Despite Apple and other corporate plans to move everything and everyone to "The Cloud", the masses are doing quite the opposite, moving everything away from the cloud and hosted resources.

There's already a growing exodus to use personally-controlled storage, cloud and other environments, or heavily encrypted storage platforms to hold their data, making apps that expect "iCloud(tm)" and other in-the-clear, branded solutions from being all but useless.

So as long as these "replacement" versions work primarily, and with full functionality without feature-reduction 100% locally and by default, then they'll be fine. If they require the iCloud/cloud to function, they're going to suffer from diminished adoption.

The same is happening with digital currency v. analog/paper currency, resulting from increased eroding confidence in the system (eg: Target failures, identity theft, and hundreds of other examples in the news, nearly weekly).

If these features aren't being demanded by users (and there's plenty of evidence they're not), then why the big push to store everything you have and own, off-premises?

On my side, every single packet across the wireless side of the router, goes through a local Squid instance. Not only can I inspect the logs, but I have Squid filtering out tens of thousands of sites, domains, ad spamming pages and other things, so if there were any abuses coming, I could just block those too, or turn on other block index files and filter off even more.

Easey peasey.
 

My ISP charges $0.50 per gig overage

Now THAT is impressive. Here in the Northeast US, where we have AT&T for phone and DSL, each GB over your cap, costs $15.00. It used to be $10.00, but they jumped it 50% without warning a few months ago.

Here's the real Occum's Razor here:

Does the "kill switch" remotely disable the mobile/cellular capabilities of the phone? Or does it completely disable the device, thus bricking it?

These are smartphones, and they're used by many people for more than just a phone. I'd even argue that the function used the least on these devices, is the actual phone itself.

I rarely see someone having an actual voice conversation on a phone these, days, but people spend hours and hours doing everything else with them.

So if there's a civil uprising, martial law, and the .gov decides to shunt an entire city (Boston Bombers anyone? Greece? Turkey last year?, we've seen this many times already), then they also render these devices inert for much more than just communications devices.

- My ex-wife can no longer monitor her blood sugar (Type 1 diabetic, 100% digitally monitored via iPhone)
- Digital locks on your home no longer are able to be unlocked (keyless entry with NFS, etc.)
- Credit card information, details, photos, videos, other data is now unavailable

The chilling effect of this alone, should cause hundreds of thousands of people to step up and march on their congressperson's front door.

The potential abuses of this are so far reaching, far superseding the cost of replacing a phone handset that happens to get stolen.

I'd rather see the funding go into a user-driven device locating capability, with remote wipe/reporting on the other end instead of a remote kill switch controlled by corporations and the .gov.

Very scary stuff happening here. Verrrrry scary.

Question: How is this any different from typing in a pirated key to a licensed copy of software you have installed in 'demo' mode today?

Answer: It isn't. You're not licensed to use the service, and enabling it on your machine, is a violation of the terms of that license.

Ahm... no.

Most of us who attend meetings, use computers. We don't sit back and watch movies or videos. We do actual work.

See all that horizontal scrolling while just viewing webpages? Magnify that tenfold for apps that don't support horizontal scrolling (eg: PowerPoint, Office apps, many editors, mail, etc.)

This is utterly useless in any sort of business settings, if it can't even handle the lowest-common-denominator laptop screen resolution.

I own a Gigabyte GB-BXi7-4770R BRIX Pro, so I do love and respect their products, it's just that THIS ONE is a poorly-executed implementation, of what could have been an amazing product.

It's got a ways to go before it's useful to the masses, beyond bachelor party photos-on-the-wall and starting gamers.

Why-o-why are we even looking at projectors that don't start with a MINIMUM resolution of 1600x900 or greater?

864x480? In 2014? Are you joking?

That's not even going to project a laptop, tablet or even smartphone screen on the projector screen or wall without clipping and overlapping, so forget trying to use this anywhere except to replace your personal vacation slide projector for family gatherings.

Movies? At 864x480? Just... no.

Moving on...

"So you are turning off and removing the battery from your Cell Phone? No?"

Pretty soon, that won't matter either, with MIT developing wireless radios that rely on nothing other than power from the wireless signals floating all around us. That's why I use a Faraday Bag to put my devices in when I am not actively using them.

"And you are worried about your CAR?"

There, FTFY.

It's still my car. If I want my car's exact speed, location, route and destination being sent to anonymous, random strangers sharing the public roadway with me, I'll be the one who authorizes that data being sent outbound, thank you very much.

"They ALREADY can track you, even with out a warrant. It's called a stakeout and tailing somebody. They can watch you in public, any time they wish, no warrant required."

The major difference here, is that we can track them as well, and they aren't allowed to continue to track you, follow you onto private property without a warrant. They're also not allowed to illegally attach GPS devices to your vehicle, but they're doing that anyway too.

See the problem here?

"Conspiracy is when you invent an implausible explanation for something."

If we've learned anything over the last 4-5 years, it's that those pesky conspiracy-theorist friends we have that we never acknowledge to others, were much closer to "Right" than we had ever dreamed of.

I agree with you. There's absolutely no way this is going to go unabused.
 

"It's all short range communication, so application is limited."

Really? How "short" is the range of GPS these days? Looks like about 12,551.7 miles.

Galactically, that's probably "short", but there is nothing about this that is "short range" at all. GPS capability + what essentially amounts to a huge, roadway-phased mesh network, and you're talking about miles to dozens of miles of coverage between "endpoints".

"We can build systems that react more quickly and consistently than any human. Every year's technological advances expand the domains in which we can do this. If we can use such systems to prevent unnecessary death and suffering, LET'S GET ON WITH IT."

Show me the data.

There is absolutely no way in this universe, that this will not be abused.

There's too much hand-wringing possible with this technology. Couple this with the recent "Remote Stop Device" that the EU is mulling over, and you've essentially got real-time tracking of every single car in the participating countries, mapping and plotting movements and vehicles, and auto-citations being sent out to offenders.

Do something you're not supposed to do, or out past curfew? Your vehicle is remotely stopped. "Please stay where you are, while we send an officer to violate your rights further, with an illegal stop, search and invasive roadside interrogation."

No, there's no way this is happening in a benign, olive-branch fashion. I'm not that naive. There's far too much evidence backing me up here, that similar technologies proposed as saving humanity weren't immediately abused when they hit the market/street/public.

"None of this takes control of your car in any way. It would just be used to provide information to built in indicators in the cars. Perhaps a HUD that would show the locations of other cars with relation to yours, especially in your blind spot."

Are you sure about that?

"Finally, we get to the issue of government spying. Since every vehicle is transmitting its location, doesn't this mean that the government could track everybody, or gather other information about them? This is actually very unlikely. The development of V2V tech has been fairly hands-off on the government's part. Their primary contribution has been to lay down certain standards and requirements for the tech, and then let the commercial companies implement it."

Don't be ridiculous.

Within a hour of this being made a requirement, there will be installations on bridges, public roadways, intersections that will be capturing, gathering, storing, aggregating and mapping every single vehicle movement within city and rural limits.

Guaranteed!

This is an over-bearing, invasive government's wet dream. To know where everyone is at any one time, at all times, day or night? Absolutely this will be abused. They're already doing it now without our consent using our phones and surreptitiously installed GPS devices in our vehicles.

If you think for a nano-second that this is truly being developed to reduce the number of traffic accidents, you're being quite naive. You may be working on the technology, but that doesn't mean you understand the full implications of how it's targeted for use, or how it will ultimately be used when it becomes a reality.

There is absolutely no way this isn't going to get abused at the highest levels of Government.

When computer-based automation and robotics starts taking away 50%+ of the common jobs in the industry, you can bet learning how to code, will be immensely valuable.

Do we have the capital funds at the government level to re-school and re-skill everyone who is 40+, locked into a career path and now out of work, with nothing available in their own industry sector?

We're ignoring a very large and looming issue that is about to hit us in 10 years or less. Someone will need to be around, understand and be conversantly expert in the technologies powering that automation (think cloud, drones, home automation, self-driving vehicles, facial recognition, algorithms, etc.).

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