I used to play Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon (the original PC version) a lot, as well as the good old Rainbow Six series. I usually set up a game with 15 min rounds, no respawn, no threat indicators (a cursor that showed roughly in which direction the enemy is). The games were one shot, kill. Some people complained that it was boring, but I liked it. Your heart would beat like crazy at times. When your whole team was gone with only you left, you would definitely feel the pressure knowing the whole other team was hunting just for you. You should check some videos on YouTube.

My guess is that the data is fetched to the phone when other means of positioning fails. This data is probably not your location, but the location of nearby Wifi hotspots. By using the nearby Wifi hotspot locations the phone still approximates your location, which is ofcourse neat. According to the update in the article, Android phones would seem to do the same.

Buffering data on the device makes sense. Downloading it every time you visit a location be much bigger privacy issue. Ofcourse downloading it in the first place would reveal your approximate position to Apple (or is it Google?). In my opinion, there is two things that could be improved: 1) disabling of Wifi hotspot positioning entirely and 2) expiration of data (shorter, if there already is expiration) of maybe one month to a couple of months.

I don't have an iPhone so I have not analyzed any data, but this would seem logical to me. My bets are that this is not some evil scheme to "track your every move", so calm down.

I'm sorry, but the NYT story was just stupid. I think I'm like many others in here: I come here for the news and the discussion. I don't care about the "social media". I don't want to have any "Facebook and Twitter integration". I don't care about what some guy wrote on his blogpost. And I don't care if some article is a day or half a day late - hardly ever are news really that important. And if I did not follow the link, then I probably just did not think the topic was worth my time.

Okay, so I got a few replies basically asking what is the difference in having these points at 0 and 100, instead of 32 and 212 (with Fahrenheit) or for example 0 and 3 with "Geekoid scale", so here is a one.

One degree change in Celsius equals one degree change in the SI-unit Kelvin. Only the reference point is at a different place (absolute zero). Thus conversion between Celsius and Kelvin is as easy as subtracting or adding 273,15 depending on which way you want to go. With Fahrenheit or the "Geekoid scale" you need to do multiplication as well.

At the end of the day, we could put these points wherever we'd like and it would be okay. In practice, I think that there are demand for two common units. One for scientific use and one for everyday use. Which fits Kelvin better? Celsius, which differs only in reference point and has a scale that makes sense in every day life? Or Fahrenheit, which requires scaling and where 0 F really does not matter in everyday life. If you want to measure fever, the zero point could as well have been put to 100 Fahrenheit.

I'd pick Celsius. But hey, I admit that I am biased.

Basically, I say that they are both roughly as useful (but celsius in far more used).

The advantage of Celsius over Fahrenheit is that it is bound to two very useful points: the temperature water freezes (0 Celsius) and the temperature water boils (100 Celsius). These can be used to predict things more easily, like is there a risk for icing on the roads, how does the frozen lake/sea hold weight and so on. Or just to know if a surface is above 100 degrees. Put some water on it and see if it vaporizes.

I have not used biometrics and aren't any expert on the matter, but I think there is a obvious solution to this problem: biometrics should only be used for authentication on the local side. Successful local authentication would authenticate local user remotely using public-key cryptography. In this case, if the account get compromised, all you need to do is generate a new pair of keys to a clean computer and you're secure again.

I am shocked that there is a bunker under the US Vice Presidents residence. Here in Finland all bigger structures require bunkers by law. Quote from Wikipedia:

Finland has over 40,000 air-raid shelters which can house 3.8 million persons (71% of the population). Private homes rarely have them, but houses over 600 square meters are obligated to build them. Fire inspectors check the shelters every 10 years and flaws have to be repaired or corrected as soon as possible. The law requires that inhabitants of apartment blocks can clear the shelters and put them into action in less than 24 hours. Also, the shelters must possess a working phone line connection that must be usable at all times.

If 2% of the votes were lost, how many were incorrect or not registered properly? If the system can lose votes, it can very easily put them for the wrong person as well...

As far as I know, the reason why votes were lost was that the voting system had a very bad UI. For the vote to be registered, you had to push an OK-button more than once *) - something that wasn't that apparent, and which all users did not understand to do. Also, when then removing the voting card from the machine, no indication was given if the vote was registered or not. This caused votes to be lost simply by a bad UI design, which could be fixed later on.

*) Having a confirm button is good, but the system should in that case clearly indicate that the voting is still in progress.

There's no standard way to control a device from a standard headphone jack

Sounds like a good argument to develop a standard rather than applaud this bad behaviour.

A reality check please; companies rather push out new products immediately, than argue about some random feature in a standards committee. In fact, it is much more in the interest of the company to keep shut about this kind of features.

But don't get me wrong. I think standards are good and crucial to the whole business. It is just that there should not be any expectation on the companies for developing these standards.

Right. But even if you'd be ok with your corporate mail being monitored this law applied to any "community subscriber". This includes the high-speed Internet connection you are sharing with your neighbours. Would you like to give your neighbours legal right to capture all your protocol headers starting with IP? This is more than the police has authorization to do in normal circumstances. This law will do absolutely nothing to stop IP theft, just cause paranoia between people.

I'm not very into mobile phones so correct if I'm wrong, but isn't the limit for a SMS message 160 characters? Now if you send a text message longer than that, it actually sends several text messages and thus is counted as several messages on the service provider side, even though it looks like one message on the modern mobile phones.

Now, filling 160 characters is not hard. With an average word length of 5.1 in English that would mean around 30 words per SMS when including whitespace. Even this post, that would be counted as not that long by Slashdot standards, would make up 7 SMS messages giving a count seven times larger than it actually is. Now imagine that you combine this with lots of short messages like "OK" you could easily get a large number of SMS messages even though your communication has really not been that intensive.

Does this explain the bizarre amount of messages this girl has sent? No. Is there a possibility that she has "broadcasted" her messages to all her friends for instance? That would explain a lot.