack a single game if they had access to the back end?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision
Worldwide it was estimated in 2004 that 1.2 million people were killed (2.2% of all deaths) and 50 million more were injured in motor vehicle collisions.[1][39] India leads with 105,000 traffic deaths in a year, compared with over 96,000 in China.[40] This makes motor vehicle collisions the leading cause of injury death among children worldwide 10 – 19 years old (260,000 children die a year, 10 million are injured) [41] and the sixth leading preventable cause of death in the United States[42] (45,800 people died and 2.4 million were injured in 2005).[43] In Canada they are the cause of 48% of severe injuries.[44]
Complete with references.
Government mandated insurance policies and then insurance companies offering deep discounts for automated drivers will push the solution through.
According to wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water , traditional electrolysis is 50-80% efficient, and solar cells are ~20%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency
Therefore, the efficiency of using the solar panel to power electrolysis would be
So, unless there's a pretty substantial price benefit to the cell, where's the benefit?
They didn't track the phone in this case either. They recorded the cell sites the SIM card was connected to when the device performed an action which would attract a charge. Extremely different things. Specifically, it is the lat/long/antenna of the cell site which is recorded, not the device. The device can actually be several km away, or even using a different SIM.
Carriers can mark a phone as "stolen". Once you do that, then that _device_ (separate from the SIM) will be barred from the network, along with a tonne of other international networks. However, they still don't track the device.
They can track it, but only at the request of the police, and it will typically require radiolocation using several different base stations. Sometimes they use A-GPS on the phone. However, they will only do this at the request of the police, and typically only for a 911 call.
The cell site's lat/long is public information.
The cell site used for the call is needed so that when there is a disagreement, as in "I wasn't in that city, there's no way I could have made that call", they can provide all of the information needed to resolve the problem, such as showing that you were registered in another city entirely at that time.
Additionally, it seems they've got legislated data retention rules, but they have typically been based around the existing retention policies the carriers have in order to avoid having to pay the carriers (like the US govt pays carriers for legal intercept).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retention
In other words, cell towers aren't secret, and if you don't want to have your data retained, talk to the government, not the carriers.
I replied too quickly.
1) They keep 6 months because that's how long you have to object to the bill.
2) Billing isn't keeping the lat/long of the phone, it's keeping the lat/long of the cell site, otherwise, it wouldn't be a blob with a direction on the map, it would be a point with a radius. It's the cell site's lat+long and which antenna (direction) is seeing the phone.
The 6 months is because that's the length of time you have to object to the bill.
The key part they are removing is error detection and correction. They are creating chips which have an ~8% chance of producing an incorrect result. Supposedly hearing aids will accept a 10% error rate, so it is a good trade off.
These aren't "redundant" parts, they're parts which prevent errors from happening. It's just that in some applications they don't care about errors.
It's like looking at the various floating point bugs and going, "meh, close enough". Sucks for a spreadsheet, but if all you care about is integers 0-10, you probably aren't going to notice.
Here's the actual press release:
http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=15497&SnID=154992879
"Inexact Hardware" seems to be the new term. Since they mention hearing aids, it seems to be that it's bringing the fuzziness of analog back into the digital world.
Except that pure aggregations of facts don't have legal protection in the US. They do in other locations, but not the US. Otherwise, there would be a lot of fights over sports scores, tv schedules and phone books, like we have in the UK, NZ and Australia.
Actually, SMSCs are typically priced per SMS.
Actually, you are charged for the entire call, that's why most calls have a "X for the first minute, Y for each additional minute, with a minimum of 60s, and billed in 6s increments".
The charge for call setup and teardown is included in the first minute charge.
I agree with you there are better things than charging a penny. We can already see what happens when you do with SMS and VoIP.
For example, people are hacking VoIP lines and then making fraudulent calls to numbers with large termination rates. The guy at the other end gets his cut and disappears.
People are also attacking smartphones and doing similar things - signing up for premium SMS services, etc.
However, we already do have financial systems which are prepared to handle billions of one penny transactions every day - the phone network does this already. It's expensive, but it does already happen.
Magazines are very, very random access. When I read a magazine, I rarely start at the ToC. I'll flip through the magazine, stopping at a picture that interests me, a title that interests me, or something else. Heck, I tend to look at the advertisements before I look at the ToC!
So, while I love my iPad, it definitely doesn't suit the way I like to read magazines.
Are you having fun yet?
