If you can remotely disable it then why not just remotely blow it up?

Hey, there's a new strategy... remote control bombs disguised as other sorts of weapons. Sure.. raid this depot... I dare ya!!

Huh.. I thought Apple strictly disallowed emulators in their store. My iPad is the only device I didn't have an HP emulator on. I know what I am doing when I get home now...

Don't bother. If you aren't in school anymore just use an emulator on your computer or smart phone. Believe it or not HP released the ROMs to those older calculators. It's legal! They have a website with free download. Go get the 48SX ROM, pick the emulator for your platform and it's exactly like the real thing. Did you keep the manual? It still applies. No new learning curve!

I grew up with a 48G and this is what I do now. Another cool thing is on the Android emulator there are two views. One has all the buttons and looks just like the real calculator. There is also a second view that cuts down on the available buttons but enlarges them and gives you a bigger screen than the real calculator ever had! You can switch back and forth without losing your work if you need those other buttons. You don't really need that on the desktop emulators because there is so much more screen to work with anyway.

You can do this with TI too but you have to steal the ROM, not so nice.

My school was pretty open about us using other types of calculators. They only taught TI but if you were willing to take it upon yourself you could use any kind you wanted. My parents bought me an HP 48G (RPN). I liked it b/c I had dreams of programming it to do stuff (kind of like today's smart phones). It was more capable than TIs. I never got around to programming anything. I became comfortable with it so I stuck with it even though figuring out how to do the more advanced functions all by myself made class much more painful. I would not recommend going counter to the rest of the class to any current students.

While in a perfect world schools would cater to the student's or parents' choice but it isn't practical. I can certainly understand educators not wanting to learn 10 different kinds of calculators. Even if the teacher already knows them all, individually teaching students to use their calculators would slow down the class. I also undertand them not allowing general purpose devices such as smart phones. I'm not so convinced about the distraction argument (they only hurt themselves). I do think the possiblity for cheating makes them unusable.

What really sucks though is the resulting TI monopoly. Of course they are over priced and under-evolved! Why wouldn't they be??

What I would really want to see is a STANDARD generic calculator that anyone can produce. TI of course is never going to allow their own "IP" to be used that way. Unfortunately even if someone designed such a thing and made it free it will go nowhere because educators do not care about this sort of thing enough to make the switch.

The only solution I can see (unfortunately) is government action. I think that the government should be the LAST option for solving any problem but what else could ever break the monopoly? It's self-sustaining!

It could be made law that all school switch to an open calculator. Or... I've never heard of this happening but doesn't copyright law have something written in about eminent domain? TI could be forced to allow others to produce TI-like calculators. That is an ugly solution! Any time government takes private property, that is a horrible precident. It might be a bit more "fair" to TI though. At least making TI-like calculators TI would still have a head start. Also eminent domain usually requires some sort of compensation. What value is that "IP" to TI after some other open design has been mandated?

Ultimately I don't see either of these things happening. The current political situation is way too pro-corporation, anti-consumer to ever do anything like that and it shows no signs of changing. At least my own story has a somewhat happy ending. My old HP calculator died (screen cracked). But.. HP released the ROMS, free and legal! There is an emulator that let's me use it exactly like I used to. And.. since I am no longer in school I can even run it on my cellphone! I could do the same with TI but I would have to pirate a ROM.

Is there any danger of this getting into anyone's intestines and living there? I wouldn't want propane farts!

Does that mean that the Transmeta Crusoe wasn't anything special?

Short of real-time sending the data to a remote location not under control of the local police department you can't realy eliminate the problem. I think that would take too much mobile bandwidth.

The problem could be minimized through procedure or even law. Standard procedure should be that the data never gets manually erased. (Actually, don't even put controls on there to do so). Let it roll over. If no-one complains about the officer within a week the week old data deletes itself to make room. If the officer delete's his/her own footage, that should be a punishable offense all by itself. If it lines up with a time when the officer was acused of something... the fact the officer deleted something itself becomes evidence. It's also a case for a destruction of evidence charge.

