Tin foil hat on. It came to me last week.

Google has recently released Project Fi. A project/product (is project a codeword for beta now?) that will allow seamless transition between 2G/3G/LTE and *WiFi* for increased coverage and strength.

Project Fi is bandwidth charged, independent of data link being used - so while the underlying carriers (T-Mobile & Sprint) may charge wholesale for data, google will effectively get the bandwidth at "Google WiFi" for free - meaning that the data charges are a lot more profitable when going past a Starbucks, in NYC, etc. Although unproven, google might actually have meaningful alternate revenue sources from this model.

This is not fundamentally different than Xfinity's wifi sharing - except google is going for the Free WiFi in the Starbucks, NYC, etc. B2B is a lot more pragmatic, and a lot easier to enable.

Now if only Project Fi worked in a phone that was in the $2-300 range, I'd probably give it a go. But the Nexus 6 is too big and too expensive. Hopefully the invite won't expire.

Hi, I'm an enraged customer, I'd like to speak to your escalations manager.

It helps to say that in the kindest possible tone, too.

"Escalation manager" is the normal term for someone who talks to "enraged customers". It may or may not be what your ISP uses, but the two phrases in the same sentence tend to get you to the right manager.

--dave
Did escalations for a while at Sun, some of the problems were real fun. Others weren't.

The guys that kept their jobs during the DotCon collapse were those that had "community organizers" that helped them negotiate big cuts in salary and finding shared housing in the area to cut living expenses.

In practice what this means: Try to hook into the H-1b ethnic network somehow. Perhaps the best way to survive a collapse in employment is to get a tan, change your legal name to the moral equivalent of Sanjay Gupta and contact one of the many immigration law firms in the valley that aid and abet H-1b immigration fraud with a sob story about how you're going to be sent back "home" (don't tell them "home" is Champaign Urbana Illinois) if you can't find a job -- and that you'll be willing to take a big pay cut and live in a beehive to stay in "America". Do it with the appropriate accent. They'll hook you up with a "community organizer".

Region lockouts are a restraint on trade. If they were enforced within the US, they'd be an illegal one.

Imagine if a company in Virginia had, in their terms and conditions, a line prohibiting a citizen of Massachusetts from purchasing their product or service? One requiring they buy it from a specified licencee in Mass?

Can you say "criminal conspiracy in restraint of trade" ?

The fact that they have a design patent aside, Blackberry has been iterating on the fret + rounded keys design since the blackberry bold. It's what makes a "modern" blackberry recognizable.

https://www.google.com/search?...
https://www.google.com/search?...

They look quite similar.

From TFA, it is a design patent - aka Trade Dress.

From http://www.theglobeandmail.com... , the actual complain seems with merit. The frets (metal lines), key shape (rounded corners) and space bar seem to be pulled entirely from the Blackberry Q10. It's as blatant as the typical Chinese typo-based (Sony vs Somy) ripoffs.

If you saw a phone with a the Typo keyboard, it would be reasonable to assume that its an extra tall Q10. That's what Blackberry has sued about.

Guess who?

And the endorsements keep coming in...

Yes, my thanks to you and the AC who caught that!

This scheme will work for one branch in Lesser Nowhere, Sechwan Province, with a finite and small set of pictures, and a small number of crooks. Once the number of faces increases, the probability of a false positive explodes, roughly as (N 2) (select every two out of N), where N is the size of the pools of pictures + the person being scanned.

The well-known example is the "birthday paradox", in which twenty-three people at a party increases the probability of two of them having the same birthday to fifty-fifty. That particular case was because the actual probability was multiplied by (25 2) = 25! / ((25-2)! * 2!) = 6900 comparisons being made, times 1/365 chances of a hit.

The German federal security service considered using one of my then employer's recognizers for airports to catch terrorists, but ended up facing the problem of accusing grandma of being part of the Bader-Meinhoff gang (;-)) No matter how accurate we were, a few more people in the pool would give us false positives. We'd need roughly an accuracy of 99.9 followed by roughly as many decimal places of 9s as there were powers of ten of people.

--dave

From TFA...

.

It's an Australian movie, set in Australia, with Australian actors, Australian Director, Australian Writers.

Piece of co-opted Australian culture... They even drive on the left side of the road - check out IMDb for shots of the yellow interceptors...

Hollywood never co-opts other cultures do they...
   

EU privacy laws are fairly painful for US companies to comply with. To do business with EU individuals, Personal Identifiable Information needs to be handled according to a set of rules - http://ec.europa.eu/justice/da...

It is often simpler for Amazon deployed companies to set up in the Ireland AWS zone.

As others have mentioned, most foreign SIGINT/COMINT agencies can't gather intelligence domestically, so it lowers barriers. Ironically US companies that want to deal with EU customers may end up moving everything to Ireland. However this allows the NSA to gather intelligence indirectly on US citizens.

A sister company did recruiting, and a then colleague said "I asked for a MVS and Unix person in a particular state with experience in a package", and got hundreds of names, none of whom knew all those things". The didn't know the difference between "and" (3 candidates) and "or" (3000 unqualified candidates). I still get requests for things I only ever did once, with co-requisites of things I've never done...

Seriously, WTF is an article about energy vectors doing on /. without even a hint of how these guys achieved radical breakthrough advances in energy efficiency for both hydrogen-from-water and CO2-from-air?

If non-technical guys like Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn played in "The Internship" at ages 46 and 45 respectively can get jobs at Google, what's wrong with the rest of these no-talent old farts? This smells like envy, if you ask this faithful movie-goer.