The summary mentions locks and keys as also being hackable. Also combination locks, face recognition, mag stripes, signatures, DRM, many forms of encryption, passwords, captchas, PINs, ATMs Online banking, credit cards. In fact there is precious little security that isn't hackable.
Of course this isn't going to stop people here ragging on TouchID.
Couldn't you just as well say "Fantasy is about considering and exploring the human ramifications when certain aspects of reality are changed"? If you don't care about the science, you're just using sci-fi as window dressing to take you somewhere else, like Avatar is essentially Dances with Wolves with a ton of fancy gadgetry. You can do a historic war movie like 300 or contemporary one like Enemy at the Gates or a futuristic one like Independence Day and it's often the same story of a desperate stand against overwhelming forces with everything in the balance. For that matter, so could many of the great battle scenes in LotR that don't deal with the ring. It's only occasionally the science is an essential plot item and rarer still that it has any real scientific substance. In Star Trek, they just say "beam me up, Scotty" and you're back on the Enterprise, it might just as well have been Gandalf throwing a teleportation spell. That essentially just makes it futuristic fantasy, with sufficiently advanced technology to make it indistinguishable from magic.
The Apple market are completely locked into one device, and are forced to wait twice as long on average to be able to upgrade.
That's good: With Android, you don't have to buy a new phone every 6 months, you get to buy a new phone every six months.
We wouldn't have this problem if we filed our taxes online. Turbotax has prevented that, because they want to charge us for doing what the government could do free, as it does in less corrupt countries.
I have filed my fiance's parents' taxes for free for the past three years, so I don't know what you're on about.
I filed for free too, but that's a link to private services, like Turbotax, which are only free for people with $58,000 or less income (and/or certain other complicated restrictions), and the services are restricted.
Significantly, if you had a problem, for example because the instructions were ambiguous, the IRS help line wasn't allowed to help you, and the third-party providers didn't provide any help.
As I recall, it didn't do my actual calculations. I had to do most of the calculations by hand, with my TI pocket calculator. It was set up to do standard calculations, but wouldn't handle the common exceptions.
I was also annoyed at the inefficiency of it -- I had to go through the calculations, TurboTax had to go through the same calculations, and the IRS had to go through the same calculations again to check my return.
The full discussion of the problems is in the articles I linked to.
Nor have I seen any Budist or Jews or Christians or Athiest or Hindu actually attack schools full of children like what happened in Beslan.
You want Buddhists torching schools and killing children? Here you are. All religion is fucked up, no exceptions.
If there aren't sex robots involved, I'm not interested.
Forget MMOs for a while and work on some good single-player games.
MMOs are played-out. The biggest problem with them is you have to engage with other gamers and that's never a good thing.
Uh, excuse me? I chose the State of Palestine as an example specifically because a significant number of countries recognizes it while another significant number of countries doesn't. Status of Israel has nothing to do with that example. If anything, Israel would be a worse example because it is recognized by something like 83% of the member countries of UN while State of Palestine is only recognized by 70%, thus serving as a better example of the international recognition issue.
And regarding the UN declaration...while Israel sought immediately to implement it in 1948, PLO waited until 1988 with the statehood declaration. That might explain in part why they've fallen behind in the diplomacy area. That, and the very inadvisable war in 1948 (for which, however, the attacking neighboring Arab League states are probably more to blame than Palestinians.) But again, I don't see the purpose of your "You can't have it both ways." Besides this being unrelated to my mention of Palestine, I'm not even American. Keep that for Americans.
Because there's no value in overengineering things that are easy to replace and where the consequences of failure are trivial. Further, most people only need the features of their phones to be "OK" rather than "GREAT" and would rather carry one device rather than 10.
For some things - such as clothing or furniture, or items where there have literally been no earth shattering developments in the last 100 years (like, I dunno, silverware), it's okay to overengineer because doing so is actually efficient. I have a coat and a pair of boots that have lasted me 20+ years, some silverware that's maybe 200 years old, and the average of most of the "important" furniture in my home is over 75 years.
But my phone? I'm not a professional photographer. I'm not even an amateur photographer. I just want pictures I took of people and things and events I found worth photographing that are "good enough." I'm not doing professional video editing, so I just want a video cam that's good enough I can take footage of my dogs doing goofy stuff that I can send to my family. If I'm in a place where I'm watching movies or TV on my phone, it means I'm traveling and therefore unlikely to give much of a shit if the screen doesn't have perfect color fidelity or whatever because, well, there's a bunch of shit going on around me anyway. Ditto for music - why would I aim for some kind of audiophile's wet dream when likely the only time I'll be using my phone for music is when I'm out and about in situations where music quality isn't terribly relevant? Etc. and so on.
It's not that we don't value quality - I think we DO value quality very, very much - it's just that we can recognize that it's kind of stupid to waste time and money and effort on overengineering things that will be hopelessly outclassed in a few scant years.
Buy quality where it matters, buy cheap and replaceable where it doesn't.
You've got midi-chlorians shooting out of your nose, young padawan. Don't burst.
. I feel that both PHP and VB has a nice place when you need to write once, use for a day and throw away.
That's what Perl and shell scripts are for.
LinkedIn to face lawsuit for spamming users' email address books
A judge in the Northern District of California has paved the way for a lawsuit against the social network LinkedIn for violating the privacy of its users. The complaint was that LinkedIn "violated several state and federal laws by harvesting email addresses from the contact lists of email accounts associated with Plaintiffs’ LinkedIn accounts and by sending repeated invitations to join LinkedIn to the harvested email addresses". It relates to the fact that LinkedIn not only used the address books of those signing up for accounts to tout for business by sending out an email to that effect, but also sent follow-up email if there was no response.
US district judge Lucy Koh ruled that while users granted permission for LinkedIn to access their contact list it is this 'spamming' that is likely to land the company in court again. The judge outlined the process users were complaining about, explaining that LinkedIn sent an email to connected in users' address books -- albeit with initial permission -- sends the same email a week later if the recipient has not joined LinkedIn, and a third email if another week passes without a signup.
Further complaints stemmed from the fact that "the only way a LinkedIn user can stop the two follow-up endorsement emails (assuming the user found out about the initial emails in the first place) from going out to the email addresses harvested from that user’s external email account is for the user to individually open up each invitation from within his or her LinkedIn account (which LinkedIn has intentionally made difficult to find within the user’s account) and click a button that allows the user to withdraw that single invitation". This means it could take several hours to individually cancel hundreds, or even thousands, of emails that were scheduled to be sent out.
The complainants pointed out that LinkedIn's Help Center pages are filled with complaints from other users about the emails. Some users said that "LinkedIn knew about flaws in its process but nevertheless took no action". One of the plaintiff's main causes for concern is that their contacts would regard the emails sent out by LinkedIn as being indicative that they endorsed LinkedIn, as well as being seen as being so enamored with the network as to spam on its behalf. This 'spamming' is seen as having the potential to damage the reputation of the user the emails were sent on the behalf of -- it could "injure users' reputations by allowing contacts to think that the users are the types of people who spam their contacts or are unable to take the hint that their contacts do not want to join their LinkedIn network".
The judge also pointed out that some of the wording used during the signup process was misleading. "By stating a mere three screens before the disclosure regarding the first invitation that 'We will not... email anyone without your permission,' LinkedIn may have actively led users astray". Koh also suggests that LinkedIn has violated California law by associating users' names and images advertising for further business.
I sure as heck wouldn't want anyone to think I was willing to spam for linkedin, which still resembles a bunch of strangers asking other strangers to recommend them to still other strangers.
The right word for that other one is "Imperial".
"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra
