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Comment Re:And all this without Jobs (Score 1) 534

by hcs_$reboot (#48925915) Attached to: Apple Posts $18B Quarterly Profit, the Highest By Any Company, Ever

It just goes to prove no one is irreplaceable; not even Jobs.

On one hand Tim Cook was able to pursue Jobs' job. That's refinement of initially very well designed and innovative products. Under the hood, I see annoying bugs that remain unfixed for years - is Cook able to motivate and manage his teams efficiently? Strategically, where is Apple going? An aggressive campaign to get rid of Chrome on the Mac that smells like the early days of Windows. The exceptionally good results of Apple are due to one thing: a bigger iPhone. Users have been wanting that for a long time, looking enviously at the giant Samsung phones for years. Now that everybody has a bigger iPhone, will they buy a new phone in Sept 2015? Unlikely.

Comment Re:18B on 75B (Score 1) 534

by hcs_$reboot (#48922511) Attached to: Apple Posts $18B Quarterly Profit, the Highest By Any Company, Ever

That means your device could be 20% cheaper.

Since when companies charge for making cost + x% margin? That's not the way prices are set. A product is sold at the price it can be sold - the higher the better. Many entrepreneurs are still making huge profit selling stuff 10~100x what it costs in China. Apple could sell 20% cheaper - but why would they do that? They can barely answer the huge demand of iPhones worldwide.

Submission + - Hijacking Drones With Malware

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A recent incident at the White House showed that small aerial vehicles (drones) present a specific security problem. Rahul Sasi, a security engineer at Citrix R&D, created MalDrone, the first backdoor malware for the AR drone ARM Linux system, to target Parrot AR Drones, but says it can be modified to target others as well. The malware can be silently installed on a drone, and be used to control the drone remotely and to conduct remote surveillance.

Comment Re:Cam-tastic (Score -1, Flamebait) 152

The fact that drugs are illegal is the true problem.

Aren't they illegal for a reason? Maybe some drugs could be authorized. But addictive and health-destroy stuff are rightfully illegal. One might ask: Is it legal to prevent someone from destroying his own body? The problem is the highly addictiveness of the products. Someone may eventually want to stop taking the drug and be back to a normal life, but he just can't. The drug owns the user.

Submission + - White House Drone Incident Exposes Key Security Gap

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The Washington Post reports that the intrusion by a recreational drone onto the White House lawn has exposed a security gap at the compound that the Secret Service has spent years studying but has so far been unable to fix. Commercial technology is available that can use a combination of sensitive radar and acoustic trackers to detect small drones, though coming up with an effective way to stop them has been more elusive. "To do something about the problem, you have to find it, you have to track it, you have to identify it and you have to decide what to do with it,” says Frederick F. Roggero. “But especially in an urban environment, it would be tough to detect and tough to defeat kinetically without shooting it down and causing collateral damage.” Most recreational drones, like the one that crashed Monday, weigh only a few pounds and lack the power to do much harm. Larger models that can carry payloads of up to 30 pounds are available on the market and are expected to become more common. The FAA imposes strict safety regulations on drones flown by government agencies or anyone who operates them for commercial purposes. In contrast, hardly any rules apply to people who fly drones as a hobby, other than FAA guidelines that advise them to keep the aircraft below 400 feet and five miles from an airport. “With the discovery of an unauthorized drone on the White House lawn, the eagle has crash-landed in Washington," says Senator Charles Schumer. "There is no stronger sign that clear FAA guidelines for drones are needed."

Submission + - Childhood neglect erodes the brain (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In perhaps the most famous study of childhood neglect, researchers have closely tracked the progress, or lack of it, in children who lived as infants in Romania’s bleak orphanages and are now teenagers. A new analysis now shows that these children, who display a variety of behavioral and cognitive problems, have less white matter in their brains than do a group of comparable children in local families. The affected brain regions include nerve bundles that support attention, general cognition, and emotion processing. The work suggests that sensory deprivation early in life can have dramatic anatomical impacts on the brain and may help explain the previously documented long-term negative affects on behavior. But there’s some potential good news: A small group of children who were taken out of orphanages and moved into foster homes at age 2 appeared to bounce back, at least in brain structure.

Submission + - Why Coding is not the new literacy (chris-granger.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There has been a furious effort over the past few years to bring the teaching of programming into the core academic curricula. Enthusiasts have been quick to take up the motto: "Coding is the new literacy!" But long-time developer Chris Granger argues that this is not the case: "When we say that coding is the new literacy, we're arguing that wielding a pencil and paper is the old one. Coding, like writing, is a mechanical act. All we've done is upgrade the storage medium. ... When we say that coding is the new literacy, we're arguing that wielding a pencil and paper is the old one. Coding, like writing, is a mechanical act. All we've done is upgrade the storage medium."

He further suggests that if anything, the "new" literacy should be modeling — the ability to create a representation of a system that can be explored or used. "Defining a system or process requires breaking it down into pieces and defining those, which can then be broken down further. It is a process that helps acknowledge and remove ambiguity and it is the most important aspect of teaching people to model. In breaking parts down we can take something overwhelmingly complex and frame it in terms that we understand and actions we know how to do."

Submission + - As real Flash patches go out, fake ones hit thousands of Facebook users (cso.com.au)

Submitted by River Tam
River Tam writes: On the heels of two real Flash Player security updates being distributed by Adobe Systems this week, hackers are spreading a fake update for the media player via a scam on Facebook that has exposed at least 5,000 users to the threat.

Fake Flash Player update through a three-day Facebook scam beginning Friday. The hackers are targeting the social network’s users by tagging would-be victims in photos that purport to be racy videos.

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