So that assumption here is what? Someone walks down the street bumping into random strangers repeatedly hoping that:

1) The bump into the side where the strangers phone was being held.
2) The two phones are perfectly at the same height (presumably in a pocket).
3) The strangers phone is vulnerable.
4) They have NFC enabled.
5) They could hold the phones in contact for the about of time necessary to transfer both an overloaded filed (presumably exceeded a buffer limit) and THEN also transfer the app compromised app that allows the actual hack to work (over a connection with a maximum bandwidth of a few hundred kbits/s).
6) Then after the hack succeeded they remained in contact long enough for the data from the strangers phone to be transferred back to the hackers phone.

All with anyone noticing? That's all assuming they fix whatever issue was causing it to need to be run 185 times before it finally worked? Assuming those 185 times were the incremental transfers of all the data needed? Again I'm still not scared. And this is fixed in Jelly bean (which my S3 is running...doom on you close talking random guy on the street thinking you finally found someone with an S3 to stand uncomfortably close to!).

I think that is pretty key here, 185 times at the range of less than and inch or so is basically someone sitting there next to you pretty much touching you for 5 minutes. Obviously this is something that needs to be fixed but I'll hold off on my panic just yet. Even if it worked on the first try someone would have to first identify you as having a vulnerable phone, and where you have if (ie which pocket, etc) then get so close as to be practically touching you and then they have to hope that you have nfc enabled. This isn't some sort of thing you can do just casually walking down the street. It might be an issue for a particular person being targeted but not very likely for a random attack.

Well maybe the idea is that they are using the bike path and there's no traffic jam on the bike path?

The main issue I see with the anger at cyclists is that the people who are angry generally think of cyclists of as the "other". The other that we use for people of other religions we don't like, or political groups we don't agree with. In that way we somehow forget, they're just other people like us and if we were in their shoes we might very well be making similar choices!

As a frequent bike commuter I go to extra effort to follow the rules. So generally I'm extra strict on myself to make up for the people I see not following the rules but I think that is mostly because that's just the type of person I am in general. The problem is much like the walkers I see crossing out of turn or people turning right on red when that is not allowed, people do what they think they can get away with (generally speaking). So when they see someone else on a bike run a red light they decide that since there was no consequence for that person so they can do it too. The average person out there only does what they think will not get them in trouble. When they think they can get away with it a large percent of people will do it. The people raging against bikers are often people raging against themselves because they want to break the rules and they feel they can't, in that bikers place they would be doing the same thing.

Very interesting post (wish I had mod points today). For some people I think the current system works but for others it definitely doesn't. The problem is we want to make this into a race and have everyone judged at the end so we can find "the best" all on equal terms. Education just doesn't work that way though. For my I feel like I would have really benefited from an alternative program like the one suggested above but not homeschooling because I don't think anyone in my family would have done a good job, except perhaps my father. The problem with the home school bandwagon is that it still assumes too much about the make up and capabilities of the families involved. I think we need more, smaller schools with more variety of options of design and format.

We want to be cheap and efficient but we also need big changes and improved techniques that cost a lot. That's just very hard in our penny wise dollar poor system.

The problem is that people read the headline thinking, oh ok now being overweight isn't a problem. In fact that is exactly what my morning new people said on the air today! They're not saying being fat is fine now or that restricting calories will not help you lose weight. They're talking about the theory proposed based on mouse studies that restricting calories down to near starvation levels made the mice live long because it triggered some biological functions that served to allow adults to survive through periods of poor food supply. People here on Slashdot probably get it but people watching the news this morning stuffing themselves with their third McBacon sandwich now thinks they are just fine.

There are two parts to this though. Trade dress is only one part of Apple's case. The other part is about technical patents like pinch to zoom (which is both obvious and prior art) and the part that the juror is talking about in this article. The patent should have been invalidated but instead its being setup to be used against every single other maker of any touch screen device.

Yeah the Anternet is awesome and all but the ping time is crap. I tried playing CS on it and with the horrible ping time everything was just unplayable and then one of them wandered into my power supply and fried my PC.

Absolutely correct. Quite a number of my close female friends (and closer) in my life have told me that they have been raped as well. It truly amazes me how many men I see (mainly online) angrily saying that women all lie about this and seeming to believe it doesn't exist or maybe actively denying that it does. Its a sad statement on our society that people have so little empathy for each other that people are unwilling or unable to put themselves in other peoples shoes and listen to what they have to say without attacking them in response.

The facility to find and flash roms should be easy as easy to access as the app market in my opinion. Google is letting manufacturers and carrier ruin the system with their slow updates and locked in crap. If someone makes a JB rom for my phone I shouldn't have to spent hours trying to find it, and then figuring out how to get it on my phone without bricking it in the process. The instructions that are out there are terrible at best for the most part and risky to even try.

I know people will say stuff about it being a free and open thing and something you are doing at your own risk. But the counter is that as it is it's hard (as in you need to do a lot of reading first) to do and it doesn't need to be. It would be a real boon to the entire Android ecosystem if more open ROMs were available easily and quickly for anyone. People could just find the best rated rom for their phone and flash it to keep it up to date and not be beholden to their stock rom that is a year out of date.

I'm sort of curious about this too (and don't feel like reading through 700+ posts and aggregating the responses).

For myself, 99% of the time its fairly basic math (add, subtract, multiply, divide, etc) but on occasion I have gotten fancy enough to use some trig and statistics. I was pretty happy recently when I came up with a pretty clever trig formula that replaced a large block of code with a single math formula. Never had to use calculus or anything of the sort. I think the theory is that math is logical and therefore gives someone practice as logic and problem solving though I'm not sure I buy it.

Granted I assume these are more sophisticated than traditional missiles and now it seems they'll be land based as well but still these are missiles that phone home.

Talk of? There are several remote desktop clients already.

That I can't figure out what exactly I would use it for, if this thing was a full on Google TV, plus DVR (and maybe keep those social media things...though really that seems like something that should just be built into Google TV). Then sure I'd be fine with the cost and maybe even more! But this thing seems simply less capable than a product they already put out (Google TV) and costs more. I simply can't find a reason to buy...and frankly with the whole straight from Google and made in the US things I kind of want to want to buy it but I don't. Maybe I missed some aspect of its functionality or future but they didn't reveal anything like that from what I saw.

" As for point 3, there are actually very few pedestrians on sidewalks around here, and when there are, I tend to dismount and walk the bike around them"

I live in DC that would be called "taking my bike for a walk to work".