If this exact same logic had been applied during the time the Constitution was written, these people would have attempted to ban anyone from possessing or using fire in any place where any document that any government agency might one day want to read is created or stored, because "the criminals might burn the papers we think might contain evidence against them, therefore nobody should be allowed to have fire and paper at the same time because it would inconvenience us."

Notation that you create a vacuum. ;)

Agreed entirely.

"Wah, technology is making our extremely self-isolated, often xenophobic culture irrelevant and unnecessary, and we're losing children to the 'normals' because the 'normals' want our precious deaf babies to be able to hear just like them, and then they won't be able to identify with our problems and won't want to be part of our little culture. Waaaaaahhhhhhhh."

It's a bit like the tiny backwards religions and cults (like the ones that preach total abstinence, for example) who can't figure out why their children don't want to remain part of their tiny little self-isolated ultra-religious, extremely narrow-minded and often rather intolerant communities for the larger world of opportunities without the shackles of self-imposed dogmas or bigotries. "We just can't figure out why these children would want to leave our perfect little nest and see or be part of the wider world."

That's part of what technology does: encourages progress, and helps us ablate away the slough and callouses on our society and cultures. 100+ years ago there were whole, relatively mainstream cultures focused on death because it was such an unavoidable part of life, during an age where you were lucky if 1 in 3 children survived to adolescence, much less adulthood. Since then, medical science drastically increased survival rates, and those cults faded away as fewer and fewer people suffered agonizing, tragic, or otherwise preventable losses, and thus as fewer people needed social support in their grief or hardships, such cults largely disappeared.

Deaf "culture" should be no different. It's a crutch, a support group, for people with similar problems to band together, however it very often creates as many problems as it solves. By pulling people away or serving to isolate them from their larger culture, not as an individual wishing to remain unique, but as someone who sees themselves as irrevocably different from, and outside the groups that would otherwise be their peers, if not for their disability, it creates a barrier to participation or feelings of inclusion in society at large, and in the end can do as much harm as good by fostering resentment toward a society they see as rejecting them, all while they isolate themselves from it further and further.

Having recently just re-watched all of ST:TNG, my picks for worst are fairly simple: most episodes focusing on Troi, any episode featuring Troi's mother, and almost every episode featuring or focusing on Worf's son Alexander.

Stop feeding the troll, kids.

Seriously, this is being reposted to multiple threads with no intent other than disrupting normal discussion, no different from the GNAA trolls of years past. Just move along and ignore it, nothing to see here.

> "is a 100% free software mobile device important to you?"

In a word: Yes.

The borderline (and sometimes not-so-borderline) criminal behavior of some software/hardware makers, coupled with often exorbitant costs for a device that will either be destroyed (via being cheaply made) or totally obsolete in a few years makes me quite leery of trusting or relying on a modern smartphone, much less actually spending my own money on one. Especially when my company provides me with a phone, POS though it may be.

If you can afford a 20TB RAID *and* have enough data of value to warrant *retaining* 20TB, then you can certainly justify the expense of a tape drive and corresponding tapes to back it all up.

Tape is not dead, contrary to more than 3 decades of claims otherwise. It is, in fact, perfectly alive and healthy, and well worth using (with a proper backup/rotation scheme) when you have that kind of data volume to store.

I've worked for Arcus/Iron Mountain and Recall both, and I can't tell you how many times over my years with those companies I've heard someone say "We don't need off-site backups" or "We don't need tape, we just have the IT guy take the hotswap drives home every day", only to have them come crawling back in tears weeks, months or years later when they've lost everything.

Because tape is a dead and obsolete technology too, just like people have been saying it will be with every new storage advance for more than 30 years, right?

*sigh* Let me guess, you're either between 15 - 25 years old, and/or have never worked in enterprise-class I.T.? Otherwise, you really ought to know better.

Before I ever entered I.T. professionally 20 years ago, people had been claiming the impending death of magnetic tape for more than a decade. at least, yet it is still with us today. Sure, the round-wheel tape is more-or-less gone, but tape is still going strong.

Similarly, SSD's are not going to completely replace mechanical storage any time soon, if only because as solid-state memory improves, so will mechanical devices continue to do, and they will almost certainly have a place in modern computing for many years yet to come, barring some as-yet completely unforeseen revolution in materials science lowering materials and production costs while raising quality and value to thresholds well beyond anything currently predicted. Then again, the same advance (such as room-temperature superconductors) could have wide-ranging positive impacts on both technologies, increasing memory operation speeds in SSD's while eliminating the mechanical bearing from HDD's and providing similar performance increases.

After all, I'm pretty sure that if I dig back far enough, I can find at least one thread - quite possibly one I made substantially similar comments in - on this very site from ~15 years ago with someone saying much the same thing about how optical (or magneto-optical) is going to make tape/mechanical-drives obsolete. Now we know optical disks have a life-span before they degrade, making them useless for long-term archival storage, and I couldn't tell you when the last time I saw a mini-disc was.

This is very common in large, enterprise-class businesses with significant numbers of PC's dedicated to end-users, as this methodology is used in various ways to provide security (to the enterprise, while simultaneously robbing the end-user of theirs in favor of the business'). The services provided by companies likeZScaler would be perhaps the most common use of these types of MITM attacks.

Ah, I can understand that fear, but there's really no reason such a system can't be generally safe and reliable, especially as there is no need for the lasers to be on at all times, and its not unreasonable to believe one might be able to source a fairly low-power laser that would still have the desired effect on CCD cameras while being reasonably safe for at least short exposures to the human eye, just in case a motor stops working properly or the like.

Titanium is paramagnetic, meaning that while it is attracted/reactive to the presence of external magnetic fields, it retains no magnetization of its own when removed from said external field. In this specific usage case, magnetization of the part would not be of concern any more than it would be for any other titanium prosthesis.

So, in fact, does everything you have ever seen in your entire life: otherwise, you wouldn't see it.

The key is the specific frequencies (notice the plurality) of light reflected. The human cornea, like a camera lens, has a rather unique and readily identifiable reflected spectroscopy, and both are easily differentiated from the other.

Seriously, not an NP-hard problem. As is usual, people are trying to make it out as more difficult than it actually is.

Doesn't need one. This is not an NP-hard problem, nor is the proposed solution. It could, in fact, be done on a relatively low budget. Relative, that is, to the costs that might otherwise come with lawsuits or bad media publicity resulting from "unauthorized" video taken by passengers, in any event.

Besides, if he does the footwork and engineering on his customer's dime, he (and perhaps the customer, as a partner in a joint venture) could come out of it with a product they can market and sell to other similar bus operators, theaters, etc.

None of the tech I outlined is rare, odd, or terribly expensive (excepting LIDAR units, at about $5k each), and can be done entirely with COTS hardware and some customized programming that would only have to be built on top of programming that has already been done in this field. In fact, the PS3EYE or Kinect already has most of the capability needed.

Honestly, I've seen homebrewers do much more complex things (including code), such as the home-built, automated air-hockey table built by a father for his daughter, which not only has to identify the puck, but then do loads of computational math to determine angles, speeds and force loads: what I initially described in my original post would almost be child's play by comparison.