And the thing wrong in your post which others have not already pointed out is that many phones come with the ability to add a wireless coil of choice already, even older phones like the 3 generations old Galaxy S3 which has a pair of contacts right above the battery. That isn't even taking into account phones like the HTC One which has had wireless charging since its early models.

The interesting part about waiting to flip the switch is the "why" part. Why would you flip the switch? To install new firmware of course. Why flash firmware on the HDD? Because you have a problem with the current one.

This results in a few scenarios:

1. The malware is hyper advanced and automatically updates to infect the latest firmware.
2. The malware fails as soon as the user updates the latest firmware.
3. The malware completely overwrites the new firmware with the result that the user may attempt to re-flash or even send the drive back because the problem isn't fixed by the firmware that isn't currently installed because of the malware.

For this attack to work we're looking at malware of rather insane sophistication in which case I highly doubt I'm the target.

Yes we could concoct an elaborate scheme involving some deep firmware hacks on people's harddrive which is highly hardware dependent.

Or you could just send the people a phishing email.

I know which I would be doing if I were going after the millions of dumb users out there.

Increase manufacturing of course.

The wonderful thing about freeing up human resources is they can go on to do other things. Yes it's not perfect but the reality is people have been saying x technology will destroy the workforce since manufacturing at scale began, and the reality has been that as people have been replaced, manufacturing has become cheaper and as a result we tend to manufacture more.

Cheers, thanks for replying.

I must say the change this time is being handled very well compared to beta.

In case you need any further information here's a screenshot of what I'm seeing

Screen resolution is 1440x2160 and because of the small HDPI screen I browse with a 150% zoom on Chrome.
Of note is the topics bar already runs off the screen on the right but the main content is squished into just the standard browser width.

While I think the new layout is much better than beta, it has broken my normal Slashdot reading experience.
I was reading using Google Chrome on a Microsoft Surface Pro 3.... vertically. I tend to browse a lot of news vertically. This limits the vertical screen resolution.

The old slashdot layout imposed a minimum screen width and would provide a horizontal scrollbar which allowed me to see the stories without a sidebar visible.
The new slashdot layout locks into the screen resolution such that the stories on my screen appear to be about 3cm wide fitting about 4 words per line, and the right sidebar is a cool 12cm wide full of useless stuff (for reading purposes anyway).

Can slashdot please impose a minimum width on the container that contains the main content?

Problem is 100% reproducible on all browsers. Simply change the width of the window to around 650px. i.e. open up two browser windows side by side and the front page goes to heck.

Those bits of communication that only come through face to face can be substituted by more technology. Someone in a teleconference doesn't need to read my facial expression when drawing if I then say "Wow, holdup, I don't understand." There's a whole different method of communication when it comes to having an effective meeting that isn't face to face. Things like going around the table person to person and addressing each person individually, asking for confirmation of something being understood, not assuming that someone knows something etc. There's nothing magical about a face-to-face meeting that can't be communicated via a telephone using a different method. You said it yourself, it takes longer, but as soon as you include travel it is actually far more efficient.

Spend $5k on sending each person to a business communications class, and an how to run an effective meeting class. Then save yourself $50k / year on flights.

This. I use electronic whiteboards at work. The ability to share a session in the software is great. It works just like a real whiteboard except with more features and the ability for people in distributed locations to write on the same board in the same meeting is well worth it.

That was a trick question right? If the other side also has a digital whiteboard then they can scribble on the same image.

Slightly typically works out to be about 50-70% depending on geology. The lionshare of the cost of trenching is the labour with only a small part being engineering, and approvals (this assumes you own the rights to the land or otherwise have approvals to dig, if you don't then disregard this post).

But really the problem with fibre is rarely ever any of the things you list. Typically it is an excavator which digs up fibre and causes an outage. You don't get fire in underground systems which don't generate heat, corrosion is effectively a non issue, rodents shouldn't have access when things are direct buried and the network is typically out of the elements.

Outages are typically man made, though it's not common for metal thieves to pull out a fibre trunk. This one is a bit new.

Everything is relative. The last mile network is incredibly expensive. Your comment doesn't change the economics of running a fibre one bit.

Also no the customer support part of running an ISP is only the most expensive part depending on how you do accounting. See customer support is one of the few true Revex costs for an ISP. Ongoing support does not contribute to the ISP's value as a company, it's just a cost of doing business. This cost is dwarfed by the cost of the infrastructure unless you lease all of it. Where you are the builder of infrastructure, those costs are Capex and result in a lovely asset base which depreciates over time and gives for some nice tax advantages, not to mention government kickbacks.

So yes Customer Support is the single most expensive part of an ISP, if you are an accountant.

Fibre is built only as bandwidth requires it because it is bloody expensive. There were likely multiple fibres but rarely if ever can they be considered true "backups" with the main going down, the backup suffers from instant congestion which with the bandwidth we're talking about is crippling. There are entire countries without this kind of redundancy, let alone a state which is mostly desert.

Depends on the geography and the demographics. In a large city or along a coastline, or on edges of countries ISPs actually have a reasonably nice network topology where any one cut to a trunk may reduce speed but may not necessarily cut services. If you're on the edge or part of a city or state that is wired directly through then there's every chance the other end doesn't have a loop back to some network.

Laying fiber is very VERY expensive. Many companies will chose not to do it at all and instead lease it from a single owner. As nice as it would be it isn't always financially feasible to have complete redundancy.

No parent is right, it depends on which display. Only one LCD technology has the ability to screw up colours with viewing angles so spectacularly. On any IPS or PVA display the viewing angles won't mess up the colours. My girlfriend said blue and black from her laptop which has a TN display, then changed her mind when she saw it on the desktop with an IPS display.

Wow if that's how you use QED or define "usefulness" then you should probably re-do highschool maths and english.