Justin Volpe, formerly of the NYPD, already has that one covered. So egregiously that he even went to jail, in an atypical twist.

A simple matter.

You simply affix an xbox headset to the subject. If they look vaguely confused, you use the general population baselines. If they start reflexively screaming obscenities and accusing the diagnostic team of cheating, you use the gamer baselines.

Oh, I'd certainly be in favor of such a feature, and I'm a little surprised that none of the 'throw things at the wall until some of them stick' Android vendors seem to have tried it; but I'm just not wildly optimistic. On the low end, they just use junk, on the high end they love that SKU tiering ability, and none of the mobile OS vendors seem particularly enthusiastic about the fact that local storage even exists, since it inconveniences their assorted 'cloud' nonsense and sometimes adds little slots to the otherwise sleek-looking handsets.

I'd recommend getting a job playing campus cop at some California state school instead. Much nicer weather.

The nice thing about the knee-pin move is that, while it lacks the drama and blood of a good mag-lite to the face and thus plays comparatively well for the cameras, there is a relatively thin line between 'pinning' and 'compressive asphyxia'. Just a matter of how much weight you put on that knee...

Does it merely make them look bad? A bad cop is a more dangerous criminal than most of the people the cops are there to deal with. If the 'good cops' aren't enthusiastically hunting them down, I'd say that they are ineffectual at best and complicit at worst, not merely sullied by unfortunate proximity.

Well, I can't speak for the failure rate but my iPhone 4 is now 3.5 years old and during Easter I used it a lot, even after a day of heavy use I still had 20% battery left. Today it's at 67% after a 2 hours of GPS tracking. For daily use it's still fine and I'm guessing will be fine for years to come. For weekends and vacations away from a charger I'm considering getting a battery pack - compared to the original 1420 mAh battery you can get a 7000-10000 mAh external charger for cheap. You put it in your backpack or luggage, plug it in where you sleep at night even if that's a remote cabin or a tent in the wilds. Or for that matter just turn off the "smart", if I kill data traffic it'll last very long as a dumb phone as I've done that abroad due to cost. Basically as long as the battery works it's not really a problem.

The tricky bit is that 'stability and job security' are apparently bad for shareholder value or something, so people hunting it are racing against (generally successful) attempts to crush it like a bug and bring in the temps and subcontractors and offshore peons and whatever else seems handy.

This doesn't make their dumb plan any less dumb; but the number of good plans that they passed up to chose that dumb plan is something we are actively whittling away at.

Astroturfing Microsoft on websites, duh...

I certainly wouldn't doubt the use of non-upgradable internal storage as an effective price discrimination and margin padding tactic; but there is the issue of flash and controller quality.

If you are running something nearly the weight of a full OS (and a RAM constrained one that spends a lot of time killing processes and trying to reload them before anybody notices), you want good performance from your flash and controller (consider the user happiness that the first gen Nexus 7 created before it gained TRIM support and the flash was fragmenting and I/O going to hell). That costs more per gigabyte, more in line with what a decent SSD would (which still isn't all that much, these days; but it's a bit steeper than a basic SD/SDHC card).

If you just want bulk mostly-read storage, lousy flash doesn't matter nearly as much.

Unfortunately, there really isn't a terribly elegant way, and mobile OSes tend to adopt the 'the filesystem doesn't exist if we don't show it to you' theory of UI design, in any case (unless you have onboard/SD to serve as an obvious boundary) to present multiple flash subsystems of nonuniform performance to the user, even if some of them really would be better off with 16GB of bat-out-of-hell flash and 128 or 256 of cheap as chips stuff for their media storage and playback.

Maybe we'll see some of the stuff designed for server and SAN use, with the assorted designs for using faster devices to increase the overall performance of a larger pool of cheaper storage, make it down to phones at some point; but until that happens, non-uniformity is unlikely to be a crowd pleaser.

Would you want to be the guy who pokes every existing and legacy system that makes stupid and/or dangerous assumptions about reserved blocks being reserved permanently? You'd hope that that wouldn't be an issue; but finding out could be exciting indeed.

Hey, now that Intel is trying to sell quarks NICs, we could be looking at a real crunch in the IPv6 space... (and, at a tray price of over $9/unit, large atoms and even most molecules becoming enormously expensive.)

Listening is 'hauling in data'(unless you are purely passive about it, which they aren't.) I didn't mention humans at all.

Yes, and I don't see why faces, especially if you have a method for quickly and easily algorithmically fingerprinting them, would be of any less interest than any other aspect of an intercepted signal that could be used to draw inferences about who and where it came from, where it's going and who it's intended for, draw correlations between otherwise apparently separate transmissions, and so on.

Given the relative obscurity of video compared to voice and text, I wouldn't see it replacing CDR grovelling or anything; but that's merely a question of scale rather than of scope.

Well the cops did get a tip of one reckless maneuver that allegedly forced the tipper off the road. They tailed the truck for five minutes, saw no traffic violations or poor driving to collaborate the story. Then they pulled the truck over instead of being on their way. I'd agree with the dissenters, there's no reasonable suspicion of an ongoing crime - that is, drunk driving - and they pulled him over on a fishing expedition. One incident, observed by nobody but an anonymous tipper who may or may not have called it in just to be mean - I mean it's quite impressive to get a full license plate down while you're really being run off the road so some generous exaggeration may have happened. She didn't even accuse them of driving drunk, that's the court's argument that maybe they were while completely ignoring that the officers saw no sign of it.