"What if the police got to the scene of a crime after..."

The same point could be made against the officer giving any testimony of what he saw.

"but it would still require a massive database and supporting infrastructure"

If this happens I don't know how it will actually be implemented. Maybe lawmakers will mandate some huge infrastructure. I don't think that is necessary though.

  I think the camera should probably send it's data wirelessly to a box in the police car. That box should be made from heavy gauge steel with a lock the officer does not get a key for. Any tampering would be a federal offense punishable by jailtime. Inside is a computer that stores the data and automatically deletes anything older than some arbitrary age (How about a week?). So long as nothing funny happens that's as far as the data needs to go.

For a little more robust of a system the car could sync it's stored footage with a computer at the police station. This would happen wirelessly and automatically. The syncing process would NOT delete anything from the car's own box.

I don't mind seeing some advertising. I would rather not block the ads so that the people who are providing me with whatever I do want to see can get something out of it. But.. then there's those damn video ads, flash monstrosities which make the browser slow to a crawl and those horrible things that 'cover up' the content you want to see until a timer goes off or you press a tiny little X or something...

Those kinds of things make me switch on the ad blocking software. Unfortunately then the 'nice advertisers' suffer too.

Yes. It would be easier to crack a gramatically correct sentence than a nonsense one because grammer rules would narrow down the possiblities. Who today is using whole nonsense sentences as their passwords? I assume a nonsense sentence is a collection of words right? Currently most people are using nonsense words, a collection of characters. So, tell me there aren't more possible permutations of 6-9 word gramatically correct sentences than there are 6-9 charcter collections of nonsense words...

This example gets trumpeted out in every discussion on patents. First of all, I think most of us here are interested in software patents and maybe to a lesser extent patents on electronic or mechanical devices.

Second... WHY does it take so much money to develop a drug. Is it really necessary? Or is this just the result of the system which people in industry and government have created? This is an industry where the customer MUST buy the product. To not do so is to be sick or maybe dead. That hardly gives the companies involved a lot of incentive to save money. Likewise having seen drugs taken off the market which had been helping me with my own issues better than any other just becasue 1 in 300k people had a bad reaction I suspect regulators are doing little to help matters.

I have a friend who is a nurse, he argues adamantly for the drug companies any time this subject comes up. He talks about multii-million dollar lab equipment he has seen during his schooling which are somehow used in drug research. I wonder why any piece of equipment is so expensive. Is it the materials? Our TVs and cellphones are full of rare earth minerals. Is it the labor? Look at all the labor that goes into all sorts of consumer products. I suspect it's the fact that it is only large drug corporations and universities ever buy such equipment. They expect it to be expensive. they only trust expensive equipment. They have deep pockets. Not many companies make such things and the manufacturers know all of this. I am not a part of the health industry and I don't claim to be an expert in these matters. I only have my suspicions and I freely admit I could be wrong. The more I read about DIY biologists and the lab equipment they make however the more I think I might be right.

From what I have heard all you have to do is claim it wasn't you driving your car and that you don't know who it was. I haven't tried it. I was told that works though.

Are you sure you didn't sign it over to dice when you posted here? No, I am not willing to go wade through the Slashdot TOS to check right now.

"They can be, but it would be incredibly stupid to use something like that. A dictionary attack would crack that password in seconds"

Really? How?

First off, I would expect that a password cracking script's dictionary would include variations of single words and maybe combinations of 2. There are 11 words in that sentence. Anyone with such a password is such an outlier I can't believe any reasonable script today would be written to even try that!

So, what if everyone used passwords like that? No doubt cracking scripts would change. But how is a dictionary attack going to work? They can't possibly put every parsable sentence of a language into a dictionary! The example sentence was 11 words. Even if we treated that as a limit, how many sentences can be made out of 11 or fewer words? Certainly there are far more possible 11-word sentences than there are 11 character passwords.

And then there is punctuation. See the two commas?

That is dead to this crowd. 1/2 of them were probably in diapers in 2002!