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Comment Re:Why the iTunes sync? (Score 1) 318

You need more than just the positions of near by cell towers to triangulate a position. You need the exact amount of time it took a signal to travel from each of at least three towers to the phone. If that data isn't stored then at best you can only get a very rough idea of where the phone is. A phone can connect to cell towers that are miles away.

If this data is a cash, then the time stamp might not even be the time the phone was near the tower. It could be the most recent date the actual position of the tower was confirmed.

Comment Re:This is just a money grab (Score 1) 562

I understand the politicians motivations. I'm against what they're doing because it wastes my tax dollars, and makes America look incompetent.

Designing a rocket is hard enough without congressmen adding a bunch of random requirements to protect big businesses that are no longer competitive. If politicians keep interfering with important engineering decisions like this we'll never get back to the moon. This bill should call for NASA to find the best way to get back to the moon. It shouldn't require that they use a specific system. They should leave that decision to the engineers.

Comment This is just a money grab (Score 5, Informative) 562

This bill is an attempt to revive the failed SLS space launcher based on space shuttle parts. Here's the relevant text in the bill:

(3) The 111th Congress, in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2010, called for the development of a heavy lift capability of greater than 130 metric tons consisting of the Space Launch System (SLS) and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) to pursue exploration, yet fell short on explicitly stating a clear destination.

(4) The 112th Congress has reaffirmed this commitment to the development of a heavy lift capability.

A few months ago a senator from Utah tried to get NASA to stop looking for alternatives to the SLS (such as SpaceX) by citing the 130 ton requirement. Now they're trying to pass a new bill with stronger wording to force NASA to spend money on the SLS, which happens to be built in their states.

Comment Re:Again? (Score 2) 465

I don't support this lawsuit. I oppose any legal action that might deprive me of choice. That said, it's not reasonable to argue that intuitive interfaces are necessarily obvious. Just because it's easy to use an intuitive interface doesn't mean it's easy to invent one.

You're basically saying "the iPhone is easy to use, therefore it must have been easy to design". If that were true the first smart phones would have been as easy to use as an iPhone.

Comment Re:Could it be? (Score 1) 436

If that's truly the case, the battery % charge meter would count down running *any* CPU and/or GPU intensive application. To think that Flash somehow consumes more battery than any other CPU-pegging (not tough to do on an 8-year-old PC) process is to show a fundamental lack of understanding about how computers work.

--Jeremy

On any laptop I've used running the CPU at 100% reduces the battery life to less than a quarter of what it normally is. The issue is that there's no reason web browsing should be a CPU intensive task (besides poor programming). An iPad gets 10 hours of web browsing. It's completely inexcusable for my laptop which normally gets 8 hours of battery life to get only 2 hours of web browsing because flash is enabled.

Comment Re:plain-text OS? (Score 1) 433

A system is as secure as it's weakest component. The setup you described would make using hashed passwords for authentication only as secure as using public/private key encryption. So you could use a hash, but you wouldn't get any security benefit from it.

Comment Re:plain-text OS? (Score 3, Informative) 433

The article says they have to be able to provide the actual passwords. The idea behind using a hash it that the actual password isn't stored and can't be determined using the hash. That way if someone steals their data they still can't get the actual user passwords. According to the article, any secure implementation of hashed passwords would be in violation of this law.

Comment Re:Use cases? (Score 1) 716

This isn't a debate about how easy it is to code in various languages. It's about whether or not most users are effected by the absence of flash on the iPad. They aren't because the vast majority of the mainstream sites are written in JavaScript and HTML or have an iPad app available.

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